It started as a newsletter platform for unknown writers. Now it is becoming a media giant in its own right – with many of the problems it was supposed to avoidIsabelle Roughol was done with her day job at LinkedIn and was ready to start something of her own. She quit in early 2020 and launched Borderline, a podcast and newsletter aimed at “defiant global citizens”, and to help her build it she became an early user of a new online service: Substack.Substack has marketed itself aggressively to people such as Roughol as a new type of tech company, one that will let writers build their own brands and communities. The company offers software to help people set up free or paid-for newsletters and promises the people creating them that they can write what they want and that they own their own mailing list and can take it with them if they leave. Continue reading...

The Republican senator has written a sort of manifesto for the presidential primary. The Democrat seems focused on the supreme court

eCall contacts emergency services in an accident – but it is causing problems for some driversThe Volkswagen, Audi and Skoda group has been accused of knowingly selling cars with defective SOS warning systems that in some cases failed before the new owner had left the dealership.Since 2018 all new cars sold across the EU have been required to have an eCall system that automatically contacts the emergency services with the vehicle’s location in the event of a serious accident. It is a sophisticated set-up using the car’s navigation system and airbag sensors, and it has its own mobile phone sim card. Continue reading...

Zoë Roth says she plans to use proceeds from sale of 2005 image of her smirking in front of burning house to pay student loansZoë Roth, the woman whose picture was central to the 2005 Disaster Girl meme, has sold the original photo for $473,000 – the latest addition to the cryptocurrency-linked, digital image NFT craze that is sweeping through the art market.The image was taken of Roth, then aged four, by her father in front of a burning house in Mebane, North Carolina. Firefighters had intentionally set the blaze as a controlled fire. Continue reading...

iPhone and iPad maker distorts competition for streaming services such as Spotify, says commissionerApple has been accused of breaking EU law by charging high fees and setting unfair rules on those selling their products in its App Store, resulting typically in a 30% price hike for paying customers.Margrethe Vestager, the European commissioner for competition, said the preliminary view was that Apple had distorted competition in the music streaming market by abusing its dominant position and role as a “gatekeeper” to the 1.8m apps in its store. Continue reading...

Several internet personalities will be on the ballot on 6 May, though most know they have no chance of winning

Company makes $8.1bn profit for quarter as positive economic reports suggest US shaking off worst of pandemic recession

A brother and sister try to escape a satanic spell in this cruddy horror story shot entirely on smartphonesIn some corner of a US nowheresville town, sad-sack musician-schoolteacher Leo (Joey Millin) gets a call from his mom begging him to pick up his screw-up of a sister Virginia (Madison West). Virginia has had an on-off problem with drugs that ruined a once promising law career. Leo is sceptical of her latest excuse for being found in a squalid apartment looking high, even though there are no obvious track marks: she claims satanic jiggery-pokery has fused her bodily sensations with that of an unknown man, so she feels all his pain and pleasure and vice versa. She has no idea where he is – but carving “where r u?” into her arm prompts a handy reply with precise coordinates. So off Leo and Virginia go, for a family road trip. Continue reading...

The company says it’s creating a viable alternative for readers and writers – but is it trying to have its cake and eat it?Since launching in 2017, Substack has been touting itself as a “better future for news”. Their offering was simple: email newsletters with an option for subscribers to pay monthly fees for content – like Netflix for newsletters.Related: ‘So. Much. Sex’: a beginner’s guide to the ‘hot vax summer’ Continue reading...

Bumper results lead strong quarter for US tech giants, as Facebook and Alphabet also report soaring revenues

Makers say machine could be part of an agricultural revolution of automation and sustainability

ACCC won’t rule out regulation of tech giants if people aren’t given more choice when setting up a new devicePeople should be given a choice of apps other than the default Apple and Google phone apps when setting up a new device, under a raft of proposals from Australia’s competition watchdog to reduce the duopoly the two tech giants have over the app store marketplaces.The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s latest interim report arising from the long-running digital platforms inquiry has found that while Apple and Google compete with each other, both companies face very little competition in app distributions on their respective mobile platforms. Continue reading...

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...