Technology | The Guardian

As thousands of tech workers move into Sacramento, the city long considered California’s overlooked middle child is enjoying the attention – for nowPhotographs by Salgu WissmathJoan Didion, the patron saint of California, once managed to summarily dismiss and define her hometown with just one flippant eye-roll of a quote: “Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.”California residents have long derided the state’s capital for the crime of being perfectly average. “The midwest of California”, they call it. A cow town. Sacramento’s appeal, it’s often said, is that it’s close to places that are actually appealing, like San Francisco and Tahoe. Continue reading...

Company will match rider donations to Raices, which provides legal aid to immigrantsThe ride-hailing company Lyft will be donating $150,000 in ride credits to support immigration groups across the US in the next six months.The company has also partnered with Raices, a not-for-profit organization providing legal services to immigrants. Through its Round Up & Donate program, Lyft will match rider donations to Raices throughout the month of July, and it will commit to up to $50,000 to the organization in support of their services. Continue reading...

Company policy prohibits praise or support for specific term ‘white nationalism’Facebook’s new policy banning white nationalism from its site has been undercut by the company’s decision to ignore content that does not use the term “white nationalism”, according to an external audit.The auditors, appointed by Facebook in 2018 to oversee its goals of “advancing civil rights on our platform”, said Facebook’s overly narrow implementation of its own rules was hampering moderation. Continue reading...

Fears ‘spaceshippy’ proposals by TfL to make vehicles audible could confuse pedestriansTransport for London has been warned that proposals put forward for a safety feature to make electric buses more audible risk confusing vulnerable road users.TfL has commissioned Aecom to come up with a recognisable noise that will help alert pedestrians and cyclists to the presence of vehicles that can be dangerously quiet. Continue reading...

The Avengers video game has just been unveiled – and has proved divisive, thanks to redesigned characters and a trailer that looked more like a film than a gameBefore this year’s E3, the annual video games event where publishers descend on Los Angeles to unveil and promote their wares for the next year and beyond, anticipation was high for Square Enix’s new Avengers game – an action-adventure for one to four players, in which you can fight as Hulk, Black Widow, Thor and plenty of others. In the year that Endgame grossed more than $2.7bn at the box office worldwide, surely not much could go wrong for a game proffering a personalised Marvel superhero fantasy.As it turned out, however, the Avengers game’s big reveal fell rather flat (and was rather eclipsed by Keanu Reeves, who made a surprise appearance to reveal his top-secret cameo in the forthcoming Cyberpunk 2077 the day before). That is Iron Man, right? Why does he look nothing like Robert Downey Jr? Continue reading...

San Franciscans have long complained that tech workers ruined their city, driving up rents and homelessness and eliminating diversity. Now even the tech workers agreePhotographs by Jason HenryIt was a beautiful winter day in San Francisco, and Zoe was grooving to the soundtrack of the roller-skating musical Xanadu as she rode an e-scooter to work. The 29-year-old tech worker had just passed the Uber building when, without warning, a homeless man jumped into the bike lane with his dog, blocking her path.She slammed on the brakes, flew four feet into the air and landed on the pavement, bleeding. “It was one of those hardening moments where I was like, ‘Even I am being affected,’” she recalled. Continue reading...

Jordan Erica Webber looks at why some people, such as Carlos Maza, say YouTube needs to do more to protect minorities from hate speech. The Guardian’s UK technology editor, Alex Hern, joins in on the conversation.Note added 1 July 2019: Due to a communication mix-up, we erroneously stated in the first airing of this episode that Google, of which YouTube is a subsidiary, did not respond to our request for comment. The company did respond, citing their official blog post on the subject matter of this episode - read it here. Suggestions that Google did not respond have been omitted.

Ex-wife MacKenzie Bezos will become world’s fourth-richest woman but has promised to give away half of awardThe world’s biggest divorce settlement will be made official this week as Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos hands over a 4% stake in the online shopping giant to his soon-to-be ex-wife MacKenzie Bezos.A judge is expected to sign legal papers transferring the Amazon shares – worth $38bn (£29bn) – into MacKenzie Bezos’s name. It is by some distance the largest divorce settlement in history the previous record was $2.5bn paid to Jocelyn Wildenstein when she divorced art dealer Alec Wildenstein in 1999. Continue reading...

