Technology | The Guardian

A stock image of an egg has amassed 26m likes to become the most popular post of all time, bumping Jenner’s shot of her newborn daughter and spurring some unlikely imitators

A student loan scheme is the latest example of how bubble economy marketing seems oblivious to the outside worldFor a good period in the middle ages, Europeans totally forgot how to make concrete. The Roman recipe for the tough stuff – opus caementicium – was lost for roughly 600 years after the fall of the empire, and the modern formula we know and love wasn’t invented for another 300 years after that.I’m telling you this because human progress isn’t linear. It’s fine to go backwards and forwards – to retread old ground and improve old ideas. Yet if someone approached Theo Paphitis with a cinder block tomorrow, he’d rightly tell them to get the hell out of the Dragons’ Den. So why do we keep falling over ourselves to praise Silicon Valley for reinventing concrete – or, if you prefer your analogies more straightforward, the wheel? Continue reading...

Rather than try to deal with every single email to achieve ‘inbox zero’, some workers have taken to letting them pile up, unanswered. But there are downsides …At the beginning of each year, many of us look at our overflowing inboxes with horror, then make a resolution: no longer will our email account be burdened with thousands of unread messages. Instead, it will become gloriously empty. You will leave work each day knowing that you have dealt with every single message.Devotees of “inbox zero” say that having a clean email account is like having a clean conscience. No guilt about unanswered messages, no anxiety, no vague sense of impending doom. Continue reading...

A new generation of devices featuring a host of clever features will make conventional alarm systems obsolete. We review four of the bestThe days of alarms and floodlights being the only choice for home security are behind us with the growing availability of more intelligent and flexible options, such as smart cameras.Placed outside or within the home, these internet-connected cameras offer a live view of what’s happening from practically anywhere, send alerts when they detect motion – and some can even recognise friend from foe. They promise full control and piece of mind through your smartphone, tablet or smart display. Continue reading...

Since the bad-boy days of the Evo, Mitsubishi has quietly rebranded itself as the queen of serene. And the crown of its electric hybrid vehicles is the OutlanderMitsubishi Outlander 2.0 PHEV GX4h 5dr Auto

Proposals to charge firms for data said to have been revealed by badly redacted court papersFacebook staff discussed charging companies for access to user data, before ultimately deciding against such a policy, according to reports.The internal discussions were revealed due to improperly redacted court documents, released as part of Facebook’s lawsuit against American software developer Six4Three last year. According to Ars Technica and the Wall Street Journal, an 18-page court filing contains three pages that were supposed to be blacked out because they contain “sensitive discussion of Facebook’s internal strategic analysis of third-party applications”, Facebook said in other court filings. Continue reading...

Data grabbing | Country diary | Cost of stamps | A question of perspective | Steepest street titleThe solution is surely to use the non-profit Ecosia search engine that plants trees and quite simply guarantees that it protects your data (Together we can thwart big tech’s data grab, Opinion, 7 January)?

Also unveiled in Las Vegas: the world’s first rollable TV and Alexa for your toiletThe Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas revealed what the tech world has in store for us this year. From the spectacular to the controversial – as well as some total tosh – here are 10 of the most memorable products unveiled at CES 2019 last week. Continue reading...

Jordan Erica Webber looks at why a rapper, an actor and a teenage viral sensation have launched lawsuits against Epic Games for allegedly making money off their dance movesFortnite Battle Royale has been a runaway success, so much so that it has brought in more than $1bn (£780m), and has broken into mainstream culture in a way few video games do. But towards the end of 2018, the game became the subject of some controversy as people started to sue its creator, Epic Games, for copyright infringement.The rapper 2 Milly, the actor Alfonso Ribeiro and the family of Russell Horning, otherwise known as the Backpack Kid, are suing the company for allegedly copying what they say are their dance creations, and not paying them to do so. Continue reading...

