Technology | The Guardian

PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, PC; FuturLab/Curve Digital

Dolby Atmos-enabled wifi smart speaker is brilliant one-box audio upgrade for TV and music, but think twice if using Sky, Virgin or similarMulti-room audio specialist Sonos is back with the Arc, the firm’s first Dolby Atmos-enabled soundbar that totally transforms your TV’s sound.The £799 Arc replaces the old Playbar and Playbase, sitting above the £399 Beam as Sonos’s top-of-the-line home cinema soundbar. It is a single box of tricks that combines a smart speaker, wifi music sound system and home cinema kit in one, but like most soundbars of this type it can be dogged by audio-picture syncing issues when used with TV set top boxes – more on that later. Continue reading...

Home-sharing company files preliminary paperwork to sell stock after cutting nearly 2,000 workers in MayAirbnb on Wednesday filed preliminary paperwork for selling stock on Wall Street, undaunted by a global pandemic that has taken some wind out of its home-sharing business.The San Francisco-based company said it submitted a draft registration statement to the Securities and Exchange Commission. It kept details in the statement confidential. Continue reading...

Tech giant behind iPhone hits crucial share valuation of $467.77 but closes at $1.979tn just after breaking barrierApple became the first US $2tn company on Wednesday, only two years after becoming the first to be valued at $1tn by Wall Street.The technology powerhouse behind the iPhone needed to hit a share price of $467.77 to reach the milestone and moved through that barrier during mid-morning trading on the Nasdaq exchange on Wednesday, although it closed down just below that historic level at $1.979tn (£1.51tn). Continue reading...

My friend and colleague Ian Braid, who has died aged 77, was a pioneer in the field of solid modelling. His fundamental work on the 3D modelling of mechanical engineering parts in computer memory was a key technology that has changed the way engineering is practised around the world.Ian was born in Melbourne and raised on a farm in rural New South Wales. After initial home schooling, he was educated at Scotch college in Melbourne and Melbourne University, where he graduated in mechanical engineering. Soon afterwards he sailed for the UK to join an English Electric graduate apprentice scheme. Continue reading...

Companies threatened to shut down operations over a court ruling ordering them to classify their drivers as employees by 20 August

Judge has ordered Uber and rival Lyft to upgrade status of their drivers to employees

What is this insanely popular game, and why are people so excited it’s going multiplayer? Naaman Zhou explains it to Steph Harmon ... quickly.Hello Naaman. Why is everyone on Twitter suddenly screaming “UNTITLED GEESE GAME!!!”?

Exclusive: Signatory of letter to bosses two years ago makes it public, alleging sexism continues

PC (version tested)/Xbox One (coming soon)

Comedians like Sarah Cooper have used the Chinese-owned social video app to make fun of the president, but there’s more at stake than his bruised egoIf you’d heard of former Google designer Sarah Cooper at the start of 2020, it was probably because you were familiar with an old mega-viral post she wrote, titled 10 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings.Cooper had quit her job to pursue a full-time career in online comedy, and was ticking along with YouTube subscriber numbers in the low six figures. Then, this year, she discovered two things. The first was TikTok, and the second was a style of parodying Donald Trump by miming his words. Continue reading...

The author and academic on why smartphones have been a game changer in African Americans’ struggle against police brutality – and the ethics of sharing violent imagesIn her new book, Bearing Witness While Black, Allissa Richardson, an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Southern California, explores how video footage captured and shared by victims, activists and shocked bystanders has alerted the world to a struggle for justice that has a very long history.Did technology bring us to this moment?

Back-to-back Zooms and employee surveillance apps have seen work invade the home in sinister waysRemember when it was so exciting to be able to WFH – work from home? When your boss, instead of being grumpy and taking a grudging “well-if-you-must” attitude was suddenly insisting that you had to work remotely? And how refreshing that seemed at the beginning? No more dispiriting 90-minute commutes, for example. Suddenly, extra hours were added to your day. A better work-life balance beckoned, because we had developed a technological infrastructure that had made distance irrelevant. What was not to like?Of course there were glitches. Childcare, for example, became a nightmare when schools and nurseries closed. Not everyone had good, reliable broadband. And it turned out that not every household had multiple laptops either. Likewise, many people lived in small apartments where the choice of workspace boiled down to either the kitchen table or the cubbyhole that masqueraded as a spare bedroom. And there were still large numbers of “critical” workers whose work couldn’t be done from home. Continue reading...

