Technology | The Guardian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exclusive: NSO Group technology is allegedly used by autocratic regimes to spy on journalists and activistsThe British government is helping a controversial Israeli spyware company to market its surveillance technologies at a secretive trade fair visited by repressive regimes, the Guardian can reveal.The government will host the NSO Group, which sells technology that has allegedly been used by autocratic regimes to spy on the private messages of journalists and human rights activists, at the closed Security and Policing trade fair in Hampshire next month. Continue reading...

Harry has data backed up to DVDs, but wants to copy the files to a hard drive. Is there a quick way to do it?Over the years, I have been backing up files to writeable DVDs. I probably have around 1,400 of them. Now I want to transfer their contents onto a single 10TB USB hard drive. Can you and your erudite readers recommend the quickest solution?Is there a DVD recorder that can load 10 to 20 DVDs at a time and automatically copy them onto said 10TB hard drive? Also, are there any issues with the formats needed to ensure access to my data for another 10 years or more? HarryI expect many of us still have lots of optical discs stashed away, because CDs and DVDs were the most economical way to store data for 20 to 30 years. Just cutting one disc a week could get you over the 1,000 mark, though I assume most of them would have been recopied and recycled before now. Continue reading...

Social media platform refuses to remove or display warning on footage of C-130 crash that killed three US firefightersTikTok will not take action to remove or include a warning on a video on the social media platform of the waterbombing plane crash that killed three US firefighters because it does not violate the company’s community guidelines.Captain Ian McBeth, first officer Paul Hudson and flight engineer Rick DeMorgan Jr were killed when their C-130 Hercules crashed on 23 January while fighting a fire in the Snowy Monaro region of New South Wales. Continue reading...

Statement comes after leaked memo on use of technology in security provoked outcryThe European parliament has insisted it has no plans to introduce facial recognition technology after a leaked internal memo discussing its use in security provoked an outcry.A page on the European parliament’s intranet, seen by the Guardian, suggested that facial recognition could be used “in the context of biometric-based security and services to members [MEPs]”. Continue reading...

Government told to halt use of AI to detect fraud in decision hailed by privacy campaignersA Dutch court has ordered the immediate halt of an automated surveillance system for detecting welfare fraud because it violates human rights, in a judgment likely to resonate well beyond the Netherlands.The case was seen as an important legal challenge to the controversial but growing use by governments around the world of artificial intelligence (AI) and risk modelling in administering welfare benefits and other core services. Continue reading...

Co-writer of the multimillion-selling series to step down in March, leaving questions over long-awaited sixth instalmentDan Houser, a co-founder of Rockstar Games, is leaving his post in March, according to the developer’s parent company Take-Two Interactive. Houser was lead writer on the multimillion-selling Grand Theft Auto series, as well as other Rockstar hits including the acclaimed western adventure Red Dead Redemption.In a statement to investors on Tuesday, Take-Two stated that Houser, who was creative vice president at the studio, would leave Rockstar on 11 March after taking an “extended break”, which began in spring last year. Houser’s brother Sam, with whom he co-founded Rockstar Games in 1998, will stay on as company president. Continue reading...

Employees under pressure to work faster call on retail giant to improve conditions – and take their complaints seriouslyRina Cummings has worked three 12-hour shifts every week at Amazon’s gargantuan New York City warehouse, called JFK8, on Staten Island since it first began operations in late 2018. As a sorter on the outbound ship dock, her job is to inspect and scan a mandated rate of 1,800 Amazon packages an hour – 30 per minute – that are sent through a chute and transported on a conveyor belt before leaving the facility for delivery.Related: ‘The only ones not paying for Boeing’s mistakes is Boeing': laid-off supply workers voice their anger Continue reading...

