Want an original artwork in your home but don’t know where to start? We’ve got you and your empty feature wall coveredYou’ve been locked down and staring at the walls for months. It’s time for a change of scene.Related: From the Pilbara to Australia’s classrooms: meet the Indigenous kids teaching the nation Continue reading...

Jess Impiazzi stars as a TV show android who has a different husband each day but gets hacked in this scattershot dramaThis is an inane hodgepodge of sci-fi, political thriller and perhaps some kind of ill-considered satire – of reality TV, venal politicians? It’s hard to divine the target when the attack is so scattershot. It is supposed to take place in the US in 2040 where everyone is obsessed with watching a daily TV show about a buxom android housewife with an English accent named Ria (Jess Impiazzi); she spends every day nearly the same way with her husband Jack, from waking up and breakfasting to winding down with an evening soap opera and then sex if Jack so wishes. In other words, it’s The Truman Show meets The Stepford Wives, except there’s just the one wife – and the twist is that “Jack” is played by a different person in each episode. The first we meet is Luke Goss, who seems to be merely passing though before being replaced the next night while a recharged Ria gets rebooted with Jack number 2 (Amar Adatia), a coarser, crueller mate for a day, who is in turn replaced by many more Jacks – some of them women. Continue reading...

The company’s collapse has changed the startup environment, but some say the industry still hasn’t faced a ‘true reckoning’A charismatic young leader, billions of dollars in valuations and a technology that promised to change the world but failed to deliver: the meteoric rise and fantastic fall of the medical tech startup Theranos has been seen by many as an indictment of the hype-train attitude of Silicon Valley.Nearly 20 years after Theranos’s launch, its CEO, Elizabeth Holmes, is headed to trial, charged with defrauding clients and investors. Silicon Valley is facing a public that’s wary of its methods and intentions – but the verdict is still out on whether startup culture has fundamentally changed. Continue reading...

Country will be first to adopt cryptocurrency as legal tender next month – but economists are sounding warnings over risksLitha María de Los Angeles slaps two cheese-filled pupusas – the El Salvadoran cornmeal flatbread – on the griddle. With a camera click on the QR code, she receives her payment: four hundred-thousandths of a Bitcoin. Then, as the rain pelts the corrugated iron roof and a gust of wind lifts the blue plastic table cloths, the power cuts out.A tumultuous few weeks awaits El Salvador as it prepares to become the first country to adopt Bitcoin, the world’s most popular decentralised digital currency, as legal tender on 7 September. With that deadline looming, a host of challenges – technological, financial and criminal – threaten to sink the plan of the president, Nayib Bukele, to ride the Central American economy out of its current choppy waters on the back of a cryptocurrency wave. Continue reading...

Guardian Australia picture editor Carly Earl explains the dos and don’ts of taking pictures of the moonWhen a full moon rises, many people will pull out their mobile phones to try and take an Instagram-worthy picture, but unfortunately it is really challenging to get a great photograph of.Two reasons: it is very far away and unless you have a telephoto lens (which makes the moon appear closer than it is) it will always appear as a very small glowing dot in the frame. Continue reading...

Site announced last week it was suspending adult content, only to quickly change its mindFor five days, it looked as if one of Britain’s most successful tech startups was on the verge of a make-or-break gamble, one that would either see it burst on to the global stage or destroy its billion-dollar business.OnlyFans, a self-described “subscription social network”, announced last week that it would ban sexually explicit content from October. The ban was a shock because, behind the generic branding, such content is perceived to be OnlyFans’ biggest draw. Continue reading...

He’s the Silicon Valley Übermensch, the maverick boss of Tesla and SpaceX who wants us to colonise Mars and who can wipe out billions of dollars with a single tweet. So what’s not to love?It’s interesting whenever Elon Musk’s name comes up and people begin discussing his accomplishments, such as the reinvention of money, automobiles and space travel, there’s always someone who says: “Yeah, but I hear he can be a real dick.”Take that, Elon. Continue reading...

