Technology | The Guardian

Law must address profits made by companies from fraudsters’ advertisementsMinisters must force tech giants such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft to stop the “immoral” practice of profiting from the £10bn of pension fraud committed by internet scammers, a committee of MPs has urged.Fraudsters use online advertisements, mostly on Google, to trick people out of their pension funds, according to a report published by the work and pensions select committee, but regulators are “powerless” to hold the internet firms to account. Continue reading...

Our tendency to believe social media platforms’ claims of effectiveness is blinding us to what they are actually deliveringHere’s a disturbing thought for those of us who are critics of the tech industry: are we unduly credulous about the capabilities of the technology as extolled by the companies and their paid evangelists? Did clever exploitation of social media really lead to the election of Trump and the Brexit vote in 2016, for example?At one level, the answer to that has to be “no”. Social media obviously played some role in those political earthquakes, but anyone who attributes seismic shocks on that scale just to tech companies hasn’t been paying attention to what’s been happening to democratic countries since the 1970s. Nor have they been reading the political science literature. Nevertheless, the drumbeat of angst about what networked technology and surveillance capitalism are doing to society continues to reverberate. Continue reading...

Technology companies rallied to apply their expertise as King county went from the US center of the pandemic to one of the country’s lowest death ratesLast year, four days after the first recorded Covid-19 death in the United States was reported in Kirkland, Washington, just east of Seattle, Microsoft leaders jumped into action – recommending that their employees in the area work from home. Two days later, Amazon made a similar declaration.Combined, their announcements affected more than 100,000 employees in this Pacific north-west tech hub and came days before the Washington state governor’s first major Covid mandate and about a week before the US president declared an emergency for Covid. Continue reading...

A powerful battery of drones, thermal cameras and heartbeat detectors are being deployed to exclude asylum seekersKhaled has been playing “the game” for a year now. A former law student, he left Afghanistan in 2018, driven by precarious economic circumstances and fear for his security, as the Taliban were increasingly targeting Kabul.But when he reached Europe, he realised the chances at winning the game were stacked against him. Getting to Europe’s borders was easy compared with actually crossing into the EU, he says, and there were more than physical obstacles preventing him from getting to Germany, where his uncle and girlfriend live. Continue reading...

Documents provided to the Intercept published after the company denied reports delivery workers lack access to bathroomsAmazon caused an uproar on Thursday when it denied reports that its delivery workers have been forced to urinate in bottles due to lack of access to bathrooms, but a leaked internal memo shows the company has been aware of the problem for at least several months. Continue reading...

‘You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you?’ a tweet from the Amazon News account readTo paraphrase one of the most iconic tweets of the past 10 years, Amazon’s recent denial about employees not being forced to urinate in bottles at work has people asking a lot of questions already answered by the denial.Related: What if the most important election of the year is happening right now in Alabama? | Indigo Olivier Continue reading...

Company says it ‘must do better’ after Guardian discovers more than 150 offensive comments on Maps siteGoogle has said it “must do better” at removing what campaigners called “sickening” and “grotesque” antisemitic content following an investigation by the Guardian.More than 150 antisemitic comments were discovered on the Google Maps site for the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp which is today the site of a museum in memorial to the where the Nazis killed 1.1 million people killed there, the overwhelming majority Jews. Continue reading...

Nintendo Switch; Capcom

Exclusive: public figures considered to be permissible targets for otherwise-banned abuse, leaked moderator guidelines show

Lawsuit filed by Reporters without Borders says company allows ‘disinformation and hate speech to flourish’Facebook has failed to live up to its promises of creating a “safe” and “error-free” online environment, according to a new lawsuit filed by the press freedom not-for-profit Reporters without Borders. Continue reading...

