by Josh Toussaint-Strauss Ali Assaf Andrew Warwick Ry on (#5S234)
Predicting what is going on with the weather is important. It impacts every aspect of our life: from deciding what to wear and when we go outside to predicting natural disasters and managing a public health crisis. In this digital age, we have a vast array of different apps that can predict the weather to a decent level of accuracy. But there is a frustrating anomaly with weather apps: often they cannot seem to agree. Josh Toussaint-Strauss explores why there are regular discrepancies between weather apps and how to get the best out of them Continue reading...
Bitcoin and similar blockchain-based currencies require huge amounts of power, predominantly generated from fossil fuelsThe incoming mayor of New York City thinks cryptocurrency and blockchain technology are the future. Eric Adams has advocated to reshape the city into a crypto hotspot, with crypto being taught in schools. He also plans to take his first three paychecks in bitcoin payment.Adams said in an interview that bitcoin was the “new way of paying for goods and services throughout the entire globe” and that schools “must” teach the technology behind it, as well as “this new way of thinking”. Continue reading...
Online order service to launch with sales of screen, battery and camera parts for iPhones 12 and 13Cracked your iPhone screen but cannot find a repair shop or book a slot at the Apple store? Then try your kitchen table.From next year phone owners can fix their handset at home after the tech company said it would make repair kits available to the public. Continue reading...
Company blames the move, which will start on 19 January, on the cost of processing paymentsAmazon has told customers that it plans to stop accepting payments made with UK-issued Visa credit cards in January.In an email to users of the site, it blamed the cost of processing the payments, telling them: “Starting 19 January 2022, we will unfortunately no longer accept Visa credit cards issued in the UK, due to the high fees Visa charges for processing credit card transactions.” Continue reading...
Records show LA police trialed social media surveillance tech from Voyager Labs, which claims its software can predict crimes and help monitor private messages
by Johana Bhuiyan and Sam Levin with graphics by Alvi on (#5S0NA)
Voyager, which pitches its tech to police, has suggested indicators such as Instagram usernames that show Arab pride can signal inclination towards extremism
by Dan Sabbagh Defence and security editor on (#5S0E1)
National Cyber Security Centre says cyberattacks at record high and urges businesses not to pay upThe National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said it tackled a record number of cyber incidents in the UK over the last year, with ransomware attacks originating from Russia dominating its activities.The cybersecurity agency said it had helped deal with a 7.5% increase in cases in the year to August, fuelled by the surge of criminal hackers seizing control of corporate data and demanding payment in cryptocurrency for its return. Continue reading...
by Samuel Gibbs Consumer technology editor on (#5RXQQ)
Top-priced, big screen, two-day battery life and cracking cameras – but just too heavy to beat the bestApple’s latest super-sized smartphone is a beast in all directions, but is bigger really better?The iPhone 13 Pro Max is Apple’s most expensive smartphone, starting at £1,049 ($1,099/A$1,849) – at least £100 more than other models. With the same chips, software, design and camera as the regular sized 13 Pro, size is the key differentiator.Screen: 6.7in Super Retina XDR with ProMotion (120Hz OLED) (458ppi)Processor: Apple A15 BionicRAM: 6GBStorage: 128, 256, 512GB or 1TBOperating system: iOS 15.1Camera: Triple 12MP rear cameras with OIS, 12MP front-facing cameraConnectivity: 5G, wifi 6, NFC, Bluetooth 5, Lightning, ultra wideband and GNSSWater resistance: IP68 (6 metres for 30 mins)Dimensions: 160.8 x 78.1 x 7.7mmWeight: 240g Continue reading...
by Written by Huib Modderkolk, read by Aaron Vodovoz on (#5RXNF)
Edwin Robbe had a troubled life, but found excitement and purpose by joining an audacious community of hackers. Then the real world caught up with his online activities. By Huib Modderkolk Continue reading...
