Technology | The Guardian

From Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales to Demon’s Souls and Destruction AllStars, we look at the games lineup for those lucky enough to secure Sony’s new PlayStation 5 console

Campaigners ask consumers to consider plight of retailers struggling due to CovidCampaign groups and small business representatives have called on consumers to shun this week’s Amazon Prime extravaganza and support small retailers instead.On Tuesday and Wednesday the tech giant will host its annual Prime Day event, with thousands of tempting bargains – many at up to half price. Continue reading...

A new advert suggesting a ballerina retrain for a job in ‘cyber’ has faced a backlash. What were they thinking?Name: Fatima.Age: Early 20s. Continue reading...

Twin sisters vie for musical supremacy and an arranged marriage gets the supernatural treatment in the horror company’s collaborations with AmazonKicking off the second batch of Welcome to the Blumhouse, the horror outfit’s collaboration with Amazon, Nocturne (★★★★☆) is played firmly in the key of Black Swan, and it is a confident interpretation. The setting isn’t ballet, but an elite music academy where out-of-sorts pianist Juliet (Sydney Sweeney) looks sure to be eclipsed by her outgoing twin (Madison Iseman) in a competition to decide the school’s year-end concerto soloist. Then she stumbles on a notebook – covered in esoteric scrawls depicting a satanic pact – that belonged to the competition’s original winner, who recently jumped off her balcony. Juliet is suddenly fired up to take on Saint-Saëns’ Piano Concerto No 2, aiming to gazump her sister, who is playing the same piece. It’s the most sanity-threatening keyboard pick since Rachmaninov’s Third in Shine. Continue reading...

Mark Zuckerberg says his thinking has evolved after increase in antisemitic violence

Social media addiction isn’t a failure of parenting. It’s a feature of the tech industry“Chill out, Mum, you’re overreacting. Watching TV is just as bad,” my daughter yells as I beg her and her brother to put down their devices for just five minutes. My daughter can see me getting agitated and gives me the “you are a loser” eye-roll that all 12-year-olds seem to master.I’m trying to convince her that mindlessly scrolling Instagram for hours is not good for her. I explain that unlimited social media is dangerous – a bit like being able to have as many Big Macs as you like, at any time you want: you end up feeling sick and empty inside. In the same way my daughter is mindful of what food she puts in her body, I want her to be mindful of what she feeds her brain. I call it “junk tech”. No brain required. Continue reading...

English National Ballet will return to the stage soon, but dance’s wider future looks precarious. The company’s artistic director tells us about bubbles, business models, and ballet classes in her kitchenTamara Rojo may be a great tragic dancer on stage, but in person she is far from the voice of doom. “The performing arts and dance have survived millennia,” she says, sitting in her office looking out onto a floor of empty desks. “They’ve survived pandemics and hundred-year wars and all kind of disasters. Getting together to share stories is intrinsic to humanity. People will gather, live performance will continue to exist.” Just maybe not quite in the way we’re used to, yet.Ballet is finally putting its pointe shoes back on for a live audience. This month there are performances by the Royal Ballet, Northern Ballet and Birmingham Royal Ballet – and English National Ballet, where Rojo is artistic director, has just announced two live shows. In November, a live version of their upcoming digital season will feature five new short ballets at Sadler’s Wells, and in December there’s a slimmed-down version of The Nutcracker at the London Coliseum. Christmas isn’t quite cancelled after all. Continue reading...

Louder, more bass and better sound for Google Assistant speaker made of recycled plastic bottlesGoogle’s first smart speaker has finally got a much-needed upgrade in sound with the new Nest Audio.The speaker replaces the Google Home and costs £89.99, fitting in between the £49 Nest Mini and £299 Google Home Max. Continue reading...

