Technology | The Guardian

Vlogger embraced by far right apologizes for planned donation to Anti-Defamation League, after fans claim conspiracyYouTuber Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg has withdrawn a $50,000 pledge to an anti-hate group, which he had dedicated as a means of atoning for past accusations of racism and antisemitism, after backlash from his fans.The Swedish vlogger had promised funds received from a sponsorship deal to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a not-for-profit organization that fights antisemitism. But he apologized to fans, who had been developing conspiracy theories that he had been pressured to make the donation, in a video uploaded on Thursday. Continue reading...

Mariela Castro and state media journalists were also blocked in move Cuban Union of Journalists called ‘massive censorship’Twitter has blocked the accounts of the Cuban Communist party leader Raúl Castro, his daughter Mariela Castro and Cuba’s top state-run media outlets, a move the Cuban Union of Journalists denounced as “massive censorship”.Related: Cuba is driving dissidents off island with threats of violence and jail, report finds Continue reading...

An essay about an Instagram influencer and an intense female friendship that turned toxic is blowing up online. One Guardian Australia staffer asks another to explain what it means … quicklyHi Alyx. Who is Caroline Calloway, and why could no one stop talking about her at the pub last night?Caroline Calloway is the subject of an intense, emotionally complex long read in New York Magazine’s the Cut. It was written by her former close friend and ghostwriter Natalie Beach, and now the internet can’t stop talking about her – largely because Calloway herself can’t stop talking about the article. Continue reading...

11 September 1969: Robots could be used as slaves, to do the things human beings do not want to do, hears the International Congress of Industrial DesignRobots might do repetitive housework, such as cleaning, scrubbing, and washing-up, but it was unlikely they would do creative work such as cooking, Professor Meredith W. Thring, professor of mechanical engineering, Queen Mary College, London, said yesterday.Related: Robot kills factory worker: From the archive, 9 December 1981 Continue reading...

Latest developments in the pipeline for those struggling with mobility, sight, hearing or speechNine years ago, David Mzee was left paralysed by a gymnastics accident and told he would never walk again. Last week, he competed in a charity run during which he walked 390 metres, thanks to an experimental treatment that uses electrical stimulation of the spinal cord to rejuvenate dormant circuits in patients whose spinal breaks are not complete. Continue reading...

The MIT-Epstein debacle shows ‘the prostitution of intellectual activity’. Time for a radical agenda: close the Media Lab, disband Ted Talks and refuse tech billionaires moneyAs the world wakes up to the power of big tech, we get to hear – belatedly – of all the damage wrought by the digital giants. Most of these debates, alas, don’t veer too far from the policy-oriented realms of economics or law. Now that the big technocracy wants to quash big tech, expect more such wonkery.What, however, about the ideas that feed big tech? For one, we are no longer in 2009: Mark Zuckerberg’s sophomoric musings on transparency or the global village impress very few. Continue reading...

AI and brain-scanning technology could soon make it possible to reliably detect when people are lying. But do we really want to know? By Amit KatwalaWe learn to lie as children, between the ages of two and five. By adulthood, we are prolific. We lie to our employers, our partners and, most of all, one study has found, to our mothers. The average person hears up to 200 lies a day, according to research by Jerry Jellison, a psychologist at the University of Southern California. The majority of the lies we tell are “white”, the inconsequential niceties – “I love your dress!” – that grease the wheels of human interaction. But most people tell one or two “big” lies a day, says Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire. We lie to promote ourselves, protect ourselves and to hurt or avoid hurting others.The mystery is how we keep getting away with it. Our bodies expose us in every way. Hearts race, sweat drips and micro-expressions leak from small muscles in the face. We stutter, stall and make Freudian slips. “No mortal can keep a secret,” wrote the psychoanalyst in 1905. “If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips. Betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.” Continue reading...

