Technology | The Guardian

Fifteen-year-old resorts to drastic measures after action taken ‘so I’d pay more attention to my surroundings’A resourceful teenager has taken the rise of increasingly powerful smart home devices to its logical conclusion – tweeting from her family’s smart fridge after her mother confiscated her phone.The 15-year-old Ariana Grande fan known only as “Dorothy” was barred from using her phone but managed to find a number of innovative ways to reach her thousands of followers – a handheld Nintendo device, a Wii U gaming console and, finally, her family’s LG Smart Refrigerator. Continue reading...

One person reassured by the technology but most echo the complaint that ‘it’s unjustified’Members of the public have said there is no justification for the use of facial recognition technology in CCTV systems operated by a private developer at a 67-acre site in central London.Related: London mayor writes to King’s Cross owner over facial recognition Continue reading...

Are deepfakes a threat to democracy? The creator of a series of viral clips says he is raising awareness of their subversive potential

Committee chairman suggested staff knew Cambridge Analytica had misused data before Guardian revelation

Information commissioner says use of the technology must be ‘necessary and proportionate’The UK’s privacy regulator said it is studying the use of controversial facial recognition technology by property companies amid concerns that its use in CCTV systems at the King’s Cross development in central London may not be legal.The Information Commissioner’s Office warned businesses using the surveillance technology that they needed to demonstrate its use was “strictly necessary and proportionate” and had a clear basis in law. Continue reading...

Expanded program, announced at Black Hat conference, comes as governments and tech firms compete for informationApple will pay ethical hackers more than $1m if they responsibly disclose dangerous security vulnerabilities to the firm, the company announced at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas.The new “bug bounty”, up from a previous maximum of $200,000, could even out-bid what a security researcher could earn if they decided to skip disclosure altogether and sell the bug to a nation state or an “offensive security company”, according to data shared by Maor Shwartz, a vulnerability broker at the same conference. Continue reading...

A satirical tale of a near future dominated by a single power-hungry firm is gripping and cerebralWhen Amazon was founded 25 years ago, its aims seemed benevolent – to be the largest bookshop on Earth, but also one that offered touch-of-a-button convenience to shoppers. How things change. Now, with its remit having long since expanded to include virtually every service and item one could wish for, the once-likable company has become a monolithic conglomerate, shutting down its competition mercilessly.It is surely Amazon that gave Rob Hart the idea for the all-powerful, omniscient company Cloud in his hugely engaging novel, even if one character dismisses it as operating on “a much smaller scale… their interests were too earthbound”. Continue reading...

At £99, Ikea’s wifi speaker provides a cheaper way to experience Sonos and sounds good tooThere’s a new, cheaper way to buy a Sonos wifi speaker and it’s from Ikea.The Symfonisk bookshelf speaker is the second of two new products born of a partnership between the Swedish furniture manufacturer Ikea and the American premium multiroom audio specialists Sonos. Continue reading...

High street bank says Google Home trial could let you do the banking as you make a cuppa or iron a shirtGet ready to say: “Hey Google. How much do I have in my bank account?” NatWest is to begin voice-only banking that will give customers direct access to their accounts by talking to the Google Home smart speakers now in millions of British homes.The trial – the first by a UK high street bank – will let customers ask Google “What’s my balance?”, “What’s my latest transactions?” and “What’s my pending transactions”. Google devices will answer verbally, and also flash the answers up on the customer’s smartphone. Continue reading...

Jordan Erica Webber talks to Julia Carrie Wong about the extremist message board 8chan after the suspect in the mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, used the website to post a manifesto on why he targeted those he murdered Continue reading...

