Technology | The Guardian

Salesforce chief Marc Benioff is latest tech insider to raise alarm over social media’s effect on society with comments at DavosFacebook should be regulated like a cigarette company, because of the addictive and harmful properties of social media, according to Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff.Social networks would be regulated “exactly the same way that you regulated the cigarette industry”, Benioff told CNBC at the World Economic Forum in Davos. “Here’s a product – cigarettes – they’re addictive, they’re not good for you, maybe there’s all kinds of different forces trying to get you to do certain things. There’s a lot of parallels. Continue reading...

Oscar Nilsson ‘knocked to ground’ in San Francisco as company tested self-driving carsGeneral Motors is facing one of the first lawsuits to involve an autonomous vehicle, after a collision between its Cruise self-driving car and a motorbike in California.

Journalists pestering women in the industry won’t help – there are good reasons why few have spoken out so farA couple of weeks after the Weinstein revelations, the emails started coming. Some weren’t even personalised. “Hello, prominent woman in the video games industry. I am a reporter trying to unmask sexual predators. Is this something you would be willing to talk about? If not, do you know anyone else who will?” Women working in video game development and media, especially those who are outspoken about gender equality in the games industry’s notoriously unbalanced workforce – which, according to the most recent Independent Game Developers Association survey, is 79% male – have been getting these missives for months.Related: The Aziz Ansari furore isn’t the end of #MeToo. It’s just the beginning | Sarah Solemani Continue reading...

Autopilot controls are not yet fully capable of functioning without human intervention – but they’re good enough to lull us into a false sense of securityWhen California police officers approached a Tesla stopped in the centre of a five-lane highway outside San Francisco last week, they found a man asleep at the wheel. The driver, who was arrested on suspicion of drunk driving, told them his car was in “autopilot”, Tesla’s semi-autonomous driver assist system.In a separate incident this week, firefighters in Culver City reported that a Tesla rear-ended their parked fire truck as it attended an accident on the freeway. Again, the driver said the vehicle was in autopilot. Continue reading...

Computer scientist who became one of the world’s first freelance programmers in the 1950sThe computer scientist Mary Lee Berners-Lee, who has died aged 93, was on the programming team for the computer that in 1951 became the first in the world to be sold commercially: the Ferranti Mark I. She led a successful campaign at Ferranti for equal pay for male and female programmers, almost two decades before the Equal Pay Act came into force. As a young mother in the mid-1950s she set up on her own as a home-based software consultant, making her one of the world’s first freelance programmers.Modest about her own pioneering achievements, she is on record (in an interview with computer historian Janet Abbate) as saying that her biggest contribution was to be “the grandmother of the web”. In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee (now Sir Tim), the eldest of her four children, proposed a system to access and exchange documents across the internet, and soon afterwards built the first web server, website and browser. Continue reading...

Musk will become planet’s richest man if he turns Tesla into a $650bn business in a decadeElon Musk, the founder and chief executive of electric car company Tesla, would smash all pay records and become the richest man in the world if an extraordinarily ambitious new incentive scheme pays out.The 46-year-old entrepreneur, who is already a multi-billionaire, has agreed to work unpaid for the next 10 years – after which he would collect an unprecedented $55.8bn (£40bn) bonus if builds the 14-year-old business into a $650bn company within a decade. Continue reading...

COO Sheryl Sandberg also reiterates company’s promise to add 10,000 safety and security personnel, tackle fake news and end abuseFacebook will roll out a new set of tools aimed at making it easier for users to make informed choices about their privacy in response to sweeping new European privacy laws, according to the company’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg.“We’re rolling out a new privacy centre globally that will put the core privacy settings for Facebook in one place and make it much easier for people to manage their data,” Sandberg said at a Facebook event in Brussels on Tuesday. Continue reading...

Axel Weber says cryptocurrency ‘not an investment we would advise’ while South Korea bans anonymous tradingBitcoin has fallen 12% over 24 hours while the chairman of UBS warned against investing in it and South Korea continued to crack down on cryptocurrencies by banning anonymous trading.

Of the 978m global victims of cybercrime last year, 17m were Britons targeted by phishing, ransomware, online fraud and hackingHackers stole a total of £130bn from consumers in 2017, including £4.6bn from British internet users, according to a new report from cybersecurity firm Norton.More than 17 million Brits were hit by cybercrime in the past year, meaning the nation, which accounts for less than 1% of the global population, makes up almost 2% of the 978 million global victims of cybercrime and almost 4% of the global losses. Continue reading...

