Technology | The Guardian

First chickens, and now a worldwide shortage of microprocessors … the word ‘chip’ is the latest word to gain an Armageddon flavourAs if there weren’t enough disasters happening simultaneously, people are now speaking of the present “chipageddon”: the worldwide shortage of microprocessors that is affecting supplies of everything from toasters and games consoles to cars.A silicon “chip” was thus christened in the early 1960s simply because it is a small flat piece of material, like a chip of wood or stone – or, of course, potato – separated by a cutting action (the verb “chop” is related). In a modern chip factory, a small circular wafer of silicon is divided into many chips, each one holding billions of transistors, which is an improvement on the few thousand possible in the early 70s. The ever-flexible “-mageddon” suffix, meanwhile – as in snowmageddon or carmageddon – ultimately takes its form from the Hebrew place name Megiddo in the Book of Revelation’s account of the end of days. Continue reading...

Preliminary lawsuit settlement allows developers to circumvent the tech giant’s lucrative commission systemIndependent developers will be allowed to tell iPhone users about ways of avoiding the “Apple Tax” on their apps for the first time, as part of an out-of-court settlement concluding a class-action lawsuit against the company.The agreement, which is accompanied by a $100m payout from Apple to be distributed among App Store developers who have earned less than $1m over the past six years, represents a small but significant concession from the company, whose iron grip over the App Store has earned it billions in profit alongside accusations of unlawful monopolistic behaviour. Continue reading...

The acclaimed Dropout podcast returns to chronicle legal proceedings against the Theranos founder. Plus: good cops go bad in a new series with shades of The WireThe Dropout (available from 31 August)

The government says an overhaul will boost growth and increase trade – but it must be careful not to go too farThe government has announced plans to reshape the UK’s data laws such as GDPR requirements in an effort, it claims, to boost growth and increase trade post-Brexit. The digital, media and culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, says the UK wants to shape data laws based on “common sense, not box-ticking”. Continue reading...

Culture secretary says move could lead to an end to irritating cookie popups and consent requests onlineBritain will attempt to move away from European data protection regulations as it overhauls its privacy rules after Brexit, the government has announced.The freedom to chart its own course could lead to an end to irritating cookie popups and consent requests online, said the culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, as he called for rules based on “common sense, not box-ticking”. Continue reading...

App Store gave 14-year-old’s account access to apps rated ‘17+’ even though it knew user’s self-declared ageApple knowingly lets underage users access apps intended for adults, according to an investigation by the Tech Transparency Project (TTP), despite having asked for and recorded their dates of birth.The investigation asserts a disconnect between the information Apple knows about a user, which includes their self-declared age, and the ways it polices age restrictions on its App Store. Continue reading...

Experts say dangerous injuries can occur as videos of people falling off precariously stacked crates go viral on social mediaThe latest challenge to take the internet by storm involves milk crates, balance and some painful falls.In the milk crate challenge, which recently started on TikTok, participants take on a set of milk crates precariously stacked in the shape of a pyramid, attempt to climb to the top and then back down again without toppling over. Continue reading...

U-turn comes after resolution of issues with payment processors, says chief executive of user-generated adult content siteOnlyFans, the user-generated adult content site, is reversing course on plans to ban “sexually explicit” content after securing agreement with its payment processors, it has announced.Last week, OnlyFans said it would ban adult material from 1 October, to the dismay of its users and creators, who argued that doing so risked driving such work underground. Continue reading...

Up for discussion in the Guardian tech newsletter: what lies behind Roblox’s success … the ongoing saga of Facebook’s traffic ‘transparency report’ … and Elon Musk’s ‘onesie’ stuntUser-generated porn site OnlyFans will become … something else, the company announced on Thursday. From 1 October, it will ban “sexually explicit content”, the material that made it a billion-dollar company and refocus on becoming a more mainstream social network.For the uninitiated or those who are pretending to be, OnlyFans is, on a technical level, effectively Instagram combined with Patreon. Creators can post photos, videos and text to the service for their followers to peruse, and they can also lock any of those behind a personal paywall, and even charge to send and receive messages. Continue reading...

PC, Xbox, PlayStation 4; Double Fine/Microsoft

Guardian Australia picture editor Carly Earl explains the dos and don’ts of taking pictures of the moonWhen a full moon rises, many people will pull out their mobile phones to try and get an Instagram-worthy photograph, but unfortunately the moon is really challenging to get a great photo of.Two reasons: it is very far away and unless you have a telephoto lens (which makes the moon appear closer than it is) it will always appear as a very small glowing dot in the frame. Continue reading...

