Relatable jokes about trauma can help people feel less alone, but questions remain over how therapeutic they can truly beWhen, more than a decade ago, I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, I turned to the internet to learn more about my condition.Back then, the effects of trauma weren’t exactly unknown, but they weren’t making headlines, either. Most of the information I found was on psychology websites, but it wasn’t until I went to the doctor and received my diagnosis that I fully understood what was happening to me. Public awareness of the condition was low – or at least, it wasn’t something that people spoke openly about. I felt very alone. Continue reading...

Staying in touch with friends and family via technology made many older people feel more lonely, research finds

The writer’s new essay collection covers 200 years of women and science, from Mary Shelley to AI. She discusses burning books and the ensuing Twitter storm, the end of her marriage, and why a move into politics could be nextThere’s a disconcerting silence outside Jeanette Winterson’s London pied-a-terre. It’s the morning after the night before, when she travelled across London after dinner with her publisher to scenes of football fans setting the city alight with their cup final fervour. “It was uproar,” she says, “We saw cars on fire.” Her flat is in the East End district of Spitalfields in a Georgian house, which she bought 25 years ago, complete with a little shop that she ran for years as an organic grocer and tea room until the rates got too high, and she let it out to an upmarket chocolatier.It’s as if a scene from Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop has been dropped into a satire about prosperity Britain: the quaint old shopfront is still intact, while outside it a lifesize sculpture of a rowing boat full of people sits surreally in the middle of the street, and a little further along, a herd of large bronze elephants frolics. These public artworks only arrived a few weeks ago, Winterson explains, as part of a grand plan to pedestrianise the area, and make it more buzzy, just at the moment that the sort of well-heeled office workers who bought upmarket chocolates are abandoning it owing to the Covid pandemic. Continue reading...

The 14th annual iPhone photography awards offer glimpses of beauty, hope and the endurance of the human spirit. Out of thousands of submissions, photojournalist Istvan Kerekes of Hungary was named the grand prize winner for his image Transylvanian Shepherds. In it, two rugged shepherds traverse an equally rugged industrial landscape, bearing a pair of lambs in their arms. Continue reading...

Henry is a fixture in millions of homes – including 10 Downing Street – despite almost no advertising. Meet the man behind a curiously British success storyIn March this year, photos of the government’s glitzy new briefing room, where Boris Johnson’s new media chief was set to host daily press conferences, leaked to the media. The centrepiece of a “presidential” approach to communications, it was already controversial for its cost to taxpayers of £2.6m. With its gaudy blue backdrop, giant union flags and imposing podium, it looked like the stage for a US political or legal TV show: The West Wing with a touch of Judge Judy.What the briefing room needed was something to suck the pomposity out of it. What it needed, it turned out, was a cameo appearance from a 620-watt anthropomorphic vacuum cleaner. The stocky red and black appliance was barely visible in the wings, stage left, yet instantly recognisable. Turned away from the podium, his chrome wand propped casually against a varnished dado rail, the Henry vacuum cleaner looked almost as if he were rolling his eyes. Continue reading...

Tech options to deter would-be intruders, and let you monitor your house from anywhereWith the prospect of trips out and holidays finally on the cards, over the next few weeks many of us will be leaving our houses unattended for the first time in months. So now is the time to think about making your home a bit more secure.In addition to the basics, there is a range of DIY tech that may help to deter would-be intruders and allow you to keep an eye on your home from almost anywhere in the world. Continue reading...

Twelve essays drawing on years of research into artificial intelligence ask challenging questions about humanity, art, religion and the way we live and loveIn Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, a scientist creates life and is horrified by what he has done. Two centuries on, synthetic life, albeit in a far simpler form, has been created in a dish. What Shelley imagined has only now become possible. But as Jeanette Winterson points out in this essay collection, the achievements of science and technology always start out as fiction. Not everything that can be imagined can be realised, but nothing can be realised if it hasn’t been imagined first.Take artificial intelligence. For now AI is a tool that we train to address specific tasks such as predicting the next Covid wave, but plenty of people have imagined that it could be something categorically different: a multitasking problem-solver whose capacity to understand and learn is equal or superior to ours. Many labs are working on this concept, which is called artificial general intelligence (AGI), and it could be a reality within decades. That’s how far imagination in technology has brought us. What can the artistic imagination add? Continue reading...