by Hannah J Davies, Hannah Verdier, Hollie Richardson on (#5RTKR)
Hooked tells the story of how addiction led Tony Hathaway to embark on a shocking crime spree. Plus: chilling catfish hit Sweet Bobby, and the rise and fall of the phone sex industryHooked
Still played by millions, Bethesda’s 2011 fantasy RPG has become a touchstone in the video game world. Game director Todd Howard reflects on its development and legacyIs there anyone who’s played video games over the last 10 years who hasn’t played Skyrim? When it came out in 2011, this must surely have seemed to the outside world like one of the nerdiest games around: potions and spells, axes and swords, dark elves and giants and, of course, dragons. But Skyrim nevertheless became one of the most widely played games ever, a touchstone in the video game world, for players and developers alike. It has been re-released on every console and platform imaginable, to the point where it’s become a gaming in-joke. It’s still huge on YouTube and TikTok, even with people who were little kids when it came out. At a wedding a few weeks ago, I met someone whose wife had played Skyrim as her first ever game; a decade later, she’s still playing it.Skyrim was made at Bethesda Game Studios by a team of around 100 people – far fewer than the 400-strong team working on its forthcoming game, Starfield. Coming straight from wrapping up development on Fallout 3, a post-nuclear-apocalypse role playing game, the team quickly found a tone and direction that they were excited by. Unlike The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (2006), a glossy, classical high-fantasy set in the most gilded area of the world of Tamriel, Skyrim is grimy and cold. Its aesthetic is more Nordic: furs and leather, snow and stone. If Oblivion felt like a Roman legend, and its intriguingly weird predecessor Morrowind resembled a tattered novel from an unknown author plucked from the back of the fantasy shelf at your local library, Skyrim is like one of those brutal Scandinavian folk stories where someone always gets an axe to the head. Continue reading...
Platform says it is responding to feedback on preventing firms from abusing targeting optionsFacebook and Instagram are to stop allowing advertisers to target users based on their history of posting, reading or liking content related to subjects such as sexual orientation, religion and political beliefs.The social media networks’ parent company, Meta Platforms, said from January it would remove detailed targeting options that let advertisers seek out users based on their interactions with causes, organisations or public figures related to health, race or ethnicity, political affiliation, religion, or sexual orientation. Continue reading...
Thrilling but not forbidding, Hidetaka Miyazaki’s forthcoming fantasy epic is like Dark Souls meets Zelda: Breath of the WildBefore Hidetaka Miyazaki was given the job of salvaging his company’s embattled medieval fantasy game Demon’s Souls (2009), he was just another rank-and-file designer. For a child who grew up a voracious reader of sword-and-sorcery genre fiction, directing a grimy fantasy game was a dream. I find a great sense of poetic satisfaction in the fact that Miyazaki – now in his mid 40s and the president of developer FromSoftware, having propelled the company to global success with his demanding, distinctive, haunting and unforgettable games Dark Souls, Bloodborne and Sekiro – has been working with George RR Martin on a fantasy game. It feels like a full-circle moment for the boy who, when he couldn’t understand parts of the fantasy novels he brought home from his local library, used his own imagination to bridge the gaps.Martin’s role on Elden Ring was completed some time ago – he workshopped the characters and their relationships, which Miyazaki and his team then integrated into the game. Aside from all the swords, Elden Ring bears almost no resemblance to Game of Thrones (it does have dragons, but if there is any complex politicking, skullduggery or mass-murder at weddings to be found here, it’s later in the game than the five hours I played). This game is more fantastical: your character can summon ethereal blades and lightning strikes, characters talk in reverent jargon about “sites of grace” and “the Tarnished”, and your horse is a corporeal ghost. After learning the basics of attacking and defending yourself, you emerge into a world called the Lands Between, where eerily glowing trees extend into the sky like mountains, bathing the forested land below in golden light. Continue reading...
Campaigners sought to sue for £3bn damages on behalf of millions of iPhone users in England and WalesA £3bn legal action against Google over claims it secretly tracked the internet activity of millions of iPhone users has been blocked by the UK supreme court.Legal experts said the decision meant the “floodgates” remained closed to class actions on data privacy in England and Wales, although the ruling noted digital technology’s ability to cause “mass harm” to people. Continue reading...
