Technology | The Guardian

Four Guardian reporters on the platform that defined the early years of their career - and what its end might mean for themFor months now, Twitter users have been anticipating the platform's demise. The technology is buggy and often appears to be breaking down. There's a new corporate crisis every week. It's a strange feeling to witness the death spiral of a major social media platform - not a planned shutdown or an attempted government ban, but a social network becoming a ghost town before our very eyes.This week Mark Zuckerberg successfully launched Threads, a Twitter competitor that claimed 70m sign-ups by its second day. It has been widely interpreted as a potential death blow to an already struggling platform. Continue reading...

Would wind and fog stop the PhD student getting the shot she was after?Dominika Koszowska is a self-confessed night owl but she had woken up extra early that morning with the goal of capturing the sunrise. The photographer, who is studying for a PhD at the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice, Poland, was visiting the Faroe Islands with her friend Michal.The weather outside our rented cottage wasn't encouraging; it was grey and gloomy, but we decided to head for the Skeidhsskardh mountain anyway. We arrived to wind and huge amounts of fog. Michal walked ahead, and suddenly it began to lift. It ended up being one of the most beautiful sunrises I've ever seen, and I was able to capture him looking out over this spectacle of nature with my phone." Continue reading...

It's not enough to build learning around a single societal shift. Students should be trained to handle a rapidly changing worldFrom one day to the next, our profession was wiped out. We woke up and discovered our skills were redundant." This is what two successful graphic designers told me about the impact of AI. The old promise - creative workers would be better protected than others from mechanisation - imploded overnight. If visual artists can be replaced by machines, who is safe?There's no talk of a just transition" for graphic designers, or the other professions about to be destroyed. And while there's plenty of talk about how education might change, little has been done to equip students for a world whose conditions shift so fast. It's not just at work that young people will confront sudden changes of state. They are also likely to witness cascading environmental breakdown and the collapse of certain human-made systems.George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...

Ford's Mustang Mach-E lets motorists drive hands-free in UK (T&Cs apply: motorways only; don't look away for too long)Taking your hands off the steering wheel while driving on a busy M11 motorway in Essex at 70mph feels like a counterintuitive leap of faith.When a display flashes blue on the dashboard the moment has come: let go, and the car continues in its lane with no input from feet or hands. Continue reading...

San Francisco's Safe Street Rebel group are disabling autonomous taxis by placing a cone on the hood of the carA group of San Francisco organizers are encouraging people to put traffic cones on the hoods of driverless vehicles as a form of protest against the cars' expansion on city streets.A video of the group's actions with step-by-step instructions on how to disable a robo-taxi with a cone has gone viral on Twitter and sparked intense debates about the pros and cons of autonomous vehicles and the value of protesting in this way. Continue reading...

Microblogging platform apparently fastest-downloaded ever, with Elon Musk threatening to sue over copycat' app Could Meta's Threads deal a knockout blow to Twitter?Mark Zuckerberg's Twitter-killer" Threads has reached 70m sign-ups in less than 48 hours, as it more than doubled its growth from its first day on app stores.The new microblogging platform was launched in 100 countries this week . It immediately accumulated significant numbers of users, hitting more than 30 million within its first 24 hours, apparently making it the fastest downloaded app ever. On Friday, however, Zuckerberg announced on his Threads account that the user total had more than doubled that figure. Continue reading...

While AI revolutionises medicine, bleaker alternatives present themselves, UN's AI for Good conference findsHumanity is at a crossroads that may be summed up as AI for good v AI gone bad, according to a leading artificial intelligence expert.I see two futures here," the author Prof Gary Marcus told the UN's AI for Good global summit on Friday. Continue reading...

Mark Zuckerberg's rival social network is first serious threat to Twitter since Elon Musk takeoverIf Threads truly is a Twitter-killer then it claims it is going to do it with kindness". Mark Zuckerberg, whose company Meta launched the rival platform this week, put forward the idea that positivity would be a big difference for a product that looks remarkably similar to its rival.We are definitely focusing on kindness and making this a friendly place," he wrote on his Threads account. Continue reading...

