Technology | The Guardian

An iPhone X is £999, a Samsung S9 £739, but you can find good mobiles that cost a lot lessHow do you find the best-value smartphone deal? If you are anything like me, you can be easily overwhelmed by the range of deals on offer – Carphone Warehouse alone lists 77 different pay-monthly plans. But if your old mobile phone has died, or you just dropped it one too many times, don’t be seduced into signing a £30-a-month, two-year contract for a £500-plus smartphone because, as my recent experience shows, there is just no need to do so.All you need to do is spend a little more than £100 on the latest Chinese-made Huawei (recently rebranded Honor) handset, and grab a £7.50-a-month sim-only deal from Tesco Mobile, and all but the most demanding of mobile users will not be able to spot the difference – and save hundreds of pounds. Continue reading...

Electric car firm has hit trouble, and Musk – who has a knack of making enemies – must explain to investors what is going onThe last time Elon Musk addressed the analysts who follow Tesla, his electric car company, he was – to say the least – rude. “Boring, boneheaded questions are not cool,” he told the analysts. “These questions are so dry. They’re killing me,” Musk complained.Predictably, the outburst led to a selloff for Tesla’s shares – one the company can ill afford. On Wednesday he gets another chance, when Musk must once more explain to investors what is going on at Tesla. Continue reading...

Parliamentary inquiry to demand urgent action to combat ‘relentless targeting of hyper-partisan views’The Cambridge Analytica Files: read the Observer’s full investigationDemocracy is at risk unless the government and regulators take urgent action to combat a growing crisis of data manipulation, disinformation and so-called fake news, a parliamentary committee is expected to say.In damning conclusions to a report leaked by former Vote Leave campaign strategist Dominic Cummings before its official publication on Sunday, the digital, culture, media and sport (DCMS) committee adds to the growing calls for tougher government regulation of social media companies. It accuses them of profiting from misleading material and raises concerns about Russian involvement in British politics. Continue reading...

Report into fake news could put legal burden on firms such as Twitter and Facebook to remove harmful and illegal contentFacebook, Twitter and Google could face their worst regulation nightmares if the recommendations of parliament’s report into fake news, based on a leaked version published on Friday by the former campaign strategist for Vote Leave, come to pass.The report is expected to call for the creation of a new legal framework for regulating technology firms, tightening their liabilities and imposing a requirement for them to take down “harmful and illegal content”. It will argue for the end of “safe harbour” provisions, whereby platforms are not liable for content hosted by them until it is flagged to them as problematic. Continue reading...

Social media company says fall is linked to action to delete fake accounts and admits it may well continueTwitter’s stock plunged 20.5% by the time the markets closed Friday – the second-biggest loss for Twitter’s stock since the company went public in 2013.Almost $5bn (£3.8bn) has been wiped off the market value of Twitter after the social media service reported a drop of 1 million users following its action to delete fake and offensive accounts. Continue reading...

InfoWars owner found to have violated social network’s community standardsAlex Jones, the American conspiracy theorist who runs the InfoWars website, has been suspended from Facebook for bullying and hate speech.The suspension will last for 30 days, and affects only Jones’s personal account on the social network, not the main InfoWars account. His profile will continue to be published, but he will not be not be able to post content until the suspension elapses. Continue reading...

The movie industry has seen tech advances since its inception. But do audiences really want to have a say in a film’s plot?Subscribe and review: Acast, Apple, Spotify, SoundCloud, AudioBoom,Mixcloud. Join the discussion on Facebook, Twitter or email us at chipspodcast@theguardian.com.Charlie Chaplin, known for the slapstick humour of his films, was part of a generation of actors who managed to continue working through the transition from the era of silent film to one filled with dialogue and sound. Continue reading...

Despite some critics’ glee at the latest earnings report, the planet’s most powerful business remains unstoppableImagine running a business that generated $13.2bn in revenue in one quarter – a 42% increase over the same quarter a year before. And imagine that it reported a 31% jump in profits over the same quarter last year.Now watch as many allegedly smart people dump your stock because they think the future of your company looks bleak. We live in stupid times. Only dupes pay attention to one-day moves in any stock, or even whole sectors. I can guarantee you no one inside Facebook is panicking. No one on its board of directors is worried or is demanding a shift in course or Mark Zuckerberg’s resignation. If anything, institutional investors are getting ready to buy Facebook at a bargain.

