Technology | The Guardian

Schoolgirl’s fake cosmetics site helps hundreds of women as domestic violence rises during CovidIn April 2020, weeks after Poland went into its first Covid-19 lockdown, Krysia Paszko, a 17-year-old high school pupil, watched a TV report about Europe’s surge in domestic violence cases, which had increased by up to 60% on 2019, according to the World Health Organization. Poland’s largest women’s rights centre, Centrum Praw Kobiet (CPK), had reported a 50% increase in calls to its domestic violence hotline in March.Learning from the report that France had implemented a scheme in pharmacies that women could use to report domestic violence using the codewords “Mask 19”, Paszko had an idea. With help from a graphic designer friend, she created a Facebook page for a fictitious cosmetics company. Continue reading...

Company says hackers used malware to infect devices and enable surveillance after setting up fake profiles to build trustFacebook has blocked a group of hackers in China who used the platform to target Uighurs living abroad with links to malware that would infect their devices and enable surveillance.Related: 'Think of your family': China threatens European citizens over Xinjiang protests Continue reading...

This week an investment bank announced Zoom-free Fridays – and they are far from the first to question the stress and fatigue that comes with 24/7 screen time

Nintendo Switch; Marvelous Interactive/XSEED

Survey finds Asian and Black Americans saw major jump in harassment, while LGBTQ+ respondents face highest rate overallAsian Americans and Black Americans experienced major rises in online hate in the past year, a new report has found, despite recent steps that social media firms have taken to address harassment.A survey released on Wednesday by the Anti-Defamation League, an anti-hate speech organization founded in 1913, discovered that in 2020 Asian Americans experienced the largest single rise in severe online hate and harassment year-over-year in comparison with other groups, with 17% reporting having experienced sexual harassment, stalking, physical threats, swatting, doxing or sustained harassment, compared with 11% last year. Continue reading...

Latest top-spec handset has Hasselblad-branded camera, great screen and long battery lifeOnePlus’s latest 9 Pro Android phone takes the firm’s winning formula of slick speed and adds knowhow from the Swedish renowned camera manufacturer Hasselblad to try to improve things in the photography department.The £829 phone tops the Chinese brand’s line for 2021 and joins its stablemate Oppo in its pursuit of top dog Samsung. Continue reading...

The head of Facebook, and his Google and Twitter counterparts, could face a rough ride at the scene of the insurrectionists’ crimeMark Zuckerberg, the head of Facebook, could be in for a rough ride on Thursday when he testifies to Congress for the first time about the 6 January insurrection at the Capitol in Washington DC and amid growing questions over his platform’s role in fuelling the violence.The testimony will come after signs that the new administration of Joe Biden is preparing to take a tougher line on the tech industry’s power, especially when it comes to the social media platforms and their role in spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories. Continue reading...

Calls for changes to classification system after award-winning role-playing game said to offend standards of ‘morality’The banning of video game Disco Elysium from sale in Australia has renewed calls for the Australian government to overhaul the classification system to move away from the “moral panic” associated with video games.On Friday afternoon, the Australian classification board announced Disco Elysium – The Final Cut was refused classification on the grounds the game was found to “depict, express or otherwise deal with matters of sex, drug misuse or addiction, crime, cruelty, violence or revolting or abhorrent phenomena” in a way that offended “against the standards of morality, decency and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults”. It ruled the game should not be classified. Continue reading...

The 300-page document for moderators defines which phrases are ethically unacceptable

This year non-fungible tokens burst into the mainstream after several digital images and animations sold for absurd amounts – so I entered the world of NFTs myselfFor years, I’ve kept an ever-growing record of interesting pictures I discover online in a folder entitled Images on my desktop: a fox sauntering through an art gallery; a pixelated rendering of a Tokyo streetscape; Jon Bon Jovi doing yoga. They’re sentimental reminders of things I’ve seen online, but I am under no illusion that I somehow own these images. They come from the internet and can be copied, shared and experienced by many people all at once. My collection really is worthless to anyone but me.Related: Art, amulets and cryptokitties: the new frontier of cryptocurrencies Continue reading...

Federal court to decide whether Fortnite maker’s case can be heard while legal action under way in USApple has argued that Epic Games’ case against the tech giant’s in-app purchase system is not altruistically trying to secure a better deal for Australian customers and app developers in the app store, but the “self-serving” act of a Goliath trying to fundamentally change Apple’s business model.The popular video game Fortnite was kicked off both the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store in August after Epic bypassed the companies’ in-app payment methods for their own cheaper direct billing that prevented Apple and Google taking a share. Continue reading...

