Alphabet reports $84.7bn in revenue, on back of Search and Cloud, up from the same period last yearGoogle's parent company, Alphabet, outperformed analysts' expectations on Tuesday, reporting second-quarter earnings of $1.89 per share, the same as its first quarter results.Alphabet's CEO, Sundar Pichai, touted the results as proof that the company's investments across different areas of its tech empire were seeing positive returns. Continue reading...
Non-interactive cinematic sequences remove control from our hands at games' most emotional moments. Can't players be trusted to take part in stories?At the close of Metal Gear Solid 4, just after Snake pulverises Liquid Ocelot, there is series of cutscenes that never ends. Well, that's not strictly true. It does end - after 71 minutes - it's just that I've never watched that far. I understand that the game's director Hideo Kojima is a committed cinephile who has drawn much of his inspiration from movies, but I don't care. Those are minutes of my life I'll never get back.I also don't care for the 20-minute cinematic sequences dotted through Xenoblade Chronicles or Final Fantasy, or the seemingly hundreds of non-interactive scenes detailing every single plot point in the Assassin's Creed adventures. It's needlessly aggressive to rob the player of agency, then bully them into paying attention for prolonged periods. I think it's time we retired the whole convention. Continue reading...
Israeli company aims for stock market flotation after spurning biggest deal in tech group's historyThe cybersecurity firm Wiz has turned down a $23bn (18bn) takeover bid from Google's parent, Alphabet, spurning what would have been the tech company's biggest ever acquisition and seeking a stock market flotation instead.Alphabet had been in talks with Wiz, founded by alumni of Israel's cyberintelligence unit, as it seeks to catch rivals Microsoft and Amazon in the hyper-competitive cloud services market. Continue reading...
As the world recovers from the largest IT outage in history, it shows the danger of one point of failure in IT infrastructureA global IT failure wreaked havoc on Friday, grounding flights and disrupting everything from hospitals to government agencies. Over all the chaos hung a question: how did a flawed update to Microsoft Windows software bring large swaths of society to a screeching halt?The problem originated with an Austin, Texas-based cybersecurity firm called CrowdStrike, relied upon by most of the global technology industry, including Microsoft, for its Falcon program, which blocks the execution of malware and cyber-attacks. Falcon protects devices by securing access to a wide range of internal systems and automatically updating its defenses - a level of integration that means if Falcon falters, the computer is close behind. After CrowdStrike updated Falcon on Thursday night, Microsoft systems and Windows PCs were hit with a blue screen of death" and rendered unusable as they were trapped in a recovery boot loop. Continue reading...
There has been disruption at airports around the world, as well as banks, supermarkets and media outlets, after Windows workstations were hit by a 'blue screen of death'. Long queues of passengers formed in airports in the UK, US, India and Spain as some airlines warned of delays and grounded flights
In this week's newsletter: Work, life and parenting mean I can't dive into massive games like I used to, but then I found a hack to making the time I need Don't get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereI miss very few things about being a teenager, but I do miss all the time I had back then to play video games. I got great joy out of binge-playing into the small hours, an opportunity I almost never get now as a busy adult. Aside from covering games for work it feels as if I barely get time to play at all, which explains my affection for games that can be polished off in a couple of evenings, rather than the gigantic, absorbing role-playing games I used to crave. I have pretty much made peace with this. My days of 100-hour epics and/or live-service online games are behind me. They'll be back eventually, when my kids are bigger.But it's been more than two years since Elden Ring came out - a game in my favourite genre, by my favourite director - and I suddenly got very fed up about the fact that I'd barely played it. I've picked away at the game on PS5, but never got out of the (admittedly vast) starting area of Limgrave. I kept hoping that my partner might take the kids away for a weekend, or that I might manage to take a week's holiday during term time, so that I could return to my teenage habits and play it by myself for hours on end. But it's been two years. If I want to play this game - or any massive game - I've got to try to fit it into the life that I actually have, with the job and the two small kids and every other responsibility that gets in the way. Continue reading...
