Britain's first next-generation supercomputer, planned by Tories, in doubt after Labour government moveThe Labour government has shelved 1.3bn of funding promised by the Conservatives for technology and artificial intelligence projects, putting the future of the UK's first next-generation supercomputer in doubt.The projects, announced last year, include 800m for the creation of an exascale supercomputer at the University of Edinburgh and a further 500m for the AI Research Resource, which funds computing power for AI. Continue reading...
When two horror movie fans took the leap into game development, the last thing they expected was for an actual movie production company to want to get involvedIn 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Crista Castro and Bryan Singh were moved to think about what they really wanted from their lives. An animation director and programmer respectively, the couple had worked on other people's cartoons and video games at big studios for years, but both had nursed ambitions to make something of their own. They had collaborated on weekend projects here and there, but felt if they really wanted to make a game together, they'd have to quit their jobs. So in 2021, galvanised by lockdown-induced introspection, that's what they did, forming a husband-and-wife development team under the name Cozy Game Pals. And just to raise the stakes further, they became parents at around the same time.They gave themselves two years. At the end of it, in 2023, they had made something: a short game called Fear the Spotlight, a 90s-inspired horror adventure that looks like a lost PlayStation classic and feels like a teen ghost movie. They released it on Steam, to a very positive reception from the few people who played it - but they didn't know how to market it, and it didn't sell much. We were like, OK, I guess that was it," Bryan tells me. Let's go find jobs again. And then Blumhouse showed up."Fear the Spotlight is released this autumn on PlayStation 5 and PCThis interview with Cozy Game Pals took place at Summer game fest in Los Angeles. Keza MacDonald's travel and accommodation expenses were met by Amazon Games Continue reading...
Experts warn growth of extremist influencers and micro-donations' could create even bigger wave of unrestLess than three hours after the stabbing attack on Monday that led to the death of three children, an AI-generated image was shared on X by an account called Europe Invasion. It depicted bearded men in traditional Muslim dress outside the Houses of Parliament, one waving a knife, behind a crying child in a union jack T-shirt.The tweet, which has since been viewed 900,000 times, was captioned: We must protect our children!" and shared by one of the most potent accounts for misinformation about the Southport stabbings. Continue reading...
Tech giant's revenue rises 4.9% to $85.78bn despite phone sales falling 0.9% and trend of decline in key China marketApple reported better-than-expected earnings in the third quarter of 2024, with buzz about its new AI features offsetting a continuing decline in its key China market.Earnings exceeded analyst predictions despite a year-over-year decline in iPhone sales, with revenue rising 4.9% to $85.78bn in the three months ending 29 June, beating the average analyst estimate of $84.53bn. The company maintained its cash dividend at 25 cents for each share. Continue reading...
Firm reported a loss in its second quarter and said it would cut 15% of its workforce to cut costs and compete with rivalsIntel, the chipmaker, has announced plans to cut more than 15,000 jobs as it tries to cut billions of dollars in costs and turn its business around to compete with more successful rivals.Shares in the company sank 19% as a string of leading technology stocks came under pressure on Thursday following a fresh batch of lackluster earnings that contributed to a sell-off on Wall Street. Continue reading...
by Hannah J Davies, Hannah Verdier and Rachel Aroesti on (#6PN82)
Question-setters Anna Ptaszynski and James Harkin get in the competitive spirit with Quite a Good Sport. Plus: five of the best podcasts about America Don't get Hear Here delivered to your inbox? Sign up herePerfect Day With Jessica Knappett
It mistakenly entered all my business details in the search results for How to contact Google in the UK'Four years ago, Google mistakenly published my restaurant business's details, including the phone number and address, in the search results for how to contact Google in the UK".At first I got just a few calls from people trying to get through to it but now I receive up to 300 a week, including on my personal mobile, as well as messages and letters. I have more than 130 voice messages. Continue reading...
Even as shares fall about 9%, chief financial officer says firm is seeing more investment' in AI than even 90 days ago'Chip designer Arm Holdings on Wednesday reported a stronger-than-expected 39% surge in quarterly revenue, and forecast fiscal second-quarter sales broadly in line with Wall Street estimates, yet its shares fell about 9% in extended trading.For the current fiscal second quarter, Arm forecast revenue in a range between $780m and $830m, compared with an average analyst estimate of $804.1m, according to LSEG data. Continue reading...