Dating apps are a huge success – but people are looking elsewhere for the perfect matchOn paper, it’s a great time to be on a dating app. In the seven years since Tinder’s entrance on to the dating scene in 2012, it has gone from fringe novelty to romantic ubiquity; within two years of launching, it was seeing 1bn swipes a day. Other apps have similarly impressive stats: in 2018, Bumble’s global brand director revealed it had more than 26 million users and a confirmed 20,000 marriages.It’s a far cry from the considerably less optimistic response Tinder received when it launched. Many hailed it as the end of romance itself. In a now infamous Vanity Fair article, Nancy Jo Sales even went so far as to suggest it would usher in the “dating apocalypse”. Continue reading...

A stark polemic argues that social media may have unleashed an age of nihilism from which there is little hope of escapeBack in the blissed-out 1960s, Marshall McLuhan evangelised for the new electronic media by instructing us to “serve these objects, these extensions of ourselves, as gods or minor religions”. It was a prophetic glimpse of a future that has now arrived. People today are the slaves of their fetishised, deified smartphones; the religion is no longer minor, and, like the discredited cults it replaced, it doses the faithful with opium.Technology, as Richard Seymour says, always boasts of possessing superhuman powers, which is why it arouses our wary paranoia. In earlier times, industrial engines seemed like monstrous Molochs that gobbled up workers; nowadays we are unsure whether the magical gadget we hold in our hand is “a benevolent genie or a tormenting demon”. The twittering machine, as Seymour calls it, has no innate morality, but it preys on our weaknesses to monopolise our attention and modify our behaviour. We are left jangled, needy, constantly alert for the chirp that announces some new and unnecessary missive, ever ready to resume our chore of clicking the “like” button, surrendering to the advertisers who gather up the personal data we so guilelessly provide. Continue reading...

A chimera is an organism with genetic material from two or more sources. Experiments in the field may save lives but are ethically controversialLast week, researchers led by Spanish scientist Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte announced they had created the first human-monkey chimera embryos in China. The purpose of the experiment is to investigate ways of using animals to grow human organs for transplants. The organs could be genetically matched by taking the recipient’s cells and reprogramming them into stem cells. Continue reading...

Cadge a lift in a new Kadjar and you’ll surprise yourself – Renault’s reworked family car deserves to be enjoyed by more than just familiesRenault Kadjar

As the crisis-hit video site struggles to stem the flow of extreme content, the CEO talks about her role as the internet’s gatekeeperIn YouTube’s fashionable central London “space”, where good-looking young people mill around and help themselves to the well-stocked free kitchen, there is a noticeboard that asks staff and visitors: What could we do better? On one of the sticky notes, someone has written “Nothing!!” It would be reassuring for the executives who run the video site if that were true, although not many would agree that it is. Susan Wojcicki, YouTube’s CEO, who is in town for a three-week tour of Europe, is one of the most impressive and powerful women in tech – and also one of the most beleaguered.We meet in one of the studios, where YouTubers with more than 10,000 subscribers can make videos, and sit on sofas in a set with a faux brick-wall backdrop, which gives a slightly unnerving sense of fake cosiness. Wojcicki (pronounced “Wo-jisky”) seems friendly but businesslike; chatty, but is careful about what she says. There is a lot to talk about: sexism in tech, the power of social media, being a working parent of five – and especially the crises that have engulfed the company she runs, particularly this year. Continue reading...

Recent UK law bans online sellers sending knives to homes unless buyer verified as 18+

Could widespread feelings of anger and powerlessness be behind the astrology boom?A notification from the astrology app Co-Star recently told 27-year-old Bridget: “It’s OK to catch feelings.” Bridget knows how ridiculous that sounds, she says, and how baffled older people might be by the enthusiasm with which she follows its advice. But she believes the app’s tongue-in-cheek nature is tapping into something more profound: young people’s growing disillusionment with religious and political structures.Bridget is not alone. Astrology is without doubt having a cultural moment. As well as the rapid proliferation of apps such as Co-Star, which has been downloaded more than 3m times since 2017, astrology memes are a staple on Instagram and Twitter, and have sparked a huge boost in traffic to women’s news sites; a typical horoscope post on the Cut got 150% more hits in 2017 than in 2016, while gal-dem, which introduced a horoscope column in March, said posts performed consistently well. Continue reading...