Officials say vulnerability in system used to pay for email, music and games was exploited to swipe nearly a quarter million dollars

Conservatives believe they’ve found proof of anti-rightwing bias in social media. Twitter says they haven’t. An explainer

Shares climb after quarterly profits that were twice what analysts expected, as revenue grows 39% to $53bnAmazon posted a record profit of $2.5bn in the second quarter of 2018, thanks to strong performance by the retail giant’s non-retail divisions – advertising and cloud-computing, the company announced Thursday,The favorable profit results, which were double analyst expectations, buoyed tech investors a day after weak growth saw Facebook’s market value plunged by $119bn, the single greatest one-day loss in US history. Continue reading...

Test of Rekognition software links members of Congress to arrest photos and finds people of color misidentified disproportionatelyAmazon’s facial recognition technology falsely identified 28 members of Congress as people who have been arrested for crimes, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).The ACLU of Northern California’s test of Amazon’s controversial Rekognition software also found that people of color were disproportionately misidentified in a mugshot database, raising new concerns about racial bias and the potential for abuse by law enforcement. Continue reading...

The company lost $118bn in market value after news of slowed growth and rising costs. But is it more than a blip?

Shares crash as social network admits user growth fell after Cambridge Analytica breachMore than $119bn (£90.8bn) has been wiped off Facebook’s market value, which includes a $17bn hit to the fortune of its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, after the company told investors that user growth had slowed in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.Facebook’s shares plunged 19% on Thursday in New York, a day after the Silicon Valley company revealed that 3 million users in Europe had abandoned the social network since the Observer revealed the Cambridge Analytica breach of 87m Facebook profiles and the introduction of strict European Union data protection legislation. Continue reading...

Maggie would like some affordable loudspeakers to work with her retro amp, CD player and TVI have a Rotel RA-810A amplifier – recently serviced and in good working order – and a Yamaha CDX-730 CD player but no speakers. They were originally linked to some Tannoys but I didn’t bring them with me from South Africa.I want to be able to play my CDs and DVDs with the speakers linked up to the TV. I’m not a purist and don’t want to pay top price. If you could point me towards a few alternatives, I can then make the decision what to pay. MaggieThe Rotel RA-810A is a classic stereo amplifier from the late 1980s. I remember it as being well made and having a decent sound. However, it does have a couple of drawbacks. Continue reading...

Company warns of slowing revenue growth as it invests in security – but it still makes $13.2bnFacebook stock price tumbled more than 20% in after-hours trading, after the company’s chief financial officer said revenue growth would “continue to decelerate in the second half of 2018” as the company increased its investment in security and privacy.In its earnings report for the second quarter of 2018, Facebook just missed Wall Street’s estimates on revenues and user growth, though it still made $13.2bn – a 42% year-on-year increase. Continue reading...

Tech firms are known for their lavish meals, but city says it damages local businessesFree food has long been a perk of Silicon Valley. On the campuses of Facebook, LinkedIn and Google, employees have access to high-end restaurants with pizza ovens, sushi counters, freshly baked pastries and ice cream.However, as technology companies come under increasing pressure to deliver more value to the communities they inhabit, cities are clamping down on campus cafeterias in an attempt to support local restaurants. Continue reading...

Emperor’s 2019 exit will be first era change of information age, and switchover could be as big as Y2K say industry figuresOn 30 April 2019, Emperor Akihito of Japan is expected to abdicate the chrysanthemum throne. The decision was announced in December 2017 so as to ensure an orderly transition to Akihito’s son, Naruhito, but the coronation could cause concerns in an unlikely place: the technology sector.The Japanese calendar counts up from the coronation of a new emperor, using not the name of the emperor, but the name of the era they herald. Akihito’s coronation in January 1989 marked the beginning of the Heisei era, and the end of the Shōwa era that preceded him; and Naruhito’s coronation will itself mark another new era. Continue reading...

Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and more pledged to take action against hate groups. Why isn’t it working?

The pioneer of ‘the video game approach to coaching’ explains why kids are being taught to transfer skills from Fifa to the pitch

Social media company ramps up presence with new ‘innovation hub’Facebook has set up a subsidiary in China and plans to create an “innovation hub” to support local start-ups and developers, the company has announced, ramping up its presence in the restrictive market where its social media sites remain blocked.The subsidiary is registered in Hangzhou, home of e-commerce company Alibaba, according to a filing approved on China’s National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System last week and seen by Reuters. Continue reading...

Drivers have been accused of falsely claiming passengers puked in their cars to charge clean-up money. Good thing Uber has a great record of righting wrongsName: Vomit fraud.Age: Fresh. Continue reading...

Trade body consults major law firm over possible loss-of-earnings suitLondon’s black-cab drivers are considering legal action against Uber with potential plans to sue the US ride-hailing service for more than £1bn over their loss of earnings.The Licensed Taxi Drivers’ Association is consulting lawyers at Mishcon de Reya over a possible claim, according to a report on Sky News, after Uber won a 15-month licence to keep operating in London last month. Continue reading...

I spent three weeks studying FreeHacks, one of the dark web’s biggest platform for hackers. From passports to credit cards, nothing is safeThe darknet (or dark web) is one of the most fascinating vestiges of humanity we’ve ever seen. It’s an aggregated swamp of all the darkest aspects of internet activity – child abuse images, drug markets, gun shops, gore smut, stolen merchandise, anarchist guides, terrorist chats, identity theft, hacking services …I’m going to focus on the most potent of these tiers – hacking services. Continue reading...

The agricultural simulation game could cultivate a new generation’s enthusiasm for a declining industryImagine that you spend most of your day ploughing fields, sowing seeds, spraying fertilisers or pesticides, harvesting crops, feeding livestock (if you have any), repairing fences, and maintaining a half-dozen different kinds of farm machinery. You do this every day, all year, in all weather. And then, in the evening, you sit down at a computer to do it all again – virtually.Farming Simulator is a long-running video game series played by about a million people. The game’s creator, Giants Software, estimates that as many as a quarter of its players are connected to farming in some way, and around 8-10% are full-time, professional farmers. Continue reading...

Silicon Valley’s elite are hatching plans to escape disaster – and when it comes, they’ll leave the rest of us behindLast year, I got invited to a super-deluxe private resort to deliver a keynote speech to what I assumed would be a hundred or so investment bankers. It was by far the largest fee I had ever been offered for a talk – about half my annual professor’s salary – all to deliver some insight on the subject of “the future of technology”.I’ve never liked talking about the future. The Q&A sessions always end up more like parlor games, where I’m asked to opine on the latest technology buzzwords as if they were ticker symbols for potential investments: blockchain, 3D printing, Crispr. The audiences are rarely interested in learning about these technologies or their potential impacts beyond the binary choice of whether or not to invest in them. But money talks, so I took the gig. Continue reading...

The European Union fined Google after accusing it of ‘serious illegal behaviour’, but investors shrugged off the fineGoogle parent company Alphabet reported a sharp drop in profits on Monday as the company absorbed the likely $5bn cost of a record-breaking fine from European regulators.The European Union fined Google earlier this month after accusing it of “serious illegal behaviour” to secure its dominance in mobile search. The company is appealing the decision but included the charge in its latest quarterly earnings report. Continue reading...

Flanders tourist board chides firm for removing ads featuring the Flemish master’s worksRubens nudes have entranced those visiting the world’s great art galleries for some 400 years. Contemporaries on whom the Flemish master is said to have had a profound impact include Van Dyck and Rembrandt … but none of this has passed muster with Facebook’s censors.

No more searching down the side of the sofa – Sky’s new voice-activated device could consign the device to historyName: the TV remote control.Age: About 75 years old. Continue reading...

