Technology | The Guardian

TV doctors Chris and Xand consider the drastic differences in their weight – and health. Plus: Slate’s One Year takes us back to 1977, and more mind-changing action in You’re Wrong AboutA Thorough Examination With Drs Chris and Xand

Anonymous person will be replaced by 18-year-old recent high school graduate on New Shepard spacecraftThe anonymous winner of a ticket to join billionaire Jeff Bezos in space next week will no longer board the New Shepard spacecraft due to “scheduling conflicts”, Bezos’s Blue Origin company announced on Thursday.The winner, who paid $29.7m to join one of the world’s richest men in space, will instead be replaced by Oliver Daemen, a recent high school graduate. The 18-year-old took a gap year in 2020 to obtain his private pilot’s license and plans to study physics and innovation management at the Netherlands-based University of Utrecht in September. Continue reading...

• Social media company takes down 200 accounts• ‘Hallmarks of a well-resourced and persistent operation’Facebook said on Thursday it had taken down about 200 accounts run by a group of hackers in Iran as part of a cyber-spying operation that targeted mostly US military personnel and people working at defense and aerospace companies.The social media company said the group, dubbed “Tortoiseshell” by security experts, used fake online personas to connect with targets, build trust – sometimes over the course of several months – and drive them to other sites, where they were tricked into clicking malicious links that would infect their devices with spying malware. Continue reading...

Documents appear to show how Russian intelligence worked to install their preferred candidate as presidentPapers appear to show Putin’s plot to put Trump in White HouseIn January 2016, America was coming to terms with what had previously seemed incredible. Barring an unforeseen event, Donald J Trump was on course to become the Republican party’s presidential candidate. Some welcomed this giddy prospect, while others in the Republican establishment recoiled in horror.The man himself oozed confidence. “I have a feeling it’s going to work out, actually,” he told his rival Ted Cruz, at a Fox News debate. By 22 January, the polls had Trump well ahead, as a snowstorm nudged towards Washington. Continue reading...

Researchers say web domains masquerading as activist, health and media groups are used by governments to hack targetsAn Israeli company that sells spyware to governments is linked to fake Black Lives Matter and Amnesty International websites that are used to hack targets, according to a new report.Researchers from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, who worked with Microsoft, issued a report on Thursday about the potential targets of Candiru, a Tel Aviv-based firm marketing “untraceable” spyware that can infect and monitor computers and phones. Continue reading...

My father, Aladdin Bahrani, who has died aged 91, spent many years working as a senior engineer in his birthplace, Iraq, before becoming professor of manufacturing engineering at Queen’s University in Belfast, where he had trained just after the second world war.The eldest of 10 children, he was born in Baghdad, to Mohammed Saleem Bahrani, a landowner and farmer, and Bahija Abdul Hussan Al Shamma, a housewife. Once he had finished his schooling at Baghdad College, he left Iraq on a government scholarship to study engineering at Queen’s University from 1948 to 1953, graduating with a science master’s and meeting a young Belfast woman, Margaret Sawrey, who became his wife in 1952. Continue reading...

Comfortable and long lasting with good case and brilliant audio but ultimately disposableSony’s latest top-of-the-range noise-cancelling earbuds are a cut above the previous generation and the competition.Costing £250 ($279.99/A$449.99), the WF-1000XM4 are premium true wireless earbuds that go toe to toe with the likes of the Apple AirPods Pro, Jabra Elite 85t and Samsung Galaxy Buds Pro. Continue reading...