Company’s charitable arm will work with hosts willing to offer spaces, but has yet to say where or for how longAirbnb will help house up to 20,000 Afghan refugees, the company has announced, as part of its Airbnb.org charitable arm.The company will coordinate with Airbnb hosts who want to offer their homes to refugees for free, or at a discounted rate, with the charitable organisation picking up the rest of the bill, as well as any other operational expenditures. The Airbnb co-founder and chief executive, Brian Chesky, will also fund the effort. Continue reading...

Company won licences for Manchester and Sheffield but faces pressure from Chinese governmentChinese Uber rival Didi Chuxing has reportedly suspended plans to launch in the UK and Europe, as the ride-hailing company faces pressure from authorities in its home market.The company’s plans to launch in the UK and Europe have been pushed back at least 12 months, and staff working on the launch have been told they face possible redundancy, the Daily Telegraph first reported. Continue reading...

A thriving new industry, matching people with pro gamers who advise and counsel, has exploded during the pandemicEighteen months ago, Fabio Dores was making good money as a drag queen. Performing under the name Felicity Suxwell, he had a club residency and worked hen nights throughout the UK, attracting enough bookings to quit his day job at a lettings agency. Then lockdown came and everything shut down.Bored at home, he was browsing Facebook and spotted an advertisement for LegionFarm, an online video-game coaching platform that offered to match pro gamers with clients looking to improve their abilities. As a skilled player of battle royale hit Apex Legends, he applied to become a coach. Four months later, he’s in the site’s top 20 pros, making $3,500 a month from around 80 hours of coaching to supplement his re-emerging drag career. Continue reading...

Government wants its own social media platform to replace Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and ZoomEthiopia has begun developing its own social media platform to rival Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp, though it does not plan to block the global services, the state communications security agency has said.For the past year Ethiopia has been engulfed in an armed conflict between the federal government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which controls the Tigray region in the country’s north. Continue reading...

Constance Bailey, 13, was offered a place at Hammond school but her mother could not afford the £90,000 neededA teenage ballerina with autism from the toughest housing estate in Leeds will be able to take up her place at one of the UK’s most prestigious dance schools after Guardian readers and others chipped in more than £97,000 to cover her fees.Constance Bailey, 13, received a place to study ballet at the Hammond school near Chester but her mother, Laura, a lone parent who works as a PA in the NHS, could not afford the £29,000 annual fees. Continue reading...

Escape to 1980s Oregon, get stuck in an art deco assassin game or liberate a Caribbean island with the help of a dog in this feast of new titlesAn indie game set in a beautiful lake town with a small cast of locals. Driving around and delivering mail in 1980s Oregon is not exactly the usual video game fantasy, but this looks like a calming, intriguing tale about a woman temporarily escaping urban life to revisit her roots.

Latest collaboration puts great sound behind fabric art panel that can be hung or leant against a wallThe latest device from Ikea’s novel partnership with the wifi-speaker maker Sonos is a bit different: a speaker hidden in a picture frame.The Symfonisk picture frame costs £179 ($199) and joins Ikea’s other unusual speakers – one is in a shelf while another is a table lamp – which are all fully compatible with Sonos’s whole-home wireless audio system. Continue reading...

Constance Bailey, from the deprived Seacroft estate, has a place at The Hammond School in Chester but cannot afford the costsBefore she was even accepted into one of the country’s most prestigious ballet schools, Constance Bailey’s audition immediately made her feel different.“Everyone else arrived in these really fancy cars – there were all these BMWs – and they had really nice leotards,” said the 13-year-old, who was wearing her old ballet uniform underneath a secondhand tracksuit. Continue reading...

Whether it’s chatting with small children, planning occasions or finding ways to socialise off-camera, after 18 months of lockdowns we’ve learned what worksWith many parts of Australia still in lockdown, connecting with others can feel increasingly challenging.Whether video calls are stifling your usual banter with friends, or the problem is actually hearing them at all over a patchy internet connection, Zoom fatigue is real. Continue reading...

The startling rise to wealth of the nation’s entrepreneurs has been an affront to Beijing’s political philosophy and increasingly, a threat to the communist partyIn a Politburo group study session on 23 November 2015, China’s president, Xi Jinping, recommended the book Capital in the Twenty-First Century by the French economist Thomas Piketty. “The rich data he used demonstrated that … unrestrained capitalism accelerates wealth inequality … [His] conclusion is worth us pondering on.”Back then, Piketty’s work on inequality was reported all over the world and sparked soul-searching among elites from Wall Street to Main Street. Some were surprised that Xi was paying attention, too. Continue reading...

