Technology | The Guardian

A splashy new series imagines what would have happened if Russia had won the space race with decent, if rarely compelling, resultsMonths of hype for Apple TV+ and the many A-list names attached has dramatically dissipated this week as reviews have revealed a ragtag bunch of half-formed shows that have replaced big ideas with big production values. It might therefore be faint praise to label glossy space race drama For All Mankind as the best of the bunch but it’s adequately entertaining and the first three episodes hint at the show it might become, something far better than it currently is.Related: Dickinson review – Emily Dickinson reborn as a Lizzo-loving feminist Continue reading...

Jack Dorsey has cut off a tiny revenue stream while focusing attention on rival’s inactionTwitter’s announcement that it will ban all political advertising has prompted a wave of calls for Facebook to do the same. But Twitter’s political advertising operation had just 21 advertisers across the entirety of the EU during the parliamentary elections this year, according to the site’s transparency report.The Twitter co-founder and chief executive, Jack Dorsey, has turned a weakness into a strength, cutting off a minuscule revenue stream in order to heap pressure on his main competitor. In the hours since Twitter’s announcement, support has come from voices as diverse as the US-based campaign group Muslim Advocates, the Open Knowledge Foundation thinktank and the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin. Continue reading...

PC, PS4 (version tested), Xbox One; Activision

Robert still listens to MP3s but wants wants to know which music service pays artists bestI’m a big music fan and enjoy listening to music through my PC and phone, but I feel stuck in the last century as I still listen to my MP3 collection. I refuse to get Spotify, as it’s such a bad deal for the artists. Are there any alternatives that treat the artist well? RobertYour problem is that you don’t really have a problem. I’m in almost exactly the same position, only slightly worse, because I still use an MP3 player to listen to albums in MP3 format. The main difference is that I’m almost completely happy about not using any music streaming services. They are not obligatory. If you don’t need them, don’t use them. Spend the money on downloads or CDs instead. Continue reading...

Brilliant camera, slick features and small size mean nothing when the phone won’t even last a dayGoogle is one of only a handful of smartphone manufacturers still making flagship phones that aren’t ginormous beasts, with the new Pixel 4 the cheapest in a while that significantly undercuts the competition.Priced at £669, the Pixel 4 is £70 cheaper than last year’s Pixel 3 and £60 cheaper than Apple’s iPhone 11. It’s also cheaper than its bigger sibling the £829 Pixel 4 XL. The concern is: which corners have been cut and do they matter? Continue reading...

The favorable report drove the tech giant’s stocks up 2.5% on Wednesday, as the company expands its focus beyond the iPhoneApple reported record-high quarter four earnings on Wednesday, citing strong performances in wearables and other services as the company continues to expand its focus beyond flagship products such as the iPhone.The company reported a revenue of $64bn, beating a $63bn estimate from analysts. Continue reading...

Social network’s move comes as Facebook faces controversy over ads that promote misinformationTwitter will ban all political advertising, the company’s CEO has announced, in a move that will increase pressure on Facebook over its controversial stance to allow politicians to advertise false statements.The new policy, announced via Jack Dorsey’s Twitter account on Wednesday, will come into effect on 22 November and will apply globally to all electioneering ads, as well as ads related to political issues. The timing means the ban will be in place in time for the UK snap election. Continue reading...

Fake networks in eight nations are connected to man allegedly behind disinformation empireFacebook has taken down accounts linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin – the businessman allegedly behind Russia’s notorious troll factory – which were actively seeking to influence the domestic politics of a range of African countries.The company said on Wednesday it had suspended three networks of “inauthentic” Russian accounts. The Facebook pages targeted eight countries across the continent: Madagascar, the Central African Republic (CAR), Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Sudan and Libya. Continue reading...

DeepMind’s AlphaStar masters game dubbed ‘next grand challenge for AI’ in just 44 days‘The challenge was to play like a human’: AI takes on the gamersAn artificial intelligence (AI) system has reached the highest rank of StarCraft II, the fiendishly complex and wildly popular computer game, in a landmark achievement for the field.Related: 'The challenge was to play like a human': AI takes on the gamers Continue reading...