The streamer's surprisingly varied library and ad-supported model has allowed it to start out-performing its far glossier, and more expensive, rivalsThere's a reason so many websites dedicate reams of virtual pages to the question of whether a brand-new movie is on Netflix, and when it might turn up there. For many casual viewers, the biggest streaming site is more or less synonymous with streaming itself; even big brand names like Disney+, no-longer-HBO Max, Peacock and Paramount+ are basically playing for second place. But at some point, they might need to concede that it's really a battle for third at best: last month, all of those aforementioned glossy non-Netflix services were out-viewed by Tubi.While fancier streaming services like Netflix and Prime Video have been experimenting with ad-supported versions in order to juice revenues (whether from cheaper ad-bearing subscriptions, hoping customers will pay more to avoid ads, or money from the ads themselves), Tubi offers a rotating, ad-supported lineup of movies and TV shows at the unbeatable price of zip. It's a free service that doesn't require so much as a sign-in. (I know this firsthand: I've been a regular Tubi user for years, and have yet to create an actual account.) Tubi combines the excited browsing of the old video store experience, the instant-gratification appeal of Netflix, and the old-fashioned channel-flipping of cable, where everyone once accepted the built-in ad breaks that came with movie-watching. Apparently, viewers don't mind introducing a little retro into their streaming experiences; Tubi is still growing in viewership and ad revenue. In its most recent quarter, the latter was up by 22%. (According to the CEO, the service isn't yet making money, but growth in such a competitive and capricious industry is still notable.) Continue reading...
Apple rolled out a feature highly requested by both disabled users and podcast creators. Why did it take so long?Ren Shelburne was fed up with trying to listen to popular podcast episodes her friends recommended. Shelburne, a photographer with partial hearing loss and an auditory processing condition, remembers struggling to finish a particular episode. It was a specific type of show: too many talking heads, complicated overlapping dialogue and, until recently, no transcription. Those I'm just so lost on because there's just too much going on at once," Shelburne says. She couldn't follow along, so she couldn't discuss the show with her friends. Podcasts are such a big part of pop culture and media at this point. I want to be able to be a part of that conversation."Weekly podcast listenership in the United States has more than quadrupled in the past decade, according to Pew Research. For some, though, the medium still feels inaccessible. Continue reading...
A South Australian museum honours the man who changed the way dentistry was done on a global scale'In medieval Europe, barber-surgeons might cut your hair, shave your face, do a bit of blood-letting and tend to a broken limb.They might also pull a tooth out with a pelican" - a crude beak-like shank - or lever it out with an iron tooth key". By the 17th century they might just knock it out with a steel punch elevator. Continue reading...
by Alexi Duggins, Hannah Verdier and Charlie Lindlar on (#6N5G9)
The England defender shares his life story, lessons and secrets to success in a new BBC series. Plus: five of the best tech podcasts Don't get Hear Here delivered to your inbox? Sign up herePack One Bag
Max Tegmark argues that the downplaying is not accidental and threatens to delay, until it's too late, the strict regulations neededBig tech has succeeded in distracting the world from the existential risk to humanity that artificial intelligence still poses, a leading scientist and AI campaigner has warned.Speaking with the Guardian at the AI Summit in Seoul, South Korea, Max Tegmark said the shift in focus from the extinction of life to a broader conception of safety of artificial intelligence risked an unacceptable delay in imposing strict regulation on the creators of the most powerful programs. Continue reading...
An entire generation nurses fond nostalgic memories of the gaudy kids' game that came packed in with Windows Vista. But who actually made it?If you had a PC in the 2010s, you probably owned a copy of Purble Place. The gaudy kids' game came with every copy of Windows Vista and 7. It was a simple, three-title package: Purble Pairs was a basic tile memory game; Purble Shop had the player design a mystery character using logic and deduction; and the last game of Comfy Cakes had kids playing line cook for the Purble Chef while juggling orders on a conveyor belt. And for many online teens, the legacy of these games easily equals that of Minesweeper and Solitaire, the more venerable pack-in games of PCs past.Yet nobody knows who made it. Curious players noted a simple credit to Oberon Games in the game's help menu, but that's all. Despite being installed on hundreds of millions of computers worldwide, the actual creators of the game have lived in obscurity for two decades. Continue reading...
