Technology | The Guardian

Revamp of 2000’s flip phone means big screen folds in half into a compact clamshell that fits in small pocketsIt’s not often something comes along to genuinely change the game, but the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip does just that, bringing foldable displays closer to the mainstream and reinventing the flip phone for 2020 in the process.Screens that fold in half finally arrived last year with the Galaxy Fold, which was originally plagued by durability issues causing a delay and a reworking of the device. Continue reading...

I rented a car through the Gig app. But when I lost cellphone service, I found myself stuck by a remote highwayOn Saturday morning, I used an app on my phone to unlock a vehicle from Gig, a car sharing startup, and set off for a Valentine’s Day weekend trip to northern California with my partner.By late Sunday afternoon, we were sitting on the side of a remote highway, a software issue on our smart car rendering it unusable. It was getting dark, we had no way of getting home, and I was contemplating the limits of the sharing economy and the ultimate costs of convenience. Continue reading...

Robot is almost as fast as a real snake and can nimbly and stably climb large stepsA robot snake has been developed by scientists in the race to advance the abilities of search and rescue machines.It is hoped that the robots may some day help to explore inaccessible terrain, such as rubble after an earthquake. Continue reading...

Politicians from WikiLeaks founder’s home country have flown to UK to visit him in jailBoris Johnson should block attempts to extradite Julian Assange to the US, say two Australian MPs who visited the Wikileaks founder in prison, describing him afterwards as “a man under enormous pressure” and whose health and mental health had deteriorated.George Christensen, a Liberal National MP for the ruling party in Australia told a press conference outside the gates of Belmarsh prison that he knew of information, which would come to light during the start of the extradition hearing next week, that would make people in Australia “sit up and worry”. Continue reading...

The app sensation has drawn millions of players and awarded $6m in prize moneyOnline quiz app HQ Trivia, which at its peak was played by more than 2 million people a day, has hosted its last game – with inebriated hosts awarding a total prize pool of only US$5.Described as a “final drunken hurrah”, the app’s last broadcast was watched by 28,000 people after the company told employees last Friday it would shut down due to lack of funding. Continue reading...

Figures obtained by GMB show safety at its UK warehouses could be worseningMore than 600 Amazon workers have been seriously injured or narrowly escaped an accident in the past three years, prompting calls for a parliamentary inquiry into safety at the online retailer’s vast UK warehouses.Amazon, whose largest shareholder is the world’s richest man Jeff Bezos, recently launched an advertising campaign fronted by contented staff members, after a string of embarrassing revelations about working conditions. Continue reading...

Company hit by shutdown in China and says it will fail to meet quarterly revenue targetApple has warned of global “iPhone supply shortages” resulting from its Chinese factories being shut because of the coronavirus outbreak.The Californian company told investors on Monday night it would fail to meet its quarterly revenue target of $63-67bn (£48-52bn) because of the “temporarily constrained” supply of iPhones and a dramatic drop in Chinese shoppers during the virus crisis. Apple did not provide a new forecast for its second-quarter revenue. Continue reading...

Move comes a month after Amazon threatened to fire employees who spoke out about company’s role in the climate crisisJeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and Washington Post owner, announced on Monday that he was donating $10bn to save the Earth’s environment – barely a month after it was revealed Amazon threatened to fire employees who spoke out about the company’s role in the climate crisis.The new Bezos Earth Fund will start distributing the money this summer, the multi-billionaire said in an Instagram post to his 1.4 million followers. Continue reading...

Mick Mulvaney is expected to demand that UK drop Huawei from 5G networksDonald Trump’s acting chief of staff is set to meet Dominic Cummings in Downing Street on Wednesday, when he is expected to demand that the UK rethinks its decision to allow Huawei a role in supplying 5G technology.The critical meeting between Mick Mulvaney and Johnson’s chief aide comes amid speculation that the White House wants the UK to commit to removing the Chinese company from British mobile phone networks in three to five years’ time. Continue reading...

Exquisite sound, effective noise cancelling, long battery life, future-proofed connectivity and comfortable to wearThe PX7 are the latest flagship noise-cancelling headphones from upmarket British manufacturer Bowers & Wilkins, which excel on sound while giving Bose a real run for its money.B&W have long made excellent headphones. Its first noise-cancelling headphones looked and sounded great, but weren’t comfortable. The £350 PX7’s redesigned earcups fix that problem while offering Bose-rivalling noise cancelling and exquisite sound. Continue reading...

