Technology | The Guardian

Tech giants are drawing political fire over fake news and Russian meddlingNicholas Terry understands the internet’s darker side better than most. A history lecturer at Exeter University, Terry is an expert on antisemitism and runs a blog examining Holocaust denial and its dissemination online.“You’ve got three separate phenomena converging,” he says. “One is the fake news stuff, promulgated by the likes of Facebook and Twitter, which is trying to promote specific false stories in real time for immediate impact; second, there’s the ideological bubble – people only reading leftwing or rightwing news sites; and then there’s this effort by fringe movements on Holocaust denial to make their websites look respectable and to hoodwink readers into thinking what they’re reading is OK.” Continue reading...

Banning yourself can have the perverse effect of making your phone more enticing. What you need to do is make it boringRecently, I bought a piece of digital technology to help me conquer my low-level addiction to digital technology. Yes, yes, I know this makes me sound like a sucker, no better than those techno-junkies who queue overnight at the Apple store for an early glimpse at the meaninglessness of their lives. But bear with me: Ditto, which costs about £30, is a thimble-sized contraption that clips to my belt and vibrates when I get texts or calls from specific people. So I can stash my phone in my bag, out of sight and reach, confident I’ll be contactable for, say, a baby emergency. (Or by the editor of Guardian Weekend. Obviously!) You can use the iPhone’s “do not disturb” feature to do something similar; but last year, researchers showed that just having a phone in your sightline impairs your cognitive capacities. By contrast, Ditto replicates all the secret joy of accidentally leaving your phone at home, with none of the accompanying panic.Readers even more curmudgeonly than I am may mutter that if I have such a tortured relationship with my phone, I should just get rid of it – downgrade to a dumbphone, maybe. Didn’t we manage fine before smartphones came along? The trouble is that smartphones, like most technology, aren’t simply bad. They’re worse: a diabolical mixture of bad and very good. I love receiving photos of the baby while I’m at work; I love FaceTiming with faraway friends; I just hate the compulsion to stare absently at the web every five minutes. That’s the smartphone’s whole trick: all those addictive apps are essentially parasites. Continue reading...

Couple who live in £1m London house raised more than £5,000 to pay vet bills for Welsh terrierThe chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi and his fashion designer wife have raised more than £5,000 to get their Instagram-star dog treated by a celebrity vet, after asking followers for donations on a crowdfunding website.The couple’s Welsh terrier, Edward Lear, has more than 10,000 followers on the social media site, and has been pictured in designer dogwear and at five-star hotels. Continue reading...

John has an old Sony Vaio PC that seems unlikely to receive a firmware update. Should he replace it?My Microsoft Surface Book is protected against the Meltdown and Spectre security flaws, but my Sony Vaio Pro remains vulnerable to Spectre. Both laptops run Windows 10 and have been updated via Windows Update. The Surface Book’s BIOS has also been updated by Microsoft, but there is no BIOS update for the Vaio – and, I suspect, for millions of other machines.What is the risk of continuing to run the Vaio with this known critical vulnerability? Is there another way to mitigate it? Or, in the end, do thousands of people have to dump otherwise good machines and buy new ones? John PiattIt’s too soon to say. Bear in mind that, so far, there are no known exploits for these vulnerabilities, so the current level of risk is low. Companies will try to defend against threats as and when they appear. In the short term, we’ll just have to see how well that goes.

Sundar Pichai tells Davos flawed tax system is to blame for EU countries missing out on revenueThe chief executive of Google has declared he is happy for his company to pay more tax, and called for the existing system to be reformed.Sundar Pichai told an audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos that the tax system needed to be reformed to address concerns that some companies were not paying their fair share. Continue reading...

‘Optical trap display’ projects graphics into the air, where they are visible from all anglesWe still don’t have flying cars, brain-computer interfaces, or an artificial intelligence (AI) you can hold a conversation with, but one classic science-fiction technology is on our doorstep: true 3D displays which are capable of projecting an image into “thin air”.A new paper in the journal Nature reports a breakthrough from a group of researchers at Brigham Young University in Utah: the first creation of a “free-space volumetric display”, capable of reproducing full-colour graphics floating in the air, visible from all angles. Continue reading...