Today’s young people are flocking to an egalitarian utopia where home ownership is available to all. There’s just one catch…One of the first decisions you make in The Sims is which house to buy. The 200m-selling life simulation series, which turns 20 this week, gives every player 20,000 simoleons, the game’s virtual currency, and they can use it to purchase anything from a ready-made four-bedroom townhouse to an empty plot of land on which to construct a dream pad from scratch. In this world, renting literally isn’t an option.For a generation of fans, that stands in stark contrast to real life. The Resolution Foundation, a housing thinktank, reported in 2018 that up to a third of millennials will rent for their whole lives, and the number of households privately renting in England rose by 121% in the 10 years after 1996, according to the most recent Labour Force Survey. With young people disproportionately more likely to rent than older generations, many have turned to The Sims to decorate a house that feels like their own. Continue reading...

Self-tracking tools are not troubling per se – but, having recovered from anorexia, I know how damaging it can be to fixate on dataIf you want to develop “obsessive tendencies”, there is an app for that. There are several, in fact. You may have downloaded a bunch of them on 1 January in a rush of resolution-making.Fitness apps such as Strava, MyFitnessPal and RunKeeper can be useful tools for motivating you to start and stick to a workout regime. But, according to a study at the National University of Ireland, Galway, these apps can also encourage obsessive attitudes towards exercise. The study, which observed 272 cyclists who use Strava, found that people who predominately use the tool to show off – posting their workouts to receive praise, for example – are more likely to develop an unhealthy compulsion and high stress levels. Continue reading...

Company, along with Google and Facebook, is under pressure to prevent interference in the 2020 US electionsTwitter will begin to label and in some cases remove doctored or manipulated photos, audio and videos that are designed to mislead people.The company said on Tuesday that the new rules prohibit sharing synthetic or manipulated material that’s likely to cause harm. Material that is manipulated but isn’t necessarily harmful may get a warning label. Continue reading...

Carmaker is world’s second most valuable despite never having made an annual profit

Bug affected users of Google Takeout exporting from Google Photos in late NovemberGoogle has said a software bug resulted in some users’ personal videos being emailed to strangers.The flaw affected users of Google Photos who requested to export their data in late November. For four days the export tool wrongly added videos to unrelated users’ archives. Continue reading...

Investigation finds 400-plus councils let at least one third party track use of their sitesCouncils are sharing information about users of their websites – including when they seek help with a benefit claim, or with a disability or alcoholism – with dozens of private companies.More than 400 local authorities allowed at least one third-party company to track individuals who visit their sites, an investigation has revealed. Continue reading...

Communications regulator allows Starlink satellites over Australian airspace, but Foxtel objectsElon Musk’s SpaceX satellite broadband service has taken its first step into the Australian market. The communications regulator has added the company to a list of satellite operators allowed over Australian airspace.But Foxtel has raised concerns the service might conflict with its subscription TV service. Continue reading...

Facial recognition technology is getting more sophisticated each year and is now being used commercially as identification instead of passwords as well as being adopted by the Metropolitan police in London. Our UK technology editor, Alex Hern, explores the questions it raises about privacy. Also today: Jamie Grierson on the security response to Sunday’s terror attack in south LondonCCTV cameras are a daily reality of life in UK cities, but advances in facial recognition technology are moving police surveillance into a new phase. The Metropolitan police recently announced the introduction of live facial recognition technology, which will be limited to specific locations in London. Now a leaked Home Office paper suggests 10 other forces are also trialling this technology.Police commissioners believe this could revolutionise the fight against crime, and after another terrorist attack this week public pressure for improved surveillance is likely to increase. However, campaigners warn that we could be ushering in the kind of society George Orwell envisaged in his dark novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Continue reading...

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai announced the revenues in his first quarterly earnings release as head of companyGoogle’s YouTube advertising revenues topped $1bn a month in 2019, the company announced on Monday, the first time it has revealed how much money the streaming service brings in.But the news was not enough to satisfy investors who sold off shares in Alphabet, Google’s parent company, when it announced revenues for the last quarter that were below expectations. Shares fell 4% after the markets closed. Continue reading...

Amazon knows more than just what books I’ve read and when – it knows which parts of them I liked the mostWhen I requested my personal information from Amazon this month under California’s new privacy law, I received mostly what I expected: my order history, shipping information and customer support chat logs.But tucked into the dozens of files were also two Excel spreadsheets, more than 20,000 lines each, with titles, time stamps and actions detailing my reading habits on the Kindle app on my iPhone. Continue reading...

