Technology | The Guardian

The world over, species, landscapes and natural resources are threatened by seemingly untamable wildfiresThe Australian Koala Foundation has declared koalas to be “functionally extinct”, after fears of 2,000 of them being killed as more than 100 bushfires struck south-eastern Australia. However, the claim has been criticised since there are still an estimated 15,000-28,000 koalas in New South Wales. Even so, it is believed that the species will be extinct by 2050 if its habitat is continually undermined. Continue reading...

Shadowy firms collect detailed data on where we go and who we meet through our apps. Yet where is the protest that would fuel change?When the history of our time comes to be written, one of the things that will puzzle historians (assuming any have survived the climate cataclysm) is why we allowed ourselves to sleepwalk into dystopia. Ever since 9/11, it’s been clear that western democracies had embarked on a programme of comprehensive monitoring of their citizenry, usually with erratic and inadequate democratic oversight. But we only began to get a fuller picture of the extent of this surveillance when Edward Snowden broke cover in the summer of 2013.For a time, the dramatic nature of the Snowden revelations focused public attention on the surveillance activities of the state. In consequence, we stopped thinking about what was going on in the private sector. The various scandals of 2016, and the role that network technology played in the political upheavals of that year, constituted a faint alarm call about what was happening, but in general our peaceful slumbers resumed: we went back to our smartphones and the tech giants continued their appropriation, exploitation and abuse of our personal data without hindrance. And this continued even though a host of academic studies and a powerful book by Shoshana Zuboff showed that, as the cybersecurity guru Bruce Schneier put it, “the business model of the internet is surveillance”. Continue reading...

Privacy scandals and antitrust issues dogged social media giants and the online retailer saw a rise in employee organizingWhat goes up must come down, and in 2019, gravity reasserted itself for the tech industry.After years of relatively unchecked growth, the tech industry found itself on the receiving end of increased scrutiny from lawmakers and the public and attacks from its own employees. Continue reading...

Software for fighting cybercrime in Ghana and tools for speeding up cervical cancer diagnosis in Uganda are among innovations recognised by the judges of this year’s Africa prizeThe Royal Academy of Engineering’s Africa prize, now in its sixth year, is the continent’s biggest award for engineering innovation. Sixteen African inventors from six countries – including, for the first time, Malawi – have been shortlisted to receive funding, training and mentoring for projects intended to revolutionise sectors ranging from agriculture and banking to women’s health. The winner will be awarded £25,000 and the three runners-up will receive £10,000 each.This year’s inventions include facial recognition software to prevent financial fraud, a low-cost digital microscope to speed up cervical cancer diagnosis, and two separate innovations made from water hyacinth plants. Four inventors spoke to the Guardian about their innovations and their plans to change Africa for the better. Continue reading...

Lawsuit, which lists seven similar hacking incidents, argues that the camera systems are ‘fatally flawed’A man in Alabama is suing the Amazon-owned home security company Ring, claiming his internet-connected camera was hacked and used to harass his children.Ring user John Baker Orange purchased a Ring camera in July 2019 and in recent weeks allegedly experienced a chilling cybersecurity breach involving his children aged seven, nine, and 10, according to the lawsuit. Continue reading...

Carmaker says it expects to reach 1m by end of 2023 and 1.5m by end of 2025Volkswagen has accelerated its push into electric cars, as company forecasts suggest the world’s largest carmaker will produce its millionth battery electric vehicle two years earlier than previously planned.The core Volkswagen brand will have turned out 1m battery-only cars by the end of 2023 and will reach 1.5m by the end of 2025, the Wolfsburg-based manufacturer said on Friday. Continue reading...

For some farmers in New Zealand, Britain and Australia, drones are not just a toy – they’re an increasingly vital toolA shepherd is out tending a flock when a presence appears above. It descends from the sky and communicates vital information. It may sound like a nativity scene, but for an increasing number of farmers it’s a daily occurrence – and that celestial being is a drone.Corey Lambeth, a New Zealand farmer, originally purchased a drone for photography, but he quickly realised the device had more practical applications. “I thought ‘I’ll just give it a nudge on the sheep and see what that goes like’ and it actually worked out quite well,” he says. Now, Lambeth has been using a drone “pretty much as another dog” to muster sheep for three years. Continue reading...

