In this week’s newsletter: OpenAI’s new chatbot isn’t a novelty. It’s already powerful and useful – and could radically change the way we write online

Brain-implant company accused of causing needless suffering and deaths amid pressure from CEOElon Musk’s Neuralink, a medical device company, is under federal investigation for potential animal-welfare violations amid internal staff complaints that its animal testing is being rushed, causing needless suffering and deaths, according to documents reviewed by Reuters and sources familiar with the investigation and company operations.Neuralink Corp is developing a brain implant it hopes will help paralyzed people walk again and cure other neurological ailments. The federal investigation, which has not been previously reported, was opened in recent months by the US Department of Agriculture’s inspector general at the request of a federal prosecutor, according to two sources with knowledge of the investigation. The inquiry, one of the sources said, focuses on violations of the Animal Welfare Act, which governs how researchers treat and test some animals. Continue reading...

The attempt to bring big tech to heel promised much but, three years on, pleases no one – it’s the Brexit disaster writ largeThe online safety bill was tabled for discussion in parliament on Monday, resuscitating it from its deathbed and adding yet another chapter to this controversial attempt to bring the internet to heel. But rather than celebrate its return, we should greet it with a groan: an already unwieldy attempt to regulate the internet has become a confusing mishmash of competing interests.The bill has become a Frankenstein’s monster of legislation, in part thanks to the chaotic recent history of UK politics. Successive governments and successive culture secretaries have tried to put their stamp on the legislation, pulling it this way and that until it becomes meaningless. We are now on our fourth prime minister and fifth secretary of state since the idea of legislating the digital sphere was first introduced. Continue reading...

PC, PlayStation, Xbox; Striking Distance Studios/Krafton

When you’re infected by Pegasus, spies effectively hold a clone of your phone – we’re fighting backI was warned in August 2020. A source told me to meet him at six o’clock at night in an empty parking lot in San Salvador. He had my number, but he contacted me through a mutual acquaintance instead; he didn’t want to leave a trace. When I arrived, he told me to leave my phone in the car. As we walked, he warned me that my colleagues at El Faro, the Salvadoran news organization, were being followed because of a story they were pursuing about negotiations between the president of El Salvador and the notorious MS-13 gang.This may read like an eerie movie scene, but there are many Central American journalists who have lived it for real. The suspicion you’re being followed, ditching your phone before meetings, using encrypted messaging and email apps, speaking in code, never publishing your live location – these are ordinary routines for many in my profession. Continue reading...

Live and on-demand pay-TV delivered over wifi to an easy-to-use box is let down by some crummy appsSky has taken its satellite-free pay-TV service from the Glass television and shoved it into a tiny streaming box that you can plug into your existing kit and hook up to wifi.The Sky Stream box subscription starts at £25 a month with a £20 fee upfront, which gives you Sky’s entertainment package for 18 months plus a basic Netflix account. It then rises in price depending on any other channels or content you add. Alternatively, you can subscribe on a 31-day rolling contract and chop and change as you see fit, although without an active subscription the box becomes useless. Continue reading...

Flagship internet regulation has survived four PMs, shifting its focus to child protection and free speechThe online safety bill, the government’s flagship internet regulation, returns to parliament on Monday, after a five-month delay prompted by Conservative party factional warfare threatened to kill it off.The bill was postponed until after the summer recess in July in order to make room for Boris Johnson’s unusual decision to call a confidence vote in his own government, and its return has since been put back multiple times. An anticipated revival in late October was delayed to December, while this week’s return will not see the bill progress rapidly through parliament, the digital minister Paul Scully has said, as it will instead be sent back to committee stage for deeper scrutiny. Continue reading...

EU-funded survey of people aged 16-19 finds one in four have trolled someone – while UK least ‘cyberdeviant’ of nine countriesRisky and criminal online behaviour is in danger of becoming normalised among a generation of young people across Europe, according to EU-funded research that found one in four 16- to 19-year-olds have trolled someone online and one in three have engaged in digital piracy.An EU-funded study found evidence of widespread criminal, risky and delinquent behaviour among the 16-19 age group in nine European countries including the UK. Continue reading...

