Technology | The Guardian

We criticise children for not going outside - while curtailing their freedoms and closing their spacesOn Sunday the Observer magazine published a sensitive piece about video game addiction, speaking to therapists working in the sector and one affected family. Genuine, compulsive, life-altering addiction, whether to video games or anything else, is of course devastating for those affected by it. Since the WHO classified gaming addiction as a specific disorder in 2018 (distinct from technology addiction), the specialist National Centre for Gaming Disorders set up in the UK has treated just over 1,000 patients. Thankfully, the numbers suggest it is rare, affecting less than 1% of the 88% of teenagers who play games.The article asked, why are so many young people addicted to video games?", which no doubt struck a chord with many parents who despair at the amount of time their children spend in front of computers and consoles. Speaking as the video games editor and correspondent at the Guardian, however, we think that most of us who are worried about how long our teenagers are spending with games are not dealing with an addiction problem, nor with compulsive behaviour. If we want to know why many teens choose of their own free will to spend 10 or 20 hours a week playing games, rather than pathologising them, we ought to look around us. Continue reading...

Dumping Intel for Qualcomm chips delivers big boost in speed but not battery life and breaks some appsMicrosoft's latest Surface tablet promises to be a generational upgrade that goes beyond just being faster, quieter and more efficient - all down to a change in the type of processor at its heart.The Surface Pro 11 is not the first Microsoft machine to swap traditional Intel or AMD PC processors for Arm-based chips, similar to those in your smartphone or Apple's recent Macs and iPads. But it is by far the most successful, leaving even recent editions such as the 2020 Surface Pro X and last year's Surface Pro 9 5G in the dust. Continue reading...

Company says it has never thought about news' as a way to counter misleading content on Facebook and Instagram despite evidence to the contrary

The three brands licensed by Nine's Pedestrian Group that kickstarted my career might be gone but as long as there's appetite for video game content there's hopeIn 2006 I was fired from my job at EB Games. It was, with the benefit of hindsight, a well-earned dismissal. One Sunday I'd set up a camera and filmed myself jumping over a stack of boxes and hip thrusting at a stranger. Then I uploaded that highly pixelated video of an emo-fringed teenager in a black shirt and slacks to YouTube. Ah, the innocence of youth.My area manager saw the video about eight months later. I was fired on the spot. (Today, of course, this would probably be some sort of TikTok trend.) Continue reading...

US firm's move, amid Beijing-Washington tensions, sparks rush to lure users to homegrown modelsAt the World AI Conference in Shanghai last week, one of China's leading artificial intelligence companies, SenseTime, unveiled its latest model, SenseNova 5.5.The model showed off its ability to identify and describe a stuffed toy puppy (wearing a SenseTime cap), offered feedback on a drawing of a rabbit, and instantly read and summarised a page of text. According to SenseTime, SenseNova 5.5 is comparable with GPT-4o, the flagship artificial intelligence model of the Microsoft-backed US company OpenAI. Continue reading...

The geekiest edge of the British music underground is fuelled by the 90s, featuring a ZX Spectrum Noel Edmonds, a Blobby-themed grindcore band, and a lady who performs the script to Theme HospitalWe've had live jazz bands playing Mario Kart, and a full orchestra rendition of Sonic. But there's a whole subgenre of video game music artists who'd happily describe their sound as even more nerdy. Nerdcore has been around for 25 years. It's hip-hop about nerdy subjects, predominantly video games," says 41-year-old Nick Box from Blackpool. Box has been in all sorts of weird silly bands" such as electronic horror punk band Hot Pink Sewage, where all I did was dress as a gimp and push play on the backing track". He now performs solo as Cliff Glitchard and it's even weirder than you think.It's all set against a backdrop of a ZX Spectrum running an AI clone of 90s TV presenter Noel Edmonds," he explains". The show starts with the Spectrum loading screen, then a pixelated Edmonds tells the crowd he's responsible for every celebrity death, political decision and major disaster of the last 40 years. I run around shouting about crap celebrities and end up shagging Mr Blobby on stage." Continue reading...