Companies are creating new devices and apps to mine seniors’ golden years and address the challenges of growing olderSilicon Valley has long sought to disrupt virtually every aspect of modern life. Now comes technology’s final frontier: old age. Tech that’s specifically designed for seniors is a growing market, fueled by inexorable demographic trends – about 10,000 baby boomers turn 65 every day.Senior tech is increasingly showing up in assisted living facilities and nursing homes. A company called It’s Never Too Late proffers a massive 70in high-definition touchscreen computer that provides older people with little prior tech experience easy access to everything from travel videos and music playlists to a library of college lectures. Paro, a robotic seal stuffed with sensors and actuators that react to voice, light and touch, is being used to help those experiencing memory loss and social withdrawal. A movie system called 3Scape provides immersive 3D filmed content for the elderly and mobility-challenged in order to stimulate cognitive function and relieve depression and anxiety. Continue reading...

Surveillance software switched off at prestigious development after backlashFacial recognition technology will not be deployed at the King’s Cross development in the future, following a backlash prompted by the site owner’s admission last month that the software had been used in its CCTV systems.The developer behind the prestigious central London site said the surveillance software had been used between May 2016 and March 2018 in two cameras on a busy pedestrian street running through its heart. Continue reading...

Up to 10 million people in the UK are in precarious work, juggling low paid jobs as cleaners, Deliveroo riders and Uber drivers. But a movement is under way to rewire the economy from withinFatima, from Guinea-Bissau, wakes up in the early hours of the morning to be in with a chance of being able to use the bathroom at her small house in Stratford, east London, which she shares with nine strangers – some are Italian, she thinks, and some might be eastern European, but nobody socialises as they are all too busy working, so she can’t really be sure. Almost every possession Fatima owns remains permanently packed in two large suitcases, because she knows what the landlord is capable of: he demands payments in cash and retains a personal key to every room. “When he throws me out on to the street, I’ll be ready,” she explains. By 6.30am she’s on the tube and heading to the Ministry of Justice headquarters near St James’s Park for the first of two jobs. Over the next nine hours she will walk up and down 16 floors of UK government office space, cleaning each of the male and female toilets on every floor five times per working day. She will walk for miles and miles, until 5pm, when she will walk down the road for half a mile more, and begin another set of cleaning rounds – this time at the supreme court. For all this, she will be paid £7.83 per hour, the legal minimum wage for her age. By the time she gets home, it will be past 9pm, and she will be exhausted. “It isn’t any kind of life,” she says.But today is a different kind of life. Today, she is spinning in the middle of a Westminster pavement as rain pours from the sky, with glitter on her face and strips of ticker tape in her hair. She is blowing a horn and dancing deliriously, flanked by a line of security guards on one side and police officers on the other. The air is thick with music and shouting and flare smoke and promise, and Fatima, 55, is at the heart of it all. Continue reading...

US court orders Craig Wright to share cryptocurrency haul with the estate of American programmer David KleimanThe Australian man who claimed to have invented cryptocurrency bitcoin has been ordered to hand over half of his alleged bitcoin holdings, reported to be worth up to $5bn.The IT security consultant Craig Wright, 49, was sued by the estate of David Kleiman, a programmer who died in 2013, for a share of Wright’s bitcoin haul over the pair’s involvement in the inception of the cryptocurrency from 2009 to 2013. Continue reading...

Forget sponsoring Bob in accounts to run a charity marathon: these days you can ask anyone for anythingIwan Carrington wanted AirPods but he couldn’t afford them, and for most 16-year-old boys that’s where the story would end. Since their release in December 2016, Apple’s £199 wireless Bluetooth earbuds have become a status symbol among teens: after all, only the wealthy can afford tiny, untethered headphones that are so easy to lose. As an ordinary Welsh schoolboy, Carrington wasn’t rich enough to buy them, and he was growing increasingly jealous of his friend’s pair. So in January this year, he came up with a solution.With just a few clicks on his computer, Carrington created a page on the crowdfunding website GoFundMe, set a fundraising goal of £100 (he had saved the rest from Christmas), and titled it simply and honestly: “I am desperate for AirPods. Help a brother out.” The plea was simple and unvarnished: “I am like any other teenager except I would love some Apple AirPods. I was sat on the bus untangling my earphone wires and thought how great it would be to have AirPods. I ask for any help. Please.” The first comment underneath was similarly direct: “This is a shameless act of self-promotion. I totally support it.” Eight donors and a few days later, Carrington had raised the money he needed. Continue reading...

