by Samuel Gibbs Consumer technology editor on (#6W16Z)
With launch problems fixed, first colour Kindle improves reading experience - but it is pricey and too small for comicsAmazon's first Kindle with a colour screen had been a very long time coming and then suffered a rough landing last year, plagued with yellowing screen issues and shipping delays. But with those problems fixed, is a splash of colour the revolution the Kindle needs?Amazon isn't the first to use a colour e-ink screen in an e-reader, but it thinks its upgrades meaningfully improve on the tech used by others such as Boox and Kobo over the past four years by offering greater contrast and speed. Continue reading...
Jack Thorne, whose Netflix series has shone a light on incel culture, calls for restrictions on teens' social media accessSmartphones should be treated like cigarettes and banned until the age of 16 in the UK, according to the writer of Adolescence, which explores the insidious influence of incel-culture".Jack Thorne, whose Netflix show has started a national conversation about the danger of online spaces for teenagers, argued that algorithms used on social media platforms could quickly lead to dark spaces". Continue reading...
Corporations started wooing my friends as soon as college began. It's time for the left to reimagine its relationship with techWhen my friends and I graduated with our math degrees this past May, we felt like we could do anything.After long nights spent on problem sets, the most aimless and ambitious of us will forgo grad school and become interns and employees at the shiniest, slimiest corporations in America - big banks, the military industrial complex, big tech, big pharma - where we will solve interesting, difficult problems on cushy salaries. Continue reading...
From cordless designs to budget buys, we've tested the top hair straighteners for every hair type Everything I've learned as a beauty columnist about the products that actually workStraighteners are here to stay - but thankfully, heat styling has come a long way since GHD's first ceramic straighteners ushered in an era of poker-straight hair in 2001. Today's models feature adjustable heat settings and protective technology for hairstyling with minimal damage.The looks you can achieve with a straightener have become more versatile as well: one twist of a modern, curved-edge straightener can create styles from ultra-smooth strands to structured ringlets and soft, beachy waves. There's a wide range of styling possibilities with just one tool.Best overall hair straighteners:
Il Foglio says artificial intelligence used for everything - the writing, the headlines, the quotes ... even the irony'An Italian newspaper has said it is the first in the world to publish an edition entirely produced by artificial intelligence.The initiative by Il Foglio, a conservative liberal daily, is part of a month-long journalistic experiment aimed at showing the impact AI technology has on our way of working and our days", the newspaper's editor, Claudio Cerasa, said. Continue reading...
The tech billionaire and his EV company suffer, Apple castigates itself over Siri failures and a Meta tell-all book evokes a strong reactionHello, and welcome to TechScape. In this week's edition: Elon Musk suffers the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Apple beats itself up over Siri, and Meta goes after one of its own over a tell-all book.The past 10 days have marked several of the most significant setbacks for Musk in months. Tesla, arguably his marquee company, continued to fall in value as investors worried about the threat of trade war and possible recession - as well as declining profits. Escalating protests against the company over the billionaire's role in the government also grew in number and intensity across the US, coupled with rising cases of vandalism and social stigma against his cars. SpaceX has also struggled, with one of its rockets dramatically exploding in midflight last week and then an announcement that it was delaying a rescue mission to retrieve stranded" astronauts. The company tried again two days later.Adding to Musk's headaches, his social media platform, X, experienced widespread outages throughout the day on Monday. During a Fox Business interview, he claimed that it was the result of a massive cyberattack" that the company had traced to the area of Ukraine.How an obscure US government office has become a target of Elon MuskDeeply uncomfortable': UK Starlink users switch off over Musk's political machinationsElon Musk targeted me over Tesla protests. That proves our movement is working | Valerie Costa Continue reading...