China’s video game market is the world’s biggest. International developers want in on it – but its rules on what is acceptable are growing increasingly harsh. Is it worth the compromise?In the years after it was founded in 1999, the Swedish video game company Paradox Interactive quietly built a reputation for developing some of the best, and most hardcore, strategy games on the market. “Deep, endless, complex, unyielding games,” is how Shams Jorjani, the company’s chief business development officer, describes Paradox’s offerings. Most of its biggest hits, such as the middle ages-themed Crusader Kings, or Sengoku, in which you play as a 16th-century Japanese noble, were loosely based on history.But in 2016, Paradox decided to try something a little different. Its new game, Stellaris, was a work of sprawling science fiction, set 200 years in the future. In this virtual universe, players could explore richly detailed galaxies, command their own fusion-powered starship fleets and fight with extraterrestrials to expand their space empires. Gamers could choose to play as the human race, or one of many alien species. (My personal favourite dresses in a lavish golden cape and has a head like an otter’s, with soft reddish-brown fur, dark eyes and a black snout. Another type of alien is a sentient crystal that eats rocks.) Continue reading...

Legal fight hopes to override previous ruling that drivers are not employeesNew Zealand Uber drivers are taking the global ride-share company to court, in the hopes of being legally determined as employees instead of contractors.It is the latest in a string of cases taken against the company and other ride-share apps, and the second such case in New Zealand. Continue reading...

For his eighth birthday in 1959 David Pace was given a Brownie Hawkeye camera. The young boy photographed family, church, work, and school in the region of California that would become the tech giants’ home Continue reading...

Outage means victims of Russia-linked cybercrime ring cannot pay ransom and can remain unnamedWebsites run by the ransomware gang REvil suddenly became unreachable on Tuesday.Ransomware gang websites can be unreliable, and it was unclear whether the site’s disappearance was a momentary fluke or whether the hackers had been taken offline. Continue reading...

Boris Johnson to demand that tech firms do more to tackle online abuseBoris Johnson has summoned tech companies to Downing Street to order them to do more to tackle online abuse, amid mounting criticism of the government after black England players were deluged with racist posts in the aftermath of their Euro 2020 defeat.The England footballer Tyrone Mings has criticised the home secretary, Priti Patel, for her condemnation of the racist abuse faced by his teammates, after she called players taking the knee “gesture politics”. Continue reading...

Tech company must come up with proposals for how it would compensate agencies for use of their newsFrance’s antitrust watchdog has fined Google €500m (£428m) for failing to comply with the regulator’s orders on how to conduct talks with the country’s news publishers in a row over copyright.The fine comes amid international pressure on online platforms such as Google and Facebook to share more revenue with news outlets. Continue reading...

The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical conceptsDoes anyone still believe that any of the companies they call or email are labouring under higher-than-normal call volumes – especially given that that they all seem to have it “higher than normal” all of the time. Does anyone know how long ago the baseline “normal” might have been? Robert Cullen, Härryda, SwedenPost your answers (and new questions) below or send them to nq@theguardian.com. A selection will be published on Sunday. Continue reading...

While developing traditional narrative games is harder than it has ever been, Microsoft’s Xbox chief sees an opportunity in using modern platforms and tech to tell new storiesOver the last decade, the concept of “games as a service” has revolutionised the way the interactive entertainment industry works. From the subscriptions introduced by massively multiplayer online adventures such as World of Warcraft to the seasonal battle passes of current online shooters, we’re seeing a huge amount of focus on games that can sustain a lucrative community of players over several years.But where does that leave more offbeat ideas and concepts that couldn’t support years’ worth of play? Where does it leave the single-player narrative adventure – the blockbusting genre that brought us titles such as Metal Gear Solid, Red Dead Redemption and Mass Effect? It’s a genre Sony has supported through funding the studios that make games such as The Last of Us, Spider-Man and God of War. But Microsoft has focused its efforts on cross-platform, connected games, as symbolised by the mammoth Minecraft industry. Is there still room for traditional forms of narrative games on the Xbox Series X? Continue reading...

Seizure follows confiscation of £114m of the cryptocurrency in JuneMetropolitan police detectives investigating international money laundering have seized nearly £180m of bitcoin.The seizure by the Met’s economic crime command follows a confiscation of £114m of the cryptocurrency in June. Continue reading...