Exclusive: users are allowed to praise mass killers and ‘violent non-state actors’ in certain situations

Owner will be able to take virtual reality tour of ‘Mars house’, their new living quartersIn what might be most easily understood as the most expensive game of the Sims to ever be played, a “digital home” set within a Mars-like landscape has sold for $500,000 (£360,000) or 288 Ether, a cryptocurrency, in the latest purchase on the non-fungible token market.The house, called “Mars House”, was designed by Toronto artist Krista Kim with the help of an architect and video game software, the architecture and design magazine Dezeen reported. Continue reading...

Abandoned homes, lurking enemies, approaching footsteps ... Warzone’s grim details are straight out of the horror rulebook, summoning dread from players’ ultimate need to surviveI’m lying on the roof of a bombed-out shopping arcade, watching tracer fire igniting the cool evening air about 500m from my position. Whoever wins that shootout will come my way when the fight is over. I don’t have the armour or weaponry to defend myself properly so all I can do is wait and hope they get in an abandoned car and drive right past.Deep down, I know they won’t. Continue reading...

The tale of online payment firm Stripe, founded by John and Patrick Collison, shows the value of spotting a gap in the marketThe most valuable private company in Silicon Valley is an outfit most people have never heard of – unless they are a) Irish or b) tech investors. It’s called Stripe, and this week the latest round of investments in it have given it a valuation of $95bn (£68.5bn). It was founded in 2010 by two smart young lads from rural Ireland – the brothers John and Patrick Collison – who were then aged 19 and 21 respectively. The latest valuation of their company – based on a recent investment of $600m from investors including Ireland’s National Treasury Management Agency, Fidelity and Sequoia Capital – means that each now has a net worth on paper in the region of $11.5bn.The Collisons hail from Dromineer, a small town on the shores of Lough Derg in County Tipperary. When they were growing up it was too remote to have an internet connection, and initially the only way they could get decent broadband was via an expensive satellite link. In some ways they look like young prodigies from central casting. As a teenager, Patrick discovered Lisp, the programming language that was once the lingua franca of early AI programmers, and used it to create a conversational system that won him Ireland’s young scientist of the year award in 2005, at the age of 16. His brother, two years younger, got the highest scores ever recorded in the Irish school leaving certificate. Continue reading...

The cut will take effect from July with 99% of developers globally receiving a reduction as the company and Apple face legal action from Epic Games

To make up for lack of interaction under Covid-19 restrictions, apes at zoos 150km apart can now watch each others’ daily lives on big screens

Graham Ivan Clark also took over account of Kim Kardashian West in 2020 bitcoin scamAn 18-year-old hacker who pulled off a huge breach in 2020, infiltrating several high profile Twitter accounts to solicit bitcoin transactions, has agreed to serve three years in prison for his actions.Graham Ivan Clark, of Florida, was 17 years old at the time of the hack in July, during which he took over a number of major accounts including those of Joe Biden, Bill Gates and Kim Kardashian West. Continue reading...

Move follows supreme court ruling that drivers are workers but critics say they are still short-changedUber is to guarantee its 70,000 UK drivers a minimum hourly wage, holiday pay and pensions after a landmark supreme court ruling.The ride-hailing app said drivers would start benefiting from the changes from Wednesday while retaining the right to choose when they work, as it accepted they were classed as workers in line with the ruling. Continue reading...

Campaign comes amid warnings that company removes Spanish misinformation less consistently than English materialMembers of Congress and activist groups have called on Facebook to address its “Spanish-language disinformation crisis”, urging the company to make major policy changes on the platforms it owns.In a new campaign launched on Tuesday and coordinated by the Real Facebook Oversight Board, an advocacy group, the Democratic representative Tony Cardenas of California and groups including Free Press Action, the Center for American Progress and the National Hispanic Media Coalition charge that Facebook is not doing enough to combat “rampant Spanish-language disinformation” circulating on Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram that is putting Latino communities at risk. Continue reading...