The ex-president and RFK Jr were among the stars of this year's Bitcoin conference, where there was no line for the women's bathroomLast week, downtown Nashville transformed into a carnival as thousands of people descended on the Bitcoin 2024 conference. The most enthusiastic attendees wore bitcoin orange or Make America great again" red - which, as the color wheel confirms, are not all that different.Bitcoin has been around since 2009, and the conference since 2019, but 2024 marked the first year that two US presidential candidates would give keynote addresses: Robert F Kennedy Jr, a longtime bitcoin fan, and Donald Trump, who announced that he was pro-bitcoin in May after years of calling it a scam" and disaster". The excitement was palpable: the way bitcoiners saw it, they had transformed into a voting bloc. Continue reading...
Multiple-day outage caused airline to lose revenue by cancelling and delaying thousands of flightsEd Bastian, CEO of Delta Air Lines, says the airline is facing $500m in costs related to a global tech outage that disrupted emergency services, communications and thousands of businesses.Speaking on CNBC, Bastian said on Wednesday that the monetary amount represents lost revenue as well as the tens of millions of dollars per day in compensation and hotels" for the five-day period. Continue reading...
Firm's earnings were up 15% year-on-year, but Azure's lower returns resulted in share prices falling by as much as 7%Microsoft outperformed analyst predictions in its latest quarterly earnings report, revealing on Tuesday that its revenue was up 15% year-over-year. But growth of the company's closely watched Azure cloud computing services failed to meet expectations and shares in Microsoft fell as much as 7% in after-hours trading.The company was expected to report steady growth in its fourth quarter earnings report, mostly on the back of its cloud services. Revenue from those services grew 29%, lower than the 30% to 31% that analysts predicted, resulting in a sell-off that exacerbates big tech's recent market woes. Continue reading...
Exclusive: Four internet treatments developed by University of Oxford will be rolled out across NHS trustsNew NHS-approved online therapies could help two to three times the number of children and adults recover from anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder, research suggests.One in five children and young people in England aged eight to 25 have a probable mental disorder and one in four adults in England experiences at least one diagnosable mental health problem in any given year, according to NHS England. Continue reading...
Every day, I generate more digital stuff my older self might like to look back on - but there's no way to manage it allA few years ago, I faced an unexpected conundrum: there were only a handful of decent phone repair stores in New York, and even fewer willing and able to work on a 2010 Blackberry. There was exactly no one sympathetic to my plight, which was that I had to get my broken and long-out-of-service phone working again, because it held my high school text messages that was crucial evidence of my life.For one brief, shining moment, the Blackberry had actually turned on. I scrolled through my long-lost inbox, looking for little forgotten treasures: written confirmation of teenage heartbreak, maybe, or records of lust, ennui, thrill, my eating disorder. But I didn't find much. Mostly, I texted about homework. Continue reading...
Compact discs provided the soundtrack to his life. Then came streaming and he couldn't get rid of them fast enough. As CDs enjoy a mini-renaissance, our writer looks back at what he lost and, below, musicians share their memoriesGrease: The Original Soundtrack from the Motion Picture. The Beatles' Red Album. A flimsy single, Boom! Shake the Room, by DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, and a chunky double-decker compilation record, Now That's What I Call Music! 24. I thought about these treasured objects - my first CDs, bought or gifted to me in the mid-1990s - when I read the other day that CD sales were enjoying an unexpected bounce in the mid-2020s. I felt pleased at the news of a resurgence, if distantly so, as you might on hearing something nice about an old friend you long ago lost touch with. So fans of Taylor Swift are gobbling up special-edition copies of her albums on CD? Overall sales of the format are higher than they've been in decades? Great! Good for good old CDs.It made me think of being 10 years old, newly in possession of a plasticky portable stereo that had (I still remember the glamour of the phrase) a disc reader under its press-open lid. With CDs in a CD player, you could boom and shake your room on infinite repeat without stopping to rewind. You could digitally programme the Red Album to skip And I Love Her, that buzz kill, and reorder the soundtrack of Grease to prioritise Beauty School Dropout, as heaven surely intended. You could randomise the order of a Now compilation, putting yourself through a daring Russian roulette: Ugly Kid Joe (the sonic equivalent of an empty pistol chamber), then PM Dawn (another empty chamber), then Bryan Ferry (bullet through the head). Continue reading...