As the 30-year-old studio behind many innovative and beloved video games shuts down, its founders, fans and designers discuss what made it so specialLate last month, Warner Bros announced it was closing three of its game development studios in a strategic change of direction": WB Games San Diego, Player First Studios, and Monolith Productions. At a time when the games industry is racked with layoffs and studio closures, the barrage of dispiriting headlines can be numbing. But the shutdown of Monolith cut through the noise, sparking fresh shock and outrage at the industry's slash and burn approach to cost cutting. There are numerous reasons for this, but among them was a pervading belief that Monolith would be around forever. I don't think I ever really considered the possibility that it would shut down one day," says Garrett Price, one of Monolith's seven founding members.True to its name, Monolith was a singular presence. Founded in 1994, it was a prolific developer whose games displayed visual flair, mechanical inventiveness and a knack for synthesising pop-cultural themes. Most excitingly, you could never really predict what the studio would do next. While it primarily produced first-person shooters, there were forays into platformers, dungeon crawlers and open-world games. And even the core FPS titles differed wildly in theme and style, inspired by everything from 60s spy films to Japanese horror. Continue reading...
From watching classic samurai movies to rendering the unique way light falls on Japan's mountainsides and modelling individual characters' socks, Ubisoft has spared no effort recreating a fascinatingly violent period of historyMore than four years after its announcement and after two last-minute delays, the latest title in Ubisoft's historical fiction series Assassin's Creed will finally be released on Thursday. Set in Japan in 1579, a time of intense civil war dominated by the feudal lord Oda Nobunaga, it follows two characters navigating their way through the bloody chaos: a female shinobi named Fujibayashi Naoe, and Yasuke, an African slave turned samurai. Japan has been the series' most-requested setting for years, Ubisoft says."I've been on [this] franchise for 16 years and I think every time we start a new game, Japan comes up and we ask, is this the time?" says executive producer Marc-Alexis Cote. We've never pushed beyond the conception phase with Japan until this one." Continue reading...
Cafe owners seeking convivial atmosphere as well as better turnover are starting to deter remote workersTo the Coffee-house, and there all the house full of the discourse of the great fire," wrote Samuel Pepys of his trip to a 17th-century cafe - then the social nerve centre of London's gossiping elite.Fast forward to the 21st century and the chattering classes have been replaced with the clattering classes - remote workers busily hammering away on their laptop keyboards and shouting on video calls to be heard over the mechanical grinding of coffee beans. Continue reading...
by Samuel Gibbs Consumer technology editor on (#6VZG2)
Transparent back, flashing LEDs, novel design, long battery life and huge triple camera help this Android stand outLondon-based Nothing has brought one of the last things setting top-level phones apart from cheaper mid-range models down to a more affordable price: high-quality camera zoom.Cameras have long been the battleground of the most expensive phones, each vying for better quality, longer reach and multiple lenses. While much of this costly progress has trickled down to cheaper models, optical zoom cameras are few and far between below the 600 mark.Screen: 6.77in 120Hz FHD+ OLED (387ppi)Processor: Qualcomm Snapdragon 7s Gen 3RAM: 12GBStorage: 256GBOperating system: Nothing OS 3.1 (Android 15)Camera: 50MP main, 50MP 3x tele and 8MP ultrawide, 50MP selfieConnectivity: 5G, eSIM, wifi 6, NFC, Bluetooth 5.4 and GNSSWater resistance: IP64 (spray resistant)Dimensions: 163.5 x 77.5 x 8.4mmWeight: 211g Continue reading...
Leaders on left bet on Musk's bravado to pull party out of political weeds as CEO eyes social security and health cutsFor most of the 17-minute interview, Elon Musk stuck to a script. He was just a tech guy on a mission to eliminate waste and fraud" from government.His slash-and-burn cost-cutting crusade was making good progress actually", he told the Fox Business commentator Larry Kudlow on Monday, despite sparking a backlash that has reverberated far beyond Washington. Continue reading...
This bed-in-a-box' mattress gave our tester her best sleep in years and it's hundreds of pounds cheaper than some of its rivals The best mattresses: sleep better with our six rigorously tested picksI've been reviewing mattresses for about four years and suffering from broken sleep for three times as long. The right mattress can markedly improve sleep quality, but switching between them so regularly seemed to feed my insomnia. Then I met the Otty Original Hybrid and I was blissfully dead to the world.The Original Hybrid is the flagship bed-in-a-box" mattress from UK company Otty Sleep. It combines thousands of pocket springs with multiple layers of memory foam - some soft, some thumpingly firm - to offer robust ergonomic support without sacrificing comfort. At less than 680 for a double, it's among the cheapest bed-in-a-box hybrids (meaning a combination of memory foam and springs) you can buy, and after testing several I'm confident that it's the best buy. Continue reading...
