Technology | The Guardian

We look at four e-bikes, from the hi-tech to the conventional, to see which offers the best experience

Internet tabs, like gases, expand to fill their container. Close them all and feel the weight of unread content liftWhen I was a kid, The World’s Strongest Man was televised each year during the fallow period between Christmas Day and New Year. The thing I remember most was the sheer release on the faces of men built like tree trunks when they stopped pulling a train, say, or rearranging Atlas Stones that had made ribbons of their forearms.That’s the relief I feel when clearing all the tabs in my internet browser. Clicking the crosses like a long line of kisses finally indulged. There are many reasons why one has tabs open in double figures. In my defence, they are often related to work or research. The sense of lightness that comes over me when closing them is down to a task completed. It is a bit like setting one’s pen down at the end of an exam; the way the air feels that bit fresher coming out of the hall than going in. Continue reading...

Masahiro Hara came up with black and white pattern to optimise inventory in automotive industryThe eureka moment that helped Masahiro Hara perfect the Quick Response, or QR code, sprang from a lunchtime game of Go more than a quarter of a century ago.He was playing the ancient game of strategy at work when the stones arranged on the board revealed the solution to a problem troubling the firm’s clients in Japan’s car industry – and which is now being repurposed as a weapon in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic. Continue reading...

Regulators and 48 attorney generals take on company over antitrust concernsUS regulators and 48 attorneys general are limbering up for what promises to be the biggest legal battle against a US company in decades. Letitia James, the New York attorney general who is spearheading one of two lawsuits against Facebook, this week accused the social network of abusing its “dominance and monopoly power to crush smaller rivals, snuff out competition, all at the expense of everyday users.”In a powerful speech, James said Facebook used its “vast troves of data and money” to fund a “buy or bury” scheme to quash competition. James said she would not rest until the courts ordered Facebook to sell off WhatsApp and Instagram, which she said the social network had acquired illegally. Continue reading...

Company will roll out feature in UK next year but without guarantee it will filter out 100% of advertsYouTube users will be able to opt out of most gambling and alcohol adverts if they don’t want to see them, using tools set to be rolled out by Google in the UK next year.Google told the Guardian that it was responding to feedback from users concerned by the number of ads for alcohol and gambling that they were seeing online, both on YouTube and on third-party websites. Continue reading...

Analysis: The biggest antitrust case in a generation has been compared to the years-long lawsuit against Microsoft in 1998Facebook is facing perhaps its greatest existential threat yet as the company prepares to battle two antitrust lawsuits brought by the US government and more than 40 states. But while analysts are calling the crackdown an important step, whether the social media giant can be reined in remains to be seen.The lawsuits brought against Facebook on Wednesday accuse the company of wielding its “monopoly power” to crush and overwhelm its rivals. The cases tackle Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp in particular, deals which federal regulators now say should be unwound. Continue reading...

Automation is revolutionising China’s pork farms but leaving independent farmers behindA slender snout. Shapely, upright ears. Like humans, pigs have idiosyncratic faces, and new players in the Chinese pork market are taking notice, experimenting with increasingly sophisticated versions of facial recognition software for pigs.China is the world’s largest exporter of pork, and is set to increase production next year by 9%. As the nation’s pork farms grow in scale, more farmers are turning to AI systems like facial recognition technology – known as FRT – to continuously monitor, identify, and even feed their herds. Continue reading...

Elon Musk tweets ‘Mars here we come’ after fireball engulfs prototypeSpaceX’s Starship prototype has exploded while attempting to land after its test launch from the company’s rocket facility in Boca Chica, Texas. Live video of Wednesday’s test showed the self-guided rocket landing at speed following a controlled descent before disappearing in a ball of flame.Despite the catastrophic end to the six-and-a-half-minute test, SpaceX entrepreneur Elon Musk was thrilled. “Mars, here we come!!” he tweeted. Continue reading...

Prosecutor says company has used power ‘to crush rivals’, with allegations centered on acquisition of Instagram and WhatsAppThe US government and a coalition of 48 states and districts have filed parallel lawsuits against Facebook in a major antitrust offensive that accused the social media behemoth of anticompetitive behavior and could ultimately force its breakup.At the heart of both antitrust actions, announced on Wednesday, is Facebook’s dominance of the social media landscape, and whether the company gobbled up potential competitors and blocked market access to others that could have eaten into its staggering market share. Continue reading...