Wall Street Journal found that more than 4,000 items for sale on Amazon have been declared unsafe by federal agenciesAmazon has removed hundreds of toxic and unsafe products from its site after a Wall Street Journal report found thousands of listings from third-party sellers don’t comply with federal safety standards. Thousands of problematic products remain.More than 4,000 items for sale on Amazon have been declared unsafe by federal agencies, including 2,000 listings for children’s toys and medications. The Journal also identified 157 items Amazon had already banned still listed on the site, and one product it tested had lead levels that exceed federal limits. Continue reading...

Readers respond to Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett’s piece about selfie culture in art galleriesI was pleased to read Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett’s criticism of selfie culture – every aspect of life has been gatecrashed by the mobile phone (Art, aura and the search for a perfect selfie, 22 August). However, as John Berger pointed out in Ways of Seeing (indebted to Walter Benjamin), the withering of the aura of a work of art is to be celebrated, because aura shrouds the work of art in a veil of false religiosity.Many modern artworks, such as those in film and photography (media that Benjamin advocated), are no longer necessarily unique one-offs. The fact that film is reproducible and distributed en masse does not adversely affect our viewing. I saw Once Upon a Time in Hollywood this week knowing that other copies of the film were being watched in cinemas internationally. In other words, the artwork – if you would agree that film can be an artwork – does not require the quality of one-offness to be valued. If a thing is appreciated simply for its uniqueness, which is more or less attributable to many things, not just artworks, there are other factors being overlooked. The gallery provides a space for the viewer to interact with the work on both a physical and mental – conceptual – level. Considerations of cultural contexts and history play a part. Anyone looking at their phone in a gallery shouldn’t have bothered leaving the house; they brought the house with them. My gallery-going advice: switch off the phone, dump the aura and get lost.

There are regional variations in how easy it is to pass your practical driving test – but there is also the theory part. Could you still pass?Newly released figures show that there are some areas of the country where it appears to be much easier to pass your driving test than others. But, regardless of where you take the practical test, would-be drivers in Great Britain are required to take a theory test as well before getting their driving licence.But, once we are out on the road, not all of us can remember every detail. And some of us started driving long enough ago that the theory test didn’t exist. Continue reading...

PlayStation 4; Flavourworks/Sony

Badiucao accuses the social media firm of violating the free speech of people who speak up against China’s bullyingA Melbourne artist who posted anti-Chinese government work has had it pulled offline by Instagram, while death threats against him have remained uncensored.The censorship of Badiucao – and later restoration – by Instagram came as Twitter and Facebook suspended more than 200,000 accounts deemed to be part of a “co-ordinated state-backed operation” of misinformation from the People’s Republic of China. Continue reading...

A study claims that adding emojis to communications allowed people to reach a deeper level of intimacy with one anotherName: Sexy emojis.Appearance: Irresistible. Continue reading...

Bluetooth earbuds have long battery life, rock-solid connectivity and stay firmly planted on your earThe PowerBeats Pro are Apple-owned Beats’ first true wireless Bluetooth earbuds that cut the cable and seek to be the ultimate running and gym earphones.As with Apple’s original AirPods, which looked like a set of the firm’s standard EarPods with the cables cut off, the £220 PowerBeats Pro are basically the firm’s popular PowerBeats 3 neckband Bluetooth earbuds without the cables joining the pair. Continue reading...

The best camera in the mid-range market, backed by good performance and long battery lifeThe Honor 20 Pro is the new flagship phone for Huawei’s cheaper offshoot, offering some of what made the Chinese firm the camera master but at £550 it is a little overpriced.The Honor 20 Pro is essentially the same phone as the £400 Honor 20 with a better camera on the back, a slightly larger battery and more storage. It was meant to be released alongside its cheaper sibling, but Donald Trump’s Huawei blockade caused it to be delayed. Continue reading...