Big tech behaves as though power absolves them of responsibility. Have we learned nothing since the financial crash?Towards the end of the last decade, two American social networks – Facebook and MySpace – were locked in a battle to conquer the rest of the world.The two companies took “radically different” approaches to their global expansions, TechCrunch reported at the time. MySpace spent time and money building local infrastructure for each new market – hiring a team on the ground, translating the site and performing outreach to local musicians and artists. Facebook simply enlisted volunteers to crowdsource the site’s translation into new languages, starting with Spanish, then German, French and more. Continue reading...

Google, Amazon and Facebook moved at a scale and speed governments couldn’t match. Now regulators are trying to catch upThe 2010s will be remembered for a new era in the development of capitalism, one of mind-boggling scale. Apple, Amazon and Microsoft are closing the decade as the world’s first trillion-dollar companies. Last year, Apple’s revenue was larger than Vietnam’s GDP, while Amazon’s research and development spending alone is almost as much as Iceland’s GDP. Facebook boasts 2.4 billion users, a population larger than that of every continent except Asia.Related: The dark side of tech: why the Guardian asks tough questions about Silicon Valley Continue reading...

This single piece of technology has obliterated the promise of the internet and corrupted human interactionIn the long lost year of 2011, I managed to graduate college without owning a smartphone. Even then, four years after the birth of the iPhone, I was not yet an unreasonable outlier. All my immediate friends owned flip phones. The pressure to join the future had not yet overtaken us.Related: Israeli spyware allegedly used to target Pakistani officials' phones Continue reading...

From Black Lives Matter to #OscarsSoWhite, the decade would not have been the same without black voices on social mediaThere is power in numbers. No internet subsection displayed this fact better than Black Twitter, which touched nearly every sphere of American culture and politics this decade.In the 2010s Black Twitter become a cultural force to be reckoned with. It promoted Black Lives Matter and raised awareness around the tragic deaths of Sandra Bland and Eric Garner through hashtags such as #SayHerName and #ICantBreathe. Its anger over Kevin Hart’s homophobic tweets pressured him to drop out as a host for the 2018 Oscars ceremony. It pressured Pepsi to retract and apologize for a Kendall Jenner-fronted commercial accused of co-opting the Black Lives Matter movement. It created hundreds of delightfully viral moments such as “eyebrows on fleek”. And it helped a wild 180-tweet thread – in which a stripper recounts an adventure-filled road trip to Florida – become an A24-produced, feature-length film. Continue reading...

Our database of collective actions challenges the mainstream media narrative. Here are our eight key insightsIn the past year, tech worker mobilization has reached unprecedented levels. Kickstarter employees sought union recognition from their company. Amazon workers led a cross tech-industry walkout to support the global climate strike. Googlers grappled with unionization, fought against increasing corporate hostility, and challenged their company’s unethical partnerships. Even Chinese tech workers have joined in, with the viral 996.icu campaign that demanded more reasonable working hours.We documented all the collective actions in the tech industry in a publicly accessible online database and analyzed the results. What we learned challenges many mainstream media narratives about the tech workers’ movement. Here are our eight most important insights. Continue reading...

Arrests have raised questions in China about the company’s ties to the state and the wider tech industryAround this time last year, Zeng Meng, 39, was on holiday in Thailand, having dinner with his father. Suddenly he was surrounded by Chinese police. Plainclothes officers stood on each side of him, their hands on his shoulders, while another filmed the scene.The officers showed their IDs and said they had been dispatched from Shenzhen, the headquarters of Zeng’s former employer Huawei, where he was wanted on suspicion of violating trade secrets. Having no other choice, Zeng went with them, accompanied by four Thai officers. Within a week, he had been extradited to China and formally arrested. Continue reading...