With stages closed, dancers have thrived on Instagram and TikTok, given innovative online performances and found a huge new audienceThe first time I cried watching someone dance in their living room was in April last year. A few weeks into the first lockdown, unnerved by sudden confinement, there was ballerina Céline Gittens on my laptop screen, bourréeing past a pot plant. Then in a different living room, cellist António Novais drawing out a Saint-Saëns melody, and in another house, pianist Jonathan Higgins, all deeply engrossed in this re-creation of The Dying Swan, music crossing the divide.At the beginning of the pandemic, the dance that appeared online was all about trying to connect. That’s what was moving about Birmingham Royal Ballet’s The Swan, or the Alvin Ailey company’s dancers performing Revelations in their New York apartments, or the companies doing their ritual daily class over Zoom and inviting us to watch or join in. It was a way of witnessing people apart but moving in harmony, absorbed in the same actions, finding a rhythm together, closing the distance. Continue reading...

Residents forced to move in 2017 when site was earmarked for LCD screen productionThe head of the Taiwanese manufacturing company Foxconn has said it could start making electric vehicles at a previously abandoned Wisconsin project Donald Trump had claimed would be the “eighth wonder of the world”.Speaking in Taipei, Foxconn’s chairman, Young Liu, said the company would finalise plans by July in order to start production by the end of 2023, if they decided electric vehicles (EV) were the way to go in Wisconsin. Continue reading...

Second-gen Nest Hub avoids the user needing to wear a bracelet or headband and acts as smart alarmGoogle’s latest Nest Hub smart display tracks sleep with miniaturised radar without the user having to wear a bracelet or headband.The revamped 7in Google Assistant smart display is being repositioned as a smart alarm clock and health-monitoring device for the bedroom. Continue reading...

Taking a fanboy stance on Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht doesn’t help Tiller Russell’s underpowered Silicon Valley crime dramaHere’s an unthrilling, bland drama about the rise and fall of Ross Ulbricht, the mastermind behind the illegal online drug emporium Silk Road (described by the FBI as “the Amazon of drug sites”). Between 2011 and 2013, PhD dropout Ulbricht made millions of dollars in commissions from users on the dark web anonymously buying and selling drugs. Then he got busted.If you consider how gripping David Fincher made a bunch of geeks in hoodies talking about algorithms look in The Social Network, the Ulbricht story – involving an FBI manhunt and allegations of murder-for-hire – should be a doddle. But watching Silk Road is a bit like rolling a joint only to find the leafy green substance you’ve been sold is oregano. The highs just don’t come. Continue reading...

Electric carmaker’s submission to the government said grants for battery powered cars could be revenue-neutralElon Musk’s Tesla lobbied the UK government to raise taxes on petrol and diesel cars in order to fund bigger subsidies for electric vehicles, alongside a ban on hybrids.The US electric car pioneer called for a rise in fuel duty and a charge on petrol and diesel car purchases to pay for grants and tax breaks such as a VAT exemption for battery-powered cars, according to submissions to the government seen by the Guardian. Continue reading...

Washington Post reported on the study which confirmed what researchers have long argued about: the echo chamber effectA small subset of Facebook users is reportedly responsible for the majority of content expressing or encouraging skepticism about Covid-19 vaccines, according to early results from an internal Facebook study.The study, first reported by the Washington Post, confirms what researchers have long argued about how the echo chamber effect can amplify certain beliefs within social media communities. It also shows how speech that falls short of outright misinformation about vaccines, which is banned on Facebook, can still contribute to vaccine hesitancy. Continue reading...

BT is putting 4,000 phone boxes up for adoption. Many have already been turned into libraries, defibrillator stations, even tiny art galleries

Tweeting city’s name was enough for 12-hour suspension in apparent gaffe over personal information sharingMemphis, Tennessee, is a city with a storied past. A heartland of rock’n’roll, blues, gospel and country music, it’s the home of Graceland and FedEx, and a cornerstone of the civil rights movement. So it came as a surprise when Twitter decided to ban the city from its site.Over the weekend, users of the social network discovered that simply tweeting the word “Memphis” was enough to land them with an automatic 12-hour suspension, and a requirement to delete the tweet. Continue reading...

