Technology | The Guardian

In the century since the first on-air report in 1921, meteorologists have - almost - got the science of forecasting down to a fine artExactly 100 years ago today, at 10.05am on 26 April 1921, an unassuming cleric and academic, Rev William F Robison, the president of St Louis University, made history as the first person in the world to broadcast a weather report. He was launching the university’s own radio station, WEW, and followed some opening remarks with a 500-word meteorological bulletin.Weather forecasting in Britain actually began 60 years before, when the Meteorological Office, a department within the Board of Trade founded to predict storms and limit loss of life at sea, began to supply the Times with weather reports in 1861. The shipping forecast was launched in 1867, when information about marine conditions was telegraphed to ports and harbours all round the UK coast. Continue reading...

Big, fast screen, flagship chip, long battery life and slick experience – but a few corners cut to save moneyThe OnePlus 9 offers the same top-performance, slick experience and long battery life as the firm’s best phone but with a few corners cut to slice £200 off the price.The £629 handset looks almost identical to its more expensive sibling, the £829 OnePlus 9 Pro. It has a marginally smaller screen that is flat rather than curved at the sides, and the edge of the phone is plastic not metal, but the rest is in effect a copy – which is a good thing. Continue reading...

The takeaway service may have felt like a lifeline during lockdown, but its ambitious vision will dramatically change the way we eatShukran Best Kebab – the finest Turkish restaurant in the Seven Sisters area of north London, according to some people (although it is surrounded by fierce rivals to the throne) – joined Deliveroo two years ago, and back then it seemed like a no-brainer. “Life as a small, independent restaurant is hard and the profit margins are slim,” says Hüseyin Kurt, Shukran’s owner. “We wanted more customers and money coming in and Deliveroo seemed to offer that. I didn’t think there was a downside.” Within a few days of signing a contract with the company, a shiny new tablet computer arrived on which orders placed via Deliveroo appeared out of the ether with a satisfying ping.The sense that something was wrong dawned gradually. Kurt, a gregarious, bearded man in his early 40s, who left his central Anatolian home town in 1995 and used his love of food to build a new life in the UK, ran the numbers: with Deliveroo’s commission amounting to 35% plus VAT on every order, he was forced to increase his prices to avoid losing money on each sale. It meant anyone buying his huge adana kofte or mixed shish kebabs through the Deliveroo app was in effect paying three surcharges for the convenience, as Deliveroo was also charging them a delivery and service fee. That went down badly with previously loyal customers who were presented with a vast number of often heavily discounted competitors when using the app. Continue reading...

The UK government is finally taking a look at the sale of the chip designer to US firm Nvidia, but why not just buy a controlling interest?Last September, Nvidia, the American manufacturer of graphics processing chips, and the Japanese company SoftBank announced an agreement under which Nvidia would acquire the British chip designer Arm from SoftBank for $40bn. Since SoftBank had acquired Arm in 2016 for $32bn, you could say that a 25% profit on a five-year investment isn’t to be sneezed at, especially if industry mutterings about SoftBank’s crackpot investment strategy and Arm’s internal difficulties with its China-based operation are to be believed.But even if one were foolish enough to sympathise with SoftBank’s desire to climb out of the hole it had dug for itself, the idea that Arm should be sold to a US chip manufacturer is so daft that even Boris Johnson’s administration had begun to smell a rat. And so on Monday it announced that the secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport was “intervening in the sale on national security grounds”, based on advice received “from officials across the investment security community”. To which decision the only possible response is: what took him so long? Continue reading...

I was a pupil of Bill Broderick, at the Royal Liberty school, where I enjoyed his maths lessons. From somewhere, he acquired a stock of ancient mechanical calculators, so old that you had to manually turn wheels to set each individual number – but we loved them. And in a school where the rod was rarely spared, in Bill’s class order was maintained by our affection for him, never fear. Continue reading...