Google Maps diverts road users after mistaking cartload of phones for huge traffic clusterA Berlin-based artist managed to create a traffic jam on one of the main bridges across the Spree with nothing but a handcart and 99 second-hand phones. But one other thing was unusual about the jam: it only existed on Google Maps.Simon Weckert’s artwork Google Maps Hacks involved the artist pulling a small red cart at walking pace down some of the main thoroughfares of Berlin. The 99 phones in the cart, all reporting their locations and movement back to Google’s servers, gave the search company the impression of a huge cluster of slow-moving traffic, which was duly reported on the company’s maps. Continue reading...

More and more people are using games like quiet background experiences, requiring minimal attention while they sew, cook or studyIn the recently released game Coffee Talk, you play a coffee-shop barista who stands at a counter, through long, rainy Seattle nights, making drinks for customers as they tell you about their lives. That’s it. That’s all you do. There’s no aim, no purpose. Your only interaction is pressing a button to move the conversation on and occasionally crafting a drink using the available ingredients. It’s barely a game.And yet, it’s a lovely, involving experience. The beautiful pixel art interior of your shop, the fleeting glimpses of passersby outside, and the jazzy soundtrack replicate things we love about hanging out in real coffee places. Also, this is an alternative version of Seattle populated not just by humans, but by elves, demons and other fantastical beings, so your clientele is pretty varied. Elves tell you about their love lives, insomniac werewolves seek calm and quiet – you listen and you try to make drinks that will soothe them. Continue reading...

Technology is playing a bigger than ever part in healthcare, but it’s a relationship that needs careful regulationThe deal has yet to be approved by the relevant regulators, but Google has got most of the way to buying Fitbit – the maker of wearable devices that track people’s sleep, heart rates, activity levels and more. And all for a trifling $2.1bn (£1.6bn).The upshot is yet another step forward in Google’s quest to break into big tech’s next frontier: healthcare.Last month, in a Financial Times feature about all this, came a remarkable quote from a partner at Health Advances, a Massachusetts-based tech consulting company. Wearables, he reckoned, would be only one small part of the ensuing story: just as important were – and no guffawing at the back, please – “bedside devices, under-mattress sensors, [and] sensors integrated into toilet seats”. Such inventions, it was explained, can “get even closer to you than your smartphone, and detect conditions such as depression or heart-rate variability”. Continue reading...

US biotech companies are working towards plasma therapies to tackle age-related diseases in humansIn the early 2000s a group of scientists at Stanford University, California, revived a grisly procedure used in the 1950s known as parabiosis. They paired living mice, young with old, peeled back their skin and stitched together their sides so the two animals shared the same blood circulatory system. A month later, they found signs of rejuvenation in the muscles and livers of the old mice. The findings, published in 2005, turned the minds of scientists, entrepreneurs and the public to the potential of young blood to rejuvenate ageing people. By 2016, enough interest had grown to prompt a US-based startup called Ambrosia to start offering pricey infusions of young plasma – the cell-free component of blood. The procedure came under fire from the US Food and Drug Administration early last year both for its lack of proven clinical benefit and for potential safety issues; Ambrosia closed, though it has recently reopened.Meanwhile, a clutch of scientific startups are trying to discover the secrets of parabiosis and use them to tackle age-related disease. By identifying factors in plasma that change with age, they aim to create therapies that either supplement what’s beneficial in young blood or to inhibit what’s detrimental in old. One is even beginning to report early clinical trial results. Continue reading...

Not so long ago we searched Google. Now we seem quite happy to let Google search usProbably too late to ask, but was the past year the moment we lost our technological innocence? The Alexa in the corner of the kitchen monitoring your every word? The location-betraying device in your pocket? The dozen trackers on that web page you just opened? The thought that a 5G network could, in some hazily understood way, be hardwired back to Beijing? The spooky use of live facial recognition on CCTV cameras across London.With privacy there have been so many landmarks in the past 12 months. The $5bn Federal Trade Commission fine on Facebook to settle the Cambridge Analytica scandal? The accidental exposure of a mind-blowing 1.2 billion people’s details from two data enrichment companies? Up to 50m medical records spilled? Continue reading...

