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Updated 2025-06-19 00:16
New York tenants fight as landlords embrace facial recognition cameras
More than 130 residents at a Brooklyn apartment complex oppose plan to use the cameras, whose use, experts say, is quietly expanding in cities
Apple and WhatsApp condemn GCHQ plans to eavesdrop on encrypted chats
GCHQ ‘ghost protocol’ would seriously undermine user security and trust, says letterA GCHQ proposal that would enable eavesdropping on encrypted chat services has been condemned as a “serious threat” to digital security and human rights.In an open letter signed by more than 50 companies, civil society organisations and security experts – including Apple, WhatsApp, Liberty and Privacy International – GCHQ was called on to abandon its so-called “ghost protocol”, and instead focus on “protecting privacy rights, cybersecurity, public confidence, and transparency”. Continue reading...
Britons increasingly fearful of internet risks, Ofcom research shows
Support for regulation grows as 78% express concern over harmful experiencesBritish people are increasingly fearful of the risks posed by the internet, prompting greater support for more regulation following recent headlines about the theft of personal data and abusive online behaviour.Research by the media regulator Ofcom found 78% of Britons expressed unprompted concerns about potentially harmful online experiences, a substantial rise from the previous year. Continue reading...
Facial recognition must not introduce gender or racial bias, police told
Benefits should be great enough to outweigh any public distrust, says ethics reportFacial recognition software should only be used by police if they can prove it will not introduce gender or racial bias to operations, an ethics panel has said.A report by the London policing ethics panel, which was set up to advise City Hall, concluded that while there were “important ethical issues to be addressed” in the use of the controversial technology, they did not justify not using it at all. Continue reading...
Void Bastards review – gloriously chaotic head-trip into outer space
PC; Blue Manchu/Humble Bundle
SpaceX satellites could blight the night sky, warn astronomers
Elon Musk’s Starlink internet satellites ‘have no public consensus and may impair view of the cosmos’Mega constellations of human-made satellites could soon blight the view of the night sky, astronomers warned following the launch of Elon Musk’s Starlink probes last week.The first 60 of an intended 12,000 satellites were successfully blasted into orbit on Thursday by Musk’s company, SpaceX, which plans to use them to beam internet communication from space down to Earth. Continue reading...
Saudi Arabia accused of hacking London-based dissident
Kingdom targeted satirist Ghanem Almasarir with Israeli malware, letter of claim alleges
Virtual reality: how women are taking a leading role in the sector
Despite a well-documented gender imbalance within the tech industry, a recent survey suggests that when it comes to VR, women are starting to take up leadership roles in greater numbersWhen the Arab spring uprising began in 2010, film-maker Tamara Shogaolu was living in Egypt. As she travelled around the country collecting oral histories of people’s experiences, she realised the role virtual reality (VR) could play in showcasing these stories. Her VR documentary, Another Dream, debuted at the Tribeca film festival in April. It follows an Egyptian lesbian couple who, facing the post-revolution backlash against LGBT people, escape the country to seek asylum in the Netherlands.“When you’re listening to someone’s voice, to be physically present in their memories is so interesting,” explains Shogaolu. During the production, the characters would describe their feeling of difference as people of colour in majority-white spaces. And it was a feeling familiar to Shogaolu herself, as a black woman working in the male-dominated and white-majority world of tech. Continue reading...
Spies with that? Police can snoop on McDonald's and Westfield wifi customers
Exclusive: Documents reveal rushed encryption legislation allows police to compel wifi providers to turn over information about usersPeople accessing the internet at McDonald’s and Westfield in Australia could be targeted for surveillance by police under new encryption legislation, according to the home affairs department.A briefing by the department, obtained under freedom of information, reveals that police can use new powers to compel a broad range of companies including social media giants, device manufacturers, telcos, retailers and providers of free wifi to provide information on users. Continue reading...