Ruling comes after state environmental office greenlit clearance of 92 hectares of forestA German court has ordered Tesla to stop clearing forest land near Berlin to build its first European car and battery factory, in what is being hailed as a victory for environmental activists.The US electric carmaker announced plans last November to build a “Gigafactory” in Grünheide in the eastern state of Brandenburg. Continue reading...

Expert says technology deployed is based on outdated science and therefore is unreliableArtificial Intelligence (AI) systems that companies claim can “read” facial expressions is based on outdated science and risks being unreliable and discriminatory, one of the world’s leading experts on the psychology of emotion has warned.Lisa Feldman Barrett, professor of psychology at Northeastern University, said that such technologies appear to disregard a growing body of evidence undermining the notion that the basic facial expressions are universal across cultures. As a result, such technologies – some of which are already being deployed in real-world settings – run the risk of being unreliable or discriminatory, she said. Continue reading...

Worried about the data collected about you? A new generation of startups is making apps to put your privacy settings straightTech companies don’t have favourite songs, but if they did, they would all pick Radiohead’s Just – “You do it to yourself, you do/ And that’s what really hurts,” they would croon, staring their users dead in the eye. And strictly speaking, they’d be right: many of the worst excesses of the industry are, technically, optional. The world isn’t actually a binary choice between living in a surveillance state and opting out of all technological development since the turn of the millennium. You can opt out – you just have to know how.Of course, that knowledge is not always easily acquired, nor is it necessarily easy to apply. So a new breed of services has arrived to try to help normal users take control of their digital lives. Companies including Disconnect.Me and Jumbo act as something like a digital concierge for their users, tweaking privacy settings, deleting sensitive data and throwing a spanner into the inner workings of surveillance capitalism. Continue reading...

Co-founder says site sits between telephone company and newspaper as content providerFacebook must accept some form of state regulation, acknowledging its status as a content provider somewhere between a newspaper and a telephone company, its co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has said.He also claimed an era of clean democratic elections, free of interference by foreign governments, is closer due to Facebook now employing 35,000 staff working on monitoring content and security. Continue reading...

Some employers are not amused by viral videos shot in supermarkets, hospitals or police carsThey are some of the most popular videos on the shortform video-sharing app TikTok – clips of uniformed employees, from builders to nurses to supermarket staff, dancing and goofing around in their workplaces.But police forces and other employers are dissuading staff from posting videos, warning that they risk appearing unprofessional and urging them to not let social media “get in the way of doing their jobs”. Continue reading...

Mark Esper says countries using Chinese technology will put intelligence cooperation at riskThe US defence secretary, Mark Esper, warned that US alliances including the future of Nato were in jeopardy if European countries went ahead with using Chinese Huawei technology in their 5G networks.Esper also warned future intelligence cooperation would be at risk, as the US would no longer be certain its communications networks were secure. Continue reading...

Policy change involves what Facebook calls ‘branded content’, sponsored items posted by ordinary users who are typically paid by companies

It was the second most downloaded app of 2019 but in 2020 has acquired its first ‘why I deleted my TikTok’ essayPerhaps you’ve just barely wrapped your head around the existence and popularity of TikTok – something about dances? A young woman called Charli D’Amelio? Does the word “renegade” have something to do with it? Sigh.While you’re sorting that out, at least one young user is already over 2019’s second-most downloaded app. Last Sunday, Cornell University sophomore Niko Nguyen published an essay in the Cornell Daily Sun student paper detailing his personal decision to quit TikTok. According to the Verge’s technology journalist Casey Newton, Nguyen’s post is “the first known ‘why I deleted my TikTok’ essay. An important rite of passage for any social app.” Continue reading...

Washington calls for rethink and claims Chinese firm has ‘back doors’ to mobile networksBritain needs to take a “hard look” and reconsider its decision to allow the Chinese firm Huawei into the UK 5G network, US officials have said..The remarks, made on the margins of the Munich security conference on Friday, represent the most direct public warning from Washington to the UK that it should rethink and needs to recognise the high risk of exposure of the UK network to the Chinese state. Continue reading...

