Technology | The Guardian

Silicon Valley in the 1980s was the hub of an international drug trafficking network that fueled technological innovation and criminalized black people

David asks how best to tell if a PC is fast enough for community groups on a limited budgetI am working on a project that helps various groups in the community to become more PC proficient, and some clients now wish to purchase their own systems for the first time. What is the best advice to give them about specifications etc, bearing in mind their finite budgets?A user who wants a desktop PC to deal with email and social media, office files, surfing the web and streaming some video will also need to buy peripherals, including a monitor. Some will need a printer. Often the advice will be to get the best PC possible, but they may not get the full benefit if other parts of the system are too compromised. DavidAlmost every PC on the market will perform basic tasks such as writing emails and browsing the web. Even cheap laptops can run Microsoft Office and its rival suites, which are relatively lightweight by today’s standards. Most can also do simple photo and video editing, though rendering and other video processing tasks can take a very long time. The problem is not so much the type of task as the resources required by the software and the size of your files. Continue reading...

Secretary of state strikes measured tone but says US still thinks Chinese firm poses riskBritain has a chance to “relook” at its decision to allow Huawei into its 5G phone network in the future, the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, declared as he flew to London for a two-day visit to the UK.The senior member of Donald Trump’s administration told reporters that the US believed that deploying Huawei in the UK created “real risk”, and insisted that sensitive American information should travel only through “trusted networks”. Continue reading...

Chris Murphy urges FBI and DNI to look into whether message from Saudi prince triggered hacking of Amazon founder’s phoneSenator Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, has called on US intelligence agencies including the FBI and DNI to investigate the alleged cellphone hacking of the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man.The tech tycoon’s phone was allegedly hacked in 2018 after receiving a WhatsApp message apparently sent from the personal Whatsapp account of Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. Continue reading...

Critics want commitment that firm will be out of UK telecoms infrastructure in three yearsConservative critics of Boris Johnson’s Huawei decision will push for a commitment from the government that the Chinese firm must be forced out of Britain’s telecoms infrastructure within three years.Johnson defied the US and rebels in his party on Tuesday by deciding to allow Huawei to build part of the UK’s 5G network as long as it is restricted to “non-core” parts of infrastructure and has no more than 35% of market share. Continue reading...

It has long been argued that workers will be replaced by machines, but now the threat is real. How will we bring about a revolution in both work and leisure?Oscar Wilde dreamed of a world without work. In The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891) he imagined a society liberated from drudgery by the machine: “while Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure … or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work.” This aesthete’s Eden prompted one of his most famous observations: “Is this Utopian? A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at.”In Wilde’s day the future of work was the first question that every aspiring utopian, from Edward Bellamy to HG Wells, needed to answer. Everything else, from gender relations to crime prevention, flowed from that. But proponents of the more attainable goal of drastically shorter working hours have also included Benjamin Franklin, Bertrand Russell, AT&T president Walter Gifford and John Maynard Keynes. When the great economist coined the phrase “technological unemployment” (“unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour”) in Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1931), he focused on the potential benefits a century hence. Continue reading...

Regulator says US firm’s £442m investment in London-based food courier could hit customers, restaurants and grocersAmazon’s UK ambitions have been checked by the competition watchdog after it launched an in-depth investigation into the online retailer’s purchase of a stake in food delivery company Deliveroo.The Competition and Markets Authority announced the probe on Friday after Amazon and Deliveroo declined to offer concessions in response to the CMA’s initial raising of concerns earlier this month. Continue reading...

Gaun’s online video channel, Ryan’s World, has 23 million subscribers and raked in $26m last yearAn eight-year-old YouTube presenter has topped its list of high earners, making $26m last year.Ryan Kaji (real name Gaun) made his toy review empire unboxing toys on YouTube from when he was just three. Now the eight-year-old has his face on toys and gets spotted in the supermarket. Continue reading...

Since we opened our west coast bureau in 2016, we’ve worked to expose the truth about how tech companies are reshaping society and democracy

Report was used by Labour to claim health service would be ‘on the table’ in US trade talksBritain’s security agencies are investigating whether hackers from a hostile state successfully targeted a personal Gmail account to access an explosive cache of correspondence that was seized on by Labour during the election campaign.The leak inquiry into how the 451-page dossier got into the public domain is focused on the Department for International Trade. Jeremy Corbyn said during the campaign that the documents proved the NHS was “on the table” in future US trade talks. Continue reading...

