Technology | The Guardian

A look at some of the most interesting discussion today, including around Cambridge Analytica and Facebook revelations

From the savagery in Salisbury to ‘dark social ads’, Russia’s hybrid warfare is here and needs a swift response. US law may have the answerThe Observer’s remarkable exposé of Cambridge Analytica must now bring down the curtain on the permissive environment for online electoral sabotage. It’s time for new laws, starting with a new UK version of the Honest Ads Act proposed in Congress, so voters finally learn who is targeting them with what “news” – and who’s writing the cheques. And that’s the amendment I’ll propose to the data protection bill this week.It’s not just the revelations about Cambridge Analytica that require us to act. The savagery in Salisbury brings with it a new truth. “Hybrid war”, fought for five years without mercy in the Ukraine, Crimea and the Baltics, has now arrived on our shores. Continue reading...

We can’t all go and live in the woods, of course. But if we resist debt, resist gadgets, and reconnect with nature, the world might just changeHaving once been an early adopter of tech, I was an unlikely early rejector. But it has now been over a year since I have phoned my family or friends, logged on to antisocial media, sent a text message, checked email, browsed online, took a photograph or listened to electronic music. Living and working on a smallholding without electricity, fossil fuels or running water, the last year has taught me much about the natural world, society, the state of our shared culture, and what it means to be human in a time when the boundaries between man and machine are blurring.My reasons for unplugging, during that time, haven’t so much changed as shifted in importance. My primary motives were – and still are – ecological. The logic was simple enough. Even if used minimally, a single smartphone (or toaster, internet server, solar panel, sex robot) relies on the entire industrial megamachine for its production, marketing and consumption. Continue reading...

Digital campaigns have evolved from banner ads 20 years ago to Cambridge Analytica harvesting our Facebook data. Has the rise of micro-targeting become a threat to democracy?

Fitness trackers are the boring cusp of the quantified self movement – but surely the true self can’t be found through wearable techThe latest product from Fitbit is called Ace. It is designed for children aged eight to 13 years old, and will help parents monitor their offspring’s health. (“Ace”, to my ears, sounds like the online username of a predatory catfish, but let’s leave that to one side.) I’m not sure how it will work – presumably there’s a gamification element for the kids, socially sharing movement and sleep levels, and rewarding healthy choices. Or maybe it simply electrocutes them if they go into a fried chicken shop.As any right-thinking person knows, technology peaked with the invention of the pyramid teabag. But only a fool wouldn’t admit to the sophistication of activity trackers like Fitbit. Embedded with accelerometers and altimeters, they disapprovingly calculate the number of stairs climbed, calories consumed and breaths taken, producing in-app graphs that prove you are a human sausage who will die at the desk of a job you hate. The scrutiny doesn’t end there. Fitbit has announced that it is looking into sensors that can track sleep apnea. Apple wants its earbuds to measure how much we sweat. Wearable blood glucose meters are being piloted, and in a few months, we will see personal hydration monitors on sale. This year, the sound of summer will be a wristband nagging you to put down the WKD and slam a Robinsons fruit shoot instead. Better than Ed Sheeran, I suppose. Continue reading...

UK arm – which earns about 10% of app’s global ad revenues – is forecast to bring in £181mSnapchat is so popular in Britain that its advertising revenue will overtake Twitter’s UK revenue in 2019, and revenue from consumer magazine and cinema advertising within two years.The seven-year old phone app is hugely popular with younger users, many of whom have flocked from older social media platforms such as Facebook, and advertisers are beginning to spend increasingly large amounts of their digital ad budgets on targeting its users.

Technological addiction was a problem even in the early days of computer programming, according to Dave Smith, while Peter McKenna says search engine algorithms alone are not to blame for gender biasI found Moya Sarner’s article on digital addiction and her story of Lady Geek’s reverse ferret from digital guru to prophet of doom absorbing, timely, and somehow familiar (Is it time to fight the digital dictators?, 15 March). She also quotes Professor Mark Griffiths, director of the International Gaming Research Unit at Nottingham Trent University as having invented the term “technological addiction” in 1995. In 1971 I started a degree in maths, electronics and physics at Chelsea College, University of London which involved a certain amount of programming on the college’s Elliott 803 mainframe.I remember clearly our lecturer warning us very sternly about the dangers of getting over-involved in programming, quoting the case of an earlier student who had spent so many nights in the computer room, addicted to getting his programs just-so, that he neglected all his other studies and eventually failed to make progress in anything. Remember that this was back in the days when our programs were written in Fortran on decks of hand-punched 80-column cards. Continue reading...

According to the Internal Revenue Service, anything purchased using a digital currency is liable to be taxed as a capital gainThe rollercoaster ride for some cryptocurrency investors could be about to take another tax-time lurch, according to experts, as the taxman looks for his share of transactions made using bitcoin and its like.Wild fluctuations in the value of digital currencies – bitcoin surged from less than one dollar in 2010 to $997 at the start of the 2017 to nearly $20,000 before settling back to around $8,500 on Friday – have exposed investors to tax bills the value of their coins may no longer meet. Continue reading...

