Children’s health advocates urged Mark Zuckerberg to abandon the plan citing the negative effects of social media on childrenAn international coalition of children’s health advocates has called on Facebook to abandon its plans to build an Instagram product for kids, citing harm to teens from excessive use of social media.The campaign comes after Buzzfeed broke the news in March that Facebook seeks to build an Instagram product for people under the age of 13. The company currently requires users to be 13 years or older to create an account. Continue reading...
But company’s founder pushes back against criticism of its work practices in letter to shareholdersAmazon needs to “do a better job” for its employees, Jeff Bezos told shareholders in his final letter as chief executive of the online giant, but he also pushed back against criticism of the company’s work practices.Bezos, who reclaimed his title as the world’s richest person this year, said that Amazon’s recent defeat of an attempt by some workers to form the company’s first union in Alabama did not bring him “comfort”. Continue reading...
Social media platform says it was a ‘mistake’ and that harmful terms have been removed in an updateInstagram has apologised for a “mistake” that meant it promoted weight-loss content to users with eating disorders.A new feature on the social network provides users with suggested search terms based on their interests, with default prompts including terms such as “yard work”, “home decor” or “sunsets”. But some people with eating disorders found the app was prompting them to search for terms like “appetite suppressant” instead, raising the risk of a relapse or worse. Continue reading...
Women in the Middle East and north Africa say social codes leave them unable to talk about social media abuse as pandemic pushes sexual harassment off the streetsThe first pornographic picture sent shivers of shock through Amal as she stared in horror at the phone screen. Until now, she had responded politely to the older man who had been messaging her on Facebook, hoping to deter his questions about her life with curt, one-word replies.More lurid pictures followed, some from pornographic magazines, others of the man himself in sexual poses. “I started to blame myself and feel that I invited this because I had replied to him,” says the 21-year-old, who is a university student in Amman, Jordan. Continue reading...
After 16 years, one of the internet’s first – and most surreal – Q&A platforms is to be shut downBefore Reddit’s Am I the Asshole? forum for the “frustrated moral philosopher”, or days-long Twitter debates about whether you wash your legs in the shower, there was Yahoo Answers: one of the first online crowdsourcing resources, now a repository of infamously idiosyncratic wisdom.Established in 2005, the “knowledge-sharing” platform was where you might turn for help with a head-scratcher such as “How do I get black ink from a Biro out of coloured clothes?”, “What documents do you need to enter China?” or “Any ladies want to show me their boobs?”. Continue reading...
We asked Australian comedians to find the good bits online and share them with us. Diana Nguyen has delivered them hereSo a little strange thing about me – while looking for lovers on the traditional dating apps, I found myself on LinkedIn and started dancing on LinkedIn, which then went viral. If you are looking for light entertainment, just search #DancingDiana and you’ll find my 1,000 dancing videos on LinkedIn. Not even joking. But here are some funny videos I always go to during a lockdown. Continue reading...
US justice department says bureau hacked devices to remove malware from insecure softwareThe FBI has been hacking into the computers of US companies running insecure versions of Microsoft software in order to fix them, the US Department of Justice has announced.The operation, approved by a federal court, involved the FBI hacking into “hundreds” of vulnerable computers to remove malware placed there by an earlier malicious hacking campaign, which Microsoft blamed on a Chinese hacking group known as Hafnium. Continue reading...
by Samuel Gibbs Consumer technology editor on (#5GJ9P)
Smart speaker ditches puck shape but keeps solid sound and function with or without LED clock displayAmazon’s fourth-generation Echo Dot has evolved from its predecessors’ puck-like appearance into a small ball, shaking up the idea of what a small smart speaker can look like.The new Echo Dot is priced the same as the last one, costing from £50, although it will be frequently available at a discount at various retailers, and looks like the full-sized £80 Echo hit with a shrink ray. Continue reading...