The Guardian view on Facebook: power without responsibility | Editorial
Social media cannot ensure they only publish truths. But what about deliberate falsehoods designed to damage?Are social media companies responsible for the lies their users tell? Both the obvious answers, “yes” and “no”, are clearly wrong. Complete responsibility is a bad idea, and impossible in practice: even in China, the home of the largest and most sophisticated censorship apparatus on the web, the internet is expected to slow down markedly in the coming weeks under the burden of combing through it to ensure that no references to the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre are published. And, as the Chinese example shows, there are also considerable difficulties that arise when any one organisation can decide what counts as truth or falsehood. Yet it can’t be right, either, to say that social media companies have no responsibility to exercise the powers they have to remove obnoxious material from their servers. Videos of murder, child abuse and other horrors are routinely and rightly removed. It will be objected that these are horrible precisely because they are not lies – they record things that really happened. But that doesn’t stand up. It is no defence, either in British law, or in any moral sense, to say that a video of atrocity is faked. If it works as propaganda for jihadis, or for child abusers, it will be censored and its originators punished if that’s possible.The platforms have been much more reluctant to act against lies which promote causes which are not in themselves criminal, however despicable. Google and Facebook are both advertising businesses, the biggest that the world has ever seen, and they depend on their ability to attract and to retain viewers. So the conspiracy theories of Alex Jones were tolerated for many years. So were the 9/11 truthers, the anti-vaxxers, and, on Twitter, Donald Trump’s campaign to suggest that Obama had been born abroad. Continue reading...
Pocketful of data: Chips with Everything podcast
Jordan Erica Webber and Graihagh Jackson team up for the latest instalment of Science with Everything to look at the history and potential future of weather forecasting Continue reading...
For the sake of our health, we need to kick the indoor habit | Vybarr Cregan-Reid
Spending too much time at home or in the office is confusing our bodies, which are telling us to get out moreAs a species we need to get out more. Humans now spend so much time indoors that many of us are cultivating a variety of serious health complaints, and for some they could be fatal. It is not so much that outdoor time is inherently good; more that our bodies are built to anticipate it and the way we live now is confusing to our systems. Nearly two decades ago a study published in Nature magazine concluded that the average American spent 93% of their time indoors. And that was before tablets and smartphones.In trying to cope with the shaded, sedentary world we have made, our bodies wage war on what should be harmless antigens; they fail to make bones strong enough to support our weight; even our eyes struggle to focus without the help of lenses. This incremental creep across the threshold to the great indoors began tens of thousands of years ago when the first settled communities emerged. Continue reading...
Robocrop: world's first raspberry-picking robot set to work
Autonomous machine expected to pick more than 25,000 raspberries a day, outpacing human workersQuivering and hesitant, like a spoon-wielding toddler trying to eat soup without spilling it, the world’s first raspberry-picking robot is attempting to harvest one of the fruits.After sizing it up for an age, the robot plucks the fruit with its gripping arm and gingerly deposits it into a waiting punnet. The whole process takes about a minute for a single berry. Continue reading...
Motofest: ‘A two-day, four-wheeled car extravaganza’ | Martin Love
It’s now the largest free urban motorsport festival in the UK and this year’s event in Coventry should prove to be spectacular – especially if you love CitroënMotofest
Plume by Will Wiles review – where satire meets surrealism
A mysterious column of smoke fills the London sky, in this stylish and funny tale about a journalist on the rocksAs Will Wiles demonstrated in his first novel, 2012’s Care of Wooden Floors, a stain is never just a stain. That novel was a Kafkaesque farce, set in an unnamed post-Soviet principality in which an accidental wine-spill provoked a full-blown existential crisis. The narrator of Wiles’s third novel appears no less neurotic and persecuted; though in this case it is a mysterious column of smoke that seems to be following him around.Jack Bick, a feature writer for an east London-based lifestyle magazine, finds himself staring idly out of the window during an editorial meeting when he notices a mysterious new landmark has appeared: “A column of black smoke arose from the ill-defined, low-rise muddle of the horizon city. Further out than the skyscrapers on the Isle of Dogs, it nevertheless bested them in height and weight, appearing as the most solid structure in sight.” Continue reading...
What is 5G and when can I get it in the UK?