Politicians, trade unionists and experts have set out to learn more about the new industrial landscape“We are under the threat of closure all the time,” says Andrew Peters without a hint of fear in his voice.As though repeating himself for the hundredth time, the managing director of Siemens’ Congleton factory in Cheshire explains his workers are battling for survival. Competition in this historic market town at the foothills of the Pennines, where lush green hills rise to the craggy moorlands of the Peak District, is increasingly global. Continue reading...

Quiet, composed and resolutely unshowy… Would you guess this is the world’s bestselling car?Toyota Corolla

The sociologist on how discrimination is embedded in technology – and how we go about building a fairer worldRuha Benjamin is an associate professor of African American studies at Princeton University, and lectures around the intersection of race, justice and technology. She founded the Just Data Lab, which aims to bring together activists, technologists and artists to reassess how data can be used for justice. Her latest book, Race After Technology, looks at how the design of technology can be discriminatory.Where did the motivation to write this book come from?

Unless we start taking online misogyny seriously, we are going to face a future where women may not be able to exist onlineSign up for the Week in Patriarchy, a newsletter​ on feminism and sexism sent every Saturday. Continue reading...

Ours is a desperate hour, we can try to learn to read phones, cynically and powerfullyThe Australian state of Victoria has just banned mobile phones in the classroom. This is a noble intention, but a missed opportunity. Really, they should have smashed the machines, every one.The logic of the state government’s decision is faultless. Mobile phones distract children from classroom learning, and undermine teacher authority. They are poisonous crucibles for bullying, the means of image-based abuse, and a popular media for peer humiliation. Much is being learned about the affect of the palm-held contagion on human cognition – the erasure of skills in basic orientation and location awareness, their addictive appeal to dopamine in the teenage brain, their nasty impact on body confidence and sexual perception. Continue reading...

ACCC report argues for an authority to monitor ads to ensure tech giants do not break anti-competition lawsFacebook and Google are likely to face a strong push for new regulators in Australia to oversee news and advertising on their platforms following the completion of the competition regulator’s inquiry into the tech giants.In December 2017, then-treasurer Scott Morrison directed the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to look at the impact that search engines, social media platforms and other online aggregation sites were having on competition in media and advertising. Continue reading...

Ive to remain ‘very involved’ with Apple as he launches new creative companyJony Ive, the chief architect of groundbreaking and distinctive designs from the iMac to the iPhone, announced on Thursday that he is leaving Apple after nearly 30 years.Ive’s departure, which was announced in an exclusive interview with the Financial Times, is sure to set off shock waves in the tech and design worlds, but the 52-year-old Briton will remain involved with Apple. He plans to launch a new creative company called LoveFrom – and said Apple will be his first client. Continue reading...

Move is a shift in efforts to balance its ideological commitment to free expression with rules against harassment and hate speechCall it the Trump rule.Twitter will attach a special label to tweets by major political figures if their content violates the site’s rules but the deleting of them is not in the public interest, the company said on Thursday. Continue reading...

Firm had contested allegations but has reached undisclosed out-of-court settlementsUber has reached out-of-court settlements with two women who alleged they were sexually assaulted by the same driver in what is believed to be the first case of its kind in the UK against the company.The cases were taken by two women who had ordered vehicles using Uber’s app during nights out in Leeds in December 2015, but told police they were sexually assaulted by the driver. They are both five-figure settlements. Continue reading...

Ministers to be put in fictional scenarios after series of hacking incidentsThe EU is to conduct war games to prepare for Russian and Chinese cyber-attacks, in response to a series of incidents that alarmed European governments.Pekka Haavisto, Finland’s foreign minister, said an increase in the prevalence of meddling required a reaction from the 28 member states. During meetings in Helsinki in July and September, EU interior and finance ministers will be asked to manage fictional scenarios. Continue reading...

