Technology | The Guardian

The Theranos founder’s fraud trial reminds us how obsessed Silicon Valley used to be with productivity. But has the pandemic changed things for the better?

I was hoping to earn my son’s respect by playing Sea of Thieves, but was hopelessly out of my depth

‘Total IT outage’ at convenience stores forced them to shut or accept cash payments onlyMore than 300 branches of the convenience store chain Spar in the north of England have been hit by a cyberattack, forcing many of them to close.The attack hit the company’s computer systems, causing a “total IT outage” that has prevented staff from taking card payments and locked them out of emails. Continue reading...

PC, Xbox Series, Xbox One; Microsoft; 343 Industries

We map out the rising number of high-tech surveillance and deterrent systems facing asylum seekers along EU bordersFrom military-grade drones to sensor systems and experimental technology, the EU and its members have spent hundreds of millions of euros over the past decade on technologies to track down and keep at bay the refugees on its borders.Poland’s border with Belarus is becoming the latest frontline for this technology, with the country approving last month a €350m (£300m) wall with advanced cameras and motion sensors. Continue reading...

Bitget reportedly loses licence after it promoted Army Coin, named after group’s ‘BTS army’ followersSingapore’s financial regulator has reportedly suspended Bitget, a crypto exchange that is mired in a row involving South Korea’s biggest boyband, BTS.Bitget has removed the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s logo from its website, the Guardian confirmed. The platform still claims to have licences from Australia, Canada and the United States, according to its website. Continue reading...

Jack Dorsey will no longer steer the company he founded, but is this due to stagnating profits or a more fundamental change of direction?So Jack Dorsey has stepped down as the CEO of Twitter. This means that the company has had four CEOs in its 15 years of existence, with Dorsey occupying the role twice, but in all that time it’s had only one business model, which may largely explain his departure.There are interesting parallels between Dorsey’s relationship with the company he co-founded and Steve Jobs’s with Apple, for both were ousted at one stage by their board colleagues and were then brought back to rescue said colleagues from their incompetence. Continue reading...

The inventor on the joy of Hockney, a fear of forgetfulness and how his father taught him to sink or swimBorn in Norfolk, Sir James Dyson, 74, studied at the Royal College of Art. He spent four years developing the cyclonic vacuum cleaner and went on to set up his company in 1992. Dyson products, now available in 82 countries, span household vacuums, purifier fans and heaters, lighting, hand dryers and haircare. This year he published his autobiography, Invention: a Life. He is married with three children and lives in Wiltshire.What is your earliest memory?

US official proposes ‘non-binding code of conduct’ at United Nations but campaigners disagreeThe US has rejected calls for a binding agreement regulating or banning the use of “killer robots”, instead proposing a “code of conduct” at the United Nations.Speaking at a meeting in Geneva focused on finding common ground on the use of such so-called lethal autonomous weapons, a US official balked at the idea of regulating their use through a “legally-binding instrument”. Continue reading...

Meta says misinformation spread by fictional scientist called Wilson Edwards focused on US blaming pandemic on China

The long-running franchise is back with a reasonably entertaining 90s-set story of the emergence of a zombie virusLike the zombie-making virus which is the true game engine of this long-running franchise, the world of Resident Evil keeps evolving, respawning and regenerating extra mutant limbs and organs in different media. First there was the influential shooting-centric computer game from Japan; that begat half a dozen blood-and-VFX feature films from married star-and-director team Milla Jovovich and Paul WS Anderson. Then followed television series, novels, comics, stage productions and even a Resident Evil-themed restaurant.Even if you haven’t played, watched, read or even eaten any Resident Evil product that shouldn’t significantly impair anyone’s ability to at least mildly enjoy and get up to speed with this latest iteration: a reboot story set in the late 1990s in the fictional town, the titular Raccoon City, where the zombie virus first emerges as a threat to humanity. Although gravely disappointed to report there are no raccoons whatsoever on hand, I can reveal that this is a reasonably entertaining, unpretentiously gory horror exercise, although clearly a bit distended with an excess of characters that need to be incorporated into the plot, many of whom feature in older RE lore. Continue reading...