Moxie Marlinspike accuses surveillance firm of being ‘linked to persecution’ around the worldThe CEO of the messaging app Signal claims to have hacked the phone-cracking tools used by police in Britain and around the world to extract information from seized devices.In an online post, Moxie Marlinspike, the security researcher who founded Signal in 2013, detailed a series of vulnerabilities in the surveillance devices, made by the Israeli company Cellebrite. Continue reading...

After 16 years, the ‘knowledge sharing’ site is being closed down – and without much thought about its communityOn the internet, warped humour and word salads are commonplace, but the material posted to Yahoo Answers regularly achieved new heights of bizarre. The perhaps best-known question posted to the social “knowledge sharing” platform is representative of the particular talents of its user base: “how is babby formed? how girl get pragnent?” Anyone with a Yahoo account was free to answer it. The question, misspelling and all, has been a celebrated meme in the decade since it first appeared under the category Pregnancy & Parenting.Was the question meant to be a joke or posted in a state of sincere befuddlement? I guess we’ll never know. After a 16-year run, Yahoo has announced it will shut down Yahoo Answers on 4 May. And with it the head-scratching charms of “babby” and countless other posts will go dark. Continue reading...

Former children’s commissioner for England launches case against video-sharing appA former children’s commissioner for England has launched a “landmark case” against the video-sharing app TikTok, alleging that it illegally collects the personal information of its child users.Anne Longfield, who held the commissioner post between March 2015 and February this year, has lodged a claim in the high court on behalf of millions of children in the UK and the European Economic Area who have used TikTok since 25 March 2018. Continue reading...

More powerful M1-powered computers and tablets join raft of new products and servicesApple launched a series of new iPads, Macs and tags on Tuesday at an event broadcast from California, as it continued its switch to processors of its own design.During a recorded video, the firm’s chief executive, Tim Cook, unveiled the products that Apple hopes will continue the momentum with its computers and tablets driven by home working and schooling in 2020. Continue reading...

Governments have been clashing with tech companies for decades over user privacy

Fall comes amid warnings over speculation by novice investors in cryptocurrencies such as dogecoinBitcoin has posted its biggest one-day drop in almost two months, amid warnings that novice investors could suffer heavy losses from speculating in crypto assets such as “meme coin” dogecoin.Bitcoin tumbled more than 11% on Sunday, dropping from about $62,000 (£45,000) to $55,000 – its lowest level since the end of March. Last week, the cryptocurrency had hit fresh record highs at nearly $65,000. Continue reading...

When groups of sinister drones began hovering over homes in America’s Midwest, the FBI, US Air Force and 16 police forces set up a task force. But the drones vanished. Did they even exist?At twilight on New Year’s Eve, 2020, Placido Montoya, 35, a plumber from Fort Morgan, Colorado, was driving to work. Ahead of him he noticed blinking lights in the sky. He’d heard rumours of mysterious drones, whispers in his local community, but now he was seeing them with his own eyes. In the early morning gloom, it was hard to make out how big the lights were and how many were hovering above him. But one thing was clear to Montoya: he needed to give chase.As he approached the drones in his car, they “took off very fast” and Montoya tried to follow. He confesses hitting 120mph before losing track of them. “They were creepy, really creepy,” he says. “I don’t know how to describe it, but it’s almost as if they were watching us.” Continue reading...

The Indian leader’s autocratic tendencies do not seem to have posed great ethical difficulties for Facebook and TwitterFor decades, India was a poster child for democratic development: a poor, sprawling, ethnically diverse country that nevertheless had regular elections and peaceful transfers of power – the hallmarks of a functioning democracy – albeit with the flaws inherent in such a system, including a single dominant party – the Congress party. And then, in May 2014, Narendra Modi, leader of the BJP, was elected, swept to power on a standard-issue neoliberal platform of modernisation, privatisation and liberalisation of the economy, slashing welfare budgets, lowering corporate taxes, abolishing wealth taxes, etc.Modi’s election, wrote the august journal Foreign Policy, marked a critical milestone in his country’s development. He was “the first leader since independence to command a lower-house parliamentary majority that did not belong to the Congress party of India’s founders Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. After 65 years, a dynastic founding party was subsumed by new blood.” But in the six years since his first election (he was re-elected in 2019), the journal continued, “it has become clear that his style of leadership poses an existential threat to the world’s largest democracy. Through his wildly successful promotion of Hindutva ideology, Modi is poised to remake India into a Russian-style ‘managed democracy’ – one retaining all the trappings of democracy while operating as a de facto autocracy.” Continue reading...

