Technology | The Guardian

Social network suspends thousands in the latest crackdown on state-sponsored propagandaTwitter said on Friday it had suspended thousands of accounts linked to a manipulation effort stemming from Saudi Arabia, in the latest crackdown on state-sponsored propaganda efforts.The social network said some 88,000 accounts being blocked were linked to Saudi state-backed “information operations” in violation of Twitter’s platform manipulation rules. Continue reading...

Left it a bit late? Here’s a quick list of good tech things for people of all agesLego Hidden Side – £25 Continue reading...

Company to clamp down on ads that portray taking part in the census as ‘useless or meaningless’Facebook plans to clamp down on attempts to use its services to interfere with the 2020 US census, including the posting of misleading information about when and how to participate, who can participate and what happens when people do.Facebook and other social media companies have been trying to tackle misinformation on their services, especially ahead of next year’s US presidential elections. Continue reading...

NSO Group malware may have been used to access WhatsApp messages for ‘state-on-state’ espionage

As internet use has surged, especially in developing world, so have attempts to switch off flow of informationOn Thursday, internet shutdowns came to the capital city of the world’s largest democracy.The suspension of data services, phone calls and texting to curb protests in parts of Delhi was an inauspicious milestone for a tactic that is becoming an increasingly common tool for authoritarian governments – but practised most often by India. Continue reading...

ECJ ruling on firm’s French operations marks a victory in fight to avoid more regulationAirbnb has secured a victory in its fight to avoid more regulation by city authorities after the European court of justice ruled that it acted as an “information society service” rather than a real estate agency.The EU court said the company did not require an estate agent’s licence to operate in France as it was mainly providing a tool for presenting and finding accommodation for rent rather than acting as a broker. Continue reading...

Words With Friends company admitted hack in September but size only now revealedMore than 170m usernames and passwords were stolen from the company behind Words With Friends in a hack this year, according to a breach monitoring site.Zynga, a social game developer that made its name with Farmville a decade ago and acquired Words With Friends a year later, admitted to the hack in September, telling users that cyber-attacks were “one of the unfortunate realities of doing business today”. Continue reading...

The Commodore 64 thrilled a generation of gamers in the 80s. Now it’s back (again), warts and allFirst released in 1982 – hot on the heels of its rival, Sinclair’s ZX Spectrum – the Commodore 64 became one of the most popular home computers of the 1980s. It was far from user-friendly by today’s standards – even demanding some code be entered just to load games – but it inspired a generation of future programmers and designers, many of whom went on to be influential game makers. At the peak of its popularity, factories were building 400,000 units a month to meet demand.In 2018, it made a comeback, reborn as a “microconsole” preloaded with games. A charming, half-scale replica, the C64 Mini could be plugged into a modern TV, providing access to 64 games. Unfortunately, it lacked two things so important to the Commodore 64 experience: a working keyboard and a decent joystick. Continue reading...

Michael struggles to find the search results he’s looking for, and would like some tips for better GooglingLast week’s column mentioned search skills. I’m sometimes on the third page of results before I get to what I was really looking for. I’m sure a few simple tips would find these results on page 1. All advice welcome. MichaelGoogle achieved its amazing popularity by de-skilling search. Suddenly, people who were not very good at searching – which is almost everyone – could get good results without entering long, complex searches. Partly this was because Google knew which pages were most important, based on its PageRank algorithm, and it knew which pages were most effective, because users quickly bounced back from websites that didn’t deliver what they wanted. Continue reading...

Kathryn Spiers says tech company is targeting employee activists who are pushing back against recent policy changesGoogle fired another employee activist on Friday, the fifth termination of an employee engaged in workplace organizing in less than a month.Kathryn Spiers, a 21-year-old security engineer who had worked for Google since February 2018, was suspended from work on 25 November – the same day that four other worker activists were fired for what the company described as “intentional and often repeated violations of our longstanding data security policies”. Continue reading...

Public-run +24 channel showed RT feature with the exiled Catalan separatist leaderSpain’s public broadcaster has inadvertently carried an interview with the exiled Catalan separatist leader Carles Puigdemont after hackers hijacked its online news channel and substituted its content for that of Russia’s state-backed RT network.The hack, which happened last Thursday, meant Spanish TV’s +24 channel showed RT’s interview between Puigdemont and the former Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa. Continue reading...