Foundation says words contradict reality of Instagram, which contributed to suicide of London teenagerA charity launched by the family of Molly Russell has labelled Mark Zuckerberg's pledge to prioritise kindness on his new Threads app as absurd", as the Twitter rival raced past 70 million users less than 48 hours after launch.Molly, 14, killed herself in 2017 after viewing harmful content on social media platforms including Instagram. An inquest ruled last year that dangerous online material related to self-harm, suicide and depression had contributed to her death. Continue reading...

This week in artificial intelligenceArtificial intelligence is either going to save humanity or finish it off, depending on who you speak to. Either way, every week there are new developments and breakthroughs. Here are some of the AI stories that have emerged in recent days. The consumer champion Martin Lewis has urged the government to take action against AI-powered generative deepfakes after he found that scammers were using an artificially generated version of him to defraud consumers. Lewis posted a fake video on Thursday of him apparently backing an Elon Musk project, and warned that without action against similar videos lives would be ruined. Continue reading...

Limits on number of tweets users can see have prevented National Weather Service from receiving key reportsTwitter's new volume limits on viewing posts suddenly left several National Weather Service (NWS) offices across the US unable to receive tweets from storm spotters who help with tracking extreme weather, including during storms this week - prompting safety warnings.NWS Boulder in Colorado announced on 4 July that due to Twitter's limits, implemented as part of Elon Musk's abrupt changes to the platform's usability late last month, we are unable to access most tweets at this time. Send reports to our other social media accounts or direct through our email/phone lines." The story was first reported by the Denver Post. Continue reading...

Artificial intelligence is already advancing at a worrying pace. What if we don't slam on the brakes? Experts explain what keeps them up at night

Exclusive: Prof Stuart Russell says technology could result in fewer teachers being employed - possibly even none'Recent advances in AI are likely to spell the end of the traditional school classroom, one of the world's leading experts on AI has predicted.Prof Stuart Russell, a British computer scientist based at the University of California, Berkeley, said that personalised ChatGPT-style tutors have the potential to hugely enrich education and widen global access by delivering personalised tuition to every household with a smartphone. The technology could feasibly deliver most material through to the end of high school", he said. Continue reading...

In a letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, a lawyer for the Elon Musk-owned app said Meta had unlawfully misappropriated trade secretsTwitter has threatened to sue Meta over its new Threads app, which Mark Zuckerberg has openly billed as a rival, claiming the company has violated Twitter's intellectual property rights".In a letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, first published by the news outlet Semafor, a lawyer for Twitter said the company has serious concerns that Meta Platforms (Meta) has engaged in systematic, willful and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter's trade secrets and other intellectual property". Continue reading...

Meta has been struggling with layoffs, a fledgling metaverse and a decreasing audience. The company needs its new big bet to pay offMeta has launched a Twitter killer" app, a nearly direct copy of the microblogging platform that was built to lure users away from the increasingly dysfunctional Elon Musk-owned company. But will it bring Meta the boost it has been looking for?Experts say it may. Continue reading...

Meta founder says rival platform will focus on kindness' as it claims 30 million users within day of launchMark Zuckerberg has taken a swipe at Elon Musk's Twitter as his competitor to the platform, Threads, reached 30m sign-ups less than 24 hours after launching.The chief executive and founder of Meta used his new Threads account to say Twitter had not nailed" its opportunity to become a mega app and implied that it had underachieved because of the amount of hostility on the microblogging platform. Continue reading...

Site has potential to suck the remaining life - and advertising revenue - out of Musk's struggling networkImagine a social network where users have invested so much social capital in putting up data about themselves that it is impossible to imagine them leaving. Moving to a new site would be an enormous risk for users because you would lose your network of friends. The network's entire existence, the theory goes, is secured by these barriers to starting afresh at a new outlet.This was how the Guardian described Myspace in 2007, when the early social network had 150 million global users, a number so large it was considered improbable that they would ever move elsewhere. (In the end Myspace was soon overtaken by Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook, Rupert Murdoch lost almost all the money he spent buying the site, and Myspace's once-ubiquitous founder Tom Anderson has travelled the world on the profits ever since.) Continue reading...

