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The data protection bill must be amended so independent organisations acting in the public interest can help consumers to get proper redress

Ad-tech firm Criteo likely to cut its 2018 revenue by more than a fifth after Apple blocked ‘pervasive’ tracking on web browser SafariInternet advertising firms are losing hundreds of millions of dollars following the introduction of a new privacy feature from Apple that prevents users from being tracked around the web.Advertising technology firm Criteo, one of the largest in the industry, says that the Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) feature for Safari, which holds 15% of the global browser market, is likely to cut its 2018 revenue by more than a fifth compared to projections made before ITP was announced. Continue reading...

Company says it has ‘always looked out for kids’ after open letter from investors said it should do more to tackle children’s overuse of smartphonesApple says that it plans to make parental control tools more robust, following investor calls that it must take action against smartphone addiction in children.Two investors, collectively controlling $2bn (£1.48bn) in Apple stock, called out the company on Monday for not doing enough to help mitigate the growing concerns around the negative effects of smartphones and social media on the young, urging it to “play a defining role” in the health and development of children. Continue reading...

Class-action lawsuit led by fired engineer includes 100 pages of internal documents and claims conservatives are ‘ostracized, belittled, and punished’Google is facing renewed controversy over its alleged intolerance toward conservatives at the company, after a class action lawsuit filed by former engineer James Damore disclosed almost 100 pages of screen shots of internal communications in which employees discuss sensitive political issues.

Open letter highlights growing concern that Silicon Valley is damaging youth and urges new parental controls, child protection committee and release of dataTwo of the largest investors in Apple are urging the iPhone maker to take action against smartphone addiction among children over growing concerns about the effects of technology and social media on the youth.

Increased processor use occurred when company installed patches to fix flaws, leaving players of online battle game Fortnite unable to loginThe first real-world effects of processor vulnerabilities Meltdown and Spectre are beginning to show, due to fixes for the two megabugs which have the side-effect of slowing down cloud services worldwide.Online video game Fortnite is one of the worst hit, with the game’s creators attributing login issues and service instability to a 30 percentage point spike in processor use that occurred when the company installed the patches. Continue reading...

Cryptocurrencies that can make millionaires in minutes are justification enough to get out of bed at 5am to gambleBitcoin envy, the ultramodern malaise. News reports are full of this magic internet money’s rocketing value – currently $16,000 – and Facebook is dotted with people who picked some up at $500, $50 or even 50 cents. But the cryptocurrency ship hasn’t yet sailed. In the volatile market of alternative cryptos, relatively unknown alt-coins such as ripple, litecoin and ethereum regularly shoot up by hundreds of per cent in a matter of weeks, and plummet just as fast. Bitcoin envy has brought in vast sums of new money, dollar-eyed investors taking a Las Vegas gamble on which of the more than 1,000 alt-coins might rocket next. In September the cryptocurrency market cap was $137bn. Today it’s $800bn. It’s a blockchain gold rush.In mid-December a Facebook friend well-versed in crypto tipped Cardano’s ADA, which at 21 cents was just the tip I was after. Little did I know I was riding unarmed into a lawless digital wild west, where fortunes are made and lost on a tweet and every shill, trickster, bot and conman is using all the unregulated tricks in the book to make a fast buck. And this was undoubtedly my first rodeo. Continue reading...

This new Skoda is fast, dependable, exciting and brilliant value – who wouldn’t want to date its owner?Price: from £25,185

Amazon and Google believe they’ve struck gold with their voice-controlled speakers while Apple and Microsoft struggle to catch upMove over smartphones. The battle now raging between the big technology companies for consumer cash is focused on the voice-controlled smart speaker.Having already conquered the pocket with the ubiquitous smartphone, big tech has been struggling to come up with the next must-have gadget that will open up a potentially lucrative new market – the home. Continue reading...

One is an emotionally charged love story, the other is a swords-and-sorcery adventure. But they’re both exceptional story-driven games

Plaintiffs claim compensation for security flaws and alleged slowdown that fixing computers will cause, while corporations count cost of correctionsIntel has been hit with at least three class-action lawsuits over the major processor vulnerabilities revealed this week.The flaws, called Meltdown and Spectre, exist within virtually all modern processors and could allow hackers to steal sensitive data although no data breaches have been reported yet. While Spectre affects processors made by a variety of firms, Meltdown appears to primarily affect Intel processors made since 1995. Continue reading...