Gunmen and mythic monsters lurk around every corner, but in this relentless combat game death is just a temporary hiccup“Dead, again,” growls Ron Perlman, the voice of West of Dead’s skeletal gunslinger. “But it looks like dying ain’t gonna take yet.”In video games, death has been, more often than not, downgraded from a terminal affliction to a momentary setback. The delicious “do-over” – the chance to correct the mistimed leap, to retake the missed shot, to un-step the misstep that led to your undoing – is this medium’s great gift. The video game is a realm of new beginnings. So it is in West of Dead, a game in which you venture into a shadowy, musty maze and, room by room, work your way downwards, sliding from pillar to post in a series of shootouts until you inevitably lose the last of your health and find yourself returned to the beginning, to try again. Continue reading...

As Covid puts a focus on where spending goes, Fairphone wants us to consider people and planetWith the pressures on society and the world thrown back into the spotlight by Covid-19, now is the time to readdress where and how we spend our money to do so in a way that is better for all, not only ourselves.That means trying to buy as ethically and sustainably as possible, which for consumer technology covers both the materials pulled out of the ground and the way the products are made. Continue reading...

If we take back control of our data, we can use it for good• Time to reset: more brilliant ideas to remake the worldSocial media doesn’t have to bring us only junk news and misinformation about coronavirus. Unfortunately, big platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter aren’t designed to promote healthy debate, find consensus, or solve problems. To have that kind of social media would require a radical rebuild. And the underlying principle for this would be that data about public life belongs to the public.In important ways, our democracies grew up around a scaffolding of data. Governments collected census information, and analysed it to improve public services, and made the data available to us all. Health researchers organised large studies and shared the results. Credit card companies and marketing specialists also generated data – to be bought, sold, and made useful for private advertisers. Continue reading...

Trial of restriction in UK, France and Spain aims to cut rowdy parties and tackle coronavirus spread

The public deserves to know the extent to which Apple employees have been listening to our private conversations and intimate moments

Move over payment guideline violations prompts maker Epic Games to take legal actionApple and Google have removed the enormously popular video game Fortnite from their app stores for violating their in-app payment guidelines, prompting the maker, Epic Games, to take legal action challenging the tech giants’ iron grip over the industry.Its removal from Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store came after Fortnite circumvented the companies’ in-app payment system and hefty fees, encouraging users to pay the gaming company directly. Continue reading...

Cardiff is best, with only 1% of internet users losing service last year, finds Uswitch surveyAlmost five million consumers have suffered a broadband outage lasting more than three hours in the last year, with the average household losing a total of more than a day of internet time due to cutouts.Bristol has been named Britain’s “outage capital”, with homes that have been hit by outages suffering on average 169 hours a year of internet loss, which is equivalent to seven full days. The typical UK home that does experience outages is offline for 29 hours a year, according to a new report by Uswitch.com, the utility comparison site. Continue reading...

Decision comes after criticism of slow response to Wiley’s antisemitic postsConspiracy theories about Jewish people “controlling the world” are to be explicitly banned from Facebook and Instagram for the first time, after the company announced an update to its content policies on Tuesday.The ban on “certain kinds of implicit hate speech” would also include content depicting blackface, Facebook’s vice-president of integrity, Guy Rosen, said. Continue reading...

Coronavirus has left many wary of public transportation and ride-hailing services, in a boon to Zipcar and its competitorsLike many people in recent months, AnnaLiisa Ariosa-Benston of Brooklyn has seen her primary sources of income transform in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. An arts event producer, she now is picking up odd jobs in renovation and design to make money. And to do so, she has found – for the first time in her 10 years of living in New York City – that she needs a car.Despite having used Uber and Lyft in the past, Ariosa-Benston now says she wouldn’t feel as comfortable sharing space with a stranger in a small vehicle. She recently tried to rent a car in New York City and found all the rental locations near her were booked out in advance or extremely expensive. In another attempt to find a car on a work trip in Atlanta, she checked at the desks of every single car company at the airport – all were sold out. Continue reading...

