Technology | The Guardian

Cryptocurrency now worth seven times an ounce of gold, with market cap higher than IBM, McDonald’s or Disney – but analysts warn of ‘a huge bubble’

Hundreds of thousands face six to nine-month delays as company improves national broadband networkHundreds of thousands of Australians could be forced to wait months longer than expected to be connected to the national broadband network via pay television cables.NBN Co on Monday announced it was temporarily suspending the rollout of the hybrid fibre-coaxial (HFC) network to “improve customer experience”. It warned of delays of six to nine months in new areas. Continue reading...

The menacing Type R hides a secret deep within its body armour… It’s also docile enough to drive your granny inPrice: £30,995

Alexa’s latest home works as a digital photo frame, a small TV, a video-calling hub and is smart in the kitchen, making it more than just a novelty deviceThe Amazon Echo Show takes the Alexa voice assistant and squeezes it into a cross between a digital photo frame, small TV and smart speaker for something that’s more than just an interesting novelty.

Exclusive: Data includes employees’ names, user names, work phone numbers, work emails and system passwordsThe Department of Social Services has written to 8,500 current and former employees warning them their personal data held by a contractor has been breached.In letters sent in early November the department alerted the employees to “a data compromise relating to staff profiles within the department’s credit card management system prior to 2016”. Continue reading...

Stuart is looking for a high-spec laptop at a low price. There are some good options, and Black Friday may reveal a few moreIf you were in the market for a new laptop, what would you buy if your absolute maximum budget was £500?I’ve always liked 17in widescreen laptops but will switch to 15in, preferably with an Intel Core i5 processor, 8GB of RAM and a 1TB hard disk. StuartMy first thought was that your best bet was a refurbished ThinkPad from Tier1Online, but it turns out that you really can buy new laptops with your preferred specification for less than £500, especially if they are older models at discounted prices. There may be even more examples around tomorrow, which is Black Friday, and over the weekend. Continue reading...

Most of the world won’t be affected by the changes, so are they a problem? No, if you are a tech monopoly – but yes if you don’t want a two-tier internetAjit Pai, head of the US telecoms regulator, revealed sweeping changes on Tuesday to overturn rules designed to protect an open internet.The regulations, put in place by the Obama administration in 2015, enshrined the principle of “net neutrality” in US law. Net neutrality is the idea that internet service providers should not interfere in the information they transmit to consumers, but should instead simply act as “dumb pipes” that treat all uses, from streaming video to sending tweets, interchangeably. Continue reading...

Alphabet chief executive Eric Schmidt says Google and other tech companies must act against state-run Russian news agencies to stop spread of falsehoodsEric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google’s parent company Alphabet, has said the search engine is preparing to take action against state-run Russian news agencies, including Russia Today and Sputnik, which are accused of spreading propaganda by US intelligence agencies.“We’re working on detecting this kind of scenario ... and de-ranking those kinds of sites,” Schmidt said, in response to a question at an event in Halifax, Canada. “It’s basically RT and Sputnik. We’re well aware and we’re trying to engineer the systems to prevent it.” Continue reading...

‘It only becomes a commercial business when you can remove the vehicle operator from the equation,’ says ride-hailing firm battling Lyft and WaymoUber is planning to buy up to 24,000 self-driving cars from Volvo, the company has announced, moving from its current model of ride-sharing using freelance drivers to owning a fleet of autonomous cars.Following the three-year self-driving partnership with Volvo, the non-binding framework could give Uber a boost in its ambitions to perfect self-driving systems to replace human drivers, following setbacks and lawsuits over trade secrets and talent. Continue reading...

In the era of digital politics, an odd alliance has sprung up: anti-state campaigners and Moscow-backed nationalists are combining to disrupt liberal institutionsAt a time when strange alliances are disrupting previously stable democracies, the Catalan independence referendum was a perfect reflection of a weird age. Along with the flag-waving and calls for “freedom” from Madrid, the furore that followed the vote unleashed some of the darker elements that have haunted recent turbulent episodes in Europe and America: fake news, Russian mischief and, marching oddly in step, libertarian activism.From his residence of more than five years inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, Assange tweeted 80 times in support of Catalan secession, and his views were amplified by the state-run Russian news agency, Sputnik, making him the most quoted English-language voice on Twitter, according to independent research and the Sydney Morning Herald. Continue reading...