Sadiq Khan raises concerns after development admits using technology in its CCTVThe mayor of London has written to the owner of the King’s Cross development demanding to know whether the company believes its use of facial recognition software in its CCTV systems is legal.Sadiq Khan said he wanted to express his concern a day after the property company behind the 27-hectare (67-acre) central London site admitted it was using the technology “in the interests of public safety”. Continue reading...

Creator of video says he wants to raise awareness of technology's potential in age of fake news and doctored footage

Site’s shutdown in wake of El Paso shooting likely to drive users to other, similar sites – as well as mainstream social mediaFormer members of 8chan have scattered across the internet after the far-right site was shut down over the weekend, finding new homes in other rightwing sites, on encrypted messaging services, and on major social media platforms.8chan went dark this week after the security service provider Cloudflare terminated the extremist messaging board as one of its clients following the El Paso shooting. Continue reading...

Cybersecurity firm FireEye says ‘aggressive’ APT41 group working for Beijing is also hacking video games to make moneyA group of state-sponsored hackers in China ran activities for personal gain at the same time as undertaking spying operations for the Chinese government in 14 different countries, the cybersecurity firm FireEye has said.In a report released on Thursday, the company said the hacking group APT41 was different to other China-based groups tracked by security firms in that it used non-public malware typically reserved for espionage to make money through attacks on video game companies. Continue reading...

After being reported for illegally renting out her home, one California woman took revenge with a mural, neighbors sayA California woman’s decision to plaster emojis on her outside walls, a move neighbors say came after they reported her for renting out her home on Airbnb, has made headlines around the world. But the war in Manhattan Beach, a city in southern California, sums up a wider problem for neighborhoods transformed by the tech platform: what happens if your neighbors hate it?Neighborly disputes over Airbnb and other home-share properties are frequent, said Dan Weber, the founder of Airbnb Hell, a website that collects horror stories from hosts, renters and neighbors of Airbnb homes. Continue reading...

Rosette Pambakian says she was fired after she complained about alleged 2016 attack by Gregory BlattAn ex-executive at dating site Tinder has sued the company and says she was sexually assaulted by its former CEO.The lawsuit filed on Monday in Los Angeles superior court said Rosette Pambakian was fired from her job as marketing vice-president after complaining about the alleged 2016 incident. Continue reading...

Three attackers in six months allegedly posted their plans on the site in advance. Why is it allowed to operate openly?

Swoon over the motor that won the first Italian Grand Prix – and other polished chrome wondersConcours of Elegance

If quantum computers are to help solve humanity’s problems, they will have to improve drasticallyThe unveiling of the marvel had the media gushing. It was Valentine’s Day 1946, and the New York Times broke the story. The front page spoke of “an amazing machine” and “one of the war’s top secrets”. By crunching numbers at unprecedented speed, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, with its 18,000 vacuum tubes, was poised to “revolutionise modern engineering”. Eniac would usher in a new epoch of industrial design, some said.More than 70 years on, another overblown announcement is near. Several companies, notably Google, IBM and the California-based Rigetti, are racing to build a machine that achieves what is grandly termed “quantum supremacy”. The feat will mark the moment when a quantum computer, for the first time, outperforms the best conventional computers. Google, the frontrunner, could claim the record this year. Continue reading...

Trump has criticized bid process for the cloud-computing contract as potentially biased toward AmazonThe US department of defense says the defense secretary, Mark Esper, is reviewing the bid process for the military’s $10bn cloud-computing contract.Donald Trump has criticized the process, citing complaints from other companies, as potentially biased toward Amazon. The e-commerce giant and Microsoft have been competing for the contract, known as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure plan, or Jedi. Continue reading...