Trillions of metallic nodules on the sea floor could help stop global heating, but mining them may damage ocean ecologyIn a display cabinet in the recently opened Our Broken Planet exhibition in London’s Natural History Museum, curators have placed a small nugget of dark material covered with faint indentations. The blackened lump could easily be mistaken for coal. Its true nature is much more intriguing, however.The nugget is a polymetallic nodule and oceanographers have discovered trillions of them litter Earth’s ocean floors. Each is rich in manganese, nickel, cobalt and copper, some of the most important ingredients for making the electric cars, wind turbines and solar panels that we need to replace the carbon-emitting lorries, power plants and factories now wrecking our climate. Continue reading...

As blood testing startup founder’s fraud trial looms, John Carreyrou says hero worship is still a problem in Silicon ValleyThe unraveling of Theranos began with a 2015 article in the Wall Street Journal that revealed how the revolutionary technology promoted by the blood testing startup wasn’t exactly what it seemed.Over the proceeding months, the reporter John Carreyrou exposed how the testing devices the Silicon Valley darling said could perform a variety of medical tests with just a drop of blood were not actually being used to perform most of the analyses. Investors and consumers, Carreyrou found, were being fooled. Continue reading...

Once the world’s youngest female self-made billionaire, the former head of Theranos is facing fraud charges and possible jail timeThe rise and fall of the blood testing startup Theranos turned the tech world upside down and captured the attention of millions beyond Silicon Valley, inspiring multiple books, documentaries and a television series.Theranos set out to revolutionize the medical testing space, reaching a valuation of $10bn before the capabilities of its core technology were revealed to be largely fabricated. Now, its founder and former leader, Elizabeth Holmes, is about to face the music. Continue reading...

The director’s latest film – in which a daughter enters the virtual mind of her serial killer mother – is so-so compared to his earlier effortsAfter the mega-budget blowouts of 2013’s Elysium (which had some tried-and-tested ideas rattling around inside it) and 2015’s Chappie (which had Die Antwoord), this so-so shocker finds mooted multiplex saviour Neill Blomkamp recalibrating his disc space and career prospects. Operating with TV-movie production values and nary a single familiar face among its 10-strong cast, it’s a small, manageable, patchily inspired genre piece that unpicks the fraught relationship between a daughter, her convict mother, and a medical tech firm instigating an altogether unhappy reunion.Much of Demonic suggests a sometime “visionary director” who has turned to streaming-bound work-for-hire to make ends meet; it’s cautiously compiled, competent work-for-hire, but the wild swings and grand designs of this film-maker’s earlier output are sorely missed. It’s at its most Blomkampian early on, with the integration of effects into the plot: our heroine Carly (Carly Pope) submits to “volumetric capture” (essentially mo-cap 2.0) so she can enter a virtual-world simulation that will allow her to interact with her comatose mum. Inevitably, this passage into a digital wonderland is preceded with dire warnings as to what might happen if memories slip out of sync, and inevitably, the simulation doesn’t run as smoothly as hoped. Partly this is due to the vast reserves of anger Carly ports into this virtual realm, partly due to the proximity of a giant skeletal hellbeast. These scenes have a distinctive, hyperreal look (and presumably blew the budget), rotoscoping over the uncanny-valley glitches that have blighted countless blockbusters. This time, the glitches are deliberate: the aim is to unsettle. Continue reading...

Inspired by a Guardian article, the theatre’s surreal and spellbinding show AI is a collaboration between humans and the system GPT-3Last autumn, a deep-learning computer programme wrote an essay for the Guardian. The GPT-3 system argued that humans had nothing to fear from robots. Kwame Kwei-Armah, artistic director of the Young Vic, read it and felt inspired. Could there be a future in creative collaboration between AI and humans? If AI could write an article, could it create a play too, in real time, before an audience?The Young Vic’s new show, AI, explores these questions, casting the same technology as its virtual star. The production is not so much a piece of theatre as dramaturgy, rehearsal and workshop all in one, and contains its own riveting meta drama: a play is constructed over multiple evenings, culminating in a short show that combines human direction and performance with machine imagination and stagecraft (the use of algorithms to create its soundtrack, for example). Continue reading...