Guardian Australia picture editor Carly Earl explains the dos and don’ts of taking pictures of the moon and night sky

Video-sharing app’s reputation problem isn’t holding back its phenomenal growth, says authorAlmost a third of Britons are concerned that TikTok might share their personal data with the Chinese government, according to a book on the social network, despite the app’s popularity across the nation.And a third of Britons aged between 18 and 34, the key demographic for the app, are more than just worried: they believe TikTok would hand over their data on request from China. Continue reading...

UK union complains to competition watchdog that retailer profited from high prices on hand sanitiser and masksThe Unite union has lodged an official competition complaint against Amazon, alleging the online retailer profited from pandemic-related “price gouging” on products such as hand sanitiser and face masks.In a 41-page letter, seen by the Guardian, lawyers for Unite accuse Amazon of “exploitative abuse of its dominance” and call on the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to launch an investigation. Continue reading...

Nissan’s ‘gigafactory’ in Sunderland must be the first of many sites if the UK is to compete in the electric vehicle eraThe British government’s £100m-plus commitment to secure Nissan’s battery gigafactory for Sunderland has been like gadget-shopping on Amazon writ large: splurging on some new technology that has suddenly become essential – and then being immediately prompted to buy another six.This time, though, duplicating the spending looks more sensible. More gigafactories – or plain old big battery factories – are not essential for the UK to transition to using electric vehicles (EVs). But they certainly will be if Britain hopes to keep making, selling and exporting its own cars. Continue reading...

Internet cons have surged in the Covid crisis, with some victims left with little recourse to recover cashIn early May, James Evans* met a man on the dating app Grindr. The man, who said his name was David, was friendly and chatty. “It started off as a normal conversation,” says Evans. “We moved to WhatsApp and exchanged messages. After a few days he started telling me about crypto trading and how he could show me how it worked and how I could earn money from it. It seemed like a genuine connection.”Unfortunately for Evans, , that wasn’t the case. He hadhooked up with a scammer, who within a week had convinced him to hand over £20,000. Continue reading...

The elevation of the man behind the Cloud while Jeff Bezos relinquishes day-to-day control, comes at a critical time for AmazonAndy Jassy made a powerful – and painful – first impression on the billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos soon after he joined the then start-up bookseller in 1997.During a rambunctious game of “broomball” – a cross between lacrosse and football that another Amazon executive invented and is still overly competitively played at the company – Jassy, then a fresh-faced recruit from Harvard Business School, accidentally hit Bezos over the head with a kayak paddle. Continue reading...

Slimmer, better design, long battery life, 10.1in HD screen and speakers makes for a good TV tabletAmazon’s top 10in Fire OS tablet has had a makeover and now has faster performance, without costing iPad money.The 2021 Fire HD 10 comes in either a standard version costing £150/US$150 or a “Plus” version, as tested here, costing £180/US$180, with a few more bells and whistles. Continue reading...

Alice Levine and Matt Forde delve into the News International phone-hacking scandal. Plus: spoofy horror in Summer Camp Massacre, and an insightful look at trans rights in sportBritish Scandal

A similar agreement was made with Google in February for Guardian Australia to participate in the company’s News Showcase productGuardian Australia has struck a deal with Facebook to licence news content to the platform’s News tab.After months of lengthy negotiations between the two companies since the passage of the federal government’s news media bargaining code in February, Guardian Australia’s managing director, Dan Stinton, announced the agreement with Facebook had been reached on Friday. Continue reading...

A flying car is seen completing its first intercity flight in Slovakia. The prototype, called AirCar, takes off from Nitra airport and lands in Bratislava 35 minutes later. Using wings that fold away in less than three minutes and a propeller at its rear, the dual-transportation vehicle has now completed more than 40 hours of test flight

Campaigners call on entertainment and sport sectors to ensure inclusion of those without access

Facebook, Google, Twitter and TikTok commit to overhaul their platform’s moderation systemsFour of the world’s largest social networks have committed to overhauling their moderation systems to tackle the abuse of women on their platforms.Facebook, Google, Twitter and TikTok have signed up to the pledge, led by the World Wide Web Foundation (WWWF), to fix persistent weaknesses in how they tackle online gender-based violence. Continue reading...