The singing sensation belting out big numbers in the veg aisle, Britney’s Oops! redone as vintage jazz, how to flirt if you’re a woman in a musical … our critic takes her seat for theatre on TikTokTheatre TikTok threw out a lifeline for actors during lockdown with musical spin-offs and plenty of theatrical silliness that has gathered momentum since. Sam Williams’s double-act with his grandma Judi Dench kept us laughing through the pandemic as he tried to tell her jokes and she foiled his punchlines. The duo seem to have retired but the videos are still up and enormously entertaining.The best of thespian TikTok superstars combine fabulous voices with clever comic skits: Katiejoyofosho features highly among them, composing her own parody musicals including a Broadway show in one video “after Amazon buys its own theatre” which contains regular adverts and a branded backdrop among the rousing musical solos, and another called How to Flirt if You’re a Woman in a Musical. Meanwhile, Dales_drama is an 18-year-old “musical theatre kid” who performs a mix of kooky cosplay (Peter Pettigrew from Harry Potter pops up repeatedly) and gloriously sung duets such as George Salazar’s Michael in the Bathroom (from her own bathroom) and sometimes strums along on the ukulele. Continue reading...
The film side of TikTok has plenty of spoofs. But our writer prefers the critics, the metal-jawed burger-biting machine – and the effects experts revealing how to make a camera crew vanish into thin airFilm TikTok is giving film an explosion of energy, a performative and democratised version of cinephilia that celebrates, imitates, teases, lip-syncs, mashes up and mocks – but all the time rubs up against – the movies. Susan Sontag, in Against Interpretation, called for a rich, intuitive kind of criticism that celebrates and reproduces the sensuous effect of art, instead of imposing a coldly pedagogic analysis. I think she’d have loved Film TikTok. And it’s happened over just a few years, propelled by people under the age of 25.Apart from everything else, Film TikTok may be undermining one of the most fundamental tenets of cinema: that the screen has to be “landscape” style, since anything else looks amateurish and inauthentic. British film-maker Charlie Shackleton recently talked about mentoring a group of young Australian critics and finding how utterly steeped they were in the language of TikTok: asked to take a picture of them on his phone, he recalls his chagrin for turning it sideways – “Like a fucking Lumiere brother!”
by Samuel Gibbs Consumer technology editor on (#5RQPD)
Small updates keep Apple at top of smartwatch market, even if it’s not worth upgrading from recent modelsThe Apple Watch gets a bigger, better screen, faster charging and a small price cut for 2021, which is enough to keep it at the top of the smartwatch market.The Series 7 version costs from £369 ($399/A$599) and, despite being £10 cheaper than last year’s Series 6, is Apple’s most expensive smartwatch, above the Watch SE costing from £249 ($279/A$429). It requires an iPhone 6S or newer and does not work with Android. Continue reading...
Kingshuk Das testifies that former CEO was resistant to critiques of company’s devicesThe former lab director of Theranos has testified that Elizabeth Holmes gave “implausible” excuses for apparent failures in the company’s tests and personally pushed back against his concerns about its signature blood testing machines.Kingshuk Das testified on Tuesday in the high-profile case as the government heads into its 10th week of arguments against the former CEO, who faces accusations that Theranos knowingly defrauded clients and investors about its capabilities. Continue reading...
by Stephanie Kirchgaessner and agencies on (#5RQ1N)
Businessman allegedly used surveillance tool to spy on journalist, raising questions about authorities’ links to Israeli companyMexico’s use of spyware made by NSO Group is facing new scrutiny following the arrest of a businessman on allegations that he used the surveillance tool to spy on a journalist.The arrest of the businessman – who has not formally been named by Mexican prosecutors – comes months after a consortium of media outlets, including the Guardian, published a series of reports detailing how the phone numbers of thousands of Mexicans, including 50 people linked to the country’s current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, appeared on a leaked list of numbers selected by government clients of the Israeli spyware company for possible surveillance. Continue reading...