Lockdown or no lockdown, the video-call date is here to stay. Experts reveal how to look your best, keep the conversation flowing and turn that online spark into a face-to-face meetingAs if first dates aren’t awkward enough, along comes video dating to add an extra layer of tech frustration and misinterpreted body language to the mix. During lockdown, video calls – either within a dating app, or on platforms such as Zoom – took off. But as restrictions lift, many dating experts predict the format is here to stay – or at least that it has become a helpful additional step. Dating apps rolled out video call functions last year, and Hinge found that 65% of people who had been on a virtual date planned to continue post-pandemic. Of Tinder’s younger users (Generation Z daters, in their late teens and early 20s), half have used video dating. So you may as well perfect your on-screen hairstyle, decide what to wear on your upper half and embrace it. Here are some tips on how to succeed. Continue reading...

Payment platform offers service for bitcoin, ethereum, litecoin and bitcoin cashPayPal is to allow users in the UK to buy, hold and sell cryptocurrencies through the payment platform for the first time.The firm said it would allow customers to choose from four types of cryptocurrency – bitcoin, ethereum, litecoin and bitcoin cash – and that the service would be available via the PayPal app and its website. Continue reading...

Victor Keegan, the correspondent who went on to put the first Guardian content online, recalls the chance news item in 1981 that opened up the possibilities of home computing and kicked off the paper’s dedicated coverage of a social revolutionTechnology isn’t a beat with a natural affinity for nostalgia. The industry thrives on its futuristic image, worships boy-CEOs and renders the past obsolete at a frightening pace.Even in the eight years I’ve sat on the Guardian’s technology desk, the field I cover is frequently unrecognisable from what it was when I started – a world where self-driving cars were just around the corner, where virtual reality was an impressive technology that had failed to catch on with normal people, and where the world was starting to tire of the like-clockwork appearance of a new iPhone every 12 months. Continue reading...

According to addiction expert Dr Anna Lembke, our smartphones are making us dopamine junkies, with each swipe, like and tweet feeding our habit. So how do we beat our digital dependency?Dr Anna Lembke, a world-leading expert on addiction, is concerned about my “phone problem”. During our interview I confess, in passing, to having an unhealthy attachment to my iPhone, checking it every few minutes like a compulsive tic (sound familiar?) Lembke is having none of it. She wants me to abstain from using it for at least 24 hours by locking it in a drawer and going out. The first 12 hours will be filled with anxiety and Fomo, but as time unfolds, I’ll experience a sense of “real freedom”, will gain insight into my relationship with my digital companion and will “resolve to get back to using it a little differently”, she says, speaking with a soothing yet firm tone.I’d do well to heed her advice. As the chief of Stanford University’s dual diagnosis addiction clinic (which caters to people with more than one disorder), Lembke has spent the past 25-plus years treating patients addicted to everything from heroin, gambling and sex to video games, Botox and ice baths. The bespectacled 53-year-old psychiatrist has written an influential book about the prescription-drug epidemic, delivered Ted Talks on America’s opioid crisis and appeared as a talking head in the 2020 Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma to discuss the drug that is social media. She’s a whiz on why we get hooked on things – and how we can enjoy pleasurable things in healthier doses. Continue reading...

Beloved by journalists and increasingly used by a wider public, Tveeder is still run from Franco Trimboli’s Melbourne bedroom, in his spare time, out of his own pocketOn any given day, Franco Trimboli’s hobby makes the news.During office hours the 42-year-old who lives in suburban Melbourne is a coder, digital designer and project manager for the educational branch of the jobs website Seek. Continue reading...

Billionaire Tesla chief gives no indication of any progress in actually building such a machineElon Musk said he would probably launch a humanoid robot prototype next year dubbed the “Tesla Bot”, which is designed to do “boring, repetitious and dangerous” work.The billionaire chief executive of the electric carmaker Tesla said the robot, which would be about 5ft 8in (1.7m) tall and weigh 125 pounds (56kg), would be able to handle tasks such as attaching bolts to cars with a spanner or picking up groceries at stores. Continue reading...