Company’s delayed, £319 smart speaker pitched as music-first wireless speaker that can be voice-controlled via SiriApple’s delayed £319 HomePod smart speaker will finally be available to buy on Friday in the UK, US and Australia.The 17.8cm tall HomePod is pitched as a music-first wireless speaker that can be controlled by voice using Apple’s Siri assistant, which can also set timers, reminders, check the weather and control smart home devices. Continue reading...

Car insurers have been accused of discriminating against people with Hotmail accounts. But how did the once-popular address end up with a bad rep?Admiral car insurance has been accused of putting up premiums for people with Hotmail addresses, claiming that they are more likely to crash. It would be relatively easy for Hotmail users to get their premiums back down again by changing to a more respectable Gmail address, but unfortunately none of them will be able to, because they don’t know how to use the internet.In the beginning, we all got a Hotmail address to use as an alternative to a work address, some time between discovering email and realising your boss could read them all (circa 1996). The downfall started – and this will be a curiosity to digital natives – when people started to pay for their personal email account. Because it was free, Hotmail attracted all the people who didn’t want to pay or didn’t know you could and the brand thereby became tainted by them, this being the era when paying for stuff still conveyed connoisseurship, rather than cluelessness. It didn’t help that there was nothing sacred about a Hotmail account, because you could just get another one, so there were a lot of sillynames.featuringrabbits@hotmail.com. Plus it was global, so you could never get your own name unless you added nine digits after it, like a Russian trollbot. Soon, it was all basically teenagers and people who needed a second email account for their double life. Continue reading...

Corporate buses, which ferry workers from San Francisco to its Silicon Valley headquarters, have become symbols of gentrificationAt least five buses used to transport Apple employees to the company’s headquarters have had their windows smashed by what is suspected to be pellet guns during the last week.The first window was shattered on the evening of Friday 12 January, as the shuttle bus travelled from the company campus back into San Francisco. Three more were hit on Tuesday morning, followed by another suspected attack on Tuesday evening, according to an email sent to Apple staff and seen by the Guardian. Continue reading...

While the celebrity YouTuber remains able to monetize clips, vloggers supporting marginalized groups lament yet another barrier to successYouTube changed Erin Armstrong’s life. The transgender vlogger joined in 2006, posting videos about her transition and connecting with trans people across the globe, building a community that once seemed unimaginable to her.But last year, the Google-owned video platform started flagging some of her videos as unsuitable to advertisers, costing her much-needed revenue – and this week, the site emailed her even more hurtful news: her channel is now considered too small to be eligible for ads, and under new rules, she will be kicked out of YouTube’s partner program altogether. Continue reading...

Bitcoin dropped a further $2,000 in value, leading the general slide across cryptocurrency markets as investor confidence waiversCryptocurrencies continued their sharp tumble on Wednesday as bitcoin dropped by over 16% as continued fears of regulation from Russia and China dent investor confidence.The price of the world’s biggest and best known cryptocurrency fell $2,000 to as low as $10,000, on the Luxembourg-based Bitstamp exchange, for the first time since November, and down from lows of $11,200 on Monday and $12,000 at 2pm GMT Tuesday. Continue reading...

In the first episode of our four-part series, Jordan Erica Webber asks whether our digital selves are owned by tech firms in a new form of slavery?Subscribe and review on iTunes, Audioboom, Mixcloud, Acast or on your favourite podcasting app and join the discussion on Facebook and TwitterIs the internet broken? And has the utopian 90s net been replaced by digital feudalism, where a few powerful entities wield control over all of us digital serfs? In this series, Jordan Erica Webber looks at internet-enabled dystopia, and how even the technology designed to do good can end up causing harm. Continue reading...