Latest chatbot from Elon Musk-founded OpenAI can identify incorrect premises and refuse to answer inappropriate requestsProfessors, programmers and journalists could all be out of a job in just a few years, after the latest chatbot from the Elon Musk-founded OpenAI foundation stunned onlookers with its writing ability, proficiency at complex tasks, and ease of use.The system, called ChatGPT, is the latest evolution of the GPT family of text-generating AIs. Two years ago, the team’s previous AI, GPT3, was able to generate an opinion piece for the Guardian, and ChatGPT has significant further capabilities. Continue reading...

Campaigners concerned that ‘same racist technology used to repress Uyghurs is being marketed in Britain’A Chinese security camera company has been advertising ethnicity recognition features to British and other European customers, even while it faces a ban on UK operations over allegations of involvement in ethnic cleansing in Xinjiang.In a brochure published on its website, Hikvision advertised a range of features that it said it could provide in collaboration with the UK startup FaiceTech. Continue reading...

It gave its customers low prices by making them wait. So why did the dream of affordable luxury end with a mountain of boxes in a Port Talbot warehouse?Every day since 16 November, 25 lorryloads of sleek, Scandinavian-inspired furniture have arrived at Europe’s largest indoor auctioneers in Port Talbot, south Wales. Staff at John Pye Auctions normally work from 8.30am to 5pm, but until Christmas the warehouse will be staffed from 5am to 2am as workers unload beige box after beige box into the 316,000 sq ft facility. From a metal balcony overlooking the warehouse, the stacked boxes look not unlike a towering cityscape. On the side of each is a white plus sign inside a circle – the logo of former furniture retailer Made.com.Seven days before the first truck arrived, Made.com went into administration. Launched in London in 2010, until very recently Made was a success story: a disruptive e-commerce model combined with a desirable mid-century style helped the brand earn £100m in sales by 2017. You have probably encountered Made.com furniture if you’ve ever been inside a millennial’s home or even so much as glanced at Instagram – bright velvets, tapered wooden legs and gold accents put Made.com on the map. But now, seemingly overnight, the brand has been unmade. Continue reading...

Tech billionaires seem intent on giving away a lot of money. But are those who support ‘effective altruism’ ignoring the very real problems of today?In the past few weeks a photograph of Tony Blair and his buddy Bill Clinton sharing a panel with a scruffy kid wearing a T-shirt, baggy shorts and trainers has been doing the rounds. The April event was in the Bahamas and funded by an outfit called FTX – a supposedly “user-friendly crypto exchange” – owned by the scruffy kid, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF from now on). Blair and Clinton are looking very pleased to be there, providing confirmation of the aphrodisiac effect of great wealth, because the lad who was playing host was apparently as rich as Croesus, or at any rate worth $32bn.And this was real wealth, it seemed. After all, the venture capitalists at Sequoia – who had backed Silicon Valley success stories such as Google and PayPal – had given him the green light (as well as some of their investors’ money). A few months after Blair and Clinton made their pilgrimage to the sun-soaked and regulation-lite Bahamas, one of Sequoia’s partners offered a breathless endorsement of SBF and his crypto exchange. “Of the exchanges that we had met and looked at”, she wrote, “some of them had regulatory issues, some of them were already public. And then there was Sam.” And FTX, which, Sequoia felt, was “Goldilocks-perfect”. Continue reading...

(Bad Viking; Iceberg Interactive; PC, Switch)

It’s 30 years since the first SMS landed. Writers, authors and comedians share the txt msgs that changed their lifeIt was 2007: the nation was saying goodbye to Tony Blair and the tightness of my jeans was outrageous. I was 22, fresh out of university and in a thrilling new relationship with the man who would, 11 years later, become my husband. For ages, I kept this relationship from my family, but towards the end of spring I was done with the indignity of sneaking around. I wanted to be open. I eventually told my fairly traditional Ghanaian mother that I was gay and had a boyfriend who I had been seeing for months. Let’s just say that the conversation involved increasingly heated uses of the word “No”. Continue reading...