The iPhone maker had previously told its global workforce to plan for a phased return from October

New scam spreads to Australia from Europe, targeting thousands of Android usersThousands of Australians have been hit by a new scam text message known as Flubot, which aims to install malware on their phones.Flubot is a type of malware targeting Android users, but iPhone users can also receive the messages. It tells the receiver they missed a call or have a new voicemail, providing a fake link to listen. Continue reading...

Company’s latest move comes after years of competing against brick-and-mortar retailersAmazon is planning to open department stores after years of competing against, and in some cases helping to destroy, the very same traditional brick-and-mortar retailers.The company’s latest move to bricks and mortar, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, comes after Amazon earlier this week eclipsed even Walmart in overall sales to become the world’s largest retail seller outside China. Continue reading...

The tech firm aims to restore more water than it consumes, as it competes to meet green goalsFacebook has announced plans to become “water positive” by 2030, restoring more water than the company consumes globally.The firm is leaning further into a virtuous skirmish between the world’s largest technology players, as they all compete to be the first to achieve carbon neutrality, commit to offsetting the emissions created by their customers as well as their own operations, and even plan to eliminate all carbon emitted over the organisation’s lifetime. Continue reading...

Some prototypes exist, but firms have struggled to commercialise a durable solid-state batteryBritish manufacturers believe the UK could become a significant exporter of solid-state batteries that could pave the way for lighter, longer-range electric cars within a decade, as a group of companies teamed up to develop prototypes.The FTSE 100 chemicals company Johnson Matthey, the battery startup Britishvolt, which is backed by Glencore, and Oxford University are among the seven institutions that have signed a memorandum of understanding promising to work together on the technology. Continue reading...

Push comes as Fortnite creator Epic Games fights a global legal battle against the tech giants over in-app paymentsAs Fortnite creator Epic Games continues its global legal battle against Apple and Google over in-app payments, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission says “upfront rules and regulations” may be needed to force the tech giants to open their app stores to greater competition.For Apple iOS platforms, developers must use the App Store, while for Google, apps can be installed on Android devices outside the Play store either through direct download or alternative marketplaces, but uptake of these options is limited. Continue reading...

Xbox, PC; Luis Antonia/Annapurna Interactive

Analysis: Twitter has faced criticism for allowing members to post, while Facebook has taken harder line

Demand for voice actors increases, providing relief for workers whose other sources of income has dried up

The makers of robot weeders say the machines can reduce pesticide use and be part of a more sustainable food systemIn the corner of an Ohio field, a laser-armed robot inches through a sea of onions, zapping weeds as it goes.This field doesn’t belong to a dystopian future but to Shay Myers, a third-generation farmer whose TikTok posts about farming life often go viral. Continue reading...

By turns as cerebral as Star Trek, as hopeful as Asimov and as dramatic as Battlestar Galactica, the video game series deserves a place among the sci-fi greatsOur species will one day end. Whether it’s down to our own hubris, the disastrous effects of unbridled wealth accumulation and social division, war, the climate crisis, plague, a space rock or perhaps unfriendly aliens – we’ll one day be dust caught in cosmic winds, lost to an indifferent universe. On our pale blue dot, the remnants of once-great civilisations and vanished peoples that we unearth already show us that advanced development is no guarantee of perpetuity.In sci-fi, humanity’s naive yearning to fight on despite this realisation often proves a point of curiosity – and sometimes inspiration – for alien species. This is front and centre of the Mass Effect trilogy of video games, in which our imminent annihilation is given form in the tendrils of creatures called Reapers: ancient, building-sized, alien-robot hybrids that wipe out most life in the Milky Way every 50,000 years. Continue reading...

Exclusive: civil service chief points to work to improve cybersecurity in response to Labour concernsMinisters and civil servants conducting “government by WhatsApp” have been at risk of being targeted by hackers, leading to new advice from security chiefs about how to improve their privacy.The cabinet secretary, Simon Case, revealed that the Government Security Group had issued fresh guidance across government in a letter to Labour, which had raised questions about ministers using their personal phones to conduct official business. Continue reading...