After a week of stories about the abuse of private spyware by governments around the world, Michael Safi rounds off our mini-series by looking at the global impact of the Pegasus project and what could change as a resultAll this week Guardian journalists across the world have been reporting on a massive data leak: more than 50,000 phone numbers that, it is believed, have been identified as those of people of interest by clients of the spyware company NSO Group.The leak has made people realise that without us really noticing, the world changed. There are now 3.8bn smartphones globally. They hear our most intimate conversations, hold our deepest secrets – each one can be a microphone and a camera, waiting to be switched on. Continue reading...

Commission to review claims NSO’s Pegasus was misused by customers to target journalists and activistsAn Israeli commission reviewing allegations that NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware was misused by its customers to target journalists and human rights activists will examine whether rules on Israel’s export of cyberweapons such as Pegasus should be tightened, a senior MP has said.The move came as the French president, Emmanuel Macron, convened an emergency cybersecurity meeting after reports his mobile phone and those of government ministers appeared in the leaked list. An official in Macron’s Elysee Palace said that the president’s phone and phone numbers had been changed. Continue reading...

Justice department charged four Chinese nationals with hacking as Washington accused Beijing of threatening national securityThe US has led allies in a sharp condemnation of China for “malicious” cyberattacks, including a hack of Microsoft Exchange email server software that compromised tens of thousands of computers around the world earlier this year.Related: UK and allies accuse Chinese state-backed group of Microsoft hack Continue reading...

Venomous snakebites cause tens of thousands of deaths each year. But homegrown apps are coming to the rescue – and protecting reptiles from reprisalsWhen 12-year-old Anay Sujith felt a sharp sting in his leg while asleep in his hut in a village in Kerala, “I started yelling and woke up my parents,” he recalls. They immediately sought help – not with a phone call, but through an app.A team from Kannur Wildlife Rescuers (KWR) reached the boy’s home, in Ramatheru village in the coastal city of Kannur, within minutes and he was admitted to hospital 20 minutes later. He had been bitten four times by a venomous Russell’s viper, one of the “big four” snakes in India responsible for the greatest number of venomous snakebites. Continue reading...

British foreign secretary says Beijing will be held to account if it does not stop ‘systematic cyber sabotage’Britain has joined with the US and other allies in formally accusing Chinese state-based hacking groups of being behind the exploitation of an estimated 250,000 Microsoft Exchange servers worldwide earlier this year.The UK foreign secretary said the cyber-attack amounted to “a reckless but familiar pattern of behaviour”, in an announcement released on Monday. Continue reading...

With a new generation fuelling fashion, protest and popular culture, is it time for millennials like me to move over? A panel of young trailblazers give me a glow up – and some lessons in activismI am sitting cross-legged on the floor, wearing a bucket hat, trying to be chill. I rest my chin in my hands and try to think chill thoughts, which is hard, because I am wearing mint flatform Crocs, studded with pineapples and watermelons, and a fluffy green knit that feels more like a pet than a cardigan. But I do my best, because being chill is essential if I am to get into character.The term “chill” has come up a lot during this past week in which I – one of the world’s oldest millennials at 39 – am trying to be more generation Z. I’m learning the ways of the generation beneath mine, who, according to the US thinktank the Pew Research Center, were born between 1997 and 2012, and are taking over from millennials (born between 1981 and 1996) as the cohort in charge of the internet. Continue reading...