Many smartphone screens switch to warmer colours in the evening to help you sleep better – but research suggests the science behind this is all wrong‘Night mode” is one of those features you may be aware of only because your phone keeps telling you about it. At some point while you are lying in bed at night sending texts, your screen may politely suggest you activate a function that shifts the colours of your screen from the colder to the warmer end of the spectrum. It is supposed to help you sleep better.Findings in a study led by Dr Tim Brown and published in Current Biology suggest this is the very opposite of correct. The research, carried out on mice, appears to rubbish the notion that blue light disrupts sleep. All things being equal, warm yellow light is worse. Continue reading...

Our updated list of the top iOS and Android mobile phones – at the best prices right nowNeed a new smartphone but don’t know which one is the very best? Here’s a guide comparing the current top-end smartphones from Apple, Samsung, Huawei, OnePlus and others to help you pick the best handset for you.There has never been a better time to buy a new flagship smartphone with many quality handsets available at a wider range of prices than ever before. Whether your priority is two-day battery life, fantastic camera performance or a spectacular screen, there’s plenty to choose from. Continue reading...

Call centre workers who check how helpful our voice assistants are say they hear private conversations and couples having sex. Here’s how to avoid sharing your private lifeWalls have ears; you never know who might be listening. Except, increasingly, you do. Call-centre workers for companies such as Apple, Amazon and Google are hired to check recordings made by voice assistants including Alexa and Siri for accuracy and helpfulness.The disembodied computer that lives in a cylinder in the corner of your kitchen is actually piping a random sample of your requests to humans in Cork, Berlin, Barcelona and elsewhere around the world. But if you’re shocked, spare a thought for the poor workers themselves. Continue reading...

In the final episode of Chips with Everything, Jordan Erica Webber and Alex Hern reminisce about their favourite episodes from the last couple of years. Plus, as the decade draws to a close, the duo discuss their favourite tech stories of the past 10 years Continue reading...

Swedish vlogger and comedian to step back amid accusations of racism and antisemitismYouTuber PewDiePie has announced he will be taking a break from the video-sharing platform, saying he is “very tired”.With 102 million subscribers, the Swedish vlogger and comedian was for many years the platform’s most popular star but was overtaken earlier this year by T-Series, an Indian record label which now has around 120 million subscribers. Continue reading...

Algorithmic bias can be fixed more easily than the prejudices of people – so why do we still have a problem with it?One of the things that really annoys AI researchers is how supposedly “intelligent” machines are judged by much higher standards than are humans. Take self-driving cars, they say. So far they’ve driven millions of miles with very few accidents, a tiny number of them fatal. Yet whenever an autonomous vehicle kills someone there’s a huge hoo-ha, while every year in the US nearly 40,000 people die in crashes involving conventional vehicles.Likewise, the AI evangelists complain, everybody and his dog (this columnist included) is up in arms about algorithmic bias: the way in which automated decision-making systems embody the racial, gender and other prejudices implicit in the data sets on which they were trained. And yet society is apparently content to endure the astonishing irrationality and capriciousness of much human decision-making. Continue reading...

From new gaming consoles to activism at Apple, we predict the things you will – or won’t – see in tech this yearThis is an easy prediction to make, because even Tesla isn’t claiming that its eye-catching angular steel beast will be available for sale in 2020. The company’s own pitch is that production won’t even begin until 2021, with owners receiving their first shipments in 2022. But the gap is relevant to Tesla’s future: where the company was once genuinely ahead of the curve, in making beautiful electric cars that people wanted to buy, it has increasingly relied on beating its competitors to announcements, rather than actually shipping. The list of Elon Musk’s as-yet-unfulfilled promises grows every year – but the electric fleets of BMW, Ford, General Motors and others grow faster. Continue reading...

Advocates fear such ads could roll back decades of hard-won progress against HIV/Aids and are calling on Facebook to change its policiesSince late summer, many LGBTQ+ Facebook users’ newsfeeds have begun to display medically incorrect targeted advertising. These ads pertain to Truvada, a one-pill-a-day pharmaceutical that has been demonstrated to reduce the likelihood of HIV transmissions by as much as 99%, making it a key mechanism in the decades-long fight against HIV/Aids.“Side Effects from taking an HIV Drug …” reads one badly punctuated message, full of random capitalizations. “The manufacturers had a safer drug & kept it secret … They kept selling the dangerous one.” Continue reading...

