Technology | The Guardian

Falcon 9 rocket to make history as billionaire seeks to commercialise space travel

The PM told Australians in April the contact tracing app was key to getting back to normal but just one person has been identified using its dataIt was sold as the key to unlocking restrictions – like sunscreen to protect Australians from Covid-19 – but as the country begins to open up, the role of the Covidsafe app in the recovery seems to have dropped to marginal at best.“This is an important protection for a Covid-safe Australia,” the prime minister, Scott Morrison, said in late April. “I would liken it to the fact that if you want to go outside when the sun is shining, you have got to put sunscreen on.” Continue reading...

In just a few days, the bogus Covid-19 claims of a discredited research scientist spread to millions via YouTube, Facebook and other video-sharing sites

PM set to shrink Chinese firm’s involvement to zero by 2023 after caving to backbench pressureBoris Johnson has been forced to cave into to Conservative backbench rebels opposed to the presence of Huawei in 5G networks and has drawn up plans to reduce the Chinese company’s involvement to zero by 2023.The prime minister’s retreat is designed to stave off what could have been an embarrassing defeat when his existing proposal to reduce Huawei to a 35% market share was to be voted on in the Commons. Continue reading...

EasyJet hack | Johnson’s U-turn | Tights | Albino pheasants | Favourite restaurantsYour article (EasyJet hacking attack: are you affected and what should you do?, 19 May) on dealing with a suspicious phone call about fraudulent transactions suggests: “End the call and then phone the bank or card company back to check it was legitimate.” What is missing is the fact that fraudsters can “spoof” the dial tone, hold on to the line and pretend to be the bank. The correct procedure is firstly to phone a friend, who the fraudsters cannot imitate, to check the line is actually clear.

Lockdown turns mild-mannered mutterings from a Surrey loft into unlikely spectator sport

The New Zealand software company Rocos is training a Boston Dynamics-designed robot called Spot to work on farms to help 'relieve the strain of worker shortages, and create precision in farming’. Another Boston Dynamics robot is being tested in Singapore, reminding members of the public to maintain physical distancing in a public park Continue reading...

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says he expects 50% of the company’s employees to work from home over the next five to 10 years. The social media giant will embrace remote work, even after coronavirus restrictions end, with Facebook limiting offices to 25% capacity when workers return in July.The company has 48,000 employees in 70 offices around the world

The iconic maze chase has been played billions of times, created one of the 80s’ strangest sex symbols, stupefied Martin Amis – and is now enshrined in a leading art museumIt was on this day in 1980 that one of gaming’s most iconic characters made his debut. To celebrate, here are 40 facts about the ravenous yellow circle and his proud, pill-popping legacy …1. Pac-Man was created by game designer Toru Iwatani – he was just 24 at the time. The idea for the character came to him when he removed a slice from a pizza. Continue reading...

Mark Zuckerberg says company will embrace permanent remote work after lockdowns liftFacebook will permanently embrace remote work, even after coronavirus lockdowns ease, Mark Zuckerberg told employees on Thursday, accelerating the tech sector’s geographic diversification away from its home in Silicon Valley.The CEO said the world’s largest social network would start “aggressively opening up remote hiring”, expecting that about half its workforce would work remotely over the next five to 10 years. Continue reading...

PC, Mac, iOS; Dreamfeel/Annapurna Interactive

The biggest video game of lockdown has become a new home for fashion lovers where avatars can dress in Prada, Off-White or Sports Banger hoodiesNintendo’s Animal Crossing, the best-selling game of the coronavirus pandemic, has become an unlikely outlet for fashion fans in lockdown. Avatars have been wearing bootleg creations inspired by Prada, Gucci, Chanel and Thierry Mugler catwalk looks or created specifically for the virtual world by designers including Marc Jacobs, who has created a six-strong collection for the game, and Valentino.There are various ways to attain new clothes in this soothing cyber society in which players can pick fruit and make friends with anthropomorphised animals. The Able Sisters, a tailor shop in the game that is run by two hedgehogs, has become as talked about in some quarters as Harvey Nichols. Here players can “buy” anything from pleather masks to neon tights using the game’s currency of bells. Continue reading...

The famed poster CartoonsHateHer has become a viral star for her ‘good’ trolling, but not everyone finds her creations funnyThe benevolent troll-queen of the internet prefers to remain anonymous, but here’s what we know: the 30-year-old US-based cartoonist and internet personality who goes by the alias CartoonsHateHer (let’s call her CHH for short) has, over the years, published hundreds of posts to online forums like Reddit under various alternate identities.These posts have often gone viral – thanks largely to CHH’s masterly navigation of the line between absurdity and believability. Essentially, she pretends to be someone else online – for the lols. Continue reading...

