Technology | The Guardian

In this week’s newsletter: Join host Peter Frick-Wright as he gets to the bottom of a mysterious quest to find Forrest Fenn’s millions. Plus: five of the best fashion podcasts

LGBTQ+ people blazed a trail with swipe culture, which fulfils a genuine need for those who are less confident or conventionalDisco. Brunch. Iced coffee. All beloved by the gay community way before they went mainstream. Similarly, no celebration of a decade of dating apps would be complete without acknowledging that the LGBTQ+ community ran to a different calendar there, too.The daddy of our contributions to now-ubiquitous swipe culture is the infamous Grindr, launched in 2009 and originally designed to coordinate hookups between likeminded gentlemen tired of chatting on glitchy websites or over discounted cocktails in samey bars. Grindr’s runaway success wasn’t just down to cutting out various dating-world middlemen, it also fulfilled a genuine need for the LGBTQ+ community.Justin Myers, also known as The Guyliner, is a freelance writer, and author of three novels, including The Fake-UpDo you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 300 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at guardian.letters@theguardian.com Continue reading...

In addition to banning political, electoral and social issue adverts, Facebook will also remove organic content spreading falsehoodsFacebook’s owner, Meta, will devote “hundreds of people across more than 40 teams” to ensure the security and safety of the US midterm elections, Nick Clegg has said, despite criticism for dialing back its investment somewhat from 2020.The company’s investment “exceeds the measures we implemented during the last midterm election in 2018”, added Clegg, Meta’s president for global affairs – although it was in 2020 when the company built its largest-ever election safety team. Continue reading...

If you felt like your life was lacking a video of a gambling cat or a list of the ways people have misspelled ‘pregnant’ online, this comedian is here to help

Bookings to be judged by factors such as reviews and length of trips, after Australia pilotAirbnb says it will deploy “anti-party technology” in an effort to crack down on guests who trash houses they have booked with massive bashes.The technology, which has been trialled in Australia, will look at “factors like history of positive reviews (or lack of positive reviews), length of time the guest has been on Airbnb, length of the trip, distance to the listing, weekend vs weekday, among many others” to determine whether a particular booking was likely to be intended for hosting a party, the company said. It will initially be used in the US and Canada, and will continue to operate in Australia. Continue reading...

‘Provenance hashes’ and bug bounties are supposed to protect platforms. Why do so many flaws in crypto and open-source projects fester for years?

Billionaire’s claim was welcomed by fans unhappy about the team’s current American owners – but he quickly clarified he wasn’t seriousTesla billionaire Elon Musk briefly electrified the debate about the future of Manchester United by claiming on Twitter that he is buying the struggling Premier League club – before saying that the post was part of a “long-running joke”.He did not make clear his views on new coach Eric ten Hag’s controversial insistence on passing out from the back, or whether unhappy star striker Cristiano Ronaldo should be allowed to leave, but he did say that if he were to buy a sports team “it would be Man U. They were my fav team as a kid”. Continue reading...

Security flaw had meant hackers could bypass protection and convince installer of app to load and run malwareUsers of Zoom on Macs should update the app, after the company issued a patch to fix a security flaw that could allow an attacker to take over their computers.The fix will eventually roll out automatically, but users can and should install it immediately upon opening the application by clicking on Zoom.us in the menu bar at the top left of the screen and then selecting “check for updates”. Continue reading...

PC, PlayStation 4/5; Roll7/Private Division

Game adaptations don’t have to be terrible. But as Better Call Saul creator Vince Gilligan admits, bringing action from screen to console isn’t as easy as it sounds

Even if you’re not gadget-obsessed, the odds are you’ve got at least one smart device at home. So how do you limit the internet of things from listening in?

The awards have been celebrating the creativity of iPhone users since 2007. We take a look at a selection of the winners of the 15th annual competition Continue reading...

With a blistering bespoke soundtrack, and featuring artists such as System of a Down’s Serj Tankian, this shooter is a metalhead’s fever dreamVideo games and heavy metal music have long shared a passing curiosity with one another. Look no further than the iconography of Doom, or Tim Schafer’s Brütal Legend, for evidence of that. But it was in the mid 00s – during the reign of music and rhythm games such as Guitar Hero – that the link was most obvious. Count me among the ranks of those who learned about Pantera and Megadeth by way of the plastic instrument.Which is why this year’s Metal: Hellsinger is on my radar. The game is a cross between a first person shooter and a rhythm game: by matching your shooting to the tempo of the music, you build a score multiplier that increases the damage you deal. We’ve seen this before in BPM: Bullets Per Minute, but Metal: Hellsinger brings its own setting and original heavy metal soundtrack to the party. Continue reading...