Whether you want an alarm that syncs with your body clock or a to-do list you can speak to, these are the apps you’ll need to make your smartphone smarterThe latest generation of smartphones comes with a panoply of apps to get you started, from email and photography to navigation, weather and video-calling services. But every one of those default apps has at least one alternative on the app stores, and there are often dozens more that can represent a big upgrade.Here are 20 examples that will improve your smartphone’s stock features, and in some cases provide the functionality that is puzzlingly missing from apps in 2017’s starter packs. A number of them also have smartwatch extensions, providing an upgrade on your Apple Watch or Android Wear timepiece’s features too. Continue reading...

One unit of the cryptocurrency now valued at more than six times an ounce of gold, after tenfold rise since start of 2017The price of the virtual currency bitcoin has broken the $8,000 barrier for the first time, prompting speculation that it could soar past $10,000 by the end of the year.The rise means one unit of the world’s first major cryptocurrency is now valued at more than six times an ounce of gold, traditionally seen as a safe-haven investment in times of economic turmoil. Continue reading...

The new GP in Hand app fails to provide equality of access and undermines practice revenuesLast week, with very little warning – even to those of us working in general practice – along came GP at Hand. Private doctor provider Babylon caused shockwaves with its offer to sign up patients from across London to its online GP service as a replacement for their regular NHS practices, with plans to expand to the rest of England. GP at Hand promises that patients will be able to “book an appointment within seconds” via its smartphone app and have a video consultation with a GP typically within under two hours of booking “anytime, anywhere”. Those who need it can then see a GP face to face within 48 hours at one of six sites across London.On the surface, GP at Hand sounds wonderful – the NHS finally embracing technological advances in IT, offering almost immediate access when some are waiting three weeks for a non-urgent GP appointment. But while anyone can join its service, the website says it may not be suitable for “complex mental health problems or complex physical, psychological or social needs”. Or if you’re pregnant or older and frail, and as long as you don’t have dementia or learning difficulties or safeguarding issues. This new service is cherry-picking its target population. Continue reading...

People are increasingly using virtual assistants as their closest confidantes and Apple, Google and Amazon are responding. But are we telling them too much?It’s three in the morning and my room is bathed in the glow of my phone. Like one in three people, I check my smartphone when I wake up in the middle of the night. I can’t sleep and so wander from one social-media app to another, my thumbs scrolling through what feels like miles of emptiness. “Siri, what is the meaning of life?” I ask without thinking. “I have stopped asking myself this kind of question,” she answers. I ask again, because I like it better when she says “nothing Niestzche wouldn’t teach you”.I am not the only one turning to Siri for life advice. Apple is currently recruiting a Siri engineer with a background in psychology to help make its virtual assistant better at answering these sorts of questions. Continue reading...

The inventor of the world wide web remains an optimist but sees a ‘nasty wind’ blowing amid concerns over advertising, net neutrality and fake newsSir Tim Berners-Lee’s optimism about the future of the web is starting to wane in the face of a “nasty storm” of issues including the rollback of net neutrality protections, the proliferation of fake news, propaganda and the web’s increasing polarisation.The inventor of the world wide web always maintained his creation was a reflection of humanity – the good, the bad and the ugly. But Berners-Lee’s vision for an “open platform that allows anyone to share information, access opportunities and collaborate across geographical boundaries” has been challenged by increasingly powerful digital gatekeepers whose algorithms can be weaponised by master manipulators. Continue reading...