Internet-connected devices are a tempting way to fill Christmas stockings, but our privacy is often traded away while we’re swept up in the funThis Christmas, you may be considering just how much your family would appreciate a cool new gadget – that latest internet-enabled watch for dad, a smart speaker for your grandmother’s kitchen, or an amazingly interactive talking doll for your niece.But what if you knew that these handy devices would record your conversations, expose you to malicious hacking or even create risks for your children’s online and physical safety? Might think twice about it then, huh? Good. Because there is a very real and present danger that comes from the rise in surveillance devices that are permeating our homes and invading our personal privacy. Continue reading...

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg won’t talk to the Guardian. So we fed everything he says into an algorithm, built a Zuckerbot, and interviewed itMark Zuckerberg is press shy. The 35-year-old billionaire’s innate sense of swagger (“I’m CEO … bitch”) has failed to translate into confident public speaking. But after the Cambridge Analytica scandal precipitated a massive crisis of trust for the company, Zuckerberg was forced to step out of his comfort zone and start answering for himself and his company.Related: Sacha Baron Cohen: Facebook would have let Hitler buy ads for 'final solution' Continue reading...

Section 230 of the 1996 US Telecoms Act is just 26 words long – but its impact has been incalculableIn October 1994, an unidentified user of a bulletin board hosted by an online service provider, Prodigy.com, posted an item that was to have far-reaching consequences. The post claimed that a Long Island brokerage firm called Stratton Oakmont had committed criminal and fraudulent acts in connection with the initial public offering (IPO) of another company.Stratton Oakmont sued Prodigy and the unidentified poster for defamation – and won. Prodigy argued that it couldn’t be held responsible for what anonymous users posted on its platform. The judge disagreed, arguing that the company was liable as the publisher of the content created by its users because it exercised editorial control over the messages on its bulletin boards in several ways and was thereby potentially liable for any and all defamatory material posted on its websites. Continue reading...

Users who don’t remove the Beijing-based app will be blocked from Navy Marine Corp intranetThe United States Navy has banned the social media app TikTok from government-issued mobile devices, saying the popular short video app represented a cybersecurity threat.Related: US 'investigating TikTok as potential national security risk' Continue reading...

Social network suspends thousands in the latest crackdown on state-sponsored propagandaTwitter said on Friday it had suspended thousands of accounts linked to a manipulation effort stemming from Saudi Arabia, in the latest crackdown on state-sponsored propaganda efforts.The social network said some 88,000 accounts being blocked were linked to Saudi state-backed “information operations” in violation of Twitter’s platform manipulation rules. Continue reading...

Left it a bit late? Here’s a quick list of good tech things for people of all agesLego Hidden Side – £25 Continue reading...

Company to clamp down on ads that portray taking part in the census as ‘useless or meaningless’Facebook plans to clamp down on attempts to use its services to interfere with the 2020 US census, including the posting of misleading information about when and how to participate, who can participate and what happens when people do.Facebook and other social media companies have been trying to tackle misinformation on their services, especially ahead of next year’s US presidential elections. Continue reading...

NSO Group malware may have been used to access WhatsApp messages for ‘state-on-state’ espionage

As internet use has surged, especially in developing world, so have attempts to switch off flow of informationOn Thursday, internet shutdowns came to the capital city of the world’s largest democracy.The suspension of data services, phone calls and texting to curb protests in parts of Delhi was an inauspicious milestone for a tactic that is becoming an increasingly common tool for authoritarian governments – but practised most often by India. Continue reading...

ECJ ruling on firm’s French operations marks a victory in fight to avoid more regulationAirbnb has secured a victory in its fight to avoid more regulation by city authorities after the European court of justice ruled that it acted as an “information society service” rather than a real estate agency.The EU court said the company did not require an estate agent’s licence to operate in France as it was mainly providing a tool for presenting and finding accommodation for rent rather than acting as a broker. Continue reading...

Words With Friends company admitted hack in September but size only now revealedMore than 170m usernames and passwords were stolen from the company behind Words With Friends in a hack this year, according to a breach monitoring site.Zynga, a social game developer that made its name with Farmville a decade ago and acquired Words With Friends a year later, admitted to the hack in September, telling users that cyber-attacks were “one of the unfortunate realities of doing business today”. Continue reading...