Firm will appeal against action that could expose it to billions of dollars in potential damagesA US federal appeals court has rejected Facebook’s effort to undo a class action lawsuit alleging it illegally collected and stored biometric data for millions of users without their consent using facial recognition technology.The 3-0 decision from the ninth US circuit court of appeals in San Francisco exposes the company to billions of dollars in potential damages paid out to the Illinois users who brought the case. Continue reading...

The Wall Street Journal reported that the tech company was offering news executives as much as $3m a year to license storiesFacebook is reportedly in talks with news publishers to offer “millions of dollars” for the rights to publish their material on its site. The move follows years of criticism over its growing monopolization of online advertising to the detriment of the struggling news industry.The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that Facebook representatives had told news executives that they would pay as much as $3m a year to license stories, headlines and other material. Continue reading...

Leaked documents show children as young as 16 recruited by Amazon supplier Foxconn work gruelling and illegal hoursHundreds of schoolchildren have been drafted in to make Amazon’s Alexa devices in China as part of a controversial and often illegal attempt to meet production targets, documents seen by the Guardian reveal.Interviews with workers and leaked documents from Amazon’s supplier Foxconn show that many of the children have been required to work nights and overtime to produce the smart-speaker devices, in breach of Chinese labour laws. Continue reading...

Second earnings report shows worse-than-predicted losses and revenue growthUber lost $5.24bn in the last three months, its largest-ever quarterly loss, news that sent the ride-hailing company’s shares sliding 10%.The company was reporting earnings for only the second time following its share sale in May. The latest losses were worse than analysts had expected and the company announced revenues that were also below predictions. Continue reading...

Digital video continues to power entertainment growth with gaming spend slightly upThe streaming revolution has notched up another milestone with UK consumers spending more than £100m a week on digital entertainment services such as Netflix, Amazon, Spotify and Apple Music in the first half of the year for the first time.UK consumers spent a total of £3.3bn on entertainment products in the first six months of the year, a 4.5% increase compared with a year earlier, as the popularity of subscription music and TV streaming services more than made up for the decline in sales of traditional CDs and DVDs. Continue reading...

Jaki has 11,000 photos on a USB drive but Windows 10 won’t recognise it. What can she do?My external USB hard drive, with 11,000 photos from Windows 7, isn’t recognised by Windows 10. How do I transfer them to Windows 10 for future safekeeping? JakiThe Universal Serial Bus (USB) connects billions of keyboards, mice, joysticks, printers, external hard drives and other peripherals to roughly 1.5bn personal computers, and more than 3bn mobile phones use the smaller Micro USB and newer USB-C versions. It generally works pretty well but most people have probably suffered from a USB device failing or not being recognised. Continue reading...

Luxury model has colour-changing frontlight that gets warmer as the sun setsAmazon’s most expensive, luxury e-reader, the Kindle Oasis, has taken a leaf out of the modern smartphone’s book for 2019 with a colour adjustable light that gets warmer as the sun sets.It’s a small thing that makes quite a difference to the reading experience, which is just as well as the rest of the £230 Oasis is basically the same as it was two years ago. Continue reading...

With increasing numbers of people bleeding to death in US streets, the president has to find someone – something – anything! – to blameScientific studies do not find any links between video games and gun violence. The claim that they do has been repeatedly tested, studied and debunked.Yet on Monday, US president Donald Trump insisted that “gruesome and grisly video games” were causative in the gun massacre deaths of 22 people in El Paso and another 9 in Dayton (not Toledo) Ohio. Continue reading...

Force testing app that lets officers run snapshot through ‘watchlist’ to identify suspectsSouth Wales police are to have a facial recognition app installed on their phones to identify suspects without having to take them to a police station.The force intends to test the app over the next three months with 50 officers using the technology to confirm the names of people of interest who are stopped on routine patrols. Continue reading...