Development of ChatGPT and its ilk will plateau, just like it did for smartphones, and then what are we left with? More ho-hum consumer techI bought an iPhone 15 the other day to replace my five-year-old iPhone 11. The phone is powered by the new A17 Pro chip and has a terabyte of data storage and accordingly was eye-wateringly expensive. I had, of course, finely honed rationales for splashing out on such a scale. I've always had a policy of writing only about kit that I buy with my own money (no freebies from tech companies), for example. The fancy A17 processor is needed to run the new AI" stuff that Apple is promising to launch soon; the phone has a significantly better camera than my old handset had - which matters (to me) because my Substack blog goes out three times a week and I provide a new photograph for each edition; and, finally, a friend whose ancient iPhone is on its last legs might appreciate an iPhone 11 in good nick.But these are rationalisations rather than solid justifications. The truth is that my old iPhone was fine for the job. Sure, it would need a new battery in time, but apart from that it had years more life in it. And if you take a cold, detached look at the evolution of the iPhone product line, what you see from the 2010 iPhone 4 onwards is really just a sequence of steady incremental improvements. What was so special about that model? Mostly this: it had a front-facing camera, which opened up the world of selfies, video chat, social media and all the other accoutrements of our networked world. But from then on, it was just incremental changes and price rises all the way. Continue reading...
The future is here, whether some like it or not, and artificial intelligence is already impacting the film industry. But just how far can, and should, it go?Last year, Rachel Antell, an archival producer for documentary films, started noticing AI-generated images mixed in with authentic photos. There are always holes or limitations in an archive; in one case, film-makers got around a shortage of images for a barely photographed 19th-century woman by using AI to generate what looked like old photos. Which brought up the question: should they? And if they did, what sort of transparency is required? The capability and availability of generative AI - the type that can produce text, images and video - have changed so rapidly, and the conversations around it have been so fraught, that film-makers' ability to use it far outpaces any consensus on how.We realized it was kind of the wild west, and film-makers without any mal-intent were getting themselves into situations where they could be misleading to an audience," said Antell. And we thought, what's needed here is some real guidance." Continue reading...
Company after company is swallowing the hype, only to be forced into embarrassing walkbacks by anti-AI backlashEarlier this month, a popular lifestyle magazine introduced a new fashion and lifestyle editor" to its huge social media following. Reem", who on first glance looked like a twentysomething woman who understood both fashion and lifestyle, was proudly announced as an AI enhanced team member". That is, a fake person, generated by artificial intelligence. Reem would be making product recommendations to SheerLuxe's followers - or, to put it another way, doing what SheerLuxe would otherwise pay a person to do. The reaction was entirely predictable: outrage, followed by a hastily issued apology. One suspects Reem may not become a staple of its editorial team.This is just the latest in a long line of walkbacks of exciting AI projects" that have been met with fury by the people they're meant to excite. The Prince Charles Cinema in Soho, London, cancelled a screening of an AI-written film in June, because its regulars vehemently objected. Lego was pressured to take down a series of AI-generated images it published on its website. Doctor Who started experimenting with generative AI, but quickly stopped after a wave of complaints. A company swallows the AI hype, thinks jumping on board will paint it as innovative, and entirely fails to understand the growing anti-AI sentiment taking hold among many of its customers. Continue reading...
Officials insist China-based owner ByteDance must separate from its short video app in the US because it is a threat to national security and citizens' dataThe US justice department has asked an appeals court to reject legal challenges to a law requiring China-based ByteDance to divest itself of TikTok's US assets by 19 January or face a ban.TikTok, parent company ByteDance and a group of TikTok creators have filed suits seeking to block the law, which could ban the app used by 170 million Americans. Continue reading...
