by Samuel Gibbs Consumer technology editor on (#58ND7)
Cheapest iPad gets faster, offering most of what makes Apple’s top tablets great for half the costApple’s cheapest iPad just got faster with revamped chips to keep it ahead of the competition.The eighth-generation iPad costs from £329, slotting in under the iPad Mini, iPad Air and iPad Pro lines, yet offering much of the same experience. Continue reading...
New offices will reportedly be near to the under-construction ‘landscraper’ HQ in London’s King’s CrossGoogle is to lease an additional 70,000 sq ft in office buildings close to its £1bn new UK headquarters in London, despite telling all of its 4,500 UK staff that they will be working from home until at least July 2021.The US tech giant, which is in the process of building a 330 metre-long office building nicknamed the “landscraper” next to King’s Cross railway station, is reportedly in advanced talks to lease more space in nearby offices. Continue reading...
Holiday rental giant says it is also cooperating with HMRC over details of hosts’ incomesAirbnb has paid an additional £1.8m in tax following an investigation by HM Revenue and Customs into its UK tax arrangements.It also said it was cooperating with HMRC to share data on the money made by Airbnb hosts – who are believed to number around 225,000 in the UK alone – in the tax years 2017-18 and 2018-19 Continue reading...
It’s been a confusing few weeks for the Chinese social media apps targeted by Trump – so where do things currently stand?It’s been a dizzying few weeks for TikTok and WeChat, the Chinese social media apps caught up in a trade war between the US and China.Related: Trump and Biden head to Ohio for first presidential TV debate – US politics live Continue reading...
When the UK version launched, it was like a door opening on a new dimension of astonishing cinematic clarity and thrilling new worlds to exploreThere was a sense of fundamental cultural change in the air – or that’s how I remember it. Nineteen ninety-five was the year I started out in video game journalism, as a writer for Edge magazine, the most forward-looking gaming publication in the world at the time. My introduction to the industry was booting up a brand new PlayStation and scorching through the UK launch titles. The machine had been available for several months in Japan, and Edge staff had played all the key games in their original NTSC format. They wanted me to catch up. At that time, Edge was on the top floor of Future Publishing’s Beaufort House office, a converted pub, just off Queen’s Square in Bath. While the older legacy publications – Total, Games Master, Sega Power – were crammed in on the ground floor, Edge shared upstairs with the brand new Official PlayStation Magazine. It felt like exactly the right place to be.When thinking about PlayStation, especially today on the 25th anniversary of its UK launch, it’s easy to trot out the technological advances the machine made. Following the 16bit consoles – the SNES and Mega Drive – PlayStation was among the first generation to prioritise 3D visuals, its powerful graphics co-processors able to throw 200,000 polygons a second around the screen in a dazzling display of graphics wizardry. When you played Ridge Racer or fighting game Toh Shin Den for the first time, when games such as Tomb Raider and Resident Evil arrived, you almost couldn’t believe the lifelike cinematic clarity, the swirling cameras, the depiction of real, explorable environments. It was like a dimensional doorway opening. Continue reading...
Microsoft says a recent update has affected the processing of authentication requests, making cloud-based services inaccessibleMicrosoft has said it is investigating an outage that brought down Microsoft’s cloud-based office services including the meetings software, Teams, worldwide.Microsoft reported issues with authentication for its cloud services at around 9.25pm UTC, meaning people were having issues logging into the online services Teams, Outlook and Office. Continue reading...
Launched into obscurity in 2018 but now hugely popular, this online version of wink murder, with its focus on fabrication and blame-shifting, is scarily on pointThere are 10 crew members trapped on a spacecraft, carrying out menial tasks to maintain vital systems, but at least one of them is an imposter who wants to sabotage their work and if possible, murder them. What sounds like the premise of a particularly bleak science-fiction movie is in fact the set-up of one of the most popular video games of the year. Developed by a three-person team at InnerSloth and launched to virtual obscurity in 2018, Among Us has suddenly become one of the biggest games on PC and mobile, attracting more than 85m players in the last six months. It’s so successful, InnerSloth recently abandoned plans to work on a sequel, instead piling their resources into the original. No one, it seems, is more surprised about the success of this game than its creators.So why has this happened? Among Us is essentially an online multiplayer version of the party game wink murder, but set on a constantly malfunctioning spaceship. Up to 10 players take part, and at the beginning, you’re told whether you’re an innocent crew member or an imposter. While the former carry out jobs such as rebooting the communications systems or cleaning out the air ducts, the latter stalk the corridors breaking vital equipment or looking for victims to kill. Continue reading...