A California woman has insisted that painting huge emojis on her house was not an attempt to get back at her neighbours – but it’s not the first time the Unicode characters have caused controversyA neighbourly dispute in the laid-back Californian comminuty of Manhattan Beach has deteriorated into pulling faces. Giant, grotesque faces, on the side of a hot-pink house. As first reported by Mark McDermott for Easy Reader News, homeowner Kathryn Kidd says her intent in covering the walls of her two-level duplex with two gurning yellow emojis was to bring her neighbours joy, and definitely not to get back at them for reporting her for illegally renting it out on Airbnb. Kidd said: “Instead of everybody being so gloomy, always so depressed, always in other people’s business, I just wanted to send a message to be happy.”THE EMOJI HOUSE @ztheart @thegoneman #TheEmojiHouse Continue reading...

EU project creates robotic hands that can sense and fix damage without human interventionFrom picking fruit to carrying out minor surgery, soft robotic hands made from jelly-like plastic are thought by scientists to be the future solution to many human needs.But being gentle and soft enough to avoid damaging fruit or flesh has made the robots prone to damage and left them largely impractical for use in the real world – until now. Continue reading...

Firm to launch various new top smartphones with even bigger displays in New YorkSamsung will launch various models of its latest Galaxy Note 10 flagship smartphone in New York on Wednesday, hoping to woo its biggest fans with new stylus and camera features.The original Galaxy Note introduced the concept of the big-screen smartphone in 2011, cementing Samsung as a key player in the market. Recent Note models, however, have struggled to differentiate themselves from Samsung’s other flagship smartphone line, the Galaxy S. Continue reading...

There is no compelling evidence that games cause real-life bloodshed, but the industry must address its attitude to guns and conflict, or risk being drowned out by fearmongersIt was not a surprise to see Donald Trump and a cabal of other Republican politicians seeking to implicate video games in the US’s latest mass shootings. The idea that young men can be driven to kill by Doom, Call of Duty or Fortnite is a seductive one: it’s simple, it ties in with fears that older voters harbour about digital culture and screen time, and it conveniently draws attention away from more complex societal concerns such as poverty, neglect, easy access to deadly firearms and a violently confrontational political culture. There’s just one problem: despite years of research and hundreds of studies, there is no compelling evidence that video game violence causes real-life bloodshed. It’s a dead end.Every time these claims are made, the industry seems unwilling to analyse or engage with the reasons why games are so often implicated in violent acts. The standard response is blanket outrage and denial – games don’t cause real-world violence, they’re “apolitical” fun, so we don’t have to think about the issue, we don’t have to consider how the shooters portray or utilise military violence. They’re just entertainment. Continue reading...

Brilliant Sonos sound paired with attractive Ikea lamp makes for a surprisingly great wifi speakerWhat if your simple Ikea lamp was actually a Sonos wifi speaker that could play music from any number of music sources and link up with others around your house? That’s exactly what the Ikea Symfonisk table lamp is.The new musical lamp, priced at £150, is one of a pair of new products in an interesting partnership between the Swedish furniture manufacturer Ikea and multi-room audio specialists Sonos. Continue reading...

Though it offers $15 an hour, workers report injury claims denied, sweltering in warehouses and rising productivity demandsAmazon won praise when it raised its minimum wage to $15 an hour in October 2018. Since then, the company has responded to criticism over its working conditions by claiming it is an industry leader in compensation, but a Guardian investigation has revealed many workers take issue with this messaging, as serious workplace issues remain that they say are still not being addressed.They include claims workers are being punished for injuries; the elimination of bonuses and stock options, which has lessened the impact of the wage rise; poor working conditions; higher productivity demands and the hiring of temporary workers who do not have the same benefits as Amazon staff. Continue reading...