Hackers are using two-way talk function to wake people up in the middle of the night and watch unsuspecting childrenHackers are tapping in to cameras intended for home security, talking to children through the devices and even dropping racist remarks, according to multiple news reports. The intended purpose of a two-way talk function on the devices is to allow parents to check in on their children. But hackers are using them to wake people up in the middle of the night, and watch unsuspecting children.Each time I've watched this video it's given me chills.

Players of the popular online shooter will be able to lay down their weapons and watch exclusive footageThe next trailer for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker will not be shown in the cinema or on TV – it will be in Fortnite.At the Game awards in Los Angeles on Thursday night, director JJ Abrams announced that exclusive footage from the film will be revealed live within the game on Saturday evening. Anyone playing the popular battle-royale shooter at that time will be able to head to the Risky Reels area of the map and watch on a large screen. Star Wars-themed outfits, gliders, pickaxes and emotes have been launched into the game’s item shop. Continue reading...

The machine previously known as Project Scarlett will be four times as powerful as Xbox One X with a range of next-gen featuresMicrosoft has revealed the name for its new games console – Xbox Series X. The machine, previously known by the codename Project Scarlett will launch in “Holiday 2020”, and will ship with a redesigned version of the Xbox wireless controller.The new name was announced during the annual Game awards in Los Angeles. At the event, a promotional trailer was shown for Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II, a sequel to the critically acclaimed adventure title from UK developer Ninja Theory, which is being designed to leverage the capabilities of the new technology. Continue reading...

Purchase of Oxford University spinoff gives Waymo its first presence in the UKWaymo, Google’s self-driving car sibling company, has acquired the Oxford artificial intelligence company Latent Logic for an undisclosed amount, giving Waymo its first presence in the UK.Latent Logic, a spinout company from Oxford University, specialises in “imitation learning”, teaching machines how to act by showing them examples of humans doing the same actions. It was founded in 2017 by the academics Shimon Whiteson and João Messias. Continue reading...

Prof Noel Sharkey says systems so infected with biases they cannot be trustedAn expert on artificial intelligence has called for all algorithms that make life-changing decisions – in areas from job applications to immigration into the UK – to be halted immediately.Prof Noel Sharkey, who is also a leading figure in a global campaign against “killer robots”, said algorithms were so “infected with biases” that their decision-making processes could not be fair or trusted. Continue reading...

Guardian analyses default push notifications for nine of biggest UK news apps

Elon Musk’s ‘pedo guy’ trial revealed that supposed equality between billionaires and mere mortals is a fictionBefore 1948, if a British duke, viscount or baron was accused of a felony, he was tried not alongside the common criminals in the Old Bailey, but by a jury of his peers in the House of Lords.I thought about that two-tiered system of criminal justice quite a bit last week, when I spent four days in a Los Angeles courtroom covering the civil defamation trial of Elon Musk. The Tesla and SpaceX chief had been sued by Vernon Unsworth, a British cave explorer who assisted with the Tham Luang cave rescue, for calling him a “pedo guy” on Twitter. Continue reading...

The alternative search engine markets itself on protecting users’ privacy, but is it worth using?So is DuckDuckGo no good? Surprised you did not mention it. MurrayFollowing last week’s article about privacy and surveillance capitalism, several readers wrote in about the absence of DuckDuckGo, and it was mentioned a dozen times in the comments. I have suggested this privacy-oriented search engine a few times since 2012, and I think it’s worth a go. However, I’m answering Murray’s earlier query along the same lines because I can use his email verbatim rather than cobbling together a joint question from multiple sources. Continue reading...

DIY wireless home security system is a great alarm that’s smart enough without trying to do too muchAmazon’s new Ring Alarm smartens up the traditional home security system without radically changing how it works, combining the best of both worlds into a DIY-friendly wireless alarm arrangement that just works.It’s been a 16-month wait in the UK since the Ring Alarm line of products launched in the US in July 2018, but it has been worth it. Continue reading...

You have been telling us about serious and funny accidents caused by your mobile phones and here is what some of you saidA study in the US has found that since the release of the first iPhone in 2007 phone-related injuries have risen dramatically. The types of injury varied in magnitude from batteries exploding to injuries sustained by walking into a lamppost. The researchers wanted to encourage users to be more aware of the dangers of dividing their attention between tasks, and to educate people on how to prevent such issues.We asked Guardian readers to respond with their own examples of phone-related injuries and were greeted with tales of punching chairs, football-style saves and black eyes. Here are some of our favourites: Continue reading...