A new campaign is calling for a ban on autonomous weapons. But a ban is not the solution – neither is inflaming the public with dystopian visions of the futureThe Campaign to Stop Killer Robots has called on the UN to ban the development and use of autonomous weapons: those that can identify, track and attack targets without meaningful human oversight. On Monday, the group released a sensationalist video, supported by some prominent artificial intelligence researchers, depicting a dystopian future in which such machines run wild.I am gratified that my colleagues are volunteering their efforts to ensure beneficial uses of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. But I am unconvinced of the effectiveness of the campaign beyond a symbolic gesture. Even though I identify myself strongly as a pacifist, I have reservations about signing up to the proposed ban. I am not alone in this predicament. Continue reading...

Audible gasps and expletives at screenings as the best known Pokémon departs from the convention of being able to say only his namePokémon fans around the world have been left in shock by a controversial scene in the series’s latest animated movie in which Pikachu is seen to speak English.The iconic Pokémon, who has functioned as the series mascot since the late 1990s, has traditionally been unable to speak human languages. Like most other Pokémon, he could only repeat his own name. Continue reading...

He’s the Silicon Valley visionary who gave us virtual reality. Now, in a new memoir-cum-manifesto, Jaron Lanier recounts his sad, unusual childhood and calls for a re-evaluation of our ties with the digital environment Jaron Lanier has written a book about virtual reality, a phrase he coined and a concept he did much to invent. It has the heady title Dawn of the New Everything. But it’s also a tale of his growing up and when you read it, what you really want to talk to him about is parenting. Lanier is 57, but his childhood as he describes it was so sad and so creative and so extreme, it makes him almost seem fated to pursue alternative worlds.Lanier’s parents met in New York. His mother, Lilly, blond and light-skinned and Jewish, had somehow talked her way out of a “pop-up concentration camp” in Vienna after the Anschluss, aged 15. The family of his father, Ellery, had escaped a murderous pogrom in Ukraine. They met as part of a circle of artists in Greenwich Village in the 1950s. Lilly was a painter and a dancer, Ellery an architect, but when Jaron was born in 1960 they moved to El Paso, Texas, right on the border with Mexico. Lanier was never sure why, but he believes it was an effort, given their own childhoods, to “live as obscurely as possible”, off grid. His mother did not trust American schooling, so he went across the border to a Montessori school in Mexico each day; then, after a change of heart, to a Texas public high school, where he was bullied. Continue reading...

Calm, comfortable and bursting with useful tech… Skoda’s first seven-seat SUV is every harassed parent’s dreamPrice: £22,190

The value of cryptocurrencies is rising fast. But is it sustainable? And how does it work, anyway? These questions, and many more, answered…The money has become too much to ignore and so bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are back in the news. You may have heard about Ethereum, a cryptocurrency that has risen in value by more than 2,500% over the course of 2017. Or maybe you’ve heard about one of the many smaller cryptocurrencies that raised hundreds of millions of dollars in the first few days they were on sale, during their “initial coin offering”. Or you’ve just spotted that bitcoin, which made headlines in 2013 for hitting a high of $200, is now worth nearly $7,000 (£5,250), making a lot of people very rich in the process.Are these cryptocurrencies simply speculative bubbles or will they actually transform our financial system? It’s time to answer a few common questions about this new technology – and assess whether a lot of people have just pulled off the investment of their lifetime or made a huge mistake. Continue reading...

Professor Ottoline Leyser puts the case for a stewardship body for data useMachine learning and artificial intelligence have the potential to make significant improvements to our lives in areas such as health and public services. However, as Ian Sample points out (Computer says no: why making AIs fair, open and accountable is crucial, 6 November), there are real concerns about fairness and accountability. The Royal Society and the British Academy, in Data Management and Use: Governance in the 21st century, make the urgent case for a stewardship body for data use. The governance response must be driven by the overarching principle of human flourishing – recognising that humans do not serve data, but that data must be used to serve humans and human communities. A number of principles follow from this, including the need to protect individual and collective rights and interests. We need an independent, interdisciplinary stewardship body that can identify where there are governance gaps, with the power to urge the right bodies to fill those gaps. Swift action is needed to ensure that this important area of technology operates in a way that deserves and secures public trust.

