Technology | The Guardian

Richard Kind is compelling as the retiree seduced by a VR ‘companion’, but the film fails to do much with its rather familiar premise

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...

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...

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...

Over 100 Instagram accounts are promoting dangerous antivax views and selling ‘detox’ products, investigation finds

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...

PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC; People Can Fly

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...

Like many people, I’ve long been addicted to using Jeff Bezos’s company. But now it seems it really is time to leave it alone

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...

‘I got this call: do you want to audition for a show about video games? It sounded exactly the thing a dweeb with round glasses could do’

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...

Public can try pulling faces to trick the technology, while critics highlight human rights concerns

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...

Firm hit back at Congressman Mark Pocan for saying workers had to urinate in bottles, before admitting Pocan was telling truth

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...

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...

Electronic Arts, PS4/5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X, PC

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...

Online metrics are pillow talk, and digital secrets go public in this tragicomic portmanteau of five stories about our relationship with technologyAs ever-evolving technologies produce instant gratifications and fresh horrors, Selfie sees modern life as a tragicomic minefield fraught with absurdities. This French anthology film delivers biting social critique with a side helping of je ne sais quoi wit. Across five loosely connected stories from five seasoned film-makers (including Rust and Bone scriptwriter Thomas Bidegain), human idiosyncrasies are constricted by algorithms and reduced to likes.Though pushed to ridiculous comedic heights, Selfie’s cautionary tales are not so far-fetched. A married couple whose famous vlogs revolve around their son’s cancer scramble for content now that he is cured. In a reversal of stereotypes, a female teacher anonymously ambushes a viral male comedian with vicious tweets, only to pique his romantic interest. A seemingly content man slowly unravels as he blindly obeys his algorithmic ads. An awkward millennial manipulates his ratings on a dating app through nefarious methods. And finally, the farcical pièce de résistance: on an island with limited phone signals, a wedding goes haywire as a massive data hack reveals everyone’s dirtiest online secrets. All (digital) hell breaks loose. Continue reading...

Melbourne news director Hugh Nailon says ‘the Ferrari wouldn’t start and we had to fire up the Datsun 180B’Mike Sneesby’s first day as Nine Entertainment’s chief executive was spent managing the biggest cyber-attack to hit an Australian media company, affecting TV programming and newspaper print production across the country.The source of the suspected ransomware attack has not yet been identified and sources say the disruption could extend into the Easter long weekend. Continue reading...

Mail-in ballots for the hotly contested battle to unionize 5,800 workers are due on Monday. Some experts are predicting a victory while others are unsureWith mail-in ballots due this Monday, federal officials will soon begin tallying the votes in what has been the most closely watched unionization drive in the US in years – the hotly contested battle to unionize 5,800 Amazon workers in Alabama. Some labor experts predict a union victory, others aren’t so sure.While admitting he’s afraid to make a prediction, Robin Kelley, a history professor at University of California, Los Angeles, said: “I do think the union’s going to win the election. Whether it’s overwhelming or not, I don’t know, but I do think there’s enough momentum to win.” Continue reading...

Law must address profits made by companies from fraudsters’ advertisementsMinisters must force tech giants such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft to stop the “immoral” practice of profiting from the £10bn of pension fraud committed by internet scammers, a committee of MPs has urged.Fraudsters use online advertisements, mostly on Google, to trick people out of their pension funds, according to a report published by the work and pensions select committee, but regulators are “powerless” to hold the internet firms to account. Continue reading...

Our tendency to believe social media platforms’ claims of effectiveness is blinding us to what they are actually deliveringHere’s a disturbing thought for those of us who are critics of the tech industry: are we unduly credulous about the capabilities of the technology as extolled by the companies and their paid evangelists? Did clever exploitation of social media really lead to the election of Trump and the Brexit vote in 2016, for example?At one level, the answer to that has to be “no”. Social media obviously played some role in those political earthquakes, but anyone who attributes seismic shocks on that scale just to tech companies hasn’t been paying attention to what’s been happening to democratic countries since the 1970s. Nor have they been reading the political science literature. Nevertheless, the drumbeat of angst about what networked technology and surveillance capitalism are doing to society continues to reverberate. Continue reading...

Technology companies rallied to apply their expertise as King county went from the US center of the pandemic to one of the country’s lowest death ratesLast year, four days after the first recorded Covid-19 death in the United States was reported in Kirkland, Washington, just east of Seattle, Microsoft leaders jumped into action – recommending that their employees in the area work from home. Two days later, Amazon made a similar declaration.Combined, their announcements affected more than 100,000 employees in this Pacific north-west tech hub and came days before the Washington state governor’s first major Covid mandate and about a week before the US president declared an emergency for Covid. Continue reading...

A powerful battery of drones, thermal cameras and heartbeat detectors are being deployed to exclude asylum seekersKhaled has been playing “the game” for a year now. A former law student, he left Afghanistan in 2018, driven by precarious economic circumstances and fear for his security, as the Taliban were increasingly targeting Kabul.But when he reached Europe, he realised the chances at winning the game were stacked against him. Getting to Europe’s borders was easy compared with actually crossing into the EU, he says, and there were more than physical obstacles preventing him from getting to Germany, where his uncle and girlfriend live. Continue reading...

Documents provided to the Intercept published after the company denied reports delivery workers lack access to bathroomsAmazon caused an uproar on Thursday when it denied reports that its delivery workers have been forced to urinate in bottles due to lack of access to bathrooms, but a leaked internal memo shows the company has been aware of the problem for at least several months. Continue reading...

‘You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you?’ a tweet from the Amazon News account readTo paraphrase one of the most iconic tweets of the past 10 years, Amazon’s recent denial about employees not being forced to urinate in bottles at work has people asking a lot of questions already answered by the denial.Related: What if the most important election of the year is happening right now in Alabama? | Indigo Olivier Continue reading...

Company says it ‘must do better’ after Guardian discovers more than 150 offensive comments on Maps siteGoogle has said it “must do better” at removing what campaigners called “sickening” and “grotesque” antisemitic content following an investigation by the Guardian.More than 150 antisemitic comments were discovered on the Google Maps site for the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp which is today the site of a museum in memorial to the where the Nazis killed 1.1 million people killed there, the overwhelming majority Jews. Continue reading...

Nintendo Switch; Capcom

Exclusive: public figures considered to be permissible targets for otherwise-banned abuse, leaked moderator guidelines show