New console will arrive without its showpiece title as troubled Halo sequel is put on holdThe Xbox Series X console will launch in November, but without its most anticipated title, Halo: Infinite. Microsoft announced on Tuesday that the game will be delayed until 2021.Writing on the official Halo blog, Chris Lee, studio head of Halo Infinite at developer 343 Industries, claimed the team would need more time to finish the game, partly due to production difficulties caused by the coronavirus pandemic. He said: “It is not sustainable for the wellbeing of our team or the overall success of the game to ship it this holiday.” Continue reading...

Call for forces to drop tech use after court ruled it breached privacy and broke equalities law

GPT-3, the software behind the world’s best non-human writer, is a giant step forward for machines. What about humanity?Bosses don’t often play down their products. Sam Altman, the CEO of artificial intelligence company OpenAI, did just that when people went gaga over his company’s latest software: the Generative Pretrained Transformer 3 (GPT-3). For some, GPT-3 represented a moment in which one scientific era ends and another is born. Mr Altman rightly lowered expectations. “The GPT-3 hype is way too much,” he tweeted last month. “It’s impressive … but it still has serious weaknesses and sometimes makes very silly mistakes.”OpenAI’s software is spookily good at playing human, which explains the hoopla. Whether penning poetry, dabbling in philosophy or knocking out comedy scripts, the general agreement is that the GPT-3 is probably the best non-human writer ever. Given a sentence and asked to write another like it, the software can do the task flawlessly. But this is a souped up version of the auto-complete function that most email users are familiar with. Continue reading...

Researchers call for new regulations to protect users, and society, in case of collapseLike banks in the 2008 financial crisis, Facebook and other tech giants are “too big to fail”, according to research from Oxford University that calls for new regulations to protect users, and society, in the event of a possible collapse.In their paper, published in the Internet Policy Review journal on Tuesday, Carl Öhman and Nikita Aggarwal argue that the world’s biggest technology companies are unlikely to suddenly go out of business – but the world is unprepared for what would happen if they did. Continue reading...

Apple has thrived under Cook’s leadership with the iPhone X and a move into subscription TVApple chief executive Tim Cook has joined the billionaire club as the iPhone maker is poised to become the US’s first $2tn company.Apple’s performance has so far proved to be coronavirus-proof, crushing Wall Street expectations in each of the last two quarters, and pushing the company’s market value to new peaks just below $2tn. Continue reading...

Guardian investigation finds the Facebook communities are gaining followers as Twitter cracks down on QAnon content

The Chinese-owned app has grown in strength because unlike other social media it allows users to simply have funAs Donald Trump threatens to ban TikTok in the US, the social media app beloved of teenagers has suddenly aroused the interest of an older generation. Many are asking themselves how it got so popular.These days it’s not uncommon to see a group of young people trying to learn a TikTok dance in the park, or dropping the “OK boomer” meme into a casual conversation. Continue reading...

A new design and a faster chip in a much-needed update to the best-selling budget media tabletAmazon’s bargain 8in Fire HD 8 media tablet gets a premium-feeling makeover for its fifth iteration, with a faster processor and rounded corners.The 2020 Fire HD 8 starts at £89.99 and is based on Amazon’s 10th-generation Fire tablet platform, making it the newest of all of the Fire OS devices. Continue reading...

Preliminary injunction in California follows state’s lawsuit against companies over new labor lawA California judge has issued a preliminary injunction that would block Uber and Lyft from classifying their drivers as independent contractors rather than employees.The move on Monday came in response to a May lawsuit filed by the state of California against the companies, which alleged they are misclassifying their drivers under the state’s new labor law. Continue reading...

Faculty, linked to senior Tories, hired to collect tweets as part of coronavirus-related contractPrivacy campaigners have expressed alarm after the government revealed it had hired an artificial intelligence firm to collect and analyse the tweets of UK citizens as part of a coronavirus-related contract.Faculty, which was hired by Dominic Cummings to work for the Vote Leave campaign and counts two current and former Conservative ministers among its shareholders, was paid £400,000 by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government for the work, according to a copy of the contract published online. Continue reading...