The New York subway provided the inspiration for this photo of a woman waiting on a platformChris Maliwat describes the New York subway as the first slot in a pinball machine. “Whenever I head down there, I know it’s going to be a mini adventure, like I’m about to be launched into the world,” he says. “I saw this woman waiting at Metropolitan Avenue/Grand Street station and wondered which world she was about to shoot out into. Are there people like her where she’s going? Is she headed to her tribe? I think so. Everyone finds their tribe in New York – that’s why people come here.”He didn’t approach her but instead surreptitiously took her photo for his Instagram page Subwaygram. “The subway is full of people on their phones and the ubiquity means mine disappears. We’re all familiar with what we do when we feel a camera pointing our way; there’s a flit in the eyes, a tightening of the body. I don’t want that. I’m not a travel photographer, a hunter out on safari; I’m a fellow passenger making this a regular part of my day,” Maliwat says. Continue reading...

New head of trust and safety Ella Irwin says Elon Musk is urging Twitter ‘to take more risks’ in the wake of mass layoffsElon Musk’s Twitter is leaning heavily on automation to moderate content according to the company’s new head of trust and safety, amid a reported surge in hate speech on the social media platform.Ella Irwin has told the Reuters news agency that Musk, who acquired the company in October, was focused on using automation more, arguing that Twitter had in the past erred on the side of using time and labour-intensive human reviews of harmful content. Continue reading...

Super apps can revolutionise your life – but do you want to pay the price, wonders AI and innovation professor David ShrierAcross Asia, the trend for a single app that does everything – from deliveries to bookings to chatting – is spreading. Known as super apps, they are rumoured to be the inspiration for Elon Musk’s plan for Twitter. Could they take off here – and should they? I asked David Shrier, professor of practice, AI and innovation at Imperial College Business School in London.Have you tried a super app?

Deciphering encryption is said to have upended a vast drug network, but some say the method should worry us allLaw enforcement sources have described it as an embarrassment of riches, a treasure trove that led to raids across Europe and in Dubai this week that were said to have brought down a super-cartel controlling a third of the European cocaine trade.“It was as if we were sitting at the table with the criminals,” the executive director of Europol, Catherine De Bolle, said in a recent interview. Continue reading...

Licensed video game movies get a bad rap – but free film-makers from the franchises and you get some great films about games. Here are some of the bestWhen most people think of movies about games, they immediately recall the astonishing light-cycle chase in Steven Lisberger’s visually daring film. With its underlying themes of dehumanisation and corporate greed in the digital era, Tron was more than an action romp with pretty effects and a cool arcade setting; a fact underlined by a committed lead performance from Jeff Bridges. Continue reading...

Many researchers are fleeing the platform, unnerved by the surge in climate misinformation since Musk’s chaotic takeoverTwitter has proved a cherished forum for climate scientists to share research, as well as for activists seeking to rally action to halt oil pipelines or decry politicians’ failure to cut pollution. But many are now fleeing Twitter due to a surge in climate misinformation, spam and even threats that have upended their relationship with the platform.Scientists and advocates have told the Guardian they have become unnerved by a recent resurgence of debunked climate change denialist talking points and memes on Twitter, with the term #ClimateScam now regularly the first result that appears when “climate” is searched on the site. Continue reading...

World’s richest man says human trials will begin within six months during presentation at health tech company NeuralinkElon Musk said on Wednesday he expects a brain chip developed by his health tech company to begin human trials in the next six months.During a presentation by Musk’s company Neuralink, Musk gave updates on the company’s wireless brain chip. In addition to forecasting clinical trials, Musk said he plans to get one of the chips himself. Continue reading...