Maksim Yakubets and Igor Turashev were also sanctioned by the treasury for stealing banking credentials from 40 countriesUS prosecutors have charged two members of a Russia-based hacking group that calls itself Evil Corp with masterminding a global banking fraud scheme that netted the unsubtly named gang more than $100m.Two leading members of Evil Corp, Maksim Yakubets of Moscow and Igor Turashev from the Russian city Yoshkar-Ola, were charged with bank fraud and also sanctioned by the treasury department for developing and distributing the Dridex malware which stole swiped banking credentials from more than 40 countries. In a statement, US treasury officials called Evil Corp “one of the biggest hacking groups ever”. Continue reading...

Research suggests behaviour could be linked to poorer mental health but further studies neededOne in four children and young people could have problematic smartphone use, according to research that also suggests such behaviour is associated with poorer mental health.The amount of time children and teens spend using their devices has become an issue of growing concern, but experts say there is still little evidence as to whether spending time on screens is harmful in itself. Continue reading...

Move blamed on heavy cost of investing in electric vehicles just as traditional car sales slowMercedes-Benz plans to save €1.65bn (£1.4bn) by cutting more than 1,000 jobs in the latest sign German carmakers are struggling to make big investments in electric car technology.Carmakers around the world are spending billions on developing battery-powered electric vehicles but at the same time sales of internal combustion engines are slowing in the face of economic weakness and scandals over emissions. Continue reading...

The data protection laws introduced last year are failing us – and our childrenWho owns your data? This is one of the toughest questions facing governments, companies and regulators today and no one has answered it to anyone’s satisfaction. Not what we were promised last year, when the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, commonly known as the GDPR, came into effect.The GDPR was billed as the gold standard of data protection, offering the strongest data rights in the world. It has forced companies everywhere to modify their operating models, often at great cost. It inspired the state of California to pass a similar law and where California leads, the rest of the US often follows; there have been calls for a federal version of the GDPR. Continue reading...

Parties are all involved in a targeted experiment that campaigners warn lacks transparency and could harm democracyThe three main political parties in England and Wales are using Facebook audiences “as lab rats in a giant experiment”, according to the first detailed analysis of online advertising during a UK election.Campaign group Who Targets Me?, which was established to monitor online political ads, has been examining how parties used Facebook before the election was called and in the first week of the campaign. It has found all three parties trialling subtly different messages, images and even colours as they seek to learn what resonates with voters. Continue reading...

Ride-hailing companies are stepping up their fight against new worker protections. They want drivers to helpIt feels a bit Alice in Silicon Valleyland, but the good news for Uber this week was that it lost $1.2bn in the third quarter of 2019. While burning that kind of cash in 90 days would make even WeWork’s Adam Neumann blush, it is an improvement over the previous quarter’s jaw-dropping deficit of $5.24bn.Uber’s latest financial results came just two days before its post-IPO lockup period expired on Wednesday, allowing early investors and employees to cash out and touching off a stock sell-off that saw the share price reach a new all-time low. Hundreds of Uber drivers across California marked the occasion with protests targeting some of the handful of people who have unambiguously benefited from the Uber economy. Drivers visited the home of the early investor and former board member Bill Gurley in Atherton and the $72.5m mansion of the co-founder Garret Camp in Beverly Hills. Continue reading...

Fake celebrity endorsements are used to promote free product trials that are nearly impossible to cancelAustralians are now able to report fake ads they see on Facebook after scammers used unauthorised images of celebrities including Karl Stefanovic, Nicole Kidman and Eddie McGuire.The fake Australian celebrity endorsements were used to promote free product trials that were nearly impossible to cancel, or investment schemes. Continue reading...

Culture secretary confirms deferment of decision that could have repercussions on US-UK relationsA decision on whether Huawei should be allowed into the UK’s 5G network infrastructure has been postponed to the next government, deferring a possible row between Boris Johnson and Donald Trump.The outgoing culture secretary, Nicky Morgan, confirmed the decision – part of the Telecoms Supply Chain Review – would now be made after the general election on 12 December. Continue reading...

Company withdraws appeal against £500,000 penalty imposed by UK data watchdogFacebook has agreed to pay a £500,000 fine, the highest possible, to the Information Commissioner’s Office over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, ending more than a year of litigation between the regulator and social network.The ICO announced its intention to fine Facebook in July 2018. Unusually, the office went public with its intention before giving Facebook a chance to respond, and ultimately issued the official penalty notice three months later, in October. Facebook appealed against the fine, and in June 2019 the tribunal issued an interim decision “holding that procedural fairness and allegations of bias on the part of the ICO should be considered as part of the appeal, and that the ICO should be required to disclose materials relating to its decision-making process”. Continue reading...