New functionality automatically deletes history of places users have visitedIt is now slightly easier to opt out of Google’s panopticon, with the introduction of new controls from the search engine to automatically clear your data after a set period of time.By default, Google saves a permanent history of everything a user has searched for, every website they have visited, activity from any other app, site or device that uses Google services, and a record of their physical movements gleaned from using Google Maps or an Android device. Continue reading...

PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC; Codemasters

Thomas needs a device to read A4 PDFs of technical papers that is cheaper than a good laptopI am looking for an e-reader for technical papers. These are usually only available in fixed, non-reflowable, PDF format and sized for printing on A4 paper. They cannot be read on a typical e-reader such as a Kindle because the text is too small. I don’t need the fancy note-taking capabilities of options such as the Remarkable PDF reader. Can you recommend something that doesn’t cost as much as a decent laptop? ThomasThe main attraction of Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF) is that people can read the files on almost any kind of device. The corollary is that almost any device will work as a PDF reader, including smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktops running almost any operating system. Indeed, so many people need to read PDF files for business and educational research purposes, there are e-readers designed for the task. Continue reading...

Abortion providers in Australia noticed a sharp drop in traffic from Google ads in the last weekGoogle says it has corrected a mistake that blocked ads for abortion providers from appearing in search results in Australia.Abortion clinics in Australia reported a significant drop in traffic in the last week, as first reported by the ABC, with clinics such as the Macquarie Street clinic in Sydney stating their bookings had dropped and the phones had stopped ringing due to their paid ads not appearing in Google search results. Continue reading...

Speaking at Aspen Ideas Festival, Mark Zuckerberg says private companies shouldn’t have ‘final word’ on such decisionsMark Zuckerberg has said Facebook cannot be expected to manage the crisis around election misinformation campaigns on its own.The Facebook CEO, speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival on Wednesday, said that while the company was focused on questions of election security and interference before the 2020 US presidential election, “those are really hard questions to answer”. Continue reading...

Executive of maker King tells MPs he does not believe there is addiction problemA top executive at the maker of the multibillion dollar Candy Crush Saga game has revealed that more than 9 million players a day spend from between three to six hours or more playing the puzzle game.Alex Dale, a senior executive at its maker, King, also told a Commons select committee investigating immersive and addictive technologies that last year one player spent $2,600 (£2,050) in a single day on the gold bar currency that can be used to propel players faster through the game. Continue reading...

Education secretary says guidance will help guard children against online harmsGuidance on teaching online safety in schools to make children more resilient to catfishing, fake news and other online harms has been announced by the education secretary.The guidelines will combine teaching on relationships, citizenship and computing to help students understand the technology behind targeted advertising, false profiles and other digital issues. Continue reading...

In Ubisoft’s forthcoming game, London has become a surveillance state run by authoritarian populists – and its citizens must come together to fight backThe virtual London of Watch Dogs Legion, the forthcoming sci-fi open world adventure by Ubisoft Montreal, is sometimes uncanny in its accuracy.For instance, while evading the police, and the private military forces working alongside them in the game’s dystopian future, I was able to use my knowledge of the layout of the real world’s Broadcasting House, headquarters of the BBC, to duck down a side street and avoid a drone that had been dogging me since Trafalgar Square. Continue reading...

Dominic Rushe has caught over 11,000 Pokémon, walked 1,841km in Poké-land, and doesn’t plan to stop anytime soon

Chair of Financial Stability Board says company’s plans could spark closer scrutiny of cryptocurrenciesFacebook’s Libra cryptocurrency is facing increasing skepticism from international regulators days after ambitious plans for it were unveiled by the social media company.On Tuesday, Randal Quarles, chair of the Financial Stability Board (FSB), a policy coordinator for G20 countries, said Facebook’s plan to expand into retail payments could lead regulators to take a closer look at such financial instruments. Continue reading...

