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...

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...

PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X; Square Enix

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...

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...

From improving work productivity to managing shopping lists and family commitments, these apps will help you stay in control

As management seeks more oversight of workers away from the office, campaigners fight for privacy to be respected

Issue revealed on Twitter meant results from hospitals or PHE labs could not be registered

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...

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...

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...

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...

Problems on Android and iPhone leave some unable to use the software at all

Contact-tracing app for England and Wales for Android and iPhone is now available, here’s how to get it

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...

Pilot studies show low download rate as app launches in England and Wales

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...

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...