VAT on Uber taxi trips and Airbnb stays in post-pandemic revenue plans passes the fairness testA chancellor who will borrow £394bn this financial year has to come up with a few new ways to raise money, and here’s a Treasury idea that sounds modest but interesting: put VAT on Uber taxi trips and stays in Airbnb properties.It would also seem to pass a basic test of fairness. Most Uber drivers and Airbnb providers are too small to be registered for VAT, but, taken as a whole, their sectors genuinely compete with companies that do pay VAT. Every night in a seaside Airbnb is one less visit to the local hotel, so there is also a question of keeping the competitive playing field level. Continue reading...

Papers relating to Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine reportedly targeted in attack on European Medicines AgencyGerman biotech firm BioNTech said on Wednesday that documents relating to the Covid-19 vaccine it has developed with Pfizer were “unlawfully accessed” after a cyber-attack on Europe’s medicines regulator.Earlier, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) – which is responsible for assessing and approving vaccines for the European Union – said it had been targeted in a cyber-attack. It gave no further details. Continue reading...

Elevate disposal follows sale of autonomous vehicle division as Uber aims for profitUber has sold its loss-making flying taxi division, Elevate, to a Californian startup as it abandons costly side projects in an attempt to turn a profit next year.The sale to Joby Aviation, announced late on Tuesday, comes a day after Uber ditched ambitions to develop its own self-driving car and sold its autonomous vehicle division, Advanced Technologies Group (ATG), to the startup Aurora Innovation for $4bn (£3bn). Continue reading...

We are raiding the Audio Long Reads archives and bringing you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors.This week: The ability of statistics to accurately represent the world is declining. In its wake, a new age of big data controlled by private companies is taking over – and putting democracy in peril. By William Davies Continue reading...

Giant leap in performance and twice the battery life in a winning form with no real downsidesThe MacBook Air is the first of two new laptops with Apple’s first-of-its-kind, own-brand M1 processor, which makes for a giant leap in performance and battery life.The MacBook Air with M1 chip starts at £999 and is Apple’s entry-level laptop, sitting below the MacBook Pro with M1 that starts at £1,299. Alongside the new Mac mini, they are the first models in Apple’s wholesale transition away from traditional Intel x86 processors to Apple’s Arm-based chips similar to those used in iPhones and iPads. Continue reading...

‘Where can I buy toilet paper?’ tops one category while sourdough recipes and how to make bread also rank highlyHand sanitiser topped three separate search categories in Australia during a year dominated by the coronavirus pandemic, Google has revealed, and “US election” was the leading overall search term.“Where can I buy toilet paper?” was the most searched for “can I” phrase followed by “Where can I buy hand sanitiser?” People keen to make their own hand sanitiser when there was a shortage earlier in the year resulted in it topping three separate lists: “how to …” make it; “recipe” for it and “DIY” hand sanitiser. Continue reading...

One of country’s largest cybersecurity companies says sophisticated operation stole tools it uses to test government clients’ defensesFireEye, one of the largest cybersecurity companies in the US, said on Tuesday that foreign government hackers with “world-class capabilities” broke into its network and stole tools it uses to test the defenses of its thousands of customers, who include federal, state and local governments and major global corporations.The hackers “primarily sought information related to certain government customers”, said FireEye’s CEO, Kevin Mandia, in a statement, without naming them. He said there was no indication the hackers got customer information from the company’s consulting or incident-response businesses or threat intelligence data it collects. Continue reading...

The exercise guru is joined by fast food tips, the WAP lyrics and afternoon tea delivery high on the search engine’s Year in Search snapshotIt was a year turned upside down by a global pandemic, when a country in lockdown craved the comfort of home-cooked versions of Ikea meatballs and KFC take-outs while seeking instructions on DIY face masks and hand sanitiser.From the predictable and mundane to the downright bizarre, Britons forced to spend more time at home in their kitchens and on their sofas turned to Google Search for inspiration on a wide range of activities and topics. Continue reading...

Surely, if there were a time to put the boot into the retail giant, it’s now. Instead, Channel 4 pulls its punches, with festive tips for navigating Jeff Bezos’s empireEven the gentlest programme about Amazon cannot help but function as a reminder that Jeff Bezos originally planned to called his creation Relentless.com – presumably until a brave and/or heavily stock-optioned colleague took him aside and murmured in his ear: “You’re not supposed to say the quiet part out loud, Jeff.”The Truth About Amazon: Can You Trust It This Christmas? (Channel 4) is indeed a gentle programme, the last in a series of three gentle programmes about the giganticest of retail giants. Presented by Helen Skelton and Sabrina Grant, this outcropping of Channel 4’s consumer rights franchise, Supershoppers, eschews anything like a full-blooded excoriation of Bezos or his behemoth. Like the original, supposedly one-off, documentary earlier this year, the series prefers to mix little more than a hint of hard truth with copious amounts of soft soap. Continue reading...