Several digital currencies surge a day before launch of Coinbase trading platform on Wall StreetThe value of the cryptocurrency bitcoin has surged to a record high, reaching $63,000 (£45,800).The cryptocurrency, which has risen in value by 450% in the last six months, continued to climb by a further 5% during trading on Tuesday. Continue reading...
We want to hear about the best Yahoo Answers posts you have encountered since it started in 2005Since 2005, Yahoo Answers has been one of the longest-running platforms providing reader posted questions and answers. Last week it was announced that the platform would be shutting down on 4 May.To celebrate the best of Yahoo Answers, we would like to hear about the best posts you have seen on the platform over the last 16 years. Continue reading...
by Julia Carrie Wong in San Francisco and Jeff Ernst on (#5GGZV)
Juan Orlando Hernández falsely inflated his posts’ popularity for nearly a year after the company was informed about itFacebook allowed the president of Honduras to artificially inflate the appearance of popularity on his posts for nearly a year after the company was first alerted to the activity.The astroturfing – the digital equivalent of a bussed-in crowd – was just one facet of a broader online disinformation effort that the administration has used to attack critics and undermine social movements, Honduran activists and scholars say. Continue reading...
Want to go viral on Twitter? Steer clear of positive terms, Spanish researchers sayYou’ve treated your Twitter followers to a pithy 280-character comment about the government’s latest gaffe – but what gives your tweet the fuel to spread like wildfire? It’s how negative the tweet is, say researchers, that raises its chances of going viral, at least in the political context.Previous studies have suggested that the main factors affecting the virality of a tweet are user features (such as the number of followers), specific tweet features (number of URLs, hashtags and so on), and aspects of the tweet topic – but few have investigated the importance of a specific type of sentiment as an overarching link among these factors. Continue reading...
by Samuel Gibbs Consumer technology editor on (#5GGPV)
Cheaper wifi speaker has Bluetooth plus Google or Alexa for great indoor and outdoor musicSonos’s new smaller and cheaper Roam portable speaker is one that won’t end up relegated to a drawer collecting dust as it sounds great at home too.The £159 Roam joins the much bigger and heavier £399 Move as the second of firm’s battery-powered models and proves itself as one of the best options in a saturated market. Continue reading...
In 1842, the US patent office registered 14 designs, including a bathtub and a ‘corpse preserver’. It now handles 35,000 a year. Why did this once sedate world became a corporate arms race?It was designed to make sharpening a pencil feel as thrilling as flying a jet. A gleaming chrome teardrop, tapered to a point and adorned with a bullet-like handle, Raymond Loewy’s aerodynamic tail-fin pencil sharpener brought the glamour of the machine age to the humble office desk.As the godfather of American industrial design, Loewy gave his streamlined signature to trains, planes and Coca-Cola vending machines, defining the sleek art deco look of the 1930s. But his go-faster pencil sharpener never made it into production, deemed one chrome-plated, deco-styled step too far. The design does survive in the form of its patent, filed in 1933 and now republished as one of 1,000 such protected inventions, brought together in a new book. Continue reading...
Surge in share price of parent company Alphabet moved pair on to eight-man listThe Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have joined the $100bn club of super-rich people with 12-digit fortunes after a surge in the share price of the tech firm’s parent company, Alphabet.Page and Brin, who co-founded Google in 1996, joined a group of six others with paper fortunes of more than $100bn (£73bn), according to the Bloomberg billionaires index. Continue reading...
Making a plan now can prevent identity theft, save records and stop friends getting painful pop-up reminders when you’re goneTwo things are certain in life: death and the internet.With so many day-to-day functions, tasks and memories now taking place online, the question of what will become of your digital legacy – who will preserve, control or delete your accounts when you are gone – has become increasingly important. Continue reading...
Firm takes action after criticism by UK competitions regulator for failing to clamp down on illegal tradeFacebook has removed more than 16,000 groups trading fake reviews after the UK’s competition regulator criticised the company for failing to make good on a previous promise to clamp down on the practice.In January 2020, the Competition and Markets Authority secured an agreement from Facebook to “better identify, investigate and remove groups and other pages where fake and misleading reviews were being traded, and prevent them from reappearing”. Continue reading...