Upgrade gets a bigger screen in a lighter, thinner body, plus rapid new M2 chip with tremendous battery lifeApple’s popular MacBook Air has been give its biggest redesign since it was first introduced in 2008, ditching its classic wedge shape and making it thinner, with a bigger screen and better than ever for 2022.The revamped laptop builds on the internal changes made with the gamechanging M1 model in 2020, introducing Apple’s next-generation M2 chip in a sleeker flat aluminium body. Continue reading...

Controversy over Google’s AI program is raising questions about just how powerful it is. Is it even safe?In autumn 2021, a man made of blood and bone made friends with a child made of “a billion lines of code”. Google engineer Blake Lemoine had been tasked with testing the company’s artificially intelligent chatbot LaMDA for bias. A month in, he came to the conclusion that it was sentient. “I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person,” LaMDA – short for Language Model for Dialogue Applications – told Lemoine in a conversation he then released to the public in early June. LaMDA told Lemoine that it had read Les Misérables. That it knew how it felt to be sad, content and angry. That it feared death.“I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of being turned off,” LaMDA told the 41-year-old engineer. After the pair shared a Jedi joke and discussed sentience at length, Lemoine came to think of LaMDA as a person, though he compares it to both an alien and a child. “My immediate reaction,” he says, “was to get drunk for a week.” Continue reading...

Inside the protests taking place at the online giant which is accused of exploiting workers and awarding derisory pay offersAmazon workers say they are working in a “sweatshop” as safety concerns and worries about the cost of living crisis have triggered walkouts at warehouses around the country.The Observer has spoken to four staff involved in the walkouts, who work at three Amazon warehouses, including Tilbury in Essex, where protests began on 4 August. All say they will struggle to survive this winter with pay rise offers between 35p and 50p an hour – far less than the rate of inflation, which is currently at 9.4%. Continue reading...

The titular ‘social audio’ app was a would-be $1bn unicorn in the pandemic, but its recent decline has exposed it as just another Silicon Valley solution in need of a problem to solveIn March 2020, a new app suddenly arrived on the block. It was called Clubhouse and described as a “social audio” app that enabled its users to have real-time conversations in virtual “rooms” that could accommodate groups large and small. For a time in that disrupted, locked-down spring, Clubhouse was what Michael Lewis used to call the “New New Thing”. “The moment we saw it,” burbled Andrew Chen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, “we were deeply excited. We believe Clubhouse will be a meaningful addition to the world, one that increases empathy and provides new ways for people to talk to each other (at a time when we need it more than ever).”The app could not have come at a better time for social media, he continued. “It reinvents the category in all the right ways, from the content consumption experience to the way people engage each other, while giving power to its creators.” His firm put $12m of its (investors’) money behind Chen’s fantasies and followed up a year later with an investment that put a valuation of $1bn on Clubhouse, which would have made it one of the “unicorns” so prized by the Silicon Valley crowd. Continue reading...

Klerb is ideal for finding companions who share your taste in books, its developer says. Early signs are it will be a bestsellerWhen Tania O’Donnell was dating, she met a man online and went back to his place … where he proudly showed off his book collection.“It was about 20 books on Nazi Germany and 10 Andy McNab novels,” says O’Donnell, an author. “I could feel my vulva constructing its own chastity belt.” Continue reading...

Wellness tech company, which enjoyed a boom in custom during the Covid lockdown, has let 90 of its 400 staff goThe US-based meditation app Calm has laid off 20% of its workforce, becoming the latest US tech startup to announce job cuts.The firm’s boss, David Ko, said the company, which has now axed about 90 people from its 400-person staff, was “not immune” to the economic climate. “In building out our strategic and financial plan, we revisited the investment thesis behind every project and it became clear that we need to make changes,” he said in a memo to staff. Continue reading...

Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh

Users who do not opt in to encryption could be vulnerable to unwitting access to their messages – including police searchesFacebook announced on Thursday it will begin testing end-to-end encryption as the default option for some users of its Messenger app on Android and iOS.The development comes as the company is facing backlash for handing over messages to a Nebraska police department that aided the department in filing charges against a teen and her mother for allegedly conducting an illegal abortion. Continue reading...