Up for discussion in the Guardian tech newsletter: Privacy fears over Apple’s plans to scan photo libraries to flag child abuse material … algorithmic bias … and comics in your inboxApple made waves on Friday, with an announcement that the company would begin scanning photo libraries stored on iPhones in the US to find and flag known instances of child sexual abuse material.From our story: Continue reading...

As it celebrates with a teaser of a new update, the strange, metaphysical space exploration has survived a tricky take-off and retained its vital spiritAs soon as I set foot on my first planet in No Man’s Sky five years ago, dying almost immediately in the boiling atmosphere of an utterly barren, deserted world, I was hooked. Here at last, was a space game for the rest of us, and by the rest of us I mean kids who grew up watching Silent Running and Solaris, and reading the trippy existential sci-fi of Ray Bradbury, Stanisław Lem and Ursula K le Guin. Here was a space game with no space marines, where making a bad decision on a hostile alien planet or in some distant asteroid belt could have deadly ramifications, and where existence among the stars was about toil and patience and long periods of silent travel.This wasn’t how everyone felt about the game upon its much-hyped launch in 2016. No Man’s Sky was famously revealed at the 2014 Game Awards, a hugely popular showcase for new mega-budget blockbusters, the gaming equivalent of advertising during the Super Bowl. This high-profile introduction, together with some ludicrously ambitious plans from tiny Guildford developer Hello Games, led to wild expectations – a gigantically detailed massively multiplayer space opera, combining elements of Elite Dangerous, Eve Online and Star Citizen into one giant production. Continue reading...

Information commissioner confirms Lord Bethell’s use of messaging app will be investigated

Some Venmo users enjoy the voyeurism of public payments – but soon the days of snooping on strangers’ spending habits will be overWould you ever want your friends to see how many taxi rides you share on a wild weekend out? Who you had Thai noodles with on any given day? With whom you split rent and living expenses?Related: Who misses paying for things with cash? Well, I do Continue reading...

Buds have good sound, battery life, compact shape without stalks and work with Android or iPhonesThe latest Apple Bluetooth earbuds from its Beats brand offer active noise-cancelling and cross-compatibility that goes beyond its competitors – even for Android users.The Studio Buds cost £129.99 ($149.99 or A$199.95) and are Beats’ smallest earbuds to date, following on from the sport-oriented PowerBeats Pro and budget Beats Flex. Continue reading...

The creators of the Aibo robot dog say it has ‘real emotions and instinct’. This may seem over the top, but is it? In today’s AI universe, all the eternal questions have become engineering problemsThe package arrived on a Thursday. I came home from a walk and found it sitting near the mailboxes in the front hall of my building, a box so large and imposing I was embarrassed to discover my name on the label. It took all my strength to drag it up the stairs.I paused once on the landing, considered abandoning it there, then continued hauling it up to my apartment on the third floor, where I used my keys to cut it open. Inside the box, beneath lavish folds of bubble wrap, was a sleek plastic pod. I opened the clasp: inside, lying prone, was a small white dog. Continue reading...

The social media platform was once a favourite of artists and photographers, but a shift towards TikTok-type videos and shopping could leave them looking for a new home onlineIn late July, hobbyist photographer and self-proclaimed “sunrise hunter” Sam Binding conducted an experiment. After visiting Somerset Lavender Farm to catch the sun peeking over the purple blossoms, the 40-year-old from Bristol uploaded the results to both Instagram and Twitter. Two days later, he used the apps’ built-in analytics tools to assess the impact of his shots. On Instagram, a total of 5,595 people saw his post – just over half of his 11,000 followers. On Twitter, his post was seen by 5,611 people, despite the fact he has just 333 followers on the site.This confirmed Binding’s hunch that although most people believe that Instagram is a place to share photos and Twitter is a place to share words, that may no longer be the case. When it launched in 2010, Instagram courted the artistic community, inviting respected designers to be among its initial users and naming its very first filter X-Pro II, after an analogue photo-developing technique. In her 2020 book No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram, technology reporter Sarah Frier documents how Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom wanted Instagram to be an outlet for artists (in a high-school essay, Systrom wrote that he liked how photography could “inspire others to look at the world in a new way”). Continue reading...