NSO Group’s spyware allegedly used in cyber-attacks on lawyers and journalistsWhatsApp has launched an unprecedented lawsuit against a cyber weapons firm which it has accused of being behind secret attacks on more than 100 human rights activists, lawyers, journalists, and academics in just two weeks earlier this year.The social media firm is suing NSO Group, an Israeli surveillance company, saying it is responsible for a series of highly sophisticated cyber-attacks which it claims violated American law in an “unmistakeable pattern of abuse”. Continue reading...

As it returns for the last time, Mike Judge’s tech comedy feels thrillingly urgent, thanks to uncanny parallels with the real world. My God we need it now more than ever

Move follows appeal by father of 14-year-old Molly Russell, who killed herself in 2017Instagram is to extend its ban on depictions of self-harm to cover cartoons and drawings, following an appeal from Ian Russell, whose 14-year-old daughter, Molly, killed herself in 2017.Molly had been looking at graphic content relating to suicide and self-harm before she died, her father discovered, prompting him to go public earlier this year and campaign against the platform’s rules that allowed that material. Continue reading...

System analyses body language and word choice, but polling suggests public are opposed to such use of automationUnilever has claimed it is saving hundreds of thousands of pounds a year by replacing human recruiters with an artificial intelligence system, amid warnings of a populist backlash against the spread of machine learning.The multinational told the Guardian it had saved 100,000 hours of human recruitment time in the last year by deploying software to analyse video interviews. Continue reading...

Social media companies can already use online data to make reliable guesses about pregnancy or suicidal ideation – and new BCI technology will push this even furtherIt’s raining on your walk to the station after work, but you don’t have an umbrella. Out of the corner of your eye, you see a rain jacket in a shop window. You think to yourself: “A rain jacket like that would be perfect for weather like this.”Related: 'You're trying to help drug dealers': Zuckerberg faces angry lawmakers at Libra hearing Continue reading...

Results come after Elon Musk’s electric car company lost $1.1bn during the first half of 2018Tesla rebounded from a rocky start to the year when it reported a surprise third-quarter profit of $143m on Wednesday, sending its stock price soaring more than 17% in after-hours trading.The electric automobile company’s revenues of $6.3bn narrowly missed analyst expectations, but adjusted earnings per share of $1.86 far exceeded expectations that the company would continue losing money. Continue reading...

US legislators condemn CEO’s currency plans and question whether Facebook should be broken upMark Zuckerberg faced hostile questioning in the US Congress from politicians of both parties as he sought to reassure them the planned digital currency Libra could be a force for good.The more than six hours of testimony before the House financial services committee on Wednesday came as the social network faces calls from lawmakers to be broken up. While the event was intended to focus on Libra, House members used Zuckerberg’s rare appearance to grill him on topics including political bias, fact-checking, and the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. Continue reading...

Democratic lawmaker challenges Facebook CEO during hearing over Libra cryptocurrencyMark Zuckerberg faced a grueling examination from the Democratic lawmaker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Wednesday, with questions over the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Facebook’s reluctance to police political advertising.Ocasio-Cortez and other lawmakers grilled the Facebook CEO during a hearing in front of the US House of Representatives financial services committee regarding the launch of Facebook’s cryptocurrency project, Libra. Continue reading...

Facebook CEO faces growing pushback from legislators over plans to develop alternative payment system

If you log in to every website with the same details, you’re doing it wrong. Here are four easy steps to unhackabilityIt feels like it comes round earlier every year. Yes, today is bad password day, your annual reminder that you should install a password manager and randomise your passwords, lest you end up mocked in the national press for securing your precious secrets behind the unhackable protection of “passw0rd!”.The prompt this time is the annual report of the National Cyber Security Centre, a GCHQ subsidiary tasked with defending Britain’s online infrastructure. Continue reading...

The social media giant tells us the democratic process is sacrosanct. But its policy is to ignore its own power and hope for the best

Always-on screen completes the package kicking competitors to the curb and becoming a top reason to buy an iPhoneWhen Apple launched its smartwatch in 2015 to a lukewarm reception, some critics claimed it would never take off like the iPod or iPhone. But sales of the Apple Watch quickly eclipsed every other smartwatch and with wearable technology sales soaring it is expected this year to outsell all of the Swiss watchmakers combined.The latest Apple Watch Series 5 iteration, though still pricey at £399 and up, looks likely to continue the firm’s domination of the smartwatch market and deservedly so. Continue reading...

Commons committee demands explanation ‘given constraints it will place on combatting disinformation’The UK parliament has demanded to know why Facebook has decided to exempt political statements from its fact-checking programme – removing all bars on political candidates lying in paid adverts.In a letter to the former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, now Facebook’s vice-president for global affairs and communications, Damian Collins, the chair of the House of Commons’ digital, culture, media and sport select committee, described the change first reported in early October as “particularly concerning”. Continue reading...