More than half of the world’s population is now online, but that does not mean we all see the same thing. From being filtered by the government to being delivered by post, the internet can vary enormously depending on where you live. Here are four illustrated examples Continue reading...

Social network brings in independent charity in attempt to tackle misinformationFacebook’s fact-checking operation is launching in the UK, with the independent charity Full Fact selected to be the first British publisher to review and rate the accuracy of content on the social network.Posts, links and videos that have been flagged as false will be marked as such to users, and people will be warned if a post they are about to share has been found to be false, but no one will be stopped from sharing or reading any content, false or not. Continue reading...

I got caught up in the hype. Then the bubble burstUntil 2016, I ran an advertising agency in London. At our peak, we were highly successful; I had a team of 35 people, a £3m turnover and a Covent Garden office. When the agency folded, I decided to invest in bitcoin.Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, a type of electronic cash that allows people to spend or trade via a peer-to-peer network without the involvement of banks or other intermediaries. It is a cheap, efficient way of transferring funds or holding value, which can be converted back into sterling at any time. I had used it before to buy treatment online for my mother after she was diagnosed with cancer. I had also dabbled with investing in it in 2013, and made and lost some money: bitcoin is prone to sudden fluctuations in value. But the market seemed to have moved on, and I decided it could be a good way to make some profit on my savings. Continue reading...

Alphabet directors provided big severance packages to accused executives to keep their conduct quiet, lawsuit saysAlphabet’s board of directors approved outsize severance packages for Google executives accused of sexual harassment in order to cover up a culture of misconduct, a shareholder lawsuit filed on Thursday alleged.Minutes from board meetings obtained by attorneys for the shareholder reveal the personal involvement of Alphabet directors in behavior that has harmed the company, the plaintiff’s attorneys Ann Ravel, Louise Renne and Frank Bottini said at a press conference. Continue reading...

Ocasio-Cortez livestreams her cooking, Warren has a beer: it seems no app is safe from pandering politiciansAlexandria Ocasio-Cortez took questions while cooking mac and cheese. Elizabeth Warren chatted about her presidential bid while sipping a cold one. And on Thursday morning, Beto O’Rourke alked a out or-er olicy while si-ing in a en-is air.That’s “talked about border policy while sitting in a dentist’s chair”, for those of you unfamiliar with linguistic challenges of carrying on a conversation with a dental hygienist’s hands in your mouth. Continue reading...

At its peak the Chinese bike-sharing startup had 6,000 bikes in several English citiesThe Chinese bike-sharing firm Ofo, known for its yellow bikes that users can leave in the street, is pulling out of London.Alibaba-backed Ofo, which is reportedly teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, had already withdrawn from Norwich, Sheffield and Oxford to focus on London, after facing problems with take-up and vandalism. Continue reading...

Researchers suggest over-65s may lack skills to determine veracity of online newsOlder people are almost four times more likely to have shared fake news on Facebook than the younger generation, according to research published in the journal Science.On average, American Facebook users over 65 shared nearly seven times as many articles from fake news domains as those aged between 18 and 29, researchers from NYU and Princeton found in the study, which also concluded sharing such false content was “a relatively rare activity”. Continue reading...

NGOs warned of potential harm to internet users’ rights if Google lost ECJ caseThe “right to be forgotten”, which enables claimants to request the removal of links to irrelevant or outdated online information about them, should not be enforceable globally, the European court of justice (ECJ) has found in a preliminary opinion.The controversial power, requiring search engines to prevent access to material on the internet, should be enforceable only in the EU and not worldwide, the court’s advocate general, Maciej Szpunar, said. Final judgments by the ECJ usually endorse initial opinions. Continue reading...