Exclusive: Ciaran Martin says Britain fortunate so far to avoid major, crippling attackThe head of the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre has warned that a major cyber-attack on the UK is a matter of “when, not if”, raising the prospect of devastating disruption to British elections and critical infrastructure.In remarks underlining newly released figures showing the number of cyber-attacks on the UK in the last 15 months, Ciaran Martin said the UK had been fortunate to avoid a so-called category one (C1) attack, broadly defined as an attack that might cripple infrastructure such as energy supplies and the financial services sector. Continue reading...

Amid policy changes at social network, media mogul criticizes it for failing to ‘adequately reward’ publishers that add value and integrity

Newly opened Seattle store offers a speedy experience while fueling fears for retail jobsAll around me in this Seattle corner shop, people are grabbing items off the shelves, shoving them into bags or pockets, and bolting for the door. It would feel like well-mannered looting if not for the hi-tech gates where shoppers have to swipe in with their smartphones.This is the first day that Amazon’s new checkout-less convenience store, Amazon Go, is open to the public, and shopping is even easier than online. There is no tedious clicking or scrolling, no banner ads to negotiate nor passwords to remember. Simply present the Amazon Go app at the gates and start shopping. Continue reading...

The internet is now used as a low-level weapon of war. How should Britain best defend itself?In the desperate scramble to rearm before the second world war there was always an undercurrent of pessimism. “The bomber will always get through,” Stanley Baldwin warned. In his dark fantasies, destruction and poison gas rained from the skies and obliterated civilisation. That isn’t quite what happened, though the bombers did their best. Today’s equivalent is the feeling that the hacker will always get through, and that attacks on computer networks will become the most devastating form of future warfare.There are certainly grounds for fear. Technological civilisation is now built on software, much of it desperately insecure. Even when the software itself is secure – and you’d assume that the CIA at least would use properly secured software – the human parts of a bureaucracy can fail, as is shown by the extraordinary case of a teenage hacker, Kane Gamble, operating from his bedroom in Leicestershire, who managed to impersonate the director of the CIA and the deputy director of the FBI and gain access to part of their emails, which included a great deal of classified material. Continue reading...

Social network hiring 10,000 more staff to combat spread of fake news, and harassment use of Facebook as a weapon in ‘cyberwar’Facebook has admitted to being “too slow to recognise” Russian election interference, but says that social networks simply reflect human intent, “good and bad”.In a blogpost, Facebook product manager Samidh Chakrabarti says that “at its best, [social media] allows us to express ourselves and take action. At its worst, it allows people to spread misinformation and corrode democracy. Continue reading...

Don’t be duped by a bot or phished like Hillary Clinton’s campaign – follow these four simple steps to outflank Putin’s digital foot soldiers

I get more and better sleep, feel less anxiety and even get out of bed quicker – and it’s all because social media sucksI never quite fell in love with smartwatches, but I do credit my brief time with one for sparking the most positive change to my life for years: relegating my smartphone to the hallway.With only one plug socket by my bed, and no space for an adaptor, I had to choose one device to win the hallowed bedside charging position. Thanks to my desire to eke out one final hour of standing time to goose my activity tracking, the watch won. Continue reading...

In this hugely popular Battle Royale-style game, all nuance is gone – it’s nothing but rage and deathThe island of Erangel is kind of beautiful. It has rolling hills and lush valleys, and there are little villages dotted along the coastlines. Just one thing, though. Everyone here wants to kill you.This is PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), the hit online multiplayer game that sold more than 24m copies last year. Originally developed as a modification of the military shooting sim, Arma 2, it’s now a standalone release on PC and Xbox One and fans are obsessed with it. Inspired by the Hunger Games books and movies, as well as Kinji Fukasaku’s cult film Battle Royale, it sees 100 players being dropped on to the island, before searching for useful items such as backpacks, body armour and guns and then trying to kill each other. The last player standing wins. Continue reading...

This crowdfunded and croudsourced machine could offer something special if its niggles are ironed outOn paper the Eve V reads like it should be the king of Windows tablets – a Surface Pro but with more ports, longer battery life and more features.

News organisations say they have seen a steady drop off in Facebook referred traffic“Homepage. Even the word sounds old. We bring the news to your social feed.” A week ago this is what you would have found on the not-the-homepage of the millennial-focused video site Now This News. Icons for Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook guided viewers out on to the social web where the real action was. Click there now and it is a different story: social media icons have been relegated to the very bottom of the page, while stories like “Unicorn Noodles Are Now A Thing” and “Cape Town is Going to Run Out of Water” are plastered over Now This videos.The homepage is back, and not just for those chronically old people over 40, but for every news organisation that wants to survive falling off the great Facebook cliff of 2018. Because last week Facebook announced it was changing its recipe for the news feed – the stream of posts anyone sees when they open up their account – and that the net effect would be to promote more things posted by family and friends, and fewer things produced by publishers. Continue reading...

