Technology | The Guardian

Tesla and China have stolen a huge march – but the UK’s automotive sector still has the capability to close the gapCarmakers talk a good game. Even the biggest petrolhead automotive executives are now practised at conjuring images of a zero-emissions future, but that future always seems to be just a bit further off. And even while they increase production of electric cars, many insist that there is a stubbornly long line of consumers who will still want the internal combustion engines that also happen to boost their makers’ profits.There are obvious exceptions, led by Tesla, the US electric car pioneer, as well as a bevy of Chinese imitators. In the UK, Bentley last week became the first to break ranks. On Thursday it announced that its Crewe factory would stop making internal-combustion-engined cars completely by 2030, making it the first large British carmaker to do so. Continue reading...

Biden plans to push through aid stimulus amid the pandemic, undo Trump’s corporate tax cuts, and crack down on big techWhen Joe Biden enters the White House on 20 January, he will face arguably the biggest set of challenges a president has had to tackle since the end of the second world war. The coronavirus is raging through the US, millions of Americans are still losing their jobs each month, and the climate crisis – ignored by the Trump administration – is deepening.Biden has set out his economic and policy plans, but without control of the Senate he may struggle to realise them. Official GDP figures for the third quarter showed the size of the economy was still almost 4% below its previous peak, despite a 7.4% recovery from the spring lockdown. Continue reading...

From Sega v Nintendo in the early 90s to PlayStation v Xbox in 2020, the world of computer games is still a battlefield

PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5; Insomniac Games/Sony

Investment manager Baillie Gifford says rise is no fluke as manufacturer stands to benefit from move away from fossil fuelsOne of the biggest investors in Tesla has defended the explosive growth in the US electric carmaker’s share price, arguing that it is “far from an aberration”.Baillie Gifford, the Edinburgh-based investment manager that runs the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust (SMIT), has been the second-biggest winner from Tesla’s rocketing share price, beaten only by Tesla’s outspoken chief executive, Elon Musk. Continue reading...

The University Challenge and Newsnight cross-examiner makes a foray into a chattier interview style in his new podcast. Plus: a grim new chapter in season two of Dr DeathThe Lock In with Jeremy Paxman

As parts of the UK enter another month – at least – of being stuck indoors, our critics pick out top music, games, books, TV, dance and art fixes to lift your spirits

I can see how a live-action TV series based on the hit video game series might just work. Forget the tortured mythology – just stick to running around and fightingFew video games have endured like Assassin’s Creed. Twelve different versions have been released since the game was introduced in 2007, each of them more or less clinging to the same highly enjoyable formula. Like history? Like climbing things? Like stabbing people in the skull? Like being intermittently scowled at by Danny Wallace? Like spending the final hour of any pursuit genuinely confused about why an alien has come out of nowhere to instruct you to murder everyone with a sort of glowing death apple? Then Assassin’s Creed is for you.So the news that Netflix has just commissioned a live-action Assassin’s Creed series should be cause for celebration. After all, one of its biggest hits of last year was The Witcher – a series that was based on a game that was based on a book – which shows that there’s plenty of demand for this sort of thing. If done well, the Assassin’s Creed series could be relentlessly entertaining. It could be – and this is not a phrase I use lightly – Game of Thrones with parkour. Isn’t that everything you ever wanted? Continue reading...

Apple’s more expensive model has zoom camera and lidar but uses heavier stainless steelApple’s more luxurious version of the iPhone 12 takes the best of the iPhone 4’s looks, adds some polished stainless steel and a third camera on the back – and an extra £200 to the price.The new iPhone 12 Pro costs from £999 and sits between the slightly smaller £699 12 Mini, the same-size £799 12 and the larger, more expensive £1,099 12 Pro Max, which will have a more powerful camera when launched on 13 November. Continue reading...

Musicians condemn payola-style deal to give some songs an algorithmic boostSpotify has been accused of trying to create digital “payola”, after announcing a feature that would give artists an algorithmic boost on the company’s playlists – if they agree to take a cut in the royalties they get paid for the relevant songs.The feature, which Spotify is describing as an “experiment”, will affect playlists including the company’s Artist Radio, which plays songs similar to a particular band, and Autoplay, which continues to play similar music after a playlist has run out of tracks. Continue reading...