Chelsey Glasson alleged she had been discriminated against while pregnant and had witnessed others being treated similarlyWhen Chelsey Glasson found out she was pregnant with her second child in 2019, she did not anticipate the first three years of her new baby’s life would be overshadowed by an epic legal battle against a trillion-dollar company.The 38-year-old sued Google, her former employer, in 2020 alleging she had been discriminated against while pregnant and witnessed others being treated similarly, and faced retaliation from her manager when she spoke up about it. Continue reading...
Hundreds of rare PlayStation 2 demos have been uncovered and archived, revealing how favourite games were developedIf you worked on video game magazines in the 90s, there was one sight you got used to pretty quickly. On every desk, in every drawer, there were dozens of DVD-R discs with the titles of games scrawled on them with Sharpies. These were the prerelease versions of games that were sent to us by developers to preview and review. We’d play them on debug consoles (the machines used by developers to build and test games), write our thoughts, then chuck the discs in a pile, or a bin.Fast forward two decades and game players now realise that such early and unreleased versions of games have genuine historical value. Celebrating its 15th anniversary next month, the website Hidden Palace is a collective dedicated to tracking down and archiving video game prototypes, source code and other overlooked artefacts from the development process. Last month, the site made headlines across the video game world when it announced it had secured more than 700 PlayStation 2 demo and prototype discs – all provided by a single anonymous source. The site staff have logged each disc, digitised the builds and worked with the Internet Archive to make them available. Continue reading...
Regardless of when it was leaked, user data ‘is never really old’ – it’s still valuable to cybercriminals, analysts sayAfter information from 533 million Facebook users was exposed to hackers, the company has tried to reassure users, saying that the data was leaked years ago and has since been secured.But experts say the issue is still grave – whether it happened in 2021 or years prior – largely because of the nature of the leaked data. Continue reading...
Why are young people imagining themselves as the protagonist in fictionalised versions of their lives?Staring longingly out of a window watching the sunset across the New York skyline, or sitting on a balcony while Summertime Sadness by Lana Del Rey plays softly in the background. These are just a couple examples of a TikTok trend which sees young people act out scenarios and imagine themselves as a protagonist or the “main character” in a fictionalised version of their life – usually based on film cliches.With more than 5.2bn views of the app’s #maincharacter hashtag – psychologists say the trend has gained momentum because lockdown and the feelings of isolation that come with it have created a gap once plugged by social connection. Continue reading...
ONS survey shows proportion of older people going online has shot up from 29% in 2013 to over half in 2020The proportion of people aged 75 and over using the internet has nearly doubled in the last seven years, official data shows.Figures compiled by the Office of National Statistics show that while there has been little change in internet use for adults aged 16 to 44, the number of older people going online has shot up from 29% in 2013 to 54% in 2020. Continue reading...
National Labor Relations Board found that Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa were terminated last year after circulating a petitionAmazon illegally fired two employees who advocated for better working conditions during the pandemic, the US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has found.The online retailer last year terminated the employment of Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa after they publicly protested its environmental and labor policies. Continue reading...
Smart-home devices like thermostats and fridges may be too smart for comfort – especially in a country with few laws preventing the sale of digital data to third parties
South Korea firm promises service and software support as it shifts focus to more profitable businessesSouth Korean electronics manufacturer LG has decided to wind down its mobile phones unit after admitting defeat in the global smartphone market.LG said on Monday it had made a “strategic decision to exit the incredibly competitive mobile phone sector” to focus on growing businesses such as supplying electric car parts. Continue reading...