Lesser known sports stars are showing off Olympic Village life and captivating people with their joyful relatability'Olympic hauls were once the preserve of triumphant athletes showing off their medals, but now every Olympian is getting in on the act by posting videos of themselves unboxing their sponsored kit.Haul videos - a social media staple in which someone usually shows off their recent purchases - have been popping up online with athletes who are preparing to take to track and field, pitches and courts taking to TikTok instead. Continue reading...
As Llama 3.1 405B is made freely available, investors are asking when the huge industry spend will pay offSpending on artificial intelligence could hit a staggering $1tn, according to analysts concerned about whether there will be a return on such a spree. Mark Zuckerberg's answer this week to such jitters was to release his latest AI system for free.Meta's Llama 3.1 405B is its most powerful yet, it says, and one of the most capable in the world. While the tech company didn't disclose how much it cost to train, Zuckerberg, its co-founder and chief executive, has previously disclosed a $10.5bn (8.9bn) investment in just the chips required to power its AI data centres - with the rest of the electronics, the electricity itself, and the physical building an additional cost on top of that. Continue reading...
by Harry Davies, and Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Washi on (#6PGRZ)
Officials seized documents from NSO Group to try to stop handover of information about notorious hacking tool, files suggestThe Israeli government took extraordinary measures to frustrate a high-stakes US lawsuit that threatened to reveal closely guarded secrets about one of the world's most notorious hacking tools, leaked files suggest.Israeli officials seized documents about Pegasus spyware from its manufacturer, NSO Group, in an effort to prevent the company from being able to comply with demands made by WhatsApp in a US court to hand over information about the invasive technology. Continue reading...
The performance artist and sex clown' shares her list of (mostly) wholesome clips: the cutest children, the best dog and the glitziest aerobics workout
The country has long been the world's biggest market - but the government's interest is more geopolitical than environmentalWhen Kenzi, an advertising worker in Shanghai, bought an electric vehicle in November she wasn't even thinking about the environmental benefits. She had read Elon Musk's biography and thought the Tesla 3 looked good. She also knew that if she bought an EV she could bypass the long wait and cost of getting licence plates, which are rationed by the government.It's not easy to get a licence plate in Shanghai, but you get a licence for free when you buy an EV," she said. Continue reading...
Creative director Andrea Lucco Borlera explains how this fever dream of a game came to be and why it's not afraid to get weirdNaked people with horse heads for their noggins. Nightmares so vividly surreal they blur into reality. An uncanny farmer who never blinks and forbids you from ever entering his room. If it feels as if I'm trying to describe an untitled, yet-to-be-revealed A24 film, that's because Horses often feels like one. Like most games in Italian developer Santa Ragione's experimental catalogue, it defies easy categorisation.Horses was born from an image that entered director Andrea Lucco Borlera's mind when he was studying film at the Universita Roma Tre, he says. I had an image of naked people that act like animals and are led by impulses, with horse masks on their heads." At first it felt like an idea for a movie inspired by Jan vankmajer's phantasmagorical 1968 film, The Garden - but instead, the first-time developer turned it into a game unlike anything else you'll play this year. Continue reading...
Tech firm says its freely available and usable Llama 3.1 405B model is comparable with likes of OpenAI and AnthropicMeta has claimed that its new artificial intelligence model is the first open-source system that will rival products from competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic.In a blogpost, the company said its new model, with the unwieldy name of Llama 3.1 405B, is competitive" with others - including those from OpenAI and Anthropic - across a range of tasks". Continue reading...
Transportation department says move aims to ensure care of passengers after global cyber outage snarled operationsThe US transportation department said on Tuesday it was opening an investigation into Delta Air Lines after the carrier canceled more than 5,000 flights since Friday as it struggles to recover from a global cyber outage that snarled airlines worldwide.While other carriers have been able to resume normal operations, Delta has continued to cancel hundreds of flights daily because of problems with its crew scheduling system. Continue reading...