Second-ever quarterly earnings report marks tentative success for social networkPinterest shares soared after its second-ever quarterly earnings report exceeded expectations on Thursday, representing tentative success for another Silicon Valley “unicorn”.Pinterest joined a number of other tech “unicorns” – private companies valued at over $1bn – to list on the US stock markets when it filed to go public in March 2019. Its better-than-projected revenue and user growth caused shares to jump as much as 17% after markets closed for the day. Continue reading...

Campaigns overseen by staff of Sir Lynton Crosby’s firm purported to be independent news sources

The internet is full of annoyances designed to make you click here, watch this and keep scrolling for more. How could it be better?Auto-play video ads. Aggressive pop-ups. Invisible ad trackers.The internet of 2019 is full of annoyances and dark patterns, designed to make us click this button, ignore that disclaimer, and just keep scrolling, all under the watchful eye of surveillance tools that the vast majority of us don’t realize are recording our every mouse click. Continue reading...

Cyber and intelligence experts unite to battle disinformation as character of warfare changesComputer hackers and propaganda specialists working in the British army are to be placed in a single division, as part of a reorganisation designed to reflect a belief that the boundary between peace and war has become increasingly blurred.The cyber and intelligence experts will be consolidated into a reborn 6th Division – one of three in the army with a strength of 14,500 – which will also contain ground troops who can be used in secret, special forces-type operations. Continue reading...

‘Just wanted to share this snap of my hot grandma. Isn’t she gorgeous? And can you see the resemblance? #FamilyGoals’Name: #GeneBraggingAge: New for summer 2019. Continue reading...

ACCC chair Rod Sims says NBN Co’s priority must be providing customers with better products at prices they can affordThe ACCC chair, Rod Sims, says NBN Co should be prepared to sink the value of the $50bn taxpayer investment in the project if it means customers get better products at prices they can afford.In a speech Sims will give to the ACCC and Australian Energy Regulator conference in Brisbane on Thursday, he will say that as the NBN nears completion next year the focus should be less on recouping the investment the government has made and more on how best to use the network. Continue reading...

Exclusive: Facebook executive Simon Milner says company ‘only removes content that violates our community standards’Facebook has declared it is not “our role to remove content that one side of a political debate considers to be false” in a final, positive, self-assessment of its actions in response to the death tax misinformation circulating on the platform during the May federal election.In correspondence seen by Guardian Australia, Simon Milner, the Singapore-based vice-president of the social media giant in the Asia-Pacific, tells Labor’s outgoing national secretary, Noah Carroll: “I understand that your preference would be for Facebook to remove all content that you believe constitutes misinformation – which in this instance mean all content that discussed whether or not Labor intends to introduce a death tax – rather than demote it; however Facebook only removes content that violates our community standards. Continue reading...

VC support for Mayor Pete seems to top that of other Democratic candidates with strong ties to the industryHe’s young, he’s white, he went to Harvard, and he loves to talk about data.If Pete Buttigieg had a product and a pitch deck, Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists would most likely be lining up to get in on his startup’s seed round. But with the 37-year-old Buttigieg intent on seeking a position in the – gasp – public sector, tech industry VCs instead appear interested in investing in the small-town mayor’s upstart presidential campaign. Continue reading...

More than 17,000 applicants also affected in breach of city’s personnel departmentThe personal information of 2,500 Los Angeles police department officers and 17,500 people who had applied to join the force were exposed in a data breach, the department announced on Monday.The department was informed of a potential breach of records held by the city’s personnel department on 25 July, and it notified affected officers over the weekend. Continue reading...

UK fact-checking organisation Full Fact offers 10 suggestions for improvementsFacebook should immediately extend its fact-checking programme to also cover Instagram, according to Full Fact, a journalism charity that was the first UK member of the scheme.“We do not see why the third-party fact-checking programme cannot be fully expanded to Instagram,” Full Fact said in its report on the first six months of the programme. “The potential to prevent harm is high here, and there are known risks of health misinformation on the platform.” Continue reading...