Miles uses Visual Studio and wants to use coding program Sonic Pi on Windows, not a MacI am a musician and software developer who wants to get into live coding and electronica using software like Sonic Pi and maybe, in the future, Max/MSP from Cycling 74. Most people seem to use Apple’s MacBook Pros, but I have always been a Windows user, and develop software on Windows using Visual Studio, so I am reluctant to switch to a Mac. However, every time I have tried to get a good music-making setup on Windows, I have been beset by latency problems. From what I have read online, it seems the Windows audio drivers, though improved with Windows 10, are still way behind those on MacOS.I have a Roland Duo-Capture EX and an older Novation X-Station, and I am happy to use one of these as part of my set-up, but I would like a system that is sufficiently portable to make performing with it straightforward.Your best bet would be to find and cultivate some of the people who compose and/or perform using Windows laptops – there are some! – and ask for advice. Areas like this usually involve tacit knowledge that you only learn by doing stuff for some time, and I have not done it at all. Continue reading...

Latest small smart speaker has improved looks, sound and still has everything good about AlexaAmazon’s latest low-cost Alexa-powered smart speaker, the third-generation Echo Dot, looks better, sounds better, but still costs the same budget-friendly £50.When the second-generation Echo Dot launched in the UK it had very little in the way of competition. Having everything that was good about Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant squeezed into a smaller package half the price of the bigger Echo, it was a no-brainer. Continue reading...

Figure, in written evidence to parliamentary inquiry, is almost £40m less than NextAmazon has confirmed it pays UK business rates of only £63.4m, almost £40m less than Next, despite clocking up more than double the sales in the UK of the clothing and home retailer.In written evidence to a parliamentary inquiry, the online specialist said its UK sales amounted to £8.77bn and it paid business rates on about 94 buildings and on a number of locker sites in the UK. Continue reading...

Sandy Parakilas, who worked at Facebook before opposing its use of personal data, ‘to work on data protection’Apple has reportedly hired a former Facebook employee who blew the whistle on Facebook’s data-sharing policies exposed during the Cambridge Analytica scandal.Sandy Parakilas, a product manager at Facebook in 2011 and 2012, once gave evidence to the Commons about privacy abuses at Facebook and has been outspoken about the reportedly lax approach to data protection he witnessed at the social network during his time there. Continue reading...

The Integrity Initiative debacle, in which this writer was named in leaked files, shows that western efforts to counter misinformation must be openHow do you respond when a principle that forms part of the bedrock of your society is used to undermine it?This is the question facing liberal democracies across the world as Russia and others exploit free speech and its institutions – especially traditional and social media – through misinformation and electoral interference. Continue reading...

Nintendo Switch; Nintendo

Last year he focused on ‘fixing’ Facebook. Now Mark Zuckerberg plans to host talks about technology’s future in societyHe built one of the world’s most valuable companies, transformed the media and information landscape across the globe, upended elections, fueled ethnic violence, and helped your mom keep in touch with her high school classmates.Now Mark Zuckerberg is taking on a new challenge: podcasting (basically). Continue reading...

CES organizers withdrew an award for the Osé personal massager despite spotlight on male-focused sex techThe developers of a female-focused sex toy are alleging gender bias at the International Consumer Electronics Show after organizers revoked an innovation award honoring the company and prohibited it from showcasing its product.Lora Haddock, founder and CEO of Lora DiCarlo, said her team had been overjoyed when the company’s Osé personal massager was selected as the CES 2019 Innovation Awards honoree in the robotics and drone product category. Continue reading...

Tweets | TV licences for the over-75s | Peaky Blinders cap | Sack Marina Hyde | Divorce by text messageHaving only recently learned that a tweet is a social media message, I read that “White House press secretary, Sarah Sanders, announced that Trump would be travelling to the southern border in a tweet” (Report, 8 January), which leaves me wondering if this useful neologism has also come to mean (a) a jiffy (b) a bullet-proof limo or (c) a fit of narcissistic presidential pique. Please help.

