Technology | The Guardian

Cryptocurrency mining added to list of industrial activities Beijing wants to phase outRelated: Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies – what digital money really means for our futureChina’s state planner wants to eliminate bitcoin mining in the country, according to a draft list of industrial activities the agency is seeking to stop in a sign of growing government pressure on the cryptocurrency sector. Continue reading...

Zain Qaiser targeted millions of computers with ransomware demanding large sumsA hacker who blackmailed users of pornography websites in what investigators say is the UK’s most serious cybercrime case has been jailed for six years and five months.Zain Qaiser targeted millions of computers with malicious browser-locking software that demanded payment of up to $1,000 (£765) to unfreeze screens, Kingston crown court heard. Continue reading...

Two Oregon college students allegedly submitted thousands of repair requests over the course of a year using counterfeit phonesMany of us have waited trepidatiously in the Apple Store, clasping our broken iPhone we’ve long since lost the receipt for, while the Genius Bar overlords decide whether to take pity on us and give us a new one or show us the gladiatorial thumbs down.But two Oregon students had rather a lot more riding on Apple’s replacement policy. They allegedly frauded Apple of nearly $1m by sending the company counterfeit iPhones, claiming they were faulty, and receiving brand-new genuine models as replacements. Continue reading...

Online harms white paper fuses work of DCMS and Home Office, led by PM hopeful Sajid JavidSajid Javid’s warning social media companies face “serious consequences” if they don’t keep users safe marks one of the biggest incursions by the Home Office into the world of media regulation since the issue was hived off from the department in the 1990s.The online harms white paper meshes together the work of officials at the Home Office, who have been pushing for a tough crackdown on tech companies from a law enforcement perspective, and Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) staff who traditionally regulate the media. Continue reading...

With an employee of Carole Middleton going public about being ‘bombarded’ with 71 emails a day by her boss, an expert asks the question on every frazzled employee’s lipsMany of us feel overburdened by emails at work. These frustrations were given voice by an assistant of Meghan, Duchess of Sussex last year who quit after her “demanding” employer would email her early as 5am in the morning. Now an employee of Carole Middleton, mother of the Duchess of Cambridge, has gone public about being “bombarded” with 71 emails a day by her boss. Some may be shocked, but many of us may feel the employee of the party catering firm had it easy. After all, the average office worker apparently receives 121 emails and sends about 40 each day.As the number of emails received rises, so too does evidence that email overload is a bad thing. It can take upwards of 20 minutes to get back to a task after being interrupted by an email. Constant email distractions can also temporarily lower IQ by an average of 10 points, and make people perform much worse at a task. Email can also crowd out the main tasks people are hired to do, leaving them frustrated. Continue reading...

Two very different titles reward players who relish complexity, and raise the question of whether game designers are right to raise the barAs a one-armed orphan – a disability that you might think would disqualify him from the opportunity to work as a lone assassin in 16th-century Japan – Sekiro is well acquainted with disadvantage. Still, a smooth sea never made a skilful mariner, as they used to say, and these physical and psychological handicaps have only served to strengthen this shinobi, who, with a variety of terrifying prosthetics, must now avenge his fallen master by taking down the Ashina clan. Up close, this is grindcore game-making, in which you are forced to watch the lolling of your victims’ astonished mouths as you trace a katana across their necks. This world of blood, fire and pitter-patter footsteps across bamboo rooftops calls to mind Toshiya Fujita’s Lady Snowblood or Akira Kurosawa’s Sanjuro in both theme and body count. But in its moments of exquisite pause, it’s also a game of refined cinematic style, the traumatised ninja silhouetted against a flaring sunset, while the reeds rustle and soothe.A purging influence, Sekiro must rid this sickly world of its cruel men and monsters. Stealth is the dominant mode; you crouch in tall grass, duck under the floor beams, and, with your grappling hook, perch silently on rooftops. It’s possible to strike decisively at grunts from the shadows, but sooner or later you face one of the Goliath-esque named foes that punctuate this world, roadblocks that will only topple in open combat. Without a shield behind which to cringe and circle, you are forced to trade explosive blows, timing your feints, parries and counterattacks with a maestro’s precision. There are few shortcuts to progress; only rote learning and practice will yield results, and anyone lacking the requisite tenacity must walk away from a game that withholds its treasures from all but the most grimly determined player. Continue reading...