A supreme court decision, Trump falsely claimed, would allow ‘rampant and unchecked cheating’ on election dayTwitter on Monday evening flagged a tweet from Donald Trump, which baselessly claimed a recent supreme court decision would lead to voter fraud, as misinformation. Continue reading...

Criminal gangs target NHS while hostile states hit vaccine research, says cybersecurity centreBritain’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has dealt with 194 coronavirus-related incidents involving hostile states and criminal gangs, which led to the overall number of serious hacker attacks reaching an all time record of 723 over the past year.The intelligence unit said that while Russia and other states – such as China – had targeted British vaccine research, it was criminal gangs who frequently targeted other parts of the NHS, often to attempt online fraud. Continue reading...

Error meant users spent much longer next to infectious person before self-isolating

Twitter tagged the video, which included fake Florida signs as Joe Biden addressed Minnesota, as ‘manipulated media’

Smaller, lighter, slightly cheaper version of the flagship triathlon watch ticks almost every boxGarmin’s latest multisport smartwatch is the Forerunner 745, which takes almost everything from the firm’s top model and squeezes it into a smaller, lighter and cheaper device that’ll track pretty much anything.The new model costs £450, putting it between the £250 Forerunner 245 and the top £520 Forerunner 945. With the same sized screen as the other two models, it is only 1.5mm wider, 1.1mm thicker and 8.5g heavier than the cheaper version, making it a compact sports watch. Continue reading...

The first iterations of ultra-fast 5G have now been switched on in some parts of the countryThe arrival of 5G in Australia will provide much-needed high speeds for areas left lagging behind by the National Broadband Network, but for most mobile users the day-to-day difference will not be immediately noticeable.The thing about internet access is that you only really notice it when you don’t have it, or if it isn’t working well. Continue reading...

Brothers Khaled and Mohammad Aljawad offer a rare insight into life as a refugee in the UK with this powerful choose-your-own-adventure playEvery foreign humanitarian crisis forces a government to balance compassion and restraint. To what degree should a country fulfil its moral obligation to offer aid and sanctuary to refugees? At what point does national benevolence threaten national stability? Sober deliberation soon descends into hysterics. Respondents to a 1940 poll that asked British citizens to estimate the number of refugees from Nazi Germany who had come to Britain in the previous six years put the number at 2-4 million. The true figure was just 73,500.Abuses – everything from verbal hatred to anti-immigration posters – are predicated on such fears and manipulative exaggerations. This is one of the clear lines drawn by Have Your Passport Ready, an interactive work of autobiography by Syrian-born brothers Khaled and Mohammad Aljawad. Continue reading...

Latest move in an ongoing saga comes after CEO Jack Dorsey was grilled by Republican lawmakers during a Senate hearing on WednesdayTwitter said on Friday it had changed its policy and lifted a freeze it placed on the account of the New York Post after the newspaper published controversial articles about Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.It is the latest move in an ongoing saga that called into question the moderation policies of social media platforms. Both Twitter and Facebook took measures to limit the spread of an article published by the New York Post on 14 October, which claimed to be based on documents gleaned from an abandoned computer belonging to the Democratic candidate’s son. Continue reading...

The platform has a confusing cultural appropriation policy, but it deserves some credit for attempting to tackle the issue at allDo you suffer from Justin Trudeau-esque levels of judgment when it comes to fancy dress? Are you scrambling to find a last-minute Halloween costume? Pinterest is here to help save you from yourself! The visual social media platform, which many people use to search for Halloween inspiration, has said it is limiting recommendations for “costumes that appropriate cultures”. This builds on a policy from 2016 prohibiting advertisements with “culturally inappropriate costumes” and making it easy for users to report culturally insensitive content.But what exactly does Pinterest consider “culturally inappropriate” or “culturally insensitive”? The company doesn’t make that clear. Nor does it make clear what “limiting” means. (I reached out to Pinterest for comment but didn’t hear back.) My own research didn’t provide much clarification: when I searched for “Native American Halloween costume”, for example, plenty of examples came up. There were also plenty of results for “Geisha Halloween costume” and “Arab Sheikh Halloween costume”. And when I searched “terrorist Halloween costume” a picture of a little white boy dressed as an Arab suicide bomber came up. Continue reading...