French researchers have developed a phone case that mimics the haptics of human skin. The interface could open up a new world of tactile communication. There are two styles, a simple version and an 'ultra realistic' version, but the anthropomorphic add-on is still just a prototype Continue reading...

Still an absolute beast in every way, even if it’s just a minor update to an already cracking smartphoneThe OnePlus 7T Pro is an update to the best phone of the first half of 2019 and the good news is that they haven’t messed up, with tweaks that make it just as good, if not better, than the model it replaces.The bad news is that the updated phone starts at £50 more than its predecessor, at £699, although as it also comes with more storage and RAM; in effect it matches the cost of the earlier mid-range 7 Pro version. It also gains a faster processor, an improved camera and a slightly tweaked paint job. Continue reading...

The Irish composer and conductor – who’s worked with film director Gus Van Sant and on World of Warcraft – talks passionately about making game musicEímear Noone got into composing and conducting video game music by accident. One day, while studying music at Trinity College Dublin, a fourth-year student came to the bar she was drinking in with members of the college chapel choir and offered them a few quid to help with the orchestration on a project of his.“I have a vivid memory of sitting on a studio floor somewhere in Dublin writing choral parts with my pals and then singing them,” she says. “Six months later, my brother calls me in a complete tizzy and says, ‘Did you work on Metal Gear Solid?’ I was like, ‘No!’ He says, ‘Well, I’m looking at your name on the screen credits right now.’ And sure enough, the session she had contributed to for beer money was the soundtrack to Hideo Kojima’s blockbuster adventure game. “Years later, I was at the Bird’s Nest in Beijing conducting this very piece of music,” she says. “It’s just a bizarre life.” Continue reading...

The company confirmed it had dismantled the four accounts and announced initiatives to prevent foreign interference in US campaignsFacebook on Monday disclosed it had taken down four new foreign interference operations originating from Iran and Russia, including one targeting the US 2020 presidential elections that appears to be linked to the Russian troll agency, the Internet Research Agency (IRA).The suspected IRA campaign “had the hallmarks of a well-resourced operation that took consistent operational security steps to conceal their identity and location”, Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, said in a blogpost. Continue reading...

Update will prevent new smartphone being unlocked using owner’s sleeping faceGoogle has said it will update its new Pixel 4 phones to prevent them being unlocked using the sleeping faces of their owners.The phones, which are not yet in shops, are the first from Google to include a secure face unlock feature, in place of the fingerprint sensor used on previous iterations. The feature is also used to confirm payments and sign in to apps. Continue reading...

As part of the Guardian’s Automating Poverty series, Robert Booth looked at how and why the Department for Work and Pensions in the UK is increasing investment in testing artificial intelligence to assess benefits claims. He talks to Jordan Erica Webber about his findings Continue reading...

Robot Wars survivor David Wreckham has found new purpose as the face of the Campaign to Stop Killer RobotsAn international campaign takes its battle to outlaw “killer robots” to the UN this week with a new ally – a “peace robot”.Created by an inventor from the BBC programme Robot Wars, the droid, known as David Wreckham, has been recruited to deliver a message to world leaders in New York on Monday. Continue reading...

The dating app has become the go-to tool for singles looking for a ‘hook-up’ rather than a relationship. Its chief executive reckons it can broaden its appeal – but will have to get tough with some usersSwipe right for “would like to meet”, left for “wouldn’t”. Seven years after Tinder made choosing a date as simple as flicking your thumb across a smartphone screen, it is by far the most-used dating app in the UK and the US. Downloaded 300m times and with more than 5 million paying subscribers, it is the highest-grossing app of any kind in the world, according to the analysts App Annie. For Americans, apps and online dating are the most common way to meet a partner. “It’s an amazing responsibility, and an amazing privilege,” says Elie Seidman, Tinder’s 45-year-old chief executive. If he finds it less daunting than others might, that’s because, before he took over Tinder in 2018, he was in charge of OkCupid, the Tinder of the 00s. He has spent much of his working life helping people to find love.“The vast majority of our employees are energised by that very mission,” he says. “We’re not selling plumbing supplies, right? Obviously, plumbing is really important, but ours is a really noble and exciting mission. So, when we’re taking new risks – new challenges, new chances – we know that, if we’re successful, it’s about helping members connect.” Continue reading...