The best esports competitors make millions, and the industry prides itself on meritocracy. So why are there so few women among the top earners?According to independent site esportsearnings.com, the highest-paid esports player has accumulated more than $7m (£5.2m) in winnings across his career. Johan “N0tail” Sundstein is a Danish Dota 2 player and has competed in more than 100 tournaments to amass his fortune.Below him in the rankings, the next 30 highest earners are all male Dota 2 players. But even where other games like Fortnite, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Call of Duty begin to appear, the list is still dominated by men. The first woman appears at #367: the Starcraft II champion Sasha “Scarlett” Hostyn. Hostyn has made about $400,000 (£300,000) in prize money during her career since 2011; a far cry from the millions of men above her. Continue reading...

Chief executive posts ‘Blow the whistle on Tesla!’ amid lawsuits brought against carmakerTesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, has appeared to joke about whistleblowers on Twitter in the wake of high-profile lawsuits against the electric carmaker brought by current and former staff.The billionaire urged his 65 million Twitter followers to “Blow the whistle on Tesla!” and included a link to a branded “Cyberwhistle” for sale in the company’s online shop. Continue reading...

Up for discussion in this week’s newsletter: an internal brawl over Dave Chappelle’s Netflix special is just the latest chapter in increasing activism in the industry

ERC-721’s topping of ArtReview’s Power 100 is first time a non-human entity has led listThe non-fungible token or NFT has taken the No 1 spot in the annual ranking of the contemporary art world’s most influential movers and shakers – marking the first time a non-human entity has topped the list.ERC-721, the specification for the “non-fungible token” on the Ethereum block-chain, tops the 20th Power 100 list published by ArtReview, after a year in which it upended the art market by bringing together contemporary art and millennial meme culture. Continue reading...

Nearly 3bn people, or 37% of global population, have never been online despite rise in use during pandemic

CMA said order would protect users and stop Meta ‘increasing its power in social media’Facebook parent company Meta has been ordered by the UK competition watchdog to sell the gif creation website Giphy, the first time the regulator has moved to block a deal struck by one of the Silicon Valley giants.The Competition and Markets Authority, which provisionally ruled in August that a sell-off was the only way to resolve competition concerns, said the move would “protect millions of social media users” and stop Facebook “increasing its significant power in social media”. Continue reading...

This gleefully incongruous piece of tie-in merch pays tribute to a quarter-century of Tomb Raider with recipes. So can we expect a spaghetti carbo-Lara?Tomb Raider recently celebrated its 25th anniversary, which means 25 years of articles about how Lara Croft transcended video games to become a global icon even your gran has heard of. As a female games critic, I am personally asked to explain her enduring popularity 25 times an hour, to the point where I have boiled my answer down to this: for many of us, she symbolises a moment in the history of gaming where we saw ourselves represented for the first time. Not as a princess trapped in a castle, but as an enigmatic, acrobatic embodiment of fierceness. Naturally, the adolescent boys of the 90s also regarded her with the same distanced respect, right?Anyway, here’s what nobody says they remember fondly about Tomb Raider: the food. Lara doesn’t have a signature snack, like Mario with his mushrooms or Pac-Man with his Mini Babybels. She’s never seen taking a break from shooting dinosaurs to chow down on a Kendal mint cake and some lemon-barley water. The early games allow you to explore her ancestral home, which has a walk-in freezer, but all it contains are giant legs of ham. Continue reading...

I received a flood of renewal demands and unsubscribing doesn’t workI cancelled my McAfee anti-virus subscription earlier this year when I discovered it had been double charging me. It refunded only the current year and led me on a wild goose chase to recover the previous two years’ money; I eventually gave up.Now that my subscription period has ended, it is bombarding me with renewal demand emails several times a day. This weekend I received 15. Continue reading...

Bessemer workers will hold a second vote based on objections to the first one, but labor experts say victory is a long shotA new union election for Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama, will be held based on objections to the first vote that took place in April.The move is a major blow to Amazon, which had spent about a year aggressively campaigning for warehouse workers in Bessemer to reject the union, which they ultimately did by a wide margin. Continue reading...

Clearview AI may have gathered data without people’s knowledge, says Information Commissioner’s OfficeA US company that gathered photos of people from Facebook and other social media sites for use in facial recognition by its clients is facing a £17m fine after the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) found it had committed “serious breaches” of data protection law.Clearview AI, which describes itself as the “world’s largest facial network”, allows its customers to compare facial data against a database of more than 10bn images harvested from the internet. Continue reading...