This mass surveillance is misguided and sinister. We must push back before it’s too late

Amazon requested the injunction after alleging that bias from Donald Trump caused the contract to be awarded to MicrosoftA federal court has ordered a temporary halt in Microsoft’s work on a $10bn military cloud contract that Amazon was initially expected to win. Amazon sued in December to revisit that decision, alleging that Donald Trump’s bias against the company hurt its chances to win the project.Amazon requested the court injunction last month. The documents requesting the block and the judge’s decision to issue the temporary injunction are sealed by the court. Continue reading...

Amazon founder purchases nine-acre estate once owned by Warner Bros president, Wall Street Journal saysJeff Bezos has set a new property price record in Los Angeles with the purchase of a $165m Beverly Hills estate, the Wall Street Journal reported.The Amazon founder’s purchase of the home from the media mogul David Geffen is the largest amount paid for a single-family Los Angeles-area home. The nine-acre estate originally belonged to Jack Warner, the late former president of Warner Bros Studios. Warner built up the estate’s 13,600-sq-ft Georgian-style mansion in the 1930s, reportedly with the wood floor that Napoleon was standing on when he proposed to Josephine. Continue reading...

Matthew Kabbabe wants to sue anonymous user who posted that procedure was ‘a complete waste of time’A Melbourne dentist has been given permission by the federal court to serve Google to attempt to find out the personal details of an anonymous account that left a bad review about his practice.Dr Matthew Kabbabe, a dental surgeon in Northcote, is seeking to sue a user known only as CBsm 23 for defamation over a negative review of his business in which the user claimed the dentist made the experience “extremely awkward and uncomfortable” and the procedure was “a complete waste of time”. Continue reading...

J-pop veteran Masato Nakamura’s soundtrack for the original Sonic game was an instant classic. Tom Holkenborg on reimagining that bold music for the big-budget film versionIf you’re a video game player of a certain age, the words Green Hill Zone will immediately bring to mind not only a certain blue spiky hero but also the sound of bright, crisp, high-tempo synth chords and a drum-machine beat. The music to Sonic the Hedgehog, composed by J-pop veteran Masato Nakamura, encapsulated the look and feel of the game, with its driving pace, luscious landscapes and azure skies.When soundtrack composer and electronic music producer Tom Holkenborg was brought in to provide the score for the new Sonic movie, it was Nakamura’s work that he looked to for inspiration. “I did a huge amount of research into the Sonic music and how it has developed over the last 30 years,” he explains down the line from Los Angeles. “A lot of the music is on YouTube, and it’s amazing how many views these pieces of music have – they really take people back to their first experience playing the games. For many, the Sonic music has the same nostalgic quality as an old Bing Crosby Christmas song – you can immediately picture yourself back there in front of your TV.” Continue reading...

Matt is resurrecting a 10-year-old laptop with only 4GB of memory. How can he make it run faster?I am trying to resurrect an old but good-in-its-day laptop for my son to use for his A-levels. I have bought a cheap 256GB SSD to improve the read/write speeds, but it seems I am stuck with the current 4GB of memory. Its two memory slots could support 8GB but 4GB DDR2 memory modules are prohibitively expensive at roughly £65 each. It doesn’t seem to make sense spending that sort of money on outdated memory technology for a 10-year-old laptop.What is the best way to set up Windows 10 so it runs fast on relatively limited memory? Is it worth using a different browser to Chrome? Is Microsoft Office too much of a resource hog?Chip costs are driven by production volumes, so obsolete types of memory are no longer in production, or are very expensive to produce. Often, there are alternatives, such as buying second-hand memory modules, and cannibalising laptops sold on eBay for “spares or repair”. Continue reading...

First Amazon true wireless earbuds offer a lot for the money but need attention in some areasAmazon’s first attempt at a set of true wireless earbuds gets a lot right, with Bose active noise reduction technology and hands-free Alexa.At £119.99, the Echo Buds undercut rivals, some of which cost more than twice as much. Their design is generic: large, kidney-shaped with a glossy touch panel on the outside and a standard silicone eartip on the inside. Continue reading...