The final instalment of this cult classic brings tragedy tinged with redemptionSix years in the telling, Kentucky Route Zero’s story is unusually low stakes, especially for a video game, a medium that typically operates in the twin registers of hyperbole and hysteria. You play, mostly, as Conway, a delivery man working for the owner of an antique shop on the brink of closure, tasked with making the business’s final delivery. Split into five chapters, the first of which was released in 2013, and the last arriving now alongside a box-set edition that brings the story into a unified release, the game sends Conway on a winding journey across the state of Kentucky, an item of furniture snugly secured in the back of his truck. By the start of this final chapter, while Conway has withdrawn somewhat from the foreground, his task remains overarchingly urgent: find that house and make the ultimate delivery.To state the game’s goal in such straightforward terms is to do the expedition on which the game takes its players a disservice. Described by its three-man, art-minded development team as a “magical realist adventure game”, Kentucky Route Zero is as elegiac as it is prosaic. It combines the mundane and the mystical to create an atmosphere that sits somewhere along the wispy continuum between a Samuel Beckett play and a David Lynch mini-series. You start chapter five, for example, in the role of an eavesdropping cat, listening in on conversations between residents of a recently flooded town as they discuss everything from the death of small businesses, to the appropriate depth of hole one should dig in order to bury a recently drowned horse. Continue reading...

The cosmetics industry is booming, but – as four young people discover in this unsettling series – beneath its glossy surface is a world of waste, hazards and questionable moralsKenneth Senegal, a beauty vlogger, is rubbing his hands gleefully, eyes sparkling beneath bright red eyeshadow. He’s talking money. For a small mention of a cosmetics brand in one of his YouTube videos, he would charge $3,000 (£2,260). For a “dedicated video”, it would be more like $14,000. Once his subscriber numbers go up, and with them the number of views on his videos, “I could get, like, $20,000.” Good for him, I suppose. But also, isn’t this extraordinary?In the first of this three-part BBC Three documentary, four young people are investigating the beauty industry, which has seen huge levels of growth in recent years. Beneath the glossy surface, it’s pretty grim. Chloe, a makeup artist and influencer from Belfast, and Casey, who thinks men are under-represented in the beauty business, seem the most invested and impressed with this world. Resh, 23, from Manchester, is more sceptical but understands the power of makeup to transform one’s confidence – she is the survivor of a horrific acid attack. (“Makeup, to me, is a defence,” she says). And then there’s Queenie, 21, the bewildered one many of us will identify with. Pretty much all she has packed for the trip to California is some shampoo and deodorant. The beauty industry, she says, exists “to make people feel insecure and sell products”. I like Queenie. At the Beautycon event, where brands gather and 30,000 visitors hope to pose in selfies with one of the 300 “influencers”, she seems genuinely shocked. “But who is he?” she says of one of the biggest beauty stars, Bretman Rock. “What does he represent? What does he stand for?” Continue reading...

As the most detailed images of the sun are released this week, we look at other huge telescopes and their discoveriesThis week astronomers released the highest resolution of images taken of the sun’s stormy surface. The Daniel K Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii is the largest solar telescope in the world. The images reveal the nugget-like structures that make up the solar surface, each the size of France. The image is the start of a 50-year study of our closest star by the scientists working at the telescope. Continue reading...

CEO defended Facebook’s decision not to ban political ads and said company will ‘stand up for free expression’Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook chief executive, has unveiled a new approach to political advertising which he described as a stand for the principles of free speech, but also one that will “piss off a lot of people”.In a candid discussion at the Silicon Slopes Tech Summit 2020 in Salt Lake City on Friday, Zuckerberg said that since his company is criticized for both what it does and does not do in terms of monitoring use of its platform, it will now support free speech “because in order to be trusted, people need to know what you stand for”. Continue reading...