Jury is out on whether video-sharing site could make Microsoft a social media giant

Details on staff uniforms come after CEO Tim Cook says he will not tolerate modern slaveryApple has imported clothes – probably uniforms for staff in stores – from a company facing US sanctions over forced labour at a subsidiary firm in China’s western Xinjiang region, shipping records show.The details come a week after Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, told the US Congress he would not tolerate forced labour or modern-day slavery in the company’s supply chains. Continue reading...

If the Tories truly want to reshape the country, they should help to buy ArmSo, Brexit Tories, let’s see the colour of your money. So far, Brexit has meant billions spent on new, trade-inhibiting customs facilities, a proposed US trade deal that will necessarily compromise food standards to make us ill and a slump in inward investment. Not to mention deepening the crisis caused by Covid with the de facto no-deal Brexit. But now comes a chance to redeem yourselves, at least in part.Weeks after the referendum vote, Britain lost its biggest and best technology company – Arm – to the predatory charms of the megalomaniac Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank. Son, who this year compared himself to Jesus, paid $32bn (£24bn), the highest price ever for a European hi-tech company. Continue reading...

#IwanttoseeNyome outcry after social media platform repeatedly removes pictures of Nyome Nicholas-Williams

Algorithms routinely come up with ‘recommendations’ for anti-vax ‘bestsellers’ or juices that cure cancerIt’s a truism that we live in a “digital age”. It would be more accurate to say that we live in an algorithmically curated era – that is, a period when many of our choices and perceptions are shaped by machine-learning algorithms that nudge us in directions favoured by those who employ the programmers who write the necessary code.A good way of describing them would be as recommender engines. They monitor your digital trail and note what interests you – as evidenced by what you’ve browsed or purchased online. Amazon, for example, regularly offers me suggestions for items that are “based on your browsing history”. It also shows me a list of what people who purchased the item I’m considering also bought. YouTube’s engine notes what kinds of videos I have watched – and logs how much of each I have watched before clicking onwards – and then presents on the right-hand side of the screen an endlessly-scrolling list of videos that might interest me based on what I’ve just watched. Continue reading...

Property group British Land was one of the first to allow staff back into its London HQ – with lift-button prodders at the readyTemperature checks at reception, spaced-out desks, contactless coffee dispensers and plastic lift-button prodders. Welcome back to work – in an anti-Covid-19 office. These features, which would have been deemed eccentric and invasive in January, are some of the measures being deployed for returning employees by one of the UK’s biggest companies, property firm British Land.And many more businesses will have to take heed if the UK is to reverse its position as one of the slowest European countries to get its feet back under the desk. Only a third (34%) of UK white-collar employees have gone back to work, while in continental Europe almost three-quarters of staff (68%) have done so, according to analysis from US bank Morgan Stanley. Continue reading...

The move requires TikTok and WeChat to find new owners or shut down, but it may not be that simpleOn Thursday, Donald Trump issued two executive orders aimed at banning TikTok and WeChat, saying the US must take “aggressive action” against the China-based social media platforms in the interest of national security.The move would effectively require TikTok and WeChat to shut down in the US or find new owners within 45 days. Trump claims the apps are a security concern because they are based in China and thus prone to data requests from the Chinese government. Microsoft is already reportedly in talks to purchase TikTok for billions. Continue reading...

The tech company, in the midst of antitrust hearings in Congress, has come under fire for cloning other companies’ products beforeFacebook-owned Instagram on Wednesday launched Reels, a feature within the photo and video sharing app that allows users to post short videos and songs. Rings a bell?The launch drew a cheeky retweet from TikTok on Thursday, with the year’s hottest app saying Instagram’s feature looked “familiar”. Continue reading...

Digital and analogue modes of play combine in a new nostalgia-infused toy collection that will have all generations entrancedIf there are two things that defined my 1990s childhood (apart from Disney) they would be Nintendo and Lego. Like many millennials I have never entirely grown out of either. In a cabinet in my spare room sits a perfect Lego Simpsons house, miniature cityscapes of Berlin and London, and a blocky Mini. As for the video games, well, I’ve turned them into a career; I’ve been a games journalist and critic for more than 15 years, and own more Mario games than I’m comfortable admitting.All of which means I am an absolute sucker for the Nintendo-themed Lego sets that came out this month. Aimed at younger Lego fans, the Super Mario sets (a starter set is £49.99, with an eye-wateringly expensive array of expansions, from £3.49 character packs to an £80 Bowser’s Castle) offer bright bricks that can be combined to make real-world Mario levels, and an electronic Mario toy who comes to life to jump around them. Continue reading...