by Samuel Gibbs Consumer technology editor on (#6MZ0Y)
Bluetooth and wifi noise-cancelling cans aim to dethrone Apple and Bose with ultimate private film experienceThe wifi hifi-maker Sonos has announced its long-anticipated first set of Bluetooth noise-cancelling headphones that aim to be the ultimate private cinema sound system, whether at home or on the road.The Ace look like sleek, understated regular headphones but they have a unique party trick: at the press of a button they can connect to a compatible Sonos soundbar via wifi to produce a full cinema sound experience without waking the rest of your home. Continue reading...
If OpenAI can't keep its own team together, what hope is there for the rest of the industry? Plus, AI-generated slop' is taking over the internet Don't get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up for the full article hereEverything happens so much. I'm in Seoul for the International AI summit, the half-year follow-up to last year's Bletchley Park AI safety summit (the full sequel will be in Paris this autumn). While you read this, the first day of events will have just wrapped up - though, in keeping with the reduced fuss this time round, that was merely a virtual" leaders' meeting.When the date was set for this summit - alarmingly late in the day for, say, a journalist with two preschool children for whom four days away from home is a juggling act - it was clear that there would be a lot to cover. The hot AI summer is upon us:The inaugural AI safety summit at Bletchley Park in the UK last year announced an international testing framework for AI models, after calls ... for a six-month pause in development of powerful systems.There has been no pause. The Bletchley declaration, signed by UK, US, EU, China and others, hailed the enormous global opportunities" from AI but also warned of its potential for causing catastrophic" harm. It also secured a commitment from big tech firms including OpenAI, Google and Mark Zuckerberg's Meta to cooperate with governments on testing their models before they are released.A former senior employee at OpenAI has said the company behind ChatGPT is prioritising shiny products" over safety, revealing that he quit after a disagreement over key aims reached breaking point".Leike detailed the reasons for his departure in a thread on X posted on Friday, in which he said safety culture had become a lower priority. Over the past years, safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products," he wrote.I have seen the extremely restrictive off-boarding agreement that contains nondisclosure and non-disparagement provisions former OpenAI employees are subject to. It forbids them, for the rest of their lives, from criticizing their former employer. Even acknowledging that the NDA exists is a violation of it.If a departing employee declines to sign the document, or if they violate it, they can lose all vested equity they earned during their time at the company, which is likely worth millions of dollars. One former employee, Daniel Kokotajlo, who posted that he quit OpenAI due to losing confidence that it would behave responsibly around the time of AGI", has confirmed publicly that he had to surrender what would have likely turned out to be a huge sum of money in order to quit without signing the document.Slop" is what you get when you shove artificial intelligence-generated material up on the web for anyone to view.Unlike a chatbot, the slop isn't interactive, and is rarely intended to actually answer readers' questions or serve their needs. Continue reading...
OpenAI says Sky' is not an imitation of actor's voice after users compare it to AI companion character in film HerScarlett Johansson has spoken out against OpenAI after the company used a voice eerily resembling her own in its new ChatGPT product.The actor said in a statement she was approached by OpenAI nine months ago to voice its AI system but declined for personal reasons". Johansson was shocked" and angered" when she heard the voice option, which sounded so eerily similar to mine that my closest friends and news outlets could not tell the difference," she said. Continue reading...
Letitia James announces victims fund for defrauded investors' in largest settlement the state has ever made with a crypto companyNew York's attorney general has secured a $2bn settlement with the bankrupt cryptocurrency lender Genesis Global over allegations it had defrauded thousands of investors.Genesis, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the US in January 2023, received court approval last week to return about $3bn in cash and cryptocurrency to its customers in a liquidation. Continue reading...