Internet Watch Foundation says criminal content spotted by people spending time online during pandemic

Resistance offers unsanitised tales from the frontline of the movement for black lives. Plus: warmth and assurance from Gen Z pop star YungbludResistance

Tech platforms have an increased responsibility with increasing threats from conspiracy theories, the government – and even the presidentFour years ago, foreign actors leveraged social media to interfere in the US presidential election. This year, too, misinformation is among the greatest threats to American democracy, experts warn.With conspiracy theories such as QAnon flourishing, a president who regularly uses social media platforms to demonize his opponents or spread falsehoods about the election process, and a federal government that has done little to combat foreign election interference online, tech platforms’ responsibility in the 2020 election process has only grown. Continue reading...

Victoria’s privacy commissioner has questioned why the food delivery service needs to take photos of driver’s licences or other ID at allUber’s food delivery drivers are now required to take a photo of the driver’s licence or other ID of people who order alcohol but, Uber Eats has insisted, the pictures won’t be retained.Uber Eats has advised Victorian customers ordering alcohol that from Thursday 29 October “delivery partners will need to take a photo of your ID before each delivery in order to verify your age”. The company doesn’t deliver alcohol in other states and territories. Continue reading...

Facebook, Twitter and Google chiefs to argue against law’s repeal amid unsubstantiated claims of anti-conservative biasThe CEOs of Facebook, Twitter and Google are expected to tell lawmakers in a rare appearance before Congress that a federal law protecting internet companies is crucial to free expression online. Continue reading...

Canadian police officer tells extradition hearing Washington asked for phone and laptop to be put in ‘Faraday bag’ to prevent data being ‘erased remotely’A Canadian police officer has testified about his arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou on a US extradition warrant, revealing that Washington had requested that data on her phone and laptop be secured so that it could not be “erased remotely.”Royal Canadian mounted police constable Winston Yep – the first witness to testify in the extradition case – arrested the Chinese telecom giant’s chief financial officer in December 2018 during a stopover in Vancouver. Continue reading...

From Fallout 4 to A Short Hike, games with an autumnal setting not only provide beautiful visuals – but a melancholic hit of fleeting time, tooThere is something about the clocks going back that I inextricably associate with video games. Perhaps it is the prospect of all those long evenings, hiding from the weather, snuggled up in an easy chair with a joypad and a mug of tea, lost in some fantastical role-playing adventure. This is also the period in which the year’s biggest games are released in time for Christmas, so there is the extra pleasure of discovering new characters, new worlds, as the endless drizzle falls outside.There are games that simply provide us with beautiful autumn environments. Firewatch envelops us in the rolling, red-tinged forests of Wyoming; the mountain walks in A Short Hike present the soft auburn hues of the season in an almost impressionistic style; and Forza Horizon 4 perfectly replicates the wet, leaf-scattered roads of October country lanes. The richness with which modern visuals capture the reds and oranges of the season, the way HDR technology simulates that particular low, coppery sunlight as it glints across the screen, gives these games the cosiness of an open fire. Continue reading...

The tech giant claims that no one is forced to use its search engine. All power to regulators set on proving otherwiseSundar Pichai, chief executive of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is a mild-mannered software engineer who is not good at games of verbal fisticuffs with US politicians. He received a drubbing last month during the “big tech” congressional hearing.Pichai can, however, summon lawyers and lobbyists galore as soon as the game gets more serious, which it definitely has. The US Department of Justice (DoJ) last week launched a huge and historic antitrust case against Google, accusing the tech company of abusing its position to maintain an illegal monopoly over internet searches and search advertising. Continue reading...