Scottish golf courses | Data protection | Rail strikes | John Lewis Christmas ad | Sheep and celebrities | Rappers’ monikersYour article (Trump’s resort ‘has ruined protected Scottish dunes’, 9 November) could well have also drawn attention to the current application by two US multimillionaires to similarly develop the Coul links on the Sutherland coast, north of Dornoch. This is a most beautiful, unspoilt stretch of sand dunes; an SSSI and a haven for many varied and rare species of flora and fauna. Lessons must be learned from Trump’s Aberdeen fiasco. Full details and video can be found on the protester’s website at notcoul.com.

Site announces measures to flag, review and restrict content that is inappropriate for children but doesn’t breach wider guidelinesYouTube has announced a clampdown on disturbing and inappropriate children’s videos, following accusations that the site enabled “infrastructural violence” through the long-run effects of its content recommendation system.The new policy, announced on Thursday evening, will see age restrictions apply on content featuring “inappropriate use of family entertainment characters” like unofficial videos depicting Peppa Pig “basically tortured” at the dentist. The company already had a policy that rendered such videos ineligible for advertising revenue, in the hope that doing would reduce the motivation to create them in the first place. Continue reading...

Jeff Bezos’s company has opened a new ‘innovation hub’ in the UK, where 400 staff will work on next big things, from drone deliveries to ever-smarter AI Continue reading...

A self-driving shuttle bus crashed in Las Vegas on Wednesday within two hours of setting off on its trial journey. The vehicle collided with a lorry that was reversing at the time. One passenger, Jenny Wong, escaped uninjured but noted that the bus could not reverse. Chris Barker of the transport company Keolis North America, a partner in the pilot project, said the bus was safe and had performed the way it was designed• Self-driving bus crashes less than two hours after Las Vegas launch Continue reading...

Roger is looking at a 1TB USB memory stick and wonders if he could use it as a day-to-day driveI have just had to replace my 1TB hard drive, which cost £25 all done and dusted, but I notice you can now get a 1TB USB Flash drive for £8.99. Could you use one of those as a normal day-to-day drive? I will use one as a backup, but if I mirror my drive on it, could I switch over to it if my drive goes down again? RogerI was surprised – shocked! – to discover that you could buy a 1TB flash drive for less than a tenner, because I’ve been paying more than that for 16GB and 32GB versions. As mentioned in the comments below, this is almost certainly a scam, because the old computer industry adage still applies: “cheap, fast, good – choose any two”. Continue reading...

Ambitious plans for electric drone-like flying cabs take step forward as Uber announces plans to test flights in LA in 2020Uber has taken a step forward in its plan to make autonomous “flying taxis” a reality, signing a contract with Nasa to develop the software to manage them.

Give the people what they want: my pitch for how Twitter should host lengthy contributions without sacrificing brevityIn urban planning, there is the concept of a “desire path”.

Company says trial move of allowing some tweeters to have double-length character counts is to be rolled out to everyoneTwitter’s trial of a 280-character tweet limit is to be universally expanded, the social media network has announced.The move comes after a limited experiment which began in September to see if a larger character count reduced “cramming” and led to users better expressing themselves. Continue reading...

With millennials increasingly preferring to message, it won’t be long before the call becomes a pursuit solely for cranks who like the sound of their own voiceIn the opening scene of Channel 4’s brilliant new comedy-drama series The End of the F***ing World, lead character and latent rage vessel Alyssa snaps when a friend sends her an instant messages using her smartphone as the pair sit facing each other at a table. Seconds later her phone is lying in pieces on the floor. Alyssa, however, is an anomaly. Verbal communication is on the way out, and nowhere more than on the telephone.Without us really noticing it, the phone call has been slowly fading out over the past few years, and a new survey by Ofcom shows that only 15% of 16 to 24-year-olds consider it the most important method of communication, compared with 36% who prefer instant messaging. Continue reading...

‘Out of date’ list of terms associated with explicit content blamed for blocking of search keywordTwitter has apologised for blocking the word “bisexual” from search results, saying that it was wrongly included in an “out of date” list of terms associated with explicit content.The company says the extent of the block was a “technical issue”, which will be fixed in the next day, adding that some terms in particular were “incorrectly included”. Continue reading...