New scambaiting AI technology Apate aims to keep scammers on the line while collecting data that could help disrupt their business model

Exclusive: Experts say Tesla should be excluded from rebates for disabling function on its batteries in Australia that would let users alter power usage remotely

The Fairwork trio talk about their new book on the extraction machine', exposing the repetitive labour, often in terrible conditions, that big tech is using to create artificial intelligence

The New Zealand-born photographer was planning to take a portrait of a farm owner when two animals caught his eyeFor the last two years, Mark Aitken has been working on a photo series in Lapland. It'scalled Presence of Absence," he says, and it explores the liminal and sometimes uncanny boundaries between life and death experienced by people living in this extreme climate andlandscape."Aitken, who was born in New Zealand, raised in South Africa and has lived in London for years, took this photo in spring of this year, on asheep farm. Kukkola is a borderland hamlet in Finnish Lapland on the River Tornio, near Sweden. The farm has been running for 20 years and this lamb is one of about 100 born in March and April," he says. Continue reading...

Hackers claim they obtained barcode data for hundreds of thousands of tickets to Eras tour and demand millions in ransomHackers claimed this week that they had obtained barcode data for hundreds of thousands of tickets to Taylor Swift's Eras tour, demanding that Ticketmaster pay millions in ransom money or they would leak the information online.The hacking group posted samples of the data to an online forum- ticket data on Swift's shows in Indianapolis, Miami, and New Orleans - and alleged it possessed an additional 30m million barcodes for other high-profile concerts and sporting events. Continue reading...

Threat Matrix service monitors social media profiles and flags up death threats, racism and sexist commentsThe All England Lawn Tennis Club is using artificial intelligence for the first time to protect players at Wimbledon from online abuse.An AI-driven service monitors players' public-facing social media profiles and automatically flags death threats, racism and sexist comments in 35 different languages. Continue reading...

Progressive snark over vice-president gives way to endless viral quotes and emojis, blending irony and authentic praiseIn the aftermath of Joe Biden's disastrous debate performance, left-leaning Americans can't stop talking about the vice-president online. Memes about Kamala Harris are spreading with a speed and enthusiasm previously unseen on X and Instagram.Supercuts of her set to RuPaul's Call Me Mother. Threads of her funniest Veep moments". Collages of jokes about her over a green album cover a la Charli xcx's Brat. Numerous riffs on a comment she made about a coconut tree. Previous progressive snark about Harris has cast her either as an incompetent sidekick a la HBO's Veep or as an anti-progressive cop, a reference to her years as California's top law enforcement official. But as rumors circle about discussions of Biden dropping out of the presidential race, social media commentary on the nation's second-in-command has grown more positive - even if ironically so. Continue reading...

It won't be long till everything from Drag Race to Keeping Up With the Kardashians could be written without humans - and you might be able to write yourself as the hero of a new show. But will robot TV ever be up to snuff?Justine Bateman won't name names, but a TV showrunner friend once came to her with a dilemma: their show's team was well into filming its second season when a network executive had an idea. A character in the pilot hadn't tested well with audiences, so they were just going to go in, use a little AI, and swap in someone else.The showrunner - and Bateman, an actor and director - were understandably incensed. When you change the beginning of something, you change the creative trajectory," says Bateman. There's going to be whiplash for the viewer when they get to episode three or four because what was set up in the pilot got messed with and now doesn't make sense." Using AI might have seemed like a simple solution to the executive, but to the showrunner, it was catastrophic. Continue reading...

On its 15th anniversary, the creators of FarmVille reflect on the compulsive cartoon farm sim that paved the way for a data-driven worldFacebook users of a certain age may remember a particularly forlorn farm animal popping up in their feeds during the platform's heyday. The lonely cow would wander into FarmVille players' pastures with its face twisted into a frown and its eyes shimmering with tears. She feels very sad and needs a new home," an accompanying caption read, asking you to adopt the cow or message your friends for help. Ignore the cow's plea and it would presumably be left friendless and foodless. Message your friends about it, and you'd be accelerating the spread of one of the biggest online crazes of the 2010s.Released 15 years ago, FarmVille was nothing short of a phenomenon. More than 18,000 players gave it a go on its first day, rising to 1 million by its fourth. At its peak in 2010, more than 80 million users logged in monthly to plant crops, tend animals and harvest goods for coins to spend on decorations. Celebrities professed their obsession, McDonald's created a farm for a promotion, and long before artists released music on Fortnite, Lady Gaga debuted songs from her sophomore album through the cartoon farm sim. Not bad for a game that was stitched together in five weeks. Continue reading...