Social media giants contribute to global conflicts and allow misinformation. How have they gained so much control, and what is that doing to our lives?It’s good to remember that every time Mark Zuckerberg claims that he founded Facebook in order to connect people or build communities, he is somehow forgetting that he first created the site in order to enable himself and his fellow dorm-dwellers to rate Harvard’s young women on their looks. But then, Zuckerberg has never been the sharpest tool in the box. He once said that Facebook wouldn’t interfere with Holocaust-denial on its service, because it was hard to impugn people’s motives for denying the Holocaust, before a couple of years later announcing that his “thinking” on the matter had “evolved” and Holocaust denial was now frowned upon. Well, evolution does work slowly.But as Charles Arthur’s coolly prosecutorial book shows, social-media algorithms don’t just allow people with nefarious interests to get together: they perform as active matchmakers. “Facebook was hothousing extremism by putting extremists in touch with each other,” concluded Facebook’s own internal investigations in 2016. Not only that, Facebook was “auto-generating terrorist content”: its “machine learning” systems created a “Local Business” page for “al-Qaida in the Arabian peninsula”. Continue reading...

Alliances are shifting as states led by China and Russia compete with the US and tech entrepreneursLiu Boming took in the dizzy view. Around him lay the inky vastness of space. Below was the Earth. “Wow,” he said, laughing. “It’s too beautiful out here.” Over the next seven hours Liu and his colleague Tang Hongbo carried out China’s second spacewalk, helped along by a giant robotic arm.Mission accomplished, the two taikonauts – China’s astronauts – clambered back into their home for the next three months: Beijing’s new space station. The core module of the station, named Tiangong, meaning “heavenly palace”, was launched in April. “There will be more spacewalks. The station will keep growing,” Liu said. Continue reading...

TV doctors Chris and Xand consider the drastic differences in their weight – and health. Plus: Slate’s One Year takes us back to 1977, and more mind-changing action in You’re Wrong AboutA Thorough Examination With Drs Chris and Xand

Anonymous person will be replaced by 18-year-old recent high school graduate on New Shepard spacecraftThe anonymous winner of a ticket to join billionaire Jeff Bezos in space next week will no longer board the New Shepard spacecraft due to “scheduling conflicts”, Bezos’s Blue Origin company announced on Thursday.The winner, who paid $29.7m to join one of the world’s richest men in space, will instead be replaced by Oliver Daemen, a recent high school graduate. The 18-year-old took a gap year in 2020 to obtain his private pilot’s license and plans to study physics and innovation management at the Netherlands-based University of Utrecht in September. Continue reading...

• Social media company takes down 200 accounts• ‘Hallmarks of a well-resourced and persistent operation’Facebook said on Thursday it had taken down about 200 accounts run by a group of hackers in Iran as part of a cyber-spying operation that targeted mostly US military personnel and people working at defense and aerospace companies.The social media company said the group, dubbed “Tortoiseshell” by security experts, used fake online personas to connect with targets, build trust – sometimes over the course of several months – and drive them to other sites, where they were tricked into clicking malicious links that would infect their devices with spying malware. Continue reading...

Documents appear to show how Russian intelligence worked to install their preferred candidate as presidentPapers appear to show Putin’s plot to put Trump in White HouseIn January 2016, America was coming to terms with what had previously seemed incredible. Barring an unforeseen event, Donald J Trump was on course to become the Republican party’s presidential candidate. Some welcomed this giddy prospect, while others in the Republican establishment recoiled in horror.The man himself oozed confidence. “I have a feeling it’s going to work out, actually,” he told his rival Ted Cruz, at a Fox News debate. By 22 January, the polls had Trump well ahead, as a snowstorm nudged towards Washington. Continue reading...

Researchers say web domains masquerading as activist, health and media groups are used by governments to hack targetsAn Israeli company that sells spyware to governments is linked to fake Black Lives Matter and Amnesty International websites that are used to hack targets, according to a new report.Researchers from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, who worked with Microsoft, issued a report on Thursday about the potential targets of Candiru, a Tel Aviv-based firm marketing “untraceable” spyware that can infect and monitor computers and phones. Continue reading...