A series developed with the help of anthropologists and scientists teaches children about the country’s 87 indigenous groups, who speak 71 languagesIn a simple wooden hut on a Caribbean beach, a young girl sits at the feet of her grandmother, who is crocheting a brightly coloured shoulder bag whose intricate design draws on the mythology of the Wayuu people.It’s the opening scene from a smartphone game that seeks to educate Colombian children about their country’s endangered indigenous cultures.

Updates to protect against Meltdown flaw available for supported iPhone, iPad, Mac computers and Apple TV devices, with more protections being developed

CEO reveals this year’s ‘personal challenge’ as site faces relentless criticism over spreading of misinformation and damage to users’ mental healthAmid unceasing criticism of Facebook’s immense power and pernicious impact on society, its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, announced Thursday that his “personal challenge” for 2018 will be “to focus on fixing these important issues”.Zuckerberg’s new year’s resolution – a tradition for the executive who in previous years has pledged to learn Mandarin, run 365 miles, and read a book each week – is a remarkable acknowledgment of the terrible year Facebook has had. Continue reading...

Tim Gossling says that automation means the old capitalist model is no longer viable; Albert Beale writes that our drive for ‘efficiency’ is creating an increasingly inhumane world; plus letters from Keith Flett, John Wilson and Christine Weaser The Institute for Public Policy Research seems to think it is expounding some new ideas on the dangers of future technology (Poorest to fare worst in age of automation, 28 December), but in fact these ideas are half a century old. Norbert Wiener pointed them out in his book on Cybernetics, written in 1947 and published in 1948. His argument, in paraphrase, was that the first industrial revolution – the coming of steam power in the late 18th century – represented the devaluation of muscle, so that humans only found purpose as controllers of machines, in factories. The second industrial revolution, in the last century through automation and the digital economy, represents the devaluation of the human brain. If you devalue a man’s (or woman’s) muscles and also his brain, what has he got to sell in terms of his labour?The consequence is, as the IPPR points out, a hollowing out of the world of work. We shall still need design engineers, computer programmers and brain surgeons; we shall probably still need people to clean offices, streets and toilets. It is the middle-ranking jobs – the much derided “back-office jobs” – that are going. Does the Guardian still have a typing pool, I wonder? Continue reading...

What are Meltdown and Spectre? Do they only affect Intel chips? Will the fixes slow my computer … and what even is a processor?Meltdown and Spectre are the names of two serious security flaws that have been found within computer processors. They could allow hackers to steal sensitive data without users knowing, one of them affecting chips made as far back as 1995.

Everything from smartphones and PCs to cloud computing affected by major security flaw found in Intel and other processors – and fix could slow devices

Annabelle has been using an Apple iPod Shuffle but the battery is going. Is there a cheap and suitable music player she should replace it with?I am a blind young woman who absolutely loves listening to music. Does anybody out there know of any lightweight, blind-accessible alternatives to the iPod Shuffle? I have a first-generation Shuffle, which I purchased in 2008, and the battery dies after one hour. I want something that can be compatible with iTunes Music, especially .m4a files, that can store lots of music, and most important of all, that has an easy way to replace the battery. Also, I don’t want it to be too spendy, as right this moment, I don’t have hundreds of dollars. AnnabelleApple has discontinued the iPod Shuffle, but there are still lots of them available from other sources. Many are advertised as being brand new and still sealed in their boxes. Your simplest and least disruptive option is to buy a more recent Shuffle, or two, either “as new” or little used. Given that your last Shuffle lasted around nine years, this should also be a reasonably cost-effective option.

Price jumped 130% last year amid growth in use of derivatives products that allow investors to gamble on cryptocurrenciesThe growth in gambling on the yo-yoing value of cryptocurrencies using risky derivatives products has helped boost the profits of the financial spread betting firm Plus500.The London-listed company’s shares rose 130% in value last year and gained nearly another 25% on Wednesday after it said there had been increased interest throughout 2017 in cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin. Continue reading...

The UK boss of insurer Axa lays too much of the responsibility for providing electric car charging infrastructure at National Grid’s door, writes Mike Brown. Plus Nigel Trow says people should still learn to driveAmanda Blanc, Axa’s UK boss, lays too much of the responsibility for providing electric car charging infrastructure at National Grid’s door (Report, 1 January). Electricity privatisation removed National Grid’s obligation to plan provision of adequate generation capacity as the market was seen as a more efficient provider. National Grid is responsible for carrying energy from the generation companies to regional bulk supply points, where most of it is passed on to regional distribution companies’ infrastructure which feeds our homes and businesses.While the Grid will require reinforcement, additional supply points and consequent investment, the impact on the distribution networks is likely to be disproportionate; banks of superchargers will require cabling to industrial amounts of energy while slower and home chargers will add cumulative demands that may require reinforcement work at street level. Grid and distribution charges are moderated by Ofgem but on the basis that necessary capital investment costs are passed on to the customer, so there will be an impact on energy costs. Continue reading...