All new cars must have the devices from 7 July, adding fuel economy as well as safety. Will mpg become the new mph?In the highway code and the law courts, there is no doubt what those big numbers in red circles mean. As a quick trip up any urban street or motorway with no enforcement cameras makes clear though, many drivers still regard speed signs as an aspiration rather than a limit.Technology that will be required across Europe from this weekend may change that culture, because from 7 July all new cars sold in the EU and in Northern Ireland must have a range of technical safety features fitted as standard. The most notable of these is intelligent speed assistance - or colloquially, a speed limiter. Continue reading...

Our sample of political content shows how campaigns and individuals have been using the video-sharing platform

Schools, parents and even governments need to set boundaries, without demonising devices that bring many benefitsA few weeks ago I was scrolling through social media, and Andy Murray (I am one of his 2 million followers) posted a graphic showing the average number of hours a teen in the US spends per day on their phone or other screens. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated it to be six hours for eight- to 10-year-olds, nine hours for 11- to 14-year-olds and 7.5 hours for 15- to 18-year-olds. These are shocking numbers. Although the irony of using a screen to make me reflect on how much time we're spending on screens isn't lost on me.Like many people, I check my smartphone's screen-time usage and am surprised at how many hours are logged. But I also feel uncomfortable with the blanket demonisation of these devices, as if the creation of mobile phones has been, overall, terrible for humanity. At their core, they are useful, practical tools for communication and connection. Somehow the positives that they bring are too easily forgotten.Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh Continue reading...

The makers of Italian action game have endured the longest development journey in history. Their game is now finally out - on the long-discontinued Game Boy AdvanceIn 2002, a group of five Italians made the local news: they were going to be the first company in the country to develop a game for Nintendo's popular portable, the Game Boy Advance. The cadre pulled together a few hundred euros and some computers to prepare for the project. They had no experience making games. They didn't even have a programmer. All they had was a love for video games, a shared hatred of working for bosses and endless optimism.For the next two years, the group worked away. Late nights were common and the team barely took any time off. It was a grueling time, but they were determined to make an ambitious game with complex features. Its name was Kien. If you haven't heard of it, that's because it never came out - until now. The action platformer didn't see the light of day until this year, by which time most of the original team had long since moved on. Only one member of the group of five remained: game designer, Fabio Belsanti, who never lost belief in the project. Continue reading...

In this week's newsletter: The seven-time grand slam winner and patron of the arts hosts a new series, Widening the Lens. Plus: five of the best podcasts about the single life Don't get Hear Here delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereWidening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape

New computing infrastructure means big tech is likely to miss emissions targets but they can't afford to get left behind in a winner takes all marketThe artificial intelligence boom has driven big tech share prices to fresh highs, but at the cost of the sector's climate aspirations.Google admitted on Tuesday that the technology is threatening its environmental targets after revealing that datacentres, a key piece of AI infrastructure, had helped increase its greenhouse gas emissions by 48% since 2019. It said significant uncertainty" around reaching its target of net zero emissions by 2030 - reducing the overall amount of CO2 emissions it is responsible for to zero - included the uncertainty around the future environmental impact of AI, which is complex and difficult to predict". Continue reading...

Proposed sale of 25m shares disclosed in notice on Tuesday after stock hit all-time high of $200.43 during sessionAmazon founder and executive chair Jeff Bezos is planning to sell almost $5bn worth of shares in the e-commerce giant, a regulatory filing showed, after its stock hit a record high.The proposed sale of 25m shares was disclosed in a notice filed after market hours on Tuesday. The stock had hit an all-time high of $200.43 during the session. It has jumped more than 30% so far this year, outpacing the 4% gain in the Dow Jones Industrial Average index. Continue reading...