My father, Aladdin Bahrani, who has died aged 91, spent many years working as a senior engineer in his birthplace, Iraq, before becoming professor of manufacturing engineering at Queen’s University in Belfast, where he had trained just after the second world war.The eldest of 10 children, he was born in Baghdad, to Mohammed Saleem Bahrani, a landowner and farmer, and Bahija Abdul Hussan Al Shamma, a housewife. Once he had finished his schooling at Baghdad College, he left Iraq on a government scholarship to study engineering at Queen’s University from 1948 to 1953, graduating with a science master’s and meeting a young Belfast woman, Margaret Sawrey, who became his wife in 1952. Continue reading...

Comfortable and long lasting with good case and brilliant audio but ultimately disposableSony’s latest top-of-the-range noise-cancelling earbuds are a cut above the previous generation and the competition.Costing £250 ($279.99/A$449.99), the WF-1000XM4 are premium true wireless earbuds that go toe to toe with the likes of the Apple AirPods Pro, Jabra Elite 85t and Samsung Galaxy Buds Pro. Continue reading...

China’s video game market is the world’s biggest. International developers want in on it – but its rules on what is acceptable are growing increasingly harsh. Is it worth the compromise?In the years after it was founded in 1999, the Swedish video game company Paradox Interactive quietly built a reputation for developing some of the best, and most hardcore, strategy games on the market. “Deep, endless, complex, unyielding games,” is how Shams Jorjani, the company’s chief business development officer, describes Paradox’s offerings. Most of its biggest hits, such as the middle ages-themed Crusader Kings, or Sengoku, in which you play as a 16th-century Japanese noble, were loosely based on history.But in 2016, Paradox decided to try something a little different. Its new game, Stellaris, was a work of sprawling science fiction, set 200 years in the future. In this virtual universe, players could explore richly detailed galaxies, command their own fusion-powered starship fleets and fight with extraterrestrials to expand their space empires. Gamers could choose to play as the human race, or one of many alien species. (My personal favourite dresses in a lavish golden cape and has a head like an otter’s, with soft reddish-brown fur, dark eyes and a black snout. Another type of alien is a sentient crystal that eats rocks.) Continue reading...

Legal fight hopes to override previous ruling that drivers are not employeesNew Zealand Uber drivers are taking the global ride-share company to court, in the hopes of being legally determined as employees instead of contractors.It is the latest in a string of cases taken against the company and other ride-share apps, and the second such case in New Zealand. Continue reading...

For his eighth birthday in 1959 David Pace was given a Brownie Hawkeye camera. The young boy photographed family, church, work, and school in the region of California that would become the tech giants’ home Continue reading...

Outage means victims of Russia-linked cybercrime ring cannot pay ransom and can remain unnamedWebsites run by the ransomware gang REvil suddenly became unreachable on Tuesday.Ransomware gang websites can be unreliable, and it was unclear whether the site’s disappearance was a momentary fluke or whether the hackers had been taken offline. Continue reading...

Boris Johnson to demand that tech firms do more to tackle online abuseBoris Johnson has summoned tech companies to Downing Street to order them to do more to tackle online abuse, amid mounting criticism of the government after black England players were deluged with racist posts in the aftermath of their Euro 2020 defeat.The England footballer Tyrone Mings has criticised the home secretary, Priti Patel, for her condemnation of the racist abuse faced by his teammates, after she called players taking the knee “gesture politics”. Continue reading...

Tech company must come up with proposals for how it would compensate agencies for use of their newsFrance’s antitrust watchdog has fined Google €500m (£428m) for failing to comply with the regulator’s orders on how to conduct talks with the country’s news publishers in a row over copyright.The fine comes amid international pressure on online platforms such as Google and Facebook to share more revenue with news outlets. Continue reading...

The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical conceptsDoes anyone still believe that any of the companies they call or email are labouring under higher-than-normal call volumes – especially given that that they all seem to have it “higher than normal” all of the time. Does anyone know how long ago the baseline “normal” might have been? Robert Cullen, Härryda, SwedenPost your answers (and new questions) below or send them to nq@theguardian.com. A selection will be published on Sunday. Continue reading...