We ask Australian humorists to tell us what’s funny online. Andrew Sholl’s Twitter account is devoted to doing just that. Consider this the bumper editionThe original intent behind the @OzKitsch Twitter account was to have a laugh at cringey aspects of Australian life, like concrete koala letterboxes and Ned Kelly bottle openers. There’s certainly no shortage of material.But its purpose has evolved over time. Instead of simply wincing at the olden days or wallowing in nostalgia, it seeks to examine aspects of everyday life that we have seem to have forgotten, either by accident or design: everything from regional beauty contests, monuments that were never built, and high school war cries, to Menzies’ fleeting admiration for Hitler, quack cures for the Spanish flu, and the musical stylings of Alan Jones. Continue reading...

It turns out that Facebook is more powerful and resilient – and American antitrust law less helpful – than critics of big tech had hopedWithin 12 hours of a federal judge tossing out a state and federal antitrust lawsuits against Facebook, the market value of the adolescent company exceeded $1tn. Facebook became the fifth company worth more than a trillion, joining Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet (the parent company of Google).What are we to make of this sudden turn of events? We have been conditioned by more than five years of criticism and concern about the growing power of Facebook to influence our politics, social lives and economic activities to assume that the company was increasingly vulnerable to aggressive regulators around the world. Continue reading...

Lawyers will try to persuade Canadian court to permit new documents to be introduced as evidence to clear Meng WanzhouThe US justice department’s battle to extradite Meng Wanzhou from Canada has taken a fresh turn as lawyers for Huawei’s chief financial officer claimed that internal emails and bank documents prove there is no grounds to extradite her to the US.Meng, 48, was arrested on a US warrant at Vancouver airport in late 2018, and has been battling extradition. Her detention infuriated the Chinese government and has helped drag relations between Beijing and Ottawa to their lowest point in years. Continue reading...

Graphic depicted Kashmir region as separate country, adding to tension between social media firm and stateTwitter is facing criminal charges in India after the site published a map that incorrectly showed the turbulent Indian region of Kashmir as a separate country.On Monday night a report was filed to police in the state of Uttar Pradesh against Twitter’s head in India, Manish Maheshwari, calling the publication of the distorted map “an act of treason”. Continue reading...

Cases filed by FTC and state attorneys general did not give enough evidence to prove Facebook was a monopolyIn a significant blow to US regulators’ attempt to rein in big tech, a federal judge has dismissed lawsuits brought against Facebook by the Federal Trade Commission and a broad coalition of state attorneys general.Markets cheered the ruling, sending Facebook shares surging by more than 4%, which pushed the social network’s market value to more than $1tn (£722bn) for the first time. Continue reading...

Information was parsed from gov.uk website incorrectly, leading to possible confusion over Covid requirements

As the proportion of girls taking these subjects remains low, teachers reveal why they believe that is and what they’re doing about itGetting women into tech careers has never been more important, but teachers believe old-fashioned stereotypes about subjects such as design and technology and computer science put girls off choosing them at school.In 2020, the number of girls choosing to study computer science GCSE was 16,919 – just over 21.4% of total entrants – compared with 61,540 boys. Slightly fewer girls and boys picked the subject compared with the previous year. Continue reading...

Decision that allows information to continue to flow to and from UK could be revoked ‘immediately’British data protection standards are “adequate”, the EU has ruled in a long-awaited decision that lets digital information continue to flow between the UK and the bloc. But Brussels warned Boris Johnson’s government the decision could be revoked “immediately” if it sees weakening UK standards.Failure to get a positive decision would have risked plunging British businesses into disarray, leaving industries from banking to logistics scrambling to set up more costly, bureaucratic alternatives to share data. Continue reading...