by Gwyn Topham Transport correspondent on (#58KRD)
Ride-hailing service wins appeal a year after TfL refused extension over safety concernsUber has been granted a further 18-month licence in London after an appeal found it was a “fit and proper” company to run private hire car services.Westminster magistrates court ruled in favour of Uber almost a year after Transport for London (TfL) refused the ride-hailing firm a licence extension over safety concerns. Continue reading...
by Samuel Gibbs Consumer technology editor on (#58KP2)
Powerful Android tablet has fantastic screen, great speakers and long battery life for work and playThe Galaxy Tab S7+ is Samsung’s unreserved attempt to beat Apple’s iPad Pro with an Android tablet designed just as much for work as it is for play.The new tablet comes in two sizes: the 11in Tab S7 costing £619 and the 12.4in Tab S7+ costing £799, as reviewed here. Continue reading...
Judge grants injunction sought by app’s owner ByteDance to let it remain available for downloadTikTok has been granted a last-minute reprieve from Donald Trump’s executive order banning the service from US app stores, after a judge in Washington DC temporarily blocked the ban from taking effect on Sunday evening.The order, which was due to take effect at one minute to midnight, was the first step towards banning TikTok entirely within the US. It would have required Apple and Google to remove the service from their respective app stores, preventing new users from downloading it, but would not have stopped existing TikTokers from continuing to access the app on their own devices. Continue reading...
The Chinese-owned app is seeking an injunction against Trump administration order that would ban downloads from 11.59pm on SundayA federal judge in Washington will decide later on Sunday whether to block a Trump administration order banning Apple and Google from offering TikTok for download.Related: TikTok: why it is being sold and who will own it Continue reading...
New social media platform Polis cuts through noise and trolling to establish consensus – and create new lawsThe origin of one world always begins with its feet in another. And so it was in March 2014.It came to be known as the Sunflower movement, a sudden three-week stand-off in 2014 between the government and Taiwanese protesters occupying parliament over a trade bill purporting to bring their country closer to China. Continue reading...
A business model that alters the way we think, act, and live our lives has us heading toward dystopiaWhen people envision technology overtaking society, many think of The Terminator and bulletproof robots. Or Big Brother in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, a symbol of external, omnipotent oppression.But in all likelihood, dystopian technology will not strong-arm us. Instead, we’ll unwittingly submit ourselves to a devil’s bargain: freely trade our subconscious preferences for memes, our social cohesion for instant connection, and the truth for what we want to hear. Continue reading...
Governments struggle to tackle the might of the tech giants when it comes to protecting users’ dataLast month, the Irish data protection commissioner (DPC) sent Facebook a preliminary order ordering it to stop sending the data of its European users to the US. This was a big deal, because in order to comply with the ruling, Facebook would have to embark on a comprehensive re-engineering of its European operations, or to shut down those operations entirely, at least for a time.Such a shutdown would of course be traumatic for the poor souls who are addicted to Facebook and Instagram, but it would be even worse for the company – for two reasons. The first is that it makes more money from European users’ data – an average of $13.21 (£10.19) per user in 2019 – than from any other territory except the US (where it earns $41.41 per user); the second is that failure to comply could land it with a fine of up to 4% of its global revenue, which in Facebook’s case would come to about $3bn. Given the scale of its revenues, that’s not a showstopper, but it would nevertheless be annoying. Continue reading...
by Samuel Gibbs Consumer technology editor on (#58JW1)
Lower cost doesn’t have to mean lower quality: these mobiles can give high-end models a run for their moneyIt used to be the case that you had to spend at least £700 to get a really good phone. But in 2020, that’s no longer true. With fantastic smartphones costing as little as half as much as an iPhone 11, here’s a quick guide to the best mid-priced phones.Many of these smartphones will also be available on mobile phone contracts with no, or little, upfront cost. Just be sure to compare the total monthly fees over the 18- or 24-month contract against the cost of buying the phone outright, and using a cheaper sim-only or pay-as-you-go plan, to make sure you are getting a good deal. Continue reading...
by Dan Sabbagh Defence and security editor on (#58JHJ)
Gen Sir Patrick Sanders says Boris Johnson has told him to ensure UK is major cyber powerBritain’s most senior cyber general has said the UK possesses the capacity to “degrade, disrupt and destroy” its enemies’ critical infrastructure in a future cyber conflict, in a rare acknowledgement of the military’s offensive hacking capability.Gen Sir Patrick Sanders, who heads the UK’s strategic command, said that he been told by Boris Johnson to ensure Britain is a “leading, full-spectrum cyber power” able both to defend against – and carry out – hacking attacks. Continue reading...