At this year’s expo, the games giant ditched flashy promotional press conferences for elaborate film sets. PlayStation’s EU boss Simon Rutter believes the approach will pay dividendsLast month’s E3 video game expo was a strange one for PlayStation. Traditionally, video games’ biggest companies use the annual Los Angeles conference as an opportunity to bombard attendees and fans watching online with new games. For rival consoles Xbox and PlayStation, ostentatious showcase press events are especially important and competitive: once a customer chooses between the two, they are likely to play on that console for years to come.Microsoft showed 50 games at its Xbox press conference at E3 2018, on a big stage with lots of fancy lighting. By contrast, Sony constructed several elaborate sets on an LA film lot, each themed around a different forthcoming PlayStation 4 games: The Last of Us Part 2, Ghost of Tsushima, Spider-Man and Death Stranding. Fans already knew about all of these, but they were shown in more detail over 10 or 15 minutes of footage, alongside a smattering of smaller new announcements and some unexpected live music performances. Continue reading...

The rehearsed smugness of the presenters puts me off the content – which is all about making the simple sound profoundPicture this. A darkened auditorium, an attentive, cult-like audience staring ahead expectantly, hardly daring to breathe; a huge screen on which there is an image no one can decipher. And then, the person everyone has been waiting for strides confidently on to the spotlit stage, wearing a headset and carrying a PowerPoint remote, dressed immaculately and sporting a brand-new haircut. You can hear a pin drop as the presenter begins, “You think the world is round, but I am going to tell you to begin to believe it is actually square.”Predictable, false and embarrassing; how I hate TED talks. And it’s not even because they’re named after a man. What I can’t abide is the way presenters pace around the stage, I hate the gravity with which they deliver their message, and being patronised by a smug, overconfident “thought leader” is pretty intolerable. Continue reading...

Tom Baldwin’s account of the abusive relationship with the truth in media and politics is lucid, punchy and often funnyLet’s begin with the parable of the triple-breasted woman. A couple of years in advance of Donald Trump’s arrival at the White House and before the term “fake news” had caught on, a Florida woman calling herself Jasmine Tridevil made headlines around the world by posting pictures of herself with a third breast. Claiming she had undergone this unusual implant surgery in the hope of landing a reality TV show, her story was propagated by a spectrum of media including New York magazine, BuzzFeed, the New York Post, the Toronto Sun, Fox News, CBS Tampa, the Daily Mirror and the Daily Telegraph.As you will have surmised, the story was an invention by a woman whose website boasted that it was the “provider of internet hoaxes”. Tom Baldwin remarks: “The reason why so many respectable news organisations would run it anyway is because it was flying around the internet and the prospect of a few hundred thousand clicks was too tempting to waste time with checks.” This is one of many arresting examples that he cites in support of his contention that the battle for our eyeballs has debased a click-chasing media and led to even worse from vote-chasing politicians. Continue reading...

From the limits of machine learning to a novel exploring human prejudices – Nick Harkaway shares his favourite books about artificial intelligenceThe problem with AI is that while it’s relatively easy to define the “A”, the “I” remains elusive. We don’t know what our own intelligence is, nor how we generate our familiar conscious experience, so it’s tricky to know how we might create an artificial consciousness, or indeed recognise it if we did. Algorithms can knit together plausible conversation by sampling enormous numbers of exchanges between humans, but they have no greater understanding of those exchanges than would an enormous set of punch cards speaking through a bellows and a brass trumpet. The old Turing test now looks sadly inadequate. A machine-learning program might well counterfeit human speech and yet fail to recognise a snow leopard standing on green grass because the image contains no actual snow, and therefore the cat does not meet the definition.That distinction between true AI and the powerful machine learning tools of Google and Amazon is tackled head-on by Hector Levesque in Common Sense, the Turing Test, and the Quest for Real AI. A professor emeritus in the computer science department at the University of Toronto, Levesque fearlessly zips us through John Searle’s “Chinese room” argument and the problem of common sense before delving deeper to the complexities of the “Winograd Schema”. Don’t be alarmed: this book makes everything clear. Continue reading...