The comedian, screenwriter and actor's list includes a Jurassic Park melodica cover and Kristen Wiig's Liza Minnelli impersonation

We're in the untenable position of regarding the AI as alien because we're already in the position of alienating each otherThe idea that superintelligent robots are alien invaders coming to steal our jobs" reveals profound shortcomings in the way we think about work, value, and intelligence itself. Labor is not a zero-sum game, and robots aren't an other" that competes with us. Like any technology, they're part of us, growing out of civilization the same way hair and nails grow out of a living body. They're part of humanity - and we're partly machine.When we other" a fruit-picking robot - thinking of it as a competitor in a zero-sum game - we take our eyes off the real problem: the human who used to pick the fruit is considered disposable by the farm's owners and by society when no longer fit for that job. This implies that the human laborer was already being treated like a non-person - that is, like a machine. We're in the untenable position of regarding the machine as alien because we are already in the untenable position of alienating each other. Continue reading...

Tech giant's goal of reducing climate footprint at risk as it grows increasingly reliant on energy-hungry data centresGoogle's goal of reducing its climate footprint is in jeopardy as it relies on more and more energy-hungry data centres to power its new artificial intelligence products. The tech giant revealed Tuesday that its greenhouse gas emissions have climbed 48% over the past five years.Google said electricity consumption by data centres and supply chain emissions were the primary cause of the increase. It also revealed in its annual environmental report that its emissions in 2023 had risen 13% compared with the previous year, hitting 14.3m metric tons. Continue reading...

Nintendo Switch; Nintendo

Electric automaker's quarterly deliveries fell for two straight quarters for the first time everTesla's global sales fell for the second straight quarter despite price cuts and low-interest financing offers, another sign of weakening demand for the company's products and electric vehicles overall.The Austin, Texas, company said on Tuesday that it sold 443,956 vehicles from April through June, down 4.8% from 466,140 sold the same period a year ago. The sales were better than the 436,000 figure that analysts had expected. Continue reading...

If Keir Starmer wins on Thursday, he will have the power to free our

In some constituencies - often with large Muslim populations - a parallel viral campaign focuses on emotive issues such as Gaza that rarely feature in national coverageWhen Keir Starmer was interviewed for the Sun's YouTube live stream last week, only about 10,000 people tuned in to watch him pledge to get tough on illegal immigration.Under pressure to prove he would speed up deportations, the Labour leader singled out one example in particular: At the moment people coming from countries like Bangladesh are not being removed because they're not being processed." Continue reading...

For the past week, I've been feeding UK party manifestos into the politics management game Democracy 4, to simulate their results five years on ... Are you ready to be dismayed?Whether they are called manifestos or contracts, the documents published by political parties ahead of an election are rather less substantial than their many pages would suggest. They are full of best-case scenarios, undetailed proposals and dubious costings, and it is hard to picture the impact each party would have on the UK if they followed through with their pitches. So I've been feeding party literature into the political strategy video game Democracy 4, to see how these policies might play out. The results were ... well, you'll see.Democracy 4 lets you play out your political fantasies (or nightmares) to see the impact of your choices and, ultimately, if you can get re-elected. Drawing from publicly available data, developer Positech Games has modelled various democratic nations, including the UK, with approximations of state and private institutions, government policies and taxes. Within this simulation live thousands of virtual voters. In the UK, most citizens count themselves as capitalists, but they may also be middle-income, wealthy or poor, farmers, commuters or self-employed. For each country, the makeup of the virtual citizenry differs: applying a CO2 emissions tax policy in the US, where many citizens care a lot about cars, will disappoint more voters than in Japan, where most people use public transport. Continue reading...

Powerful new chips are on the way but there are questions over whether tech firm's growth can be sustainedWhen Jensen Huang spoke at the Nvidia annual general meeting last week, he made no mention of a share price slide.The US chipmaker, buoyed up by its key role in the artificial intelligence boom, had briefly become the world's most valuable company on 18 June but the crown slipped quickly. Nvidia shed about $550bn (434bn) from the $3.4tn (2.68tn) peak market value it had reached that week, as tech investors, combining profit-taking with doubts about the sustainability of its rocketing growth, applied the brakes. Continue reading...