Countless theories for the cybersecurity firm's outage are flying around, but whatever the reason, this sort of thing is likely to happen again Don't get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up for the full article hereWhere did CrowdStrike go wrong" is, if anything, a slightly overdetermined question.We can work backwards. Pushing an update to every single computer on your network at the same time means that by the time you discover a problem, it's too late to limit the fallout. The alternative - a staged rollout - would see the update pushed to users in small groups, usually accelerating over time. If you begin by updating 50 systems at once, and then immediately lose all contact with every single one of them, hopefully you spot it before you update the next 50 million. Continue reading...
by Samuel Gibbs Consumer technology editor on (#6PDMF)
Sixth-generation folder adds bigger battery, better camera, brighter screen and more fancy AI featuresSamsung's popular folding-screen Z Flip phone is back for 2024 with a faster chip, much longer battery life and more AI.The Galaxy Z Flip 6 is the smaller of Samsung's two new folders for this year, launched alongside the book-style Z Fold 6. It takes the flat sides and slab-like design of Samsung's standard Galaxy S24+ and folds it in half, turning a big-screen phone into a compact clamshell.Main screen: 6.7in FHD+ 120Hz AMOLED Infinity Flex Display (425ppi)Cover screen: 3.4in AMOLEDProcessor: Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3RAM: 12GBStorage: 256 or 512GBOperating system: One UI 6.1 based on Android 14Camera: 50+12MP rear, 10MP front-facingConnectivity: 5G, nano sim + esim, wifi6E, NFC, Bluetooth 5.3 and GNSSWater resistance: IP48 (1.5-metre depths for 30 minutes)Folded dimensions: 85.1 x 71.9 x 14.9mmUnfolded dimensions: 165.1 x 71.9 x 6.9mmWeight: 187g Continue reading...
Firm behind California Forever', a proposed green city for up to 400,000 people on farmland, pulls back from voteThe company behind the highly criticized California Forever" project, a plan backed by Silicon Valley billionaires to build a green city for up to 400,000 people on California farmland, withdrew the ballot measure for the election in November, according to a letter released Monday.The decision followed a discussion between Mitch Mashburn, chair of the board of supervisors in Solano county, and Jan Sramek, a former Goldman Sachs trader and chief executive of California Forever. Continue reading...
This cooperative game made in Montreal sees players leading a band of Scottish soldiers against an English army in thrall to the corrupting influence of a crashed meteorThere's this giant rock that fell from the sky on a Scottish island: they call it the Dragon Stone," explains Raphael Toulouse, director of Tears of Metal. And the English army sent a general to take [a look], but that general turns a bit rogue when he finds that stone, a bit like Apocalypse Now. He cuts himself off from the English, takes control of the island, and they start mining this giant rock for weapons and armour, but also it affects their minds. So the Scottish people get organised to take back the island - and this is where you come in."Playing as the leader of a Scottish battalion, your job in Tears of Metal is to hack and slash your way through the breakaway English troops, making your way closer and closer to the Dragon Stone. But as you near the supernatural meteor, the beautiful green backdrop of the Scottish Highlands gradually gives way to something more hellish. It gets weirder and weirder, and by the end, it's almost post-apocalyptic," says Toulouse.Tears of Metal is in development for PC; release date TBC Continue reading...
A Tamagotchi seance, macabre cartoon horror and an arty shmup: this new festival spotlights a fertile Scottish games scene beyond Rockstar NorthWalking through the doors of this boutique video game festival, you are immediately greeted by a bullet hell shoot-em-up with a painterly twist. In ZOE Begone!, you dodge and unleash attacks at blistering speed before the game erupts into a euphoric shower of pointillist colour, dazzling the eyes and punishing the thumbs. Next to it sits Left Upon Read; at first glance, a dark-fantasy Quake clone, but one that gives you the bizarre task of checking text messages on a smartphone as you slice your way through a dungeon. These are subversive games, taking well-worn design tropes and breaking them in witty, playful ways.Rule-breaking is a major theme of Glasgow independent game festival, the latest iteration of an event previously known as Southside games festival. It took place last weekend at Civic House, nestled in the shadow of the M8, the concrete eyesore that carves through Glasgow and connects the city with the wider central belt. On display are more eccentric and smaller-budget games than those you see on shelves, all made by developers who either live within Glasgow or a short train ride away. Co-founder Joe Bain sees such works as part of the wider cultural landscape" of games, and sought to create a space treating them as such. It's a far cry from trade fairs such as Gamescom where, beyond the boisterous public halls, the machinations of the games industry can feel as if they're moving in capital-driven lockstep. Continue reading...