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Communications minister to say digital platforms need to ‘take more responsibility’ on harmful content as new act proposed to boost online safetyThe Morrison government is putting internet giants on notice about cyberbullying, outlining a plan to tackle the problem in a new cyber safety consultation paper released by the communications minister.Cyber safety was one of the only fully formed policies Scott Morrison put forward during the May election campaign, with Paul Fletcher left to implement the proposal. Continue reading...

Faster processor, updated software and good screen make Amazon’s 10in hard to beat for £150Amazon’s cheap-but-good-enough media tablet gets a much-needed speed boost and updated software for 2019, doing just enough to make the Fire HD 10 still the budget tablet to buy for bigger-screen video watching.Now in their ninth-generation, Amazon’s Fire tablets follow a tried and trusted formula: undercut the competition on price with a good enough screen, good enough performance and Amazon’s version of Android, Fire OS, wrapped in a robust plastic body. Continue reading...

Company said ‘personal vendetta’ against Bezos, Amazon and the Washington Post cost it the cloud computing contractAmazon says Donald Trump’s “improper pressure” and behind-the-scenes attacks harmed its chances of winning a $10bn Pentagon contract.The Pentagon awarded the cloud computing contract to Microsoft in October. Continue reading...

Health datasets play a vital role in medical research. If the US has its way, the UK could lose a valuable public resourceAs a society, we are finally acquiring a healthy scepticism about the use and abuse of our personal information. New polling conducted by YouGov for the Institute for Public Policy Research shows that 80% of the public want to see tighter rules applied to how the likes of Facebook and Amazon use their data. Over the weekend, it was revealed that US pharmaceutical companies have already been sold data relating to millions of NHS patients and that Amazon, incredibly, has been given free access to NHS data Hidden away in the secret US-UK trade papers, leaked and revealed by Labour in November, is perhaps the biggest single threat to public data yet seen.Instead of the encroaching privatisation of publicly held data, we should be looking to create a “digital commons” Continue reading...

Murder, torture, child abuse: each day we see things that keep us awake at night. Yet Mark Zuckerberg calls us ‘overdramatic’You may have shrugged when you heard that some Facebook staff are suing the company over working conditions. But welcome to my world – content moderation – where we deal with the worst of humanity so you don’t have to. Naked migrants are being tortured with molten metal in Libya; Facebook’s quality assurance (QA) department is challenging whether that baby in Myanmar is dead; Dave and Doreen are using its report function as a weapon again. All their tedious posts end up on a screen in front of us, punctuated by atrocities, porn and distasteful jokes.Moderators make hundreds of decisions every day. It needs to be done by smart, well-adjusted people Continue reading...

Good sound, solid battery life and effective noise cancelling wrapped up in a tiny, potent packageApple’s true wireless earbuds have gone “pro” and in doing so deliver on the promise of the 2017 originals. The new AirPods Pro are worth the wait.Apple managed two pieces of magic in 2017 with the original £159 AirPods. They just worked without the skips, blips or audio delay, and came in a tiny battery case that kept them charged and safe – a combination that competitors still find hard to match. Continue reading...

Jordan Erica Webber looks at how Twitter’s plans to deactivate unused accounts raised a broader conversation around the intersection of technology and death Continue reading...

From a brilliant e-bike to a robot unicorn and a table lamp that doubles as a wireless speaker… the year’s top devicesThere’s more than meets the eye to these generic-seeming glasses. The Bose Frames contain a small pair of hidden speakers and sensors on their arms. In addition to music listening, you can use them to receive calls and interact with Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant. Continue reading...