As pornography use soars, some men feel their behaviour is moving from a compulsion to an addiction. They describe how this affects their health, happiness and relationshipsTony is in his 50s and recently did a rough calculation of how much of his life he has spent looking at pornography. The result was horrifying," he says. It was eight years. I can barely think about it. The sense of failure is intense."Tony saw his first hardcore" film on VHS in the 1980s when he was 12. In his 20s, he connected to the internet for the first time, which turned his habit into a full-blown addiction". Over the past 30 years, he has just about managed to maintain a double life: he works in a caring profession, is friends with men and women, has had relationships. But there is a part of him he keeps entirely hidden. Continue reading...

Leading politicians victimised by online material including AI deepfakes, investigation findsBritish female politicians have become the victims of fake pornography, with some of their faces used in nude images created using artificial intelligence.Political candidates targeted on one prominent fake pornography website include the Labour deputy leader, Angela Rayner; the education secretary, Gillian Keegan; the Commons leader, Penny Mordaunt; the former home secretary, Priti Patel; and the Labour backbencher Stella Creasy, according to Channel 4 News. Many of the images have been online for several years and attracted hundreds of thousands of views. Continue reading...

European Commission objects to pay or consent' model for users of Facebook and InstagramThe European Commission has accused Mark Zuckerberg's Meta of breaching the EU's new digital laws with an advertising model that charges users for ad-free versions of Facebook and Instagram.Meta launched a pay or consent" model last year in an effort to comply with the bloc's data privacy rules, under which users pay a monthly fee for an ad-free version of Facebook or Instagram that does not use their personal data for advertising purposes. If users do not pay, their data is used to tailor personalised adverts that appear in their social media feeds. Continue reading...

Clampdown follows fatal stabbing of Chinese woman who tried to stop attack on Japanese mother and childChina's internet companies have announced a crackdown on extreme nationalism" online, particularly anti-Japanese sentiment, after a Chinese woman was fatally stabbed while protecting a Japanese mother and child in Suzhou.Tencent and NetEase, two of the biggest firms, said at the weekend that they would be investigating and banning users who stirred up hatred. Continue reading...

The England player's impromptu move took me back to the noughties, when PES 4-6 provided the illusion of control in a sandbox of chaos'. It was the beautiful video gameFootball, like everything else important in life, is about stories. People implant themselves into the narrative: where they were when they saw Maradona's handball, the strangers they hugged when Ole Gunnar Solskjaer scored that historic last-minute winner at the 1999 Champions League final. No doubt new tales are already being conjured around Jude Bellingham's scissor kick against Slovakia in the dying seconds of Sunday's Euro 24 match. Sport is a nostalgia machine - and this is as true for video game simulations as it is for the real thing. Every gamer has their favourite footie sim, but for me, and many other players of my ... ahem, vintage ... it was Pro Evolution Soccer, numbers 3 to 6.This was the early 2000s, the age of the PlayStation 2. I was a writer for hire at Future Publishing, basically hanging out at its office in Bath, working mostly on the Official PlayStation magazine. But every lunch time, all the magazines would get together and play PES - especially during major tournaments, where we'd organise our own versions. Fifa? Forget it. Konami had already proved its ability with footie games through the excellent International Superstar Soccer series on the Mega Drive, Nintendo 64 and PlayStation, but the introduction of PES in 2001 brought a new level of dynamism and detail. Pace was fluid, player abilities were defined by 45 different stats, adding depth and variety, controls were intuitive yet expansive. These games felt like authentic football," says Ben Wilson who was editor of Official PlayStation at the time. There was genuine joy to be had in grinding out a 1-0 win. Modern football games have as much in common with basketball as football - you shoot, I shoot, you shoot, I shoot, final score 6-4." Continue reading...

Look out for surplus fingers, compare mannerisms with real recordings and apply good old-fashioned common sense and scepticism, experts adviseIn a crucial election year for the world, with the UK, US and France among the countries going to the polls, disinformation is swirling around social media.There is much concern about deepfakes, or artificial intelligence-generated images or audio of leading political figures designed to mislead voters, and whether they will affect results. Continue reading...