Tesla could be in for a shock as far-eastern rivals use cheap money to gain traction among affluent western car buyersTesla boss Elon Musk is not known for admiring his competition, but when Chinese manufacturer Nio made its 100,000th electric car last week, he offered his congratulations.It was a mark of respect from a chief executive who had been through “manufacturing hell” with his own company. Yet it is also a sign of the growing influence of China’s electric carmakers. They are hoping to stake out a spot among the heavyweights of the new industry and bring a significant new challenge to Tesla – and to the rest of the automotive industry as it scrambles to catch up. Continue reading...

Gustafsson’s firm, founded when she was 30, is marketed as a digital parallel of a human body fighting illnessPoppy Gustafsson runs a cutting-edge and gender-diverse cybersecurity firm on the brink of a £3bn stock market debut, but she is happy to reference pop culture classic the Terminator to help describe what Darktrace actually does.Launched in Cambridge eight years ago by an unlikely alliance of mathematicians, former spies from GCHQ and the US and artificial intelligence (AI) experts, Darktrace provides protection, enabling businesses to stay one step ahead of increasingly smarter and dangerous hackers and viruses. Continue reading...

For an enthusiastic computer nerd, it should have been a fun, fulfilling, money-saving distraction during lockdown. Then the error messages startedIt’s just like building Lego, they said. Enjoy the process, they said. You’ll have such a feeling of accomplishment when it’s finished. This is what friends and colleagues told me when I set out to build a PC. It did not quite go that way.It seems more and more people are choosing to construct their own gaming machines rather than buying them already made. It’s cheaper (in theory), you get to choose the exact specifications, and it’s something to do while you’re stuck at home in lockdown. Even Superman actor Henry Cavill has been getting in on the act, making a video of himself constructing his new machine while wearing a really tight vest. I thought it would be a fun thing to do with my 13-year-old son as a sort of Easter holiday treat. We’re both nerds – what could go wrong? Continue reading...

Ruling in Amsterdam overturns company’s decision to exclude operators for alleged sharing of account detailsUber has been ordered to reinstate five British drivers who were struck off from its ride-hailing app by robot technology.The five drivers, backed by the App Drivers & Couriers Union (ADCU) and the campaign group Worker Info Exchange, argued that they had been wrongly accused of fraudulent activity based on mistaken information from Uber’s technology, and that the company had failed to provide the drivers with proper evidence to support the allegations. Continue reading...

Analysts expect company to be valued $65bn to $100bn, making CEO and co-founder Brian Armstrong’s net worth up to $20bnThe soaring value of cryptocurrencies added another name to the list of the world’s wealthiest billionaires on Wednesday with the introduction of Coinbase, the US’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, on to the Nasdaq stock exchange.Brian Armstrong, Coinbase’s CEO and co-founder, has a 20% stake in the company which analysts expected to be valued at between $65bn and $100bn. Shares surged 58% when the sale started valuing the company at about $100bn and making his net worth $20bn. Continue reading...

While many smartphones are advertised as ‘water resistant’, this doesn’t mean they’re immune from water damageIf you’ve ever gotten your phone wet in the rain, dropped it in water or spilt liquid over it, you’re not alone. One study suggests 25% of smartphone users have damaged their smartphone with water or some other kind of liquid.Liquid penetrating a smartphone can affect the device in several ways. It could lead to: Continue reading...