Cabinet Office announces new standard for tools that influence exam results, housing benefit allocations and pothole repairsMinisters and public bodies must reveal the architecture behind algorithms that influence exam results, housing benefit allocations and pothole repairs, under new transparency standards.The UK government has published a transparency standard for algorithms, the series of instructions that a computer follows to complete a task or produce a single outcome. Algorithms have become the focus of increasing controversy, whether through their role in deciding A-level results last year or making decisions about benefit claims. Continue reading...

‘Threat groups’ could target valuable secrets with aim of unlocking them when computing power allowsChinese hackers could target heavily encrypted datasets such as weapon designs or details of undercover intelligence officers with a view to unlocking them at a later date when quantum computing makes decryption possible, a report warns.Analysts at Booz Allen Hamilton, a consulting firm, say Chinese hackers could also steal pharmaceutical, chemical and material science research that can be processed by quantum computers – machines capable of crunching through numbers at unprecedented speed. Continue reading...

Clicking on my profile page is like entering a time machine to 2010. It’s not a place I want to beIt’s 2am and, for the past hour, I’ve been reliving an entire decade of my life. As far as I can tell, it was a phenomenally stupid decade. If my Facebook pictures are anything to go by, I spent all of uni honking my friends’ boobs and putting things on my head. I then spent my early- to mid-20s dressed stupidly, in the company of a lot of people I now can barely remember. My God, the Hat Phase. There I am in a fedora at Pride; skinnier and better-looking, but clearly having a hard time establishing my “look”.This is the longest I’ve spent on Facebook in about four years. Finally, I’ve decided to delete it. In my 30s, it’s started to stress me out that my profile still exists. Drunk pictures of me on display for people I haven’t thought about in a decade. Whatever teenage me saw worthy of a status update just out there, searchable, findable, obscured only by privacy settings that I don’t fully understand.Eleanor Margolis is a columnist for the i newspaper and Diva Continue reading...

From smartphones to tablets and headphones to laptop bags, there is plenty to choose from

PC, Xbox One/Series X/S, PlayStation 4/5; Frogwares

Gamers are making millions by playing in front of audiences on platforms like Twitch. But when fame and money counts on you always being on, can you ever switch off?It is June 2018, and I am sitting at a table in a needlessly fancy restaurant in LA with a bunch of teenagers. Well, some of them must be over 21 as they are able to order alcohol, but most are sticking to Coke or sparkling water with their overpriced steaks. These are some of the up-and-coming stars of Twitch, the livestreaming platform that now broadcasts about 2bn hours per month from more than 9m channels, most of which involve people filming themselves and chatting while playing video games. Later, there will be a lavish party in a similarly extravagant club, where the streamers with the most views and subscribers will be treated like celebrities in the VIP area.And, well, they are celebrities. They have millions of followers. They are stopped in the street or at airports by people wanting a selfie and an autograph. Unlike pro gamers, whose job is to be good enough at video games to win tournaments, a streamer’s job is to be entertaining enough – while playing anything from first person shooters to racing games – to win fans. Back in 2018, streaming was already a huge deal; now, bolstered by the pandemic and an ever-growing audience that boosted Twitch’s viewership by 70% in 2020, it is even bigger. To draw a comparison that makes me feel about 4,000 years old, they are their generation’s rock stars. Continue reading...

The UK developers at Playground Games explain why they cut no corners in creating the latest Forza game, and wanted to ensure it gives players an authentic and cliche-free view of the Mexican landscapeThere is a moment all Forza Horizon 5 players will experience when they first venture off road into rural Mexico. They will bust through a wall, or reach the summit of a steep hillside, and then, spread out before them as far as the eye can see, will be fields of the most glorious orange flowers. These are Mexican marigolds, or cempasúchil, which are closely associated with the country’s Día de los Muertos festival. It is believed their vibrant colour and heady scent help to guide the spirits of the dead back to their graves and altars.“When you look at the flowers you can see the individual petals,” laughs the game’s art director Don Arceta. “We love doing farmland – it’s a real opportunity to show the native agriculture that makes each landscape unique. This is the first Horizon game in a while that doesn’t have canola growing everywhere. That was really nice.” Continue reading...

EVs are seen as key in transition to low-carbon economy, but as their human and environmental costs become clearer, can new tech help?While the journey to a low-carbon economy is well under way, the best route to get there remains up for debate. But, amid the slew of “pathways” and “roadmaps”, one broad consensus exists: “clean” technology will play a vital role.Nowhere is this truer than for transport. To cut vehicle emissions, an alternative to the combustion engine is required. Continue reading...