National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh

This month's picks include a Starlight Express intro for kids, a rollicking wedding play at the National and an explosive hour of danceMicheal Mac Liammoir's 1960 solo show interweaved the private and public lives of Oscar Wilde with excerpts from the great Irish wit's oeuvre. Alastair Whatley - who directed The Importance of Being Earnest a few years ago - recently performed Mac Liammoir's monologue at Reading Rep. A recording of that production, directed by Michael Fentiman, is available on Original Online from 1 July. Continue reading...

Most UK children have their own phone by the age of 11. But what if we didn't give them one? A group of parents wants their kids to enjoy a phone-free childhood - and their numbers are growingLast year, Daisy Greenwell and Clare Fernyhough, longtime friends who have eight- and nine-year-old daughters, began having drawn-out conversations about smartphones. Rumours were swirling that children in their daughters' classes were asking for their own and both Greenwell and Fernyhough were apprehensive about the knock-on effect. If their daughters' friends owned smartphones, wouldn't their daughters eventually demand them, too? And what might happen then? Talking to the parents of children who already owned smartphones only helped to increase their concern. They told us about kids disappearing into their screens," Greenwell said recently. They don't want to hang out with family any more. They don't want to go outside." A local teacher told Greenwell he was able to speak with his daughter only when the wifi was turned off. And these are the lighter problems," she said.Neither Greenwell nor Fernyhough wanted to buy smartphones for their children until they turned 16 (preferably they wouldn't own them until much later). But they could feel pressure mounting. In the UK, 91% of 11-year-olds have a smartphone - it became common remarkably quickly for children to be given a phone when they began secondary school - and 20% of children own them by the time they are four. (The average age for a UK child to receive their first smartphone is around nine.) With grim acceptance, secondary school parents told Greenwell, It's the worst, it's so, so bad, but there's no choice" - they couldn't find a way to prevent their children from having something all of their friends already owned. Both Greenwell and Fernyhough felt trapped; for their daughters, secondary school loomed on the horizon. We thought, What can we do about it?'" Greenwell told me. Shall we not get one? But what if everyone else gets one and our children are the only ones without?" Continue reading...

A disturbing documentary explores tech's questionable ability to bring digital comfort' to the bereavedDeath is a booming business. For one thing, it's inevitable. For another, it brings a uniquely vulnerable and receptive market for any product that promises to numb the grief. Enter artificial intelligence. This thought-provoking and bang-up-to-the-minute documentary explores a morally questionable use of AI: the digital afterlife business, tech that recreates the personality (and in some cases speaking voice and even the likeness) of deceased individuals, designed to offer comfort" to the bereaved. It's the kind of technology that exists on the knife-edge between thrilling innovation and cynical recklessness. We meet a mother from South Korea who is introduced to an avatar of her daughter through a VR headset; a woman whose chats" with her late boyfriend take on an unsettlingly demonic quality when the AI tells her that he's in hell" and threatens to haunt her. These posthumous AI avatars are, one interviewee says, simultaneously a precision-tooled product and also the perfect salesperson for that product. It's hard not to watch this without a mounting sense of dread and a suspicion that a fairly significant Rubicon has been crossed. In UK and Irish cinemas now Continue reading...

An academic psychologist's insightful and compassionate study of adolescence is expertly presented, plotting out harmful as well as helpful transitions into adulthoodI had just emerged from my own teenage years when I first read Joan Didion's essay On Keeping a Notebook. Two sentences earned a mark in pen: I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4am of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends."We grow estranged from our younger selves at our peril. This warning sits at the centre of Lucy Foulkes's excellent and insightful new book, Coming of Age: How Adolescence Shapes Us. Making space for the pain, mistakes and even trauma from the past is essential for our self-perception as adults, even if it may seem safer to edit them out. You also may miss the pleasure and fun of it too. Continue reading...