Interpreting a spoken request isn’t magic, rather it has taken a team of underpaid, subcontracted linguists to make the technology possible“Do you believe in magic?” Google asked attendees of its annual developer conference this May, playing the seminal Lovin’ Spoonful tune as an introduction. Throughout the three-day event, company executives repeatedly answered yes while touting new features of the Google Assistant, the company’s version of Alexa or Siri, that can indeed feel magical. The tool can book you a rental car, tell you what the weather is like at your mother’s house, and even interpret live conversations across 26 languages.But to some of the Google employees responsible for making the Assistant work, the tagline of the conference – “Keep making magic” – obscured a more mundane reality: the technical wizardry relies on massive data sets built by subcontracted human workers earning low wages. Continue reading...

PC, Nintendo Switch; DeadToast Entertainment/Devolver Digital

New ‘influence operations’ will openly advertise participation in debate instead of hiding itThe next wave of “influence operations” like those that Russia used to target the 2016 US election will aim to destabilise debate by making voters think bots are everywhere, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy has said.Nathaniel Gleicher, who runs the company’s response to politically motivated malfeasance on its platform, said groups such as Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) were increasingly trying to manipulate public perception of themselves. “Not running a large network of fake accounts but just playing on the fact that everyone thinks there are large networks of fake accounts out there,” he said. Continue reading...

Landmark ruling set to change the way media companies engage with the social media giant

Feature-packed new software is out in beta, though users are reporting ‘tons of rough edges’Apple has released the public beta version of its much-anticipated free iOS 13 software update for iPhones and the first edition of its new iPadOS for tablets.Those eager to try the latest features, including the new dark mode, faster Face ID, Memoji stickers and smarter photo organisation, can now install iOS 13 on a compatible iPhone or iPadOS on their Apple tablet. Continue reading...

Carmaker to have 25 electrified models on sale by 2023 as strict new EU rules loomBMW is accelerating its push away from the internal combustion engine towards battery technology, as the German carmaker seeks to double the number of electric and hybrid vehicles it sells in the next two years.The company will have 25 electrified models on sale in 2023, two years earlier than previously planned, it announced on Tuesday. More than half of the vehicles will be fully electric. Continue reading...

Australian judge finds media companies have a responsibility to ensure defamatory remarks are not posted on social media

Vivian Ho befriended an electronic arm and grappled with a defunct tea maker during a trip through Silicon ValleyAround the world, an industry has emerged around automating food service through robotics, raising questions about job security and mass unemployment while also prompting praise for streamlining and innovation.In the epicenter of Silicon Valley, where innovation is exalted beyond all else, this industry has played out in various forms, from cafes, burger shops and pizza delivery to odd vending machines. Continue reading...

When computer assistants reply in female voices, are they saying that women lack power in their world?Within two years there will be more voice assistants on the internet than there are people on the planet. Another, possibly more helpful, way of looking at these statistics is to say that there will still be only half a dozen assistants that matter: Apple’s Siri, Google’s Assistant, and Amazon’s Alexa in the west, along with their Chinese equivalents, but these will have billions of microphones at their disposal, listening patiently for sounds they can use. Voice is going to become the chief way that we make our wants known to computers – and when they respond, they will do so with female voices.This detail may seem trivial, but it goes to the heart of the way in which the spread of digital technologies can amplify and extend social prejudice. The companies that program these assistants want them to be used, of course, and this requires making them appear helpful. That’s especially necessary when their helpfulness is limited in the real world: although they are getting better at answering queries outside narrow and canned parameters, they could not easily ever be mistaken for a human being on the basis of their words alone. Continue reading...

The original cryptocurrency hits 15-month high as traders bet move will legitimise sectorThe price of bitcoin has surged above $11,000 (£8,600), its highest level in 15 months, amid renewed hype over cryptocurrencies after Facebook said it was planning to launch a digital currency next year.Bitcoin has risen in value by almost $2,000 in the week since the US technology firm revealed plans to create a cryptocurrency called Libra, in a move that could radically reshape the financial landscape with far-reaching implications for governments and central banks around the world. Continue reading...

Social video app uses machine learning ‘to automate the un-fun parts of video editing’A new app from the former head of video-sharing app Vine hopes to repeat the success of the cult social network by making it easier to shoot and edit short clips.Trash hopes that its secret weapon will be “computational cinematography”: the app, which entered closed beta on Monday, uses machine learning “to automate the un-fun parts of video editing”, automatically processing video to cut together short clips with a consistent mood and feel. Continue reading...