Government urged to use influence it has through £630m of state contracts with firmThe UK government should use the influence it has over Amazon through £630m of state contracts to compel the company to improve conditions for workers, trade unions have said.The TUC issued a report criticising Amazon’s employment practices on Monday, the eve of Prime Day – an annual event when the online retailer offers deals but that unions have said pushes hardworking staff to their limit and beyond. Continue reading...

Site offers diverse material that traditional media do not, says Ben McOwen WilsonYouTube’s UK boss has said his platform is more representative of modern Britain than broadcasters such as the BBC, saying that television channels are falling behind because they do not provide material that speaks directly to all parts of the country.The Google-owned video service is on the cusp of overtaking the BBC as the dominant media source for 16- to 34-year-olds in the UK, with the average adult internet user watching 46 minutes of YouTube per day. Continue reading...

Criminals are adapting their tactics to take advantage of those spending more time at home and feeling vulnerableIt began with a text purportedly from O2. The message informed Stephen Frew that his latest payment could not be processed and asked him to update his card details via a link. Frew duly obliged. Within a week the £21,330 he was about to use as a deposit on a flat was stolen from his bank account.He is far from alone. The senior hospital nurse, who is in charge of Covid admissions, is one of thousands to have lost their life savings in an online scam known as Authorised Push-Payment (APP) fraud, which has intensified as fraudsters exploit the pandemic to target stressed customers. Over £200m was lost to APP fraud in the first half of this year according to new figures from trade association UK Finance. Continue reading...

Donning the Marigolds need not be a chore, according to a new breed of influencers who say cleaning is fun and aspirationalThere were fears that this autumn’s bumper crop of books would see some titles overlooked – but one volume definitely didn’t get brushed under the carpet. This Is Me by Sophie Hinchliffe, better known as the Instagram cleaning sensation Mrs Hinch, was the runaway hit of Super Thursday on 1 October, fighting stiff competition from almost 800 other hardbacks published that day to top the UK charts and shift more than 90,000 copies in its first week.It’s no surprise: Mrs Hinch’s three previous books have been bestsellers, and the 30-year-old comes with a readymade audience thanks to her “Hinch Army” of 3.8 million Instagram followers. Continue reading...

The tech activist on his new sci-fi novel and why we mustn’t treat the moral downsides of social media as a necessary evilCory Doctorow, 49, is a British-Canadian blogger, science fiction author and tech activist. He has worked for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and helped found the Open Rights Group – he is an advocate of liberalising copyright law. He has held various academic posts and is a visiting professor of the Open University. His latest novel, Attack Surface, was published earlier this month.The protagonist in your new novel tries to offset her job at a tech company where she is working for a repressive regime by helping some of its targets evade detection. Do you think many Silicon Valley employees feel uneasy about their work?

The influencer industry is worth billions – but Instagram and YouTube content creators are often exploited. What happens when a personal brand joins a union?Amy Hart earned her 1.2 million Instagram and 99,000 Twitter followers by appearing on 2019’s Love Island, where she had her heart broken while wearing a denim minidress. Like many of the show’s former stars, she is now an influencer: she tells fans where to buy clothes, makeup, even teeth like hers. But on 12 May this year, Hart influenced her followers in an entirely different direction. “Join a union!” the 28-year-old wrote on Twitter, above a 14-second video. “We’re in a really uncertain time when it comes to work and your rights and legislation,” she said. “If I can give you one piece of advice: join a union. They were my absolute saving grace when I was employed by a big company.”The video went viral, with more than 2,000 retweets and 10,000 likes. A former British Airways flight attendant, Hart says she was motivated by BA’s recent announcement of mass redundancies. Her video struck a chord with young people, who created supportive Karl Marx memes. “People were calling me a socialist icon,” Hart laughs. (She now uses the phrase as her nickname on WhatsApp.) Continue reading...