Thierry Henry is among the hosts of a new multilingual podcast about the football legend. Plus: a deep dive It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and I’m Not a Monster returnsThe Last Days of Maradona

Firm’s subsidiary in Ireland agrees to backdated settlement to be paid in addition to corporation tax for 2020Google’s Irish subsidiary has agreed to pay €218m (£183m) in back taxes to the Irish government, according to company filings.The US tech company, which had been accused of avoiding hundreds of millions in tax across Europe through loopholes known as the “double Irish, Dutch sandwich”, said it had “agreed to the resolution of certain tax matters relating to prior years”. Continue reading...

Fed up of getting destroyed by teenagers whenever you play online? The more tactical, slower-paced combat of Halo Infinite makes older players feel at home againAbout 30 minutes into playing the Halo: Infinite online beta last week, I had a shocking, almost unbelievable realisation: I am quite good at the game. I’d just vaporised two enemy players with a grenade, which I’d thrown in a perfect arc to catch them together and totally unaware. The brutalist formality of the level design meant that I could come in at an acute angle, skirting their sightlines until the very last moment. I then took up the flag and ran it all the way back to our base, jumping and dodging around incoming fire. It was my third capture of the evening.In modern shooter games such as Call of Duty: Warzone, Fortnite and Apex Legends, older players like me tend to get absolutely destroyed by teenagers. With Halo Infinite’s multiplayer mode, it’s the other way around. In early interviews around the game, developer 343 Industries talked about how they thought of Infinite as a spiritual reboot of and love letter to the first three Halo titles, which were released between 2001 and 2007. We’re playing on our turf now. Continue reading...

Proposed legislation follows warning from Narendra Modi and crackdown in ChinaThe Indian government is preparing to ban private cryptocurrencies and allow the country’s central bank to launch an official digital currency.The proposed legislation follows a crackdown on cryptocurrencies in China, where financial regulators and the central bank have made all digital currency transactions illegal. Continue reading...

Up for discussion in this week’s newsletter: the tech giant’s new at-home repair programme is good for customers – but there’s reason to be cynical

Group’s biggest single US investment comes amid global chip shortage and related national security concernsSamsung has said it will build a $17bn (£12.7bn) semiconductor factory in Texas, amid a global shortage of chips used in cars, phones and other electronic devices.The plant just outside Austin would be the South Korean company’s biggest US investment and is expected to be operational in the second half of 2024. Continue reading...

Panorama asks how ethical Elon Musk’s rare-metal supply chain is. Plus: Jimmy Perez concludes his murder case on scary Shetland. Here’s what to watch tonight Continue reading...

iPhone maker also seeks to ban firm behind Pegasus spyware from using any Apple software, services or devicesApple has launched a lawsuit against NSO Group, the Israeli spyware company that was recently blacklisted by the Biden administration for acting “contrary to the foreign policy and national security interests of the US”.The move marks a sharp turnaround for the technology giant, which previously downplayed the threat posed by the spyware, and underscores growing concern and frustration among technology companies about the proliferation of attacks against its customers. Continue reading...

Beauty retailer says it has had enough of social media after allegations of whistleblower Frances HaugenLush has announced it is closing its accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok until the social media sites do a better job of protecting users from harmful content.The campaigning beauty retailer said it had “had enough” after the allegations of the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, who claims the company puts profit ahead of the public good. Continue reading...

Founder of controversial blood-testing startup will continue testifying in her own defense on TuesdayThe Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes completed a second day of testimony in her own defense, in a widely followed fraud trial that could have major implications for Silicon Valley.Flanked by her mother and partner Billy Evans, Holmes brusquely walked into the federal courthouse in San Jose, California, past throngs of journalists who had been waiting since the early morning hours to chronicle one of the most high-profile trials the tech world has seen in decades. Continue reading...

Challenger company that hoped to win 100 million customers burned through cash as the complaints piled upBulb Energy was once the fastest-growing supplier in Britain’s energy market, and one of the UK’s most celebrated startups.But the company may be best remembered as the biggest casualty of the energy market crisis after it handed the responsibility for supplying gas and electricity to 1.7m homes to a special administrator on Monday. Continue reading...

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