Juergens had never acted before she played the fearsome but troubled Senua in Ninja Theory's game - and won a Bafta for it. Now she's back to battle the character's demons in a sequelI hope people can relate to Senua," says actor Melina Juergens, who plays the lead character in Senua's Saga: Hellblade II, the newest game from British developer Ninja Theory. I hope people play it and feel what somebody goes through on a daily basis who suffers from mental health issues - particularly psychosis. [They] come away with an understanding of it, able to empathise with people more."Juergens did not expect to be playing this role for the second time. In fact, she never expected to play it the first time. She was a video editor at the independent games studio when the first Hellblade game, Senua's Sacrifice, was gestating in 2012. They were looking for an actress, but in the meantime they asked me to step in to help out with [performance capture] tech experiments," she tells me. At some point, they asked me to perform a scene. The director really liked it and offered me the role." Continue reading...
by Samuel Gibbs Consumer technology editor on (#6MXYX)
Apple's mid-range tablet gets larger screen option and more power, being pro' enough for mostApple has more options than ever for those after a tablet with different sizes, prices, screens and power, but the iPad Air is fairly simple to understand - it is the premium big-screen iPad for those who don't want to fork out thousands for an iPad Pro.The Air starts at 599 (699/$599/A$999) and is now available in two screen sizes: the original 11in and a larger 13in model for big-screen viewing. That puts it right in the middle of Apple's lineup, with the 10th-gen iPad starting at 349 at the bottom and topped by the new iPad Pro M4 starting at 999. Continue reading...
Jan Leike, a key safety researcher at firm behind ChatGPT, quit days after launch of its latest AI model, GPT-4oA former senior employee at OpenAI has said the company behind ChatGPT is prioritising shiny products" over safety, revealing that he quit after a disagreement over key aims reached breaking point".Jan Leike was a key safety researcher at OpenAI as its co-head of superalignment, ensuring that powerful artificial intelligence systems adhered to human values and aims. His intervention comes before a global artificial intelligence summit in Seoul next week, where politicians, experts and tech executives will discuss oversight of the technology. Continue reading...
The invisible downside to our online lives is the data stored at giant energy-guzzling datacentresIt's been called the largest coal-powered machine on Earth" - and most of us use it countless times a day.The internet and its associated digital industry are estimated to produce about the same emissions annually as aviation. But we barely think about pollution while snapping 16 duplicate photos of our pets, which are immediately uploaded to the cloud. Continue reading...
Town of Grunheide approved the US automaker's plan on Thursday to double the capacity of the site, despite oppositionEnvironmental protesters vowed to keep up the pressure on Tesla after failing to stop plans by Elon Musk's company from expanding its sprawling electric vehicle plant outside Berlin.The town council of Grunheide, guarded by police and plain-clothed security guards, gave the green light on Thursday to the US automaker after a heated, nearly three-hour debate disrupted by heckling and booing from the audience of about 200 people. Continue reading...
Google I/O attendees were redirected to another entrance as protesters denounced company's ties to Israeli military projectsHundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters chained themselves together in front of the entrance to Google's annual developer conference on Tuesday in protest of the tech company's ties to Israeli military projects. Thousands of attendees waiting to enter Google I/O were redirected to another entrance, and the event started on time.Groups including the No Tech for Genocide coalition and other groups from across the Bay Area held a sign reading Google stop fueling genocide". They chanted we won't stop til Nimbus gets dropped," referencing a $1.2bn project supported by Amazon and Google that provides provides artificial intelligence and cloud computing services to the Israeli government. Continue reading...
Some of the threads connecting the chip to the brain began to retract. The Elon Musk-owned company did not explain whyNeuralink's first attempt at implanting its chip in a human being's skull hit an unexpected setback after the device began to detach from the patient's brain, the company revealed on Wednesday.The patient, Noland Arbaugh, underwent surgery in February to attach a Neuralink chip to his brain, but the device's functionality began to decrease within the month after his implant. Some of the device's threads, which connect the miniature computer to the brain, had begun to retract. Neuralink did not disclose why the device partly retracted from Arbaugh's brain, but stated in a blogpost that its engineers had refined the implant and restored functionality. Continue reading...
Company says it is aware of issue as users complain alarms are playing too quietly or not going offApple is working to fix a problem that has resulted in some users complaining that their iPhone alarms are not going off - or playing too quietly.The company said it was aware of the issue, which has been picked up by TikTok users, who have complained about incidents where their alarm has failed to sound. Continue reading...