Goodbye Twitter trolls, goodbye email alerts, goodbye scroll, scroll, scrollTS Eliot wrote of “faces / Distracted from distraction by distraction / Filled with fancies and empty of meaning / Tumid apathy with no concentration”. TS Eliot never had a smartphone.Neither did I for a long time. No Facebook account; not even email. Like Eliot, I was a luddite, but a peculiar breed because, according to my date of manufacture, I’m supposed to be a digital native. Perhaps it’s because by the age of 20 I was up the duff in the Welsh countryside with baby brain, no signal and no wifi. I had no need for Myspace and such. Continue reading...

I rented out my place to support my freelance lifestyle. While the money flowed in, I slept at the officeIt was a little after 2am one Friday morning two Novembers ago when I found myself on the Red Line train, on the north side of Chicago, though I had been all the way north and south a few times already that night. I was tired, a little cold, and things were getting sketchy. I’d never been on the L that late before, and my plan to ride all night was seeming less and less safe the more stops we made. My car was empty, finally – the only other passengers had been two drunk men who kept asking where I was going and if they could come – and at each stop I tensed up, hoping no one else would get on.It was a far cry from the private bungalow in Bora Bora where I had been just 24 hours earlier, but extreme contrasts were becoming the story of my life. I’m a freelance travel writer, which means I get to visit amazing places and stay in some of the world’s most beautiful hotels. It also means I don’t make very much money, thanks to rapidly decreasing magazine rates; so to afford my apartment in Chicago, I used to rent it on Airbnb while I was gone, which was often. This worked well. Too well, actually. So well that I found it hard to turn down guests even when I was in town. Continue reading...

This week, Jordan Erica Webber catches up on recent internet-related laws that she fears are getting lost in the shadow of BrexitJordan recently found herself shying away from checking the latest headlines for fear the news cycle would be, as it has been for a couple of years now, dominated by Brexit.So she invited Alex Hern and Jim Waterson into the studio to tell her about some other pieces of impending legislation that many might have missed. As internet users will soon find out, these laws are pretty important. Continue reading...

John Edwards calls out social media giant after Christchurch attack for refusing to accept responsibility for harmNew Zealand’s privacy commissioner has lashed out at social media giant Facebook in the wake of the Christchurch attacks, calling the company “morally bankrupt pathological liars”.The commissioner used his personal Twitter page to lambast the social network, which has also drawn the ire of prime minister Jacinda Ardern for hosting a livestream of the attacks that left 50 dead, which was then copied and shared all over the internet. Continue reading...

‘We won’t back down’: protesters express concern over pollution and protected speciesFor Gilles Renevier, a vet from a village south-east of Lyon, fighting Amazon’s plans to build a vast logistics centre in his area was “common sense”.The US firm was due to begin construction of a huge centre for packing and delivery beside Lyon airport in south-east France this year, but two local associations have lodged legal files to halt the build. Continue reading...

Three years on from the US election, tech firms are seeking rules that won’t hit their profitsA year on from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, two and a half years on from the advent of fake news and the 2016 presidential elections, and many years on from academics and occasional journalists raising their hands in concern about the emerging issues of our information environment, are we any closer to fixing the problem?Like climate change and the financial system, the answer to this question is both yes, and no. Yes in that we now, at least, have a shared understanding of just how great the problems are: we have a totally unregulated media environment run by a handful of giant US corporations that built their companies so fast it is now clear they had no idea what they were doing. Or, indeed, how to effectively stop some of the unwanted consequences such as genocide, live-streamed terror attacks and stolen elections. And no, in that our capacity to agree on what “fixing” might look like is extremely limited. Continue reading...

Unions warn systems such as Isaak may increase pressure on workers and cause distrustDozens of UK business owners are using artificial intelligence to scrutinise staff behaviour minute-to-minute by harvesting data on who emails whom and when, who accesses and edits files and who meets whom and when.The actions of 130,000 people in the UK and abroad are being monitored in real-time by the Isaak system, which ranks staff members’ attributes. Continue reading...