But experts says full recovery from Friday's IT failure could take weeksA significant" number of the 8.5m devices affected by last week's global IT outage are back online, according to the cybersecurity company at the centre of the incident.CrowdStrike said it was also testing a technique to reboot systems more rapidly, amid warnings from experts that a full recovery from Friday's IT failure could take weeks. Continue reading...
Exclusive: NSPCC finds Apple implicated in more cases of predators sharing child abuse imagery in England and Wales alone than the company reported globally in a yearApple is failing to effectively monitor its platforms or scan for images and videos of the sexual abuse of children, child safety experts allege, which is raising concerns about how the company can handle growth in the volume of such material associated with artificial intelligence.The UK's National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) accuses Apple of vastly undercounting how often child sexual abuse material (CSAM) appears in its products. In a year, child predators used Apple's iCloud, iMessage and Facetime to store and exchange CSAM in a higher number of cases in England and Wales alone than the company reported across all other countries combined, according to police data obtained by the NSPCC. Continue reading...
CEO Sarah Franklin got such intense pushback on her company's plans that she suspended them after three daysOne thing seems for sure: people are not ready for digital workers" just yet.That's the lesson learned by Sarah Franklin, the CEO of Lattice, a human resources and performance management platform that offers performance coaching, talent reviews, onboarding automation, compensation management and a host of other HR tools to more than 5,000 organizations around the world. Continue reading...
C the Signs' artificial intelligence program scans medical records to increase likelihood of spotting cancersArtificial intelligence that scans GP records to find hidden patterns has helped doctors detect significantly more cancer cases.The rate of cancer detection rose from 58.7% to 66.0% at GP practices using the C the Signs" AI tool. This analyses a patient's medical record to pull together their past medical history, test results, prescriptions and treatments, as well as other personal characteristics that might indicate cancer risk, such as their postcode, age and family history. Continue reading...
Result of Guardian Australia experiment aligns with research showing social media automatically delivers troubling content to young men, largely without oversight
Cash provides essential fallback when digital payments break down, Payment Choice Alliance points outCampaigners say the chaos caused by the global IT outage last week underlines the risk of moving towards a cashless society.Supermarkets, banks, pubs, cafes, train stations and airports were all hit by the failure of Microsoft systems on Friday, leaving many unable to accept electronic payments. The impact was especially severe for businesses that no longer accept cash. Continue reading...
This blog is now closed, you can read more on this story hereThere is a further update on the situation at the Port of Dover in England, which was mentioned earlier (see 9.41am BST).Chief executive Doug Bannister told the PA news agency:We operate a turn up and go system here. However, we do insist you have a book on busy days, even if people are doing this on the drive down. The greater visibility we have the better.But we are here to service people who want to travel. So I would say to displaced airport passengers come on down. We have the capacity'."We start to get busy about 5 or 5:30 in the morning. We've opened new infrastructure today which is working really well. So far there is no congestion in the town of dover. Approach roads are busy but moving. Everything is running well."The worst of this is over because the nature of the crisis was such that it went very badly wrong, very quickly. It was spotted quite quickly, and essentially, it was turned off."Until governments and the industry get together and work out how to design out some of these flaws, I'm afraid we are likely to see more of these again.Within countries like the UK and elsewhere in Europe, you can try and build up that national resilience to cope with this. But ultimately, a lot of this is going to be determined in the US. Continue reading...
Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, a longtime backer of the new vice-president pick, are among those pledging supportLess than a month after Donald Trump was elected president in November 2016, he invited the cream of Silicon Valley's tech elite to a meeting at his transition team's headquarters at Trump Tower.It was an awkward affair. Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg, Google's Larry Page and Amazon's Jeff Bezos had facial expressions that ranged from a semi-rictus grin to full tech-mogul-in-a-hostage-situation. But then, in a sense they were. There was a new sheriff in town - and none of them had seen him coming. Continue reading...