Firm had to promise to verify drivers’ identities, in deal attacked by London cabbies

The maestros of film sound reveal the secrets of their challenging job with great frankness and amazing modestyHere is a valuable and deeply felt documentary, celebrating the work of the sound designers, sound editors and Foley wizards in the cinema, and if it feels like a feelgood in-house promotional video for Hollywood technicians … well, they’ve got an awful lot to feel good about.These are the people who create that world of sound, that palimpsest of exquisitely blended noise layers, which is perhaps the thing least consciously comprehended by the movie audience but which is indispensable for fabricating a total world in which a film can live and breathe. It requires an artistry and a delicacy, as well as resourcefulness and make-do-and-mend ingenuity that reaches back to the cinema’s beginnings. Continue reading...

Adriel Hampton registered as candidate for California governor in attempt to avoid checksFacebook will continue to fact-check adverts posted by a California gubernatorial candidate despite a policy exempting political candidates from its rules on misinformation in advertising.The company said that because Adriel Hampton, the head of the Really Online Lefty League political action committee (Pac), “has made clear he registered as a candidate to get around our policies … his content, including ads, will continue to be eligible for third-party fact-checking.” Continue reading...

Unlike most tech companies, Fairphone has a workforce with an almost equal gender split, and a majority of women in leadership. So is its ethical mission the secret to achieving parity?Eva Gouwens had heard that the tech industry was male-dominated, but it wasn’t until she attended the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona for the first time that the extent of the gender imbalance really hit her.

While celebrated, some in the LGBTQ community say it reinforces a fixed idea of what gender-neutral people should look likeApple has expanded its emoji offerings on Monday to include non-binary versions of nearly every human emoji, including non-binary couple pairings.The 328 new emoji designs came with the release of the company’s latest software update iOS 13.2. The non-binary emojis even extend to fantastical creatures such as merpeople, fae, and vampires. Continue reading...

Adriel Hampton plans to run false commercials in protest at policy of letting politicians lieA California man has registered as a candidate for state governor purely to run false commercials on Facebook, as a protest against the social network’s policy to allow political misinformation in paid advertising.Adriel Hampton, a San Francisco resident, has already hit the headlines for his protests against Facebook’s misinformation policy, after a political action committee (Pac) he set up ran an advert falsely claiming that the Republican senator Lindsey Graham supported the Green New Deal. Continue reading...

Tom Watson urges competition regulator to investigate ‘data grab’ by tech companyLabour has written to the competition regulator calling for Google’s reported acquisition of Fitbit to be halted, at least until a wider inquiry into anticompetitive practices in the technology sector is completed.Google made an offer to purchase the fitness tracking company on Monday for an undisclosed price, according to Reuters. Continue reading...

Los Angeles district judge ruled jury will decide whether Tesla chief’s statements about British diver amount to defamationElon Musk will go to trial in December, after a judge denied his request to throw out a defamation lawsuit by a British man Musk called a “pedo guy”.Los Angeles district judge Stephen Wilson said a jury would now decide whether Musk’s statements about Vernon Unsworth, a British diver who helped rescue a team of young football players from an underwater cave in Thailand in 2018, amount to defamation. Continue reading...

More than 600 creators and social media influencers join campaign to plant 20m treesA group of YouTube stars have raised more than $6m (£4.7m) to plant trees around the world by rallying their huge numbers of subscribers.The American YouTuber Jimmy Donaldson, known as MrBeast, was challenged on Reddit in May to plant 20m trees to celebrate reaching 20 million subscribers on his YouTube channel, where he posts videos of extravagant stunts. Continue reading...

Face Unlock, radar and on-device voice skills show Google’s magic, but some bits need fixingGoogle’s latest Pixel 4 XL smartphone is its bravest yet, throwing out the conventions of old, integrating cutting-edge technology and attempting to round it all out with a special mix of software direct from the Android-maker.By now you probably know the drill. The Pixel 4 XL is a metal and glass sandwich like practically every other phone. Unlike most though the aluminium sides have a black textured coating, which aids grip, while the back feels almost like super-smooth skin or silk rather than glass. It also has bold, contrasting colours, if you choose the white or orange variant, that make it stand out well against the competition. Continue reading...

Australian Competition and Consumer Commission alleges Google breached law when users set up Android accountsAustralia’s competition watchdog is pursuing Google over allegations the tech giant made false or misleading claims about which personal location data it was collecting.The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission began proceedings against Google in the federal court in New South Wales on Tuesday, alleging it breached the law through a series of on-screen representations made as users set up Google accounts on their Android mobile phones and tablets. Continue reading...