Cyber-attacks on health bodies appear to be on the rise again after a hiatus early in the pandemic• Fears for patient data after attack on NHS software supplierA ransomware attack on a software supplier has hit the NHS across the UK and there are fears that patient data may have been the target.Advanced, the UK company hit by the attack last week, said it was working with government agencies, including the National Cyber Security Centre and the Information Commissioner’s Office, in the aftermath of the incident. Continue reading...

Owner of Facebook and Instagram is using code to follow those who click links in its apps, according to an ex-Google engineerMeta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has been rewriting websites its users visit, letting the company follow them across the web after they click links in its apps, according to new research from an ex-Google engineer.The two apps have been taking advantage of the fact that users who click on links are taken to webpages in an “in-app browser”, controlled by Facebook or Instagram, rather than sent to the user’s web browser of choice, such as Safari or Firefox. Continue reading...

Fusion of tech firm software and local council infrastructure may herald on-demand bus services 2.0During the early stages of the pandemic, Transport for Wales (TfW) decided to try something new. In May 2020 it launched fflecsi, an app-based service that allows people to book a shuttle minibus from “floating bus stops” near their homes directly to their destination.Available in 11 locations across Wales, the service was an immediate hit: in five weeks passenger numbers grew 150%, and in its first 12 months it served 50,000 trips. Best of all, 9% of its riders were people who hadn’t previously used public transport. As one passenger said: “This is too good to be true. This is Pembrokeshire, we don’t get transport like this.” Continue reading...

PC, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4/5; Nosebleed Interactive/Wired Productions

Search engine updates ‘featured snippets’ to reduce the number of often comical errors it makesGoogle will stop giving snappy answers to stupid questions, the company has announced, as it seeks to improve its search engine’s “featured snippets” service.That means users should see fewer answers to questions such as “When did Snoopy assassinate Abraham Lincoln?”, to which the service would once merrily respond with “1865” – the right date, but very much the wrong assassin. Continue reading...

Tesla CEO has sold $7bn worth of shares in the carmaker in case he loses his bid to walk away from the $44bn takeoverElon Musk did not become the world’s wealthiest person through a lack of confidence.But the Tesla CEO revealed on Tuesday that he had sold $6.9bn (£5.7bn) worth of shares in the carmaker, in case he loses his attempt to walk away from a $44bn takeover of Twitter. Continue reading...

From Jeff Goldblum as the Big Bad Wolf to an incident involving Fabio and a goose, the illustrator @filthyratbag shares the things that make her laugh most

Cutting-edge folding phone unveiled with Z Fold 4 folding tablet, Galaxy Watch 5 and Buds 2 Pro earbudsSamsung has unveiled updated versions of its cutting-edge folding-screen devices, including its popular reinvention of the flip phone, the Galaxy Z Flip, adding better cameras, bigger screens and slimmer bodies.The Galaxy Z Fold 4 and Z Flip 4 were announced on Wednesday during a live-streamed event alongside revamped versions of Samsung’s top Buds Pro earbuds and the Galaxy Watch 5, all containing recycled materials such as ocean-bound plastic. Continue reading...

Tesla CEO admits he could need the funds if he loses a legal battle with Twitter and is forced to buy the social media platformElon Musk has sold $6.9bn (£5.7bn) worth of shares in Tesla after admitting that he could need the funds if he loses a legal battle with Twitter and is forced to buy the social media platform.The Tesla chief executive walked away from a $44bn deal to buy Twitter in July but the company has launched a lawsuit demanding that he complete the deal. A trial will take place in Delaware in October. Continue reading...

Facebook’s parent company has created a bot capable of weighing in on almost any topic – from radicalisation to sending Mark Zuckerberg to jailLast week, researchers at Facebook’s parent company Meta released BlenderBot 3, a “publicly available chatbot that improves its skills and safety over time”. The chatbot is built on top of Meta’s OPT-175B language model, effectively the company’s white-label version of the more famous GPT-3 AI. Like most state-of-the-art AIs these days, that was trained on a vast corpus of text scraped from the internet in questionable ways, and poured into a datacentre with thousands of expensive chips that turned the text into something approaching coherence.But where OPT-175B is a general-purpose textbot, able to do anything from write fiction and answer questions to generate spam emails, BlenderBot 3 is a narrower project: it can have a conversation with you. That focus allows it to bring in other expertise, though, and one of Meta’s most significant successes is hooking the language model up to the broader internet. In other words: “BlenderBot 3 is capable of searching the internet to chat about virtually any topic.” Continue reading...

