Technology | The Guardian

People have predicted robots will destroy the labour market, but Amazon believes investment in robotics could create jobsTrapped in a metal cage in a corner of a 350,000 sq ft Amazon warehouse outside Boston last week a lonely yellow robot arm sorted through packages, preparing items to be shipped out to customers who demand ever-faster delivery. Soon it will be joined by others in a development that could mean the end of thousands of jobs and, Amazon argues, the creation of thousands of others.As the robot worked, a screen displayed its progress. It carefully packed a tub of protein powder, next came a box of napkin rings then … a tube of hemorrhoid cream. As 100 journalists from around the world snapped pictures, someone switched the screen to hide the cream. Continue reading...

Founder Sam Bankman-Fried races to find funds to fill multibillion-dollar hole in exchangeThe Bahamas securities regulator has frozen the assets of the Bahamas subsidiary of FTX, as the world’s second largest cryptocurrency exchange struggles for survival.The Securities Commission of the Bahamas said on Thursday it had frozen the assets of FTX Digital Markets and related parties, as well appointing a liquidator for the unit. Continue reading...

The game developer talks about how the hit smartphone card game is a brand new take on deck-builders – and why one simple quirk makes it irresistible• Read our review of Marvel Snap hereThere’s a lot that is surprising about Marvel Snap, the new free-to-play digital card game from one of the minds behind Hearthstone (and the money behind TikTok). A match takes just five minutes. Both players play their cards at the same time. There’s not a paid-for booster pack in sight. Perhaps the biggest surprise, as the game launches its second monthly season, is that it’s really, really good.I spoke to Ben Brode, the co-founder of Snap’s developer Second Dinner, about what Snap is, how the team set out to fix the problems of existing trading card games, and where they’re going from here. Continue reading...

iPhone, Android, PC; Second Dinner/Nuverse

Departures of top figures handling safety, security, privacy and compliance come amid warnings from Federal Trade CommissionAs Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter entered its third week, and following mass layoffs, the billionaire laid bare a delicate financial future for the social media platform, amid an exodus of top privacy and security executives.Yoel Roth, the head of safety and integrity who had been deputized to publicly address concerns advertisers and users had about the platform, is reportedly the latest to leave the company. Continue reading...

The service now allows users to pay $8 to appear ‘verified’. Celebrity impersonators are having a field dayGeorge W Bush “misses killing Iraqis”, and Tony Blair agrees. OJ Simpson says he did it. And Elon Musk is offering “free nightly dinners” and family vacations to anyone whose name happens to be that of his ex, Grimes.At least, that’s what these famous people appear to be saying on Twitter – and it must all be true, because they have a blue checkmark next to their names. Continue reading...

The blow comes soon after rival Binance backed out of a merger deal this week after due diligence of the exchange’s booksThe swift collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX sent more shockwaves through the crypto world on Thursday, with authorities now investigating the firm for potential securities violations and analysts bracing for a further downturn in crypto prices.FTX had agreed this week to sell itself to its bigger rival Binance after experiencing the cryptocurrency equivalent of a bank run. Customers fled the exchange after becoming concerned about whether FTX had sufficient capital. Continue reading...

Prof Hannah Fry is a joy, and will make you deeply excited about the weirdest things – like the magnetic strip on the back of your bank cardProf Hannah Fry brings her irresistible enthusiasm to the BBC for The Secret Genius of Modern Life (BBC Two), a documentary series about the seemingly simple everyday objects or ideas that we tend to take for granted, and how clever they really are. Fry, a mathematician by trade, who hosts podcasts, writes books and adds weekly cheer to Lauren Laverne’s morning show on 6 Music, is a host who is winningly awestruck at the facts she uncovers and the experiments she conducts. Her interest in finding out everything about everything is hugely contagious.In this first episode, she looks at the humble bank card, though naturally, it turns out to be not so humble after all. There is a lovely brisk pace to the show, which takes in history, science and technology, tracing as many elements as possible back to their roots. It begins with the Fresno Drop, in 1958, in which the Bank of America introduced a credit card to its suspicious customers and kickstarted a technological revolution. It whizzes through the introduction of the magnetic strip, via an acronym-friendly segment on how the CIA worked with IBM on inventing a new form of ID, and follows the money through to online shopping, chip and pin, contactless and what a biometric future may look like. Continue reading...

Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese says release of stolen medical records is ‘reprehensible’

The behemoths of Silicon Valley face some serious shrinkage and a reckoning with the societies they work inFacebook, Instagram, Twitter, Amazon: these behemoths have shaped our world. This winter, however, the world is shaping them. Faced with a global downturn, a US economy that appears headed for recession and interest rates shooting up across the west, big tech is in big trouble. This week, Meta – the company that owns Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram – declared it will sack 11,000 employees, or more than 13% of its staff. Last week, Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, got rid of half the workforce. In August, Snap, the parent firm of Snapchat, reduced staff by 20%. Amazon has announced a hiring freeze, while the payments-processing platform Stripe is also shedding 14% of its workers.A bleak winter lies ahead for many of those employees and their families, as well as the firms servicing and supplying the big names in technology. And a moment of reckoning is in store for big tech. For some of these companies and many of their managers, this will be their first serious downturn, and the combination of rising interest rates even as the economy sinks could make it a real stinker. The past decade has gifted Silicon Valley easy money and investors desperate to buy growth as well as gangbuster sales of smartphones – the device that spawned millions of apps. Then came the pandemic, which prompted billions of consumers to buy and socialise online. As Mark Zuckerberg admitted this week, Meta was among those businesses that counted on this huge tide staying in for ever. It hasn’t. Continue reading...

Social media has been crucial to pro-democracy protests across the region, from Myanmar to the Milk Tea Alliance in Thailand and Hong KongWhen Thai journalist and free speech defender Pravit Rojanaphruk joined Twitter in 2011, the social media platform was for him just a home for a few academics and politicos arguing among themselves.But over the next decade – in tandem with Thailand’s pro-democracy and monarchy reform movement – young people and activists flocked to Twitter to organise, share information and exchange protest tactics across borders. Pravit himself increasingly turned to his 85,000 followers to get the word out about facing forced resignation and sedition charges for criticising the government. Continue reading...

International exchange for crypto assets is in effect unregulated – and may have been built on sand

The announcement comes as three top security officials leave the company and employees are asked to ‘self-certify’ complianceElon Musk has scrapped Twitter’s work from home policy and ordered its staff back to the office, days after firing 3,700 employees.The social media platform’s new owner told staff in an email, seen by the Guardian, that its “road ahead is arduous and will require intense work to succeed”. Continue reading...

Northern Ireland secretary calls on platform’s owner to eliminate fake news after false resignation emailThe battle to curb fake news and fake accounts has swerved into a linguistic debate over the meaning of tosh.“What does a tosh look like?” Elon Musk tweeted on Thursday in reply to a British government minister who appealed to him to intervene after a false claim that he had resigned. Continue reading...

Firm valued at $25bn in 2021 suffered bank run-style crisis as investors rushed to withdraw moneyThe founder of the world’s second largest cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, has apologised for his company’s near-collapse this week, saying he “fucked up” in his calculations and in his communications during the crisis.Sam Bankman-Fried, a billionaire and major donor to the US Democratic party who has lobbied Washington for tighter regulation of the crypto market, was speaking following a run on his Bahamas-headquartered FTX exchange. Continue reading...

Theatre503, London

In this week’s newsletter: What pushed the al-Qaeda founder to extremism, and to perpetrate the 9/11 attacks? A new show tells his whole story. Plus: five podcasts for nature lovers

The deal was conditional to due diligence of FTX’s balance sheet which raised enough concerns for Binance to back outCryptocurrency prices plunged for a second straight day on Wednesday after crypto exchange platform Binance announced it was pulling out of its deal to purchase its failing rival FTX Trading.Bitcoin sank to a two-year low after Binance confirmed earlier rumors and news reports that it was ready to back out of the FTX deal, struck between the CEOs of the two exchanges on Tuesday. The deal was pending Binance’s due diligence on FTX’s balance sheet. Continue reading...