At last, a film that dares to show the positive side of living in virtual reality. Steven Spielberg’s future shocker, about people using VR to escape hell on Earth, promises to be everything The Matrix wasn’t

Chaotic roads, bad weather and reckless habits make the Russian capital one of the worst to drive, and its quest to build an autonomous car uniquely challengingIn certain sunny climes, self-driving cars are multiplying. Dressed in signature spinning sensors, the vehicles putter along roads in California, Arizona and Nevada, hoovering up data that will one day make them smart enough to run without humans.Besides perennial sunshine, those places share other common traits: wide, well-manicured roads, functional traffic enforcement, and agreeable local governments. That’s how Chandler, Arizona – a Phoenix suburb on nobody’s radar as of a few weeks ago – became the first US town to host autonomous cars on public streets without human safety drivers. Courtesy of Waymo, they’re expected to start carrying passengers within the next few months. Continue reading...

Brain-computer interfaces could change the way people think, soldiers fight and Alzheimer’s is treated. But are we in control of the ethical ramifications?At the World Government Summit in Dubai in February, Tesla and SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk said that people would need to become cyborgs to be relevant in an artificial intelligence age. He said that a “merger of biological intelligence and machine intelligence” would be necessary to ensure we stay economically valuable.

Ripple, also known as XRP, peaks at more than $100bn and surpasses Ethereum to become second most valuable cryptocurrency after bitcoinIf 2017 was the year of bitcoin, the pioneering cryptocurrency that neared $20,000 in December, will 2018 be the year of Ripple?Related: From the future of bitcoin to Facebook, 2018 in technology Continue reading...

Elon Musk sells all 50,000 plain black baseball caps showing the logo of his tunnelling firm, the Boring CompanyThe inventor and entrepreneur Elon Musk has proved that he can do more than just build futuristic cars and launch space programmes, having sold out an entire line of 50,000 hats in just over a month.The latest milestone for the businessman behind Tesla, SpaceX and a host of other tech companies came when Musk announced that every one of his “Boring” baseball caps had been snapped up. Continue reading...

Britain could miss out on autonomous vehicle revolution owing to the shortage of charging bays and National Grid limitationsA shortage of charging points and strain on energy supplies are now the main stumbling blocks to the rise of driverless electric cars, according to the UK boss of insurer Axa.Amanda Blanc said a lack of rapid charging bays and pressure on the National Grid have overtaken questions about accident liability as the biggest barriers to autonomous vehicles entering the transport mainstream. Continue reading...

Tech is one of the richest and most powerful industries in America – and it gets an awful lot wrong. So here’s some seasonal advice for Silicon Valley’s biggest beastsNew Year’s resolutions are crap. The entire exercise is rife with failure and self-loathing, and you, dearest, have no need to make any. You are already reading the Guardian. You are perfect exactly the way you are.Infinitely more fun than reflecting on one’s own shortcomings is diagnosing the problems of other, richer, more powerful entities. It is in that spirit that we have created a list of New Year’s resolutions for the tech industry. Our resolution will be to continue doing our best to hold them to account, which, like the most successful resolutions, is what we were already planning to do anyway. Continue reading...

Social networks and politics, the still unfulfilled promise of augmented reality, pay-to-play games: what might change in the year aheadBoth of the major smart home platforms have a long-running problem with “discoverability”: it’s very hard to let users know what their devices can do, particularly if they’re always improving thanks to rapid software updates. Continue reading...

An examination of the internet age suggests that we should cultivate the heresies of secrets and silenceDuring a commercial break in the 1984 Super Bowl, Apple broadcast an ad directed by Ridley Scott. Glum, grey workers sat in a vast grey hall listening to Big Brother’s declamations on a huge screen. Then a maverick athlete-cum-Steve-Jobs-lackey hurled a sledgehammer at the screen, shattering it and bathing workers in healing light. “On January 24th,” the voiceover announced, “Apple Computer will introduce the Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like [Orwell’s] Nineteen Eighty-Four.”The ad’s idea, writes Korean-born German philosopher Byung-Chul Han, was that the Apple Mac would liberate downtrodden masses from the totalitarian surveillance state. And indeed, the subsequent rise of Apple, the internet, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon and Google Glass means that today we live in nothing like the nightmare Orwell imagined. After all, Big Brother needed electroshock, sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, drugs and hectoring propaganda broadcasts to keep power, while his Ministry of Plenty ensured that consumer goods were lacking to make sure subjects were in an artificial state of need. Continue reading...