Big tech’s power has reached a tipping point. Governments must set some ground rulesIn his trademark disingenuous response to the latest wave of massacres, Donald Trump has identified the internet as both the cause and, more insidiously, the solution to the spread of rightwing domestic terrorism.Ignoring his own hate-filled social media feeds and fervent embrace of gun denial-ism, the US president has set his sites on the “dark recesses” of the internet, where hatred foments through “gruesome and grisly” video games that celebrate violence. Continue reading...

Jim Watkins defended website amid growing outcry over reports the alleged El Paso gunman used the site to publish his manifestoThe owner of the extremist message board 8chan broke his silence on Tuesday in a defensive video statement that attempted to deflect blame for the role the platform plays in disseminating hate speech and inciting violence by lashing out at service providers, journalists and Instagram.Jim Watkins, a US military veteran who lives in the Philippines, defended the website amid growing outcry over reports that the alleged El Paso gunman, as well as several other mass shooting suspects, used the site to publish white nationalist manifestos ahead of violent attacks. Continue reading...

Alex Hern on how Google’s use of personal data has potentially helped create a new age of mass surveillance. Plus Lois Beckett on the response to two mass shootings in the USGoogle’s story is one of extraordinary growth. From its days as an insurgent startup, it now dominates internet search in most of the world and has branched out into video sharing, operating systems, productivity tools and now self-driving cars and artificial intelligence.Much of its success comes down to its ability to raise huge revenues from selling targeted advertising. In order to do this effectively, it relies on vast amounts of personal data. Continue reading...

Message board enabling hate speech, where El Paso suspect allegedly posted manifesto, struggles to find new hostThe far-right message board 8chan has been flickering on and offline, after being knocked offline Sunday by the internet infrastructure company Cloudflare.Cloudflare stopped servicing 8chan on Sunday, after a shooting suspect allegedly posted a white nationalist rant on the site before killing more than 20 people in El Paso. Continue reading...

Users exposed to unsafe products bolstered by misleading reviews, says studyFacebook has been accused of failing to stop the sale of fake reviews through its website, more than a month after it was told to crack down on the issue by a UK regulator.An investigation by Which? found that despite concerns raised by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), Facebook continued to be flooded with fake review groups that try to deceive customers. Continue reading...

Amazon is not following Apple and Google in suspending practice altogetherAmazon has given Alexa users the option to disable human review of their voice recordings, and committed to greater clarity about its use of the strategy in future, but says it will not follow Google and Apple in halting the practice altogether in Europe.Echo owners, and other users of the company’s virtual voice assistant, can turn off human review in the Alexa privacy page by disabling a setting labelled “help improve Amazon services and develop new features”. Continue reading...

This week, Jordan Erica Webber talks to Kate Eichhorn about her new book The End of Forgetting: Growing up with Social Media, which explores the dangers facing young people who may find it difficult to distance themselves from their pasts, long into the future Continue reading...

The technology is helping to combat crimes police no longer deal with, but its use raises concerns about civil libertiesPaul Wilks runs a Budgens supermarket in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire. Like most retail owners, he’d had problems with shoplifting – largely carried out by a relatively small number of repeat offenders. Then a year or so ago, exasperated, he installed something called Facewatch. It’s a facial-recognition system that watches people coming into the store; it has a database of “subjects of interest” (SOIs), and if it recognises one, it sends a discreet alert to the store manager. “If someone triggers the alert,” says Paul, “they’re approached by a member of management, and asked to leave, and most of the time they duly do.”Facial recognition, in one form or another, is in the news most weeks at the moment. Recently, a novelty phone app, FaceApp, which takes your photo and ages it to show what you’ll look like in a few decades, caused a public freakout when people realised it was a Russian company and decided it was using their faces for surveillance. (It appears to have been doing nothing especially objectionable.) More seriously, the city authority in San Francisco have banned the use of facial-recognition technologies by the police and other government agencies; and the House of Commons science and technology committee has called for British police to stop using it as well, until regulation is in place, though the then home secretary (now chancellor) Sajid Javid, said he was in favour of trials continuing. Continue reading...