Julie Inman Grant's order for Elon Musk's company to take down tweets containing video of a Sydney stabbing has implications for tech platforms globally
Challenger to market leader OpenAI says it wants to meet users where they are' and become part of users' everyday lifeOpenAI's ChatGPT is facing serious competition, as the company's rival Anthropic brings its Claude chatbot to iPhones. Anthropic, led by a group of former OpenAI staff who quit over differences with chief executive Sam Altman, have a product that already beats ChatGPT on some measures of intelligence, and now wants to win over everyday users.In today's world, smartphones are at the centre of how people interact with technology. To make Claude a true AI assistant, it's crucial that we meet users where they are - and in many cases, that's on their mobile devices," said Scott White at Anthropic. Continue reading...
Exclusive: Liz Bonnin's face used on insect repellant ads after faked message ostensibly granted permissionThere was something strange about her voice, they thought. It was familiar but, after a while, it started to go all over the place.Science presenter Liz Bonnin's accent, as regular BBC viewers know, is Irish. But this voice message, ostensibly granting permission to use her likeness in an ad campaign, seemed to place her on the other side of the world. Continue reading...
The feature-free phone, launched at Milan design week, is the latest device to tap into young people's concerns about attention-harvesting and data privacyIt's almost enough to make you stop doomscrolling: dull devices are now cool.The Boring Phone is a new, featureless flip phone that is feeding the growing appetites of younger people who want to bin their smartphones in favour of a dumbphone. Continue reading...
Retailer doing whatever it takes' to halt organizing at warehouse in Moreno Valley, California, workers say, as Amazon faces unfair labor practice chargesFacing an insurgent campaign which threatened to unleash a wave of unionization across its vast workforce, Amazon stands accused of reaching for dirty tricks.Workers who tried to organize inside its warehouses claim the technology giant orchestrated an illegal counteroffensive, using scare tactics and spreading misconceptions. Continue reading...
A secret history of machine intelligence, from 14th-century horoscopes to 1930s plot genies' for coming up with storylinesHark. The end is nigh. In the industrial age, automation came for the shoemaker and the factory-line worker," writes Dennis Yi Tenen near the start of Literary Theory for Robots. Today, it has comefor the writer, the professor, the physician, the programmer and the attorney." Like the end-of-the-planet movies that pelted the multiplexes at the turn of the millennium, newspapers and - increasingly - bookshops are awash with economists, futurologists and social semioticians talking up, down and about artificial intelligence. Even Henry Kissinger, in The Age of AI (2021), spoke of epoch-making transformations" and an imminent revolution in human affairs".Tenen, a tenured professor of English at New York's Columbia University, isn't nearly as apocalyptic as he initially makes out. His is an oddly titled book - do robots need literary theory? Are we the robots? - that has little in common with the techno-theory of writers such as Friedrich Kittler, Donna Haraway and N Katherine Hayles. For the most part, it's a call for rhetorical de-escalation. Relax, he says, machines and literature go back a long way; his goal is to reconstruct the modern chatbot fromparts found on the workbench ofhistory" using strings of anecdote and light philosophical commentary". Continue reading...
Johan Rohr's 2,700 songs have been streamed 15bn times and have more plays than Britney Spears or AbbaA secret" composer who has released music under hundreds of different names has been identified as Sweden's most-listened-to artist on Spotify - pulling in more plays than Britney Spears or Abba.Johan Rohr, a Stockholm-based musician, has been unmasked as the person behind more than 650 different artists on the streaming service who have been played 15bn times, making him Sweden's current most-played artist. Continue reading...