Companies pivoting to, or just showing an interest in, cryptocurrencies and associated technologies have resulted in a sudden burst in share priceKodak hit headlines this week when the company announced a plan to launch “photo-centric cryptocurrency to empower photographers and agencies to take greater control in image rights management”. In other words, the venerable camera company is getting in on the bitcoin hype.Shares in Kodak, which had been largely flat for the previous three months and steadily declining for the five years before that, more than doubled in the following 24 hours, as the company insisted that it was not simply pumping out “hot buzzwords”. Continue reading...

The billionaire investor and his longtime manager Charlie Munger, two of the world’s most successful investors, say they’d never invest in cryptocurrenciesBillionaire investor Warren Buffett said Wednesday that he would never invest in Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, and predicted the wildly popular assets are in for a fall.Related: World's richest 500 see their wealth increase by $1tn this year Continue reading...

The irony of the partial power cut at an event designed to showcase the latest electronic advances did not escape social or industry mediaThe digital economy’s big annual trade show, CES, suffered a brief, disruptive plunge into darkness on Wednesday because of a power outage that the event’s organisers blamed on heavy rain.

UK political system vulnerable to anti-democratic meddling via social media and ‘possibly illicit’ campaign funding, report saysRussia’s attempts to influence British democracy and the potential vulnerability of parts of the UK political system to anti-democratic meddling during the EU referendum have been detailed in a report prepared by the US Senate.The report by Democrats on the Senate foreign relations committee, titled Putin’s asymmetric assault on democracy in Russia and Europe: implications for US national security, pinpoints the way in which UK campaign finance laws do not require disclosure of political donations if they are from “the beneficial owners of non-British companies that are incorporated in the EU and carry out business in the UK”. Continue reading...

Information Commissioner’s Office fines company £400,000 for ‘concerning’ security issues following investigation of hack of 3m customers’ dataCarphone Warehouse has been fined £400,000 by the Information Commissioner’s Office for a series of “systemic failures” uncovered following a data breach in 2015.The ICO described the “number of distinct and significant inadequacies in the security arrangements” of Carphone Warehouse as “striking”, and said that it was “ particularly concerning that a number of the inadequacies related to basic, commonplace measures”. Continue reading...

Exemption added after researchers said efforts to demonstrate inadequate anonymisation could fall foul of lawThe government is to amend the data protection bill to protect security researchers who work to uncover abuses of personal data, quelling fears that the bill could accidentally criminalise legitimate research.The move follows a Guardian report on the concerns, and has been welcomed by one of the researchers who raised the alarm. “I am very happy with the amendments,” said Lukasz Olejnik, an independent cybersecurity and privacy researcher. Continue reading...

Fines totalling more than £150,000 handed down over use of private detectives to illegally obtain private banking recordsAn insurance firm and two senior figures connected with the company have been given record fines for using private detectives to illegally obtain the private banking records of a businessman they were investigating.The fines, totalling more than £150,000, were described by an official watchdog as the highest ever imposed under the Data Protection Act for unlawfully acquiring personal information. Continue reading...

A hacking takedown of computer systems that capture and organise our lives is made possible because we applauded technology’s potential without adequately assessing the pitfallsThe discovery of hardware bugs in almost every computer, laptop, tablet and smartphone is evidence of the imperfect foresight human actions are apt to have. The flaws – nicknamed Meltdown and Spectre – are so fundamental that they could allow hackers to steal computers’ most secure secrets. In seeking to speed up microprocessors and diffuse them into every part of modern life, chipmakers wanted to exploit the potential of technology but paid too little heed to the pitfalls.The problems are rooted in the trade-off between speed and security. Computing capacity has doubled every 18 months, in line with Moore’s law. This has allowed the digitisation of everything: every second today 2.6m emails are sent, 64,533 Google searches made and 7,885 opinions tweeted. Processors were optimised for performance, without basic questions being asked about whether their design was secure. It turns out they are not. One error can be “patched” – but will slow down machines by up to 30%, which makes a mockery of the need for speed. The other is so foundational that a complete re-imagining of processors will be needed. In the meantime we have to live with the risk of a hacking takedown of computer systems we let capture, organise and optimise our lives. Continue reading...