Amazon, BT and Nokia among big names to pull out of mobile phone fair in Barcelona

Investors seek safe haven because of fears over the economic impact of outbreak

Competition regulator’s report takes aim at poor performance of controversial technologyAustralia’s competition regulator has said many people on fibre-to-the-node NBN connections are not able to get the speeds they are paying for, with nearly a quarter of people on higher-tier speeds found to have underperforming connections.The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission report for broadband speeds, released on Wednesday, showed similar average download-speed results for the month of November 2019 as the previous report, with users able to get at least 90.5% of their promised speed on fibre-to-the-premises, 91.4% on fibre-to-the-curb, 81.9% on fibre-to-the-node and 91.6% on cable. Continue reading...

Federal Trade Commission says its focus on smaller company takeovers will help clarify antitrust investigationsThe US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has ordered five major tech companies to hand over detailed information on hundreds of acquisitions made over the past decade, it announced on Tuesday.As part of its continued antitrust investigations, the agency, which enforces consumer protection laws, has required Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and Facebook to provide documents and other information on the purpose and scope of their takeovers of smaller companies from 2010 to 2019. Continue reading...

More than a dozen senators tell Amazon chief Jeff Bezos of their ‘serious concern’ about worker safety at the tech giantDemocratic presidential hopefuls Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are among more than a dozen senators telling Amazon chief Jeff Bezos of their “serious concern” about worker safety at the tech giant.Related: ‘I'm not a robot’: Amazon workers condemn unsafe, grueling conditions at warehouse Continue reading...

Firm’s second crack at folding screen reminiscent of mid-2000s clamshell devices

Federal judge rejected arguments that T-Mobile’s $26.5bn takeover would mean less competition and higher phone billsAnd then there were three. The number of US mobile phone provides looked set to shrink again on Tuesday as a federal judge rejected arguments that T-Mobile’s $26.5bn takeover of Sprint would mean less competition and higher phone bills.Though the deal still needs a few more approvals, T-Mobile expects to close it as early as 1 April. Continue reading...

Barcelona event to go ahead with measures including ‘no handshake policy’ for global attendees

USB-C, faster processors and new design options continue to keep Microsoft’s Windows 10 laptop near the top of the pileMicrosoft’s top-quality laptop is now in its third generation, with new ports, new processors and a slight redesign, with the option to ditch the unique Alcantara for plain old aluminium.The £999 and up Surface Laptop 3 is Microsoft’s vision of what a traditional laptop should be. For the most part that’s the same as everyone else, with traditional aluminium body, glass-covered screen and hinge that does not rotate all the way round to the back. Continue reading...

Company claims president’s interference harmed its chances of receiving military contract that was eventually awarded to Microsoft

William Barr says hackers spent weeks in Equifax system, stealing company secrets and personal dataThe United States has charged four Chinese military hackers in the 2017 breach of the Equifax credit reporting agency that affected nearly 150 million US citizens, William Barr, the attorney general, said on Monday.Related: Democrats go on the offensive ahead of New Hampshire primary – live Continue reading...

Consumer confidence in Europe suffers, with mobile sales in China forecast to fall

Computer scientist regarded as ‘the European father of the internet’The UK’s first connection to the Arpanet, a precursor to the internet, was made on 25 July 1973, when a computer at University College London transmitted packets of data to the Information Sciences Institute at the University of South California.The man behind this milestone was Peter Kirstein, who has died aged 86. Often regarded as “the European father of the internet”, Kirstein played a significant role in the technology’s early experimental period, helping establish and expand the internet in Europe and other parts of the world. Continue reading...

Microsoft billionaire’s innovative and eco-fuelled 112m Aqua vessel to launch after 2024This article is under review following a statement from the Dutch yacht design firm Sinot that its concept yacht is not linked to Bill Gates. See footnote