From hacking screen time settings to bypassing website restrictions, young people make responsible parenting in the age of tech feel like a game of whack-a-mole. Here's how to do it successfullyI know I'm not alone as a parent when I admit I have often felt like an exasperated failure in trying to restrict what my children see online. There were the times they hacked their devices' screen time settings, or managed to stumble into inappropriate content in spite of the controls, not to mention the ever inventive workarounds to access restricted sites. Worst of all is the ill will the rigmarole creates between us all. So when in the first minute of my conversation with digital parenting coach Elizabeth Milovidov, she says, I think parents need to just kind of give themselves a hug, breathe and start over," I feel so heard and comforted I could cry.Parents are incredibly busy. They're overwhelmed," says Milovidov. And then this whole idea of trying to lock things down is not easy. I remember trying to learn how to programme a VCR, and it was just like: oh my God." And yet she herself, a parent of teens, seems so chill. She admits having watched far too much TV in the 70s, and she has turned out OK; she has a PhD and is an international consultant on tech and parenting. Continue reading...
Numbers using satellite broadband system has been growing but users are having second thoughts due to Musk's role in Donald Trump's administrationTesla sales have tumbled, X has had an exodus of users, and now it seems cracks are appearing among those who have turned to Elon Musk's Starlink satellite system as a means of staying connected in remote areas.While the number of Starlink users has been growing, some subscribers have been venting their frustrations over Musk's political machinations, saying they will no longer use the high-speed satellite internet system. Continue reading...
An unexpected bit of tech opened up a whole new world of possibilities for a frustrated, injured writerIf you had asked me a month or two ago if I had ever had a spatial immersive experience, or what the chances were that at the age of 60, I would become an early adopter of virtual reality goggles, I would have said it was about as likely as a tech giant from Silicon Valley being appointed to disrupt" the US federal government.Let me explain the unlikely series of events that led me to the latest in technology. Continue reading...
This account of working life at Mark Zuckerberg's tech giant organisation describes a diabolical cult' able to swing elections and profit at the expense of the world's vulnerableShortly after her waters broke, Sarah Wynn-Williams was lying in hospital with her feet in stirrups, typing a work memo on her laptop between contractions. Facebook's director of global public policy needed to send talking points from her recent trip to oversee the tech giant's bid to launch operations in Myanmar to her boss Sheryl Sandberg. Then she would give birth to her first child.Wynn-Williams's husband, a journalist called Tom, was livid but, as men tend to be in labour rooms, impotent. The doctor gently closed her laptop. Please let me push send," whimpered Sarah. You should be pushing," retorted the doctor with improbable timing. But not send'." Continue reading...
Nordic countries were early adopters of digital payments. Now, electronic banking is seen as a potential threat to national securityIn 2018 a former deputy governor of Sweden's central bank predicted that by 2025 the country would probably be cashless.Seven years on, that prediction has turned out to be pretty much true. Just one in 10 purchases are made with cash, and card is the most common form of payment, followed by the Swedish mobile payment system Swish, launched by six banks in 2012 and now ubiquitous. Other mobile phone payment services are also growing quickly. Continue reading...
AI is so good at writing software that one father asked it to organise his kids' school lunches. But that doesn't mean it's taking overWay back in 2023, Andrej Karpathy, an eminent AI guru, made waves with a striking claim that the hottest new programming language is English". This was because the advent of large language models (LLMs) meant that from now on humans would not have to learn arcane programming languages in order to tell computers what to do. Henceforth, they could speak to machines like the Duke of Devonshire spoke to his gardener, and the machines would do their bidding.Ever since LLMs emerged, programmers have been early adopters, using them as unpaid assistants (or co-pilots") and finding them useful up to a point - but always with the proviso that, like interns, they make mistakes, and you need to have real programming expertise to spot those. Continue reading...