Company’s financial chief has been rebranded ‘master of coin’ following £1bn bitcoin investmentElon Musk, the billionaire chief executive of Tesla with a penchant for eccentric behaviour, has changed his job title to “technoking” of the electric car manufacturer.In addition to Musk, who also retains his position as chief executive, the company’s financial chief, Zach Kirkhorn, has been rebranded as “master of coin”. Continue reading...

Black Girl Gamers, a sci-fi veteran and Swedish Fortnite star Loeya are just a few of the YouTube video-makers and Twitch streamers bringing diverse voices to the gaming sphereIf you’re in a household with teenage video game players, you will know the sound of Twitch streamers and YouTubers. Right now, my sons seem to live on a steady media diet of wildly enthusiastic young men, playing the same games, in the same ways, using the same slang. Over lockdown I have heard the words “What’s up?” and “like and subscribe” enough times to last me until the heat death of the universe.Last weekend, my wife emerged from my youngest son’s bedroom and said to me, between clenched teeth: “Is there no one different for them to watch?” And true, from the outside, game streaming can seem like a monoculture, dominated by energy drink-sponsored dudebros. Here are some other streamers and YouTube video makers to throw into your household’s gaming media mix. Continue reading...

Figure makes digital payments firm the most valuable private business to come out of US tech hubThe digital payments firm Stripe has been valued at $95bn (£68m) after a funding round that makes the company the most valuable private business to come out of Silicon Valley.The company, which is dual-headquartered in San Francisco and Dublin, raised $600m from investors including Ireland’s sovereign wealth fund (NTMA), Allianz X, Axa, Baillie Gifford, Fidelity Management & Research Company, and Sequoia Capital. Continue reading...

From a lack of broadband in Appalachia to obsolete devices distributed to poor urban families, the absence of reliable internet has meant a year of lost learning

The father of the world wide web talks about its first 30 years, the rise of the toxic internet – and whether Facebook needs to be broken up

New services mean you can have a greener vehicle on your driveway for little commitmentYou’ve already got a monthly Netflix subscription, and maybe a veg box delivery service. So why wouldn’t you start leasing an electric car on the same month-to-month terms?Hot on the heels of bicycle and other monthly subscription services, drivers can now get electric cars on a renewable monthly basis, with everything included – even free charging. Continue reading...

From animated cats and sex tapes to major albums, artists are using NFTs to sell their work. But why?If you go by the headlines, there’s a trading boom in something called non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Grimes has sold $6m of art via NFTs; Kings of Leon will be releasing their new album as two types of NFT, and a 10-second digital artwork bought via an NFT for $67,000 in October last year has just sold for $6.6m. Twitter boss Jack Dorsey’s first tweet is up for auction as an NFT and may fetch as much as $2.5m.To their advocates, NFTs track the ownership and guarantee the authenticity of art – and allow creators to monetise digital artefacts. To sceptics, they’re a bubble within a bubble, a speculative frenzy that shows how far from sanity investors have gone. Continue reading...

The departure of two members of the tech firm’s ethical artificial intelligence team exposes the conflict at the heart of its business modelIf I told you that an academic paper entitled “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots” had caused an epochal row involving one of the most powerful companies in the world, you’d have asked what I’d been smoking. And well you might: but stay tuned.The paper has four co-authors, two from the University of Washington, and two from Google – Dr Timnit Gebru and Dr Margaret Mitchell. It provides a useful critical review of machine-learning language models (LMs) like GPT-3, which are trained on enormous amounts of text and are capable of producing plausible-looking prose. The amount of computation (and associated carbon emissions) involved in their construction has ballooned to insane levels, and so at some point it’s sensible to ask the question that is never asked in the tech industry: how much is enough? Continue reading...