All you need to know about the next generation mobile phone networkAfter years of hype, the switch will be flicked on the UK’s first 5G network on 30 May. Network operator EE, part of BT, will be first out of the blocks. According to telecoms and phone firms the benefits of 5G are obvious – but what exactly is it, how can you get it and how much is it going to cost? Continue reading...
Facebook refuses to delete fake Pelosi video spread by Trump supporters
Footage of House speaker deliberately slowed down to make her appear drunk or ill
Dreams becomes reality: the game that can make an artist out of anyone
Digital artist Dan Hett explores the Dreamiverse, a galaxy of games, music, art and ideas created by players in a limitless virtual art studioAs a digital artist and experimental games designer, I was one of the first in line to dive into Dreams – a PlayStation 4 game that aims to give everyone the ability to unlock the potential artist within – when the developer Media Molecule opened up limited early access in April. From the breadth of its artistic toolset to the community of creators it is enabling, Dreams feels like the start of a genuine revolution in accessible, creative play. The promise was that Dreams would represent a space where almost anything is possible, and Media Molecule has somehow got closer than I ever imagined.Dreams is hard to sum up succinctly, but it sits somewhere at the intersection of art studio, game engine and vibrant creative community hub. Almost the first thing new players see is a fun video of the development staff, smiling together in their office and holding up handmade “Welcome” signs. This warmth permeates the rest of game, the friendly tone and slightly squishy visual style helping make the work of creation less intimidating. In my real-life work, I favour simple and efficient tools such as Processing, Pico 8 and Twine over sprawling complex packages, and the tools available in Dreams replicate them surprisingly well. Continue reading...
Which devices play Audible audiobooks but can't surf the web?
Amber wants her son to be able play Audible stories but does not want him to have internet accessAs a child I had a cassette tape player. I could choose the music and stories I wanted to listen to alone in my room without my parents worrying about me accessing the internet.My son loves listening to Audible stories on an old iPhone. I have blocked certain features but he keeps finding things to do that I haven’t blocked. I want a device that can download a lot of Audible stories so he can choose what to listen to, but without all the other temptations of an old phone or the risk of him going online. AmberThis is the age of the internet, and the trend is for every device to be online all the time. This started with PCs and then smartphones, followed by TV sets, games consoles and digital video recorders. Now we’re getting connected cameras, fridges, doorbells and smart speakers, and the choice of products that can’t connect to the internet is rapidly diminishing. Continue reading...
What happened when I met my Islamophobic troll
In 2017, I started getting regular messages from an anonymous Twitter user telling me my religion was ‘evil’. Eventually I responded – and he agreed to meet face to face. By Hussein KesvaniIn 2017, I started to receive messages from a Twitter user who called themself True Brit, telling me that my religion was “Satanic”, “barbaric” and “evil”. Bearing a profile image of the St George’s cross and a biography that simply read “Anti-Islam, stop Islamic immigration now”, True Brit often spammed me with pictures taken from anti-Muslim websites, blogs and Facebook groups. Sometimes they would be cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad as a sexual deviant. Other times, I would be sent memes I had seen circulating in rightwing communities online, depicting groups of south Asian men who had been arrested for child sexual grooming, or alleged Syrian refugees who were, supposedly, secret members of Isis. One meme showed a man with a long beard, in battle camouflage, brandishing a pistol in one hand and holding the hand of a woman wearing niqab. In bold white writing below the image were the words “EUROPE IN 2020”.True Brit never said anything directly to me to begin with. I had seen social media profiles like this one, and much worse, for years. Like those accounts, True Brit had few followers – 65 in total. Their activity on Twitter predominantly consisted of retweets from rightwing news sites such as Breitbart and Fox News. They frequently posted videos of online celebrities who were popular on anti-Muslim forums and Facebook groups, including Milo Yiannopoulos, a rightwing “provocateur” who has referred to Islam as “the real rape culture”, and Paul Joseph Watson, a UK-based YouTuber and editor of the conspiracy-theory website Infowars.com, who produces weekly videos about the “dangers of Islam” in the west, with titles such as The Truth About Islamophobia and Dear Gays: The Left Betrayed You For Islam. True Brit was also a fan of the British rightwing commentator Katie Hopkins, who in 2015 likened Syrian refugees to cockroaches, and who until recently produced anti-Islam videos for Canadian far-right outlet The Rebel Media. Continue reading...