The platform provides tools for radicalization and coordinated violence, and critics say it’s been slow to ban dangerous groups

We review some of the popular gadgets helping to keep dogs and cats healthy and occupiedTechnology for pets is increasingly popular, with gadgets entering the market that promise to keep our dogs and cats in trim, healthy and occupied, and we pet owners in sync with their needs.The increasing humanisation of pets means more and more of us are treating them as fluffy family members. Spending on cats and dogs has increased hand in hand with this trend. Total spending on pets in the UK reached a record high of £6.9bn in 2019, an increase of about £3.5bn since 2009, according to the Office for National Statistics. Continue reading...

Chinese firm advises owners to break open device with screwdriver ‘when nothing else works’

Social network says accounts tied to Turning Point USA sought to influence conversations by flooding news articles with commentsFacebook has removed hundreds of fake profiles it has linked to the conservative group Turning Point USA for carrying out organized attacks on the site, including attempts to influence public conversations by flooding news articles with pro-Trump comments and misinformation.The move was prompted by reporting last month in the Washington Post that found Turning Point Action, an affiliated pro-Trump group, was paying teenagers to post coordinated messages on the site, a violation of Facebook’s rules. Continue reading...

Alok Sharma asked to explain what plans US buyer Nvidia has to keep jobs in CambridgeThe head of parliament’s business committee has asked the business secretary what his department is doing to protect British tech firm Arm, adding to pressure on the government to review the controversial $40bn (£31bn) takeover of the business by the US chipmaker Nvidia.In a letter to the business secretary, Alok Sharma, Darren Jones, the chair of the business select committee, asked what assurances Nvidia had provided on retaining jobs in the UK if the deal went through. Continue reading...

Absence of ECG and blood oxygen features saves you £110, but lack of always-on display likely to disappointThe Apple Watch SE is a cheaper version of Apple’s smartwatch that offers most of what makes it good while cutting out some key features.The Watch SE comes in two sizes, 40mm or 44mm, and is made of aluminium. Prices start at £269 – £100 less than the top Apple Watch Series 6 – and tested here in the 44mm space grey version with 4G and costing £349. It requires an iPhone and cannot be used with Android. Continue reading...

As Chinese demand for pork grows and grows, traditional small-scale farms are being replaced by vast, AI-assisted operations that feel more like smartphone factories than bucolic countryside havensIn November 2018, I travelled to Guangzhou, a city of about 14 million people in southern China. Late autumn is the time for making lap yuk, a type of preserved pork that is a local speciality, and across town I would often spot slabs of meat hanging from high-rise apartment balconies, tied up with string and swaying next to shirts and sheets left out to dry. To make lap yuk, a piece of raw pork belly is soaked in a blend of rice wine, salt, soy sauce and spices, then hung out to cure in the damp, cold autumn air. The fat becomes translucent and imparts a savoury-sweet taste to any stir-fried vegetable dish. A relative of mine claims that only southern China can make preserved pork like this. The secret is the native spores and bacteria that are carried on the wind there.Guangzhou was the first stop on a journey I was taking in order to try to understand how artificial intelligence is transforming China’s pork industry. The country is the world’s largest producer of pork, and the story of how it has ramped up production in recent years to feed its growing middle class is sometimes described as “China’s pork miracle”. While overall meat consumption still trails behind countries such as the US, China’s annual pork consumption of 54m tonnes – the highest total worldwide, though some countries still consume more per capita – is only expected to grow in the coming years. Now, in a bid to satisfy this growing demand, farmers are turning to AI. Continue reading...

It’s not the final product but we’ve been testing a preview unit of Microsoft’s new console – and we’re impressedUntil now, it’s all been marketing. Every feature, every technological advancement, promised for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, have been untested. But over the last three weeks, Microsoft has been sending out preview units of the Series X to journalists around the world. Just as the company blinked first and announced the price and launch date of its next machine before Sony, it is now allowing proper scrutiny of the hardware before its competitor.The console we’ve been testing for the past week is not the final product and its user interface is apparently not what we’ll see at launch – this is usual for the initial run of review consoles, which tend to be based on the debug units used by game developers. Consequently, we’re limited in terms of what we can cover. But even at this stage, and with these limitations, this is an impressive and exciting console. Here’s what we found. Continue reading...

PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC; Motive Studios/EA

Concern over job ads referring to monitoring of ‘hostile leaders’ and union ‘threats’A cross-party group of MEPs has written to Amazon’s chief executive, Jeff Bezos, demanding information on the online retailer’s monitoring of trade union activists and politicians in response to deleted job postings that described unions as “threats”.The letter, from 37 members of the European parliament, said they were concerned Amazon deliberately targeted workers seeking to organise, and also questioned whether the company had “spied” on politicians. Continue reading...

Policy update comes after the company’s initial attempt failed to stem misinformation and harm from the conspiracy theoryFacebook will ban any groups, pages or Instagram accounts that “represent” QAnon, the company announced Tuesday, in a sharp escalation of its attempt to crack down on the antisemitic conspiracy theory that has thrived on its platform.The policy will apply to groups, pages or Instagram accounts whose names or descriptions suggest that they are dedicated to the QAnon movement, a Facebook spokesperson explained. It will not apply to individual content, nor to individual Instagram users who post frequently about QAnon but do not explicitly identify themselves as representing the QAnon movement. Continue reading...

A report after a 16-month inquiry into Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple was critical of CEOs’ testimony during the hearingsCompanies including Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple have amassed too much power and should be reined in, US lawmakers concluded in a major report resulting from a 16-month inquiry into America’s largest tech platforms.These companies “wield their dominance in ways that erode entrepreneurship, degrade Americans’ privacy online, and undermine the vibrancy of the free and diverse press”, the House judiciary committee concluded in its nearly 500-page report. Continue reading...

Social Market Foundation report says problems over pricing and remote areas must be addressedThe government’s ambition to “level up” the nation by providing next-generation fibre broadband to every home by 2025 is likely to be missed, unless issues including pricing and concrete plans on reaching remote towns and villages are addressed, according to a new report.Addressing the UK’s status as a global laggard in rolling out gigabit speed broadband was a key promise of Boris Johnson’s election manifesto. The huge demand for reliable, high-speed internet connections as millions moved to home working during the coronavirus pandemic has added further impetus to hit that target. Only 14% of UK homes have access to full-fibre broadband, compared with up to 80% in many developed countries. Continue reading...

The comedian’s new podcast is bursting with enthusiasm for poems. If standup forces him to be funny, here he forces himself to be true‘Phwooar – Ginsy Ginsy Ginsy, I love you so much!” You won’t find that in FR Leavis. The “Ginsy” in question is beat poet Allen Ginsberg. The literary critic is Frank Skinner, deconstructing Ginsberg’s Sunflower Sutra on his Absolute Radio poetry podcast. Now embarking on its second series, the podcast is a terrific listen: bursting with enthusiasm for its chosen poems and constantly amusing about Skinner’s relationship with them. The standup is also quite brilliant at giving us footholds on the verses under review: Parnassus never felt so approachable.Has it got anything to do with Skinner’s comedy? Well, it certainly tells you plenty about the man, and makes you wonder whether he might have taken up stanzas not standup, had that not felt like an even bigger leap from his lowly Black Country beginnings. That’s the take-home from episode one of this second series, in which Skinner discusses Liz Berry’s poem Birmingham Roller, about the West Midlands pigeon that cavorted in the skies of Berry’s (and Skinner’s) youth. Continue reading...

Public Health England data error blamed on limitations of Microsoft spreadsheet

CocoRosie’s call to arms, the rage of Sweat, Arthur Jafa’s white supremacy montage and the first lady’s grand designs … Guardian writers pick the works that encapsulate Trump’s reignSince he’s a former real-estate tycoon, it seems fitting that Donald Trump’s tenure should express itself in some sort of building. So which edifice best defines his era? Well, there is the “big, beautiful wall” planned for the border with Mexico. “Nobody builds walls better than me!” he declared, yet so far just a few miles of steel fence have materialised, some of it already blown over in the wind. Continue reading...