Tech firm's bid to remove more CO than it produces is being tested as AI spawns new energy-hungry datacentres

The photographer updates her 80s teen series, capturing young people in their bedroomsIn the late 80s and early 90s, Denise Marcotte had a project photographing teens in their bedrooms. Decades later, with ateenage son of her own, the Massachusetts-based photographer decided to revisit the subject. Back then she used a Fujica 6x9 film camera with a tripod; this time she used an iPhone.There is nothing that makes a teenager feel more comfortable than an iPhone," Marcotte says. So using one brings me a sense of freedom on many levels: technically, artistically and in my connection to my young subjects." Continue reading...

Exclusive: Verily says it is refocusing on core products and cutting costs three years after opening research centers in Haifa and Tel AvivGoogle's health and data company, Verily, is closing its operations in Israel three years after opening a research and development center in the country. Verily staff in Israel are expected to leave by the third quarter of 2024. The company cited an effort to refocus its strategy on core products and projects as the reason for the closure.As part of our ongoing review of business needs, Verily has made the difficult decision to begin the process to close its R&D center in Israel located in both Haifa and Tel Aviv," a spokesperson for Verily said. This decision is in keeping with our strategy as we continue to streamline our overall company operations." Continue reading...

My dreams of reliving the good old days of NHL 94 on the Sega Mega Drive were thwarted by the unexpected difficulty of getting online play to workI am very grateful for my dual nationality right now. The horror of Scotland's dour Euro 2024 performance has been tempered by a swashbuckling Canada in their first ever Copa America, and a Canadian hockey team in a Stanley Cup final for only the third time in 18 years: the Edmonton Oilers, a team so utterly Canadian they have a fossil fuel as a name.Thank God for NHL 93 and 94 on the Mega Drive. Not only were they twin peaks of sports gaming perfection, they are also the reason why I can walk into any pub in Canada and bluff my way through conversations about Mario Lemieux, Steve Yzerman and Mark Messier. And make an argument as to why Jeremy Roenick is the most underrated hockey player of his generation based purely on the fact that he was all four horsemen of the apocalypse rolled into one in NHL94. He was up there with the likes of Barry Sanders in Madden, Kylian Mbappe in any Fifa and the Stockton/Malone Combo in NBA Jam - players so freakishly good that you can't lose if they are on your team. Continue reading...

Company says in court filing Musk is entitled to vast payout because shareholders voted in his favor earlier this monthTesla is claiming Elon Musk won his legal battle over his $56bn pay package because shareholders voted for the compensation, despite a judge rescinding it earlier this year, according to court filing made public on Friday.The company's filing comes two weeks after Tesla shareholders voted to ratify the 2018 package of stock options. Tesla held the vote following a January ruling by a Delaware judge to void the compensation because Musk improperly controlled the negotiation process and the company misled shareholders about key details. Continue reading...

Microsoft co-founder says efficiencies for technology and electricity grids will outweigh energy use by datacentresBill Gates has claimed that artificial intelligence will be more of a help than a hindrance in achieving climate goals, despite growing concern that an increase in new datacentres could drain green energy supplies.The philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder told journalists that AI would enable countries to use less energy, even as they require more datacentres, by making technology and electricity grids more efficient. Continue reading...

The stars of YouTube D&D series Natural Six Harry McEntire, Doug Cockle and Ben Starr reveal the challenges and joys of creating characters for roles than can stretch to 40 hours of invisible screen timeAs an actor, Doug Cockle is no stranger to unsettling workplaces. From battling Nazis in Spielberg's Band of Brothers to rubbing shoulders with Christian Bale in dragon romp Reign of Fire, disappearing into a role on set - whatever the set may be - has become second nature. Yet when he landed his first video game role in 2001, Cockle found himself suddenly standing completely alone in a vocal booth.It is bizarre," he says. You just have to be in the character in that moment in that world, in your brain. On stage and screen, you have other actors, you have props, costumes ... all these things that are helping you do this thing called acting'. When you're a voice actor, it's just you in the booth and the director and the engineer on the other side of a glass wall, eating Jelly Babies." Continue reading...

The presenter and comedian Larry Dean dive into infamous legal fights in Famously ... On Trial. Plus: five of the best clubbing podcasts Don't get Hear Here delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereFamously ... On Trial