In Ubisoft’s next game, populism has morphed into authoritarianism in a virtual, futuristic London. It’s up to you to lead the fightbackArmed militia stroll around London, picking fights where they please and shutting down small gatherings of masked protesters demanding their freedoms on street corners. Drones buzz above, monitoring citizens’ movements and following anyone suspicious. In Watch Dogs Legion’s future dystopian British capital, Brexit happened years ago, Scotland has seceded from the union, and the country has been overtaken by private, corporate interests who’ve wrested control from the government and framed a collective of hacker protesters, DeadSec, for a series of terrorist attacks. People are pissed off, and ready to rise up. You, the player, are the catalyst that makes that happen.Like Grand Theft Auto, Watch Dogs conjures a huge living city out of code, filled with thousands of individual characters who go about their lives, going to work, visiting their sister, driving around in the rain. But unlike Grand Theft Auto, your weapon here isn’t a gun: it’s a smartphone. You can hijack drones and security cameras, hack into laptops and terminals, and view a precis of someone’s recent internet search history and talents by looking at them and pressing a button. If they seem useful, you can recruit them to your cause. Continue reading...

The streaming service offered nuggets of TV fit for the commute – and then we stopped going to the office. Now it’s folding, but were any of its shows worth watching?

iPhone, iPad (via Apple Arcade)

It had big backers and star names, but short-form Netflix rival failed to deliver content in the way people want to consume itWhen some of the biggest names in Hollywood and Wall Street linked arms with some of the best-known business executives and tech firms, it looked like their plan to become the Netflix of mobile streaming – with bite-size TV and film content designed to appeal to viewers on the move – would be a sure-fire winnerBarely six months after launch, Quibi, named after the “quick bites” of content of less than 10 minutes, has become the first casualty of the streaming wars. Continue reading...

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar livestreamed the video game on Twitch – and by every metric their unusual voter outreach event was a successOn Tuesday night, US members of Congress Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar held what is perhaps the most unusual voter outreach event in recent memory. They signed on to play a livestreamed video game on Twitch, and joined a crew of online strangers to build a spaceship and try to get away with murder – literally.Related: Why are 400,000 people watching AOC play the game Among Us on Twitch? Continue reading...

Every day, people leave their quandaries on the Reddit website – asking others to judge whether they were in the wrong. As religion wanes, are we crowdsourcing our ethics?

It is a gorgeous, engaging, free-to-play, open-world role-playing game … but at what cost?Genshin Impact seems to have come from nowhere. A month ago nobody knew what it was; now ads for it are plastered all over the New York subway and it’s the talk of gaming Twitter. It has raked in more than $100m (£75m) in its first two weeks, placing it among the Chinese games industry’s most successful forays into the global scene. That’s because it’s a pretty good game that looks, sounds and feels expensive, but is available for free – at least at face value.Like Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – which it heavily resembles, at least on a surface level – Genshin Impact is an action-packed role-playing game with a huge world, chock-full of gorgeous vistas to explore by running, climbing and gliding. The appearance might be similar but the feeling is significantly different. Breath of the Wild’s aesthetic is based on the beauty and solitude of nature; Genshin, by contrast, is the theme park version of that. Where BotW was content to merely hint at hidden treasures and leave vast spaces in-between, you can’t go 30 seconds in Genshin without tripping over some glowy object or mysterious chest. A constant stream of new weapons, trinkets, crafting materials, coins and characters to play with makes it dangerously easy to keep playing. Continue reading...

Filing is first step in a battle that could take years, and experts say it will probably move forward even if Biden wins the electionAfter being hit Tuesday with the most significant monopoly-related charges to be filed in the US in decades, Google has a long road ahead in its quest to prove it does not unfairly dominate the online search engine space.Google was accused in the long-expected lawsuit of harming competition in internet search and search advertising through distribution agreements – contracts in which Google pays other companies millions of dollars to prioritize its search engine in their products – and other restrictions that put its search tool front and center whenever consumers browsed the web. Continue reading...

Video-sharing platform announces move just days after crackdown on QAnon conspiracy movementTikTok has banned a swathe of hate speech from its platform, just days after the company announced a crackdown on the conspiracist QAnon movement.Explicitly hateful ideologies, such as neo-nazism and white supremacy, are already banned on TikTok. Now, the moderation will be extended to cover “neighbouring ideologies”, such as white nationalism and white genocide theory. Continue reading...