Guardian clip attracted more than 103m views and 1.5m likes and was No 1 trending on the website in the UKA Guardian video of the moment Will Smith slapped Chris Rock on stage at the Oscars was the top trending video on YouTube in the UK this year.The uncensored clip of the smack that reverberated around the world has racked up more than 103m views and 1.5m likes on the video-sharing website. Continue reading...

We all said goodbye at the restaurant only to find we were walking in the same direction, unsure of what to sayThat’s it, time to pull the plug. Enough is enough.We’ve been more than patient with Elon Musk, weathering the constant cringe posts and the crypto memes, the randomly generated child names and the Mars colony dystopianism – and that’s before you even get into the basic culture-destroying billionaire stuff. Continue reading...

Disgraced chief executive tells summit he ‘didn’t knowingly commingle funds’ with FTX’s sister company Alameda Research“Look, I screwed up,” the fallen crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried told a conference in New York on Wednesday, but he maintained he “didn’t ever try to commit fraud” and was “shocked” by the collapse of his businesses.With glassy eyes, at times visibly shaking, Bankman-Fried appeared via video conference from a nondescript room in the Bahamas. He told the New York Times DealBook summit he was “deeply sorry about what happened” but consistently said he did not have a full picture of what was going on within the various branches of FTX, his now bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange, and its offshoots. Continue reading...

Ofcom inquiry follows complaints over lack of information on annual mid-contract price risesThe telecoms regulator has launched an investigation into whether companies are ripping off mobile and broadband customers by not telling them that they could face bill increases of hundreds of pounds when they sign their contract.Ofcom will investigate the sales practices used in the UK telecoms market – which is dominated by BT, EE, Virgin Media O2, Sky, Vodafone, Three and TalkTalk – after complaints that customers were not told about mid-contract price rises when they signed up. Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: Actor Michael Nathanson hears from his peers on what happens when your character meets their end in Playing Dead. Plus: five podcasts adapted for TV

After chat with Tim Cook the tycoon admits misunderstanding and Apple had ‘never considered removing platform’Elon Musk has said he has “resolved” a misunderstanding with Apple over his claim that Twitter was being threatened with removal from the iPhone maker’s app store.The new Twitter owner tweeted on Wednesday that he had had a “good conversation” with Apple CEO Tim Cook and that Apple had “never considered” removing the social media platform from its app store. Continue reading...

Company says its security system prevented the hacker accessing customer data or encrypted passwords

Adoption of ‘multi-technology mix’ model and decision to preference regions in rollout cited as major factors in reported losses

The Starlink technology uses more than 3,000 low Earth small orbit satellites to beam broadband signalsElon Musk’s satellite Starlink technology is to be part of a UK government trial to get better internet connectivity to remote parts of the country.The technology, which uses more than 3,000 low Earth orbit small satellites to beam a broadband signal and is operated by the firm SpaceX, will initially be trialled at three remote locations – Rievaulx Abbey in North Yorkshire Moors national park, Wasdale Head in the Lake District and two sites within Snowdonia national park, the government said. Continue reading...

European Bank criticises digital currency sector for facilitating illegal activityThe European Central Bank says bitcoin is on an “artificially induced last gasp before the road to irrelevance”, in a scathing intervention arguing against giving regulatory legitimacy to the cryptocurrency.In a strongly worded blogpost, senior European Central Bank (ECB) staffers Ulrich Bindseil and Jürgen Schaaf criticised bitcoin for being a hotbed of illegal transactions that brings reputational risk for any bank that gets involved with the sector. Continue reading...

Now that Elon Musk has bought the social media platform, some users fear a unique form of Black witnessing will be lostOn Twitter – Black Twitter – Sydette Harry found people who resonated with her intersectional identities as a Black woman, a New Yorker, an immigrant and a member of the diaspora with family in England, Guyana and Trinidad.But she also found other affinity groups. Continue reading...