Post on blog linked to Russian ransomware group says it offered ‘discount’ ransom to health insurer of US$9.7m, or $1 for each customer’s data

Elon Musk’s takeover has seen an estimated million users leave the site. But was it already past its prime?Like much of what has happened in recent years, the possibility of Elon Musk taking over and actually managing to destroy Twitter had the quality of a fever dream: something that would probably be a disaster but would almost certainly never happen. It felt likely that, even in the most dramatic case, he would succeed only in making an already bad platform slightly worse. Which is why the last 10 days have awed even Musk’s harshest critics: since he took over Twitter on 27 October, after firing thousands of staff and the company’s entire board so that he became its sole member, the site has truly begun to tank. By Musk’s own admission, the company is losing $4m a day – reportedly in large part due to advertisers fleeing.In the few days after Musk’s takeover, more than a million people are believed to have left the site, many in pursuit of an alternative Twitter-esque platform. While there are several popular existing sites that allow users to create text posts shared to an online message board (like Discord, Reddit, and Tumblr), the emerging favourite is Mastodon: a social networking site which uniquely operates as a nonprofit, effectively pitching itself as “Twitter, but nice”. However, the idea that you can recreate a version of Twitter without Twitter’s pre-existing problems is a pipe dream. It won’t happen on Mastodon; it most probably won’t happen anywhere.Sarah Manavis is an American writer covering technology, culture and society Continue reading...

Musk said he was done selling Tesla stock back in August, before Twitter’s legal action sealed the deal for the $44bn takeoverTesla CEO Elon Musk has sold 19.5 million of his shares in the electric car company, according to filings published by the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday, in a transaction worth $3.95bn.The move comes in the wake of his purchase of Twitter for $44bn. Continue reading...

Twitter troubles | I Spy in Yorkshire | Gavin Williamson’s defenestration | Dishonours system | Don’t forget the editorSeeing the damage that Elon Musk has done to his Twitter brand in such a short time brings to mind the example of Gerald Ratner when, 30 years ago, he described some of his products as “total crap” and remarked that one set of Ratners earrings were cheaper than an M&S prawn sandwich, but probably would not last as long.

Holmes faces up to 20 years in prison after being convicted on 12 counts of fraud and conspiracyA federal judge denied the Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes’s bid for a retrial on investor fraud charges after finding that an attempt by a remorseful prosecution witness to contact her didn’t introduce material new evidence or establish government misconduct – and it wasn’t enough to award her another trial.The ruling issued late Monday by US district judge Edward Davila is a setback for Holmes, who faces up to 20 years in prison at sentencing on 18 November. Holmes was convicted on 12 counts of fraud and conspiracy in January and had previously been denied a request for an acquittal. Continue reading...

Meme artist @Sunday.nobody builds $1,200 sarcophagus for cheesy snack ‘for future civilizations to find’A small bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos has been sealed in an elaborate, 3,000lb, concrete sarcophagus with a gold leaf headstone “for future civilizations to find” by a 28-year-old TikTok user who says “there’s nothing else I’d really want to spend my money on” other than completing a project of this nature.Meme artist @Sunday.nobody, based in Seattle, Washington, said on the TikTok social media video platform that everything about the sarcophagus had been designed and built from scratch, including the exterior moldings and the headstone that lists the Cheetos ingredients. Continue reading...