The horror hit factory creeps on to streaming platform Amazon with two studies in psychological unsettlementBlumhouse, the production outfit founded by Jason Blum, struck it big with unquiet souls terrorising American domesticity in Paranormal Activity – and not much has changed 11 years later, as the company launches Welcome to the Blumhouse, a diffusion line of eight thrillers in collaboration with Amazon Studios. (Four are released this year, four in 2021.) Here, the unquiet souls are the domestic inhabitants themselves – at least that’s the case in these first two films, which slot more into the psychological thriller category than the pure horror the studio is known for.Veena Sud (showrunner of the US remake of The Killing) offers an accomplished helicopter-parenting noir in The Lie (★★★★☆) – though what beleaguered divorcees Mireille Enos and Peter Sarsgaard engage in when trying to shield their daughter (Joey King) after she murders a schoolmate is probably better described as Black Hawk Down parenting. Sud – with plenty of inexorable tracking shots through the family’s chilly condo – efficiently tightens the screw as the twitchy mother and indulgent father first bicker, then are doomed together by their blood allegiances. Continue reading...

Slick with great health and fitness tracking but sleep and blood oxygen monitor aren’t yet usefulThe new top-end Apple Watch Series 6 is slightly faster, brighter and cheaper with a new sensor – and does just enough to stay the king of smartwatches.Available in two sizes, 40 or 44mm, and in a variety of case materials and colours, it starts at £379 in aluminium. Our test watch is in 44mm graphite stainless steel costing £699. It requires an iPhone and cannot be used with Android. Continue reading...

Video games seem like radical relief from hard reality, but they’re also deeply implicated in the problems we collectively faceThere’s a woman in my social media feed who has spent the past week flying around the world in an Airbus A320. Remember travel? The degree of enviousness with which I look at her photos of skylines and mountains is well past being impolite.She’s not really travelling, of course. She’s playing Microsoft Flight Simulator, the latest video game to capture the public’s imagination as a kind of Covid-19 era balm. This is a game that uses Bing maps satellite data to create a one-to-one scale replica of the entire planet, ready for players to explore now that the pleasures of physical travel have been temporarily relinquished by most of us. Continue reading...

A developer’s powerful resignation letter is the latest condemnation of the social network’s attitude to hate speechAt the beginning of last month, a Facebook software engineer, Ashok Chandwaney, resigned and published a blistering public letter, excoriating the company for its failure to tackle hate.“Facebook is choosing to be on the wrong side of history,” warned Chandwaney in the letter, which was posted on the company’s internal message board. “I can no longer stomach contributing to an organisation that is profiting off hate in the US and globally.” Continue reading...

Ava DuVernay among those highlighting platform’s lack of action over abusive tweets

On a private island, a murderer is at large. But with a death sentence for the culprit a certainty, your role as a cop leaves no room for errorsParadise Killer’s high-fructose world of garish GeoCities colours, arcane jargon and weird concepts is, at first, forcefully bewildering. This surreal private island, inhabited by a bickering community of peculiar elites, where you assume the role of local detective, has the wispy feel of a half-remembered fever dream. The mission that lurks at the game’s core, however, provides a steadying familiarity: multiple homicides, a rather-too-obvious suspect, and a mandate to gather the facts and arrange them into a truth that can withstand examination. While you’re free to make your accusation at any point, the accused will face the death sentence. The moral onus, then, urges thorough, impartial investigative work – something that might prove difficult if you choose to start sleeping with your suspects.“Crime cannot hide,” asserts one of Paradise Killer’s fabulously eccentric characters. “Crime wants to be found. The nature of crime is perverse.” The clues, in other words, are there to be found, and much of your time is spent either snuffling around the island’s crannies in search of evidence, or interviewing its inhabitants for titbits of information, perhaps searching through their phone records. Unlike, say, the Phoenix Wright series of detective video games, which lead you, Agatha Christie-style, down an ingeniously laid narrative, Paradise Killer is completely freeform: you go where you want and speak to whomever you want, whenever you want. Serendipity, then, can lead you down cul-de-sacs, and the order in which you happen to discover facts will inevitably prejudice your conclusions. Continue reading...