Exclusive: former employee alleges that women hired to work as preschool teachers in the company’s childcare center were paid lower salaries than men with fewer qualifications doing same jobGoogle, which has been accused of systematically underpaying female engineers and other workers, is now facing allegations that it discriminated against women who taught employees’ children at the company’s childcare center.A former employee, Heidi Lamar, is alleging in a complaint that female teachers were paid lower salaries than men with fewer qualifications doing the same job. Continue reading...

Developers scramble to fix bug within chips made in the last decade that will affect millions of computers running Windows, macOS and LinuxA security flaw has been found in virtually all Intel processors that will require fixes within Windows, macOS and Linux, according to reports.Developers are currently scrambling behind the scenes to fix the significant security hole within the Intel chips, with patches already available within some versions of Linux and some testing versions of Windows, although the fixes are expected to significantly slow down computers. Continue reading...

Here be dragons … and grog-swilling pirates, armed cultists, dino-beasts and a teenage supersleuth called Jenny LeClue. We preview spring’s biggest releases, from Ni no Kuni 2 to the return of Red Dead Redemption Continue reading...

As the arctic ice melts, smartphones eat our brains and the ghost of Brexit future stalks the land, it’s getting harder and harder to believe in SantaThere is much we can learn from the ancient traditions of Winterval, each culture’s festive myths and rituals being equally valid, and equally instructive, irrespective of their veracity or worth.Upon the solstice night in Latveria, for example, Pappy Puffklap leaves a dried clump of donkey excrement on the breakfast table of each home. Is this so very different from the wise kings bringing the infant Christ sealed flagons of foul-smelling gas, the divine in harmony with the physical at its most pungent? Continue reading...

Instant delivery ideas for those in need of emergency gifts, from Netflix and Spotify subscriptions to games, apps, movies and vanity URLsThe time has probably passed for Christmas delivery, and the shops are going to be rammed, so here’s a list of gifts that can be bought and delivered instantly from the comfort of the sofa in case you’ve forgotten someone on Christmas Eve.

Schmidt, who played an integral role in Google’s rise to power, will remain on Alphabet’s board and serve as a technical adviserEric Schmidt will step down as the executive chairman of Alphabet’s board of directors, the company announced on Thursday.Schmidt will remain on Alphabet’s board and serve as a technical adviser to the company, whose holdings include Google, YouTube, Nest and Waymo. Continue reading...

Under ‘unprecedented’ partnership, users will be able to upload videos containing licensed music on Facebook, Instagram and OculusUniversal Music Group is to become the first major music company to license its recorded music and publishing catalogues for use on Facebook, Instagram and virtual reality platform Oculus in a global, multi-year agreement.The deal, described as “unprecedented” in a statement from Universal, will license the content for video and “other social experiences”. Continue reading...

From competitive cow-milking to DJ battles, here are six great options for keeping the whole family entertained on Boxing Day and beyondPretty much anyone who plays video games has fond memories of childhood Christmases; the weeks spent gazing at the coveted new game or console under the tree, awaiting the moment where you could finally unwrap it, escape the family and run away to play. As adults, Christmas becomes a time to share the joy of video games with non-gaming friends (and parents, aunts and cousins). Festive Mario Kart has been a staple in my own household since I was about eight, starting out with me and my brother; now it’s my nieces, nephews and little cousins who lead the fun.This year has yielded a few new games to play together, all of which are miles better than charades and none of which will make you resent your Christmas companions as much as Monopoly. If you want to refresh the selection of multiplayer games you’ll be playing this year, try one of these.

New data supports claims that iPhone 6S performance is poor until old battery is replaced, sparking fresh speculation that Apple intentionally slows down phonesA new analysis of performance data has reignited the debate over whether Apple intentionally slows down older iPhones.

Every year, a capella groups from technology companies across the San Francisco Bay Area gather to perform in a sold-out event called Techapella. Groups performing include Google, Facebook, Twitter and many more. Continue reading...