Surprise move signals wider opening up of Apple ecosystem as tech firm seeks new revenueApple has announced that iTunes films will be available on Samsung smart TVs, ending the company’s insistence that users buy an Apple TV to watch their purchases on a big screen.Fifteen years after Steve Jobs launched iTunes for Windows, quipping that he was “giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell”, the move signals a wider opening up of the Apple ecosystem, with TV manufacturers including Sony, LG and Vizio announcing integration with Apple’s AirPlay 2 streaming technology, to allow users to broadcast from their phones or tablets directly to their televisions. Continue reading...

Five hundred years ago, this swath of California was populated by the Ohlone, who survived without farming or animal domesticationThere was a point in time, before colonization, when the San Francisco Bay Area was dominated by a people with a way of life and philosophy that did not revolve around technology or technological improvement.Five hundred years ago, this swath of northern California was populated by the Ohlone peoples, about 10,000 of whom lived in the stretch of land that we call the San Francisco Bay Area. So rich in plant and animal life was this region that the Ohlone were able to survive without farming or animal domestication; indeed, western explorers, when they eventually arrived, were amazed at the quantity of wild animal life. Continue reading...

Harry Potter, The Last of Us and Kingdom Hearts are likely to be the stars of the year – but streaming could change everythingVideo games are a fast-moving form of art and entertainment, and that makes the games industry a notoriously difficult one to predict. Sure, new Fifa and Call of Duty games will arrive every year and sell predictably well, there’ll probably be a new Assassin’s Creed, and Nintendo will usually deliver a fresh take on Mario, Zelda or Pokémon – but who could have foreseen that 2018 would be obliterated by Fortnite, a colourful cartoon shooter that launched to little fanfare in 2017 but became a global phenomenon over the course of last year? Or that one of 2018’s most critically acclaimed games would be a psychedelic virtual-reality version of 80s obsession, Tetris?Games are now almost as varied as the people who play them – more than two billion of all ages, across the world, playing on phones or PCs or PlayStations. But apart from Rockstar’s western epic Red Dead Redemption 2, whose £550m opening weekend made the kind of splash seen only every few years, the biggest earners of 2018 were games that have been around for years: Clash Royale and Pokémon Go on mobile, League of Legends and Counter-Strike on PC, and the omnipresent Fortnite. The money that these established, evolving mega-games make is astounding: it’s estimated that Fortnite now earns its creator Epic Games about $100m (£78.5m) a week. In terms of revenue, any new game released in 2019 will struggle to compete. Continue reading...

Police will be able to land, seize and search drones, with exclusion zones around airports extendedPolice will be handed extra powers to combat drones after the mass disruption at Gatwick airport in the run-up to Christmas.Gatwick was repeatedly forced to close between 19 and 21 December due to reported drone sightings, affecting about 1,000 flights. In response the government has announced a package of measures which include plans to give police the power to land, seize and search drones. Continue reading...

Council members urge New Yorkers to demand concessions like labor standards before company gains foothold in cityTwo lawmakers from Amazon’s hometown in Seattle traveled to New York on Monday to warn the city of potential unintended consequences of the tech company’s planned new headquarters.Lisa Herbold and Teresa Mosqueda, members of Seattle’s city council, addressed a summit of activist groups fighting Amazon’s plan for a new campus in Long Island City, Queens. They told the New Yorkers that Amazon’s presence in the west coast city had driven up housing costs, that the company had ducked efforts to make them help pay to address the crisis, and that they should resist it. Continue reading...

Released on Bowie’s birthday and narrated by Gary Oldman, the David Bowie Is ... app intends to bring you the gift of sound and vision – but falls a little shortYou have to feel for anyone tasked with designing a David Bowie app, which launches on 8 January, his birthday, priced £7.99. Given the guy was a shape-shifting pop genius who worked 10 steps ahead of his peers, transformed our cultural landscape and even turned his own death into a piece of art, you’re probably not going to get away with throwing up a few annotated pictures. Bowie fans want something that lives up to the icon’s name. No pressure.David Bowie Is … is an app based on the V&A’s record-breaking 2013 exhibition of the same name, which toured the world before ending up at New York’s Brooklyn Museum last year. The rather ambitious plan is not just to recreate the experience of going to the exhibition – which focused on the colourful, theatrical side of Bowie and drew a staggering 2m visitors – but to better it. As the creators put it, the app gains you access to all the exhibits: “Without the entire exhibition in the intimacy of your own environment, without glass barriers, vitrines or throngs of visitors.” Who needs people when you’ve got a smartphone? Continue reading...