There is a lot of science demonstrating plausible risk of harm from electromagnetic fields, says Damien Downing, and campaigners against 5G are simply alerting people to the evidence, says Sally BeareHas the Guardian never heard of the precautionary principle (How baseless fears over 5G rollout created a health scare, 26 July)? The one the Stewart report (from the Independent Expert Group on Mobile Phones) called for in 2000, but which has been ignored ever since? The one that says government has a responsibility to protect the public from exposure to harm, when scientific investigation has found a plausible risk?Whatever labels – “baseless”, “half-science”, “cherry-picked” – you put on it, there is quite a lot of science demonstrating plausible risk of harm from electromagnetic fields, far too much to dismiss with a chuckle from the hardly impartial head of technology communications for EE, Howard Jones. Continue reading...

Ford’s all-conquering Ranger is an impressive beast. But is time running out for vehicles like this?Ford Ranger

Sales rush for gadget after it appears in photo of the Queen meeting Boris JohnsonIt is the kind of influencer power that money can’t buy: after being photographed in the Queen’s private apartment, Dyson’s upmarket fans are selling out.The £500 gadget inserted itself into history on Wednesday when its space age design stood out among the ornate furnishings in the audience room at Buckingham Palace, as the monarch was pictured meeting the new prime minister, Boris Johnson. Continue reading...

Losses come even as Elon Musk’s company says it’s delivering a record-breaking number of vehiclesTesla shares tumbled more than 11% in after-hours trading on Wednesday after the company reported a larger-than-expected $408m loss in its second quarter earnings, and announced the departure of its chief technology officer (CTO).Related: Electric dreams? What you need to know about Tesla's Model 3 Continue reading...

Company says US regulators have launched an antitrust investigation into platformTwo giant fines by US government agencies totaling $5.1bn could not derail Facebook’s financial juggernaut on Wednesday, as the company reported revenues of $16.9bn in the second quarter of 2019, exceeding analyst expectations.The social media company’s regulatory concerns are by no means over, however. Facebook also disclosed on Wednesday that the FTC informed it in June that it has opened an antitrust investigation into the company. This follows the Department of Justice’s announcement of a broad antitrust review of online platforms on Tuesday. Continue reading...

Anxious parents may see the appeal of measuring their baby’s vital signs – but sharing your child’s data with a private company may not be wiseThis week’s instalment of innovations no one was waiting for is brought to you by Pampers, which has announced a “smart nappy” system. Lumi consists of a sensor that you stick to a specially designed nappy; the gizmo then beams information about how much your little bub is peeing and sleeping to a dedicated app. You can complement this with a video monitor that links to the app and tracks room temperature and humidity. Voilà: your embarrassingly low-tech baby is now a sophisticated analytics machine.If you can’t wait to start a more data-driven relationship with your newborn, I am afraid to say there is no word on when Lumi will launch in the UK (it arrives in the US this autumn). If you are in South Korea, however, you can grab some Huggies smart nappies; these let you know, via Bluetooth, whether your baby has urinated or defecated. A truly brilliant update to the obsolete technology known as “your nose”. Continue reading...

FTC to claim company misled users about handling of their phone numbers as part of settlementThe Federal Trade Commission is expected to announce on Wednesday that Facebook has agreed to a sweeping settlement of allegations it mishandled user privacy and pay roughly $5bn, two people briefed on the matter said.Related: Should tech companies be worried about DoJ's antitrust review? Continue reading...

Officials to look into whether Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple are unlawfully limiting competitionThe US justice department is opening a broad antitrust review into major technology firms, as criticism over the companies’ growing reach and power heats up.The investigation will focus on growing complaints that the companies are unlawfully stifling competition. Continue reading...

Government-owned company says it is just 1.6m premises short of reaching its 2020 targetNBN Co is racing closer to the finish line of the network being built, announcing there are now 10m homes and businesses that can connect to the network, just 1.6m short of the 2020 target.The government-owned company announced the achievement on Wednesday, less than one year until the network is due to be completed. Continue reading...