Disappointing earnings come as the company faces antitrust challenges and employees condemn policiesAlphabet’s stock fell as much as 4% in after hours trading after it reported it missed analyst expectations and posted a 23% decline in profit as it faces rising expenses.Google’s parent company posted earnings of $10.12 per share in its third quarter, lower than the $12.42 per share expected. Its quarterly profit fell 23% to $7.07, hurt by investments in research, development, and marketing. Continue reading...

A letter to Mark Zuckerberg says the exemption is ‘a threat to what FB stands for’ and called for the same standards as other advertsHundreds of Facebook employees have signed a letter to executive Mark Zuckerberg decrying his decision to allow politicians to post advertisements on the platform that include false claims.More than 250 employees signed the letter, which was posted on an internal communication message board for the company, the New York Times reported Monday. They expressed concern that Facebook “is on track to undo the great strides [its] product teams have made in integrity over the last two years”. Continue reading...

New silicone tips, noise cancelling and transparency modes in a similar designApple has launched a new set of its popular true wireless earbuds with traditional silicone tips and noise-cancelling software.The AirPods Pro have a similar design to the current non-isolating AirPods, complete with white stalks and an ultra-compact case. But instead of a plastic duct that rests in your ear, allowing sounds from the outside world to be heard over music, the AirPods Pro aim to block it all out. Continue reading...

If your phone is a bit too big, your hand hurts or you frequently drop it, these cheap accessories can helpSmartphones are getting bigger and heavier every year, but our hands aren’t. At some point something has to break. And when it does it’ll either be a sting in the wallet when your phone hits the ground or a pain in the hand as your constant finger stretching induces dreaded RSI.There aren’t any really small smartphones on the market, just smaller phones that are often very expensive. And that doesn’t help you with the phone in your pocket right now, whether an iPhone 11 Pro Max, a Pixel 3 XL or Galaxy Note 10+. So the solution is some kind of accessory to help you keep a grip. Here are five of the best: Continue reading...

The web domain democracy.com went up for auction last week with an asking price of at least $300,000 (£233,000). This week, Jordan Erica Webber looks at what makes a few words in a web browser worth thousands, if not millions of dollars Continue reading...

Scientists have conducted a series of trials that point to various ways to check the progress of the diseaseLast week, a US biotechnology company claimed to have produced the first drug with the ability to slow down the development of Alzheimer’s. Biogen says it hopes to release aducanumab on to the market after it gets US Food and Drug Administration approval, which could take up to two years. Research into the drug had been abandoned but trials using higher doses of the drug are claimed to improve cognitive functions such as memory, orientation, and language. Continue reading...

Ad, which ran Friday, was put up as a stunt by a left-leaning Pac to test Facebook political ad policies

China’s use of technology for social control of its citizens is extensive – but it could affect users elsewhere too, says security analyst Samantha HoffmanSamantha Hoffman is an analyst of Chinese security issues at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (Aspi). She recently published a paper entitled Engineering Global Consent: The Chinese Communist Party’s Data-Driven Power Expansion.Internet pioneers heralded a time when information would be set free, giving people everywhere unfiltered access to the world’s knowledge and bringing about the decline of authoritarian regimes… that’s not really happened has it?

Microsoft edges out Amazon to win joint enterprise defence infrastructure cloud contractMicrosoft has won the Pentagon’s $10bn (£7.8bn) cloud computing contract, beating Amazon, which was seen as the favourite to build the system.The joint enterprise defence infrastructure cloud (Jedi) contract is part of a broader digital modernisation of the Pentagon meant to make it more technologically agile. Continue reading...

Many third-party contractors learned of new policy from Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony to CongressMany of Facebook’s third-party fact checkers have still not been told that the company now expects them to vet adverts as well as user content for misinformation – though, controversially, not political adverts.Some fact checkers only found out that they should be vetting paid adverts after Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg described the new policyin Congress on Wednesday. Continue reading...

The goodwill offer will buy temporarily for the tech behemoth which has wreaked havoc on democracies across the worldOn Tuesday, Facebook announced it would contribute $1bn toward fixing California’s existential housing crisis. This is a seemingly large number that will buy, temporarily, some goodwill for the tech behemoth, which has wreaked havoc on democracies across the world and hoovered revenue from news organizations.The $1bn in grants and loans would be used over the next decade. Elements include a $250m partnership with the state of California for mixed-income housing, $150m for subsidized and supportive housing for homeless people in the Bay Area, and $250m worth of land near Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters. It follows a $1bn pledge Google made earlier this year for a similar effort. Continue reading...