Six years after the adventure began, Shadowbringers sets up a heady climax, as well as the chance to uncover true friendsThe climax of Dead Pixels, E4’s recent sitcom from the creators of Peep Show and based on a group of friends obsessed with an online fantasy video game, was surprisingly affecting. After years of questing together, the friends, for whom the game had become the crucible in which their bonds had been made and reinforced, successfully plant the “Orb of Uncreation” into the slug queen’s egg sac and thereby triumphantly conclude the game’s story. The reward for the thousands of hours’ effort? A treasure chest containing a pair of red gloves.“No, this was totally, totally worth it,” murmurs one of the players into the head mic she uses to chat to her teammates (one of whom plays from the adjacent bedroom). “I’m so happy with my life choices.” Continue reading...

People born in the late 1970s are the last to have grown up without the internet. Social scientists call them the Last of the Innocents. Leah McLaren ponders a time when our attention was allowed to wanderIn moments of digital anxiety I find myself thinking of my father’s desk. Dad was a travelling furniture salesman in the 1980s, a job that served him well in the years before globalisation hobbled the Canadian manufacturing sector. He was out on the road a lot, but when he worked from home he sat in his office, a small windowless study dominated by a large teak desk. There wasn’t much on it – synthetic upholstery swatches, a mug of pens, a lamp, a phone, an ashtray. And yet every day Dad spent hours there, making notes, smoking Craven “A”s, drinking coffee and yakking affably to small-town retailers about shipments of sectional sofas and dinette sets. This is what I find so amazing. That my father – like most other professionals of his generation and generations before him – was able to earn a salary and support our family with little more than a phone and a stack of papers. Just thinking of his desk, the emptiness of it, induces in me a strange disorientation and loneliness. How did he sit there all day, I wonder, without the internet to keep him company?In this age of uncertainty, predictions have lost value, but here’s an irrefutable one: quite soon, no person on earth will remember what the world was like before the internet. There will be records, of course (stored in the intangibly limitless archive of the cloud), but the actual lived experience of what it was like to think and feel and be human before the emergence of big data will be gone. When that happens, what will be lost? Continue reading...

Uber plans to expand into food delivery and driverless cars but its IPO was a flop and its latest earnings figures could prove vitalUber has big plans. The ride-hailing service wants to ferry the world around in self-driving cars and on electric scooters, deliver our takeouts and groceries by drone, and ship freight via robot trucks. But first Uber needs to answer a big question: will it ever make any money?This week, Wall Street will have the chance to ask that question. Continue reading...

In our digital world, a misdirected text or simple keyboard error can trigger huge unintended consequencesOne day in May this year, Luigi Rimonti left his home in Gateshead to catch a ferry from North Shields, the first stage in a 1,000-mile drive across Europe to Italy. A dapper, energetic 81-year-old, Rimonti had grown up in a suburb of Rome before coming to the north-east of England as a young man. Often, over the years, he had driven back to Rome, insisting to his two adult sons, Gino and Valter, that he preferred to make this long journey by car. They worried about their father on these drives, and this spring, for the first time, they persuaded Rimonti to equip his car with a satellite-navigation device.Off the ferry in Amsterdam, Rimonti began to have difficulties with the satnav. He stopped in a petrol station: could someone there help him re-input his destination? A stranger obliged. Tap-tap-tap, enter. Rimonti thanked the stranger and drove on – south, he presumed, towards Rome. Continue reading...

Materials used in manufacturing and companies’ efforts to collect and charge scooters create significant greenhouse gas emissions

Tech firm to review virtual assistant ‘grading’ programme after Guardian revelations

From tablets to robot toys, here’s some tech ideas to keep the little ones occupied in the long breakWith the summer holidays in full swing you might need a bit of a hand keeping the kids entertained. From tablets and cameras to robot toys and updated old-school favourites, here is a collection of kid-aimed tech to keep the little ones occupied. Continue reading...