Company’s shares could start trading at $10 each when it goes public, bankers sayThe controversial data-mining-software company Palantir Technologies could be valued at as much as $22bn when it goes public next week.Bankers told the Wall Street Journal that the company’s shares could start trading at $10 each when it begins trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday, giving the company a value of $22bn. Continue reading...
Brussels seeks to overturn decision over alleged unpaid taxes to Irish governmentThe European commission is appealing against a court ruling that said Apple did not have to pay €13bn (£11.9bn) in alleged back taxes to the Irish government, reopening a landmark battle in the EU’s campaign to stop sweetheart deals for multinationals.The bloc’s competition chief, Margrethe Vestager, said on Friday she would appeal to the EU court of justice to try to oblige Ireland to collect the alleged unpaid taxes and interest from the tech giant. Continue reading...
Unpaid overtime, 100-hour weeks, instant dismissals … the pandemic has brought fresh momentum to the games industry’s union driveWorker strikes, let alone successful ones, are vanishingly rare in the video games industry. But in August, writers at Lovestruck, a mobile app that publishes visual romance novels, went on a 21-day strike, accusing the company of unfair pay, and won a rates increase after owner Voltage initially dismissed their demands.This is part of a growing, global unionisation movement among game developers – a movement whose urgency has been intensified by the pandemic, according to Declan Peach, who helped found the Game Workers Unite UK union in late 2018. With rising inquiries, casework and membership since lockdown, problems from the pandemic have brought growing momentum to the union. But dire conditions in the games industry had been driving developers to unionise long before coronavirus struck. Continue reading...
Feels Good Man and TFW No GF trace the impact of Pepe the Frog, lonely men, and the far rightOn 13 October 2015, Donald Trump, who had recently announced his run for president, tweeted an image of himself standing at the presidential lectern, his face transmogrified into a green, smug-looking frog, known to certain corners of the internet as Pepe. With hindsight, this strange moment offers a stake in the ground, marking out the point when the meme was invited into mainstream political culture.This collapse of the virtual and the real seems to have only accelerated since then. Online phenomena are no longer cordoned off in their virtual barriers but regularly pass through the screen to play mischief in the so-called “real world”. Two recent documentaries attempt to explain how this all happened – from two very different perspectives. Continue reading...
by Samuel Gibbs Consumer technology editor on (#58HW4)
Firm shows new motorised display, car alarm, Luna game-streaming service and moreAmazon has announced a full range of new spherical Echo devices, new motorised smart display, a camera drone that flies around your house, a game-streaming service and more.In a streaming presentation, the company showed off a smorgasbord of new devices from its various brands, including Ring, Eero, Fire and Echo. Continue reading...
Body will be able to overrule some content moderation decisions and plans to be ready to hear user appeals next monthThe long-awaited Facebook Oversight Board, empowered to overrule some of the platform’s content moderation decisions, plans to launch in October, just in time for the US election.The board will be ready to hear appeals from Facebook users as well as cases referred by the company itself “as soon as mid- or late-October at the very latest, unless there are some major technical issues that come up”, said Julie Owono, one of the 20 initial members of the committee who were named in May, in an interview on Wednesday. Continue reading...
Simplicity and lack of need for physical contact make scanning QR codes the perfect solution for the appAs people across England and Wales download the long-awaited NHS contact-tracing app on Thursday, they’ll also contribute to one of the most unlikely revivals of the Covid era: the humble QR code.The app, which has been substantially rebuilt from the version first tested in the Isle of Wight in May, has had two significant changes. The first is a new underpinning, based on a framework created by Apple and Google, which allows it to work in a “decentralised” manner, sharing little data with the NHS about individuals’ movements. Continue reading...