Republicans and Democrats agree on something: big tech’s power threatens our economies and our flow of information

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is live streaming as she plays the popular game with some internet-famous people on Twitch. Will it win new voters?Hi Patrick, I keep seeing lots of screenshots of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez playing some game involving little Telly Tubby-type creatures. What’s all that about?Hey Josh. So basically AOC (and Ilhan Omar, for a bit) is playing a video game called Among Us with some internet-famous people, and she’s broadcasting the whole thing live on the internet to anyone who wants to tune in! Continue reading...

Not all virtual sports games are faithful copies of their real-life counterparts. Here are a handful where developers play fast and loose with the rulesWhen you think of sports video games you might think of Fifa or Madden, which obsessively mimic their real-life equivalents – or Track & Field, which valiantly if unsuccessfully tries to. But not all developers play by the rules. From impossible athletics to fantasy baseball players with 27 fingers, these are some of the weirdest virtual takes on sport around. Continue reading...

Site was back online Monday morning with a Russian company enlisted to protect it from DDoS attacksThe latest incarnation of the hate-filled online forum 8chan was temporarily kicked off the internet on Sunday, after a company protecting the site from DDoS attacks cut its services.The site, which is now called 8kun but was formerly known as 8chan, was back online on Monday morning, security researcher Brian Krebs reported, with a Russian company freshly enlisted to provide the protection services. Continue reading...

Children International and The Water Project have no way of refunding Darkside groupNo charity wants to turn down donations, particularly in the middle of a funding crunch. But what if donations come from a surprising source – hackers?While it may sound like a modern-day version of Robin Hood – electronically stealing money from companies and corporations, and giving it back digitally via bitcoin to charities – when the money comes from the proceeds of crime, the law is clear: it must be rejected. Continue reading...

Lawsuit accuses tech company of abusing its position to dominate search and search advertisingThe US justice department filed a lawsuit against Google on Tuesday, accusing the tech company of abusing its position to maintain an illegal monopoly over search and search advertising.“Two decades ago, Google became the darling of Silicon Valley as a scrappy startup with an innovative way to search the emerging internet. That Google is long gone,” the suit alleged. Continue reading...

Far from moaning about the glitches, players are experimenting with everything from community fly-ins to planes operated live by Twitch groupsThe building stood 212 storeys high, piercing the skyline like some kind of alien monument. The pilots who discovered it while flying over a quiet Melbourne suburb quickly reported their findings on forums and social media, drawing other fascinated spectators. Soon, they were visiting in their thousands.The building is not real – it exists only within Flight Simulator 2020, the latest in Microsoft’s 35-year-old series. And what players quickly realised was that it was the product of a slight mathematical error. Flight Simulator bases its reproduction of the entire surface of the planet on data from a range of sources including the OpenStreetMap, an open source mapping application maintained by volunteers. One such volunteer, Australian student Nathan Wright accidentally entered a particular building height as 212 storeys rather than 12. No one corrected it, so the Flight Simulator program used the data as it stood. Hence: super skyscraper. Continue reading...

New fibre-optic cables to Pacific islands have been cautiously welcomed amid warnings over harassment and violence linked to online platformsFrom the narrow bay of Sydney’s Tamarama Beach, a cable twice as thick as garden hose, carrying optic fibre thinner than human hair, stretches along the ocean floor linking Australia to Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands.The Coral Sea cable will provide, for the first time, fast internet to Australia’s near Pacific island neighbours. A similar link, called Manatua One Polynesia – connecting Samoa, Niue, the Cook Islands and French Polynesia – was declared “ready for service” in July. Continue reading...

The policy change is intended to ‘reduce opportunities for confusion or abuse’ and did not give a timeline for advertising to returnFacebook has announced significant changes to its advertising and misinformation policies, saying it will stop running political ads in the United States after polls close on 3 November for an undetermined period of time.The changes, announced on Wednesday, come in an effort to “protect the integrity” of the upcoming election “by fighting foreign interference, misinformation and voter suppression”, the company said in a blogpost. Continue reading...