The Commodore 64 thrilled a generation of gamers in the 80s. Now it’s back (again), warts and allFirst released in 1982 – hot on the heels of its rival, Sinclair’s ZX Spectrum – the Commodore 64 became one of the most popular home computers of the 1980s. It was far from user-friendly by today’s standards – even demanding some code be entered just to load games – but it inspired a generation of future programmers and designers, many of whom went on to be influential game makers. At the peak of its popularity, factories were building 400,000 units a month to meet demand.In 2018, it made a comeback, reborn as a “microconsole” preloaded with games. A charming, half-scale replica, the C64 Mini could be plugged into a modern TV, providing access to 64 games. Unfortunately, it lacked two things so important to the Commodore 64 experience: a working keyboard and a decent joystick. Continue reading...

Michael struggles to find the search results he’s looking for, and would like some tips for better GooglingLast week’s column mentioned search skills. I’m sometimes on the third page of results before I get to what I was really looking for. I’m sure a few simple tips would find these results on page 1. All advice welcome. MichaelGoogle achieved its amazing popularity by de-skilling search. Suddenly, people who were not very good at searching – which is almost everyone – could get good results without entering long, complex searches. Partly this was because Google knew which pages were most important, based on its PageRank algorithm, and it knew which pages were most effective, because users quickly bounced back from websites that didn’t deliver what they wanted. Continue reading...

Kathryn Spiers says tech company is targeting employee activists who are pushing back against recent policy changesGoogle fired another employee activist on Friday, the fifth termination of an employee engaged in workplace organizing in less than a month.Kathryn Spiers, a 21-year-old security engineer who had worked for Google since February 2018, was suspended from work on 25 November – the same day that four other worker activists were fired for what the company described as “intentional and often repeated violations of our longstanding data security policies”. Continue reading...

Public-run +24 channel showed RT feature with the exiled Catalan separatist leaderSpain’s public broadcaster has inadvertently carried an interview with the exiled Catalan separatist leader Carles Puigdemont after hackers hijacked its online news channel and substituted its content for that of Russia’s state-backed RT network.The hack, which happened last Thursday, meant Spanish TV’s +24 channel showed RT’s interview between Puigdemont and the former Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa. Continue reading...

Many smartphone screens switch to warmer colours in the evening to help you sleep better – but research suggests the science behind this is all wrong‘Night mode” is one of those features you may be aware of only because your phone keeps telling you about it. At some point while you are lying in bed at night sending texts, your screen may politely suggest you activate a function that shifts the colours of your screen from the colder to the warmer end of the spectrum. It is supposed to help you sleep better.Findings in a study led by Dr Tim Brown and published in Current Biology suggest this is the very opposite of correct. The research, carried out on mice, appears to rubbish the notion that blue light disrupts sleep. All things being equal, warm yellow light is worse. Continue reading...

Our updated list of the top iOS and Android mobile phones – at the best prices right nowNeed a new smartphone but don’t know which one is the very best? Here’s a guide comparing the current top-end smartphones from Apple, Samsung, Huawei, OnePlus and others to help you pick the best handset for you.There has never been a better time to buy a new flagship smartphone with many quality handsets available at a wider range of prices than ever before. Whether your priority is two-day battery life, fantastic camera performance or a spectacular screen, there’s plenty to choose from. Continue reading...

Call centre workers who check how helpful our voice assistants are say they hear private conversations and couples having sex. Here’s how to avoid sharing your private lifeWalls have ears; you never know who might be listening. Except, increasingly, you do. Call-centre workers for companies such as Apple, Amazon and Google are hired to check recordings made by voice assistants including Alexa and Siri for accuracy and helpfulness.The disembodied computer that lives in a cylinder in the corner of your kitchen is actually piping a random sample of your requests to humans in Cork, Berlin, Barcelona and elsewhere around the world. But if you’re shocked, spare a thought for the poor workers themselves. Continue reading...