How one magic word became a way of justifying Silicon Valley’s unconstrained powerThere are certain phrases that are central to the sway the tech industry holds over our collective imagination: they do not simply reflect our experience, they frame how we experience it in the first place. They sweep aside certain parts of the status quo, and leave other parts mysteriously untouched. They implicitly cast you as a stick-in-the-mud if you ask how much revolution someone is capable of when that person represents billions in venture capital investment. Among the most influential of these phrases is undoubtedly “disruption”.The concept of disruption is a way for companies, the press or simply individuals to think about questions of continuity and discontinuity – what lasts and what doesn’t, what is genuinely new and what is just the next version of something older. There is a lot at stake in how we think about these issues. Are the changes the tech industry brings about, or claims to bring about, fundamental transformations of how capitalism functions, or are they an extension of how it has always functioned? The answers to such questions will determine what regulatory oversight we believe is necessary or desirable, what role we think the government or unions should play in a new industry such as tech, and even how the industry and its titans ought to be discussed. Continue reading...
Major carmakers, including Elon Musk’s electric car company, say the levies imposed last year on crucial components were ‘arbitrary’Tesla, Volvo, Ford and Mercedes-Benz have filed lawsuits against the Trump administration, aiming to end what Elon Musk’s electric car manufacturer called “unlawful” tariffs imposed on certain parts imported from China.The lawsuits, filed in New York this week, target the 25% tariffs imposed by the US trade representative on a list of products including spare parts such as terminals. Continue reading...
The social media platform says it has ‘strict controls’ around its data security and has never censored Australian content at China’s requestVideo messaging app TikTok has hit back at what it says is “misinformation” about its connection to China, characterising itself as a global platform with “strict controls around security and data access”.The hugely popular platform has used a submission to the Senate inquiry into foreign interference through social media to note “and welcome” Scott Morrison’s recent commentary after a “reported investigation by security agencies”. Continue reading...
My mother, Nina Wedderburn, who has died at 91, was an authority on how viruses affect the immune system. At the Royal College of Surgeons, where she became dean of the Hunterian Institute, 1990-93, she led a successful research group investigating the effects of malaria and viruses on the immune system.Her early work was on how malaria alters the immune system’s ability to control cancer. She then developed a model to understand how viruses can suppress immunity and in particular the Epstein Barr Virus (EBV), linked to a childhood cancer common in Africa. Many of her PhD students and fellows went on to establish successful careers all over the world, and remained lifelong friends. Continue reading...
by Helen Davidson and Carmela Fonbuena in Manila on (#58FXY)
Facebook says accounts were interfering in politics of US and PhilippinesFacebook says it has removed hundreds of coordinated fake accounts with links to individuals in China and in the Filipino military that were interfering in the politics of the Philippines and the US.The company said all the accounts – in two distinct networks based in China and the Philippines – were removed for violating its policy against foreign or government interference, which it defines as “coordinated inauthentic behaviour on behalf of a foreign or government entity”. Continue reading...
Communications minister does not rule out shift on the public broadcasters, saying government will consider its position after regulator’s consultation processThe communications minister has left the door open to including the ABC and SBS in the new code forcing Google and Facebook to pay for the value they receive from distributing Australian journalism.Paul Fletcher also acknowledged on Wednesday that the competition regulator had received “quite a number of submissions” about the suitability of the proposed mechanism to resolve disputes between the big digital platforms and Australian media organisations. Continue reading...
The federal government has announced plans to boost broadband speeds for millions of homes across Australia. Here’s what it means for your internetMillions of homes across Australia will be able to get their national broadband network connection upgraded to offer speeds of up to one gigabit-per-second under a plan announced by the federal government on Tuesday. Here’s what we know so far. Continue reading...
Communications minister Paul Fletcher will defend the government’s approach during a National Press Club appearanceAustralia’s national broadband network will roll out fibre “deeper and closer to homes and businesses” under a $3.5bn upgrade package to be announced on Wednesday.The federal communications minister, Paul Fletcher, will use an address to the National Press Club to defend the Coalition’s approach of “committing to more fibre when it makes economic sense to do so”. Continue reading...
For months the broadband in the whole village failed due to ‘electrical noise’ from one resident’s televisionFor 18 months, at precisely 7am every day, the broadband signal in the tiny Welsh village of Aberhosan simply vanished.Engineers were sent to the remote settlement in mid Wales, which has a population of just 400, to investigate the problem. They spent days testing connections and replacing cables until they finally got to the root of the problem – one villager’s old telly. Continue reading...