The billionaire's companies enjoyed major tax breaks in the state. Now, he's declared it intolerable and ordered his firms to TexasElon Musk announced this week he would move the headquarters of his companies X and SpaceX from California to Texas, the culmination of a longstanding face-off between the volatile executive and the state where his companies began.Just one year ago, Musk declared he would not move X headquarters out of San Francisco - despite his assertions the city was in a doom spiral". At the time, he wrote: You only know who your real friends are when the chips are down. San Francisco, beautiful San Francisco, though others forsake you, we will always be your friend." Continue reading...
Internet betting tycoon Teddy Sagi's multimillion-pound acquisition of a gaming firm now allegedly worth nothing is the subject of a court case involving heavily contested claims of fraud and physical threatEnsconced within the luxury of his 30m Knightsbridge pad overlooking Hyde Park, the billionaire Teddy Sagi laid his cards on the table. I have a big pair of balls," he proclaimed, according to documents filed at the high court. I lost 300,000 in the casino last night. I will buy your business for 53m."For the man on the other side of the negotiating table, the online gambling entrepreneur Simon Wilson, the stakes had never beenhigher. Continue reading...
It's not that the outfits are necessarily bad, although many of them are. Have we lost something in the transition away from the coat-and-tie?The business casual revolution of the 1990s and rise of tech billionaires in the early aughts supposedly ushered in a new era that freed employees from the shackles of dress codes. Mark Zuckerberg turned hoodies and jeans into a symbol of New Economy meritocracy, the uniform of whiz kid hackers shaking up the coat-and-tie aesthetic of traditional industries back east. In the digital economy, many imagined, the most successful companies would allow talented employees to wear whatever they wanted as they jumped around in colorful ball pits.But as Facebook engineer Carlos Bueno wrote in his 2014 blogpost Inside the Mirrortocracy, we simply traded our hard-written dress codes for softly coded dress norms. The new world is actually not so free. The cognitive dissonance is plain to see on the faces of recruiters who pretend clothing is no big deal, but are clearly disappointed if you show up to a job interview in a dark worsted business suit. You are expected to conform to the rules of The Culture before you are allowed to demonstrate your actual worth," wrote Bueno. What wearing a suit really indicates is - I am not making this up - non-conformity, one of the gravest of sins." Continue reading...
For decades now, anyone who's wanted to know everything about anything has asked Google. But is the platform losing its edge - and can we still trust it to tell us the truth?I didn't know I was dead until I saw it on Google. When I searched my name, there it was: a picture of my smiling face next to the text Tom Faber was a physicist and publisher, and he was a university lecturer at Cambridge for 35 years". Apparently I died on 27 July 2004, aged 77. This was news to me.The problem was the picture. When you search the name of a notable person, Google may create what it calls a knowledge panel", a little box with basic information taken from Wikipedia. Somewhere along the way, the algorithm had confused pictures of my face with the biography of another man who shared my name. According to his obituary, he was a distinguished physicist with a literary hinterland". Google provides a feedback form to resolve this type of bug. I filled it in several times, but it made no difference. Continue reading...
The Shanghai native and street photographer intentionally included his own shadow in this colourful imageShanghai native Chang Nianzu and his wife were visiting their local children's playground with their four-year-old daughter, Chang Yuning, when he took this photograph. The park is in Xuhui district, near the main football stadium. Shanghai is very colourful and clean, but for a hobbyist street photographer like me, it's difficult to capture that. Sometimes there are other elements that interfere, like trees and parked bikes."As Nianzu watched his daughter explore, he realised the light and colours would lend themselves to a good photograph. His composition was inspired by American photographer Lee Friedlander: In some of his work he intentionally includes his shadow, so I imitated this with my own shadow in the yellow triangle." Nianzu then waited patiently with his Xiaomi 13 Pro for someone to walk up the stairs and complete his shot. Suddenly, another little girl, about six or seven, dressed all in purple, appeared. It suited the scene perfectly," Nianzu says. Continue reading...
Using the reissued 3210 model left our reporter very frustrated - but less mobile-obsessed and in awe of its battery lifeAfter about 10 minutes of furious tapping on the tiny buttons to write a still unfinished text the anger I'm feeling towards the retro" Nokia 3210 I'm toiling over is mounting.It is one of a new wave of detox" or dumb" phones aimed at techno-stressed individuals who want to escape the thrall of apps and notifications but, in this moment, I really want to smash it. Continue reading...
Technology | The Guardian