Comedians went virtual, Ai Weiwei went to Portugal – and Bake Off pledged the show would go on. In the first of a two-part series, cultural figures look back on a year that shook their industry

The acclaimed writer on technology and its effect on our mental health talks about her memoir and the insights Covid has given herSherry Turkle, 72, is professor of the social studies of science and technology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was one of the first academics to examine the impact of technology on human psychology and society. She has published a series of acclaimed books: her latest, The Empathy Diaries, is an enthralling memoir taking in her time growing up in Brooklyn, her thorny family background, studying in Paris and at Harvard, and her academic career.It’s quite unusual for an academic to put themselves central to the story. What was your motivation for writing a memoir?

The effort has received several high profile endorsements, including from President Joe Biden and other labor unionsOrganizers and workers are making the final push in the first Amazon warehouse union election in the US in Bessemer, Alabama which, if successful, would mark one of the biggest labor victories in the US over the past several decades.The fight over forming a union at the hugely profitable tech and retail giant has triggered immense political interest and pushed labor rights on to America’s front pages, especially during the coronavirus pandemic when warehouse workers for online retail have become an essential workforce. Continue reading...

Ipswich is an ideal place to trial technology to bring fully self-driving cars to Australian cities. But the project has had to overcome a lot of road bumpsAs the traffic lights turn from amber to red, Miranda Blogg accelerates towards them.“Here we go,” she says. Continue reading...

In progressive circles these days, there is a palpable horror of the uncurated world, of thought-spaces flourishing outside the consensusOne day in March 2015, I sat in a theater in New York City and took careful notes as a series of personages led by Hillary Clinton and Melinda Gates described the dazzling sunburst of liberation that was coming our way thanks to entrepreneurs, foundations and Silicon Valley. The presentation I remember most vividly was that of a famous TV actor who rhapsodized about the wonders of Twitter, Facebook and the rest: “No matter which platform you prefer,” she told us, “social media has given us all an extraordinary new world, where anyone, no matter their gender, can share their story across communities, continents and computer screens. A whole new world without ceilings.”Six years later and liberals can’t wait for that extraordinary new world to end. Today we know that social media is what gives you things like Donald Trump’s lying tweets, the QAnon conspiracy theory and the Capitol riot of 6 January. Social media, we now know, is a volcano of misinformation, a non-stop wallow in hatred and lies, generated for fun and profit, and these days liberal politicians are openly pleading with social media’s corporate masters to pleez clamp a ceiling on it, to stop people from sharing their false and dangerous stories. Continue reading...

Nintendo Switch; Natsume

Shon Faye hosts Call Me Mother. Plus: inviting homecoming tours with Katy Wix and Adam Drake, and weird and wonderful tales with Heavyweight’s Jonathan GoldsteinCall Me Mother

Rise in 3D-printed homes comes as California’s housing crisis continues to rage, with 1.8m to 3.5m new units needed by 2025The desert landscape of California’s Coachella Valley will soon be home to the first US neighborhood comprised entirely of 3D-printed houses.Through a partnership between two California companies – Palari, a sustainable real estate development group, and Mighty Buildings, a construction technology company – a five acre parcel of land in Rancho Mirage will be transformed into a planned community of 15 3D-printed, eco-friendly homes claiming to be the first of its kind. Continue reading...

Social media giant says it’s exploring introducing a parent-controlled experience that allows kids to ‘safely’ use the photo sharing platformFacebook is considering launching a version of its popular photo social media platform, Instagram, for children under the age of 13.BuzzFeed News first reported Facebook announced in an internal company post that the company would begin building a version of Instagram for people under the age of 13 years to allow them to “safely” use Instagram for the first time. Currently the company does not allow people who are under this age to create an account on the platform. Continue reading...

Drivers react to new remuneration with taxi hailing app but say more still needs to be done to improve termsOn Wednesday Uber, the taxi hailing app, began offering 70,000 UK drivers a minimum hourly wage, holiday pay and pensions after years of legal battles.Related: Uber to pay UK drivers minimum wage, holiday pay and pension Continue reading...