Google faces Irish inquiry over possible breach of privacy laws
Technology firm’s Ad Exchange processing of users’ personal data being investigatedThe Irish data protection commission has opened an investigation into Google over suspected infringements of European Union privacy rules.The statutory inquiry will probe whether Google’s online Ad Exchange violated general data protection regulations (GDPR) covering the sharing of personal data of internet users, the watchdog said in a statement on Wednesday. Continue reading...
EE and Vodafone drop Huawei phones from 5G network launch
EE is to be first next-generation mobile network in UK, going live in six cities on 30 MayThe mobile operators EE and Vodafone have dropped Huawei phones from their 5G launch plans, as the backlash in the UK against the Chinese company gathers pace.Huawei was then dealt a further blow on Wednesday when the British chip designer ARM said it would stop licensing its silicon chip technology to the company. Continue reading...
Alexa, why does the brave new world of AI have all the sexism of the old one?
Virtual assistants such as Google Home and Siri only encourage the attitude that women exist merely to aid men in getting on with more important things.When women are over-represented in the workforce, it tends be in industries of assistance – cleaning, nursing, secretarial work and, now, the world of virtual assistants. Research by Unesco has shown that using default female voices in AI – as Microsoft has done with Cortana, Amazon with Alexa, Google with Google Assistant and Apple with Siri – is furthering the belief that women exist merely to help men to get on with more important things.There is no real reason for AI technologies to be gendered at all, but we are at the mercy of tech companies “staffed by overwhelmingly male engineering teams”, fixated on living out a Captain Kirk fantasy and delegating to the subservient, silky-voiced computers of Star Trek. These systems are unapologetically built by men, for men. They can even struggle to understand the “breathy” voices of women as software is often developed with male voice samples. Continue reading...
Facial recognition tech prevents crime, police tell UK privacy case
South Wales force defends use of technology after office worker claims rights breachFacial recognition cameras prevent crime, protect the public and do not breach the privacy of innocent people whose images are captured, a police force has argued.Ed Bridges, an office worker from Cardiff, claims South Wales police violated his privacy and data protection rights by using facial recognition technology on him. Continue reading...
How far can a viral tweet get you? Be careful what you wish for
Adam Koszary’s ‘absolute unit’ sheep led to a job at Tesla, but his new boss, Elon Musk, has had less social media success – with one missive landing him in court
Baltimore: government computers crippled by attack as hackers demand bitcoin
Attack on city computers prevents employees from sending email and knocked out bill pay websites, as hackers demand $76,000Hackers have seized control of government computers for the city of Baltimore, demanding ransom and leaving the city locked out of basic technology for more than two weeks.The ransomware attack, discovered on 7 May, infected city computers, officials said, forcing the city to take down online services and systems to contain the extent of the damage. As of Wednesday, the city remains unable to send or receive email. Continue reading...
Observation review – you are the AI in this unsettling space-station thriller
PlayStation 4, PC; No Code/Devolver Digital
Team Sonic Racing review – well-tuned fan service for Sega's iconic hedgehog
PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch; Sumo Digital/Sega
Much shorter working weeks needed to tackle climate crisis–study
UK workers must move to nine-hour week if carbon levels do not change, says thinktankPeople across Europe will need to work drastically fewer hours to avoid disastrous climate heating unless there is a radical decarbonising of the economy, according to a study.The research, from thinktank Autonomy, shows workers in the UK would need to move to nine-hour weeks to keep the country on track to avoid more than 2C of heating at current carbon intensity levels. Similar reductions were found to be necessary in Sweden and Germany. Continue reading...
Digital assistants like Siri and Alexa entrench gender biases, says UN
Female-voiced tech often gives submissive responses to queries, Unesco report findsAssigning female genders to digital assistants such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa is helping entrench harmful gender biases, according to a UN agency.Research released by Unesco claims that the often submissive and flirty responses offered by the systems to many queries – including outright abusive ones – reinforce ideas of women as subservient. Continue reading...