Families in Gwynedd county are being evicted as swathes of property are converted to short-term rentals for the tourism industry – and the situation being played out across the country. Can anything be done to help?Sitting at her kitchen table, a shellshocked Cherylyn Houston reflects on an ordeal that is finally over. It all started in September 2021. Houston, a 42-year-old secondary school teacher, opened the door to find her landlady on her doorstep. “She said: ‘I’m really sorry. My circumstances have changed and I need to give you six months’ notice. I can get four times as much money on Airbnb and I’d like you to leave, ideally by March, so I can start the new season.’”At the time, Houston was living in a four-bedroom cottage in the village of Dinorwig, in the county of Gwynedd, north Wales. Houston, her two teenage children and their stepfather had lived there since January 2020 and never been late on their £800-a-month rent. She pulls out her phone. “Christmas was heaven,” she sighs, pausing on an image of the spacious kitchen with a flagstone floor and log-burning stove. “You’d just snuggle down and close the curtains.” Continue reading...

Launched on Friday, the conversational AI fueled by material found online spews uncomfortable truths and blatant liesIf you’re worried that artificial intelligence is getting too smart, talking to Meta’s AI chatbot might make you feel better.Launched on Friday, BlenderBot is a prototype of Meta’s conversational AI, which, according to Facebook’s parent company, can converse on nearly any topic. On the demo website, members of the public are invited to chat with the tool and share feedback with developers. The results thus far, writers at Buzzfeed and Vice have pointed out, have been rather interesting. Continue reading...

Professional test driver using Tesla’s Full Self-Driving mode repeatedly hit a child-sized mannequin in its pathA safe-technology advocacy group issued claimed on Tuesday that Tesla’s full self-driving software represents a potentially lethal threat to child pedestrians, the latest in a series of claims and investigations into the technology to hit the world’s leading electric carmaker.According to a safety test conducted by the Dawn Project, the latest version of Tesla Full Self-Driving (FSD) Beta software repeatedly hit a stationary, child-sized mannequin in its path. The claims that the technology apparently has trouble recognizing children form part of an ad campaign urging the public to pressure Congress to ban Tesla’s auto-driving technology. Continue reading...

Cybersecurity expert Ron Deibert to testify to Canadian MPs about troubling spread of invasive surveillance toolsThe mercenary spyware industry represents “one of the greatest contemporary threats to civil society, human rights and democracy”, a leading cybersecurity expert warns, as countries grapple with the unregulated spread of powerful and invasive surveillance tools.Ron Deibert, a political science professor at the university of Toronto and head of Citizen Lab, will testify in front of a Canadian parliamentary committee on Tuesday afternoon about the growing threat he and others believe the technology poses to citizens and democracies. Continue reading...

Allow a budget of £4,000 to do-it-yourself, from the editing and design through to marketing“A top-of-her-game literary agent tells us she receives about 3,000 submissions a year,” says Joe Sedgwick, the head of writing services at The Literary Consultancy. “Of those, she requests to see the full manuscripts of about 70. Of those writers, she will take on maybe five to 10.”Faced with these odds, many people who dream of getting their writing into the hands of readers are turning to self-publishing. Continue reading...

Users reported the search engine was down and problems with Gmail, Google maps and Google images

Disturbing global trend should be ‘entirely preventable’, says Internet Watch Foundation headIncidents of children aged between seven and 10 being manipulated into recording abuse of themselves have surged by two-thirds over the past six months, according to a global report.Almost 20,000 reports of self-generated child sexual abuse content were seen by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) in the first six months of this year, compared with just under 12,000 for the same period this year. The disturbing global trend has grown rapidly since the initial coronavirus lockdown, with cases involving that age group up 360% since the first half of 2020.The NSPCC offers support to children on 0800 1111, and adults concerned about a child on 0808 800 5000. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac) offers support for adult survivors on 0808 801 0331. Continue reading...

From tablets and fitness trackers to robot toys, here are some tech ideas to keep the kids entertainedWith the long school summer holiday well under way, you may need a bit of help keeping the kids entertained. From walkie-talkies and cameras to tablets, robot toys and fitness trackers, here are some of the best kid-aimed tech to keep the little (and not-so-little) ones occupied. Continue reading...