Bavarian interior minister ‘astonished’ at handling of biggest data leak in German historyThe German government and security agencies have been accused of not taking internet security seriously, following a huge data breach that affected hundreds of politicians and celebrities.Joachim Herrmann, interior minister for the southern state of Bavaria, said he was appalled at the way the federal government and information security agency, the BSI, was handling the scandal, the biggest data leak in German history, after it was revealed it had dismissed a breach in December as one-off incident. Continue reading...

A righteous polemic depicting the likes of Amazon as part of a military conspiracy just doesn’t hold waterYasha Levine, an American investigative reporter of Russian extraction, was born in the Soviet Union. His background is in a certain kind of fashionable radicalism, set on exposing liberal hypocrisy from an anticapitalist perspective. One of his previous books was entitled The Corruption of Malcolm Gladwell, which portrayed the celebrated New Yorker writer as a shill for big pharma and the tobacco industry.His polemical method is to assemble all the supporting evidence he can find for his thesis and skirt round or dismiss anything that gets in its way. His latest book targets the tech industry, which, let’s face it, is a massive and deserving target. But he’s less concerned about surveillance capitalism per se than what he sees as a weaponised front in the west’s battle for hegemony and control. Continue reading...

The interactive fiction of the latest Black Mirror episode is a thrilling indication of the direction games could takeA new episode of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror debuted on Netflix just before the new year. Unlike most previous examples, Bandersnatch is not a cautionary tale of how current technologies might evolve to further ruin our hearts, minds and communities. It is, rather, a period piece set in early-1980s Britain, when young video-game programmers were becoming millionaires selling their games in WH Smith. Unlike all previous Black Mirror episodes, Bandersnatch is a nonlinear film that allows the viewer to steer the plot using simple A/B choices at key moments in the drama. Like the Choose Your Own Adventure books of the period, these choices range from the mundane (“which cereal would you like for breakfast?”) to the life-imperilling, and each path winds to one of a number of possible endings.That Netflix should choose to invest in the required technology, then use it with one of its prestige shows is, regardless of how you judge the results, thrilling, and demonstrates that games still have the capacity to enter new rooms of culture to woo those who might otherwise reject the form. Bandersnatch may even prove a tipping point for interactive fiction. This year also promises Telling Lies, a pseudo-sequel to Her Story, one of the best games of the genre to date, which also uses filmed footage (clips of police interview tapes) to reshuffle the narrative in beguiling ways. Continue reading...

Developing markets offer growth: but the firm’s phones must become cheaper and its services must compete with local rivalsAfter years of boom, Apple looks set for a rockier road in 2019 – partly through faults of its own and partly through social and economic factors that are affecting all the big smartphone manufacturers.The company’s chief executive, Tim Cook, laid the blame for a shock cut in sales forecasts – and the subsequent share price tumble – on the economic downturn in China. A convenient excuse, but far from the whole picture. Continue reading...

With its snorkel at the ready, the Nissan Navara AT32 is a bathing beautyNissan Navara Off-roader AT32 Double Cab

Most popular mobile weather app misled users who shared location information, say Los Angeles prosecutors in lawsuitPeople relied on the most popular mobile weather app to track forecasts that determined whether they chose jeans over shorts and packed a parka or umbrella, but its owners used it to track their every step and profit off that information, Los Angeles prosecutors said Friday.The operator of the Weather Channel mobile app misled users who agreed to share their location information in exchange for personalized forecasts and alerts, and they instead unwittingly surrendered personal privacy when the company sold their data to third parties, the city attorney, Michael Feuer, said. Continue reading...