Elon Musk hires man behind 'absolute unit' sheep meme to run Tesla's social media
Office worker launches UK's first police facial recognition legal action
Ed Bridges, from Cardiff, says ‘intrusive’ technology is used on thousands of peopleAn office worker who believes his image was captured by facial recognition cameras when he popped out for a sandwich in his lunch break has launched a groundbreaking legal battle against the use of the technology.Supported by the campaign group Liberty, Ed Bridges, from Cardiff, raised money through crowdfunding to pursue the action, claiming the suspected use of the technology on him by South Wales police was an unlawful violation of privacy. Continue reading...
Honor 20: Huawei Android phone launch defies Donald Trump
Huawei announces cut-price premium phones with quad cameras and top-end chipsHuawei’s Honor is trying to dominate the increasingly crowded cut-price premium phone market with the launch of two new top-spec phones, the Honor 20 and Honor 20 Pro, flying in the face of the US blockade.With Apple, Samsung and now Huawei ceding the space of the sub-£600 top-end phone as starting prices have risen beyond £900, Honor’s latest offering continues the winning trend of flagship hardware at more reasonable prices. Continue reading...
Google changes policy to block misleading ads for anti-abortion groups
Announcement comes after Guardian revealed Google gave $150,000 in free ads to opaque anti-abortion groupGoogle has changed its advertising policy after facing scrutiny for providing tens of thousands of dollars in free advertising to an anti-abortion group that runs misleading ads designed to deter women from terminating their pregnancies.Google announced this week that starting in June, advertisers running ads “using keywords related to getting an abortion” will first have to distinguish themselves as an organization that “either provides abortions or does not provide abortions”, according to the new policy update. Continue reading...
American Fugitive review – homage to old-school Grand Theft Auto
PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch; Fallen Tree Games/Curve Digital
'There will be conflict': US has underestimated Huawei, says founder
Ren Zhengfei says firm is fully prepared to face US bans and that 5G plans will be unaffectedThe founder of Huawei has said the US “underestimates” the Chinese telecom makers’s strength and that conflict with the US is inevitable in the quest to “stand on top of the world”.Ren Zhengfei said his company was fully prepared to face US bans on key components following new trade restrictions caused by Donald Trump’s declaration of a national economic emergency last week Continue reading...
US ban on Huawei a ‘cynically timed’ blow in escalating trade war, says firm
Top executive says dispute is about trade, not security, as US temporarily eases some restrictions to avoid hurting US companiesThe US ban on sharing technology with Huawei is a “cynically timed” blow in the escalating trade war between the US and China, the Chinese firm’s top executive in the UK has said.Huawei denounced Donald Trump’s ban on the sharing of US tech with “foreign adversaries”, after a string of US tech companies followed Google in restricting the company’s access to their products on Monday. Continue reading...
Huawei blockade: do I need to stop using my Android phone?
Google has cut off Huawei from its Android services because of Trump’s blacklist, but what does that mean for your phone?Donald Trump’s blacklisting of Huawei in the escalating trade war between the US and China is now starting to cause significant issues for the world’s second-largest smartphone manufacturer.Alongside US chip manufacturers, Google has been forced to comply with the US government’s ban on the supply of technologies to Huawei. Continue reading...
Google blocks Huawei access to Android updates after blacklisting
Reported move could hit Huawei Technologies’ ability to run phone operating systemGoogle has suspended Huawei’s access to updates of its Android operating system and chipmakers have reportedly cut off supplies to the Chinese telecoms company, after the US government added it to a trade blacklist last week.Google said it was complying with an executive order issued by Donald Trump and was reviewing the “implications”, later adding that Google Play – through which Google allows users to download apps – and the security features of its antivirus software Google Play Protect would continue on existing Huawei devices. New versions of its smartphones outside China would lose access to popular applications and services including Google Play, Maps and the Gmail app. Continue reading...