Three years’ research and a lot of very expensive materials have gone into Steve and Nick Tidball’s thermal camouflage jacket. Can its wearer really blend into the background?Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak arrived in a parcel for Christmas, with a note from Dumbledore: “Use it well.” Ron Weasley’s reaction was, as you might expect, to be insanely jealous. Who, after all, hasn’t dreamed of having the power of passing through the world without being seen?Well, there might just be some good news for Ron and the rest of us. A pair of twins have created something very like an invisibility cloak. No, not the Weasley twins, but real-life brothers Steve and Nick Tidball. They call it the thermal camouflage jacket, and I’ve come to see it and Steve, in the offices of the brothers’ futuristic clothing company, hidden away behind a Travelodge in King’s Cross, London. Continue reading...

Elon Musk’s chaotic first week as chief twit has crystallised fears that the site is in a death spiral. Here’s a handy guide to other platforms – from a Slack-style chatroom to the anti-Twitter

Whether you need something sturdy for your kids or a noise-cancelling haven for yourself, here are gaming headset recommendations for all budgetsRazer’s budget headsets are always very good and though they’re lightweight, they’re pretty strong and reliable – my careless teenage sons have had their Krakens for almost two years and they’ve survived admirably. The Kraken X model is compatible with all the current consoles, it’s comfortable, has decent sound and looks pretty good. The newer, slightly more expensive Razer Barracuda X is another excellent option in the unde-£100 price category. Continue reading...

Verification is free, toots are twice as long as tweets – but you might find it hard to replace your Twitter follower list. Here’s how to use it, find a server to join and navigate the fediverseInterest in the open source social media platform known as Mastodon has spiked again as users look for an alternative to Twitter, should Elon Musk’s takeover spell the end of that website as we know it.If you’re fleeing the sinking ship of Twitter for the potential life raft of Mastodon – or wondering whether to – here’s what you need to know. Continue reading...

A search of James Zhong’s Georgia home uncovered 50,000 bitcoins found on a circuit board in the bottom of a popcorn tinThe United States is seeking the forfeiture of more than $1bn in bitcoin stolen from the Silk Road online marketplace, federal prosecutors in Manhattan said on Monday.In the second largest seizure in US Department of Justice history, Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agents obtained the 50,000 bitcoins during a November 2021 search of the defendant James Zhong’s home in Gainesville, Georgia. Continue reading...

PC, Mac; Max Inferno/Secret Mode

Super-premium Apple tablet gets power and feature upgrade, but comes at even higher costApple has added yet more power to its top tablet, fitting the new iPad Pro with the M2 chip from the latest Macs while attempting to make it work more like a laptop with new software. But all that power comes at a truly eye-watering price.The new models cost £899 ($799/A$1,399) for the 11in screen or £1,249 ($1,099/A$1,899) for the 12.9in version as reviewed here. That’s the same price as the MacBook Air laptop, and £250 more than last year’s 12.9in iPad Pro with M1 chip, due to weak currency rates against the US dollar. Continue reading...

Guardian Australia picture editor Carly Earl explains the dos and don’ts of photographing the moon. Tuesday night’s total lunar eclipse will be the last one visible from the region until 2025.

Tech company says customers will experience longer wait times as the plant in China is operating at reduced capacityApple has said it expects fewer iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone Pro Max shipments than previously anticipated as Covid-19 restrictions temporarily disrupt production at an assembly facility in Zhengzhou, China.“The facility is currently operating at significantly reduced capacity,” Apple said in a statement. “Customers will experience longer wait times to receive their new products.” Continue reading...

Platform’s new owner tells video-makers he’s planning ‘creator monetization for all forms of content’The anarchic behaviour of YouTubers draws huge online audiences and has turned stars such as MrBeast and Logan Paul into the best-paid entertainers of the internet age. Now Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, wants a piece of this lucrative action and will attempt to lure video creators on to the social media platform.In a series of messages posted on Twitter this weekend, Musk engaged with video-makers, saying he was planning “creator monetization for all forms of content”, and that his company could “beat” the 55% cut of advertising revenue that YouTube gives its top entertainers. Continue reading...