After a SpaceX rocket exploded, investors offloaded Tesla shares and Doge hit legal roadblocks, the world's richest man saw his fortune sink by $100bnElon Musk began the week of 10 March with a friendly sit-down interview on Fox Business to talk about his work with the so-called department of government efficiency" (Doge) and the state of his businesses. Already, it had been a trying few days for the world's richest man, who was facing a Tesla stock selloff and fierce backlash over his attempts to radically overhaul the federal government. His net worth declined over $22bn on Monday alone.After Musk jokingly brushed off initial questions about the mounting pressure, host Larry Kudlow asked the Tesla and SpaceX CEO how he was managing to run his numerous companies amid the chaos. Continue reading...
In response to the billionaire's scorched-earth raids on US government agencies, Tesla chargers and showrooms are being targetedIn the early morning hours of Donald Trump's inauguration day, a person wearing a long black cloak and face mask wheeled a cart down an Oregon sidewalk. He was headed toward a Tesla showroom in Salem, and his cart appeared to be loaded with molotov cocktails, according to court documents. One by one, he took out the handmade explosives, lit them on fire and lobbed them at the glass-walled dealership.By the time Salem police arrived, the showroom window was shattered, a fire was burning on the sidewalk out front, a nearby Tesla sedan was ablaze and the alleged vandal had fled. The whole scene was caught by security footage, according to an affidavit from a special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). The showroom's general manager estimated $500,000 in damages, with seven vehicles struck and one completely destroyed. Continue reading...
Photographers, translators, academics and GPs are among those whose jobs are either threatened or aided by the techOliver Fiegel, a 47-year-old photographer based in Munich, was reading a German national Sunday newspaper recently when he saw a front-page image that looked strangely off. The image showed a boy chasing a football on a pitch. But some of the wildflowers on the grass floated without stems. Half the goal net was missing. The boy's hands were misshapen.In previous years, many of Fiegel's photography clients had been newspapers and magazines. But that work has dried up recently. This image, he felt, showed one reason why: generative illustration", the supplied caption said. Continue reading...
One afternoon, as he passed a train station bench in Chicago, the street photographer spotted young men in uniform ...On his way to work at anorth Chicago public high school, Spiro Bolos has been making a photo series of people on this train station bench. On the way to visit his partner one Sunday afternoon, he saw these young men. The US navy's largest training camp is about an hour away; home to the force's only boot camp and 20,000 sailors, marines, soldiers and Department of Defense civilians.Bolos thinks these men had been given aweekend pass to visit the city. He says they were looking at their phones and preparing their backpacks when he took this shot. As one stood up to stretch, Bolos captured their image. Continue reading...
Christopher Tsai retains faith in carmaker's earnings potential despite backlash that has seen its shares take a hitA devoted investor in Elon Musk's Tesla - and once a close childhood friend of the US president's eldest son and namesake - says he hopes the world's richest man's role in cutting federal spending for Donald Trump's administration is short-lived" and that he returns to managing his businesses.Investment manager Christopher Tsai, whose firm has tens of millions of dollars tied up in Tesla, said the stock market had demonstrated clear signs of displeasure with Musk's activities at the so-called department of government efficiency". And in an interview with the Guardian, Tsai said: I hope his involvement with [Doge] is short-lived so he can spend even more time on his businesses." Continue reading...
As they get ready to tour its mournful music, the band reflect on Disco Elysium, the video game whose soundtrack won them a Bafta - and plenty of new followersWhen Jan Scott Wilkinson, frontman of the band formerly known as British Sea Power, was first asked to work on a video game soundtrack, he was sceptical. We didn't know much about the game, but our manager Dave seemed to think there was something interesting about this Robert guy who had been pleasantly hounding him," he says. That was Estonian novelist Robert Kurvitz, part of a team who had just started work on an esoteric video game about an alcoholic cop trying to solve a murder in an impoverished region of a war-torn country. The game was Disco Elysium, now regarded as one of the all-time great cerebral role-playing games: released in 2019, it sat atop PC Gamer's top 100 list for four years in a row.Kurvitz is a Sea Power superfan. Pick a random scene from the game and there'll be something - a bit of dialogue, a location, a theme - that has some sort of Sea Power reference in it. Wilkinson tells me that Kurvitz was captivating and full of a bubbling passion" and that he knew an unsettling number of strange details about our music". Kurvitz had already embedded some of those very obscure" Sea Power references in the world of Disco Elysium before they had even met. Whether the band liked it or not, they were already enmeshed in this eccentric Estonian's world. Continue reading...