Managerial hierarchies must learn the true lessons of the pandemic if they are to survive and thrivePandemics, the historian Yuval Noah Harari has observed, have a way of accelerating history. Just ask the founders of Zoom. Only two years ago, we were all thinking that it would take at least another decade before video-conferencing became an integral part of the way we work in organisations. Then along comes Covid and in three weeks we’re all happily Zooming (or unhappily in the case of Handforth parish council). And now we’re more or less acclimatised or, at any rate, resigned to the idea that remote meetings might be here to stay.The problem with having had the fast-forward button suddenly propel us into an unexpected place, though, is that we find ourselves unmoored. We start wondering about what lies ahead as the immediate threat of the virus recedes. What will our post-pandemic future be like? In relation to work, three main possibilities are currently taking up all the airtime: continuing to work from home (WFH); a hybrid mode in which we spend some time in the office but also two or three days WFH; and a return to ye olde days commuting to the office to gather round the water cooler and pretend to be doing something useful. Continue reading...

They were sold as gadgets that meant you would never miss a delivery. But now doorbell cameras – from Amazon’s Ring to Google’s Nest – are recording our every moveI have got a new doorbell. It’s brilliant. It should be; it cost £89. It’s a Ring video doorbell; you’ll have seen them around. There are others available, made by other companies, with other four-letter names such as Nest and Arlo. When someone rings my doorbell, I’m alerted on my smartphone. I can see who is there, and speak to them.My phone is ringing! C major first inversion chord, arpeggiated, repeated, for the musically trained – you’ll recognise it if you’ve heard it. It’s a delivery. Amazon, as it happens; Amazon acquired Ring in 2018, reportedly for more than $1bn. Continue reading...

New message warns that results are ‘changing quickly’ and may not yet include reliable sourcesGoogle has started warning users when they search for a topic that is likely to have poor results, as part of its effort to tackle “data voids” on the search engine.The new warning was spotted by Renee DiResta, an academic who studies misinformation at Stanford University. “It looks like these results are changing quickly,” Google will now caution users. “If this topic is new, it can sometimes take time for results to be added by reliable sources.” Continue reading...

CMA will decide whether consumer law was broken by not taking sufficient action to protect shoppersAmazon and Google are to be investigated by the UK competition watchdog over concerns the tech companies have not done enough to tackle the widespread problem of fake reviews on their websites.The Competition and Markets Authority, which began looking at the issue of fake reviews on major platforms two years ago, will now consider whether Amazon and Google have broken consumer law by not taking sufficient action to protect shoppers from fake reviews. Continue reading...

The Teamsters union is rich, strong, and experienced – and it’s ready to help workers and give Amazon a headacheThe announcement that the Teamsters – one of America’s most powerful unions – is going to mount an ambitious campaign to unionize Amazon warehouses across the US presents the e-retailing colossus with a far bigger threat than the recent effort to unionize an Amazon warehouse in Alabama ever did.Related: Amazon fired him – now he’s trying to unionize 5,000 workers in New York Continue reading...

This year’s all-digital video game expo involved a deluge of livestreams showcasing upcoming excitements. Here are our picksThe chaotic mini-game series is making a really welcome return, this time featuring two-player co-op. The new vignette challenges range from avoiding bird plops to tweaking someone’s nipple hair. Classic Wario. Continue reading...

The growth of non-fungible tokens has given rise to massive windfalls for those behind early virals. Sirin Kale and Alex Hern explain allOn 28 May 2016 the photographer Jeff McCurry was taking pictures of a 17-year-old western lowland gorilla called Harambe in Cincinnati zoo when a child entered the enclosure. The zookeepers reacted by shooting the gorilla dead. The child was unhurt. What was a local story suddenly became a global phenomenon due to the combination of social media and McCurry’s picture. Harambe’s image was everywhere. But, despite his photo being shared billions of times, McCurry did not see much of a financial benefit. Now advances in technology have given the world non-fungible tokens (NFTs) – and McCurry has a way of finally cashing in on his famous image.The Guardian’s technology editor, Alex Hern, tells Rachel Humphreys that this year’s craze for NFTs follows in the wake of speculation on cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. Now similar technology means unique images, film clips, animations and even poems are being bought and sold online for increasingly large sums. Continue reading...