From high in the Andes to the world’s oldest submerged city, here are five significant discoveries in subaquatic archaeologyOn 1 April, a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the US highlighted the significance of a recent expedition that made multiple finds in the depths of Lake Titicaca. Among gold medallions, precious shells and stone artefacts were the bones of sacrificed young llamas. The discovery provides new insights into the religious rituals of the pre-Columbian Tiwanaku state that dominated in the Andes region between AD500 and 900. Continue reading...

With its diligence and workman-like practicality, the CR-V is not going to appeal to thrill-seekers, but in its own way this Honda is a heroHonda CR-V

Does video gaming really breed antisocial behaviour and isolation? On the contrary…Video games are one of the most misunderstood forms of entertainment. In one sense, it’s easy to see why: if you haven’t had much interaction with them, watching someone play one can be a pretty unsettling experience. Gamers can often give the impression that they’re glued to the screen, absorbed in what feels like the digital equivalent of junk food. At best, it seems like a pointless thing to do; at worst, we worry that games are socially isolating, or actively harmful. If we take a little time to uncover the true nature of video games, though, we find a very different story playing out… Continue reading...

The mythological epic leads a diverse slate of winners as Return of the Obra Dinn and Nintendo Labo pick up two awards eachThe Bafta games awards are always slightly different from the institute’s TV and film evenings. Instead of glitzy celebrities, there are endearingly earnest speeches from the developers, artists, musicians, designers and performers behind the year’s most creatively accomplished video games.The awards went to a diverse range of games, but one dominated the evening. Sony Santa Monica’s mythological epic God of War won five awards overall, having been nominated in 10 categories, including best game. The atmospheric nautical mystery Return of the Obra Dinn and the wildly creative Nintendo Labo took two honours each. Continue reading...

Guardian study finds inferior items appear highly praised, making ratings worthlessBadly translated versions of classic books and critically panned remakes of Hollywood films appear to have glowing endorsements on Amazon thanks to the website’s policy of bundling together reviews of different products.Analysis by the Guardian shows products that have actually been given one-star ratings appear alongside rave reviews of better quality items, making it impossible for consumers to judge the true value of what they are about to buy. Continue reading...

Musk and SEC given two weeks to work out an agreement about the billionaire’s social media posts as share price falls 8%The Tesla billionaire Elon Musk is in “clear violation” of a restraint issued by the US’s top financial watchdog after Musk inaccurately claimed last year he had a buyer for the company, a court heard on Thursday.A federal judge in New York heard oral arguments in a lawsuit brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) seeking to hold Tesla’s chief executive, in contempt for violating a settlement reached last September when Tesla agreed to vet Musk’s public communications. Continue reading...

MacKenzie Bezos receives estimated $36bn but relinquishes interests in Washington Post and rocket company Blue OriginThe world’s richest couple revealed the terms of their divorce on Thursday as Jeff and McKenzie Bezos – seen as the “parents” of the global online retail giant and media company Amazon – wrapped up their painful split.MacKenzie, now the ex-wife of Amazon’s founder and chief executive officer Jeff, will give 75% of their stake in the company and all voting rights to the billionaire entrepreneur. Continue reading...

Government wants UK to be safest place to go online and also best place to grow a digital businessIt’s rare to describe a government white paper as “trendy”, but among the small community of people who think deeply about how to rein in the the power of big tech, that’s exactly how these proposals will be seen.The online harms white paper attempts a neat magic trick that tries to offer regulation that won’t scare away the titans of technology, while still providing enough teeth to ease the tabloid campaigns for accountability and action. Continue reading...

We must redefine Facebook as a publisher and not a platform so it bears responsibility for its content, says Pam Rudd. Tobacco was once ubiquitous yet many managed to quit, says Bob Walsh. We must view social media the same wayI do not believe we need to rewrite most of our regulation to accommodate the digital age as mentioned by Carys Afoko (Zuckerberg is right about regulation – but we must all act, 2 April). Many of our existing discrimination and potential harm laws are good enough. The key is to redefine Facebook as a publisher and to no longer accept the argument that they are a platform. Facebook both publishes and distributes content and, importantly, earns revenue as a consequence of the consumption of the content. It should bear the responsibility of a publisher and not be allowed to evade our existing laws. This is the only way to effect real change quickly and to not be mired in the “too difficult” box, while Facebook continues to rake in billions.Carys argues that Facebook and Google are not responsible for racism and terrorism, but there is evidence that access to information promoting illegal behaviour does incite individuals, and it changes the tone of the environment in which we all live.