After photographs go viral, your child becomes a social-media influencer and a celebrity on Instagram. Should you step in? Parents reveal the contrasting conflicts of instant fameWhen Charlotte D’Alessio was 16 she accidentally became a social media influencer. The Canadian-born teen had recently moved from Toronto to Los Angeles with her family when, in the spring of her first year in LA, she attended the music festival Coachella with a few of her new mates.While at Coachella, Charlotte and her friend Josie changed outfits several times, taking a few pictures of themselves in bodysuits, bikini tops and jean shorts (the typical Coachella nouveau-boho uniform) and posted them on social media. So far so normal. But when the successful LA photographer Bryant Eslava took some photos of the girls and tagged them on his account, their images began to go viral. Soon the girls were seeing themselves everywhere, featured in roundups of the festival and in the “popular” galleries of Tumblr and Instagram. They were gaining hundreds and thousands of followers by the minute and being followed by strangers who’d comment “I found them!” and then tag their image to their followers in turn. Continue reading...

Many foods that are now commonplace were being prepared by our ancestors long before modern agriculture or industrialisation beganOn Monday, archaeologists revealed they had found the earliest known example of bread. The charred remains, just a few millimetres in size, were recovered from a pair of ancient fireplaces in the Black Desert, north-east Jordan. Radiocarbon dating of plant materials within the hearths revealed the fireplaces were used just over 14,000 years ago. Continue reading...

Dependence on complex hi-tech networks means western democracies are bound to feel the effects of cyberattacks far more keenly than any rogue stateIn their book, The Future of Violence, Benjamin Wittes and Gabriella Blum point out that one of the things that made the Roman empire so powerful was its amazing network of paved roads. This network made it easy to move armies relatively quickly. But it also made it possible to move goods around, too, and so Roman logistics were more efficient and dependable than anything that had gone before. Had Jeff Bezos been around in AD125, he would have been the consummate road hog. But in the end, this feature turned out to be also a bug, for when the tide of history began to turn against the empire, those terrific roads were used by the Goths to attack and destroy it.In a remarkable new paper, Jack Goldsmith and Stuart Russell point out that there’s a lesson here for us. “The internet and related digital systems that the United States did so much to create,” they write, “have effectuated and symbolised US military, economic and cultural power for decades.” But this raises an uncomfortable question: in the long view of history, will these systems, like the Roman empire’s roads, come to be seen as a platform that accelerated US decline? Continue reading...

The latest addition to the Audi line-up may not be the biggest or the most practical, but it will sit at the top of the brand’s pyramidAudi Q8

An article we published last week about links between mobiles and cancer proved highly controversial. Here a cancer expert and physicist argues that it misrepresented the research and that fears are ill-founded

Tom Edwards from Colorado, who challenged Musk’s use of motif without attribution, reaches agreement with Tesla tycoonA Colorado artist says he has reached a settlement with Elon Musk after challenging the Tesla tycoon’s use of a farting unicorn motif that he had drawn as an ironic tribute to electric cars.Musk used the cartoon image on Twitter, without attribution, to promote his Tesla electric car range, and ignored Tom Edwards’ attempts to come to a licensing arrangement, telling the artist’s daughter it would be “kinda lame” to sue. Continue reading...

Crimson Hexagon suspended as concerns surface over company’s federal contracts and ties to Russia and TurkeyFacebook has suspended a social media analytics firm from accessing user data while it investigates potential violations of its policy barring surveillance.The firm, Crimson Hexagon, boasts an impressive list of blue chip clients and claims to have collected more than 1tn public social media posts from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, and other sources. It uses artificial intelligence and image analysis to monitor social media and provide customers with insights into public sentiment about their brands. Continue reading...