When I ended up single in a small town, I turned to a dating app. But finding someone fully and messily human was harder than I thoughtI did not intend to be single in the rural village where I live. I’d moved there with my fiance after taking a good job at the local university. We’d bought a house with room enough for children. Then the wedding was off and I found myself single in a town where the non-student population is 1,236 people. I briefly considered flirting with the cute local bartender, the cute local mailman – then realised the foolishness of limiting my ability to do things such as get mail or get drunk in a town with only 1,235 other adults. For the first time in my life, I decided to date online.The thing about talking to people on Tinder is that it is boring. I am an obnoxious kind of conversation snob and have a pathologically low threshold for small talk. I love people who fall into the category of Smart Sad People Flaunting Their Intelligence With Panache. I love Shakespeare’s fools and Elizabeth Bennet and Cyrano de Bergerac. I love Gilmore Girls and the West Wing and Rick And Morty. I want a conversation partner who travels through an abundance of interesting material at breakneck speed, shouting over their shoulder at me: Keep up. I want a conversation partner who assumes I am up for the challenge, who assumes the best of me. Continue reading...

Documents, believed to be genuine, were used by Jeremy Corbyn to lambast Tory party

Amazon says in response it ‘strictly prohibits’ counterfeit products and invests heavily to protect customers from them

The company had cancelled plans for a headquarters in Queens 10 months ago, after backlash from residents and politiciansNew York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is “waiting on the haters to apologize” after Amazon announced it would open corporate offices in New York City after all, nearly a year after the internet giant abruptly reversed a decision to build a second headquarters there.Me waiting on the haters to apologize after we were proven right on Amazon and saved the public billions https://t.co/AC64pG0nZI pic.twitter.com/xzCepkX4AV Continue reading...

Vernon Unsworth’s legal team had sought at least $190m in damages after Tesla CEO called him ‘pedo guy’Elon Musk did not defame the British cave explorer Vernon Unsworth by calling him a “pedo guy” on Twitter, a Los Angeles jury found Friday.Musk shook hands with his lawyer at the close of the four-day trial in Los Angeles. He did not address Unsworth, whose team had told the court earlier on Friday the Tesla CEO should pay at least $190m in damages for his tweets about the diver. Continue reading...

A Los Angeles jury is expected to weigh in later on Friday whether the Tesla CEO defamed Vernon Unsworth on TwitterElon Musk should pay the British cave explorer Vernon Unsworth at least $190m in damages for calling him a “pedo guy”, Unsworth’s attorney argued in closing arguments of the Tesla CEO’s defamation trial.The amount of monetary damages came on Friday as the trial, which began on Tuesday, came to a close. The jury is expected to start deliberations later in the day. . Musk is in court for the final arguments, and his attorneys will respond on Friday. Continue reading...

The dating platform an analysis of user data and activity in the last year, that tells us how the world dated on the app in 2019Are you a vegan who likes kombucha? Are you real, lit, or looking for a real lit match? Do you even know what these words mean? If not, you probably need to lower your expectations on Tinder. Yesterday, the dating platform – which has an estimated 50 million users worldwide – released its Year in Swipe roundup: an analysis of user data and activity in the last year, that tells us how the world dated on the app in 2019.From Kombucha to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, we’ve gone through the data to tell you what people were talking about the most in 2019 on Tinder. Continue reading...

Xbox One (version tested), Switch, PC, PS4; Hello There Games/Wired Productions

Electoral commission admits it doesn’t have the resources to scrutinise covert campaigns to influence votersAustralia’s electoral authorities lack the resources and powers to investigate the opaque funding used to spread political ads on Facebook, an inquiry has heard.The use of paid political advertising on the social network has posed challenges for democracies across the globe, including Australia, because it can allow unknown sources to use money to influence voters. Continue reading...

The rideshare company released its first-ever safety report in the wake of a House committee calling for improved policyMore than 3,000 Uber passengers reported sexual assaults in 2018, the ride-sharing company revealed in its first-ever safety report on Friday. Nine passengers were murdered and 58 riders were killed in crashes last year, the report said.These incidents, which include 229 rapes, represent just a fraction of the more than 1.3bn rides Uber facilitated in the US in the past year, but they come at a time when the company is increasingly under scrutiny for worker and rider safety conditions. Continue reading...

Vernon Unsworth, who assisted in the Thailand cave rescue, had deemed Musk’s miniature submarine a ‘PR stunt’Elon Musk’s attorney pressured a British cave explorer to apologize for criticizing Musk’s miniature submarine, in the third day of Vernon Unsworth’s defamation trial.“Do you believe Mr Musk is so cold-hearted that he was sending over this sub with no regard for the children’s lives?” Bill Price asked Vernon Unsworth in a Los Angeles federal court on Thursday. “Are you willing to apologize to Mr Musk for saying that it was just a PR stunt?” Continue reading...