From tap stars duetting with Gene Kelly to Gordon Ramsay twisting with his daughter, TikTok is where performers – large, small, amateur, pro – drop the facade and dance till their toes are rawTikTok is made for dance. The most popular TikToker – Charli D’Amelio, 17, with 9.9bn likes – is a dancer, or started out as one. And it is the platform that’s launched or spread a thousand dance trends, from the #toosieslide to the #TheGitUpChallenge, via the Floss, the Dougie and the Milly Rock.Unlike the slick pros of Instagram, or the archive performances on YouTube, TikTok is just about the pure joy of dancing, whoever you are. Size, shape, experience and natural grace are immaterial. It’s essentially the school playground writ very large, the silly routines and memes that used to get passed around, with everyone miming the lyrics to whatever was on Top of the Pops last night. Continue reading...
Other cryptocurrencies such as ethereum also reach records as investors hedge against inflationThe bitcoin price has reached a new record high, breaking through $68,000 (£50,000), and analysts predict that the world’s best-known cryptocurrency will rise further in the coming weeks.This beats the previous record high set in late October, when bitcoin reached nearly $67,700 before falling back again when investors discovered a new cryptocurrency, shiba inu. Other cryptocurrencies have also risen to record highs, such as ethereum, which soared to $4,837. Continue reading...
Some firms reinvent themselves in the battery era, but others struggle as work moves abroadCorners of the Alucast factory in the Black Country would be familiar to metalworkers several centuries ago. Workers pour molten aluminium at 720C into steel moulds. The cooling metal is then quickly pressed into shape before being sanded down into parts for gas-guzzling British sports cars.Yet for all its traditional West Midlands manufacturing roots, Alucast is finding a role for itself in a fast-growing new industry: electric cars. Continue reading...
A 16-year-old girl was rescued in Kentucky after using a hand gesture described on the social media app TikTok to signal to motorists that she was in trouble. The signal – turning the palm outwards and closing the fingers around a tucked thumb – has been demonstrated by users on TikTok and by non-profit organisations like the Canadian Women's Foundation as a way for a person being abused to tell someone they are in trouble without alerting the abuser. 'That hand gesture was everything,' Gilbert Acciardo from the Laurel county sheriff's office said. 'Had that not been been transmitted by the young lady, had there not been someone out there that knew how to interpret what she was doing, then who knows? We might not have had a good resolution on this'
Steve Wozniak, Steve and Patricia Jobs and Daniel Kottke built 200 Apple-1 units in Jobs’ home 45 years agoOne of the few remaining Apple-1 computers, the company’s first product, will go on sale this week at an auction that is expected to fetch as much as $600,000.The 45-year-old computer is one of just 200 that Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs tested and designed along with Patty Jobs and Daniel Kottke in the Jobs’ Los Altos home. It is considered a “holy grail” for vintage tech collectors. Continue reading...
by Stephanie Kirchgaessner and Michael Safi on (#5RMWX)
Investigation finds rights activists working for groups accused by Israel of being terrorist were previously targeted by NSO spywareThe mobile phones of six Palestinian human rights defenders, some of whom work for organisations that were recently – and controversially – accused by Israel of being terrorist groups, were previously hacked by sophisticated spyware made by NSO Group, according to a report.An investigation by Front Line Defenders (FLD), a Dublin-based human rights group, found that the mobile phones of Salah Hammouri, a Palestinian rights defender and lawyer whose Jerusalem residency status has been revoked, and five others were hacked using Pegasus, NSO’s signature spyware. In one case, the hacking was found to have occurred as far back as July 2020. Continue reading...