Facebook will not be rolling out transparency features it introduced in the UK, US, EU, India, Israel and Ukraine• Help us monitor political advertising during the 2019 Australian election campaignFacebook has announced it will restrict “political” ads from being bought by non-Australians during the election campaign, but will not be rolling out other key political ad transparency features used in other countries until after the election.In a blog post published on Friday, Mia Garlick, director of policy for Facebook Australia, detailed the company’s plans to combat misinformation and foreign interference during the Australian election campaign. Continue reading...

Half a dozen celebrities were the first to experience the service, carriers say

Faster connections and better capacity have got consumers excited about the capabilitiesAs South Korean firms claim to have beaten their US rivals to become the first to roll out a super-fast 5G mobile network, we explain what exactly 5G is and what it means for you. Continue reading...

But such potential may be threatened by a no-deal Brexit, says SMMTBritain’s leading position in developing self-driving cars could produce a £62bn economic boost by 2030, the car industry claimed – but warned that such potential could be jeopardised by a no-deal Brexit.A report published by the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders said the UK has significant advantages over other countries in pushing connected and autonomous vehicles, including forward-looking legislation allowing autonomous cars to be insured and driven on a greater proportion of roads than elsewhere. Continue reading...

IMB is receiving explicit emails and is thinking of creating a new accountSomeone has been using my Gmail address to sign me up for things online, and I consistently get explicit emails sent to my inbox and my spam box. I have decided to get a new email address, abandon my current one and delete it from my phone account. What will happen to my old email address when I’m not using it? IMBIt’s amazing how little progress we have made in the past 30-odd years. First, any company that still emails people – or adds them to mailing lists – without a “double opt-in” is run by idiots. If anyone signs up for anything, they should get an email that they must click to confirm they really want whatever it is. This remains true even for porn sites. Continue reading...

Disappointing production figures come amid more uncertainty for a company that seems to be caught in an endless cycle of turmoilElectric carmaker Tesla’s output slowed down during a rocky start to the new year, a development that will likely magnify nagging doubts about whether the electric car pioneer will be able to make the mass-market leap.The Palo Alto, California, company churned out 77,100 vehicles from January to March, well behind the pace it must sustain to fulfill the CEO Elon Musk’s pledge to manufacture 500,000 cars annually. Continue reading...

Company’s employees benefit as it shares spoils of £350m stock scheme payoutGoogle’s UK staff earned an average of £226,000 each last year as the company shared the spoils of a £350m payout from its stock scheme.Google, with UK staff numbers jumping by almost 400 to 3,658 last year, footed an £829m wage and salary bill for the year to 30 June. The total was a 26% increase on the £656m paid to staff in 2017, according to the company’s latest financial filings. Continue reading...

Sega’s retro reboot is no mere gimmick. It’s a joyous gift to make you a child again – but with all of 2019’s HD trimmingsThose disappointed by the recent PlayStation Classic, with its limited range of built-in and mundanely emulated games, may well be wondering what the higher end of the retro console market looks like. Well, this is it. Built by specialist company Analogue, previously responsible for the Super Nt and Nt Mini machines, the Mega Sg is billed as a “reimagining” of Sega’s original Mega Drive, the bad boy underdog of the 16-bit era.Unlike the PlayStation Classic, the Mini SNES, or even the recently announced Sega Mega Drive Mini (coming in September), the Mega Sg doesn’t come with a pre-loaded games library. Instead it has a cartridge slot that will accept any original Mega Drive cart, and two joypad ports that can take your old controllers (it will also work with modern wireless alternatives, although these aren’t supplied). In short, this isn’t a nostalgic toy designed for a few hours of fun reminiscence, but the gaming equivalent of a high-end turntable that plays all your old records as they were meant to be played. Continue reading...