EU court in July ruled there were insufficient safeguards against snooping by US intelligence agenciesFacebook has warned that it may pull out of Europe if the Irish data protection commissioner enforces a ban on sharing data with the US, after a landmark ruling by the European court of justice found in July that there were insufficient safeguards against snooping by US intelligence agencies.In a court filing in Dublin, Facebook’s associate general counsel wrote that enforcing the ban would leave the company unable to operate. Continue reading...
Acquisition comes ahead of Microsoft’s new Xbox Series X consoles and could have significant impact on games industryMicrosoft is acquiring ZeniMax Media, the parent company of Bethesda Softworks, publisher of the best-selling video game franchises The Elder Scrolls, Fallout and Doom. The $7.5bn deal (£5.85m) will see all future releases from Bethesda’s studios included on the Xbox Game Pass subscription service.Xbox chief Phil Spencer said: “Like us, Bethesda are passionate believers in building a diverse array of creative experiences, in exploring new game franchises, and in telling stories in bold ways. All of their great work will continue and grow, and we look forward to empowering them with the resources and support of Microsoft to scale their creative visions to more players in new ways for you.” Continue reading...
Users highlight examples of feature automatically focusing on white faces over black onesTwitter has apologised for a “racist” image cropping algorithm, after users discovered the feature was automatically focusing on white faces over black ones.The company says it had tested the service for bias before it started using it, but now accepts that it didn’t go far enough. Continue reading...
Parent company ByteDance, under pressure in China not to give in to US demands, said the plan ‘does not involve the transfer of any algorithms’A new company set up to allow TikTok to continue operating in the United States plans to float on the stock market in an effort to increase transparency and show the Trump administration that it will adhere to regulatory oversight.TikTok Global plans to hold a public listing, its Chinese parent company ByteDance said Monday, after announcing a deal over the weekend that would avert a shutdown of the popular app in the US. Continue reading...
Rumours of a leap forward in technology to be announced this week have energised an already bullish marketCarmakers’ annual meetings can be drab affairs: executives reading from a script, votes decided by big investors who don’t bother turning up, and perhaps the odd small shareholder deciding to take a pop at management. Tesla is different. This week’s event will be livestreamed around the world, with investor hype over what the company is teasing as its “battery day” reaching Steve Jobs/iPhone levels of fever pitch.Tesla has already achieved astonishing things, almost singlehandedly spurring the car industry towards its electric future while growing its own revenues from $100m in 2010 to $24.6bn in 2019. Now investors hope that chief executive Elon Musk will be revealing a technological leap relating to battery power on Tuesday to put it further ahead of its rivals. Continue reading...
Melbourne financial planner’s videos on his quest have surprised him in going viral, with some gaining more than a million views, and he isn’t done yetPeople get famous for plenty of bizarre reasons, but even in the age of the internet, it’s hard to imagine a more inexplicable or heartwarming rise to popularity than that of Rohit Roy.The 41-year-old financial planning assistant from Melbourne has amassed hundreds of thousands of devoted and loving fans on TikTok by simply not drinking fizzy drinks. Continue reading...
The new Netflix docudrama is a valiant if flawed attempt to address our complacency about surveillance capitalismSpool forward a couple of centuries. A small group of social historians drawn from the survivors of climate catastrophe are picking through the documentary records of what we are currently pleased to call our civilisation, and they come across a couple of old movies. When they’ve managed to find a device on which they can view them, it dawns on them that these two films might provide an insight into a great puzzle: how and why did the prosperous, apparently peaceful societies of the early 21st century implode?The two movies are The Social Network, which tells the story of how a po-faced Harvard dropout named Mark Zuckerberg created a powerful and highly profitable company; and The Social Dilemma, which is about how the business model of this company – as ruthlessly deployed by its po-faced founder – turned out to be an existential threat to the democracy that 21st-century humans once enjoyed. Continue reading...
Donald Trump’s decision to ban downloads of the Chinese-owned platform prompts realignment of tech spaceChina has accused the United States of “bullying” and suggested it may take unspecified countermeasures after Washington banned downloads of popular video app TikTok and effectively blocked the use of the Chinese super-app WeChat.“China urges the US to abandon bullying, cease (its) wrongful actions and earnestly maintain fair and transparent international rules and order,” a statement by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce said on Saturday. Continue reading...
Technology | The Guardian