Jayda Fransen and Paul Golding suspended as social media platform takes steps to protect those targeted by abuseTwitter has suspended the accounts of the leader and deputy leader of Britain First, a far-right group recently retweeted by Donald Trump, under the terms of its revised anti-abuse rules.Paul Golding and Jayda Fransen’s accounts were unavailable on Monday afternoon hours after the social network’s new rules came into effect. The organisation’s main account was also suspended. Continue reading...

New type of polymer glass that can mend itself when pressed together is in development by University of Tokyo after a student discovered itJapanese researchers say they have developed a new type of glass that can heal itself from cracks and breaks.Glass made from a low weight polymer called “polyether-thioureas” can heal breaks when pressed together by hand without the need for high heat to melt the material. Continue reading...

The new Swift from Suzuki proves that just because you look like a small car, it doesn’t mean you have to act like one, tooPrice: from £11,499

We should welcome politicians’ growing skepticism about Silicon Valley – but not if it means authoritarian interventions into our digital livesWashington used to worship Silicon Valley. Few things made politicians’ hearts beat faster than the bipartisan love for big tech. Silicon Valley was building the future. Government’s role was to offer compliments and get out of the way.Recently, however, the mood has shifted. Both sides of the political divide seem to be awakening to the possibility that letting the tech industry do whatever it wants hasn’t produced the best of all possible worlds. “I have found a flaw,” Alan Greenspan famously said in 2008 of his free-market worldview, as the global financial system imploded. A similar discovery may be dawning on our political class when it comes to its hands-off approach to Silicon Valley. Continue reading...

Chamath Palihapitiya, former vice-president of user growth, expressed regret for his part in building tools that destroy ‘the social fabric of how society works’A former Facebook executive has said he feels “tremendous guilt” over his work on “tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works”, joining a growing chorus of critics of the social media giant.Chamath Palihapitiya, who was vice-president for user growth at Facebook before he left the company in 2011, said: “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works. No civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth.” Continue reading...

Head of US financial regulator concerned by lack of protections saying there are ‘substantial risks of theft or loss, including from hacking’The head of the US Securities and Exchange Commission has warned bitcoin and other cryptocurrency investors to beware of scams and criminal activity in the sector.In the financial regulator’s strongest statement yet, SEC chair Jay Clayton said: “If a promoter guarantees returns, if an opportunity sounds too good to be true, or if you are pressured to act quickly, please exercise extreme caution and be aware of the risk that your investment may be lost.” Continue reading...

The character played by 22-year-old Moriah Pereira is a childlike, robotic-sounding woman with friends who include a basil plant. Now she’s trying to become the first pop megastar to be born on YouTubeI’m Poppy,” says Poppy, often. In one of her hundreds of videos on YouTube, she repeats those two words in her childlike monotone for 10 minutes. This has been viewed more than 12.6m times.Poppy has about 300 videos on her channel, which have received a combined 235m views, increasing by 250,000 a day; YouTube says her subscribers have grown 260% in the past year. Her videos are the sort you stumble upon while following links blindly down an online rabbit hole: portals to a pastel-washed parallel universe populated by platinum-blond Poppy and her fellow characters – a basil plant and a mannequin called Charlotte. Continue reading...

Billions of internet-connected devices could produce 3.5% of global emissions within 10 years and 14% by 2040, according to new research, reports Climate Home NewsThe communications industry could use 20% of all the world’s electricity by 2025, hampering attempts to meet climate change targets and straining grids as demand by power-hungry server farms storing digital data from billions of smartphones, tablets and internet-connected devices grows exponentially.The industry has long argued that it can considerably reduce carbon emissions by increasing efficiency and reducing waste, but academics are challenging industry assumptions. A new paper, due to be published by US researchers later this month, will forecast that information and communications technology could create up to 3.5% of global emissions by 2020 – surpassing aviation and shipping – and up to 14% 2040, around the same proportion as the US today. Continue reading...