Technology is messing with our emotions: Chips with Everything podcast
Jordan Erica Webber chats to the authors of a new book which looks into why human emotions have changed so drastically in the last couple of centuriesSusan Matt is a professor of history at Weber State University in Utah. She recently collaborated with Luke Fernandez, an assistant professor in the school of computing there, to write a book called Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid: Changing Feelings About Technology, from the Telegraph to Twitter.Jordan Erica Webber chats to them about how our emotions have changed alongside technological advances, from the invention of the telegraph and the ability to write letters to the emergence of the camera and the creation of social media. Continue reading...
Minecraft at 10: a decade of building things and changing lives
As the blocky exploration game and creativity tool reaches its first decade, our games writer – and the father of someone on the autism spectrum – reflects on the impact it has hadHidden away somewhere in my attic is an old Xbox 360 that I’ll never throw away. On its hard drive is a Minecraft save file that contains the first house my oldest son ever built in the game. He was seven and, coming from a boy on the autism spectrum with a limited vocabulary and no patience to draw and paint, his creation was a revelation. Sure, it is a monstrous carbuncle, a mess of wooden planks, cobblestone and dirt. But it is also the greatest building I ever saw.Now Minecraft is 10. The building-and-exploring game, originally developed by one coder, Markus Persson, in his spare time, has now sold 176m copies across 21 platforms. A free-to-play version launched in China via a partnership with NetEase has been downloaded 200m times alone. Every month, 90 million people around the world play Minecraft. There are Minecraft clothes, Lego sets and spin-off games. In spring 2022, there will be a live-action Minecraft movie. Continue reading...
The WhatsApp spyware story tells us that nothing is secure | John Naughton
The attack on the messaging app showed us spying is a thriving businessWhen Edward Snowden broke cover in the summer of 2013 and a team of Guardian journalists met up with him in his Hong Kong hotel, he insisted not only that they switch off their mobile phones but also that they put the devices into a fridge. This precaution suggested that Snowden had some special insight into the hacking powers of the NSA, specifically that the agency had developed techniques for covertly taking over a mobile phone and using it as a tracking and recording device. To anyone familiar with the capabilities of agencies such as the NSA or GCHQ, this seemed plausible. And in fact, some years later, such capabilities were explicitly deemed necessary and permissible (as “equipment interference”) in the Investigatory Powers Act 2016.When Snowden was talking to the reporters in Hong Kong, WhatsApp was a four-year-old startup with an honest business model (people paid for the app), about 200m active users and a valuation of $1.5bn. In February 2014, Facebook bought the company for $19bn and everything changed. WhatsApp grew exponentially to its present ubiquity: it has more than 1.5 billion users and has spread like a rash over the entire planet. Continue reading...
Citroën C5 Aircross: ‘An SUV that’s determined to smooth out your drive’ | Martin Love
A uniquely effective suspension means this easy-going family car will cope with all of life’s little bumpsCitroën C5 Aircross
I wanted to order my breakfast from a waiter not an iPad
Eating is a social pleasure – touchscreens just serve to make it more solitaryLast month, in New York, I saw the future, and I didn’t like it. Let me first set the scene. Booked on an eye-scorchingly early flight, I arrived at Newark airport before dawn, feeling fiercely alone, as I often do when I travel for work: a bagatelle ball, pinging around, unseen by those I love and who love me back. The airport was quiet and I passed through security quickly. On the other side, I sent a couple of emails and bought a newspaper, and then it hit me: I was ravenous; hungry like a wolf. I wanted some breakfast. I needed some breakfast. And so I set off to find some breakfast.Hunger in these situations isn’t straightforward. My stomach was empty, it’s true. But I also had time to kill and spare dollars in my pocket. The potential for boredom flickered away in the glare of the artificial light. I didn’t want to make conversation with anyone, but I did want to receive that particular form of ersatz kindness a waiter may offer to a person travelling on their own. “Coming right up,” they tell you in America, as if you were their best ever customer, and an order of coffee the most original and daring request ever made. In the right mood – or perhaps I mean the wrong mood – this line has the potential to reduce me to tears. Continue reading...