Slim and powerful laptop with excellent keyboard and trackpad is hindered by a few small flawsThe 2020 MateBook X Pro takes a winning design and upgrades the chips to Intel’s latest for a powerful and surprisingly good-value machine.The new MateBook X Pro starts at £1,299, and fits a pretty large 13.9in screen in the size of a laptop body that would traditionally fit only a 13in screen. Continue reading...

From throwing an alpaca party to adding a goat to a work call, video calling is providing a financial lifeline for businessesWhile the rest of the world has been in lockdown, the goats of Cronkshaw Fold farm in Lancashire have never been busier. In the past few weeks they’ve been to a rave in Berlin and a birthday party in New Zealand, while Mary goes to church services every Sunday – all virtually, of course.They’re one of an increasing variety of animal breeds people can now book to join their Zoom meetings, whether it’s to break the tedium of a work conference call or to surprise someone on their birthday. Continue reading...

Software can be used to develop apps that detect when a user has spent time near another user who later tests positive for the virusApple and Google have released long-awaited smartphone technology to automatically notify people if they might have been exposed to the coronavirus.Related: Apple and Google team up in bid to use smartphones to track coronavirus spread Continue reading...

Thomas le Bonniec says firm violating rights and continues massive collection of dataA former Apple contractor who helped blow the whistle on the company’s programme to listen to users’ Siri recordings has decided to go public, in protest at the lack of action taken as a result of the disclosures.In a letter announcing his decision, sent to all European data protection regulators, Thomas le Bonniec said: “It is worrying that Apple (and undoubtedly not just Apple) keeps ignoring and violating fundamental rights and continues their massive collection of data. Continue reading...

Businesses will be able to sell to customers through Shops, potentially posing a challenge to commerce rivals such as Amazon

The pandemic has forced the Unicode Consortium to delay new emojis in 2021 – but remixes of existing ones could be on their wayCovid-19 has taken so much from us, but now it’s come for our emojis too.Related: Coronavirus US live: Trump claims to take hydroxychloroquine and threatens to withdraw US from WHO Continue reading...

Airline apologises after credit card details of about 2,200 passengers were stolen

New model squeezes bigger screen in same body, for an excellent, affordable ultraportable PCThe Surface Go 2 is Microsoft’s second iteration of its low-cost, smaller tablet computer and continues to prove that cheap Windows PCs don’t have to be terrible.The Surface Go 2 starts at £399, but for that you don’t get the £100 Type Cover keyboard, which is a must-have. That places the Surface Go 2 in the low-end PC bracket and makes it Microsoft’s cheapest current PC, undercutting the Surface Pro 7 by £300. Continue reading...

Journalists forced to submit written questions after outages of video conferencing platform

The latest attempt by the social media giant to act as a sovereign power is breathtaking in its sheer effronteryHere we go again. Facebook, a tech company that suffers from the delusion that it’s a nation state, has had another go at pretending that it is one. Originally, you will recall, it was going to create a global currency called Libra and in effect become shadow banker to the world. Strangely, a world that normally seems hypnotised by Facebook turned out to be distinctly unimpressed by that idea; after all, who would trust Facebook with money? So the project is effectively evaporating into something that looks a bit like PayPal, which is not quite what Facebook’s supreme leader, Mark Zuckerberg, had in mind.Nothing daunted, though, Zuck has had another hubristic idea. On the grounds that Facebook is the world’s largest information-exchange autocracy (population 2.6 billion) he thinks that it should have its own supreme court. (Yes, that’s the expression he originally used: later, wiser councils – possibly a guy called Nick Clegg – persuaded him that that might be just a tad presumptuous.) So it’s now just an “oversight board for content decisions”, complete with its own charter and a 40-strong board of big shots who will, it seems, have the power “to reverse Facebook’s decisions about whether to allow or remove certain posts on the platform”. Sounds impressive, doesn’t it? But it looks rather less so when you realise what it will actually be doing. It’s actually a board for locking the stable door after the horses have bolted. Let us call the Facebook oversight board by its initials: FOB. Continue reading...