Deals that brought the top four social media companies under Facebook rule would be violations if they were considered a threatFacebook is expecting significant new legal challenges, as the US Federal Trade Commission and a coalition of attorney generals from up to 40 states are preparing antitrust suits. Continue reading...

If your family can’t gather, or you’ve decided not to risk it, how can you bring your loved ones together? Here’s a guide to all the kit you need, and how to set it up …The holidays are going to be different this year. Three households may be more than we’ve crammed into the same room for months, but for most of us it’s a far cry from our whole family. And even if you can fit everyone you care about in the same limited gathering, you may have reasonable doubts about whether you want to take the risk that comes with it.So it’s time to start preparing for alternatives. We may be Zoomed out, but with a little extra effort, even a remote gathering can feel special and fun. Continue reading...

Can rich video game worlds introduce us to nature? A forager, a programmer and a botany professor discuss the educational possibilities of simulated plantlifeSomething is afoot in the sleepy Shropshire village of Yaughton. The locals have vanished into thin air, and the roads throng with murmuring golden lights. Most unsettlingly of all, the local pub sells beer at 50p a pint. There’s a mystery to unravel, but when I visit with author and educator Adele Nozedar, we’re most interested in the plants.Nozedar, who runs Brecon Beacons Foraging, is a font of botanical insight. As we amble past eerily abandoned cottage gardens, she points out leylandii conifers and Japanese hostas. In the woods above the village, she sends me squelching along streambeds in search of wild mint and bulrushes. She also calls my attention to anomalies: the presence of both rose and tulip flowers, for instance, that typically appear at different times of year, and the absence of common plants such as fat hen, hogweed and greater plantain. Some plants appear to be a collage of species; others resist identification altogether. We spend 10 minutes poring over one specimen with delicate white flowers. It could be Queen Anne’s lace, a kind of edible wild carrot. Or it could be a variety of hemlock, the poisonous herb fed to the Greek philosopher Socrates at his execution. Continue reading...

Ride-hailing company sells division to startup Aurora but says they will collaborateUber has ditched efforts to develop its own self-driving car with the multibillion-dollar sale of its driverless car division to a Silicon Valley startup.The ride-hailing company is selling the business, known as Advanced Technologies Group (ATG), for a reported $4bn (£3bn) to Aurora, a start-up that makes sensors and software for autonomous vehicles and is backed by Amazon and Sequoia Capital. Continue reading...

In Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, families were forced out for a huge hi-tech plant – but three years later, it still hasn’t been builtWhen Sean McFarlane recently returned to the site where his lifelong home was demolished, he found in its place a retention pond and hundreds of geese perched on a hill.The quiet scene came as a shock. The Wisconsin village of Mount Pleasant had effectively forced him, his girlfriend and four children from their home in 2017 to make way for a proposed 20m sq ft hi-tech plant owned by the Taiwanese electronics giant Foxconn, a plant Donald Trump had said would soon be the “eighth wonder of the world”. Continue reading...

The cult show that splices Evil Dead II with Elvis Presley hits is now on video cassette as standups hark back to retro formatsThe movie was a sequel to one of the original video nasties, so what better format for a stage show that pays it tribute? Comedy distributors Go Faster Stripe have released Rob Kemp’s cult musical-comedy The Elvis Dead – based on Evil Dead II – on VHS. I’ve got a copy, its chunky rectangular case a Proustian madeleine transporting me back to the 80s. Indelible memories of, er, endlessly rewinding and fast-forwarding things, and trying to press record at just the right moment to splice episodes 1 and 2 of the latest Doctor Who.If the VHS format is remembered for little else, it’s remembered for the video nasties panic at the start of that decade, when a nation trembled before the corrupting power of Zombie Holocaust, Eaten Alive! and Bambi Goes Crazy-Ape Bonkers with His Drill and Sex. (That last one courtesy of Vyvyan from The Young Ones.) Even if the panic abated by the time of Evil Dead II’s release in 1987, it’s a nice touch by the Cardiff outfit to offer Kemp’s show in retro video format – with a digital download simultaneously available. And it’s not a bolt from the blue. Earlier this year, in a bid to offset Covid-era losses, Monkey Barrel Comedy released standup sets by John Kearns, Olga Koch and Ari Eldjárn on vinyl LP. Continue reading...