Fun for beginners and seasoned players alike, the beautifully illustrated decks let you concoct your own adventures with some surprisingly deep and interesting possibilitiesOne of the most appealing aspects of games set in the Star Wars universe is that you get to concoct scenes and stories we would never see in the movies. Whether you're playing Knights of the Old Republic, Jedi: Fallen Order or the old Star Wars role-playing board game designed by Greg Costikyan in the 1990s, there will be individual moments unrepeatable on the big screen. I know this, because I just won a round of the new trading card game Star Wars Unlimited thanks to a heroic C-3PO wielding Luke Skywalker's lightsaber.On a basic level, Star Wars Unlimited works like most modern trading card games, such as Yu-Gi-Oh! and Magic: The Gathering. You and an opponent each have a deck of cards, most of which feature a single character or vehicle, with a number for health and another number for power/damage. Usually the character will also have special abilities described on the face of the card, which add strategic depth. Players then take it in turns to place cards into the arena and attack their opponent's forces, and the winner is the player who destroys their rival's base. Star Wars Unlimited's starter kit gives you two complete decks, one of imperial forces and one of the rebels, but you can also buy booster packs to start customising your army and creating your own themed decks. Continue reading...
Lawyer says tech tycoon will testify in trial on charges of fraud and conspiracy in 2011 sale of company to HPA British technology tycoon once lauded as Britain's Bill Gates" was the driving force" behind a massive" years-long fraud, prosecutors alleged, as his criminal trial got under way in San Francisco on Monday.Prosecutors said Mike Lynch, co-founder of the UK software company Autonomy, ruled the firm with an iron fist" before its blockbuster takeover by Hewlett-Packard in 2011. Continue reading...
Tesla CEO tells Don Lemon people should be treated according to their skills and integrity'Elon Musk has defended his stance on diversity and free speech in a tense interview with the former CNN anchor Don Lemon.The Tesla chief executive was openly irritated by Lemon's line of questioning during the hour-long video interview, published on Monday. Continue reading...
Arcade enthusiasts recall the heady days when Funland and SegaWorld at the Troc' in central London had all the latest and greatest cabinets, and united subcultures in a social gaming scene that anticipated the internetEntering central London's Trocadero complex in the late 1990s could be an overwhelming, intoxicating experience. The vast building was then home to SegaWorld, an indoor theme park" and arcade based on the Joypolis" concept that the Japanese gaming giant had seen thrive in its homeland. Leaving the bustle of Coventry Street behind, visitors would pass a statue of Sonic the Hedgehog at the doors before stepping on to the famed pair of rocket escalators": a vision of the future delivered in brushed steel and slashes of electric blue lighting. Taking people high up into the building through a vast central open area, the escalator ride afforded a glimpse of the varied attractions that occupied each floor - the Mad Bazooka bumper car ride, the Ghost Hunt VR experience - before visitors were deposited at the top, ready to snake their way down through themed zones such as the Carnival and the Sports Arena.All around, arcade machines chirped and sang, backed by a chorus of juddering AS-1 simulator rides, with their whining hydraulics, and the excited chatter of guests waiting in line for Sega's VR-1 virtual reality experience, with its eight-seater pods and interactive shooter games. Intermittently the sudden mechanical wail of the Pepsi Max Drop ride would fill the air, along with the screams of its occupants. Speakers belted out the era's biggest pop hits. Props including a full-size Harrier jump jet and carefully placed Formula 1 car occupied the gaps between the cabinets housing arcade icons such as Daytona USA and Virtua Fighter. The whole experience, Sega keenly asserted in promotional videos, was the ultimate in futuractive entertainment". Continue reading...
A mother describes how her autistic son became one of thousands of under-18s caught viewing or sharing indecent images of childrenLouise* thought she had been open and clear with her two children about the dangers of the internet. But last year there was a knock on her door at 6am. It was the police looking for her 17-year-old son.There were five or six police coming up my stairs," she says. When they said they were looking for my son because of indecent images I thought I was going to pass out. Continue reading...
Congress is spending $65bn to connect the rural US to the world. Orangeburg, South Carolina, knows the stakes better than anywhereOrangeburg, South Carolina, is not the middle of nowhere.It's an hour south of Columbia. It's an hour and 15 minutes north of Charleston. It's an hour and a half away from Augusta. It's just country enough to be out of the way but tantalizingly close to somewhere. Continue reading...