Policymakers might learn from London’s Silicon Roundabout experienceEvery city wants a cluster, a concentration of high-productivity firms and workers beavering away in a particular industry in a particular place. Proximity means ideas and productivity growing and spreading. Who doesn’t want their own Silicon Valley?David Cameron certainly did. In November 2010, he announced the “Tech City” programme, aiming to grow a digital cluster in Shoreditch, east London. The plan was to use branding to get firms in, networking to ensure those ideas get flowing with focused support for high-potential firms. Continue reading...

It may be some way off, but mind uploading, the digital duplication of your mental essence, could expand human experience into a virtual afterlifeImagine that a person’s brain could be scanned in great detail and recreated in a computer simulation. The person’s mind and memories, emotions and personality would be duplicated. In effect, a new and equally valid version of that person would now exist, in a potentially immortal, digital form. This futuristic possibility is called mind uploading. The science of the brain and of consciousness increasingly suggests that mind uploading is possible – there are no laws of physics to prevent it. The technology is likely to be far in our future; it may be centuries before the details are fully worked out – and yet given how much interest and effort is already directed towards that goal, mind uploading seems inevitable. Of course we can’t be certain how it might affect our culture but as the technology of simulation and artificial neural networks shapes up, we can guess what that mind uploading future might be like.Suppose one day you go into an uploading clinic to have your brain scanned. Let’s be generous and pretend the technology works perfectly. It’s been tested and debugged. It captures all your synapses in sufficient detail to recreate your unique mind. It gives that mind a standard-issue, virtual body that’s reasonably comfortable, with your face and voice attached, in a virtual environment like a high-quality video game. Let’s pretend all of this has come true. Continue reading...

Their smartphones do everything, but can teenagers master old tech and life skills – from reading a map to setting an alarm clock?Three 15-year-old school children are on the phone, in class. No, it’s OK, they’re supposed to be; they’ve been told to, by me, with permission from their teacher. And they’re not actually on the phone, because they don’t know how to use it. It’s an old-fashioned rotary telephone, finger-in-the-dial variety. They’re tapping it, prodding at the holes. Hahahaha – they haven’t got a clue.Loxford is an academy in Ilford, east London. I’ve come here with a suitcase stuffed full of the past, tech from my own childhood, mostly borrowed from nostalgic hoarder colleagues. Everything in the case is obsolete: it’s all been shrunk to fit into the smartphones today’s 15-year-olds almost all have. It’s a kind of social experiment, about different generations, lost skills, changing technology – what Loxford media studies teacher Mr Rushworth calls “convergence”. OK, and it’s also about having a laugh; and getting my generation’s own back for those times we’ve had to go crawling to a teenager for technical assistance, such as asking how to make the video on WhatsApp work. Continue reading...

Billy Foister died last month after a heart attack at work. The incident was just one in a series of recent accidents and fatalitiesIn September, Billy Foister, a 48-year-old Amazon warehouse worker, died after a heart attack at work. According to his brother, an Amazon human resources representative informed him at the hospital that Billy had lain on the floor for 20 minutes before receiving treatment from Amazon’s internal safety responders.“How can you not see a 6ft 3in man laying on the ground and not help him within 20 minutes? A couple of days before, he put the wrong product in the wrong bin and within two minutes management saw it on camera and came down to talk to him about it,” Edward Foister said. Continue reading...

Design Museum, London

Support for Mark Zuckerberg’s mission to reshape global finance is slipping away slowly but surelyWhen Facebook announced plans to launch a digital currency earlier this summer, it added a full-blown revolution in global finance to its typically vaulting Silicon Valley mission statement: to create a digital currency alongside its efforts to bring the world closer together through networks.Over the past month, that mission has gone badly awry. The Libra cryptocurrency project now faces existential threats from world leaders and central bankers worried about its harmful potential: as a vehicle for money laundering, a threat to global financial stability, open to data privacy abuse, dangerous for consumers and stripping nations of the control of their economies by privatising the money supply. Continue reading...

The author of Hooked, a bible of addictive tech design, now offers advice on how not to be distracted. But is his self-help argument convincing?In The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley points out that the Lord’s Prayer has 50 words, and six of them are dedicated to imploring God not to lead us into temptation. When I was a child sitting in Sunday school in west Texas, I often wondered why God would engineer these temptations into our environment in the first place – much less lead us into them – if he was only going to enjoin us to avoid them later.Today I feel the same way about the creators of our technological environments. We are bombarded at every turn with persuasive design that exploits our psychological weaknesses and often leads us into temptation, habituation and distraction. At the same time, we are expected to take up arms against these distractions, to muster superhuman levels of self-regulation, just to adapt to this all-out war others are waging for our attention. Continue reading...