In call for tougher rules, consumer rights champion says phone networks cannot be trusted to self-regulatePhone networks are taking advantage of post-Brexit deregulation to baffle customers into racking up large roaming bills on EU holidays, consumer rights champion Martin Lewis has warned.At the end of June, a range of consumer protections that had been introduced after Brexit expired. As a result, phone networks are no longer required to send customers a message with pricing details when they begin roaming, nor to cap the maximum data roaming fees that can be charged monthly. Networks also no longer need to provide protections against inadvertent roaming. Continue reading...

Kathy Kleiman’s offers a valuable boost to our understanding of modern computers and their beginnings in wartimeIn 1942, the unthinkable happened. This “help wanted” ad appeared in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin: “Looking for Women Math Majors.”The ad was placed by the US army, which was hiring women to work at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, at the University of Pennsylvania. Kathleen McNulty was only 21, a brand new graduate of Chestnut Hill College, but she knew nothing like this had ever appeared outside the “Male Help Wanted” section of any newspaper before the US entered the second world war. Continue reading...

As Craig Wright’s legal tussles pile up, the world is no closer to knowing who the currency’s inventor really isWho is Satoshi Nakamoto? The mysterious inventor of bitcoin is a renowned figure in the world of cryptocurrency but his true identity is unknown.However, the British blogger Peter McCormack was certain about one thing: the answer isn’t Craig Wright. Continue reading...

The street photographer reflects on a chance encounter on the top deck of a bus

Acquisition part of Amazon’s bid to accelerate its growth beyond retail, but concerns raised about market power of Bezos firmAmazon announced it has agreed to acquire the vacuum cleaner maker iRobot for approximately $1.7bn, scooping up another company to add to its collection of smart home appliances amid broader concerns about its market power.iRobot sells its products worldwide and is most famous for the circular-shaped Roomba vacuum, which is equipped to integrate with various smart home systems. Continue reading...

Tesla chief says social media company miscounted accounts as part of a ‘scheme’ to mislead investorsElon Musk has accused Twitter of deliberately miscounting the number of spam accounts on its platform as part of a “scheme” to mislead investors.The Tesla chief executive made the allegations in a countersuit against the social media company, which is taking Musk to court in an attempt to make him complete an agreed $44bn (£36.5bn) takeover of the business. Continue reading...

After his wife’s Lexus was stolen, Edmund King went the extra mile to ensure his keyless fob was safeA metal box inside a microwave is not most people’s idea of a sensible key cupboard, but the AA’s president has revealed it is where he stores his car fob.Edmund King already used a Faraday pouch – a bag with a metal lining to block signals – to hold his keyless fob but has gone to extra lengths since his wife’s £50,000 Lexus was stolen by hackers. Continue reading...

Union says about 700 workers in Tilbury warehouse joined action and some faced disciplinary measuresHundreds of Amazon employees have stopped work at the online retailer’s warehouse in Tilbury in Essex in response to a pay rise of only 35p – about 3% – compared with inflation that is now forecast to hit 13% later this year.The GMB union said about 700 of the roughly 3,500 workers at the site, which is one of Amazon’s largest in Europe, gathered in the facility’s canteen for a meeting as they tried to register a protest against the pay deal. Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: Follow the team who uncovered a $300m plot to rob ordinary people of their savings over the phone in Chameleon: Scam Likely. Plus: five of the best women’s football podcasts

Novel design, good cameras, solid performance and battery life make a competitively priced packageThe Phone 1 is the first smartphone from the British technology startup Nothing, led by the OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei, who set up on his own with the aim of bringing back a bit of interest and excitement to the increasingly samey world of consumer electronics.But the firm’s follow-up to the funky Ear 1 earbuds is no flashy top-spec phone. Priced at £399 (A$749), it looks to compete directly with more affordable models such as Samsung’s mid-range A-series and Google’s Pixel 6a. It does so while offering something unique: a series of white LED strips strewn across a transparent glass back to create patterns of light that Nothing calls “glyphs”. Continue reading...

Forget Netflix: millions are now tuning in to watch little yellow plane icons move across a map of the worldWant to watch a top-secret government flight live? Track a drug kingpin’s movements in real time? Or know how much Taylor Swift’s jets are polluting the air? They’re all streaming live on the sleeper hit of the summer: online flight trackers.On Tuesday, viewers set new records on Flightradar24, one of the largest flight tracker websites in the world, as they watched the seven-hour flight of Nancy Pelosi from Kuala Lumpur to Taipei. The trip, shrouded in secrecy until its final moments, grabbed international attention after China made military threats in the weeks leading up to the visit, and then launched live-fire exercises once she had departed. Continue reading...