The deactivation of @realDonaldTrump – apparently by a rogue employee – prompted much online mirth but raised concern about more sinister possibilitiesFor 11 hushed minutes, much of the world got to read the words they had waited to see since last November: “@realDonaldTrump does not exist”.It wasn’t fake news. It wasn’t even a glitch. Twitter pulled the plug on the hyperactive president on Thursday evening.

MIT researchers managed to confuse artificial intelligence into classifying a reptile as a firearm, posing questions about the future of AI securityIf it is the shape of a turtle, the size of a turtle, and has the patterning of a turtle, it’s probably a turtle. So when artificial intelligence confidently declares it’s a gun instead, something’s gone wrong.But that’s what researchers from MIT’s Labsix managed to trick Google’s object recognition AI into thinking, they revealed in a paper published this week. Continue reading...

Urban leaders must reject the race to the bottom that these scrambles to please corporations generate – as 19th-century mayors did during the rise of capitalism

Australian government employees also hit by breach after third-party contractor misconfigures form of cloud storageThe personal details of more than 4,000 government employees have been exposed in a massive data breach of 50,000 staff records from various companies across Australia.

Meanwhile, Malcolm Turnbull’s Sydney home is not connected to the network, despite it being available in his streetThe consumer watchdog will review the standard of service NBN Co delivers to retailers amid an influx of customer complaints about connecting to the network.The announcement came on the same day a Senate committee heard Malcolm Turnbull’s private Sydney home is not connected to the national broadband network, despite it being available in his street. Continue reading...

Ads released by US lawmakers appear to have targeted both liberals and conservatives on hot-button issues and attempted to sow discord during electionUS lawmakers have publicly released a selection of Facebook ads bought by Russian operatives and a list of imposter Twitter accounts, revealing how foreign actors sought to sow division among American citizens.The ads and Twitter profiles appeared to target liberals and conservatives on a range of hot-button topics, including police brutality, immigration, race relations, Islamophobia and LGBT rights. Continue reading...

The 20th feature-length promo tool for the Pokémon phenomenon is a reboot, all about the very first meeting of Ash and likable company mascot PikachuThe – get this – 20th feature-length promotional tool for the media-spanning collectibles phenomenon turns out to be a reboot of the series entire. We are returned to the very first meeting between 10-year-old everykid Ash and totemic cat-bug-baby creature Pikachu, thereby allowing the rules of the game to be explained to a whole new generation with disposable income to squander.As rebranding exercises cinemagoers are expected to underwrite go, I Choose You! forms a modest improvement on those headachy spinoffs that bedevilled the world around the last millennium. Though the Poké-matches rely on generic, TV-standard animation and become repetitive, occasional flourishes (some black-and-white backstory, a computer-assisted bad dream) suggest that those responsible may some day make art once they’re done bolstering a leisure conglomerate’s stock options. Continue reading...

Japanese firm looks to rekindle its innovative spirit with reboot of pioneering robot pet after nearly a decade on holdPets are great, but in our modern hectic lives it’s increasingly difficult to give them the love and attention they deserve without paying someone else to do it. But what if you never needed to feed them, walk them or worry about them tearing up the house? Maybe that’s why Sony is bringing its robotic dog Aibo back from the dead.The Japanese electronics firm, once a pioneer in home robotics, announced that after more than a decade its robot canine pal will return to shelves with artificial intelligence-infused upgrades. Continue reading...

The company’s Photos app includes AI that can recognise thousands of search terms. Should we worry that one of those is ‘brassiere’?Don’t freak out, but your iPhone knows all about your underwear selfies. On Monday, a viral tweet led to thousands of users discovering that the Photos app, on Apple’s iOS and macOS operating systems, knows what a bra looks like – and lets you search for it.Apple being Apple, it’s vaguely classy, of course: the app will only give responses for “brassiere”. But type that into the search bar and there, in all their glory, are likely to be a fair few pics of people – maybe you – in various states of undress. Continue reading...