While developing traditional narrative games is harder than it has ever been, Microsoft’s Xbox chief sees an opportunity in using modern platforms and tech to tell new storiesOver the last decade, the concept of “games as a service” has revolutionised the way the interactive entertainment industry works. From the subscriptions introduced by massively multiplayer online adventures such as World of Warcraft to the seasonal battle passes of current online shooters, we’re seeing a huge amount of focus on games that can sustain a lucrative community of players over several years.But where does that leave more offbeat ideas and concepts that couldn’t support years’ worth of play? Where does it leave the single-player narrative adventure – the blockbusting genre that brought us titles such as Metal Gear Solid, Red Dead Redemption and Mass Effect? It’s a genre Sony has supported through funding the studios that make games such as The Last of Us, Spider-Man and God of War. But Microsoft has focused its efforts on cross-platform, connected games, as symbolised by the mammoth Minecraft industry. Is there still room for traditional forms of narrative games on the Xbox Series X? Continue reading...

Seizure follows confiscation of £114m of the cryptocurrency in JuneMetropolitan police detectives investigating international money laundering have seized nearly £180m of bitcoin.The seizure by the Met’s economic crime command follows a confiscation of £114m of the cryptocurrency in June. Continue reading...

Guardian Australia picture editor Carly Earl explains the dos and don’ts of taking pictures of the moon and night sky

Video-sharing app’s reputation problem isn’t holding back its phenomenal growth, says authorAlmost a third of Britons are concerned that TikTok might share their personal data with the Chinese government, according to a book on the social network, despite the app’s popularity across the nation.And a third of Britons aged between 18 and 34, the key demographic for the app, are more than just worried: they believe TikTok would hand over their data on request from China. Continue reading...

UK union complains to competition watchdog that retailer profited from high prices on hand sanitiser and masksThe Unite union has lodged an official competition complaint against Amazon, alleging the online retailer profited from pandemic-related “price gouging” on products such as hand sanitiser and face masks.In a 41-page letter, seen by the Guardian, lawyers for Unite accuse Amazon of “exploitative abuse of its dominance” and call on the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to launch an investigation. Continue reading...

Nissan’s ‘gigafactory’ in Sunderland must be the first of many sites if the UK is to compete in the electric vehicle eraThe British government’s £100m-plus commitment to secure Nissan’s battery gigafactory for Sunderland has been like gadget-shopping on Amazon writ large: splurging on some new technology that has suddenly become essential – and then being immediately prompted to buy another six.This time, though, duplicating the spending looks more sensible. More gigafactories – or plain old big battery factories – are not essential for the UK to transition to using electric vehicles (EVs). But they certainly will be if Britain hopes to keep making, selling and exporting its own cars. Continue reading...

Internet cons have surged in the Covid crisis, with some victims left with little recourse to recover cashIn early May, James Evans* met a man on the dating app Grindr. The man, who said his name was David, was friendly and chatty. “It started off as a normal conversation,” says Evans. “We moved to WhatsApp and exchanged messages. After a few days he started telling me about crypto trading and how he could show me how it worked and how I could earn money from it. It seemed like a genuine connection.”Unfortunately for Evans, , that wasn’t the case. He hadhooked up with a scammer, who within a week had convinced him to hand over £20,000. Continue reading...

The elevation of the man behind the Cloud while Jeff Bezos relinquishes day-to-day control, comes at a critical time for AmazonAndy Jassy made a powerful – and painful – first impression on the billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos soon after he joined the then start-up bookseller in 1997.During a rambunctious game of “broomball” – a cross between lacrosse and football that another Amazon executive invented and is still overly competitively played at the company – Jassy, then a fresh-faced recruit from Harvard Business School, accidentally hit Bezos over the head with a kayak paddle. Continue reading...

Slimmer, better design, long battery life, 10.1in HD screen and speakers makes for a good TV tabletAmazon’s top 10in Fire OS tablet has had a makeover and now has faster performance, without costing iPad money.The 2021 Fire HD 10 comes in either a standard version costing £150/US$150 or a “Plus” version, as tested here, costing £180/US$180, with a few more bells and whistles. Continue reading...