Tech firm’s communications chief says it found no evidence of Russian interferenceNick Clegg, Facebook’s head of communications, has dismissed allegations that misuse of the social network influenced the Brexit referendum result.Speaking on the BBC’s Today programme on Monday, the former deputy UK prime minister said the company’s investigations had found no evidence of Russian involvement in the campaign, unlike when it ran a similar inquiry into the 2016 US election. Continue reading...

By framing deepfakes as a tech problem we allow Silicon Valley to evade responsibility for its symbiotic relationship with fake news

Leyland Cecco and Lilian Edwards join Jordan Erica Webber to talk about the latest delays in plans to build a smart neighbourhood in Toronto. Continue reading...

Move could affect competition and data privacy, warns Bank for International SettlementsFacebook’s plan to operate its own digital currency poses risks to the international banking system that should trigger a speedy response from global policymakers, according to the organisation that represents the world’s central banks.Although the move of big tech firms such as Facebook, Amazon and Alibaba into financial services could speed up transactions and cut costs, especially in developing world countries, it could also undermine the stability of a banking system that has only just recovered from the crash of 2008. Continue reading...

Deepfake – the ability of AI to fabricate apparently real footage of people – is a growing problem with implications for us allThere exist, on the internet, any number of videos that show people doing things they never did. Real people, real faces, close to photorealistic footage; entirely unreal events.These videos are called deepfakes, and they’re made using a particular kind of AI. Inevitably enough, they began in porn – there is a thriving online market for celebrity faces superimposed on porn actors’ bodies – but the reason we’re talking about them now is that people are worried about their impact on our already fervid political debate. Those worries are real enough to prompt the British government and the US Congress to look at ways of regulating them. Continue reading...

From the Oculus Quest and Valve’s pricey Vive Pro to Nintendo’s family-friendly kits, a guide to what’s on offer in the world of virtual realitySix years after the first iteration of the Oculus Rift kickstarted the modern era of virtual reality, the now Facebook-owned company is back with not one but two new entries, joining a raft of big names from Valve’s Vive to Sony’s PlayStation VR and even Nintendo.With more options than ever to suit budgets, play styles – and games and experiences actually worth paying for – there’s never been a better time to don a headset and step into a new reality. Here’s a quick guide to five of the best on the market. Continue reading...

They started out as a joke – doctored videos of celebrities doing unlikely things, from a Nicolas Cage cameo in Friends to Mark Zuckerberg boasting about ‘stolen’ data. But as the technology improves, could deepfakes swing an election? Continue reading...

Marissa Fuchs posted photos of disbelief, but marketers were sent itinerary months beforeA public proposal is a risky thing to attempt. For every couple whose love for each other is perfectly in tune, there is a partner who has woefully misjudged their lover’s desire for public attention, grand romantic gestures, or simply marriage full stop.So Gabriel Grossman might have been taking a huge risk when he and his girlfriend, the Instagram influencer Marissa Casey Fuchs, embarked on not just a public proposal, but a 48-hour-long surprise holiday scavenger hunt, exhaustively documented by the couple on their respective Instagram accounts. What if she’d said no? Or decided that this precious moment was too personal to be shared with her audience of 193,000 people? Continue reading...

Chris Hughes says involvement of private companies is threat to autonomy of nation statesOne of Facebook’s co-founders has warned the social network’s plans for a digital currency called Libra could allow corporations involved in the scheme to wield power over nation states.Chris Hughes, whose role in the early days of Facebook has given him a net worth estimated at $430m (£340m), said global regulators should intervene to slow the progress of the cryptocurrency. Continue reading...

Customers urged to stop using limited number of machines sold between 2015 and 2017Apple is recalling some of its 15in MacBook Pro laptops over a battery fire risk.The company said on Thursday that a limited number of its largest laptop line, sold between September 2015 and February 2017, contained batteries that “may overheat and pose a safety risk”. Continue reading...