Guardian Australia picture editor Carly Earl explains the dos and don’ts of taking pictures of this month’s blue moon, also known as a sturgeon moonWith a blue moon rising on Sunday night, many people will pull out their mobile phones to try and get an Instagram-worthy photograph of the August 2021 full moon, also known as a sturgeon moon, but unfortunately the moon is really challenging to get a great photo of.Two reasons: it is very far away and unless you have a telephoto lens (which makes the moon appear closer than it is) it will always appear as a very small glowing dot in the frame. Continue reading...

A workplace in Bucharest filled with anti-virus innovations could become the new normal in office design, its creators hope

They are good for the environment and your wallet but there can be pitfalls. Here’s how to grab a bargain safely in the UKSmartphones are a key part of modern life but with prices routinely in excess of £1,000 for the latest high-end handsets, should you be considering cheaper secondhand or refurbished models instead?These have the potential to be good for your wallet and the planet, as any device that is given a second life instead of being recycled reduces its lifetime environmental impact and, with it, your footprint. Continue reading...

Musk said he would probably launch a humanoid robot prototype next year, which is designed to do 'boring, repetitious and dangerous' work.The billionaire chief executive of Tesla said the robot, which would be about 5ft 8in (1.7 metres) tall and weigh 56kg, would be able to handle tasks such as attaching bolts to cars with a spanner or picking up groceries at shops.Musk was speaking at Tesla's AI Day event, but gave no indication of having made concrete progress on actually building such a machine. At the point when a normal tech launch might feature a demonstration of a prototype model, Musk instead brought out an actor in a bodysuit, who proceeded to breakdance to a soundtrack of electronic dance music

The quest to prevent batteries – rich in raw materials such as cobalt, lithium and nickel – ending up as a mountain of wasteA tsunami of electric vehicles is expected in rich countries, as car companies and governments pledge to ramp up their numbers – there are predicted be 145m on the roads by 2030. But while electric vehicles can play an important role in reducing emissions, they also contain a potential environmental timebomb: their batteries.By one estimate, more than 12m tons of lithium-ion batteries are expected to retire between now and 2030. Continue reading...

She has a learning disability and doesn’t know what in-app purchases areI recently found out that my sister, who has a learning disability, unwittingly spent more than £1,100 on 83 Apple purchases over four weeks. She enjoys playing word games and colouring on her iPad, but has no understanding of money or how in-app purchases work. Until last year, her husband managed her finances, but he died. Most of the transactions were repeat purchases of items called “bundles”. She has no idea what they are and hasn’t downloaded them, but Apple is refusing a refund.

From sexual revolution to the suffragettes, Fry examines Edward VII’s reign in his polished new series. Plus: grim and gruesome deathbed confessionsStephen Fry’s Edwardian Secrets

The agency also dismissed a request by the tech giant that chair Lina Khan recuse herself from the caseThe Federal Trade Commission on Thursday refiled its antitrust case against Facebook, arguing the company holds monopoly power in social networking and renewing the fight to rein in big tech.The agency also dismissed a request from Facebook that its chair, Lina Khan, step aside in the case because of her criticism of them in the past. Continue reading...

CEO says problem is primarily one of ‘vaccine hesitancy’ among the US public, touting platform’s vaccine literacy toolFacebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg skirted a question on Thursday about coronavirus vaccine disinformation on the social network, choosing to phrase the problem instead as primarily one of “vaccine hesitancy” among the US public.In an interview with CBS, which was released on Thursday morning, TV anchor Gayle King pressed Zuckerberg to release information on how many people have viewed and shared Facebook posts containing misinformation about the Covid vaccine. Continue reading...

The executive’s case has sent China’s relations with the US and Canada plummeting with accusations of political arrests and ‘hostage diplomacy’Until she was detained at Vancouver airport in December 2018, Meng Wanzhou was not a household name. But the 49-year-old Huawei executive has now become the face of a high-stakes trilateral dispute between China, Canada and the US.Related: Meng Wanzhou extradition case wraps up but verdict will take months Continue reading...

We ask funny people about what’s funny online. Comedian Alexei Toliopoulos dives so deep he hasn’t seen the surface in yearsMy whole life is a deep dive into the mysteries of pop culture. I don’t think I’ve seen the surface in years and it’s likely I have a permanent case of the bends.