In the final episode of Chips with Everything, Jordan Erica Webber and Alex Hern reminisce about their favourite episodes from the last couple of years. Plus, as the decade draws to a close, the duo discuss their favourite tech stories of the past 10 years Continue reading...

Swedish vlogger and comedian to step back amid accusations of racism and antisemitismYouTuber PewDiePie has announced he will be taking a break from the video-sharing platform, saying he is “very tired”.With 102 million subscribers, the Swedish vlogger and comedian was for many years the platform’s most popular star but was overtaken earlier this year by T-Series, an Indian record label which now has around 120 million subscribers. Continue reading...

Algorithmic bias can be fixed more easily than the prejudices of people – so why do we still have a problem with it?One of the things that really annoys AI researchers is how supposedly “intelligent” machines are judged by much higher standards than are humans. Take self-driving cars, they say. So far they’ve driven millions of miles with very few accidents, a tiny number of them fatal. Yet whenever an autonomous vehicle kills someone there’s a huge hoo-ha, while every year in the US nearly 40,000 people die in crashes involving conventional vehicles.Likewise, the AI evangelists complain, everybody and his dog (this columnist included) is up in arms about algorithmic bias: the way in which automated decision-making systems embody the racial, gender and other prejudices implicit in the data sets on which they were trained. And yet society is apparently content to endure the astonishing irrationality and capriciousness of much human decision-making. Continue reading...

From new gaming consoles to activism at Apple, we predict the things you will – or won’t – see in tech this yearThis is an easy prediction to make, because even Tesla isn’t claiming that its eye-catching angular steel beast will be available for sale in 2020. The company’s own pitch is that production won’t even begin until 2021, with owners receiving their first shipments in 2022. But the gap is relevant to Tesla’s future: where the company was once genuinely ahead of the curve, in making beautiful electric cars that people wanted to buy, it has increasingly relied on beating its competitors to announcements, rather than actually shipping. The list of Elon Musk’s as-yet-unfulfilled promises grows every year – but the electric fleets of BMW, Ford, General Motors and others grow faster. Continue reading...

Advocates fear such ads could roll back decades of hard-won progress against HIV/Aids and are calling on Facebook to change its policiesSince late summer, many LGBTQ+ Facebook users’ newsfeeds have begun to display medically incorrect targeted advertising. These ads pertain to Truvada, a one-pill-a-day pharmaceutical that has been demonstrated to reduce the likelihood of HIV transmissions by as much as 99%, making it a key mechanism in the decades-long fight against HIV/Aids.“Side Effects from taking an HIV Drug …” reads one badly punctuated message, full of random capitalizations. “The manufacturers had a safer drug & kept it secret … They kept selling the dangerous one.” Continue reading...

Hackers are using two-way talk function to wake people up in the middle of the night and watch unsuspecting childrenHackers are tapping in to cameras intended for home security, talking to children through the devices and even dropping racist remarks, according to multiple news reports. The intended purpose of a two-way talk function on the devices is to allow parents to check in on their children. But hackers are using them to wake people up in the middle of the night, and watch unsuspecting children.Each time I've watched this video it's given me chills.

Players of the popular online shooter will be able to lay down their weapons and watch exclusive footageThe next trailer for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker will not be shown in the cinema or on TV – it will be in Fortnite.At the Game awards in Los Angeles on Thursday night, director JJ Abrams announced that exclusive footage from the film will be revealed live within the game on Saturday evening. Anyone playing the popular battle-royale shooter at that time will be able to head to the Risky Reels area of the map and watch on a large screen. Star Wars-themed outfits, gliders, pickaxes and emotes have been launched into the game’s item shop. Continue reading...

The machine previously known as Project Scarlett will be four times as powerful as Xbox One X with a range of next-gen featuresMicrosoft has revealed the name for its new games console – Xbox Series X. The machine, previously known by the codename Project Scarlett will launch in “Holiday 2020”, and will ship with a redesigned version of the Xbox wireless controller.The new name was announced during the annual Game awards in Los Angeles. At the event, a promotional trailer was shown for Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II, a sequel to the critically acclaimed adventure title from UK developer Ninja Theory, which is being designed to leverage the capabilities of the new technology. Continue reading...