Too Old to Die Young review - Nicolas Winding Refn's dead-eyed LA nightmare
The Only God Forgives director has made his first foray into TV with a supernatural noir series, and it’s just as horrible and upsetting as you’d expectWhen I spoke to Nicolas Winding Refn at the Lumiere film festival in Lyon a while back, he told me that though cinema would find a way to return in the digital multiplatform age: “Television is dead. And television will not be reborn.” He can only of course have meant that mischievously, because Refn has just completed a huge new TV show, a quasi-supernatural LA horror-thriller noir entitled Too Old to Die Young, two episodes of which premiered on the bigger-than-big screen of the Grand Theatre Lumiere at Cannes. The programme is produced by Amazon, with whom Cannes’s relations are considerably better than with Netflix. It incidentally contains a clip of Curtis Harrington’s cult thriller Night Tide, starring Dennis Hopper, from 1961: a film which Refn has championed on his new streaming platform.The show is every bit as hypnotically horrible and upsetting as you would expect, with terse lines, tense pauses, dead-eyed glares, all conducted at the andante pace of a zombie continuing to move after being shot – and delivering a doomy, sepulchral, and very plausible evocation of pure evil. Despite its occasional forays into the fierce sunshine of California and New Mexico, this is a creature of the night, lit by neon, an underworld of madness and fear. The two episodes shown here allow only for a partial understanding of what is supposed to be going on, but it’s clearly influenced by Lynch and Tarantino, and like Refn’s bygone horror Only God Forgives, there is a sense memory of the corridor of blood that Travis Bickle will walk down in Taxi Driver. And the hero himself is a little like Ryan Gosling’s implacable wheelman in Refn’s Drive, from 2011. Continue reading...
Pressure mounts on Google to pull ads for anti-abortion clinics that 'deceive women'
‘Appalled’ Democrat urges action after Guardian revealed Google has given $150,000 in free ads to opaque anti-abortion groupGoogle is facing pressure in Washington to immediately remove online advertisements for “fake medical clinics” that are designed to “mislead” women who are seeking an abortion.Related: Google has given $150,000 in free ads to deceptive anti-abortion group Continue reading...
Grumpy Cat: internet’s most famous cat dies aged seven – video obituary
Grumpy Cathas died aged seven. She became an internet sensation in 2012 when images of her downturned mouth and unimpressed expression emerged on Reddit. She soon became the universal digital shorthand for displeasure, with thousands of memes and gifs of her being circulated online to communicate apathy or cynicism. Grumpy Cat’s online stardom quickly translated into a real-world empire with a Christmas film, a Madame Tussauds wax figure, and a range of merchandise including soft toys, clothing and a fragrance.
Minecraft Earth: block building game moves into the real world
Microsoft has launched an augmented reality version of the bestselling game, which follows Pokémon Go on to the streetsSince its beta launch in 2009, the blocky, world-building adventure game Minecraft has been released on more than 20 different platforms, from PC to consoles to mobile phones, selling 176m copies. Now it’s heading somewhere new: the real world.News of a Minecraft AR (augmented reality) app leaked a few weeks ago, but now Microsoft has officially announced Minecraft Earth. It is being developed at the company’s Redmond campus, using an array of its mobile, GPS and tracking technologies. Continue reading...
Grumpy Cat dies aged seven: 'Some days are grumpier than others'
Internet’s No 1 cat, with a face that launched a thousand gifs, expires in ArizonaThe greatest frown in town: Grumpy Cat – a life in picturesGrumpy Cat – the most famous cat on the internet, whose downturned mouth and unimpressed expression was the universal digital shorthand for displeasure – has died.The seven-year-old cat, real name Tardar Sauce or Tard, became one of the internet’s first “petfluencers” after gaining fame online for her perpetually gloomy gaze, launching an empire worth millions. She died in the arms of her owner, Tabatha Bundesen, in Phoenix, Arizona, on Tuesday morning after complications from a urinary tract infection. Continue reading...
Facebook job offers 'shunned by top talent after data scandal'
Recruiters reportedly say social network has suffered major decline in interest from top US schoolsThe fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal continues to hurt Facebook as candidates turn down job offers from what was once considered one of the best employers in the tech sector.Job offer acceptance rates at Facebook have significantly decreased, it has been reported, after the revelations last March that the data of up to 87m users of the social network had been used improperly by Cambridge Analytica to target ads for Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election. Continue reading...
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