Artists have been dismayed to find their work ending up in the ‘control’ of othersWhen the virtual auction bell rang at Christie’s on Thursday, Mike Winkelmann, a digital artist better known as Beeple, made history: he had sold a “non-fungible token” representing his piece Everydays: The First 5,000 Days, for $69.4m.But while the new cryptocurrency craze may have brought the high-end art market into the 21st century, it’s also modernising another aspect of the industry: art thieves. Continue reading...

A suicide and a strange bitcoin bequest have opened a window on to the new frontier of extremist online mediaOn 8 December last year, a Frenchman called Laurent Bachelier gave away a total of 28.5 bitcoins – worth $556,000 – to 22 people. On the same day, he killed himself.In suicide notes written in French and English, he explained that the burden of illness (he suffered from a neurological pain disorder) and his loss of hope for the future had led him to despair. After railing against the decline of western civilization and attacks on free speech, he wrote that he had decided to “leave his modest wealth to certain causes and people”. Continue reading...

Great screen, performance and battery let down by lack of long zoom camera and only two years of software supportChinese smartphone brand Oppo is looking to cement itself as Samsung’s big challenger – filling the vacuum left by Huawei – but as nice as the Find X3 Pro is to look at, it is just not good value.Far from a household name in the UK, Oppo is part of BKK Electronics, which is one of the largest smartphone manufacturers in the world and operates brands OnePlus, Vivo and RealMe among others. Continue reading...

Naomi Shimada hosts The Beauty Fix, featuring guests including Queer Eye’s Tan France. Plus: cautionary tales, and diverse stories from the Arab worldThe Beauty Fix

Drawing on her own cathartic relationship with role-playing games, Leilani uses gaming as a narrative device and an inspiration in her acclaimed debutThere is an extraordinary and telling moment in Raven Leilani’s acclaimed novel Luster, about a young black woman who has an affair with a middle-aged white man and ends up living with his family. The woman, Edie, is heading back to her lover’s house with his adopted black daughter, Akila, when the pair are stopped and questioned by two police officers. Although Edie is compliant, Akila – younger and much less worldly – challenges the cops and gets thrust to the ground and restrained. The confrontation is rife with fear and tension, and when it’s over (diffused when Akila’s white mother intervenes), the first thing Edie and Akila do is go inside, sit down and play a video game.Much of the fervid discussion around Luster has focused on Leilani’s astute and witty analysis of sexual politics and racial power structures in the 21st-century US. But a key part of her acutely realised portrayal of a millennial protagonist coping with crappy jobs and crappier love affairs is Edie’s natural relationship with digital culture and technology. At a time in which video game references are still mostly consigned to YA and sci-fi books, Leilani has made them a central component of a literary novel. Continue reading...

Pandemic has prompted some people to confront their insecurities about venturing onlineBefore the pandemic struck, 79-year-old Jim Whelan barely used his computer. The online world was a mystery and an irrelevance to him. A year on, however, Whelan can give computer geeks half his age a run for their money.“Although I had been online before the pandemic, it was just the occasional answering of emails. Now I’m a past master at all sorts of amazing things,” said Whelan, a former Coronation Street actor who before the pandemic used to travel around local community groups to give talks about his 50 years in the acting profession. Continue reading...

In March 1891, the laying of a cross-Channel subsea cable enabled the first international telephone service between Britain and France. See how the Guardian reported events10 March 1891 Continue reading...

Government to force firms to make spare parts available and create products that are cheaper to runTougher rules are being introduced to make appliances such as fridges, washing machines and TVs cheaper to run and last longer, the government has said.New legislation aims to tackle “premature obsolescence” in electrical goods – short lifespans built into appliances by manufacturers so that customers have to buy new ones sooner – and make them more energy efficient. Continue reading...