Social security numbers, names, phone numbers and account pins were exposed in some cases, according to the companyA security breach against T-Mobile has exposed personal information, including social security numbers (SSN) and pins in some cases, of more than 40 million users, the company said in a statement on Wednesday morning.The same data for about 7.8 million current T-Mobile post-paid customers appears to be compromised. No phone numbers, account numbers, pins, passwords or financial information from the nearly 50m records and accounts were compromised, it said. Continue reading...

Up for discussion in the Guardian tech newsletter: Instagram, Tik Tok and YouTube implement new rules … CGI CEOs … and unpleasant rightwing ‘lolz’ in KabulI bring good news: regulation works.The last month has brought a flurry of changes to major tech platforms related to child safety online, and specifically to the use and protection of children’s personal data. Continue reading...

I blew the whistle on inauthentic behavior at Facebook. But authentic misinformation is the bigger problem in the westOn 18 May 2021, German YouTuber Mirko Drotschmann tweeted an unusual message: a marketing agency was asking him to share allegedly leaked documents on Covid-19 vaccine deaths. Within a week, French YouTuber Léo Grasset shared similar news. News reports followed: Fazze, a London-based marketing firm with ties to Russia, was offering money to influencers to falsely disparage a Covid-19 vaccine.Related: Facebook shut down our research into its role in spreading disinformation | Laura Edelson and Damon McCoy Continue reading...

Sinead Stubbins is the first to admit she might know a bit too much about the British personality. Is it creepy? Maybe. Maybe not? Who knows• Internet Wormhole is a new column where Guardian Australia writers take you on a tour of their online obsession. Click here for moreLast year, I spent a lot of time staring intently into a computer screen at a person who does not know I exist. Let’s just say if restraining orders were determined by hours spent watching someone’s YouTube channel, British model, designer and TV presenter Alexa Chung would have a pretty decent case against me.Alexa Chung’s YouTube channel started in 2018 with sporadic videos promoting her clothing label and for the last couple of years has included tutorials (for makeup, skincare and how to dress), field trips to fashion shows and interviews with other glamorous, tousled hair women in which they give advice about dating or sleeping or throwing dinner parties from their tranquil, presumably-Santal 33-scented apartments. Continue reading...

Mining cryptocurrency requires lots of cheap energy and many miners have settled on Texas as their destinationIn the middle of rural Texas, a cryptocurrency mine is currently under construction.Hundreds of machines more powerful than the average computer will soon be housed in this 320-acre mining facility in Dickens county, where they will work day and night to solve a complex series of algorithms. If successful, the reward will be newly minted bitcoin, currently worth about $44,000 each. Continue reading...

Lawsuit filed after Blue Origin offered Nasa $2bn if it would change its mind on lunar lander contractJeff Bezos’s Blue Origin has sued the US government over Nasa’s decision to award a $2.9bn lunar lander contract to Elon Musk’s SpaceX.Related: Billionaire space cowboys could become heroes by focusing on the climate crisis Continue reading...

• Investigators to review 765,000 vehicles made since 2014• NHTSA identifies 11 crashes involving first responder vehiclesThe US government has opened a formal investigation into Tesla’s driver-assistance system known as Autopilot after a series of collisions with parked emergency vehicles.The investigation covers 765,000 vehicles, almost everything that Tesla has sold in the US since the start of the 2014 model year. Of the crashes identified by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) as part of the investigation, 17 people were injured and one was killed. Continue reading...

Schools already have pupils’ mobile phone use under control, say leaders in response to government plansSchool and college leaders have condemned the government’s plan to ban mobile phones from classrooms as outdated and out of touch, arguing that schools should be allowed to decide on appropriate rules.Responding to a Department for Education (DfE) consultation on student behaviour, the Association of School and College Leaders said education leaders already had student mobile phone use under control and warned that some students, such as those caring for a relative, may be disadvantaged by a strict approach. Continue reading...

Within weeks of Khan’s appointment as FTC chair, Facebook and Amazon asked that she be recused from antitrust investigationsLina Khan has some of the biggest companies in the world shaking in their boots.The 32-year-old antitrust scholar and law professor in June became the youngest person in history and the most progressive in more than a decade to be appointed as chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Continue reading...

