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...
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...
by Samuel Gibbs Consumer technology editor on (#58WZV)
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...
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...
by Oliver Wainwright, Lanre Bakare, Brian Logan, Emma on (#58TZX)
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...
by Samuel Gibbs Consumer technology editor on (#58T5S)
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...
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.
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...
by Samuel Gibbs Consumer technology editor on (#58PDJ)
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...
by Samuel Gibbs Consumer technology editor on (#58P10)
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...
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...
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...
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...
Technology | The Guardian