From a drunk Donald Trump to storytime with Boris Johnson, women are skewering the absurdity of Covid-19 life

Many people in Britain lack internet access and sufficient tech skills, charities warn MPs

The in-game party where you can listen to DJs, do cartoonish challenges or hurl burgers while dressed as a banana is a mass-participation godsendMy son is dressed as a giant banana and he is throwing hamburgers at me. I am making my getaway on a solid gold quad bike. For once, neither of us has access to automatic weapons.No, our home schooling regime hasn’t taken a dark turn. This is Party Royale, the brand new Fortnite mode, where deadly violence is banned and where the emphasis is on messing about and engaging in non-lethal competitions – but mostly messing about. It’s only been live for a few days but already it feels like what the early-millennium online social experiment Second Life could have been if it had been built by game designers rather than Californian internet eggheads. Continue reading...

Resident Evil was reanimated, Coffee Talk brewed up a mindful treat and Final Fantasy VII made our dreams come trueThe desert-island alternate-life game that’s spawned a thousand memes, Animal Crossing offers a cute, stress-free and eminently controllable little world to escape into. Compelling and full of character, it gives plenty of reasons to come back every day. Continue reading...

PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, Nintendo Switch (version reviewed); Megagon Industries

Long battery life, comfortable and secure ear hooks and great sound for exercisingApple’s revamped Powerbeats Bluetooth workout earphones take what was great from the firm’s true wireless earbuds and add a cable, longer battery life and cheaper price.The new £129.95 Powerbeats replace the older, more expensive Powerbeats 3, with redesigned ear hooks, cable guides and Apple’s H1 chip, which simplifies Bluetooth connectivity and gives them all the AirPods-like features Apple’s headphones have with iPhones. Continue reading...

Minicab firms aim to increase coronavirus protections after data shows drivers are one of the groups most at riskAddison Lee and Uber are to install partition screens in vehicles to protect staff and passengers from infection with coronavirus, after new data earlier this week revealed that male taxi drivers and chauffeurs are among those at highest risk of death from the disease.London’s largest private hire car operator, Addison Lee, claims to be the first in the industry to make the move, announcing that it would be fitting screens to all 4,000 vehicles in its fleet at a likely cost of hundreds of thousands of pounds. Continue reading...

The billionaire has defied shelter-in-place orders and styled himself as an anti-lockdown hero. This is how we got here

Chancellor says she was pained to learn outcome of inquiry pinning blame on Fancy BearAngela Merkel has said Russian hacking attacks on the Bundestag in which her emails were seized harmed efforts to build a trusting relationship with Moscow.Merkel told the German parliament on Wednesday that she had been pained to learn of the 2015 hack and the perpetrator. Continue reading...

Nintendo’s record-breaking new game has been embraced by a world in isolation. Its creators talk about how it was made for sharingAnimal Crossing has been a thing for almost 20 years, but this year it has exploded. You cannot scroll through any social media feed without seeing one of its benign, big-headed characters in a screenshot or video showing off someone’s beautifully tended desert island. Celebrities including Elijah Wood have been delighting fans by turning up to visit their towns. People who’ve rarely played games before have been picking it up as a lockdown distraction – including Lauren Laverne, who enthused about it on her Radio 6 Music show. US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez picked it up a few days ago and has been visiting her Twitter followers.Since the latest game, New Horizons, came out on 20 March, it has become a cliche to say that this is the game we all need right now. But if the numbers are anything to go by – it’s been setting new records, selling 11m copies by the end of March – then it’s absolutely true. Continue reading...

Great screen, performance, battery life and health tracking – but held back by small nigglesSamsung’s Galaxy Watch Active 2 may not run Android, but it is the best Android-compatible smartwatch available.The Galaxy Watch Active 2 starts at £269, costing £289 as reviewed here, and is the firm’s 10th smartwatch. Samsung has been making smartwatches since 2013 and it shows – the Galaxy Watch Active 2 is the most polished this side of the Apple Watch Series 5. Continue reading...

Federal parliamentary committee examining rollout says fears over network are being exploited, particularly on social media

Each worker will get $1,000, more if they were diagnosed with a disorder as a result of the material they viewedFacebook has agreed to pay a settlement of $52m in a court case alleging the company failed to protect workers tasked with moderating disturbing content from the grave mental health impacts of the job.As part of the settlement, which was announced Tuesday, moderators will get a minimum of $1,000 each from Facebook with the potential for additional compensation if they have been diagnosed with mental health disorders, including PTSD. Continue reading...