The artist and social media critic on his work subverting the manipulative practices of Facebook, Instagram and TwitterWhen the history of the first decades of this century comes to be written, there will be few more telling artworks than Ben Grosser’s film Order of Magnitude. In the 47 minute video, Grosser, a digital artist and professor of new media at the University of Illinois, has spliced together every public instance in which Mark Zuckerberg has talked of “more” and “bigger”. The resulting montage of interviews and presentations is a fast forward of the rapid growth of Facebook as, in the chief executive’s mouth, thousands become millions then billions. It makes a mesmerising monologue, the story of our times.“The idea that Zuckerberg latched on to even more than anyone else in Silicon Valley,” Grosser suggested, when he spoke to me from Urbana via Zoom last week, “was the need to grow as big as fast as possible, get the largest market share. And everything was subservient to that.” The film is part of a double act. Grosser has also spliced together all the moments he can find of Zuckerberg ever mentioning numbers diminishing or things getting smaller. This film runs for 30 seconds, though in a new version for his forthcoming exhibition at the Arebyte Gallery in London, he has slowed those seconds down so it also runs for 47 minutes. Continue reading...

Brits didn’t ditch pizza and curry takeaways after lockdown ended, but delivery firms’ valuations don’t reflect thisOrdering a takeaway and sitting down with a box set was the height of entertainment for most people during successive coronavirus lockdowns – and this served up bumper sales and profits for a string of food delivery companies.But now that restaurants, cafes and other hospitality venues have reopened, will consumers lose their taste for ordering and go back to eating out? Continue reading...

Four householders with recently installed air source heat pumps discuss the ups and downs of ownershipJohn and Carol Deed, Thriplow, Cambs

The tech giant says its iCloud security update is designed to help weed out images of abuse their children, but activists have voiced concernsOnce upon a time, updates of computer operating systems were of interest only to geeks. No longer – at least in relation to Apple’s operating systems, iOS and Mac OS. You may recall how Version 14.5 of iOS, which required users to opt in to tracking, had the online advertising racketeers in a tizzy while their stout ally, Facebook, stood up for them. Now, the forthcoming version of iOS has libertarians, privacy campaigners and “thin-end-of-the-wedge” worriers in a spin.It also has busy mainstream journalists struggling to find headline-friendly summaries of what Apple has in store for us. “Apple is prying into iPhones to find sexual predators, but privacy activists worry governments could weaponise the feature” was how the venerable Washington Post initially reported it. This was, to put it politely, a trifle misleading and the first three paragraphs below the headline were, as John Gruber brusquely pointed out, plain wrong. Continue reading...

The company’s hostility to academic scrutiny limits our ability to understand how the platform amplifies political falsehoodsLast week, Facebook disabled our personal accounts, obstructing the research we lead at New York University to study the spread of disinformation on the company’s platform. The move has already compromised our work – forcing us to suspend our investigations into Facebook’s role in amplifying vaccine misinformation, sowing distrust in our elections and fomenting the violent riots at the US Capitol on 6 January.But even more important than the effect on our work is what Facebook’s hostility toward outside scrutiny means for the many other researchers and journalists trying to study Facebook’s effects on society. We’ve already heard from other researchers planning similar projects who are now pulling back. If Facebook has its way, there will be no independent research of its platform. Continue reading...

The Scottish islands are leading the way in sustainable energy and now there’s a greener way for tourists to visit them

CMA says sometimes only credits were offered, and it wants swift change or court action could followCustomers of the deals website Groupon who were told by the firm they had to accept a credit note could be due cash refunds after the UK’s competition watchdog ordered the company to improve the way it treats users or face legal action.The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said this week it had found evidence that Groupon does not always provide customers with refunds or replacement items when there is a problem with an order. Shoppers have sometimes only been offered Groupon “credits”, potentially breaking consumer law, it says. Continue reading...

After years trying for a child without success, I sought solace in online message boards. Before long, I was spending hours a day poring over intimate posts, sharing everything with total strangers. Would it help?Leanne was having her fringe cut when she was offered fertility drugs. It was leftover stock from her hairdresser’s treatment and she was giving it to Leanne for free on condition that she dispose of the packaging, as it was labelled with the hairdresser’s name and address. Leanne accepted the drugs – it would save months on NHS waiting lists.A couple of weeks later, Leanne began taking the hormones that would stimulate her ovaries. There was no doctor overseeing the process, no scan or blood test, so Leanne had no idea whether her body was responding correctly. Instead of medical supervision, she followed the advice of several women in a fertility forum. When the pills gave her vertigo, it was these strangers who advised that she should take them at night “so you sleep through the worst of the side-effects”. Continue reading...