Most first encountered ransomware after an outbreak shut down hospital computers and diverted ambulances this year. Is it here to stay?For thousands of people, the first time they heard of “ransomware” was as they were turned away from hospitals in May 2017.The WannaCry outbreak had shut down computers in more than 80 NHS organisations in England alone, resulting in almost 20,000 cancelled appointments, 600 GP surgeries having to return to pen and paper, and five hospitals simply diverting ambulances, unable to handle any more emergency cases. Continue reading...

Male employee of UK-registered cryptocurrency exchange ‘safe, but stressed’ following capture by gunmenKidnappers in Ukraine have released an employee at a UK-registered cryptocurrency exchange after getting more than $1m (£750,000) in bitcoin as a ransom, an adviser to the Ukrainian interior minister told Reuters on Friday.Pavel Lerner, a leading analyst and blockchain expert, was seized by masked abductors on Boxing Day, according to a statement by his company, EXMO Finance, on its website. Continue reading...

The main use of quantum technology might not be to hack existing systems but to create unhackable communication networks of the futureThe Washington Post’s columnist David Ignatius moonlights as a pacey novelist. His latest book, The Quantum Spy, is a thriller that touches upon the space race of our times: the great power contest to develop a quantum computer, able to work so fast that it can crack today’s uncrackable codes. Such a machine would be revolutionary. Modern e-commerce depends on encryption to protect confidential information. It is used to authenticate our identities and ensure the integrity of the data. To be able to break such codes would expose us all. Ignatius’s fiction is grounded in fact: the US National Institute of Standards and Technology thinks that within 15 years the first quantum computer will emerge to defeat the most prevalent forms of encryption.However, cryptography remains a game of cat and mouse between codemakers and codebreakers. As fast as one group creates codes, another tries to break them. Unbreakable ciphers sometimes fall short. “Post-quantum cryptography” already exists, even before quantum computers do. Earlier this year academics suggested, controversially, that they had solved the maths to make “quantum-resistant” the main cryptography used on the internet. The main use of quantum technology might not be to hack existing systems but to create unbreakable protection for communication networks of the future. China claims to have launched such a network this year. Continue reading...

US firm admits it introduced feature, that affects the iPhone 6, 6S, 7 and SE, without users’ consent to cope with ageing batteries

Wild-living nomads, artists, actors, singers, cricketers and refugees – here is a stunning selection of images, from Gina Miller and Steve Coogan to Ed Sheeran, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Jeremy Corbyn, Cardi B and Fenella Fielding Continue reading...

In a year filled with depressing news alerts and Trump tweetstorms, moments of sheer joy online were hard to come by – but there were a fewUnless you’re a corporation hoarding billions of dollars in offshore tax shelters, 2017 has not been a good year.From Trump’s Twitter tantrums to the constant stream of alerts about natural disasters, the news has offered little in the way of happy distraction. Continue reading...

Buyers take stake of about 17.5% in ride-hailing company that has gone through a turbulent yearA consortium led by SoftBank Group Corp has successfully bought a large number of shares in Uber in a deal that values the ride-hailing/food delivery firm at $48bn (£36bn), Uber said on Thursday.

Claims of Russian meddling dominated 2017. The US midterm elections will be first big test of Facebook’s effort to stamp it outSocial networks spent much of 2017 slowly coming to terms with the extent to which their platforms had been exploited to spread political misinformation. But the narrow focus of investigations over the last year is likely to cause further pain in 2018, as the US midterm elections create a new urgency for the problem to be solved.At the beginning of this year, Facebook was hostile to the suggestion that it may have played an unwitting part in a foreign influence campaign. After the election of Donald Trump, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, described the suggestion that his site may have swayed voters as a “crazy idea”, despite evidence that hoaxes and lies had been spread on the social network during the campaign. (He later apologised for the comment, saying it was “dismissive and I regret it”.) Continue reading...

Move comes less than two weeks after high-profile digital currency exchange in Seoul was hacked and went bankruptBitcoin plunged by more than $1,000 (£740) on Thursday after South Korea said it was planning a crackdown on trading in the digital currency in the latest of a string of warnings for investors.It dropped to about $13,500 after trading at about $15,400 on Wednesday. The dip was seen as a further illustration of bitcoin’s volatility. Continue reading...