App users were able to see other customers’ data, including names, dates of birth and mobile numbersThe popular petrol-buying app run by 7-Eleven has suffered a data breach that allowed customers to view the names, email addresses, mobile numbers and dates of birth of other users.The 7-Eleven fuel app, which the company said this week has been downloaded two million times, was taken offline for a matter of hours on Thursday after a customer alerted the company to the fact that he was able to access the personal information of several other customers via the app. Continue reading...

Filming themselves brushing off threatening voicemails from their exes, these young women are telling each other that they aren’t aloneThis week, the social video platform TikTok unleashed a new meme: young women filming themselves dancing – interpretively – to a soundtrack of angry, abusive, emotionally manipulative or threatening voicemails left by their ex-boyfriends.The images of girls throwing gentle shapes through recorded monologues of hostile condemnation have understandably gone viral. If someone hasn’t dubbed them “scornstars” yet, they probably should. Continue reading...

Chuck Schumer and Tom Cotton urged inquiry, noting app reportedly censors material such as Hong Kong protest contentChuck Schumer, the most senior Democrat in the Senate, has urged the government to investigate TikTok, describing the China-owned social media app as “a potential counter-intelligence threat we cannot ignore” and warning it could be used to interfere in US elections.Related: Revealed: how TikTok censors videos that do not please Beijing Continue reading...

Minister reveals sum paid to BBFC to implement age verificationMore than £2m of taxpayers’ money was spent preparing for the pornography block before the policy was quietly dropped in early October, the government has revealed.The bulk of the spending, £2.2m, was paid to the British Board for Film Classification to do the detailed work on the policy from 2016 onwards. Before then, additional costs were borne by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, where civil servants were tasked with developing the proposals as part of their normal work. Continue reading...

Firm reports ‘headwinds’ as near 20% hike in costs and advertising bugs dent profitsTwitter shares slumped on Thursday after the social network reported lower than anticipated revenues and higher costs and said it expected advertising technology bugs to continue to drag on profits.Shares fell by almost 20% in early trading on the New York Stock Exchange to a low of $31.10, the weakest since March. Continue reading...

Washboard existed for only six days. But unlike WeWork, it was profitable – and its founders knew when to give upThe summer of 2014 was a heady time in Silicon Valley. Cash was flowing as freely as Soylent as every Stanford graduate with a half-baked idea about a “pinch point” and a semi-plausible pitch book was lining up checks from venture capital firms. Into this mix came Washboard, a startup so utterly absurd that most of the news outlets that wrote about it (and boy did they write about it) took the trouble to clarify that it was, in fact, “real”.Washboard was designed to solve a real, if insubstantial, problem: it can be difficult for those who rely on coin-operated laundry machines to acquire enough quarters to run a load. Banks have limited hours, small businesses are not always obliging, and most apartment buildings don’t have change machines. Washboard offered a solution: $20 in quarters, sent to you by mail each month, for the totally normal and understandable price of $27. Continue reading...

PC, PS4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One; Obsidian Entertainment

Len wants to replace a Samsung Tab S2. Should he buy the 11in iPad Pro or an iPad Air with extra storage?I use a 9.7in Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 tablet for general browsing, emails, reading digital magazines and some very basic photo editing. It only has 32GB of storage so some apps are installed on its 128GB SD card. However, the battery is no longer what it was, and Samsung has not updated its version of Android, so it is still running Android 7.I am thinking of getting a new iPad because Apple seems to support machines for longer, the apps seem better suited to my needs and, anecdotally, they appear to be more secure. On my budget, I can’t decide between an iPad Air with 256GB and an iPad Pro 11 with 64GB. Both will fit in my camera bag. Is it better to opt for a tablet with more built-in storage or one with a better processor? LenThe challenge for anyone designing a computing device – whether it’s a desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone – is to create a machine that is properly balanced to meet its user’s needs at the price being charged. This is not an exact science. It depends on the cost of major components such as the processor and memory, screen, graphics, storage modules, operating system and so on. But you trust them not to saddle low-end devices with the cost of high-end processors, or to compromise high-end devices by providing too little memory and/or storage space. Continue reading...