2006’s Hokusai-inspired video game is transformed in an exemplary HD rereleaseIf the American novelist Chuck Palahniuk skewered the almost-lie that money buys happiness with his quippy adage that the things we own end up owning us, the newly rereleased Ōkami (and pretty much every other video game in which you play God) spoils the idea that the life of a deity is in any way enviable. Sure, as the benevolent goddess Amaterasu, freshly incarnated as a white wolf, you have the power to change the world in extravagant ways, both galactic and molecular.With a flourish of that mystical calligraphic brush clenched between your fangs you can, for example, paint entire suns into the world, daub leaves back on to the branches of barren trees, or splotch a missing star on to a lapsed constellation. More often, however, you are a god of small things, engaged in the mundane busywork of answering the prayers of the villagers who live within your domain. With a swipe of the bristles you must light their fires, fix their bridges, repair their tools, replace their lost objects and, when cleaving passing demons in two, save their lives. To crib Palahniuk’s format: the god we follow ends up following us. Continue reading...

In the first of a new series on ideas and advances in science, nature and tech, we look at the innovations coming to this year’s Winter OlympicsSouth Korea boasts the speediest broadband in the world (an average of 28.6Mbps compared to the UK’s 16.9) and connectivity will be further boosted at Pyeongchang by the introduction of a 5G mobile network at games venues, courtesy of Intel. 5G delivers download speeds of 100Mbps (Stoke-on-Trent was recently crowned the town with the fastest 4G connection in the UK at 26.6Mbps). The tech giant is planning to show off the capabilities of its enormous mobile bandwidth by offering such delights as transcendent live streaming and unsurpassed live VR experiences to visitors. Continue reading...

The all-new flagship model from VW is a breath of fresh air. But will it make the grade in the corporate car park?Price £30,280

Service providers put out their best tariffs at set times of the year, but many users are failing to take advantage of them, says comparison siteBroadband providers put out their best deals at the end of the month or every three months when they want to push up their subscriber numbers, it has been claimed.A new analysis of broadband usage has found that the average household could save almost £180 a year by switching providers. However, the best deals are only available at certain times of the month, according to ctrlio, a website which compares tariffs according to use. Continue reading...

YouTube’s head of culture and trends on the evolution of viral videos, fake news – and the old-school joys of writing a bookYour YouTube colleague Robert Kyncl published Streampunks last year and now you have a book of your own. Why is everyone at YouTube writing books?

Inventor Hugo Spowers has a dream: to replace today’s cars with his own hydrogen prototype. Is the world ready?In the mid-1990s, Hugo Spowers ran a Formula Three racing team. At the time, motorsport was in the pocket of big tobacco. Every weekend, Formula One cars emblazoned with cigarette brands – Marlboro, Camel, Silk Cut – raced on TV in front of millions. “It was pretty clear it was killing people,” Spowers says. “Meanwhile, the industry was portraying a link between smoking and winners. It was ludicrous. But nobody was going against it.”So when, in 1995, Spowers’ team introduced a car decorated with an anti-smoking campaign, it caused a commotion. At a party the night before the car was set to debut at the British Grand Prix, the chairman of the British Racing Drivers’ Club summoned Spowers, outraged. “He bellowed at me for a full five minutes, about how motorsport needed its sponsors, and ‘not pinkos like you’,” Spowers says now, chuckling. But Spowers was unmoved: he knew he was right. Furthermore, he believed it made financial sense: the relationship with tobacco was tainting the sport for businesses that didn’t want to be associated with smoking. Continue reading...

Company says it removed more than 50,000 accounts and reported them to investigators, marking latest upward revision of figuresTwitter has admitted that more than 50,000 Russia-linked accounts used its service to post automated material about the 2016 US election – a far greater number than previously disclosed.Announcing the discovery in a post to its website late on Friday, the company said the posts had reached at least 677,775 Americans, all of whom would be receiving a warning by email. Continue reading...