Purchase of Oxford University spinoff gives Waymo its first presence in the UKWaymo, Google’s self-driving car sibling company, has acquired the Oxford artificial intelligence company Latent Logic for an undisclosed amount, giving Waymo its first presence in the UK.Latent Logic, a spinout company from Oxford University, specialises in “imitation learning”, teaching machines how to act by showing them examples of humans doing the same actions. It was founded in 2017 by the academics Shimon Whiteson and João Messias. Continue reading...

Prof Noel Sharkey says systems so infected with biases they cannot be trustedAn expert on artificial intelligence has called for all algorithms that make life-changing decisions – in areas from job applications to immigration into the UK – to be halted immediately.Prof Noel Sharkey, who is also a leading figure in a global campaign against “killer robots”, said algorithms were so “infected with biases” that their decision-making processes could not be fair or trusted. Continue reading...

Guardian analyses default push notifications for nine of biggest UK news apps

Elon Musk’s ‘pedo guy’ trial revealed that supposed equality between billionaires and mere mortals is a fictionBefore 1948, if a British duke, viscount or baron was accused of a felony, he was tried not alongside the common criminals in the Old Bailey, but by a jury of his peers in the House of Lords.I thought about that two-tiered system of criminal justice quite a bit last week, when I spent four days in a Los Angeles courtroom covering the civil defamation trial of Elon Musk. The Tesla and SpaceX chief had been sued by Vernon Unsworth, a British cave explorer who assisted with the Tham Luang cave rescue, for calling him a “pedo guy” on Twitter. Continue reading...

The alternative search engine markets itself on protecting users’ privacy, but is it worth using?So is DuckDuckGo no good? Surprised you did not mention it. MurrayFollowing last week’s article about privacy and surveillance capitalism, several readers wrote in about the absence of DuckDuckGo, and it was mentioned a dozen times in the comments. I have suggested this privacy-oriented search engine a few times since 2012, and I think it’s worth a go. However, I’m answering Murray’s earlier query along the same lines because I can use his email verbatim rather than cobbling together a joint question from multiple sources. Continue reading...

DIY wireless home security system is a great alarm that’s smart enough without trying to do too muchAmazon’s new Ring Alarm smartens up the traditional home security system without radically changing how it works, combining the best of both worlds into a DIY-friendly wireless alarm arrangement that just works.It’s been a 16-month wait in the UK since the Ring Alarm line of products launched in the US in July 2018, but it has been worth it. Continue reading...

You have been telling us about serious and funny accidents caused by your mobile phones and here is what some of you saidA study in the US has found that since the release of the first iPhone in 2007 phone-related injuries have risen dramatically. The types of injury varied in magnitude from batteries exploding to injuries sustained by walking into a lamppost. The researchers wanted to encourage users to be more aware of the dangers of dividing their attention between tasks, and to educate people on how to prevent such issues.We asked Guardian readers to respond with their own examples of phone-related injuries and were greeted with tales of punching chairs, football-style saves and black eyes. Here are some of our favourites: Continue reading...

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Communications minister to say digital platforms need to ‘take more responsibility’ on harmful content as new act proposed to boost online safetyThe Morrison government is putting internet giants on notice about cyberbullying, outlining a plan to tackle the problem in a new cyber safety consultation paper released by the communications minister.Cyber safety was one of the only fully formed policies Scott Morrison put forward during the May election campaign, with Paul Fletcher left to implement the proposal. Continue reading...

Faster processor, updated software and good screen make Amazon’s 10in hard to beat for £150Amazon’s cheap-but-good-enough media tablet gets a much-needed speed boost and updated software for 2019, doing just enough to make the Fire HD 10 still the budget tablet to buy for bigger-screen video watching.Now in their ninth-generation, Amazon’s Fire tablets follow a tried and trusted formula: undercut the competition on price with a good enough screen, good enough performance and Amazon’s version of Android, Fire OS, wrapped in a robust plastic body. Continue reading...