Notebooks offer choice of Intel and AMD chips for first time, plus better webcams and mics for video callsMicrosoft has announced the latest in its Windows 10 PC notebook series, the Surface Laptop 4, with a choice of AMD and Intel processors across all sizes for the first time.The Surface Laptop 4 comes with either a 13.5in or 15in touchscreen display and, like its predecessors, is a mainstream premium laptop offering a smoother experience with hardware and software made by the same firm, similar to the scheme employed by Apple with its Mac computers. Continue reading...

State-backed harassment campaign targets journalists and dissidents in authoritarian countryFacebook has allowed a state-backed harassment campaign targeting independent news outlets and opposition politicians in Azerbaijan to return to its platform, less than six months after it banned the troll network.A Guardian investigation has revealed how Facebook allowed an arm of Azerbaijan’s ruling party, the YAP, to carry out the harassment campaign for 14 months after an employee, Sophie Zhang, first alerted managers and executives to its existence in August 2019. Continue reading...

Critics argue the new integration could mimic notoriously faulty background checks without necessarily making dating apps saferWhen Jerrel Gantt was released from prison after three years, he was handed a pamphlet about healthcare and nothing else. He began searching for employment, a deep source of anxiety for him, and secured housing through a ministry in New York City. He later enrolled in school part-time.As he settled into life outside of prison and developed a support system, Gantt began going on dates with people he met on apps like Tinder. Continue reading...

Deal comes as Microsoft builds up its cloud-computing operation for healthcare and business customersMicrosoft is to buy the artificial intelligence and speech technology firm Nuance Communications for about $16bn (£12bn), as it builds up its cloud-computing operation for healthcare and business customers.Nuance, known for pioneering speech technology and helping to launch Apple’s virtual assistant, Siri, operates in 28 countries and reported revenues of $1.5bn in its last full financial year. Continue reading...

App was to have been updated before English lockdown easing, but firms objected to data-sharing changes

Gesture backfires as customers highlight accessibility issues, with one saying UK has ‘completely lost the plot’A leading sight charity has stressed the need for inclusive web design after rail websites switched to black and white to mark Prince Philip’s death, leaving partially sighted people struggling.

A Guardian investigation exposes the breadth of state-backed manipulation of the platformFacebook has repeatedly allowed world leaders and politicians to use its platform to deceive the public or harass opponents despite being alerted to evidence of the wrongdoing.The Guardian has seen extensive internal documentation showing how Facebook handled more than 30 cases across 25 countries of politically manipulative behavior that was proactively detected by company staff. Continue reading...

The social media giant is still a law unto itself. Can anybody hold it to account?Half a billion Facebook users’ accounts stolen. Personal information compromised. Telephone numbers and birth dates drifting across the internet being used for God knows what. And for four days, from Facebook’s corporate headquarters, nothing but silence.If this sounds familiar, it’s because it is. This week saw reports of a massive new Facebook breach and everything about it, from Facebook’s denials of the words “data” and “breach” to its repeated refusal to answer journalists’ questions, has been uncannily reminiscent of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Continue reading...

There have been many reports but little action: UK university science departments need to do more to fix their serious diversity problem

Neuralink video appears to show monkey controlling game paddle simply by thinkingThe billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s brain-chip startup released footage on Friday appearing to show a monkey playing a simple video game after getting implants of the new technology.The three-minute video by Neuralink shows Pager, a male macaque with chips embedded on each side of its brain, playing Mind Pong. Although he was trained to move a joystick, it is now unplugged. He appears to control the paddle simply by thinking about moving his hand up or down. Continue reading...

Over the past year, I’ve reconnected with my laziest self. Now I need a jump startBefore I met my wife, my capacity to do nothing was infinite. After I met my wife, my capacity to do nothing remained infinite, but I was retrained to believe that staring into space doesn’t count as a hobby.Over the past year, though, I’ve reconnected with my laziest self. Lockdown has meant we have been encouraged to kick back, and I have taken the slogan “Stay home, save lives” to mean that as I sit on the sofa and rewatch every Marvel movie, I am actually a hero. Continue reading...