Recommendations feature also pushed anti-vaccination and antisemitic material, watchdog says

A Banksy just fetched $382,000 despite going up in smoke, while a cat cartoon bagged twice that. And it’s all thanks to NFTs, an offshoot of crypto currency bitcoin. But is this a bubble about to burst?Last week masked men set fire to a Banksy screenprint called Morons (White) at a secret location in Brooklyn, livestreaming the destruction via the Twitter account @BurntBanksy. The men worked for a company called Injective Protocol, which bought the print for $95,000 in order to destroy it and replace it with a unique digital facsimile. This is called crypto art and, if you want to know the extent to which it’s booming, well, the new work just went for $382,336, more than four times the original price.From Ai Weiwei smashing a 2,000-year-old vase to the Chapman brothers defacing Goya prints, artists are no strangers to creative destruction. But this is different. The burning of Morons (White) is thought to be the first time a physical artwork has been replaced by a unique digital asset. “We view this burning event as an expression of art itself,” Injective Protocol executive Mirza Uddin said. “We specifically chose a Banksy piece since he has previously shredded one of his own artworks at an auction.” Continue reading...

With the help of botanists, Daan Roosegaarde has created a ‘light recipe’ for a field of leeks to help the plants grow betterBy day, the field of leeks looks like any other. But, as the sun sets, blue and red light, mixed with invisible ultraviolet (UV) radiation, transforms the scene into a multicoloured landscape.This LED light show is not just for effect. For a couple of hours every evening the lights are shone across the 20,000sq metre field in Lelystad in the Netherlands in a bid to make the leeks grow better. In a light installation that brings art and science together, four solar-powered units emit a tailor-made spectrum across the leafy vegetables. Continue reading...

Till-free convenience is all very well until the bill eventually arrives at homeI may be a retail misanthrope, but are the till-free Amazon Fresh shops a depersonalised step too far? At first sight, the basic concept (wander in, wander out, get charged later) looks tailor-made for me.I already don’t need much shopping “face time”. I was never one for going 1950s-walkabout with a wicker basket collecting items from different artisan shops, served by smiling central-casting shopkeepers, straight out of a Happy Families card deck. Each to their own: if people get their kicks cosplaying Camberwick Green, then good luck to them. Though you have to wonder if this nostalgia is their own or, rather, a borrowed memory from parents or grandparents. Continue reading...

Stoking panic about China’s dominance is just another way for western technology giants to avoid scrutiny and gain powerThis week the American National Security Commission on artificial intelligence released its final report. Cursory inspection of its 756 pages suggests that it’s just another standard product of the military-industrial complex that so worried President Eisenhower at the end of his term of office. On closer examination, however, it turns out to be a set of case notes on a tragic case of what we psychologists call “hegemonic anxiety” – the fear of losing global dominance.The report is the work of 15 bigwigs, led by Dr Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Alphabet (and before that the adult supervisor imposed by venture capitalists on the young co-founders of Google). Of the 15 members of the commission only four are female. Eight are from the tech industry (including Andy Jassy, Jeff Bezos’s anointed heir at Amazon); two are former senior Pentagon officials; and the tech sector of the national intelligence community is represented by at least three commissioners. Given these establishment credentials, the only surprising thing is that the inquiry seems to have been set up during Trump’s presidency, which suggests that it was organised by the “deep state” during the hours of one to four AM, when Trump was generally asleep. Continue reading...

(Graceful Decay; Annapurna Interactive; PC, PS4/5)

In Beat Saber, you slice away at big squares that come rushing at you – it’s like colouring in and partying at the same timeWhen somebody suggested Beat Saber to me, I wasn’t interested. First, it looks rather intimidating from the demo videos: you’re inside a virtual reality headset, with a controller in each hand, which resembles a swishing lightsaber on your screen. You have to slice through bright blue and red blocks as they come rushing towards you, having first noticed which way their arrows point. Plus there’s music. If you can imagine being in an arcade with a hangover, that’s the dread that went through me.Second, you have to invest in a headset. There are about six that people recommend – including a thrifty Hamswan one (£19.99) – but only one that’s a stand-alone, in that you don’t need to already have a PC to connect it to. I borrowed one, the Oculus. It’s expensive (£299) and I didn’t want to buy one. Except then I did, because I didn’t want to give it back. Continue reading...