Covid shutdowns and Texas storms behind dearth of chips needed for semiconductors to make array of productsA global shortage of one crucial piece of technology is causing delays in everything from cars and televisions to video game consoles and Australia’s National Broadband Network rollout.A temporary shutdown in the production of silicon computer chips at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, as well as severe storms in Texas causing more recent delays, has caused worldwide chip shortages, with a knock-on effect for the production of phones, laptops and even automobiles. Continue reading...
Even Facebook and Google had their troubles when they first went public, so Deliveroo’s bad experience is far from uniqueAmazon listed on the Nasdaq at $18 a share with a market value of $438m in 1997, when it was just an online bookseller, with 256 employees. The share price rose gradually over the years, but started to rocket in 2015 after the firm posted substantial profits. Three years later, it became the world’s second trillion-dollar company, just weeks after Apple reached that milestone, and Amazon boss Jeff Bezos became the world’s richest man. Amazon is now worth about $1.6tn, with its shares trading at $3,161 last week.Google’s IPO in August 2004, six years after it was founded by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, valued it at $23bn, well below the $39bn achieved by rival Yahoo. Google had been forced to cut its float price by almost 40% and halve the number of shares being sold when the process was mired in controversy by technical mishaps, an interview with the founders published in Playboy and other IPO rule breaches. Shares in Google, now Alphabet, started trading on Nasdaq at $85 and rose to more than $100 on their first day. They are now worth $2,129, valuing the company at $1.4tn. Continue reading...
Tailors and dressmakers long ago worked out that men and women are different shapes and sizes. The news has yet to reach Palo AltoIn November 2019, which now seems like an aeon ago, I wrote about an interesting correlation I had stumbled across. It was that the authors of the most insightful critiques of digital technology as deployed by the tech companies were women. I listed 20 of them and added that I made no claims for the statistical representativeness of my sample. It might simply have been the result of confirmation bias – I read more tech commentary than is good for anyone and it could be that the stuff that sticks in my memory happens to resonate with my views.Sixteen months later, I find that my list of formidable female tech critics has extended. It now includes (in alphabetical order): Janet Abbate, Lilian Edwards, Maria Farrell, Timnit Gebru, Wendy Hall, Mar Hicks, Kashmir Hill, Lina Khan, Pratyusha Kalluri, Rebecca Mackinnon, Margaret Mitchell, Safiya Noble, Kavita Philip, Mitali Thakor, Corinna Schlombs, Dina Srinivasan and Carissa Véliz. If any of these are unknown to you then any good search engine will point you to them and to their work. Again, the usual caveats apply. I’m not claiming statistical representativeness, just that as someone whose various day jobs involve reading a lot of tech critiques, these are the thinkers who stand out. Continue reading...
This iPhone-shot sci-fi drama with cameos from Ian McKellen and Conleth Hill is impressively realised, though the plot ultimately frustratesYou’ve got to admire wife and husband film-makers Tori and Matthew Butler-Hart. Stuck in their London flat at the start of the pandemic, the pair wrote a sci-fi script together: a Groundhog-Day-meets-The-Matrix tale of a woman trapped in a time loop. They shot it à deux on an iPhone; she stars, he directs. And there are a couple of cameos, from Ian McKellen and Game of Thrones actor Conleth Hill (who quite literally phoned in their performances from home). It’s a genuinely impressive achievement, but for a film about the infinite possibilities of parallel universes, it’s exasperatingly samey.Tori Butler-Hart is Jane, a woman who wakes up every morning tied to a chair in the attic of a London semi with no memory of how she got there. Outside, the streets are eerily quiet. Scared but resourceful, Jane finds a door hidden behind a pile of junk. A camera on the wall is watching – and from time to time the soundtrack picks up the voices of her observers, distorted and crackling. Continue reading...
Peter Rawlinson says Lucid, which is about to list for $24bn, has drawn interest from big carmakersThe Lucid Motors boss Peter Rawlinson is fluent in the language of the new breed of electric carmaker: he wants to save the planet and he wants to do it fast.The California carmaker is only starting production of its hotly anticipated first model in the second half of this year but it has quickly come to be seen as one of the leaders in the pack of would-be rivals to Tesla. A recent $24bn (£17bn) deal to list on US stock markets will give it $4.6bn in funds to play with. Continue reading...