Pseudocide looks at infamous, grisly cases of death fraud. Plus: deliciously devellish scares in At Your Peril, and a rich true crime investigation in West CorkPseudocide

Results have not yet been finalized, but workers so far have voted 1,100-463 against forming a union at the Bessemer facilityVote counting kicked off on Thursday in a consequential unionization drive at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama, an effort seen as one of the most important labor fights in recent American history.While results have not yet been finalised, it appeared on Thursday evening that warehouse workers were on track to reject unionization by a 2-1 margin, with almost half the votes counted. Vote counting will resume on Friday morning. Continue reading...

Twitter said that because of the former president’s ban content from his account will not appear on the social networkThe National Archives will not be allowed to resurrect Donald Trump’s tweets on the social network, Twitter said on Wednesday, even in its official capacity as a record-keeping organization. However, the archive is working to create a separate record of the former president’s tweets on his official library website.The former president has been permanently banned from Twitter since January, when the company became the first major social media platform to eject Trump after his behavior during the Capitol insurrection. Continue reading...

Company spokesperson said Facebook was not confident it had full visibility on which users would need to be alertedFacebook has not notified the more-than 530m users whose details were exposed on a hacker forum in 2019 and has no plans to do so, according to company representatives. Continue reading...

New American proposals offer the prospect of a global deal against corporate tax avoidance. Britain has a vital role to play in making it workThe terrible global cloud that is the Covid-19 pandemic offered the world the glimpse of a silver lining this week. New tax proposals by Joe Biden mean that the economic emergency caused by coronavirus could result in big multinational corporations having to pay the fair amounts of tax they have avoided for so long. A breakthrough this week at the 135-nation Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development talks in Paris may produce an agreement. Giants like Facebook and Google would then have to pay up – and not before time. This is definitely a step in the right direction.Until Covid, the OECD corporate tax negotiations that began nearly a decade ago had been deadlocked, especially after the Trump administration refused to agree to anything that might raise taxes on US tech giants. Individual nations, notably in Europe, had started to impose or threaten stiffer local taxes, leading to retaliatory threats from Washington, but without inhibiting the big multinationals’ lucrative tax-avoidance strategies. Under Donald Trump, the US had even made clear that it reserved the right to allow American corporations to remain outside any new OECD-brokered regime. Mr Biden abandoned that demand in January. Continue reading...

As the pandemic forced us inside and online, Room Rater was one Twitter account giving doomscrollers a well-needed levity break. A year on, co-founder Claude Taylor explains how he plans to keep goingWith its stately lamp and verdant window view, Hillary Clinton’s “Zoom room” is nicer than most.So when Room Rater – a Twitter account which scores the video conference backgrounds of high-profile figures – gave it nine out of 10 last spring, Clinton took her disappointment to social media: “I’ll keep striving for that highest, hardest glass ceiling, the elusive 10/10,” she tweeted at the account. Continue reading...

Radar-based gesture and sleep tracking turns top smart assistant into a great alarm clock tooGoogle’s second-generation Nest Hub smart display now comes with radar-based sleep tracking as it attempts to keep Amazon’s Alexa at bay.The new Nest Hub costs £89.99 on launch, which makes it cheaper than its predecessor and slightly undercuts competitors of a similar size. Continue reading...

The FBI has relied on a variety of technologies to track down rioters – and watchdogs are concerned those technologies could impede protesters exercising their first amendment rightsOver the past months, federal law enforcement has used a wide variety of surveillance technologies to track down rioters who participated in the 6 January attack on the US Capitol building – demonstrating rising surveillance across the nation. Continue reading...

We are raiding the Audio Long Reads archives and bringing you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors.This week, from 2018: How an extreme libertarian tract predicting the collapse of liberal democracies – written by Jacob Rees-Mogg’s father – inspired the likes of Peter Thiel to buy up property across the Pacific. By Mark O’Connell Continue reading...