A week-long experiment by the Guardian showcased how widely each person’s experience and ‘For You’ page variedDance videos, viral pranks, adorable pets, beauty tutorials and 60-second recipes. A scroll through TikTok’s “For You” page offers a steady stream of strange and delightful content that can feel both chaotic and somehow perfectly suited to your tastes.But how exactly does TikTok’s algorithm decide what to serve up, and why do you get that eerie feeling it knows you better than you know yourself?Create a brand new account using their real identities (even if they already had one)Open their “For You” page at the same time every morningMake a note of the first 10 videos the algorithm served upRepeat for seven days Continue reading...

Analysis by hate monitoring organisation shows platform has shown reality star’s content ‘despite pledge’ to crack downTikTok is failing to crack down on accounts that post misogynistic content featuring the banned influencer Andrew Tate, despite a previous pledge to do so, according to new research.Analysis by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) identified more than 100 accounts that frequently promote content featuring Tate, with a total of 250m video views and 5.7 million followers. Continue reading...

Stuffed ballot boxes, ‘BlueAnon’, support for Russia and ‘corporate communists’ are catnip on the rightwing platformBallot boxes being stuffed. “BlueAnon”. Men in underpants. Every Democratic candidate: a “complete weirdo psychopath”.To dive into Truth Social, Donald Trump’s Twitter-but-for-conspiracy-theorists social media platform, is to enter a world where all of the above are real topics of debate, breathlessly discussed by Trump-backing Republicans and anonymous rightwing provocateurs. Continue reading...

Volker Türk says reports of platform’s human rights team being laid off is ‘not an encouraging start’Elon Musk has been urged by the UN to make respect for human rights central to Twitter after suggestions that as many as half of its more than 7,500 staff could be sacked.In an open letter, Volker Türk, the UN high commissioner for human rights, said that reports of the new owner laying off the platform’s entire human rights team were “not, from my perspective, an encouraging start”. Continue reading...

Twitter Blue offers status marks formerly used to validate VIP accounts, with more features ‘coming soon’Twitter has launched a subscription service allowing users to buy blue-tick verification for a monthly fee of $7.99 (£7) in a significant change under its new owner, Elon Musk.The system was designed to help users identify authentic and influential users on the platform, including government figures, sports stars, entertainment figures, journalists, brands and organisations. Continue reading...

Former UK-based vice-president Bruce Daisley thinks Tesla boss has underestimated the complexity of his restructuring plansElon Musk “doesn’t know what he’s doing” with Twitter and is “making everyone alarmed”, a former executive has said, after major brands paused their advertising spend on the platform and the company laid off thousands of staff.

As anger builds, Dorsey says ‘I own the responsibility for why everyone is in this situation – I grew the company too quickly’Former Twitter chief executive officer Jack Dorsey has gone on the platform recently acquired by billionaire Elon Musk to apologize for the state of the site, which has laid off thousands of workers.On Saturday Dorsey published a series of tweets in response to the layoffs across Twitter’s workforce, which began on Friday. As many as half of the company’s 7,500 staffers could be axed since Musk acquired the company for $44bn last week. Continue reading...

Pretending that opaque, error-prone ML is part of the grand, romantic quest to find artificial intelligence is an attempt to distract us from the truthOne of the most useful texts for anyone covering the tech industry is George Orwell’s celebrated essay, Politics and the English Language. Orwell’s focus in the essay was on political use of the language to, as he put it, “make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”. But the analysis can also be applied to the ways in which contemporary corporations bend the language to distract attention from the sordid realities of what they are up to.The tech industry has been particularly adept at this kind of linguistic engineering. “Sharing”, for example, is clicking on a link to leave a data trail that can be used to refine the profile the company maintains about you. You give your “consent” to a one-sided proposition: agree to these terms or get lost. Content is “moderated”, not censored. Advertisers “reach out” to you with unsolicited messages. Employees who are fired are “let go”. Defective products are “recalled”. And so on. Continue reading...