The psychologist talks about the widespread fear that smartphones are harmful to our wellbeing – and the difficulty of proving itAmy Orben is a research fellow at Emmanuel College and the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at the University of Cambridge. She works in the field of experimental psychology and her speciality is analysing large-scale datasets to determine how social media and the use of digital technology affect the wellbeing of teenagers. Her latest paper, co-written with Prof Andrew Przybylski, looks at teenage sleep and technology engagement.In recent years there has been a great deal of speculation about the possible harmful effects of digital technology, particularly smartphones, on mental health, the ability to concentrate, and sleep patterns. Is there any sound evidence to support these concerns?

Though Steve Jobs’s sleek tablet was a worldwide hit, it can still be naggingly awkward to useLast Monday, the Apple iPad turned 10. On 27 January 2010, Steve Jobs walked on to the stage of a San Francisco auditorium carrying with him the answer to years of fevered speculation. “Everyone at the event that day knew why they were there,” wrote John Vorhees, “and what would be announced”. Jobs acknowledged as much up front, saying that he had a “truly magical and revolutionary product” to unveil. “Last time there was this much excitement about a tablet,” observed the normally sober Wall Street Journal, “it had some commandments written on it.”This was three years on from the launch of the iPhone, the device that really transformed Apple into a tech giant, so everyone thought they knew roughly what the new device would look like – a bigger block of aluminium and glass with a touch-sensitive screen. Over at Microsoft, where the Windows team led by Steve Sinofsky were watching the live stream, they definitely knew what to expect. After all, Microsoft had been experimenting with tablets for years: a tablet, to them, was a portable slab which had a keyboard and a stylus. The tech media, for their part, also “knew” two things: the new device would be Apple’s answer to the cheap netbooks that were then the sensation du jour and, knowing Apple, it wouldn’t be cheap. Continue reading...

Tony Harding, 79, was left with a heavy exercise bike he did not order and told he would have to dispose of it himselfA pensioner from Bristol has described his disbelief after Amazon delivered a 28kg (62lb) exercise machine he had not ordered, and then flatly refused to take it away – leaving it blocking his front room.Tony Harding, who is 79 and unable to move the heavy item, says Amazon effectively abandoned the giant box in his and his wife’s Winterbourne home, apparently expecting him to dispose of the brand new exercise bike himself. Despite asking both the driver who brought the item, and a second driver who delivered the order he had been expecting, neither would take away the £149 machine. Customer services told him it was highly unlikely the company would come to retrieve the fitness bike, and he would have to dispose of it. Continue reading...

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO has dropped Don’t Doubt Ur Vibe on Soundcloud – a wannabe dancefloor banger that somehow manages to doubt its own vibeLike Charles Foster Kane splashing his millions on promoting his mistress’s disastrous opera career, very rich men have, in recent years, displayed a certain tendency to come to grief when dabbling in the field of music. First, the now-incarcerated pharma bro Martin Shkreli bought the only extant copy of the Wu-Tang Clan’s album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin and, as a result, was first called “a shithead”, “the Michael Jackson nose kid”, “the man with the 12-year-old body” and “a fake super-villain” by the group’s Ghostface Killah, and then became the subject of a Wu-Tang Clan diss track. Not, one suspects, the response he expected when he ponied up $2m for their CD. Now Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk – net worth $34.4bn – has launched a parallel career as an EDM artist, posting a track called Don’t Doubt Ur Vibe on Soundcloud. Continue reading...

The government is showing signs of legalising electric scooters on roads, but new laws should be about safety, not horsepowerIf there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that being hit by a scooter hurts less than being hit by a bike. That may sound like a strangely negative place to start, but it’s sort of fundamental to why I’m glad the government is finally showing signs of legalising the use of electronic scooters on public roads across the UK.The current state of the law is a mess. Its broad strokes are reasonable enough: powered vehicles require an MOT and registration to use on public roads, while unpowered vehicles do not. Pavements are for foot traffic only. Access requirements complicate matters, but only a little: wheelchairs, both manual and powered – legally, “class three invalid carriages” – can go on pavements, while some – class four – can go on roads as well. Continue reading...