The annual Crap Games Competition has been bringing Spectrum fans together for more than 25 years. It all began with an April fool's joke in a magazine called Your Sinclair ...Retro video games have never been more popular, mostly because gamers have never been older. The home-computer generation of players are now in their 40s and 50s, and as we get older, we're spending more time down memory lane. Who wouldn't want to replay the classics of their youth on mini versions of the original consoles and computers, or even on a phone?The ZX Spectrum - released in 1982 - had only eight basic colours, a rubber keyboard and 48K of RAM (your 4GB RAM phone has nearly 90,000 times more); nonetheless, some still view it like others view the Beatles. Games such as Manic Miner, Chuckie Egg and Atic Atac were truly original, unlike anything seen before. But some remember it just as fondly for being, well, a bit crap. Continue reading...

In this week's newsletter: The Serial makers reveal the agony female patients were put through at the Yale Fertility Center in The Retrievals. Plus: five of the best podcasts about human connection

Meta's newest app can be accessed with an Instagram account and looks a lot like its rival

Mark Zuckerberg targets Elon Musk's troubled platform with new app from Meta that's closely modelled on Twitter

Kari Paul tested the social network minutes after its launch - did it fail to impress, or should Elon Musk be shuddering?

Gary Wilcox allegedly performed to graphically sexual and violent songs while wearing his robes at court and in chambersA judge in New Jersey is under investigation for allegedly filming TikTok videos in which he lip-synced to popular songs, at times in his bed or his judicial chambers.Last Friday, the advisory committee on judicial conduct in New Jersey's supreme court filed a complaint against Gary Wilcox, a 58-year-old superior court judge who presides over criminal cases in Bergen county. Continue reading...

New app developed by Facebook and WhatsApp owner is due to launch in the UK and US on ThursdayMark Zuckerberg's rival to Twitter will not launch in the EU on Thursday amid regulatory uncertainty about the service's use of personal data.Sources at Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, said regulations were behind the postponement of an EU launch, amid a series of clashes between the social media group and the bloc. Continue reading...

Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay allege that their books, which are copyrighted, were used to train' ChatGPT because the chatbot generated very accurate summaries' of the worksTwo authors have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, the company behind the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT, claiming that the organisation breached copyright law by training" its model on novels without the permission of authors.Mona Awad, whose books include Bunny and 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, and Paul Tremblay, author of The Cabin at the End of the World, filed the class action complaint to a San Francisco federal court last week. Continue reading...

ChatGPT is creating headaches for schools while giving rise to a growing cohort of companies that say they can tell' human from machineSince its release last November, ChatGPT has shaken the education world. The chatbot and other sophisticated AI tools are reportedly being used everywhere from college essays to high school art projects. A recent survey of 1,000 students at four-year universities by Intelligent.com found that 30% of college students have reported using ChatGPT on written assignments.This is a problem for schools, educators and students - but a boon for a small but growing cohort of companies in the AI-detection business. Players like Winston AI, Content at Scale and Turnitin are billing for their ability to detect AI-involvement in student work, offering subscription services where teachers can run their students' work through a web dashboard and receive a probability score that grades how human" or AI" the text is. Continue reading...

Android maker's first foldable has sleeker design, simpler software and top camera, but wallet-busting priceGoogle's first folding phone-tablet hybrid is finally here to give Samsung's leading Z Fold a run for its money, with different ideas of how such a cutting-edge device should work and a serious camera upgrade.The Pixel Fold costs a colossal 1,749 ($1,799), which is 100 more than the already eye-wateringly expensive rival from Samsung, and more than twice the price of Google's top regular phone, the 849 Pixel 7 Pro. That puts the Pixel Fold in the rarefied company of ultra-premium gadgets, best thought of as the Ferraris or Bentleys of the phone world. Continue reading...