We ask Australian comedians to liven up our day with comedy gems. Here’s what Nikki Britton sent usI’ll not waste too much of your time here. There is nothing funnier than an obnoxious dad, three beers in at a barbecue, dominating the kids’ trampoline, only to misstep and get his scrotum pinched in the springs. Nothing. It is comedy perfection. The slapstick physicality, the status drop, the schadenfreude. *chef’s kiss*Unfortunately, these clips are harder to come across that you’d think. And, if you do a Google search for “scrotal pinch” you’re in for a bit of spice. I expect most of these wonders are locked deep in a dusty vault in the basement at Channel Nine. The only way it might be opened is if Shelley Craft and Toni Pearen meet by the midnight moon and chant the spell: “You’re dinky-di true blue, the funny things you do. Australia, Australia, this is you.” Then combine their separate halves of the only key that opens the lock. (If you did not live through the 90s in Australia you won’t get this reference, and I can’t help you.) Continue reading...

Union says taxi app firm will force workers to take new cases to court despite success with wage claimUber is set to face further legal action over pay as unions said the taxi hailing app’s new deal was continuing to shortchange its UK drivers.On Tuesday, after years of resistance by the company, Uber said it accepted that its 70,000 private-hire drivers were workers with rights to a minimum hourly wage and holiday pay in line with a supreme court ruling last month. Continue reading...

It may seem like a lot for a digital-only artwork. But in some ways, NFTs are a continuation of collecting as usualOn 11 March, one of the art world’s signature can-you-believe-it moments made global headlines: a digital-only artwork sold for more than $69m, the third highest price ever paid for an artwork at auction. It was a digital collage by the artist Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, who until October had never sold a print for more than $100.This sensational auction came on the heels of simmering interest in “non-fungible tokens”, or NFTs, which finally boiled over into the annals of art auction houses. NFTs are unique assets verified by blockchain technology; as with cryptocurrency, a record of who owns what is stored on a decentralised public ledger of sorts. Thus NFTs function like a digital certificate of authenticity that can be attached to all manner of things, virtual or physical. Mostly now, they are being used to monetise digital assets such as audio files, videos, Gifs, tweets and even virtual versions of sneakers; 621 of them recently sold for a combined $3.1m. Continue reading...

This online experiment uses live motion capture to bring the fairies and sprites of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to vivid lifeThe opening moments of Dream contain all the enticements of an augmented Imax experience, beamed to our laptops. The camera hovers over a forest drenched in mist, then swoops in as if entering a 3D DreamWorks movie. Our host, Puck (EM Williams), is in a real-life studio and transforms into an avatar on our screens.Despite the futuristic feel, we are entering a Shakespearean forest and following Puck into an experiment that splices A Midsummer Night’s Dream with cutting-edge immersive and gaming technology. Continue reading...

The regulatory body sounds like a positive step. But it’s designed to give political cover while Facebook continues to allow dangerous content

We would like to hear from Uber drivers about their thoughts on a minimum hourly wage, holiday pay and pensionsFrom Wednesday, Uber said its UK drivers will be guaranteed a minimum hourly wage, holiday pay and pensions.After a long-running dispute between drivers and Uber operating companies, the Supreme Court ruled that Uber drivers should be classed as workers rather than independent third-party contractors. Continue reading...

Great screen, flagship chips and good camera with a few corners cut for significantly cheaper priceWith the Mi 11 Xiaomi, one of China’s largest electronics firms, is attempting to undercut Samsung with a premium, top-spec phone costing significantly less.The £750 Mi 11 is the first of Xiaomi’s new top-spec phones for the year, replacing the Mi 10 series from 2020. Continue reading...

Brothers Patrick and John Collison’s online payments empire is now valued at $95bnThe latest fundraising round by the digital payments firm Stripe has boosted the net worth of its co-founders, Patrick and John Collison, to about $11.5bn (£8.3bn) each, catapulting them into the top bracket of the world’s millennial billionaires. Not bad for two brothers from the tiny Tipperary village of Dromineer, population: barely 100.Related: Silicon Valley's Stripe valued at $95bn after fundraising Continue reading...

Former high-flying Finnish phone firm to use estimated €600m in savings to fund R&D to catch up with rivalsThe Finnish telecommunications company Nokia has unveiled plans to cut up to 10,000 jobs worldwide in the next two years, and wants to use the savings to catch up with rivals on 5G technologies.The company said it would reduce its global workforce to between 80,000 and 85,000 over the next 18 to 24 months, from 90,000 now. The exact number will depend on market developments. Nokia will invest the estimated €600m (£515m) annual cost savings in research & development, particularly in 5G, cloud and digital infrastructure. Continue reading...

Holmes is on trial for allegedly defrauding investors, doctors and patients while at the helm of blood-testing startupThe alleged Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes is pregnant, according to a new court filing, potentially delaying her trial by several weeks. Continue reading...