Waymo’s vehicles may not have the cool quotient of Tesla’s Model S, but they manage to navigate a minefield of potential accidentsOf all my recurring anxiety dreams, my least favorite is the one where I’m in a car. It always begins with me driving, but eventually I realize that for some reason I’m sitting in the back seat. My arms can’t reach the steering wheel, my legs can’t reach the pedals, and I’m stuck in a spiral of terror, careening around turns and accelerating toward obstacles until, gasping, I wake up.This is a bit like the passenger experience in Waymo’s self-driving cars. You climb into the back seat of a minivan, and watch in awe – or horror – as the wheel turns itself above an entirely empty driving seat. Continue reading...

Electronics giant makes $10bn profit in just three months on the back of strong sales and relaunch of Galaxy smartphonesSouth Korean tech giant Samsung Electronics logged a record profit of 11.2trn won – $10bn (£7.6bn) – in the July to September period, it said on Tuesday, its best for any quarter.The world’s biggest memory chip and smartphone maker had its de facto leader jailed in August for bribery and faced a recall of its flagship Galaxy Note 7 device. Continue reading...

Facebook expected to present testimony on Russian content on Tuesday, after three Trump aides indicted as part of inquiry into interference in 2016 voteRussia-backed content reached as many as 126 million Americans on Facebook during and after the 2016 presidential election, according to the company’s prepared testimony submitted to the Senate judiciary committee before hearings this week.Facebook believes 120 fake Russian-backed pages created 80,000 posts that were received by 29 million Americans directly, but reached a much bigger audience by users sharing, liking and following the posts. Continue reading...

It’s 500 years since Martin Luther defied the authority of the Catholic church. It’s time for a similar revolt against the hypocrisy of the religion of technologyA new power is loose in the world. It is nowhere and yet it’s everywhere. It knows everything about us – our movements, our thoughts, our desires, our fears, our secrets, who our friends are, our financial status, even how well we sleep at night. We tell it things that we would not whisper to another human being. It shapes our politics, stokes our appetites, loosens our tongues, heightens our moral panics, keeps us entertained (and therefore passive). We engage with it 150 times or more every day, and with every moment of contact we add to the unfathomable wealth of its priesthood. And we worship it because we are, somehow, mesmerised by it.In other words, we are all members of the Church of Technopoly, and what we worship is digital technology. Most of us are so happy in our obeisance to this new power that we spend an average of 50 minutes on our daily devotion to Facebook alone without a flicker of concern. It makes us feel modern, connected, empowered, sophisticated and informed. Continue reading...

The ability to self-manage our health could break down barriers to efficient healthcare, but only if doctors embrace the technologyHealthcare is the fastest rising cost to taxpayers in advanced western economies. The ability to self-manage our health is one of the best ways to rein in the rising costs. And the obstacles to bringing these costs down for consumers are often the medical practitioners who insist the only way to practise is to exchange letters with each other, to write illegible prescriptions and to refer patients to specialists for information they can now gather on their smartphones.Dr Eric Topol, an American cardiologist and professor, raised the ante on this in his 2015 book The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine is in Your Hands. His observations about digital disruption in the healthcare system offer an insight into how doctors have been slow to embrace new technologies. Topol was alerted to this when he received a text message from a patient with a screenshot of an electrocardiogram he’d run on himself from a smartphone app. “I’m in afib [atrial fibrillation]. Now what do I do?” the patient asked. Continue reading...

Driver reviews intended to provide insight into the person picking you up often say more about who they have had in the back of their carA new Uber feature allowing users to check previous reviews of their drivers has opened up a world of drunken apologies, private confessions and angry complaints.The feature, rolled out to users worldwide on Friday, is intended to provide more insight into who will be picking customers up. It helps align the app with Uber’s long-running claim to be simply a middleman, linking what the company calls “driver-partners” with “riders” in a largely hands-off manner. Continue reading...

Company says only a small handful of review devices have been affected and that tests show device behaves same as other OLED-based devicesFollowing reports of defective screens in the first batch of Pixel 2 XL smartphones, Google says that its tests show so-called burn is not a widespread issue.