Multiple Australian projects are on the cutting edge of neurotech breakthroughs and man-machine interfaces - raising questions of security and privacy for human minds
by Miranda Bryant Nordic correspondent on (#6KD8W)
Exclusive: Psychologist accuses Meta of turning a blind eye' to posts she believes represent further danger to vulnerable womenA leading psychologist who advises Meta on suicide prevention and self-harm has quit her role, accusing the tech giant of turning a blind eye" to harmful content on Instagram, repeatedly ignoring expert advice and prioritising profit over lives.Lotte Rubaek, who has been on Meta's global expert group for more than three years, told the Observer that the tech giant's ongoing failure to remove images of self-harm from its platforms is triggering" vulnerable young women and girls to further harm themselves and contributing to rising suicide figures. Continue reading...
What are the chances of real romance via a missed connection'? And has the internet turned these interactions from the stuff of romcoms to just a bit creepy?In the beginning, Darcy had a boyfriend and an aisle seat. It was 29 March 2000, and she was the last person to board the plane from Atlanta, Georgia, to Sacramento in California. Hot, sweaty and tired from running to catch the flight, she was frustrated to see that someone else was in her seat. I'm sorry," the stranger said, do you mind switching with me?" The thing was, he explained, his wife was afraid of flying - he wanted to sit by her. Darcy McGaffic is 6ft tall - there's a reason she had booked to sit in the aisle of the exit row. The stranger gestured to his seat, right at the back of the plane. A middle seat. Darcy said: Fine." She laughed, made her way back, sat down, and then another stranger opened their mouth. I wouldn't have done that," the man next to her smiled.That man was Scott Germond - just a stranger named Scott back then. They spoke for the entire five-hour duration of their flight; Darcy, who was in her 30s, told him about her job sorting out the instant replays" for sports tournaments, and the pair told stupid jokes" that made each other laugh. At one point, Scott asked Darcy if she was dating anyone. She hesitated. Technically she was, but she had already decided to break up with her boyfriend the night before, because they had beenon the phone and he hadn't stopped talking abouthis ex-wife. Darcy stumbled over Scott's question. She couldn't tell him the truth: Well, I'm dating somebody, but I'm thinking about dumping him because I might like you." Continue reading...
The increasing use of digital technology has inspired many scare stories, but is it reducing our attention span, does smartphone addiction actually exist - and should we even be feeling bad about it?Digital technology is now inextricably woven into the fabric of society, and for many of us, that does not always feel like a good thing. As screens have become more numerous, so the anxieties that we have about them have become more salient and pressing. But what if we are focusing on the wrong sorts of worries? Here are five common questions about screen time, the answers to which may help us to frame the relationships we have with our tech more accurately. Continue reading...
Britain's Bill Gates' could spend up to 25 years in jail if convicted of fraud in the 2011 sale of Autonomy to Hewlett-PackardMike Lynch, the technology tycoon, once dubbed Britain's Bill Gates, has spent the past 10 months in San Francisco, with a GPS bracelet strapped to his ankle and two armed guards monitoring him around the clock. This week he heads to court to face a long, hard fight for his freedom.It's been 13 years since one of Silicon Valley's most storied companies bought Lynch's business in a blockbuster takeover that seemed to confirm his image as one of the UK's most brilliant technologists. Now that deal is at the center of a criminal fraud trial. If convicted, Lynch could spend up to 25 years in jail. Continue reading...
Ivory Coast, Liberia, Benin, Ghana and Burkina Faso among countries experiencing outagesMuch of west and central Africa has been left without internet service, as operators of several subsea cables reported failures.The cause of the cable failures on Thursday was not immediately clear. Continue reading...
Those who - like me - have spent years looking for love on a six-inch screen know the pitfalls of these platformsOn Valentine's Day this year, a lawsuit was brought by six people in the US against Match Group, the company behind dating apps such as Tinder, Hinge and Match. The suit blames dating apps for game-like tactics that, they say, contribute to addictive behaviour, making miserable swiping addicts of us all.Match Group denies this, calling the claims ridiculous". But anyone who, like me, has spent years on and off the apps knows that there are clear parallels between love algorithms and online gaming - only with dating apps, we are the commodities.Georgina Lawton is the author of Raceless: In Search of Family, Identity and the Truth About Where I Belong Continue reading...
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