Platform says abusive tweets about the president, who was diagnosed with Covid-19 this week, could result in suspensionTwitter has said that tweets wishing for Donald Trump’s death in the wake of the president’s diagnosis with Covid-19 violate its policies and could result in suspension.

Tech company has faced criticism for keeping warehouses open

In an age of social distancing, machines are being used for everything from cleaning to taking temperatures

A study of millions of tweets finds Twitter users rarely see or retweet vaccine misinformation generated by botsTwitter users rarely see or retweet anti-vaccination content generated by bots, a study of millions of tweets found, suggesting the role of bots in spreading vaccine misinformation is limited.The study was led by the University of Sydney’s associate professor Adam Dunn, who said despite growing concern about the influence of bots in spreading misinformation, they appeared to be ineffective when it came to influencing discourse around vaccines. Continue reading...

Hold for Me notifies users when call is picked up, leaving them free to put phone downHold music could one day be a thing of the past thanks to a service coming to Google’s smartphones.Hold for Me, which launches on Thursday in the US for owners of Google’s Pixel 5 and Pixel 4a phones, involves Google’s AI tools taking over as an automatic secretary when on hold to a call centre, leaving the user free to put down the phone and carry on with their life. Continue reading...

Lower-cost Windows 10 PC announced, plus faster chips for Surface Pro X tabletMicrosoft has launched a cheaper version of its popular notebook Windows 10 PC, the Surface Laptop Go, alongside a faster Surface Pro X tablet.Announced via blogpost rather than a press event because of the pandemic, the Surface Laptop Go is a smaller, lighter and lower-cost version of the excellent Surface Laptop 3 and seeks to offer the same premium Windows 10 experience but starting at just over half the cost at £549.99 in the UK or $549.99 in the US. Continue reading...

PC, Mac, Nintendo Switch; Supergiant Games

New Chromecast with Google TV alongside Pixel 5 and Pixel 4a 5G smartphonesGoogle has announced four new additions to its own-brand hardware line including two new Pixel smartphones, a new Chromecast and Nest Audio smart speaker.The Pixel 5 is Google’s new top phone, which slots in above the well received but heavily delayed Pixel 4a and the new Pixel 4a 5G, which also launches today. Continue reading...

Head of armed forces says both China and Russia trying to undermine cohesion in west

My husband, Howard Davies, who has died aged 81, knew from a young age that he wanted to become a scientist and as a boy engineering was his passion. However, during his studies he became increasingly interested in computing and went on to play a key role in establishing academic computer networks in Europe.Born in Bradford, where his parents, Eddie Davies and Margaret (nee Hunter), owned a small grocer’s shop, Howard attended Bradford grammar school and excelled in maths and science. In 1958 he was awarded a scholarship to study engineering science at Balliol College, Oxford. He achieved a first-class degree in just two years and went on to complete a doctorate in engineering and computing. Continue reading...

Three UK unions among signatories to letter calling for action against tech firm

PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One (version tested); Hangar 13/2K Games

After 11 years of digital ploughing, planting and harvesting, the most famous social network game of all time is being consigned to the scrapheapName: FarmVille.Appearance: Cute, colourful agricultural community filled with innocent, wide-eyed people and animals who are never slaughtered.

Users will be able to send chats, photos and videos between the two platforms for first timeFacebook Messenger and Instagram have merged, more than 18 months after the Facebook chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, announced his intention to integrate the two platforms.Instagram’s old direct messaging service, Instagram Direct, has been replaced by Messenger, allowing users to send chats, photos and videos between the two platforms for the first time. Continue reading...