No one needs 45 buttons on the TV remote, but phones, computers and ovens have all become overly complicated. And it’s excluding the people who would get the most out of the latest advancesAbout 10 years ago, I moved into a fancy flat. I was looking forward to my dad coming to stay for the first time. He arrived at lunchtime, before I went off to present The One Show. He is really into music, so I enjoyed showing him the audio system, which could play more or less every radio station in the world and just about every piece of music ever made. I could even summon up a specialist jazz station in Los Angeles. Then there was the lighting, which could be selected to come on in different places at selected levels. Finally, there was the television and associated apparatus which, for convenience, could be operated by a single remote control sporting a little touchscreen. With a cheery wave, I bade him farewell, encouraging him to relax and enjoy himself.It was eight o’clock and night had fallen by the time I returned. The place was quiet and in darkness. I was terrified, frankly, that he had expired. Then I heard a tiny, tinny sound emanating from the big, open-plan living room. “Dad?” I switched on the light, selecting the brightest of the five available options, and there he was, sitting alone in the middle of the too-big sofa that could comfortably have seated 20 of him. On the coffee table in front of him was the small, battery-operated wireless he carried with him everywhere. On the television, an error message flitted around the screen. In his hand was a glass of wine. He looked resigned, but not unhappy. “I tried,” he said, “but got nowhere with anything, so just gave up.” Continue reading...

It was the self-aware classic that took decades to complete – and laid the groundwork for an era of adventure gamesAnyone who went to school during the Thatcher years will remember adventure games as something experienced on the class computer, typically a BBC Micro. Educational titles such as Granny’s Garden and Flowers of Crystal were as compulsive as they were frustrating. These were the prototype point-and-click games, incorporating graphics into riddles and thinly disguised geography lessons. After my 50th wrong marker buoy on Cambridge Software House’s Mary Rose had me contemplating hurling the floppy disks away from me like a pair of swimming floats, I’d learn that there was a new type of adventure game on the horizon: LucasArts’ The Secret of Monkey Island, which turns 30 this month.Ron Gilbert, co-designer on Monkey Island and various other adventure games of the era, disliked the fantasy themes that titles like Loom (1990) were relying on, and wrote as much in a 1989 article Why Adventure Games Suck. So Monkey Island took players to the 17th-century Caribbean instead, the place and time of Treasure Island. Players took control of Guybrush Threepwood as he tried to prove himself a seadog, rubbing shoulders with some of the most bloodthirsty – and self-aware – buccaneers ever conjured in code: Smirk, a cigar-chewing fencing instructor, and Meathooks, a brawler with metal claws for hands. Then there was island governor Elaine Marley, a formidable swordfighter and unlikely damsel who had been kidnapped by back-from-the-dead ghost pirate LeChuck. Continue reading...

Claims Biden immigration policies risked more Covid-19 as company also blocks ads delegitimizing election resultsFacebook has removed a number of ads from the Trump campaign for making misleading and inaccurate claims about Covid-19 and immigration.On Wednesday the social media platform took down the Trump-sponsored advertisements which claimed, without evidence, that accepting refugees would increase Americans’ risk of Covid-19. The ad, which featured a video of Joe Biden talking about the border and asylum seekers, claimed, also without evidence, that the Democratic candidate’s policies would increase the number of refugees from Syria, Somalia and Yemen by “700%”. More than 38 versions of the ad were run on Facebook and were seen by hundreds of thousands of people before the company removed them. Continue reading...

Tesla CEO acknowledged the design and manufacturing process of the new cells, which he says will be half as expensive, is not completeElon Musk described a new generation of electric vehicle batteries that will be more powerful, longer lasting, and half as expensive as the company’s current cells at Tesla’s “Battery Day” on Tuesday.Tesla’s new larger cylindrical cells will provide five times more energy, six times more power and 16% greater driving range, Musk said, adding that full production is about three years away. Continue reading...

Upload to social video site was part of ‘coordinated attack’ a week after live Facebook broadcast, MPs hearA graphic suicide video that went viral on TikTok in early September was “the result of a coordinated raid from the dark web”, the company has told MPs.Giving evidence to the Commons committee for digital, culture, media and sport (DCMS), Theo Bertram, TikTok’s European director of public policy, said the video, which was originally broadcast live on Facebook, was used in a “coordinated attack” on the social video app a week after it was originally recorded. Continue reading...