Take a trip down memory lane with six superb retro games consoles you can get your hands on without breaking the bankSince the hugely successful launch of the Nintendo NES Classic Edition back in 2016, the retro games console has become a lucrative little side hustle for the big console manufacturers and smaller retro hardware companies; so much so that machines such as the SNES Classic Mini and Mega Drive Mini – which are both excellent – are now hard to get hold of without paying vastly inflated prices. Here, though, are six superb alternatives you can buy now without too much of a hunt or the need to take out a second mortgage. Continue reading...

Decision comes after heated debate as police oversight groups warn over further militarization of law enforcementPolice in San Francisco will be allowed to deploy potentially lethal, remote-controlled robots in emergency situations. The controversial policy was approved after weeks of scrutiny and a heated debate among the city’s board of supervisors during their meeting on Tuesday.Police oversight groups, the ACLU and San Francisco’s public defender had urged the 11-member body to reject the police’s use of equipment proposal. Opponents of the policy said it would lead to further militarization of a police force already too aggressive with underserved communities. They said the parameters under which use would be allowed were too vague. Supporters argued that having these robots as an option in dangerous situations was necessary given what they see as an ever-increasing risk of a high-profile shooting hitting the city. Continue reading...

Ministers drop ‘harmful communications’ offence with some arguing it was ‘legislating for hurt feelings’The online safety bill is returning to parliament under the aegis of its fourth prime minister and seventh secretary of state since it was first proposed as an online harms white paper under Theresa May.Each of those has been determined to leave their fingerprints on the legislation, which has swollen to encompass everything from age verification on pornography to criminalisation of posting falsehoods online, and Rishi Sunak and the digital and culture secretary, Michelle Donelan, are no different. Continue reading...

Michelle Donelan rejects claim by father of Molly Russell that online safety bill has been watered down

US owners say they’ve been on the receiving end of road rage, but it may be more about EVs than the CEO himselfTesla lost at least one customer this weekend, after Alyssa Milano tweeted that she had returned her model for a Volkswagen electric vehicle, prompting jokes from Elon Musk and conservative commentators about the German manufacturer’s Nazi origin story. Milano said she had ditched Tesla due to Musk’s ownership of Twitter.While Tesla owners do not seem to be following the actor’s move en masse, some note that they have been on the receiving end of road rage directed toward their vehicle choice. Continue reading...

Experts say investing in identity theft protection may provide peace of mind, but won’t help recover lost information

Twitter owner says Apple gave no reason for the potential ban and had stopped advertising on the platformElon Musk has accused Apple of threatening to remove Twitter from its App Store without giving a reason to the social media platform.Twitter’s new owner also said the iPhone maker had stopped advertising on Twitter, prompting him to ask if the tech group hated free speech. Continue reading...

Revised online safety bill proposes fines of 10% of revenue but drops harmful communications offenceSocial media platforms that breach pledges to block sexist and racist content face the threat of substantial fines under government changes to the online safety bill announced on Monday.Under the new approach, social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter must also give users the option of avoiding content that is harmful but does not constitute a criminal offence. This could include racism, misogyny or the glorification of eating disorders. Continue reading...

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp owner has been fined nearly €1bn by EU since September 2021Facebook’s owner has been fined €265m (£230m) by the Irish data watchdog after a breach that resulted in the details of more than 500 million users being published online.The Data Protection Commission (DPC) said Meta had infringed two articles of the EU’s data protection laws after details of Facebook users from around the world were scraped from public profiles in 2018 and 2019. Continue reading...

Activity indicates ‘first major failure’ to stop government interference under ownership of Elon MuskTwitter has been flooded with nuisance posts designed to obscure news of the coronavirus lockdown protests in China, in an apparent state-directed attempt to suppress footage of the demonstrations.Chinese bot accounts – not operated by humans – are being used to flood the social networking service with adverts for sex workers, pornography and gambling when users search for a major city in the country, such as Shanghai or Beijing, using Chinese script. Continue reading...