The company said those who want to return to the office won’t likely do so until at least September and reopening will be ‘careful’

Those who stay home ‘will be on unpaid leave’, email says, as employees say company is using ‘threatening tactics’

CEO announces electric carmaker will begin production on Monday after company sues county over Covid-19 restrictionsElon Musk announced on Twitter that Tesla would resume production at its northern California factory on Monday afternoon, in defiance of a local public health order designed to slow the spread of coronavirus.“Tesla is restarting production today against Alameda County rules,” the billionaire CEO tweeted. “I will be on the line with everyone else. If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me.” Continue reading...

From separate share-houses in lockdown we tackle shared finances, work-life balance and goal setting – in a farming simulation“I’m going to the mines!” says a voice through my laptop.It’s my partner, Joel – albeit a pixelated version of him. I see him move swiftly out of the screen as I go back to my task of chopping down an oak tree, searching for wood and sap. Continue reading...

Carmaker sues authorities and threatens to move HQ out of California after factory stopped from reopening

Tesla sues state authorities over lockdown after Fremont factory stopped from reopening

Want something to show for the weeks you have spent in lockdown? These apps will help you achieve your aimsIn early April, one bullish American consultant suggested on Twitter that if people didn’t emerge from coronavirus quarantine having learned a new skill, gained more knowledge or having started something they’d been putting off, then “you didn’t ever lack the time, you lacked the discipline”.As the tweet was widely shared, it met mockery and anger in equal measure, as people noted that home schooling, financial worries, stress and/or illness are making this period anything but a delightful self-improvement holiday. Continue reading...

The tech giant has often been accused of mistreating workers, but our desire for instant gratification is part of the problemTim Bray resigned as an Amazon vice-president last week. “Who he?” I hear you say. And why is this news significant? Answers: first, Bray is an ubergeek who’s an alumnus of many of the outfits in tech’s hall of fame (including DEC, Sun Microsystems, the OED project at the University of Waterloo, Google’s Android team and, eventually, Amazon Web Services); and second, he resigned on an issue of principle – something as rare as hen’s teeth in the tech industry.In his blog, he wrote: “I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19.” It was an expensive decision. Bray said the decision to resign would probably cost him more than a million dollars in salary and shares, and that he regretted leaving a job he enjoyed, working with good colleagues. “So I’m pretty blue.” Continue reading...

As a delivery driver in a Blade Runner-style landscape, the thrill is to dip into client’s lives. Just don’t ask what’s in the packageThe city of Nivalis is, at once, arrestingly beautiful and awkwardly familiar. With its streaking hover cars and pink-humming katakana signs, the sparkling rain and homeless androids, it’s a cliche that invites cliches: “sprawling”, “neon-lit”, “Blade Runner-esque”. Still, overfamiliarity with the aesthetic does little to blunt the fierce appeal of Cloudpunk’s game world.In part that’s because this is a world constructed from tiny pixelated building blocks, which give the city and its distinct districts the feel of a basement Lego project that got wildly out of hand. As you sweep across its glowing vistas, weaving in, out, over, and under the local traffic, the tumbling blocks of houses below appear to plead to spill their secrets. The buzz when you first realise you can park up and gather them up on foot is exhilarating. But Cloudpunk also slips the constraints of its genre by virtue of its casting: you play, not as a monosyllabic hacker trying to topple a megacorp, or as an ex-cop trying to win back his badge, but as that humble hero of the hour: the delivery driver. Continue reading...

The wildly popular game gives players a place to socialize with others or simply escape while on lockdown for coronavirusAs shelter in place orders around the world have left many people trapped at home indefinitely, some have found a new place to meet up: inside the digital world of wildly popular Nintendo game Animal Crossing.Released in late March, Animal Crossing: New Horizons quickly became the top game in the US. In it, users explore a carefree pastel environment, growing fruits and flowers, catching bugs or fish to sell, and making friends with other characters in an open-ended simulation. Continue reading...

Cities like Barcelona want to use crisis to allow people to rent properties at decent ratesAirbnb has revolutionised travel and since it was founded in 2008 hundreds of thousands of property owners have used the holiday accommodation platform to make ends meet, make a living and, in some cases, make a killing.But while hosts, as they are known, are wringing their hands over the collapse of the travel industry and their loss of income, many city authorities are rubbing theirs at the prospect of thousands of holiday lets returning to the traditional rental market. Cities complain that the highly profitable holiday lets have driven up rents and forced out residents with the knock-on effect that local businesses no longer have a community to serve. Continue reading...

Juul, Yelp and hundreds of startups among tech firms cutting jobs while Amazon and Zoom see huge boosts