Technology | The Guardian

Online crime during Black Friday and Cyber Monday in 2020 defrauded UK shoppers by £2.5m

As a former top civil servant has pointed out, private firms seem happy to let governments pick up the pieces when hackers strikeCiaran Martin is what is known in Whitehall as “a safe pair of hands”. In the 23 years he spent working there he held a number of senior roles within the Cabinet Office, which included negotiating the basis of the Scottish referendum with the Scottish government and being director of security and intelligence. He was also responsible for (and I am not making this up) “spearheading the equalising of the royal succession laws between males and females in the line”. Before that, he had been private secretary to the permanent secretary at the Treasury and then principal private secretary to the cabinet secretary. When the government set up the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) in 2016 he was appointed its first director. He now basks as a professor in the luxurious environs of the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University.Folk with that kind of background generally don’t go in for hyperbole. And yet Martin has recently been all over the mainstream media warning that “nobody is safe from Russia’s digital pirates” (the Spectator), that the “sale of semiconductor factory to Chinese-owned firm presents a bigger UK risk than Huawei” (Daily Telegraph), that UK schools have been “held to ransom” by Russian hackers (BBC Radio 4) and so on. And now here he is in Prospect magazine under the headline “We have privatised our cyber security. The winners are the hackers”. Continue reading...

Opportunities for business, health and the environment offered by superfast processors are huge – and so are the hurdlesThe technology behind everyday computers such as smartphones and laptops has revolutionised modern life, to the extent that our day-to-day lives are unimaginable without it. But an alternative method of computing is advancing rapidly, and Boris Johnson is among the people who have noticed. He will need to push the boundaries of his linguistic dexterity to explain it.Quantum computing is based on quantum physics, which looks at how the subatomic particles that make up the universe work. Last week, the prime minister promised the UK would “go big on quantum computing” by building a general-purpose quantum computer, and secure 50% of the global quantum computing market by 2040. The UK will need to get a move on though: big steps have been taken in the field this year by the technology superpowers of China and the US. Continue reading...

The Biden administration has shown an early determination to tackle the power of Amazon, Google, Facebook and co. But is it already too late?When historians look back on this period, one of the things that they will find remarkable is that for a quarter of a century, the governments of western democracies slept peacefully while some of the most powerful (and profitable) corporations in history emerged and grew, without let or hindrance, at exponential speeds.They will wonder at how a small number of these organisations, which came to be called “tech giants” (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft), acquired, and began to wield, extraordinary powers. They logged and tracked everything we did online – every email, tweet, blog, photograph and social media post we sent, every “like” we registered, every website we visited, every Google search we made, every product we ordered online, every place we visited, which groups we belonged to and who our closest friends were. Continue reading...

Dozen of motorists report error as company’s CEO, Elon Musk, apologises on TwitterHundreds of Tesla drivers were locked out of their cars at the start of the weekend after the manufacturer’s mobile app suffered an outage – and dozens voiced their complaints on social media.Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, said on Friday that the company’s mobile application was coming back online after the app server outage. Musk was responding to a Tesla owner’s tweet, who said that he was experiencing a “500 server error” to connect his Model 3 through the iOS app in Seoul, South Korea. Continue reading...

With so much film, TV, music, books, streaming, games and podcasts easily available and vying for our attention, how can we absorb it all? And should we even try, asks Anne Helen PetersenThere was a moment, back in, oh, 2012, when I thought I’d be able to keep up with it all. And by “it all”, I meant all the good TV shows, all the good movies, all the good music. From my tiny studio apartment in Austin, Texas, I would read the Twitter feeds of the critics I loved, then consume what they told me to. I caught obscure documentaries at one of the local theatres. I BitTorrented the shows that fell under the ever-widening banner of “quality” television. Spotify meant that, for the first time, I really could listen to the Top 100 albums of the year, as advised by Pitchfork. I saw blockbusters on Friday nights in movie houses packed with teenagers. I listened to Top 40 radio. I read the latest Pulitzer winners and all four Twilight books. I was feasting, but not yet overfull.Or, to use a different metaphor: I was treading water in what I saw as a glorious and expanding sea of media, such a contrast to the options of my rural youth, when my choices were severely limited by the options at the video rental store, extended cable and the one CD a month I could afford on babysitting money. Of course, elements of my access were either illegal (BitTorrent) or paid the artist very little (Spotify). But I also felt, very much like the 27-year-old I was, that I had finally achieved a sort of comfortable fluency, the kind that allowed me to always answer “Yes” when someone inevitably asked: “Have you seen/read/heard this? Continue reading...

Allowing 13-year-olds with a Junior account to use iPhone or Apple Watch ‘adds an extra layer of safety’One of the fastest-growing banking apps is letting its teenage customers make contactless payments using their iPhone or Apple Watch.Revolut, which has almost 4 million users in Britain and more than 16 million globally, said this week its Junior account holders in the UK and Europe can now make use of Apple Pay. Continue reading...

People in the Jadar valley fear environmental catastrophe as Europe presses for self-sufficiency in battery technology

Guardian Australia picture editor Carly Earl explains the dos and don’ts of photographing the celestial spectacle

Company’s letter to LA police chief comes after the Guardian revealed that the department partnered with a tech firm that enables undercover spying

Attorneys general launch bipartisan inquiry after company’s own research showed platform harmed childrenA bipartisan coalition of US state attorneys general has opened an investigation into Facebook for promoting Instagram to children despite the company’s own awareness of its potential harms.The investigation, which involves at least eight states, comes as Facebook faces increasing scrutiny over its approach to children and young adults. Documents leaked by a former employee turned whistleblower recently revealed the company’s own internal research showed the platform negatively affected the mental health of teens, particularly regarding body image issues. Continue reading...

The vehicle is rumoured to have no steering wheel or pedals, and the interior has a U-shaped seating planApple is stepping up its plans to enter the car market and aims to launch a self-driving electric vehicle in 2025, according to a report.The tech company’s much-rumoured automotive project has bolstered its ambitions under new leadership and is pushing for a fully self-driving vehicle with no steering wheel or pedals, said Bloomberg. The car’s interior would be designed for hands-off driving, with one possible design featuring passengers sitting around a U-shaped seating formation. Continue reading...

The smash-hit Nintendo Switch game has been updated with a wealth of new content – and no shortage of familiar comfortsWhen I heard there was an enormous Animal Crossing update on the way, I was as unnerved as I was excited. I wanted to go back to my island, sure; Kissing was a tiny paradise I’d painstakingly curated, hour by hour, in the depths of last year’s lockdowns – but had been avoiding since January.For the past 11 months I’ve let the place go to seed, missing in-game events and limited-edition items and, most importantly, ignoring the villagers who inhabit Kissing. Dom, the first creature on the land, a sheep who likes sports – how was he? What about Sprinkles, a blue penguin who wants to be a pop star? I’ve been navigating my return to real-life society very slowly, and I know from experience that when left alone for too long, the villagers of Animal Crossing are notorious for laying on the guilt. Continue reading...

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...

PC, Xbox, PlayStation 4/5, Nintendo Switch; Rockstar Games/Grove Street Games/Take-Two Interactive

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

Voyager, which pitches its tech to police, has suggested indicators such as Instagram usernames that show Arab pride can signal inclination towards extremism

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...

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...

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...

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...

PC, Microsoft/Relic Entertainment

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...

PC, PS4/5, Xbox; Activision

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...

Up for discussion in the Guardian tech newsletter: Facebook and Google will be targets for Ofcom if the government passes the proposed legislation

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!”

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...

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...

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...