We are more connected than ever, but we rarely seem to really speak to each other. So, Rebecca Nicholson decided to tryLike most people I know, my Weekly Screen Report is obscene. Every Sunday, when the notification pops up to tell me the hours I have wasted, mostly texting, I think about all the things I could have done. Finished Middlemarch. Started Middlemarch. But as I have my phone in my hand, I scroll through Instagram instead. I send an article or a joke to a friend, a picture of the dog to the family WhatsApp, catch up on someone else’s night out. Recently, I clocked up – and I’m ashamed as I write this – six hours and 29 minutes of phone usage in a single day. I have had days where I’ve barely been awake that long. Messages is my most used app. I am talking all the time.But I am rarely talking. For the chatterboxes among us, this is a time of upheaval. The long, spontaneous chat on the phone is going the way of the fax. The percentage of households with a landline that’s used to make calls is declining every year, from 83% in 2016 to 73% in 2019; the number of calls made on house phones plummeted by 17% in 2018 alone. We still use our mobiles to talk – in 2018, Ofcom surveyed mobile users for three months and found only 6% of them never made a single call – but we are not talking in any great depth. The same study found that over 80% of calls were shorter than five minutes, and the majority were under 90 seconds. I looked at my own recent call list: three minutes, two minutes, five minutes at a push. What can you say in that time? You can only make the point you’ve called to make. Continue reading...

Experts say information sold on by Department of Health and Social Care can be traced back to individual medical recordsThe Department of Health and Social Care has been selling the medical data of millions of NHS patients to American and other international drugs companies having misled the public into believing the information would be “anonymous”, according to leading experts in the field.Senior NHS figures have told the Observer that patient data compiled from GP surgeries and hospitals – and then sold for huge sums for research – can routinely be linked back to individual patients’ medical records via their GP surgeries. They say there is clear evidence this is already being done by companies and organisations that have bought data from the DHSC, having identified individuals whose medical histories are of particular interest. Continue reading...

From bike mechanics to baking, the video-sharing site offers a goldmine of knowledgeHolding an Allen key in a grease-stained hand, João Cruz looks every bit the professional bike mechanic. Wind back five years, however, and this 39-year-old former journalist barely knew how to fix a brake cable.“To be a good mechanic, you need tools and knowledge; I had the tools, but I needed to get the knowledge,” said Cruz, owner of Velurb, a small bike rental business in the Portuguese city of Porto. Continue reading...

Letter from Iain Duncan Smith and other MPs requests that ‘high-risk’ vendors are ruled outA group of senior Conservatives have written to their fellow Tory MPs expressing concern over the government’s decision to allow Chinese technology company Huawei to have a role in building the UK’s 5G network.Iain Duncan Smith, who is among the signatories, said there was cross-party concern about the issue. Continue reading...

Teens, more than anyone, need time spent in solitude, where emotions are processed and the brain powers downThere are many reasons to fret about our relationship to technology, not least of which is the way smartphones, and their slot machine-like apps, have hooked us so thoroughly. Thanks to these miniature overlords many of us now boast the attention span (and manners) of a toddler, and, like prisoners on parole, are physically incapable of moving about without our electronic monitoring devices on us at all times.When adults behave this way it’s depressing and odd, but when teenagers step into this world – not having known an alternative reality – the problem becomes a social concern. Continue reading...

We have fallen for the idea that apps and artificial intelligence can substitute judgement and hard work. They can’tEvery four years, journalists from around the world are drawn to the Iowa caucuses like podcasters to a murder. The blatantly anti-democratic tradition appeals to certain journalistic biases: the steadfast belief of the political press that rural Americans are more authentically American than the vast majority of Americans who live in cities and suburbs – and the irresistible opportunity to pedantically explain arcane rules. You can also get something called a “pie shake” in Iowa, which is, truly, delicious.I understand the appeal. In 2008, as a graduate student at the University of Iowa, I was so enthusiastic about the caucuses that I stayed in town through winter break during the snowiest Iowa winter on record, rather than risk missing my chance to caucus for Barack Obama. (This was long before I had even considered journalism as a career.) The exercise in “democracy” that I ended up experiencing was patently absurd. Continue reading...

Firm that supplies Apple hopes to manufacture 2m masks after electronics production was hit

US president was reportedly furious about PM’s decision to use Chinese 5G expertiseDowning Street has sought to play down the significance of a difficult phone call between Donald Trump and Boris Johnson over the UK’s decision to allow Chinese company Huawei to help build its 5G network.Trump was reported by the FT to have been “apoplectic” about the decision taken by Johnson, and the phone call last week was said by one official to have been “very difficult” and tense. Continue reading...