Alice Levine and Matt Forde delve into the News International phone-hacking scandal. Plus: spoofy horror in Summer Camp Massacre, and an insightful look at trans rights in sportBritish Scandal

A similar agreement was made with Google in February for Guardian Australia to participate in the company’s News Showcase productGuardian Australia has struck a deal with Facebook to licence news content to the platform’s News tab.After months of lengthy negotiations between the two companies since the passage of the federal government’s news media bargaining code in February, Guardian Australia’s managing director, Dan Stinton, announced the agreement with Facebook had been reached on Friday. Continue reading...

A flying car is seen completing its first intercity flight in Slovakia. The prototype, called AirCar, takes off from Nitra airport and lands in Bratislava 35 minutes later. Using wings that fold away in less than three minutes and a propeller at its rear, the dual-transportation vehicle has now completed more than 40 hours of test flight

Campaigners call on entertainment and sport sectors to ensure inclusion of those without access

Facebook, Google, Twitter and TikTok commit to overhaul their platform’s moderation systemsFour of the world’s largest social networks have committed to overhauling their moderation systems to tackle the abuse of women on their platforms.Facebook, Google, Twitter and TikTok have signed up to the pledge, led by the World Wide Web Foundation (WWWF), to fix persistent weaknesses in how they tackle online gender-based violence. Continue reading...

We ask Australian humorists to tell us what’s funny online. Andrew Sholl’s Twitter account is devoted to doing just that. Consider this the bumper editionThe original intent behind the @OzKitsch Twitter account was to have a laugh at cringey aspects of Australian life, like concrete koala letterboxes and Ned Kelly bottle openers. There’s certainly no shortage of material.But its purpose has evolved over time. Instead of simply wincing at the olden days or wallowing in nostalgia, it seeks to examine aspects of everyday life that we have seem to have forgotten, either by accident or design: everything from regional beauty contests, monuments that were never built, and high school war cries, to Menzies’ fleeting admiration for Hitler, quack cures for the Spanish flu, and the musical stylings of Alan Jones. Continue reading...

It turns out that Facebook is more powerful and resilient – and American antitrust law less helpful – than critics of big tech had hopedWithin 12 hours of a federal judge tossing out a state and federal antitrust lawsuits against Facebook, the market value of the adolescent company exceeded $1tn. Facebook became the fifth company worth more than a trillion, joining Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet (the parent company of Google).What are we to make of this sudden turn of events? We have been conditioned by more than five years of criticism and concern about the growing power of Facebook to influence our politics, social lives and economic activities to assume that the company was increasingly vulnerable to aggressive regulators around the world. Continue reading...

Lawyers will try to persuade Canadian court to permit new documents to be introduced as evidence to clear Meng WanzhouThe US justice department’s battle to extradite Meng Wanzhou from Canada has taken a fresh turn as lawyers for Huawei’s chief financial officer claimed that internal emails and bank documents prove there is no grounds to extradite her to the US.Meng, 48, was arrested on a US warrant at Vancouver airport in late 2018, and has been battling extradition. Her detention infuriated the Chinese government and has helped drag relations between Beijing and Ottawa to their lowest point in years. Continue reading...

Graphic depicted Kashmir region as separate country, adding to tension between social media firm and stateTwitter is facing criminal charges in India after the site published a map that incorrectly showed the turbulent Indian region of Kashmir as a separate country.On Monday night a report was filed to police in the state of Uttar Pradesh against Twitter’s head in India, Manish Maheshwari, calling the publication of the distorted map “an act of treason”. Continue reading...

Cases filed by FTC and state attorneys general did not give enough evidence to prove Facebook was a monopolyIn a significant blow to US regulators’ attempt to rein in big tech, a federal judge has dismissed lawsuits brought against Facebook by the Federal Trade Commission and a broad coalition of state attorneys general.Markets cheered the ruling, sending Facebook shares surging by more than 4%, which pushed the social network’s market value to more than $1tn (£722bn) for the first time. Continue reading...

Information was parsed from gov.uk website incorrectly, leading to possible confusion over Covid requirements