Apple chief talks about tax affairs and overuse of tech at launch of school coding initiative

Appointment made before deadline for bids on rights to stream Premier League matchesFacebook is poised to appoint a senior broadcasting executive to lead its multibillion-dollar drive to secure streaming rights for top-flight live sport.The appointment of Eurosport’s chief executive, Peter Hutton, follows its global search for a head of live sport after being frustrated in a $600m (£433m) bid to secure streaming rights to Indian Premier League cricket matches. Continue reading...

PC, PlayStation 4; Joakim Sandberg/Konjak

The company’s hunt for a city to host its second headquarters has prompted a bizarre beauty contest, amid the promise of jobs and an economic boost

In the second instalment of this mini-series, Jordan Erica Webber asks: why are we losing our trust in institutions? And who we can trust instead?Subscribe and review on iTunes, Audioboom, Mixcloud, Acast or on your favourite podcasting app and join the discussion on Facebook and TwitterIs the internet broken? And has the utopian 90s net been replaced by digital feudalism, where a few powerful entities wield control over all of us digital serfs? In this series, Jordan Erica Webber looks at internet-enabled dystopia, and how even the technology designed to do good can end up causing harm. Continue reading...

Tony hates apps such as Cortana, Edge, Xbox, Groove and would like to uninstall them. But should he?

Malware developers have had to demand ransoms in local currencies as they attempt to not price their targets outBitcoin’s price swings are so huge that even ransomware developers are dialling back their reliance on the currency, according to researchers at cybersecurity firm Proofpoint.Over the last quarter of 2017, researchers saw a fall of 73% in payment demands denominated in bitcoin. When demanding money to unlock a victim’s data, cybercriminals are now more likely to simply ask for a figure in US dollars, or a local currency, than specify a sum of bitcoin. Continue reading...

Trend of biting into soap tabs for bragging rights elicits warnings from watchdogs, poison control centres and Procter & GambleGoogle has started clamping down on YouTube videos displaying the “Tide Pod challenge”, in which people record themselves intentionally biting into laundry detergent tabs to gain bragging rights.The trend, which reportedly started as a joke, has gone viral, eliciting warnings from watchdogs, poison control centres and Tide manufacturer Procter & Gamble. Now Google has stepped up its efforts, saying that it is actively removing videos portraying the potentially dangerous action. Continue reading...

Hogwarts Mystery, the first JK Rowling-inspired game since 2012, to be released this springHarry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery, a mobile game for iOS and Android from developer Jam City, will be released this spring.It will be the first Harry Potter video game since 2012’s Wonderbook: Book of Spells, for Sony’s PlayStation 3. It will also be the first game released under Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment’s new Portkey Games label, which the company set up last year. Announced via JK Rowling’s Pottermore site in November, Portkey Games will “work with talented creators to build games that focus on player-generated stories, which will live alongside the magical universe created by JK Rowling”. Continue reading...

Nintendo’s ingenious upcoming release for its Switch console uses augmented reality to make working cars, pianos and full-body robot suits – teaching coding and engineering principles through playNintendo has introduced a new product for its Switch games console: Nintendo Labo, an innovative augmented-reality game that turns cardboard models into fully functioning toys.Inside the Nintendo Labo box are 25 sheets of thick, brown, branded cardboard, and a little cartridge that pops into a Nintendo Switch console. Following Lego-like instructions on the Switch screen, you punch out the cardboard pieces and assemble them into contraptions of varying complexity. The first project, which takes maybe 15 minutes, is a simple little bug-like radio-controlled car; slot the Joy-Con controllers into its cardboard sides, pull up the controls on the Switch’s screen, and the vibrations send it juddering across a flat surface with surprising speed. Continue reading...

Apple chief Tim Cook says update for iOS will provide new option, but urges against using it for risk of sudden shutdown problemsApple will give users the option to turn off a feature that temporarily slows down older iPhones in order to prevent unexpected shutdowns, chief executive Tim Cook has said.The new option is likely to arrive in March, as part of the next update to iOS 11. “If you don’t want it, you can turn it off,” Cook told ABC News. The CEO maintains, however, that Apple “don’t recommend” users take advantage of the ability to disable the slowdown. Continue reading...

Despite losing 40% in a matter of weeks the cryptocurrency still has further to drop according to experts at Capital EconomicsBitcoin has all the hallmarks of a classic speculative bubble and even after almost halving in value in a matter of weeks it still has further to fall, according to a leading team of economists.As regulators in South Korea again signalled on Thursday that they were considering a ban on cryptocurrency exchanges, Capital Economics also dismissed claims that bitcoin and its imitators could replace established currencies as “rubbish”. Continue reading...

Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, as well as lawmakers, urged to prepare for foreign actors using US citizens to carry out violenceSocial media companies and lawmakers have been urged to prepare for a looming type of extremism born from foreign actors mobilising US citizens to carry out violent acts in their homeland.Speaking during a Senate committee hearing on extremist propaganda and social media, Clint Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, warned of foreign countries using the kinds of persuasive techniques previously used to recruit Islamist terrorists to manipulate political discourse and mobilise unwitting Americans to attack specific targets. Continue reading...

Users of Natural Cycles, first app certified as contraceptive method in Europe, identified among people seeking abortions at hospitalA much-hyped birth control app has been reported to Swedish authorities after a hospital found 37 cases of unwanted pregnancies among women relying on the app for contraception.Natural Cycles, a smartphone application that marries hi-tech algorithms with the old-fashioned rhythm method, last year became the first app to be certified as a contraceptive method in Europe. The app requires women to input their temperature every morning, then calculates the users’ menstrual cycle and informs them when they can have sex without protection. Continue reading...

Tech giant looks into spreading of disinformation after MPs criticised scope of first investigationFacebook has bowed to pressure from MPs and said it will deepen its investigation into whether Russian agents used the platform to spread fake news in the hope of influencing the Brexit vote.The social media giant told the digital, culture, media and sport committee that it would examine whether there were further clusters of accounts spreading disinformation, having previously been criticised for only conducting a limited investigation. Continue reading...

The cryptocurrency uses as much CO2 a year as 1m transatlantic flights. We need to take it seriously as a climate threatBitcoin’s electricity usage is enormous. In November, the power consumed by the entire bitcoin network was estimated to be higher than that of the Republic of Ireland. Since then, its demands have only grown. It’s now on pace to use just over 42TWh of electricity in a year, placing it ahead of New Zealand and Hungary and just behind Peru, according to estimates from Digiconomist. That’s commensurate with CO2 emissions of 20 megatonnes – or roughly 1m transatlantic flights.That fact should be a grave notion to anyone who hopes for the cryptocurrency to grow further in stature and enter widespread usage. But even more alarming is that things could get much, much worse, helping to increase climate change in the process. Continue reading...

Chrissy Chambers proposes to her new partner after winning civil claim against ex who posted videos online‘Revenge pornography’: follow Chrissy Chambers’ search for justiceA YouTube celebrity has won unprecedented damages against a man who uploaded “revenge pornography” videos of her to the internet.Chrissy Chambers, 26, celebrated her landmark victory on the steps of the High Court by proposing to her partner - who immediately said yes and called Chambers “the bravest, most incredible human being that I’ve ever met”. Continue reading...

The firm’s chief executive says his hands-on approach has paid off so far, but he’s not ready for a victory lap just yetThe secret to rekindling Sony’s return to form, according to the company’s chief executive, is personalisation – achieved not by the mass collection of customer data in the way some big tech firms do, but by eliciting an emotional response to its products.“Getting in close is the only way,” says Kaz Hirai, who took the helm of Sony five-and-half-years ago charged with turning the company around; he has succeeded, with Sony projecting its largest-ever annual operating profit of £4.2bn this year. Hirai is a passionate believer in the Japanese concept of Kando, which is about establishing an emotional connection across what Sony calls “the last one inch” to the consumer – the wow factor that creates enthusiasm and loyalty. Continue reading...

Platform to ensure top content meets ‘ad-friendly guidelines’ following unease at scandals, but some vloggers may lose incomeVideos from YouTube’s most popular channels are to be subject to human review, as the Google platform attempts to use advertising money to reign in content producers following a series of scandals.For the first time, the company will be pre-emptively reviewing large swaths of its content to ensure it meets “ad-friendly guidelines”, raising the bar for video creators who wish to run adverts on their content, while hoping to allay advertiser unease about the video-sharing website following scandals such as Logal Paul’s video of a dead body. Continue reading...

Bitcoin hits a four-week low before rebounding on Tuesday as South Korean statements send cryptocurrency markets yo-yoingThe price of bitcoin was sent plummeting 18% as it and other cryptocurrencies yo-yo in value over fears of a wider trading crackdown spurred by renewed potential of South Korean regulatory action.

Firm hopes to extend its market dominance further as Alexa-powered, 2.5in-screened smart speaker comes to UKAmazon is launching its small clock-like Echo Spot in the UK, as it continues to cement its market dominance.

Enrichment Commission for the French Language also prefers ‘fibronique’ for fiber opticsSmartphones may have become ubiquitous in France but the country’s language mavens hope there’s still time to keep the word from becoming ensconced in everyday speech.