Sam Altman, the OpenAI boss, has declared its new model good at creative writing'. We asked writers including Tracy Chevalier, Kamila Shamsie and David Baddiel if they agreeThis week has seen writers divided over a story written by an AI model that is good at creative writing" - at least according to Sam Altman, the CEO of ChatGPT company OpenAI, which is developing the new model. Author Jeanette Winterson, writing in the Guardian on Wednesday, agreed with him, calling the story - which is a metafictional piece about grief - beautiful and moving". We asked other authors to assess ChatGPT's current writing skills - and what recent developments around artificial intelligence might mean for human creativity.Nick Harkaway is the author of Karla's ChoiceTracy Chevalier is the author of The GlassmakerKamila Shamsie is the author of Best of FriendsDavid Baddiel is the author of My Family: The Memoir Continue reading...
Diggs' harrowing music is a world away from his Hollywood films and a Tony-winning run in Hamilton. But his band's world-building - setting resource wars in imagined cyberpunk clubs - is no less dramaticAs a child, Daveed Diggs and his schoolfriend William Hutson drew pictures inspired by the space-age album covers of funk legends Parliament, filled with gleaming UFOs and eccentric interplanetary travellers. Diggs would grow up to become an actor, winning a Tony award as the first person to play the roles of Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson in Hamilton. He's since voiced Sebastian the crab in The Little Mermaid's live-action remake and appeared in Nickel Boys, which was nominated twice at this year's Oscars. But away from Hollywood and Broadway, he's still dreaming up fantastical sci-fi worlds with Hutson - now through one of the most imaginative, harrowing projects in underground rap.Along with Hutson's college roommate Jonathan Snipes - who had a similar childhood experience, inspired by the otherworldly paintings adorning classical albums - the friends formed Clipping in Los Angeles in 2010. Over Hutson and Snipes's production, Diggs weaves blood-soaked horror stories about racial violence or fables of enslaved people in outer space. On their new album Dead Channel Sky, he raps with mechanical precision over warped rave music, creating a noirish cyberpunk world of hackers, clubgoers, future-soldiers and digital avatars. Continue reading...
Sarah Sorensen says we should be hanging up on surveillance capitalismThe Guardian has published quite a lot of articles recently expressing some concern over the use of smartphones. EmmaBeddington's piece (My phone knows what I want before I do. That should be worrying - but it's oddly comforting, 10 March) is perhaps the most alarming to date, mitigated to onlysome degree by herself-awareness. Buthelpisathand.There is a simple way in which we can set ourselves free. Remove the battery if possible, then take your biggest hammer and set to work on the rest. The more cost-effective solution is not to buy one in the first place. I never have and it's still rarely a problem, though surveillance capitalism tries hard to make it one. Oldish people like myself are less likely to own smartphones, increasingly likely to be marginalised as a result, lucky to remember life without their constant intrusion. Continue reading...
America's biggest crypto companies are riding high. Plus, can the left reclaim techno-optimism?Hello, and welcome to TechScape. In this week's edition, the crypto industry's political investments pay off in spades, the left attempts to reclaim an optimistic view of our shiny technological future, and your memories of Skype.SpaceX's Starship explodes in second failure for Elon Musk's Mars programMusk tells Republicans he isn't to blame for mass firings of federal workersMusk survives as fellow of Royal Society despite anger among scientistsWhite House to overhaul $42.5bn Biden-era internet plan - probably to Musk's advantage Continue reading...
Social media company wins emergency arbitration ruling on book, Careless People by Sarah Wynn-WilliamsMeta on Wednesday won an emergency arbitration ruling to temporarily stop promotion of the tell-all book Careless People by a former employee, according to a copy of the ruling published by the social media company.The book, written by a former director of global public policy at Meta, Sarah Wynn-Williams, was called by the New York Times book review an ugly, detailed portrait of one of the most powerful companies in the world", and its leading executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, former chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan. Continue reading...