Education ministry in the Netherlands says tech is a distraction from learning and will only be allowed if specifically neededMobile phones, tablets and smartwatches will be largely banned from classrooms in the Netherlands from 1 January 2024, the Dutch government has said, in an attempt to limit distractions during lessons.Devices will only be allowed if they are specifically needed, for instance during lessons on digital skills, for medical reasons or for people with disabilities. Continue reading...

Tesla tycoon challenged Meta boss to a cage fight but the launch of Twitter's rival this week may provide the real action

Screen time can feel all-consuming. But there are ways to combat it. Guardian readers explain the rules, hobbies and habits that help them maintain healthy lives offlineMy work communications come primarily through three WhatsApp groups, so the blending of personal and work has felt pretty unavoidable. Then, I accidentally kept my phone on Do Not Disturb - ie. all notifications were silenced - for a week. It was bliss! As I still use my phone constantly, I picked up enough of the messages to show I'm still engaged in life and work, but since I don't have the constant notifications I feel much calmer. It's been months now and it's been fine. Victory! Ammie Johnstone, Glasgow Continue reading...

Driverless cars have their cameras trained on the road - and on those inside, making some wonder how that data will be used. Plus, Twitter's viewing limits Don't get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up for the full article hereIf you've spent any time in San Francisco, you might believe we're on the cusp of the self-driving future promised by car makers and the tech industry: a high-tech utopia where roving robot cars pick up and drop off passengers seamlessly and more safely than if they had a human behind the wheel.While the city certainly has one key element down - a small network of driverless cars - the reality is far different and much more awkward and invasive than what the people building the technology once portrayed. Continue reading...

The chair of the Commons business select committee is a firm believer that technology is a force for good and should be central to his party's plans to transform the UKIt's an upgrade. In the same way as you upgrade your iPhone, we need to upgrade Britain." Labour MP Darren Jones believes artificial intelligence will bring an economic change on the scale of the industrial revolution, which politicians must be ready to shape.As chair of the business and trade select committee, the ambitious 36-year-old backbencher, who represents Bristol North West, has built a reputation for himself in Westminster as a tough interrogator. Continue reading...

Interface of Meta's app appears similar to Twitter, whose tweet viewing restrictions have driven users to join rival platforms BlueSky and Mastodon

Restriction on previously free dashboard tool is latest dramatic change to platform under Elon MuskTwitter users will soon need to be verified in order to use the online dashboard TweetDeck, the company announced on Monday.The popular and previously free tool allows users to organize the accounts they follow into different columns to easily monitor content. It has been popular with businesses and news organizations. Continue reading...

All 24 Russell Group universities have reviewed their academic conduct policies and guidanceUK universities have drawn up a set of guiding principles to ensure that students and staff are AI literate, as the sector struggles to adapt teaching and assessment methods to deal with the growing use of generative artificial intelligence.Vice-chancellors at the 24 Russell Group research-intensive universities have signed up to the code. They say this will help universities to capitalise on the opportunities of AI while simultaneously protecting academic rigour and integrity in higher education. Continue reading...

Tech firm gives parents greater control over their children's online activities, but not all kids have consistent supervisionSocial media giant Meta this week introduced new parental supervision tools, but child protection and anti-sex trafficking organizations say the new measures offer little protection to the children most vulnerable to exploitation, and divert the responsibility from the company to keep its users safe.On Tuesday, Meta launched new features aimed at increasing parents' awareness of their children's activities on its platforms. For Messenger, its private message service, parents can now view and receive updates on their child's contacts list and monitor who views any stories their child posts. On Instagram, the company has introduced a new notice to alert parents if their child has blocked somebody. Continue reading...