Sadly, it has nothing to do with fungusWhen is an album not an album? Why, when it’s a “non-fungible token”, a new form of digital swag, related to cryptocurrency, being sold by artists and musicians such as Kings of Leon and Grimes. They’re called NFTs for short, but why?Perhaps disappointingly, “fungible” does not mean “capable of being turned into fungi”. Rather, the Latin verb fungi means to discharge some office or perform some task, and so fungibilis means “useful”, and English “fungible” specifically describes useful things that are interchangeable. If I order five spoons of a certain design, it doesn’t matter exactly which five of those spoons you send me. Continue reading...

Streaming service tests feature that asks viewers if they share household with subscriberNetflix has begun testing a feature that asks viewers whether they share a household with a subscriber, in a move that could lead to crackdown on the widespread practice of sharing passwords among friends and family.Some Netflix users are reported to have received a message asking them to confirm they live with the account owner by entering a code included in a text message or email sent to the subscriber. Continue reading...

Wombo AI can animate any face to sing songs in a way that is unbelievable enough to help the fight against deepfakes, say some expertsIf you’ve ever wanted to know what it might be like to see Kim Jong-un let loose at karaoke, your wish has been granted, thanks to an app that lets users turn photographs of anyone – or anything remotely resembling a face – into uncanny AI-powered videos of them lip syncing famous songs.The app is called Wombo AI, and while the future of artificial intelligence and the ability to make fake videos of real people strikes fear into the hearts of many experts, some say that Wombo could help by raising awareness of “deepfakes”. Continue reading...

In a letter to mark 32 years of the web, its founder says getting 2.2 billion fully online must be a priorityToo many young people around the world are excluded from accessing the web, and getting them online should be a priority for the post-Covid era, Tim Berners-Lee has said.In a letter published to mark the 32nd birthday of the web, its founder says the opportunity “to reimagine our world and create something better” in the aftermath of Covid-19 must be channelled to getting internet access to the third of people aged between 15 and 24 who are offline. Continue reading...

Subhakar Khadka says video of San Francisco incident reveals abuse that often goes unacknowledgedAn Uber driver in San Francisco who was assaulted by an unmasked passenger has spoken out about the incident, saying that he was attacked after asking the woman to get out of the vehicle and taunted because of his race and job.Video of the incident went viral, prompting a police investigation an an outpouring of support for the driver, Subhakar Khadka. In an interview with the Guardian, Khadka, who is from Nepal, said that between constant feelings of anxiety, fielding calls from media outlets and talking to family and friends back home, he has only gotten about three hours of sleep each night since the footage came out. Continue reading...

My friend Mike Carey, who has died aged 71, was a pioneer in the development of speech recognition and digital audio, including digital audio broadcasting (DAB). After a formative period at the Post Office research labs, Keele University and Mitel Telecom, he left in 1985 with Adrian Anderson and me to establish Ensigma, a company that quickly established itself as a leader in the research and development of digital speech and audio applications, with uses in mobile telephony, broadcasting and automated speech recognition systems.Mike was born in Preston, to Ethel (nee Glover), a weaver and housewife, and Stephen, a miner-cum-decorator. At Preston Catholic college, a local grammar, he met Elizabeth Mercer at a school dance, for once beating the cross-country champion across the floor. They married in 1969, by which time Mike was on a Post Office scholarship to study electrical engineering at Imperial College, London, supported throughout by extra work taken on by his parents. Continue reading...

Florian Kaps – Vienna’s answer to Steve Jobs – enthuses over analogue hardware and makes a persuasive case for moving beyond an online existenceHere is a documentary about the resurgent interest in retro culture that comes across like a warm fuzzy blanket of nostalgia for pre-Covid days. The central figure is “Doc” Florian Kaps, who the film presents as Vienna’s answer to Steve Jobs, a social visionary untroubled by such details as earning a living or indeed running a functioning business. Kaps’ speciality is what he calls “analogue”: physical hardware such as manual switchboards, jukeboxes, printing presses, and the like, made obsolete by the rise of laptops and smartphones.At the start of the film, Kaps’ attention is caught by the failing Polaroid camera, and – seemingly on a whim – he agrees to take over the company’s last factory, in the Netherlands. (We are not told much about his finances, other than the occasional arrival of tech investor types who pop up whenever needed.) It soon becomes clear that Kaps’ visionary utterances (“What does Facebook smell like?”) are no match for a solid business plan, and after a few years of trying fruitlessly to replicate Polaroid’s instant film, Kaps is ejected from his own company when a former intern becomes CEO after bringing in his own investor father. Continue reading...