If this year’s $120m juicing flop gave you reason to doubt in human ingenuity, take heart in these incredible inventions to come: from an artificial kidney to a breast pump you might actually want to use

The system of ‘loot box’ gaming is perfectly pitched to profit from players and drive addiction, with all its associated costsIn a tale of gambling addiction posted to Reddit shortly before Christmas, the numbers were as shocking as they were unsurprising. First the anonymous addict frittered away $200 (£149), in November 2016. Then $700 more, later that month. Then $300, $400, $1,500 … eventually, by December 2017, a credit card debt of $16,000, too large to be kept a secret any longer. It’s a painful narrative, one that’s not softened through repeated telling.What might be more surprising is the particular type of gambling under discussion. This man hadn’t lost his money betting on football, or feeding notes into a fixed-odds betting terminal. He had been playing the mobile video game Final Fantasy: Brave Exodus (FFBE), a free-to-play game for android and iOS based on the Final Fantasy series. Continue reading...

This year, Facebook turned on its notification function for attacks in London and Las Vegas, Stockholm and St Petersburg. But do we feel more secure?You know the drill by now: a terrorist atrocity or catastrophe occurs in your home town, and no sooner have you seen the news than you receive a Facebook notification that one of your friends has marked themselves safe, or that another is asking you to do so.This was my experience during the attack in Westminster in March, with friends as far away as Canada asking me to declare myself “safe”. Clicking on Facebook’s nagging notification revealed 31 of my friends were apparently out of danger, but a further 249 were “not marked as safe”. Continue reading...

Sam’s old Dell has failed and she urgently needs a replacement. Happily there are lots of attractive options for less than her £800 budge …My seven-year-old Dell desktop has died and I need urgently to buy a new PC. It is a family computer but I also use it for work, for processing photos that I take professionally, and creating photobooks. Otherwise, my husband has 333GB of music, and we have also have email and web-surfing needs. I’m looking to spend £800-ish. Please help, it’s a minefield out there. SamBuying a new desktop PC is one of today’s simpler computer problems. The main decisions are about size, speed, source and price, though not necessarily in that order. There aren’t any tough technology decisions, because we already know the best options. The main barrier is the ability, or willingness, to pay for them.

Machines threaten jobs generating £290bn in wages and could widen inequality gap, according to IPPR

A series of attacks on government agencies, TV and banking networks convinced Seoul to develop an elite cadre of experts to defend the countryAt the fortified border between South and North Korea, students on a computer hacking course are instructed to peer northwards across a strip of empty land toward the enemy state.“Our country is divided and we are at war, but you can’t see that division in cyberspace,” said Kim Jin-seok. “So we take them to see it in person.” Continue reading...

Amid criminal investigations, the #DeleteUber campaign and accusations of sexual harassment, it’s been a rocky road for the service Continue reading...

Cryptocurrency heads back over $16,000 after losing more than 30% of its value in one day and sinking as low as $12,000Bitcoin bounced back over $16,000 on Boxing Day, recovering some of the ground lost in a pre-Christmas rout that pushed its price down below $12,000.Bitcoin is the first, and the biggest, "cryptocurrency" – a decentralised tradable digital asset. Whether it's a bad investment is the big question . Bitcoin can only be used as a medium of exchange and in practice has been far more important for the dark economy than it has for most legitimate uses. The lack of any central authority makes bitcoin remarkably resilient to censorship, corruption – or regulation. That means it has attracted a range of backers, from libertarian monetarists who enjoy the idea of a currency with no inflation and no central bank, to drug dealers who like the fact that it's hard (but not impossible) to trace a bitcoin transaction back to a physical person. Continue reading...

The Winter Olympics, Wimbledon, the World Cup and Premier League football will drive 4K into the mainstream – but HDR will remain nicheDuring Black Friday and the run up to Christmas , discounted TVs have been advertised with buzzwords such as 4K, UltraHD and HDR banded around as the latest and greatest thing – but is now the right time to buy one?Having been burned by 3DTV and then annoyed by often rubbish smart TVs, you could be forgiven for thinking that 4K and HDR are the next big forgettable fad. Continue reading...

As the number of Guardian supporters continues to grow, we look at independent publications with their own take on membership modelsAfter the Guardian wrote three weeks ago about the collapse of independent media all around the world, it quickly became apparent that was only half the story.Press freedom is at its lowest ebb this century. Authoritarian rulers and an economic rout have combined to drive hundreds of titles out of business.

Scandal at Uber, the backlash against Facebook, smartphone addiction: west coast editor Merope Mills shares the Guardian stories that captured the moodThe utopian dream of Silicon Valley is no more – 2017 made sure of that. Every month has brought fresh scandal to the titans of the industry, from Russian interference to sexual harassment; from Uber’s never-ending woes to YouTube’s advertising scandals.