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.

Former Bank of England adviser and ex-M&S executive Laurel Powers-Freeling named as new chair of embattled taxi appUber has unveiled former Bank of England adviser Laurel Powers-Freeling as the new chair of its UK operations, as it battles to stave off a ban on operating in London.Powers-Freeling, who was born in the US but took British citizenship in 2003, will oversee operations at the ride-hailing app at a crucial juncture for the business that claims to have 5 million customers in the UK, served by 50,000 drivers. Continue reading...

White grievance is on the rise around the world – even in the non-real world, as criticism of the latest instalment of the Wolfenstein game demonstratesWolfenstein has been around longer than I’ve been alive. What began as two innovative anti-Nazi stealth video games for the Apple II and Commodore 64 became id Software’s famous first-person anti-Nazi shooter. The game popularised the first-person shooter, giving rise to household names like Doom and Call of Duty. The latest iteration is released this week and, for the first time, some people are offended by its opposition to Nazis. How on earth have we got here?Related: Is there a neo-Nazi storm brewing in Trump country? Continue reading...

Condensing everything that’s good about the bigger Google Home into a small pin-cushion-like speaker works great, but it won’t blow you away for musicGoogle Home Mini is the company’s new smart speaker that shrinks down all the intelligence into a cheaper, smaller package.

Channel 4’s Jay Hunt who poached Bake Off from BBC and commissioned hit shows like Sherlock appointed creative chief of European video operationsApple has hired the television executive who masterminded Channel 4’s £75m poaching of The Great British Bake Off from the BBC, in an ambitious move to take on traditional broadcasters and digital rivals Netflix and Amazon.The US tech firm has hired Jay Hunt, who has held top roles at Channel 4, the BBC and Channel 5, and whose credits include British hits such as Sherlock, Luther, Humans and Gogglebox. She was also behind deals to bring US series such as Homeland and The Handmaid’s Tale to the UK. Continue reading...

The tech world wants us to believe that virtual reality will unlock human understanding on a global scale. But it’s also a business strategy

Four UK-based, female influencers on Instagram discuss how they use the social media platform and the effect it has had on their lives. They tackle issues such as anxiety, addiction and the endless appetite for consumption, but point out that their real lives are distinct from what they portray on their Instagram feed Continue reading...

An old RPG favourite is thrillingly reborn on the 3DS, a Sony platform franchise takes a step up and a cyberpunk shooter proves a real blastNintendo 3DS; cert: 3

Prime minister responds to NBN Co chief’s concerns the network may never pay its way, due to competition from 4G networkMalcolm Turnbull has labelled the national broadband network a mistake and blamed Labor for leaving the Coalition a “calamitous train wreck” of a project while responding to concerns from the NBN Co chief executive that it may not pay its own way.Bill Morrow has suggested that competing technologies may hamper the commercial viability of the NBN in the lead-up to an ABC Four Corners investigation, airing Monday night, into the digital divide between premises that get faster fibre-to-the-premises rather than fibre-to-the-node connections. Continue reading...

The tech pioneer, CEO of publishing company O’Reilly Media, says his industry will fail unless the web giants start putting consumers ahead of shareholdersTim O’Reilly believes we need to have a reset. This means more coming from him than it does from most people. The 63-year-old CEO, born in Ireland and raised in San Francisco, is one of the most influential pioneers and thinkers of the internet age. His publishing company, O’Reilly Media, began producing computer manuals in the late 1970s and he has been early to spot many influential tech trends ever since: open-source software, web 2.0, wifi, the maker movement and big data among them.His new book, WTF: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us, looks at work and how jobs will change in a world shaped by technology. It is sometimes hard not to be pessimistic about what’s coming over the hill, but he is convinced that our destiny remains in human hands. Continue reading...

Consumer group finds that 53% of households are left unhappy by slow speeds, rising prices or router failuresHalf of all broadband users in the UK are getting a raw deal from their supplier, with slow speeds, rising prices and router failures exasperating customers, according to a damning assessment of Britain’s internet services.Consumer group Which? found that 53% of households have had difficulties with their broadband, with customers of Virgin Media, TalkTalk, Sky and BT the most likely to experience an issue. Continue reading...

Arianna Huffington’s upcoming app stops you receiving notifications, so you can concentrate on other things. But is it the best way to break free of technology?

A huge weakness in wifi security erodes online privacy. But the real challenge is designing with human shortcomings in mindThis week’s security scandal is the discovery that every household with wifi in this country has a network that isn’t really private. For 13 years a weakness has lurked in the supposedly secure way in which wireless networks carry our information. Although the WPA2 security scheme was supposed to be mathematically proven to be uncrackable, it turns out that the mechanism by which it can compensate for weak signals can be compromised, and when that happens it might as well be unencrypted. Practically every router, every laptop and every mobile phone in the world is now potentially exposed. As the Belgian researcher who discovered the vulnerability points out, this could be abused to steal information such as credit card numbers, emails and photos.It is not a catastrophic flaw: the attacker has to be within range of the wifi they are attacking. Most email and chat guarded by end-to-end encryption is still protected from eavesdroppers. But the flaw affects a huge number of devices, many of which will never be updated to address it. Since both ends of a wifi connection need to be brought up to date to be fixed, it is no longer safe to assume that any wifi connection is entirely private. Continue reading...

Antonella wants a reasonably priced compact camera with an image stabiliser that’s good for night shots. Something like the Sony RX100, but cheaper …I’m struggling to find the perfect camera for my needs. I watched a YouTube video by one of my favourite photographers, and she suggested the Sony DSC-RX100 M5, but it costs way too much. It got my attention because it was small, it had the SteadyShot stabiliser, and was good for night shoots.I’m now using a Canon PowerShot SX110IS, but it’s pretty terrible, unless the weather conditions are perfect. If I try photographing landscapes at night, I get wobbly pictures, and I don’t usually have wobbly hands. Continue reading...

Company updates rules on hate speech, revenge porn and violent groups to counter perceptions social network is not doing enough to protect usersTwitter is introducing new rules around hate symbols, sexual advances and violent groups, in an effort to counter perceptions that the social network is not doing enough to protect those who feel silenced on the site.The company was planning to announce the new rules later on this week, but they leaked in an email to Wired magazine, which published the changes on Tuesday. Continue reading...

Google’s parent company drops takeaway food and also medication into back gardens in rural Australia as project enters new phaseGoogle parent Alphabet has begun a new phase of testing its hybrid drones, dubbed Project Wing, by delivering burritos and medication to customers in rural Australia in a partnership with taqueria Guzman y Gomez and pharmacist Chemist Warehouse.In a blogpost, Project Wing’s co-lead James Ryan Burgess wrote: “This fall we’ve been testing in a rural community on the border of the [Australian Capital Territory] and [New South Wales] and tackling an entirely different level of operational complexity: making deliveries directly to people’s yards.” Continue reading...