Facebook, Google and Amazon have not just colonised the internet: their hubs, campuses and offices are taking over huge sections of cities around the world. But campaigners from New York to Toronto and Berlin are fighting back‘It’s a challenge out here. The way the tech companies are building and increasing their size is just pricing people out. Families who have been here for generations can’t afford to be here any more. They’re being pushed off into rural areas – anywhere from an hour to two and a half hours away.”JT Faraji is a 43-year-old artist who lives with his family in East Palo Alto, the northern California city on the edge of Silicon Valley. Just a stone’s throw away, Facebook’s global headquarters is his most visible neighbour, and he is also close to a big new Amazon office. He has lived in the area all his life and talks volubly about fascinating aspects of East Palo Alto’s history – like the period in the 1960s when black activists set up a high school and college, and there was even talk of renaming the city Nairobi: “There are a lot of minorities here: Hispanics, blacks, Pacific Islanders,” he says. “But those people are not really represented in the workforce in technology. So the way that northern California is going to look in not too long is going to be very … undiverse.” Continue reading...

Amazon made its CEO the wealthiest person in the world. So why can’t the company care for those injured while working there?Michelle Quinones, 27, started working at a Fort Worth, Texas, Amazon Fulfillment Center in July 2017 as an order picker, where she spent long hours on overnight shifts in the Amazon warehouse meeting mandatory rates for filling orders.A few months into the job, Quinones started having carpal tunnel symptoms. She was sent back to work at least 10 times from her warehouse’s Amcare clinic, put in place to provide Amazon employees with on-site first aid. Continue reading...

Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has accused technology giants of competing unfairlyDisplaying a degree of courage and clarity that is difficult to overstate, US senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has taken on big tech, including Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple. Warren’s proposals amount to a total rethink of the United States’ exceptionally permissive merger and acquisition policy over the past four decades. Indeed, big tech is only the poster child for a significant increase in monopoly and oligopoly power across a broad swath of the American economy. Although the best approach is still far from clear, I could not agree more that something needs to done, especially when it comes to big tech’s ability to buy out potential competitors and use their platform dominance to move into other lines of business.Warren is courageous because big tech is big money for most leading Democratic candidates, particularly progressives, for whom California is a veritable campaign-financing ATM. And although one can certainly object, Warren is not alone in thinking that the tech giants have gained excessive market dominance; in fact, it is one of the few issues in Washington on which there is some semblance of agreement. Other candidates, most notably Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, have also taken principled stands. Continue reading...

Taxi company’s shares dropped about 12% on Monday, ending the day at $69.03 after selling shares at $72 on FridayShares in Lyft, the ridesharing company, stalled on Monday, falling below their initial public offering (IPO) on their second day of trading.Lyft became the first of a new wave of giant tech companies to go public last Friday, selling shares at $72 a piece. The hotly anticipated sale saw Lyft’s share price leap to $78.89 on the first day of trading. Continue reading...

Facebook aims to assure users it’s not spying on them via their phone’s mic for better adsFacebook is attempting to demystify how its news feed works with a new feature that explains to users how it picks the posts and adverts to show them.The company hopes the tool could put an end to the widespread conspiracy theory that it targets users by spying on them with their phone’s microphones, by explaining in plain English the most important factors that determine whether and when they see content on the social network. Continue reading...

Mark Zuckerberg also said he is weighing up paying publishers for use of their journalismFacebook could start employing editors to select “high-quality news” to show to users, in the social network’s latest attempt to lose its reputation as a source for disinformation.Mark Zuckerberg said he is considering the introduction of a dedicated news section on the social network, which could use either humans or algorithms to chose stories from outlets that are “broadly trusted” by society. Continue reading...

Staffers criticized the appointment of Heritage Foundation president Kay Coles James in a letter published on MondayA group of Google employees have called for the removal of a rightwing thinktank leader from the company’s new artificial intelligence council, citing her anti-LGBT and anti-immigrant record.Related: 'Bias deep inside the code': the problem with AI 'ethics' in Silicon Valley Continue reading...

In his latest bid to wrong-foot people, the Tesla CEO has released a novelty pop song about a dead gorilla called RIP HarambeName: Elon Musk, the rapper.Age: Two days, according to SoundCloud. Continue reading...