A sophisticated space arcade experience, a Xenoblade instalment pushing the Switch to great things, and head-rolling fun in an unlikely multiplayer mashupSwitch, Linux, Mac, PC, 2Awesome Studio, cert: 7

While some welcome regulated way to bet on or hedge against bitcoin, others warn risks remain to more than just investorsThe newest way to bet on bitcoin will be available later on Sunday when futures in the wildly fluctuating cryptocurrency start trading.The first bitcoin future trades are set to kick off at 6 pm local time on a Chicago exchange. Continue reading...

Donald Trump’s pick to lead Federal Communications Commission accused of ‘dismissing democratic engagement’ amid plans to end Obama-era safeguardsOver the last few weeks, critics have attacked Ajit Pai online, protesters have covered his house in cardboard signs and he has publicly squabbled with celebrities including Alyssa Milano, Mark Ruffalo and Cher.

‘Stay away from my kids,’ health secretary tells US social media platform after trial of new service designed for under 13sJeremy Hunt has publicly attacked Facebook for releasing a version of its Messenger app aimed at children, and called on the social media company to “stay away from my kids”.The health secretary accused the company of “targeting younger children” after Facebook announced on Monday that it was conducting trials of an app called Messenger Kids in the US, which is designed to be used by pre-teens. Continue reading...

New video and text messenger aims to make connecting with friends and family safe for under 13s, with strict parental approval and screened contentFacebook is launching a new version of its chat app targeting children under 13 with strict parental controls including contact approvals.

Cryptocurrency close to record high despite news Treasury plans to end traders’ anonymityThe UK and other EU governments are planning a crackdown on bitcoin amid growing concerns that the digital currency is being used for money laundering and tax evasion.The Treasury plans to regulate bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to bring them in line with anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financial legislation. Traders will be forced to disclose their identities, ending the anonymity that has made the currency attractive for drug dealing and other illegal activities. Continue reading...

As facial recognition tools play a bigger role in fighting crime, inbuilt racial biases raise troubling questions about the systems that create them“You good?” a man asked two narcotics detectives late in the summer of 2015.The detectives had just finished an undercover drug deal in Brentwood, a predominately black neighborhood in Jacksonville, Florida, that is among the poorest in the country, when the man unexpectedly approached them. One of the detectives responded that he was looking for $50 worth of “hard”– slang for crack cocaine. The man disappeared into a nearby apartment and came back out to fulfill the detective’s request, swapping the drugs for money. Continue reading...

Google enters the headphone market with interesting but flawed earbuds that don’t match Apple’s AirPods – and translation doesn’t live up to the hypeThe Google Pixel Buds are a set of wireless neckband-style Bluetooth earbuds that have a few fancy tricks up their sleeve, including the ability to near real-time translation. But are they really that good?

Bahtiyar Duysak of Germany tells CNN he made ‘a mistake’ in temporarily deactivating the president’s account, but the details remain murkyA German man who says he “admires” Donald Trump has claimed responsibility for the deactivation of the president’s Twitter account for 11 minutes on 2 November, though questions remain about how and why he did it.Twitter said at the time that the temporary outage was caused by “a Twitter customer support employee who did this on the employee’s last day”. Many Trump opponents hailed the unknown employee as a hero. Continue reading...

Lawyers for British student accused of hacking US government sites tell high court he should be tried in UK, not extraditedLauri Love, the British student accused of hacking into US government websites, would be at high risk of killing himself if extradited to the US, the high court has heard.Love, who lives in Suffolk and has Asperger’s syndrome and severe depression, should be tried in Britain for his alleged offences, his counsel, Edward Fitzgerald QC, told the court. Continue reading...

Mitch Fifield concedes there are issues to work through in early rollout period of any NBN technology, but they are ‘very fixable’The government and Telstra have defended NBN Co’s suspension of its rollout of the HFC network. About 250,000 households that were to receive the NBN over the next six months will now have to wait after the company halted the rollout of services through pay TV cables.The news sparked complaints from Australians who were scheduled to get the new service, and commiserations from people who already had it but weren’t that impressed anyway. Continue reading...