Huge stars like Justin Bieber have made singles designed to go viral on TikTok. Yet the platform’s pop scene is far weirder – from internet drama turned into 40-second tunes, to singers famous for making ‘adorable faces’The means by which music is played invariably affects music itself: jazz changed with the introduction of the LP, which allowed longer pieces to be released; the arrival of the CD gave the world the blockbuster 70-minute hip-hop album padded out with skits; a couple of years ago, a famous pop producer told me that the algorithms of Spotify now affect everything from a single’s length to the sound of its intro and choruses.So it is with TikTok, seemingly the primary means by which tweens and teenagers discover music in 2021. There have been pop singles audibly designed to become memes on the video-sharing platform, Drake’s Toosie Slide and Justin Bieber’s Yummy among them. More intriguing is the way it has democratised music, taking it away from the machinations of record companies and placing its promotion into the hands of ordinary people, with often unpredictable results. Continue reading...
The pandemic has driven a great leap forward in digital learning. Is there any point in looking back?My 21-year-old goddaughter, a second-year undergraduate, mentioned in passing that she watches video lectures offline at twice the normal speed. Struck by this, I asked some other students I know. Many now routinely accelerate their lectures when learning offline – often by 1.5 times, sometimes by more. Speed learning is not for everyone, but there are whole Reddit threads where students discuss how odd it will be to return to the lecture theatre. One contributor wrote: “Normal speed now sounds like drunk speed.”Education was adapting to the digital world long before Covid but, as with so many other human activities, the pandemic has given learning a huge shove towards the virtual. Overnight, schools and universities closed and teachers and students had to find ways to do what they do exclusively via the internet. Naturally there were problems, but as Professor Diana Laurillard of University College London’s Knowledge Lab explains, they essentially pulled off an extraordinary – and global – experiment. “It can’t return to the way it was,” she says. “The cat is out of the bag.” Continue reading...
The writer’s follow-up to The Circle is longer and baggier, but still fuelled by rage at the power of Silicon Valley and its numbing effect on the human raceKudos to Dave Eggers. In this follow-up to the admirable, big-tech, dystopian thriller The Circle (which you needn’t have read to enjoy the current book), he again squares up to the new enemies of everything untamed and brilliant in humankind. If you meant to read Shoshana Zuboff’s important and demanding The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, but were too worn down by surveillance capitalism’s intrusions to get round to it, The Every tackles the same concerns from a shared perspective of humanist outrage, in the form of a gulpable fictive entertainment.The Circle’s titular startup turned metaphysical empire (think: Googlebook) has merged with an unmistakable e-commerce site referred to, doubtless for legal reasons, only by its nickname: “the jungle”. Messianically rebranded as The Every, the corporation is now run by Mae Holland, The Circle’s fast-rising, newbie protagonist. Under Holland, The Every pursues its heedless agenda of a worldwide, soft totalitarian order of mass behavioural compliance through surveillance. However, in part due to a corporate culture of timid self-scrutiny, there is a dearth of new ideas on campus. Enter another newbie, Delaney Wells, radicalised by her years studying under anti-monopoly crusader Professor Agarwal (surely based on the aforementioned Zuboff, Agarwal articulates the novel’s moral and intellectual conscience in letters to her former protege). Bent on bringing down The Every from the inside, Delaney conspires with her housemate Wes, a big-tech resisting “trog”, to sabotage the company. The pair settle on a strategy of terroristic accelerationism: if they can introduce enough vile or moronic apps into The Every’s portfolio, it might trigger a popular insurrection that will bring about the company’s downfall. Continue reading...
There’s Shakespeare the Roadman, life lessons from Grey’s Anatomy, and everything Gemma Collins has ever said or done. In the first of a series in which Guardian critics unearth the best of TikTok, our writer takes on its TV-related contentTikTok and telly go together like Ant and Dec before the drink-driving ban. Most obviously, TikTok is good for reliving highlights from daytime and reality shows past. Remember that iconic “Dear-lord-what-a-sad-little-life-Jane” moment from Come Dine With Me? Or that time an indignant Curtis from Love Island chose coffee-making over morning cuddles? Or everything Gemma Collins has ever said and done? All these have been faithfully chopped, churned, lip-synced and lauded by accounts such as Greatbritishmemes, Qualitybritishtelly and Loveofhuns. It makes the enforced ad breaks on All 4 and ITV Hub just whiz by.That’s only the beginning of this sweet symbiosis however, because TikTok also provides a glimpse into TV’s future. The outrageously talented Munya Chawawa has finally reached Channel 4, as co-host of Complaints Welcome, but his viral music parodies have long-threatened to spill out of the small(er) screen and into the mainstream. And since TikTok allows quality content to bypass the traditional gatekeepers and connect directly with an audience, there’s plenty more where he came from. The likes of Bigmiko (if Shakespeare was a roadman …), Abi Clarke (relatable queen of banal office chat) and Harry Trevaldwyn (he’s already been cast in the UK remake of Call My Agent) are shaping up to be the panel show regulars of tomorrow. Continue reading...