Creating machines smarter than us could be the biggest event in human history – and the lastHere’s a question scientists might ask more often: what if we succeed? That is, how will the world change if we achieve what we’re striving for? Tucked away in offices and labs, researchers can develop tunnel vision, the rosiest of outlooks for their creations. The unintended consequences and shoddy misuses become afterthoughts – messes for society to clean up later.Today those messes spread far and wide: global heating, air pollution, plastics in the oceans, nuclear waste and babies with badly rewritten DNA. All are products of neat technologies that solve old problems by creating new ones. In the inevitable race to be first to invent, the downsides are dismissed, unexplored or glossed over. Continue reading...

‘Welfare robots’ | Privacy | Rugby | Norfolk Park in Sheffield | Sport and winningEd Pilkington’s reference to a “21st-century Dickensian dystopia” (The worldwide tech revolution digitising welfare systems and punishing the most vulnerable, 15 October) is spot-on. How prescient was Dickens’s depiction of the nightmare Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit. It’s hard to believe that common sense is so completely absent among those tasked with running the country and evolving systems, but sadly it’s all too clear.

The US, UK and Australia are taking on Facebook in a bid to undermine the only method that protects our personal information• Edward Snowden is a US surveillance whistleblowerIn every country of the world, the security of computers keeps the lights on, the shelves stocked, the dams closed, and transportation running. For more than half a decade, the vulnerability of our computers and computer networks has been ranked the number one risk in the US Intelligence Community’s Worldwide Threat Assessment – that’s higher than terrorism, higher than war. Your bank balance, the local hospital’s equipment, and the 2020 US presidential election, among many, many other things, all depend on computer safety.And yet, in the midst of the greatest computer security crisis in history, the US government, along with the governments of the UK and Australia, is attempting to undermine the only method that currently exists for reliably protecting the world’s information: encryption. Should they succeed in their quest to undermine encryption, our public infrastructure and private lives will be rendered permanently unsafe. Continue reading...

John Mullen believes Australia would have access to better broadband had the government not embarked on the NBNThe Telstra chair, John Mullen, has admitted the company must accept part of the blame for the NBN due to its “recalcitrance” in helping the then Labor government’s NBN policy a decade ago.Mullen told shareholders at the company’s annual general meeting in Melbourne on Tuesday he believes Australia would have access to better broadband than is available on the NBN today, at no cost to taxpayers, had the government not embarked on rolling out the NBN. Continue reading...

Tired? Bored? Supremely unconcerned? Thanks to the latest rollout of digital icons, soon we’ll all be able to express our lack of enthusiasm in tiny circular formName: Yawning Face emoji.Age: Unveiled 224 days ago, as part of Emoji 12.0. Continue reading...

Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and eBay have withdrawn as sponsors – and it may face regulatory problemsPlans for Facebook’s proposed “stablecoin”, Libra, appear to be unravelling with the withdrawal of PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, eBay and Mercado Pago as potential sponsors. This is hardly surprising, given growing awareness of Libra’s potential adverse consequences. If it offers anonymity to its users, Libra will become a platform for tax evasion, money laundering and terrorist finance. If, on the other hand, its privacy protections are lax, Libra will give Facebook access to users’ most intimate financial details.Then there are the dangers Libra poses to economic and financial stability. Although Facebook’s stablecoin will be backed by a portfolio of “low-volatility assets”, anyone who lived through the 2008 global financial crisis will know that low volatility is more a state of mind than an intrinsic attribute of an asset. If the prices of the bonds in the reserve portfolio fall in response to an unexpected rise in interest rates, for example, those bonds may then be inadequate to redeem all the Libra in circulation. At this point, the reserve will be subject to the equivalent of a bank run. And because Libra operates like a currency board, there will be no lender of last resort. Continue reading...

DWP spending millions on ‘intelligent automation garage’ to develop welfare robots to replace humans

Ministers from several countries have written an open letter to the Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, asking him not to fully encrypt all of the company’s messaging services. This week, Jordan Erica Webber talks to the Guardian’s tech reporter Julia Carrie Wong and the security expert Alan Woodward about the implications of restricting end-to-end encryption Continue reading...

As Skoda’s bestselling model the Octavia celebrates its 60th birthday, it’s worth remembering why it has become such a firm favourite on British roadsSkoda Octavia

Constantly checking your phone? Sidetracked by apps? Use these tips to change bad tech habits to good