Arbitrator rebuffed the company’s position that it wasn’t liable for drivers’ behavior given their status as contractorsRide share giant Uber must pay a blind passenger $1.1m following a discrimination claim that its drivers unlawfully denied her rides on 14 occasions, an arbitrator decided Thursday.This arbitrator rebuffed the company’s position that it wasn’t liable for drivers’ behavior given their status as contractors, according to news website Insider. Continue reading...
by Keza MacDonald, Kristan Reed, Oliver Holmes, Pip U on (#5G3DD)
Quality time together or the guaranteed path to a breakup? Either way, over the pandemic more and more couples have been giving co-operative video games a tryKristan Reed: “Oh God! Let’s never break up!” pleads Keza as we embark upon the divorcees-to-be shenanigans of It Takes Two, a kind of Honey-I-Shrunk-the-Parents-to-Fix-Their-Toxic-Marriage. I admit, I approached this bizarro platformer with a certain amount of trepidation, on account of occasionally having a rocky time playing games with my beloved partner. People imagine it’s some holy-grail nirvana to have a gamer partner, but the truth is Keza is just a bit too good at games to be wholly tolerant towards others (mostly: me) flailing around haplessly – especially in Nintendo games, effectively her second native language. Continue reading...
Company is latest to speak out against law that restricts voting access in the state that was passed last weekApple chief executive Tim Cook joined the chorus of business leaders who have come out in support of voting rights in light of voting restrictions Georgia’s governor signed into law last week.“The right to vote is fundamental in a democracy. American history is the story of expanding the right to vote to all citizens, and Black people, in particular, have had to march, struggle and even give their lives for more than a century to defend that right,” Cook said in a statement to Axios. Continue reading...
CMA concerned acquisition could lessen competition for creation of gifs popular on social mediaThe UK’s competition regulator is launching an in-depth investigation of Facebook’s $400m (£290m) acquisition of the gif creation website Giphy over fears that it could lead to a squeeze on the supply of gifs to other social networks such as Snapchat, TikTok and Twitter.The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said on Thursday it was concerned that the takeover may “result in a substantial lessening of competition” for gif creation in the UK and other markets. Continue reading...
End-to-end encryption could be challenged with security agencies enabled to monitor user messagesMinisters are considering forcing Facebook to implement a backdoor to allow security agencies and police to read the contents of messages sent across its Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram chat services.Industry sources say they understand that the Home Office is threatening to use a special legal power called a technical capability notice to compel Facebook to develop a system to allow for the eavesdropping of messages. Continue reading...
The Amazon News Twitter account and executive Dave Clark have been lashing out at critics online – just as Alabama workers vote on unionizationSay what you will about the relative merits of the continued existence of Amazon, the humble online bookstore that might end up being the last company in the world at this rate, you might expect all of that accumulated wealth to afford them access to the best and brightest communications professionals in the world. The behavior of the Amazon News corporate account and of executive Dave Clark on Twitter over the past week, lashing out at prominent critics in an uncharacteristically spiteful and petty manner, calls that seemingly obvious proposition into question.Turns out there may be a good explanation for that. The boss may have taken matters into his own hands. Continue reading...
Intelligence value of SolarWinds hacking of then acting secretary Chad Wolf is not publicly knownSuspected Russian hackers gained access to email accounts belonging to the Trump administration’s head of homeland security (DHS) and members of cybersecurity staff whose jobs included hunting threats from foreign countries, the Associated Press (AP) has learned.The intelligence value of the hacking of then acting secretary Chad Wolf and his staff is not publicly known but the symbolism is stark. Their accounts were accessed in what is known as the SolarWinds intrusion, throwing into question how the US government can protect individuals, companies and institutions if it can’t protect itself. Continue reading...
Technology | The Guardian