Companies accused of using social media influencers to entice young people to try nicotine productsPosing expertly for Instagram snaps, a parade of young and beautiful DJs, models and socialites line up to endorse Velo, a brand of flavoured nicotine pouches made by British American Tobacco (BAT).Between them, the 26 social media influencers boast 2.2m followers, and an audience that skews young, meaning they are hard to reach through traditional advertising channels. Continue reading...
Guardian Australia picture editor Carly Earl explains the dos and don’ts of taking pictures of the moonWhen a full moon rises, many people will pull out their mobile phones to try and taken an Instagram-worthy picture, but unfortunately the moon is really challenging to get a great photo of.Two reasons: it is very far away and unless you have a telephoto lens (which makes the moon appear closer than it is) it will always appear as a very small glowing dot in the frame. Continue reading...
Tech companies are seeking to analyse data on the way we tap, scroll, text and call to monitor our mental health – with potential consequences for privacy and healthcareWe all fear our smartphones spy on us, and I’m subject to a new type of surveillance. An app called TapCounter records each time I touch my phone’s screen. My swipes and jabs are averaging about 1,000 a day, though I notice that’s falling as I steer shy of social media to meet my deadline. The European company behind it, QuantActions, promises that through capturing and analysing the data it will be able to “detect important indicators related to mental/neurological health”.Arko Ghosh is the company’s cofounder and a neuroscientist at Leiden University in the Netherlands. “Tappigraphy patterns” – the time series of my touches – can, he says, confidently be used not only to infer slumber habits (tapping in the wee hours means you are not sleeping) but also mental performance level (the small intervals in a series of key-presses represent a proxy for reaction time), and he has published work to support it. Continue reading...
The promise of neurotechnology to make lives better is growing. But do we need a new set of rights to protect the integrity of our minds?“The skull acts as a bastion of privacy; the brain is the last private part of ourselves,” Australian neurosurgeon Tom Oxley says from New York.Oxley is the CEO of Synchron, a neurotechnology company born in Melbourne that has successfully trialled hi-tech brain implants that allow people to send emails and texts purely by thought. Continue reading...
Facebook’s woes cast a long shadow at a European tech summit this week, and it will take more than rebranding to mend themIt has been a bruising time for Facebook. The company is still absurdly profitable – Meta, its renamed parent company, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, generated $86bn (£63bn) in revenues last year, while Facebook’s own revenues grew by 56% in the second quarter. But away from the lucre, there is diminishing lustre. It stands condemned by critics and a widely feted whistleblower. And now it finds its standing diminishing among its peers.
Does your machine need an upgrade to get the most out of 2021’s games? Here’s what to considerWith the autumn video game release schedule now in full swing, the thoughts of many PC owners are turning to hardware upgrades. Blockbusters such as Halo Infinite, Battlefield 1942 and Forza Horizon 5 will all support demanding visual effects such as ray tracing, so it seems like the perfect time to invest in new kit.There’s just one problem: this is probably the worst, most expensive time in recent memory to boost your processing power. Manufacturing and distribution problems, together with skyrocketing demand, have seen prices soar, especially for high-end graphics cards. “There are GTX 1080Ti cards listed on eBay for over £500 – that’s a four-year-old GPU for half a grand,” says Chris Wilson, design director at Cardboard Sword. “The suggestion for most people would probably be to wait it out. Intel is rumoured to have a serious GPU out early next year and they are likely to price it aggressively to try and gain some market share. Eventually the bottom has to fall out of this current disaster.” Continue reading...