An eye-opening insider account of Facebook alleges a bizarre office culture and worrying political overreachIf Douglas Coupland's 1995 novel about young tech workers, Microserfs, were a dystopian tragedy, it might read something like Careless People. The author narrates, in a fizzy historic present, her youthful idealism when she arrives at Facebook (now Meta) to work on global affairs in 2011, after astint as an ambassador for New Zealand. Some years later she finds a female agency worker having a seizure on the office floor, surrounded by bosses who are ignoring her. The scales falling from her eyes become ablizzard. These people, she decides, just didn't give a fuck".Mark Zuckerberg's first meeting with a head of state was with the Russian prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, in 2012. He was sweaty andnervous, but slowly he acquires ataste for the limelight. He asks (unsuccessfully) to be sat next to Fidel Castro at a dinner. In 2015 he asks Xi Jinping if he'll do him the honor of naming his unborn child". (Xi refuses.) He's friendly with Barack Obama, until the latter gives him a dressing-down about fake news. Continue reading...
We would like to hear from people aged 18-24 about their childhood experiences with smartphones - positive or negativeWe would like to hear from people aged 18-24 about their childhood experiences with smartphones and social media, positive or negative.What approach would you take with your own children, as a result of lessons learned from your experience? Would you let them have access to a smartphone or social media, and how often? What rules would you put in place? Continue reading...
Surrey was region of UK with most sign-ups for Smartphone Free Childhood's parent pact, launched last yearAn online campaign committing parents to bar their children from owning a smartphone until they are at least 14 has garnered 100,000 signatures in the six months since its launch.The Smartphone Free Childhood campaign launched a parent pact" in September in which signatories committed to withhold handsets from their children until at least the end of year 9, and to keep them off social media until they are 16. Continue reading...
The new digital mantra' prompts unions to warn PM to stop blaming problems on Whitehall officialsAI should replace the work of government officials where it can be done to the same standard, under new rules that have prompted unions to warn Keir Starmer to stop blaming problems on civil servants.As part of his plans for reshaping the state, the prime minister will on Thursday outline how a digital revolution will bring billions of pounds in savings to the government. Continue reading...
Guardian understands tech company's appeal against Home Office request for encrypted data is to be heard by tribunal on FridayApple's appeal against a UK government demand to access its customers' highly encrypted data will be the subject of a secret high court hearing, the Guardian understands.The appeal on Friday will be considered by the investigatory powers tribunal, an independent court that has the power to investigate claims that the UK intelligence services have acted unlawfully. Continue reading...
After failing to recreate success of augmented reality game, Niantic Labs plans to sell its video game division to ScopelyNiantic Labs said it would sell its video game division to Saudi Arabia-owned Scopely for $3.5bn, as the US augmented reality firm shifts focus to geospatial technology after failing to recreate the success of its 2016 smash hit Pokemon Go.The deal, announced on Wednesday, also advances Saudi Arabia's ambitions to become the ultimate global hub" for gaming. The kingdom's sovereign wealth fund, via Savvy Games, bought Scopely for $4.9bn in 2023 as part of a broader push by the country to diversify beyond fossil fuels. Continue reading...
Speed through your spring cleaning with our tried and tested steam mops and handheld cleaners, perfect for tackling everything from bathroom floors to kitchen tiles The best window vacs for clearing condensationIf something makes cleaning faster and easier, then it has to be a good thing. Steam mops are a great example, using steam to shift stains, spills and everyday grime from your hard floors in seconds, and even freshening up your carpets with the right attachment. Steam cleaners can go even further, dishing out gusts of steam that help with mucky jobs such as driving dirt and gunge from your bathroom sink and shower tray, and cleaning up tiles, kitchen sinks and worktops. Not only will you get these jobs done faster, but you'll get a great deep clean at the same time. What's more, the steam helps combat germs and hostile bacteria without the aid of bleach-heavy sprays.These mean cleaning machines don't have to be expensive, either, with simple steam mops starting at less than 50 and some of the best full-size steam cleaners costing 150 to 180. You'll spend more for extra power or a wide range of attachments, but you might not need to. With so many types, makes and models available, your biggest challenge is finding the right one for you. Having tested 12 of the best steam mops and cleaners, I'm in a good place to guide you on your way.Best overall:
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