From new iterations of Street Fighter, Diablo and Zelda to modern takes on 80s arcades and an evil pizza atop a pizza tower, readers share their picksThis is a 2023 remake of the game that got me into action games in 2005. Third-person over the shoulder shooters were new then and the action genre started appealing to me for the first time. It now has a modern polish and atmosphere steeped in dread along with, at last, controls that don't make you feel like you're stuck in a tank. Leon is as goofy and dashing as ever and the blood and gore is dialled up to 11. It is smooth, slick, sick and just a fantastic experience. I haven't enjoyed a shooter this much since Resident Evil 4. Leslie, 37, Manchester Continue reading...

Carmaker co-founded by Elon Musk beats forecasts to deliver 466,000 vehicles in three months to end of JuneTesla delivered a record number of vehicles in the second quarter, as its strategy to cut prices drove a sharp increase in sales of its most popular electric vehicles.The carmaker, which is run by the Twitter and Space X owner Elon Musk, delivered 466,000 vehicles in the three months to the end of June. Continue reading...

Tesla speculated electricity from thin air was possible - now the question is whether it will be possible to harness it on the scale needed to power our homesIn the early 20th century, Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla dreamed of pulling limitless free electricity from the air around us. Ever ambitious, Tesla was thinking on a vast scale, effectively looking at the Earth and upper atmosphere as two ends of an enormous battery. Needless to say, his dreams were never realised, but the promise of air-derived electricity - hygroelectricity - is now capturing researchers' imaginations again. The difference: they're not thinking big, but very, very small.In May, a team at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Amherst published a paper declaring they had successfully generated a small but continuous electric current from humidity in the air. It's a claim that will probably raise a few eyebrows, and when the team made the discovery that inspired this new research in 2018, it did. Continue reading...

Essence Festival of Culture, held annually in New Orleans, sues corporation, citing its intentional exploitation of Black culture'Spotify last year hosted an event using the branding of what is arguably the US's largest Black cultural festival without permission, according to a lawsuit which pits the streaming giant against the organizers of the Essence Festival of Culture.Attorneys for the festival say their lawsuit represents a stand against the intentional exploitation of Black culture" and intellectual property by a corporation that can more than afford to pay for permission to use Essence's branding. Continue reading...

As platforms such as Omegle and Roblox proliferate so do warnings about technology being weaponised to abuse children'. What can families do?

Move is to address extreme levels' of data scraping and system manipulation, says Elon MuskTwitter has applied temporary reading limits to address extreme levels" of data scraping and system manipulation, Elon Musk said in a post on the social media platform on Saturday.Verified accounts were temporarily limited to reading 6,000 posts a day, Musk said, adding that unverified accounts and new unverified accounts were limited to reading 600 posts a day and 300 posts a day respectively. Continue reading...

For a street photographer in a New York zoo, wildlife and children came together brilliantlyIt happens to be his daughter Tess's 16th birthday on the day I speak with Sheldon Serkin about this photograph, which he took when Tess (on right) was just six. Sheldon and his wife, Tali, had taken Tess and her older brother, Elliot, to visit an exhibition at New York's Bronx zoo when they came upon the prairie dog enclosure.I wanted to take a photo of these bubbles in the ground, which visitors can climb up into as though they are in with the animals," Serkin says. It looked like an alien landscape to me. I framed the shot without the surrounding spectators, and as one of the prairie dogs took centre stage, children popped up in all three bubbles. It was brilliant timing and made an even better photo than I had anticipated." Continue reading...

A Netflix standup show was written by bots'. A TV writer has scripted joke software. And now artificial intelligence is taking on improvI've seen some bad comedy acts over the years - but not, until now, one that is part of an existential threat to humanity. One of artificial intelligence's pre-eminent boffins, Geoffrey Hinton, sent out shock waves recently by arguing that, in relation to AI: We're toast. This is the actual end of history."That's a hell of a backdrop to my visit to see Artificial Intelligence Improvisation, a show by the Improbotics troupe playing as part of an AI festival in London this week. You'll forgive me, I hope, for some hesitation in wielding the critical brickbat, given that the act under review boasts the capacity to wipe out all of us. Continue reading...