California’s legal action could mark step towards fixing culture of harassment, experts sayFor women at Activision Blizzard, one of the world’s most famous video game companies, showing up to work meant navigating near daily episodes of humiliation, sexual harassment, and even physical abuse, according to a bombshell lawsuit that has prompted a reckoning within the gaming industry.The claims paint a disturbing picture of life for female employees: rampant sexual harassment, gender discrimination, retaliation, and a “frat boy” workplace culture where men objectified women’s bodies and openly joked about rape. Continue reading...

Seek help for a mental health issue today and you may find yourself referred to an online app or talking to a robot therapist. Is this welcome democratisation of an expensive resource – or the ‘Uberisation of therapy’?She’s sitting on a purple armchair, nodding slowly as she talks. “When was the last time you felt really happy?” Her voice is low and measured, with the gently broken glottal quality that one might expect of a computer simulation, her ethnicity undefined, her cardigan beige. Ellie, an artificial intelligence therapist created with funding from the US government agency responsible for the development of military technologies, is capable of reading 60 non-verbal cues a second. She wears a watch and a look of blank empathy. On the split screen, her patient repeats her question. “Hmm, when was the last time I felt really happy?” He’s a young white man who appears to find the interaction unremarkable, which I find remarkable. She detects his “low gaze attention” as he answers, and nods, and prods, and mirrors his facial expressions. And I realise I am nodding, too.The future of therapy arrived faster than planned. Over the past decade the appearance of mental health care has radically changed, evolving from soft conversations held in small rooms, to encompass teletherapy (at a distance), text-based therapy (through messaging apps), chatbots that perform cognitive behavioural therapy, online platforms that match you to a therapist and, soon, AI therapy with a “non-human” therapist like Ellie. In 2020 the pandemic brought about a mental health crisis and these online services were pushed blinking into the light. As Covid gnawed its way through communities, record numbers of children and adults sought NHS help for problems such as anxiety and depression, and private online therapy platforms, such as BetterHelp, saw a spike in users. The future was here, for around £60 a week. Continue reading...

The social media magnate has evidently decided that the ‘metaverse’ is the way forward. But should we be worried?Brace yourselves: Mark Zuckerberg has a new pivot for Facebook. The visionary genius who brought us the pivot to video, the pivot to privacy, the pivot to trusted news and the pivot away from trusted news is now preparing for the latest turn: the pivot to the “metaverse”. Continue reading...

Silicon Valley makes billions by stealing your attention. No wonder it’s so hard to focus…One Friday in April 2016, as that year’s polarising US presidential race intensified, and more than 30 armed conflicts raged around the globe, approximately 3 million people spent part of their day watching two reporters from BuzzFeed wrap rubber bands around a watermelon. Gradually, over the course of 43 agonising minutes, the pressure ramped up – the psychological kind and the physical force on the watermelon – until, at minute 44, the 686th rubber band was applied.What happened next won’t amaze you: the watermelon exploded, messily. The reporters high-fived, wiped the splatters from their reflective goggles, then ate some of the fruit. The broadcast ended. Earth continued its orbit around the sun. Continue reading...

The messaging app does not comply with laws protecting children, say prosecutors, in fresh crackdown on tech firmsProsecutors in Beijing have initiated a civil lawsuit against a subsidiary of Tencent, saying the “youth mode” on the company’s popular social messaging app WeChat does not comply with laws protecting minors.Related: No cults, no politics, no ghouls: how China censors the video game world Continue reading...

For £1m a week you can rent 126-metre ship built for Paul Allen, with two helicopters, two subs and a recording studioA vast “explorer class” superyacht built for Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has been sold for almost £200m, and is now available to rent for anyone with about a £1m to drop for a week.Octopus was the world’s largest yacht when she was built for Allen in 2003 and the 126-metre vessel marked a turning point in superyacht design, capable of being used for deep sea exploration as well as living a life of luxury on the high seas. Continue reading...