Opening up iOS to ‘sideloading’ would lead to wave of damaging malware on iPhones and iPads, firm saysAllowing users to bypass the App Store would lead to a wave of damaging malware on iPhones and iPads, Apple has warned, as the company faces the prospect of sweeping regulatory action on both sides of the Atlantic.Opening up iOS to “sideloading”, the name for installing software from unapproved sources, could allow malicious software to hold user data to ransom, let children bypass parental controls, or lead to rampant piracy, the company claims in a new paper. Continue reading...

It was the decade Sonic the Hedgehog, the original PlayStation, the Nintendo 64 and so much more entered the world – here are the 15 best games of this golden age of gamingOf all LucasArts’ memorable, quip-fuelled point and click adventures – from dark afterlife comedy Grim Fandango to the surrealist Day of the Tentacle – it’s Monkey Island 2 that gets the most love nowadays, and justifiably so. The puzzles were just on the right side of deliberately obscure, the characters were strange and colourful, and the music unforgettable. And that ending still sparks discussion, 30 years on. Continue reading...

Creator of the world wide web says digital asset is ‘totally aligned with the values of the web’Tim Berners-Lee has defended his decision to auction an NFT (non-fungible token) representing the source code to the web, comparing the sale to an autographed book or a speaking tour.The creator of the world wide web announced his decision to create and sell the digital asset through Sotheby’s auction house last week. In the auction, which begins on Wednesday and will run for one week, collectors will have the chance to bid on a bundle of items, including the 10,000 lines of the source code to the original web browser, a digital poster created by Berners-Lee representing the code, a letter from him, and an animated video showing the code being entered. Continue reading...

Once, people who owned viral photos made little money from them. Now, the ‘original’ can potentially sell for an enormous sum. But are buyers savvy investors – or unwitting dupes?The photographer Jeff McCurry’s favourite Harambe memes are the ones where the dead gorilla is in heaven, Photoshopped alongside Diana, Princess of Wales, Tupac and Muhammad Ali. “It’s like: wow,” says McCurry. “What greater spot can you be placed in? Harambe’s at the top of the hill, waiting to meet you there.”McCurry took the photograph of the 17-year-old western lowland gorilla that went on to become a meme. In it, Harambe kneels, projecting a fearsome aura of strength, nobility and calm. A former volunteer photographer at Cincinnati zoo, McCurry was there on 28 May 2016, the fateful day a three-year-old boy climbed into the gorilla’s enclosure, forcing zookeepers to shoot Harambe dead. “It didn’t seem real at first,” says McCurry, who was a regular visitor to the zoo. “When any of your friends die, it’s hard to process. I was in shock.” Continue reading...

One of US’s biggest unions, with 1.4m workers, to vote on resolution making Amazon employees its top priorityOne of the largest unions in the US is expected this week to launch a broad effort to unionize Amazon employees.The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which represents 1.4 million workers in 500 unions nationwide, will vote on Thursday on a landmark resolution to make its highest priority helping Amazon workers achieve a union contract. Continue reading...

‘Report remove’ button on Childline website is described by internet safety charity as a world firstChildren in the UK who are worried that nude pictures and videos may end up online will be able to report the material to help prevent it from being uploaded in the future.For the first time, young people will be able to flag the content with the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) via a tool on Childline’s website before it has appeared online. Continue reading...

Investors wary after authorities in Sichuan ordered bitcoin mining projects to closeBitcoin has tumbled further in the wake of China’s expanding crackdown on bitcoin mining, as investors grow more uncertain about the future of the leading cryptocurrency.Bitcoin fell as low as $31,333 on Monday, a two-week trough, dragging down other cryptocurrencies. The world’s biggest cryptocurrency has lost more than 20% in the past six days alone and was at half its April peak of almost $65,000. In the year to date, it remains up about 11%. Continue reading...