China powers nearly 80% of the global cryptocurrencies trade, but the energy required could jeopardise its pledge to peak carbon emissions by 2030China’s electricity-hungry bitcoin mines that power nearly 80% of the global trade in cryptocurrencies risk undercutting the country’s climate goals, a study in the journal Nature has said.Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies rely on “blockchain” technology, which is a shared database of transactions, with entries that must be confirmed and encrypted. The network is secured by individuals called “miners” who use high-powered computers to verify transactions, with bitcoins offered as a reward. Those computers consume enormous amounts of electricity. Continue reading...

Maggie Kelly went looking for secondhand clothes and a crib and found the mother tribeIt was that special brand of 2020 pessimism and a hefty dose of first-mum nerves that turned me in the pregnancy Grinch. Everything was new, overwhelming and expensive. List upon list grew with every 3am bolt from the blue. Cribs, bassinets, prams, nursing chairs, eco-nappies, cotton nappies, bamboo nappies. I was trapped in a cutesy-wootsy duckling-print plastic hell.“We’re going to kill the planet with every dollar we spend,” I grumbled to my partner as I waddled the aisles of Baby Bunting. Shopping secondhand seemed like the better option – I could save the planet while avoiding anything printed with baby animals. Continue reading...

Experts urge users to secure accounts and passwords after breach exposes personal details of more than 500 million peopleAustralians are being urged to secure their social media accounts after the details of more than 500 million global Facebook users were found online in a massive data breach.The details published freely online included names, phone numbers, email addresses, account IDs and bios. Continue reading...

Digital art can be easily and endlessly duplicated, but non-fungible tokens allow buyers to confirm ownershipThe artist Kevin Abosch has sold a picture of a potato for $1.5m, made a neon sculpture inspired by cryptocurrency, and even sold his own blood on the blockchain.So in many ways, entering the world of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) was the next logical step for the 51-year-old Irish artist, whose work explores themes of digital currency and value. Continue reading...

Vote in Bessemer, Alabama, is chance to inform younger generations about the role unions play, labor leaders sayCounting is currently under way for the historic union election at Amazon’s warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, and union organizers and leaders throughout the labor movement are hoping the effort will help galvanize support for workers and unions in the south and across the US.Tevita Uhatafe, 35, a member of Transport Workers Union of America Local 513 in the Dallas area, was one of several union members and leaders who visited Bessemer to lend their support for the union organizing drive. Continue reading...

Covid has given Peter Thiel’s secretive US tech company new opportunities to operate in Europe in ways some campaigners find worryingThe 24 March, 2020 will be remembered by some for the news that Prince Charles tested positive for Covid and was isolating in Scotland. In Athens it was memorable as the day the traffic went silent. Twenty-four hours into a hard lockdown, Greeks were acclimatising to a new reality in which they had to send an SMS to the government in order to leave the house. As well as millions of text messages, the Greek government faced extraordinary dilemmas. The European Union’s most vulnerable economy, its oldest population along with Italy, and one of its weakest health systems faced the first wave of a pandemic that overwhelmed richer countries with fewer pensioners and stronger health provision. The carnage in Italy loomed large across the Adriatic.One Greek who did go into the office that day was Kyriakos Pierrakakis, the minister for digital transformation, whose signature was inked in blue on an agreement with the US technology company, Palantir. The deal, which would not be revealed to the public for another nine months, gave one of the world’s most controversial tech companies access to vast amounts of personal data while offering its software to help Greece weather the Covid storm. The zero-cost agreement was not registered on the public procurement system, neither did the Greek government carry out a data impact assessment – the mandated check to see whether an agreement might violate privacy laws. Continue reading...

Spy Affair delves in to the tale of a gun campaigner arrested for espionage. Plus: true crime with a purpose in The Doodler, and Current Affairs looks at unionisation efforts at AmazonSpy Affair