New owner says company is losing $4m a day as he tries to reassure advertisers over content moderationElon Musk has defended the mass layoffs at Twitter by saying axed employees received a three-month payment from the company, which is losing more than $4m a day.The company began widespread staff cuts around the world on Friday, with suggestions that as many as half of its more than 7,500 staff could lose their jobs. Continue reading...

The UK-based photographer had to act quickly to capture his mini-moggy’s perfect pose – but is it enough to make Pearly Whiskers famous?John Angerson was working late one night when the family kitten hopped on to his desk. “She was only about three or four months old; I think we got her a little bit early,” he says. “This was the first time she’d made her way into my office. As she sat in my in-tray, I reached for my phone to take a quick photo – the yawn was just good luck.”Angerson’s daughter Daisy, who was four at the time, named the tabby Pearly Whiskers. Angerson admits that she hasn’t grown into the most affectionate of cats. “She usually only appears at breakfast and tea – she’s very independent. She still wanders into the office sometimes, but usually just to nibble on my wires until I give her food,” he says. “She does like to hang out in Daisy’s bedroom, though. When I told her about this, she asked: ‘Is Pearly Whiskers going to be famous?’” Continue reading...

Internal chaos at the company – and the decimation of its staff – has created ideal conditions for falsehoods and hateful contentThe mass layoffs at Twitter that diminished several teams, including staff on the company’s safety and misinformation teams, could spell disaster during the US midterm elections next week, experts have warned.The company has laid off around 50% of its workforce, according to news reports; a figure that Musk and others have not disputed, amounting to an estimated 3,700 people. Continue reading...

Claims that the social media platform’s entire curation team was dismissed prompts fears content could become ‘more toxic’Elon Musk ended his first week as Twitter’s owner with an indelible mark by slashing, by some estimates, up to half of the company’s workforce with little notice and abruptly cutting off employees’ access to their computers and work systems.Many employees spent the day tweeting their goodbyes, as Musk revealed brands had begun pulling their advertisements, leading to what he said was a “massive drop in revenue”. He tweeted late Friday the cuts were needed as “unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day”. Continue reading...

With advertisers cutting ties and pressure to pay back loans worth $13bn, the new direction for revenue has come under questioningLayoffs of hundreds of Twitter employees have raised alarm about the future of the platform as it continues to restructure under the ownership of Elon Musk, who purchased the company for $44bn last week.Musk, upon taking the helm of Twitter has made sweeping changes to the company, on Friday beginning mass layoffs across a number of sections – including marketing, product, engineering, legal and trust and safety. Continue reading...

In part three of our series on the UK’s battery ambitions, we look at its attempts to encourage ‘gigafactories’Human beings and batteries are a bad mix: water and dust can cause disastrous short circuits in the cells that power electric cars, risking blazing fires. So the few people allowed into the vast clean rooms at Envision AESC’s factory in Sunderland must don a full body suit and go through an air shower first. Even the Guardian’s notebook is switched for paper that does not shed fibres.Once inside, robots rule the lines. They cut rolls of electrode materials to size, layer them on top of each other and weld them to an accuracy not possible with human hands, before they are injected with electrolyte that will enable lithium ions to move one way and electrons another, powering motors of the Nissan cars made next door. Continue reading...

New owner plans widespread overhaul but he’ll need to work hard to keep advertisers onside

From lapsed millennials ageing reluctantly into their 30s to families and new players, a guide to which of the many Pokémon games might be your vibeWhen Pokémon first arrived on the scene, on cheerful coloured Game Boy cartridges inside unassuming cardboard boxes, few would have predicted that 25+ years later, there would be more than 50 games featuring these collectible pocket monsters. They’ve become a bit of a pest problem, actually, growing from the original 150 critters to more than 900. Thanks to the franchise’s gargantuan success – from anime to trading cards to several films, one of which starred Ryan Reynolds as Pikachu – there’s an overwhelming number of modern Pokémon games. If choosing between them has left you grasping your head like a Psyduck, here’s a breakdown of the best. Continue reading...