Security researchers fear neuralMatch system could be misused to spy on citizensApple will scan photo libraries stored on iPhones in the US for known images of child sexual abuse, the company says, drawing praise from child protection groups but crossing a line that privacy campaigners warn could have dangerous ramifications. The company will also examine the contents of end-to-end encrypted messages for the first time. Continue reading...

Amy Westervelt’s Drilled considers the terrifying practices of the natural gas industry. Plus: an epic podcast about a reclusive writer, and the rise and fall of a prominent megachurchDrilled

App does not distinguish between trips inside and outside restricted areas, forcing drivers to either give up work or break rulesUber drivers who live in the most heavily locked-down areas of western and south-western Sydney are still being offered work outside of their local government areas, with drivers asking for more clarity from the app about what they can and can’t do.Under the current Sydney lockdown restrictions, rideshare drivers are still allowed to work in certain conditions, such as driving essential workers to their workplaces. But a driver who lives in a locked-down LGA generally cannot leave their LGA to work. Continue reading...

A non-player character evolves into a sentient AI in a cheerfully silly riff on The Truman Show, with Taika Waititi and Jodie ComerThe great big handsome-goofy face of Ryan Reynolds looms out of the screen in this fantasy comedy from screenwriter Matt Lieberman and director Shawn Levy (of the Night at the Museum franchise). It’s an undemanding and cheerfully silly riff on the themes of virtual reality and artificial intelligence, and what the heck we’re all doing in this big old universe of ours: as if someone took The Truman Show or Inception – or even The Lego Movie – and stripped out every serious satirical ambition, replacing it with M&M-coloured spectacle. The result is not something that’s in any way challenging, but Reynolds is so puppyishly eager to please.Reynolds plays a normal, boring guy whose name is Guy (amusingly, it is never clear if this is his actual given name, as in Guy Crouchback, or the more generic “guy”). He smiles incessantly, wears a bland, short-sleeved blue shirt and goes to work every day as a bank teller in a serenely marvellous-looking modern city, resembling Vancouver. There, he hangs out with his best friend, Buddy – again: generic or given name? – played by Lil Rel Howery, but his bank is always being hit by heists, which he greets with the same imperturbable smileyness. Gradually, Guy realises that he is an NPC, or non-player character, in a video game: a quirk or flaw in the algorithm means that he has hyperevolved into an AI state of free will and agency, able to question what is going on. This astonishes the game’s evil corporate owner Antwan (Taika Waititi), and also the designers Millie (Jodie Comer) and Keys (Joe Keery) whose concept Antwan ripped off. And Millie realises that she will have to enter the game as a player, befriend Guy and enlist his help in getting back their intellectual property – before, of course, falling in love with this clueless pixelated lunk. Continue reading...

President outlines plan to tackle the climate crisis by cutting emissions and tightening pollution standards for cars and trucksJoe Biden is setting a goal for half of all new US vehicle sales to be electric by 2030 while also tightening pollution standards for cars and trucks, in a barrage of action aimed at reducing the largest source of planet-heating gases in America.Related: Climate crisis: Scientists spot warning signs of Gulf Stream collapse Continue reading...

Revenues double as demand for rides increases, but ride-hailing company has to spend moreHeavy spending to encourage drivers back to the road has pushed ride-hailing firm Uber into a larger-than-expected loss, despite the company than doubling its revenues as demand for its services increased.Uber’s “take rate”, or its share of the fare, dropped in the last quarter as it faced elevated costs of getting willing drivers behind the wheel. Continue reading...

Up for discussion in the Guardian tech newsletter: DEF CON hit by Covid concerns … Zuckerberg enters the Metaverse … and the impact of Final Fantasy VIIIn a normal year, I would be getting on a plane today and travelling to Las Vegas for the loose conglomeration of events informally known as “Hacker Summer Camp”. Centred around DEF CON and its stuffy younger sibling Black Hat, the event sees Las Vegas taken over by hackers, information security specialists, spooks and criminals, all there to discuss the best ways to defend computers against hostile adversaries – and to break into those same computers as quickly as possible. Continue reading...