The use of Chinese-made equipment in Britain’s broadband infrastructure demands, and gets, careful scrutinyHow far can we trust Chinese companies to supply our critical national infrastructure? The question was raised by the Hinkley Point power station, but is even more pressing in the telecoms business. Broadband internet is now as critical a part of the infrastructure as the road or rail network. So the question seems to answer itself. Many countries are extremely reluctant to allow two Chinese telecoms companies in particular, Huawei and ZTE, to do business with them. They view both of them as arms of the Chinese state, even though Huawei is legally a private company. In fact the US government nearly shut down ZTE altogether this year by forbidding its American component suppliers to deal with it, although it was later allowed to resume operations on payment of a $1bn fine. The British National Cyber Security Centre has already warned telecoms companies against the use of ZTE equipment or services.Huawaei had already abandoned the US market in 2013, but in the UK it has had a central position in BT’s broadband operation since 2010, having won its first contract in 2005. A 2013 report by the parliamentary intelligence and security committee was extremely critical of the way in which that deal had been nodded through without any ministerial input at all. Partly as a result, an arrangement was reached that allowed experts from GCHQ to examine the code in Huawei equipment used in Britain. The latest report from the oversight committee, which watches the progress of monitoring, suggests that there is more work to be done in some areas, mostly to do with third party components. This is not very alarmist language, and the company claims that it shows the process is working as designed. But it still reminds us of the inherent dangers of an obscure situation. Continue reading...

The pair have been verbally sparring for months – soon they will face off at Manchester ArenaYork Hall, in London’s Bethnal Green, is one of Britain’s oldest boxing venues. Opened in the 1920s, it still hosts professional bouts in front of audiences of 1,200 people.But in its near-century, the venue has never seen anything like the event that took place on Wednesday, when more than 1,000 teenagers queued to watch two of YouTube’s biggest stars – and rivals – trade insults ahead of their highly publicised boxing match next month. Continue reading...

Facebook-owned messaging service wants to crack down on viral spread of hateful misinformationWhatsApp’s users will only be able to forward messages to 20 people, as the Facebook-owned messaging service attempts to crack down on the viral spread of hateful misinformation.In India, where false rumours about child abduction spread virally over WhatsApp, leading to several vigilante murders over the past year, the new limit will be even stricter: each message can be forwarded just five times. In that country, where according to Facebook “people forward more messages, photos, and videos than any other country in the world”, WhatsApp is also removing the “quick forward” feature, a button that appears next to photos, videos and links. The previous forwarding cap, rarely hit by users, was more than 250. Continue reading...

Strong results attributed to reorganizing the company’s priorities to cloud computing and artificial intelligenceMicrosoft’s revenue exceeded $100bn for the first time in fiscal year 2018, the company reported Thursday, as the legacy software company’s efforts to reinvent itself as a major player in cloud computing continued to pay off.Microsoft stock jumped more than 4% in after-hours trading as the company beat analyst expectations with earnings for the quarter of $8.8bn, or $1.14 per share. Continue reading...

In July 2018 a Dutch company showcased what it calls the first ever flying car already fit for purpose, at the Farnborough Airshow. But do we need flying cars in our lives?Subscribe and review: Acast, Apple, Spotify, SoundCloud, AudioBoom, Mixcloud. Join the discussion on Facebook and Twitter, or email us at chipspodcast@theguardian.com.Any time technology throws up a new problem for society, you’re guaranteed to see someone say, “We were promised flying cars. Instead we got this.” Continue reading...

Murray and Hello Games coded a near-infinite universe and survived a harassment ordeal. For two years, they’ve stuck by the game that put them on the map – and led to death threats

Social media company to provide details of spending on ads targeting Irish votersFacebook is to publish comprehensive data on political advertising during Ireland’s abortion referendum campaign, giving an unprecedented insight into targeting of voters on social media, and setting a powerful precedent for election transparency.The US company has told Irish politicians it will provide anonymised details of the amount spent on targeting Irish voters on its platform between 1 March and 25 May, and the number of referendum-linked ads that had been purchased. Continue reading...

Thousands of people from more than 140 countries submitted their iPhone pictures to the annual iPhone Photography Awards. Here’s a selection of the winning entries Continue reading...

Michael and Heather Martin were sentenced to five years of probation last year for treatment of children in videosYouTube has banned a family of vloggers from its platform, after the parents were convicted of child neglect in the course of filming their popular “prank” videos.Michael and Heather Martin,who post videos under the name FamilyOFive, were sentenced to five years of probation for child neglect in September last year, after viewers raised alarm over their treatment of their children in videos. Continue reading...