Drivers report being underpaid and having to urinate in bottles in their vehicles to keep up with delivery ratesJames Meyers worked as a driver for several Amazon delivery service providers in Austin, Texas, for about one year until he quit in October 2020 citing the immense workloads and poor working conditions. Continue reading...

Everything from online news to social media and streaming platforms are captured by the regulations, branded ‘palpably illegal’ by opponentsNot long before he was elected as India’s prime minister in 2014, Narendra Modi spoke of his dreams of a “digital India”, where “access to information knows no barriers”.But this week, unprecedented barriers on every form of digital content, from online news to social media and films and television on streaming platforms, came into force, making India’s digital realm one of the most heavily regulated of any major democracy. Continue reading...

Epic’s court battle with Google over being banned from the Play Store, mirrors one it has launched against Apple over its App Store removalEpic Games has launched new legal action against Google in Australia over alleged anti-competitive behaviour after Fortnite was kicked off the Google Play store last year.It is the second such court action Epic has taken in Australia following similar court action against Apple, launched in November last year. Continue reading...

Trading debut in New York prompts huge demand for game system with 200m monthly usersShares in Roblox, the virtual gaming world that has proved to be a lockdown winner with hundreds of millions of mostly young players, have surged 60% valuing it at $47bn after an investor frenzy on its first day of trading on the New York stock exchange.Roblox may not have the profile of a Fortnite or Minecraft, but its formula – allowing players to develop simple multiplayer games, socialise with friends and buy its digital currency to pay for virtual items – has made it a global phenomenon. Continue reading...

Users could effectively ‘teleport’ to connect with friends in more planet-friendly way, says ZuckerbergFacebook has unveiled the first of a wave of virtual reality innovations that its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, hopes will allow for effective “teleportation” by the end of the decade.One experimental project aims to track hand movements using nervous signals read by a wristwatch, with the hope of one day using that data to allow the wearer to manipulate virtual space. Continue reading...

Research estimates cryptocurrency will consume as much energy as all datacentres globallyThe surge in bitcoin’s price since the start of 2021 could result in the cryptocurrency having a carbon footprint the same as that of London, according to research.Alex de Vries, a Dutch economist, created the Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index, one of the first systematic attempts to estimate the energy use of the bitcoin network. By late 2017 he estimated the network used 30 terawatt hours (TWh) a year, the same as the whole of the Republic of Ireland. Continue reading...

Smaller, lighter and water-resistant device has Bluetooth and wifi, aimed at home and outdoor use

The ‘unusually aggressive’ attack allowed hackers to access email accounts of at least 30,000 organizations in the USThe Biden administration is launching an emergency taskforce to address an aggressive cyber-attack that has affected hundreds of thousands of Microsoft customers around the world – the second major hacking campaign to hit the US since the election.The attack, first reported by security researcher Brian Krebs on 5 March, allowed hackers to access the email accounts of at least 30,000 organizations in the US. Continue reading...

OpenAI’s Clip system fails to correctly decipher images when words are pasted on pictureAs artificial intelligence systems go, it is pretty smart: show Clip a picture of an apple and it can recognise that it is looking at a fruit. It can even tell you which one, and sometimes go as far as differentiating between varieties.But even cleverest AI can be fooled with the simplest of hacks. If you write out the word “iPod” on a sticky label and paste it over the apple, Clip does something odd: it decides, with near certainty, that it is looking at a mid-00s piece of consumer electronics. In another test, pasting dollar signs over a picture of a dog caused it to be recognised as a piggy bank. Continue reading...

Measure would allow developers to use own payment systems as tide turns against industry that has been largely unregulatedA controversial Arizona bill that addresses the fees technology companies like Apple and Google charge app developers is raising new antitrust challenges for embattled US tech giants.The bill – which passed the Arizona state house last week and now will move to the state’s senate – would require Apple and Google to allow app developers to use their own payment systems, rather than Google’s or Apple’s, to process user purchases within the app. Continue reading...

Sales of slumber-related products have soared during lockdownThere are breathing robots versed in “thousands of years of Buddhist breathing techniques” that claim to soothe you to sleep. Then there are weighted blankets that press around 10% of your body weight down as you snooze.And there are apps, such as supermodel Natalia Vodianova’s Loóna, designed to create a “sleepscape” by combining visual and aural storytelling with relaxation-based activities such as colouring in. These are just some of the products at the heart of the “sleep aid revolution”. Continue reading...

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission indicates it suspects company policies may fuel broad discriminationA US agency investigating Facebook for racial bias in hiring and promotions has designated its inquiry as “systemic”, meaning it suspects company policies may be contributing to widespread discrimination.