Thumping bass, great sound and new spherical design propels Amazon to top of the pileAmazon’s fourth-generation Echo Alexa smart speaker is a complete redesign in form and audio, with the popular device transformed into a ball of sound.The Echo costs £89.99 and is Amazon’s mid-range speaker, sitting above the £49.99 Echo Dot and below the £189.99 Echo Studio. Continue reading...

Exclusive: Nationals’ Anne Webster reveals she is pressing for legislation to hold social media platforms to account for content they publish

Pandora Sykes and Dolly Alderton bow out after four years hosting their hit show. Plus: fly-on-the-wall chats with Pharrell Williams, and an accessible look at the climate emergencyThe Climate Question

A new lawsuit says the social media giant favored those with H1-B visas, ‘refusing’ to recruit, consider or hire qualified US workersThe US Department of Justice accused Facebook on Thursday of discriminating against American workers, saying in a new lawsuit that the social media giant had given hiring preferences to temporary workers, including those who hold H-1B visas.The DoJ said that Facebook had “refused” to recruit, consider or hire qualified US workers for more than 2,600 jobs that in many cases paid an average salary of $156,000 a year. Continue reading...

Tech firm IBM says it has uncovered global phishing campaign with hallmarks of being state-backed

Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, Mac; Romero Games/Paradox Interactive

Productivity score potentially allowed managers to identify individual employees who weren’t contributing enoughMicrosoft has apologised for enabling a feature, “productivity score”, which critics said was tantamount to workplace surveillance.The company says it will now make changes to the service, which lets IT administrators “help their people get the most” from its products, in order to limit the amount of information about individual employees that is shared with managers. Continue reading...

Our article asking why so many players invert their controls provoked a fierce debate that has now caught the attention of researchers into visual perception

Over the course of the pandemic, I’ve been assailed by targeted ads for ‘life-changing’ products – so I put a selection of them to the testIf, like me, you’ve been involuntarily participating in this wild ride people are calling “the pandemic”, you may have experienced the same embarrassing urge as I have. Which is to fill the wide, empty void in your life with things: gadgets, gizmos, subscriptions, speakers, a little brush for your facial hair. Buying stuff online is, simply put, something to do.Thanks to mass online data harvesting, this new pandemic habit has already been widely monetized. It’s most noticeable on Instagram, where with every few scrolls we are hit with ads for products promising to change our lives, taking advantage of the fact that wherever you may be on the sliding scale of privilege, “life” is undeniably shit right now. Continue reading...

The pandemic has spurred on robotics companies building machines to perform tasks in hospitals and other industries

Marc Benioff’s company gains leverage against Microsoft’s threat with the largest acquisition in its 21-year historyBusiness software pioneer Salesforce.com is buying work-chatting service Slack for $27.7bn in a deal aimed at giving the two companies a better shot at competing against longtime industry powerhouse Microsoft.The acquisition announced Tuesday is by far the largest in the 21-year history of Salesforce. The San Francisco company was one of the first to begin selling software as a subscription service that could be used on any internet-connected device instead of the more cumbersome process of installing the programs on individual computers. Continue reading...

Winning combo of great sound, noise cancelling, dual connection, long battery, small case and fitJabra is back with its fourth-generation Bluetooth true wireless earbuds, the Elite 85t, with improved fit, better sound and active noise cancelling to rival Apple’s AirPods Pro.The Elite 85t cost £219.99 and top the range that includes its predecessors the £170 Elite 75t and £140 Elite 65t. Continue reading...

Social network agrees deal with mainstream outlets in face of government crackdown on its dominance of advertising

Demand for the cryptocurrency surges during NovemberThe price of bitcoin has hit an all-time-high of almost $20,000 three years after the cryptocurrency last spiked to that level.One bitcoin was worth $19,850.11 (£14,880) on Monday afternoon, according to CoinDesk, a bitcoin price index. By Monday evening its value fell back to about $19,223. Continue reading...