From Steam’s weakening monopoly to the tyranny of sales figures, the same game-changing issues were highlighted by leading figures in an industry teetering on transformationNever has the games industry felt more on the precipice. The entire medium is on the brink of enormous change, and there’s no clear understanding of exactly what sort. Speaking to various industry figures at this year’s Games Developers Conference, the feeling is that the current state of affairs is unsustainable.“Everything is coming to a head right now,” said Rami Ismail, organiser of international gaming conference GameDev.World. A combination of a “race to the bottom” with game prices, ever-increasing budgets and the difficulty of getting discovered for newcomers is causing many to push for change. Continue reading...

Following similar consoles from Nintendo and Sony, Sega is bringing its 1990s Mega Drive back with 40 games, including SonicSega has announced a release date for the long-expected Mega Drive Mini, a modern version of its classic 16bit console.Launching on 19 September, the retro replica will feature 40 built-in games, and comes with two controllers and a HDMI port, which plugs straight into modern televisions. It will cost £70/$80. Continue reading...

Jordan Erica Webber chats to Max Benwell about how he managed to track down the person using his photos to deceive women, and what happened when he got them on the phoneIn March 2018, Max Benwell was minding his own business when he received a message from a woman he had never met. She told him someone had been messaging her and had been really abusive. The person messaging her was using Max’s photos.Jordan follows Max’s unusual tale. He went to incredible lengths to find the person who had stolen his identity online. She also chats to the woman whose day-to-day job involves figuring out whether people online are the people they say they are, or a catfisher.

Chief executive allegedly targeted because he owns Washington Post, where Jamal Khashoggi was columnistThe security chief for Jeff Bezos, chief executive of Amazon, says the Saudi government had access to Bezos’s phone and gained private information from it.Gavin de Becker, Bezos’s longtime security consultant, said he had concluded his investigation into the publication in January of leaked text messages between Bezos and Lauren Sánchez, a former television anchor whom the US National Enquirer tabloid newspaper said Bezos was dating. Continue reading...

It may be small, green and mean-looking, but spend some time in the Suzuki Jimny and you’ll soon be smittenSuzuki Jimny

This is what I’ve learned from living without email, electricity, or a phone…It was almost midnight when I checked my email for the last time and turned off my phone for what I hoped would be for ever. I had spent the summer of 2016 hand-building a straw bale home on a half-wild smallholding in County Galway, Ireland, and the following morning I intended to begin a new life without modern technology. There would be no running water, no clock, no fossil fuels, no electricity or any of the things it powers; no internet, phone, washing machine, lightbulbs or radio. I had no idea if unplugging myself from the industrial world would mean I’d lose all touch with reality, or finally discover it.I’m reluctant to write much about the big-picture reasons why I decided to reject tech. We know them too well already, and it’s not for want of information that we continue down the road we’re on. But, over time, I found my reasons slowly changed. Now they’ve less to do with saving the world, and much more to do with savouring the world. The world needs savouring. Continue reading...

Lyft, which went public on Friday, will soon be joined by Uber, Airbnb and other companies valued over $1bn – and they may be just the animal to burst a bubbleFive years ago Aileen Lee, founder of Silicon Valley investor Cowboy Ventures, coined the term “unicorn” for a private company valued at more than $1bn. Back then unicorns were almost as rare as their mythical namesakes – just 39 existed, according to Lee. Now there are 334 around the world, worth more than $1tn. And this week some of the very biggest beasts started stampeding towards the public markets.Related: Lyft share price soars 20% in minutes on taxi app's stock market debut Continue reading...

After two weeks of criticism, Sheryl Sandberg published a letter saying the company is exploring live stream video restrictionsTwo weeks after a terrorist used Facebook to broadcast live video while he massacred 50 Muslim worshippers in New Zealand, the company has broken its silence in the country by publishing a letter from Sheryl Sandberg in the New Zealand Herald.Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, said the company is “exploring” placing restrictions on who can live stream video on Facebook, but did not announce any actual policy changes. Continue reading...

App, designed to help EU nationals to apply for settled status, until now worked only on Android

Tech firm has acted as US-Havana intermediary as memo says Cubans trust Google more than Trump administrationGoogle has worked as an intermediary between the Trump administration and the Cuban government as it has sought a deal to improve internet access on the island, according to private remarks by Google’s manager in Havana.Related: Apple Arcade v Google Stadia: which is the future for video games? Continue reading...