Company says cost of adding homes to new network has dropped 15%, and ‘we can fund it ourselves’BT has scrapped plans to find a joint venture partner to help fund the rollout of its next-generation broadband network to an extra 5 million homes, before a potential takeover move by the billionaire investor Patrick Drahi next month.The company said it had abandoned plans to find a partner for its subsidiary Openreach because the cost of rolling out the new network had dropped significantly, and takeup by homes and business had proved better than expected. Continue reading...
This wildly hagiographic documentary about the billionaires fiddling with their massive rockets will have you cringing all the way into suborbital spaceFor a documentary created with the Washington Post, a newspaper owned by a company controlled by Jeff Bezos, the new Discovery+ special Space Titans has an impressive amount of Elon Musk in it. Maybe the algorithm doesn’t dictate everything quite yet. Or maybe it’s an oversight that is even now causing heads to roll in the corridors of Nash Holdings LLC before they are boxed up and sent by Prime to the homes of their former loved ones. We will never know, I suppose, unless Bezos chooses to tell us.Space Titans tells the story of the three billionaires – Bezos, Musk and, uh, Richard Branson – competing to see who has the biggest penis (I’m sorry: competing to see who can be the first to make space travel for ordinary citizens and colonisation of other planets a reality). We are told – repeatedly – that we are at an inflection point in space exploration. Billionaires are going to boldly go where no one has gone before. Because they have all the money now. Continue reading...
Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook, also calls misuse of user data as unethical as child labourA former adviser to Mark Zuckerberg has said democracy “may never recover” if Facebook does not change and has called for misuse of users’ data to be labelled as unethical as child labour.Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook who has become a staunch critic of the business, said revelations from whistleblower Frances Haugen have created an opportunity for change at Zuckerberg’s social media empire. Continue reading...
Firm must speed up drivers’ take-up of zero-emissions vehicles to meet green targets, says thinktankElectric cars are used for fewer than one in every 20 miles driven by Uber drivers in major European cities, according to data that suggest the taxi app company must drastically accelerate its drivers’ take-up of zero-emissions vehicles to meet its environmental targets.Uber pledged last year that 50% of miles driven in seven European capitals by the end of 2025 will be in battery electric cars. The vehicles produce zero exhaust emissions, helping to address the impacts on health and the climate caused by urban transport. Continue reading...
Firm says decision is in response to growing concerns over software that identifies users in photos and videosFacebook will delete the “faceprints” of more than a billion people after announcing that it is shutting down its facial recognition system due to the “many concerns” about using the technology.The social media network has been under political, legal and regulatory pressure over its use of the software, which automatically identifies users in photos and videos – and let’s them know if a fellow user has posted a photo or video with them in it – if they have opted in to the feature. In a statement, Facebook’s parent company, Meta, said it would shut down facial recognition on the platform over the coming weeks and delete 1 billion facial recognition templates. Continue reading...
by Vincent Ni China affairs correspondent on (#5RE19)
Internet firm cites ‘increasingly challenging business and legal environment’ as reason for exitYahoo has announced its withdrawal from the Chinese market in the latest retreat by foreign technology firms responding to Beijing’s tightening control over the industry.“In recognition of the increasingly challenging business and legal environment in China, Yahoo’s suite of services will no longer be accessible from mainland China as of November 1,” the company said on Tuesday. Continue reading...
Communication error may cause a false forward-collision warning or unexpected activation of the emergency brakesTesla Inc is recalling nearly 12,000 US vehicles sold since 2017 because a communication error may cause a false forward-collision warning or unexpected activation of the emergency brakes, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said on Tuesday.The California automaker said the recall of 11,704 Model S, X, 3 and Y vehicles was prompted after a software update on 23 October to vehicles in its limited early access version 10.3 Full-Self Driving (FSD) (Beta) population. Continue reading...
Technology | The Guardian