Teachers and parents can’t detect this new form of plagiarism. Tech companies could step in – if they had the will to do soParents and teachers across the world are rejoicing as students have returned to classrooms. But unbeknownst to them, an unexpected insidious academic threat is on the scene: a revolution in artificial intelligence has created powerful new automatic writing tools. These are machines optimised for cheating on school and university papers, a potential siren song for students that is difficult, if not outright impossible, to catch.Of course, cheats have always existed, and there is an eternal and familiar cat-and-mouse dynamic between students and teachers. But where once the cheat had to pay someone to write an essay for them, or download an essay from the web that was easily detectable by plagiarism software, new AI language-generation technologies make it easy to produce high-quality essays. Continue reading...

FTX collapse | Replica of William the Conqueror’s ship | A seat for the privileged | Giant otters | Matt Hancock’s ‘junglewashing’Moya Lothian-McLean (Opinion, 25 November) appears to signal the death of “effective altruism” (EA) on the basis of the fall from grace of one of its most famous proponents, Sam Bankman-Fried. Just as Dr Andrew Wakefield’s discredited research into the MMR vaccine did not dishonour medical research in its entirety, nor should Bankman-Fried’s involvement in the collapse of the cryptocurency exchange FTX discredit EA. The aim of “doing good better” remains a laudable objective.

Online scams such as banking and credit card fraud are the most prevalent cyberthreat, says InterpolPolice and investigators fear organised gangs of fraudsters are expanding across sub-Saharan Africa, exploiting new opportunities as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and the global economic crisis to make huge sums with little risk of being caught.The growth will have a direct impact on the rest of the world, where many victims of “hugely lucrative” fraud live, senior police officials have said. Continue reading...

The American computer scientist, who coined the term ‘virtual reality,’ cautions against online ‘psychological operatives’Jaron Lanier, the eminent American computer scientist, composer and artist, is no stranger to skepticism around social media, but his current interpretations of its effects are becoming darker and his warnings more trenchant.Lanier, a dreadlocked free-thinker credited with coining the term “virtual reality”, has long sounded dire sirens about the dangers of a world over-reliant on the internet and at the increasing mercy of tech lords, their social media platforms and those who work for them. Continue reading...

Culture secretary Michelle Donelan to amend bill that, after Molly Russell case, will place duty of care on social media firmsPeople who use social media posts to encourage self-harm face criminal prosecution under government changes to the revived online safety bill.Culture secretary Michelle Donelan will update the bill to criminalise encouraging self-harm when the legislation returns to parliament next month. Continue reading...

Tech titans like Elon Musk and Sam Bankman-Fried have been feted for their wealth, but see the world in ways that also merit scrutinyThe new gods are running into a bit of trouble. From the soap opera playing out at Twitter HQ, the too-big-to-fail bankruptcies in the cryptocurrency space, to mass tech layoffs, the past month has seen successive headlines declaring a litany of woes facing the bullish tech boyos in Silicon Valley and beyond.The minute-by-minute coverage of Elon Musk’s escapades and the global levels of interest in the FTX collapse both go well beyond what you’d expect from a business story. I’m willing to gamble a few Bitcoins that the popular fixation has little to do with any particular interest in successful software engineering; rather it is the personalities who inhabit these spaces, and the philosophies that propel them in their godlike ambition. What is their end goal, we wonder. What drives them, beyond the pursuit of growth? It is easy to assume that money is all that motivates the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Musk and Jeff Bezos. Except, when you start to examine the mindsets of these men, it’s clear that cash is far from the whole story.Moya Lothian-McLean is a contributing editor at Novara MediaDo you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. Continue reading...

UK government blocked new Chinese ownership on security grounds, but Nexperia bosses had ‘planned to build two new plants’

The legendary designer behind Super Mario, Zelda and many other Nintendo classics understood how technological innovation and sharp ideas could work together. At 70, he’s lost none of his sense of fun