With a background including Elder Scrolls, Fallout and forthcoming epic Starfield, how does the acclaimed developer see games in the next five years?When you’ve got a discography like Todd Howard’s, full of critically acclaimed games in the Elder Scrolls and Fallout series, it must be hard to pick a favourite. But there is one game he remembers more fondly than anyone else does: the first he ever worked on.“Terminator: Future Shock,” he says. “When [Bethesda] came to Fallout, people were saying, oh, you’re doing a post-apocalyptic open world! In 3D! But we already did that in Terminator. It’s an underrated game that not a lot of people played. I think Quake came out right afterwards, that might have had something to do with it, and understandably so … Future Shock was made with eight or 10 people and it did a lot of things that no game had done. I remember it got critiqued at the time, which annoyed me to be honest. But now the things it did are commonplace.” Continue reading...

Some 300 homes in Fife to be fitted with free boilers, heaters and cooking appliancesHundreds of homes in Scotland will soon become the first in the world to use 100% green hydrogen to heat their properties and cook their meals as part of a new trial that could help households across the country replace fossil fuel gas.Some 300 homes in Fife will be fitted with free hydrogen boilers, heaters and cooking appliances to be used for more than four years in the largest test of whether zero carbon hydrogen, made using renewable energy and water, could help meet Britain’s climate goals. Continue reading...

They’re too young to vote or drive. But meet the children writing computer programs to track our health and wellbeing, choose a new school… and even how to cheat at online gamesI started getting interested in coding when I was about 11. I joined a local community lab where biologists and computer scientists come together and conduct experiments. I wanted to join the lab because my brother was really into biology and at the time I wanted to be exactly like him. I was too young to participate in the experiments, so my mentor pushed me more towards coding. Continue reading...

For years, it never made a profit – despite having bigger warehouses and better tech than its rivals. Post Covid-19, can Ocado go global?Ocado’s warehouse in Erith, 15 miles east of London on the Thames estuary, is staffed by 1,050 “personal shoppers”. Outnumbering them are 1,800 robots the size of small washing machines.You see them by climbing to the top level of the vast warehouse – at 564,000 sq ft, it is more than three times the size of St Peter’s in Rome – where a sign tells you that photography is strictly prohibited. The online supermarket is paranoid that rivals will glimpse the technology it believes to be revolutionary. Continue reading...

A Kent couple love their new car – but their experience suggests there are problems with the charging networkA couple from Kent have described how it took them more than nine hours to drive 130 miles home from Bournemouth as they struggled to find a working charger capable of producing enough power to their electric car.Linda Barnes and her husband had to visit six charging stations as one after another they were either out of order, already had a queue or were the slow, older versions that would never be able to provide a fast enough charge in the time. Continue reading...

The pandemic has left millions of Americans unemployed – including many in the hospitality industry, which has seen a rise in the adoption of new techThey can check you in and deliver orange juice to your hotel room, answer your questions about a missing package, whip up sushi and pack up thousands of subscription boxes. And, perhaps most importantly, they are completely immune to Covid-19. While people have had a hard time in the coronavirus pandemic, robots are having a moment.The Covid-19 pandemic has left millions of Americans unemployed – disproportionately those in the service industries where women and people of color make up the largest share of the labor force. In October, 11 million people were unemployed in the US, compared with about 6 million people who were without a job during the same time last year. Continue reading...

Actor Taraji P Henson exploes the history of the poppy, R&B-influenced New Jack Swing. Plus: rapper Eve turns interviewer, and a US politics podcast high on camaraderie and insightJacked: Rise of the New Jack Sound

Economist takes on retail giant before planned day of international protestsThe economist Yanis Varoufakis has called for a one-day boycott of Amazon on Black Friday as trade unionists, environmental activists, privacy campaigners and tax justice advocates plan coordinated actions against the company’s sites and supply chain.Amazon’s success during the coronavirus pandemic – at one point the company was reported to be making sales of $11,000 (£8,200) a second – has vastly inflated its share price, increasing the personal wealth of its chief executive, Jeff Bezos, already the world’s richest man, by $70bn. Bloomberg estimates his current wealth to be $187bn. Continue reading...

Tool allows managers to use Microsoft 365 to track their employees’ activityMicrosoft has been criticised for enabling “workplace surveillance” after privacy campaigners warned that the company’s “productivity score” feature allows managers to use Microsoft 365 to track their employees’ activity at an individual level.The tools, first released in 2019, are designed to “provide you visibility into how your organisation works”, according to a Microsoft blogpost, and aggregate information about everything from email use to network connectivity into a headline percentage for office productivity. Continue reading...

Nintendo Switch; Omega Force/Koei-Tecmo/Nintendo

With its iPhones, watches and forthcoming smart glasses, Apple’s gadgets are increasingly becoming extensions of our minds and bodies. It’s the big tech dream – but could it turn into a nightmare?