In the Covid-19 age, protestors are finding novel ways to express themselves, from BLM rallies in The Sims to Hong Kong protests in Animal CrossingAs street protests against anti-black racism erupted across the globe, Animal Crossing: New Horizons players were taking their own stand. Adelle, a software engineer from New York, decided to create a memorial on her in-game island, decorated with flowers and pixel art portraits of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other black victims of police brutality.“I was living with immuno-compromised people, so couldn’t attend the physical protests,” explains Adelle. The virtual space she created soon turned into a protest site as other players – some wearing masks – visited Adelle’s island, shouting: “No justice, no peace”, “Justice for Breonna” and “Defund the police.” “Being there with other players you don’t know, connected by this common feeling, was really moving,” she recalls. While the game only allows eight players on an island at one time, more people were engaging with the protest and raising thousands of dollars via the live-streaming platform Twitch. Continue reading...

The Chinese social media platform subject to a banning order by the US president

The 36-year-old follows Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates as fortune passes $100bn for first timeMark Zuckerberg’s fortune has passed $100bn (£76bn) for the first time, adding him to an exclusive club of the world’s centibillionaires, after Facebook’s shares surged on news it is to launch a rival to the video-sharing app TikTok.Facebook announced the US rollout of Instagram Reels, its answer to the Chinese app TikTok, as the US president, Donald Trump, issued bans on American companies transacting with its parent company, ByteDance, and Tencent, which owns the WeChat messaging service. Continue reading...

Executive order comes as TikTok faces scrutiny from US lawmakers and Trump administration over national security concernsDonald Trump has issued a pair of executive orders that would ban any US transactions with the Chinese companies that own TikTok and WeChat, saying the US must take “aggressive action” in the interest of national security.Executive orders issued late on Thursday would prohibit “any transaction by any person, or with respect to any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States,” with the companies, beginning in 45 days. Continue reading...

Move will allow Uber to offer journeys in towns such as Oxford, Doncaster and Aberdeen

Australian Signals Directorate will for the first time be able to identify suspects on home soilPeter Dutton has confirmed the government’s $1.6bn cyberstrategy will include capability for the Australian Signals Directorate to help law enforcement agencies identify and disrupt serious criminal activity – including in Australia.By rendering support to the Australian federal police and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, the cybersecurity and intelligence agency would for the first time be able to target Australians, although Dutton maintains ASD won’t be able to do so directly. Continue reading...

Coronavirus has accelerated the shift away from banknotes – central banks must act fast to catch upAs the Covid-19 crisis accelerates the long-term shift away from cash (at least in tax-compliant, legal transactions), official discussions about digital currencies are heating up. Between the impending launch of Facebook’s Libra and China’s proposed central-bank digital currency, events now could reshape global finance for a generation. A recent report from the G30 argues that if central banks want to shape the outcome, they need to start moving fast.Much is at stake, including global financial stability and control of information. Financial innovation, if not carefully managed, is often at the root of a crisis, and the dollar gives the US significant monitoring and sanctions capabilities. Dollar dominance is not just about what currency is used, but also about the systems that clear transactions and, from China to Europe, there is a growing desire to challenge this. This is where a lot of the innovation is taking place. Continue reading...

Move comes amid rising US-China tensions over TikTok and WeChat apps that White House says are ‘significant threats’Google says it has deleted more than 2,500 YouTube channels tied to China as part of its effort to weed out disinformation on the video-sharing platform.The Alphabet-owned company said the channels were removed between April and June “as part of our ongoing investigation into coordinated influence operations linked to China.“ Continue reading...

Video in which Trump wrongly said kids were ‘almost immune’ from illness also prompted Twitter to ban president’s re-election campaign accountFacebook has removed a post from Donald Trump’s page for spreading false information about the coronavirus, a first for the social media company that has been harshly criticized for repeatedly allowing the president to break its content rules.The post included video of Trump falsely asserting that children were “almost immune from Covid-19” during an appearance on Fox News. There is evidence to suggest that children who contract Covid-19 generally experience milder symptoms than adults do. However, they are not immune, and some children have become severely ill or died from the disease. Continue reading...