Shares of Apple, which is also the world's most valuable listed company, ended the day up 2.3%, valuing the company at just over $3tnApple market capitalization on Friday breached the $3tn mark for the first time since January last year, as investors bet on the iPhone maker's ability to grow its revenue even as it explores new markets such as virtual reality.Shares of Apple, which is also the world's most valuable-listed company, ended the day up 2.3%, valuing the company at just over $3tn. Continue reading...

The parents of the home computer gamers of the 1980s presumably hoped we'd become programmers or accountants, but instead their kids ended up like meI had one of those ads pop up on Twitter recently. You know the ones. Not the weirdly suggestive ones trying to get you to download some crap free-to-play mobile game. The ones that show you something you never previously thought you needed - because you didn't - but now you've seen it, you think your life cannot possibly go on without it. Like a cage for barbecuing vegetables. A watch that doubles as a miniature air fryer. This one was for a tiny inkless printer you can use to print stuff from your phone and turn it into stickers.People my age had this 42 years ago, though. Only back then it was the most derided peripheral ever: the Sinclair ZX Printer for the ZX Spectrum. My mother brought both machine and printer home in 1982, proclaiming that we would now be able to do word processing and write books like the families in the posh part of town. Before you scoff and say, But Dominik, you grew up in Arbroath. There IS no posh part of Arbroath!", let me stress that there IS. It is called Dundee. Continue reading...

This week in artificial intelligenceArtificial intelligence is either going to save humanity or finish it off, depending on who you speak to. Either way, every week there are new developments and breakthroughs. Here are just some of the AI stories that have emerged in recent days: The US company behind the ChatGPT chatbot, OpenAI, has announced that its first international office will be in London. The move is a boost for the UK prime minister, Rishi Sunak, who has described the AI race as one of the greatest opportunities" for the country's tech industry. OpenAI said it chose the UK capital because of its rich culture and exceptional talent pool". This month Palantir, a $30bn US firm specialising in software programs that process huge amounts of data (customers range from the NHS to the US army), picked London as its European base for AI research and development. Continue reading...

2020's Tell Me Why from French studio Don't Nod remains the best trans story in games - and we could use more of themNow is the perfect time to play 2020's story-driven adventure game Tell Me Why: in honour of Pride month, it's currently free to download. Developer Don't Nod's tale follows a trans man returning to his childhood home and confronting his family's past. A major video game that centres any trans character is a rarity to celebrate, but Tyler Ronan doesn't feel tokenistic; he is part of a mature and complex story. Tell Me Why feels like a necessary counterbalance to a wider climate that seems desperate to make gender-diverse people feel marginalised and forgotten.Tyler, a trans man, and his twin cisgender sister, Alyson, spend much of the game exploring the mysteries behind their mother's death. Mental health and the fallibility of memory take equal weight, as the game explores transphobia and belonging. As a trans woman, I found the narrative compelling, challenging and deeply affecting. I was drawn in by its representation of trans people, but my attention was held by its musings on the universal concerns we all have. In other words, I was moved by its confidence in showing that trans lives are as complex as anyone else's. Continue reading...

Changes to the online safety bill will order platforms such as TikTok to protect young users from harm or injurySocial media firms will be ordered to protect children from encountering dangerous stunts and challenges on their platforms under changes to the online safety bill.The legislation will explicitly refer to content that encourages, promotes or provides instructions for a challenge or stunt highly likely to result in serious injury" as the type of material that under-18s should be protected from. Continue reading...

Online News Act, which was passed last week, stipulates tech giant must negotiate deals with publishers for their contentGoogle has announced that it will make good on its threat to remove news links from search results and its other products in Canada once a law that requires tech firms to negotiate deals to pay news publishers for their content goes into effect.Google joins Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc in announcing an end to news access for Canadian users of their platforms after Bill C-18, or the Online News Act, was passed into law last week. The move is just the latest development in the years-long tussle between tech platforms and publishers around the world over whether and how to share advertising revenue from engagement with news articles. Continue reading...