Rapper has become embroiled in the fallout over the CEO’s controversial tweet about taking Tesla private

From next to no value in 2009, it rose to $20,000 and crashed back to $3,000 within a decadeTwo years after its inception, 10,000 bitcoin was just about enough to buy a couple of takeaway pizzas. Today those bitcoin would be worth nearly $38m (£30m). That is a huge increase, but just a fraction of their $180m value only 13 months ago, because since its creation a decade ago this week, the digital currency has been at the centre of one of the biggest economic bubbles in history.Bitcoin has had a wild ride since its birth on 3 January 2009. Created as a digital currency to sidestep the traditional finance industry using encrypted code, it took until May 2010 for the first reported purchase using bitcoin to take place: those two large Papa John’s pizzas worth $30 for 10,000 bitcoins. Continue reading...

Huge cache of documents published daily in December but came to light only on ThursdaySensitive data belonging to hundreds of German politicians, celebrities and public figures has been published online via a Twitter account in what is thought to be one of the largest leaks in the country’s history.The huge cache of documents includes personal phone numbers and addresses, internal party documents, credit card details and private chats. Continue reading...

If you frequently fly drones professionally or as a hobby, we’d like to hear your experiences and any concerns about the technology

Almost two decades after the millennium bug failed to bite, Jordan Erica Webber looks at the potential consequences for big tech of the end of another era: Emperor Akihito’s reign in Japan

Firms with exposure to China hit over fears the Silicon Valley giant’s slowdown could spread

Higher price tags, competition, cultural differences and saturation in the west have led to longer replacement cyclesApple’s cut in its sales forecast was blamed almost entirely on the economic slowdown in China, but the real picture is probably far more complex, with high prices, cultural differences, fierce competition and consumers keeping their phones for longer all causing problems.Its chief executive, Tim Cook, said falling sales of iPhone, iPads and computers were primarily due to the “magnitude of the economic deceleration, particularly in greater China”. Continue reading...

As firm’s stock falls over sales warnings, it has competition in bid to be the best smartphone

Paul lives in a signal black spot where his wife’s smartphone still works. Is there a way to find if phone has good reception?I have a Moto 3 smartphone and my wife has a similar earlier model. We are right on the edge of reception from EE. I can just get a very weak signal if I attach my phone to a selfie stick and lean out of a window, or walk up the bank behind the house. This is not ideal.Away from home, sometimes my wife’s phone can get a strong signal whereas mine can’t get a signal at all. This made me wonder if there was a measurement to assess how good a mobile phone is at receiving signals in areas of poor reception before you buy it … and if there is an easy way for an ordinary punter to understand it. PaulPhone manufacturers and others can and do test their phones, usually for certification purposes. The performance test results you want, if you can get them, are the Total Isotropic Sensitivity (TIS) value for reception and the Total Radiated Power (TRP) for transmission. Continue reading...

Tim Cook cites unforeseen magnitude of economic slowdown in China in a letter to shareholders explaining the changeApple cut its sales forecasts for its key end of year period on Wednesday, citing the unforeseen “magnitude” of the economic slowdown in China.Related: US markets start 2019 with a whimper as Trump blames 'glitch' for 2018 losses Continue reading...

Civil engineer who oversaw the completion of the Sydney Opera House and went on to become chair of Ove Arup in LondonNo roof is more dramatic – or symbolic of a country, as well as a major city – than that of the Sydney Opera House in Australia. Yet it nearly did not happen and it is thanks to Jack Zunz, who has died aged 94, that it did.The young Danish architect Jørn Utzon had won a competition in 1957 with a scheme resembling a Mayan temple topped by petal-like shell roofs, which could be enjoyed from any angle, since the opera house’s exposed promontory site has no back and is overlooked from the Sydney harbour bridge and the Rocks. He desperately needed an engineer to realise such a unique vision. Continue reading...