Once the International Space Station is decommissioned in 2028, what will the next generation of orbital bases look like?

Only a handful of these stunning track cars are going to be built, but that won’t stop millions of us lusting after themAston Martin Valkyrie AMR Pro hypercar

The founder of the screen repair initiative is a judge for the Observer’s New RadicalsCracked It, a social enterprise staffed by young ex-offenders, and whose founder is a judge of the Observer New Radicals initiative, has been named social enterprise of the year.The project, a smartphone-repair service which employs young ex-offenders and tries to turn young people away from gangs, was recognised at the Centre for Social Justice Awards last week. Cracked It was tipped as a rising star of 2017 by the Observer last year. Continue reading...

The algorithm used in the Facebook data breach trawled though personal data for information on sexual orientation, race, gender – and even intelligence and childhood traumaThe algorithm at the heart of the Facebook data breach sounds almost too dystopian to be real. It trawls through the most apparently trivial, throwaway postings –the “likes” users dole out as they browse the site – to gather sensitive personal information about sexual orientation, race, gender, even intelligence and childhood trauma.A few dozen “likes” can give a strong prediction of which party a user will vote for, reveal their gender and whether their partner is likely to be a man or woman, provide powerful clues about whether their parents stayed together throughout their childhood and predict their vulnerability to substance abuse. And it can do all this without an need for delving into personal messages, posts, status updates, photos or all the other information Facebook holds. Continue reading...

When these young entrepreneurs bought a remote ski resort in Utah, they dreamed of an exclusive, socially conscious community. Is this the future, or Mt Olympus for Generation Me?Jeff Rosenthal is standing near the top of his snow-covered mountain wearing a fluffy jacket, fingerless gloves and ripped jeans. “It’s surreal, man!” he says, shivering as he surveys the landscape of newly laid roads and half-built homes. “That’s Ken Howery’s house, the co-founder of PayPal. Awesome house!”

Recreate a galaxy far, far away on your kitchen table; compete to dominate a woodland canopy; or beat rival Japanese artists in a race to paint the emperor in our roundup of this month’s new board games

Searches starting ‘video of’ returned autocomplete suggestions of sexual videos and child abuse contentFacebook has been forced to apologise after it spent hours suggesting bizarre, vulgar and upsetting searches to users on Thursday night.The social network’s search suggestions, which are supposed to automatically offer the most popular search terms to users, apparently broke around 4am in the UK, and started to suggest unpleasant results for those who typed in “video of”. Continue reading...

Working for a tech company may sound like all fun and ping-pong, but behind the facade is a ruthless code of secrecy – and retribution for those who break itOne day last year, John Evans (not his real name) received a message from his manager at Facebook telling him he was in line for a promotion. When they met the following day, she led him down a hallway praising his performance. However, when she opened the door to a meeting room, he came face to face with members of Facebook’s secretive “rat-catching” team, led by the company’s head of investigations, Sonya Ahuja.

This month, MIT scientists published a paper that found lies spread six times faster than real news on Twitter. This week, Jordan Erica Webber tries to understand why this happensSubscribe and review: Acast, Apple, Spotify, Soundcloud, Audioboom, Mixcloud. Join the discussion on Facebook, Twitter & email us as podcasts@theguardian.comPeople don’t spread rumours any more, they spread fake news. One of the most widely used phrases throughout the 2016 US presidential election, “fake news” was named Collins dictionary’s word of the year for 2017, and it’s still going strong. This has left some people questioning the validity of every story that pops up on their social media feeds. Continue reading...

Court records reveal company says women must settle through arbitration, a move critics say stops the public from learning of rapes

Thinktank that helped ministers draft rules to verify ages says it is unlikely site would be blockedTwitter and other social media companies have so far refused to engage with the government’s plans to introduce age checks to limit underage access to online pornography, an organisation that strongly influenced the rules has said.Lord Erroll, a crossbench peer who chairs the Digital Policy Alliance (DPA) – a thinktank that has collaborated with the government to draft the rules on age verification (AV), admitted the ultimate sanction intended for sites that fail to implement AV is unlikely to be applied to Twitter. Continue reading...

CEO Daniel Ek presents 3 April launch on New York stock exchange as bid to save music business from piracyThe music streaming service Spotify has told investors it can become profitable and fend off bigger rivals such as Apple and Amazon, as it announced its shares will begin trading on the New York stock exchange on 3 April.Executives of the 12-year-old company said it had a user base of more than 100 million, with a higher percentage of paid subscribers than “freemium” listeners, who get music streamed free with ads, which is helping to drive more revenue to performers and copyright holders. Continue reading...

PayPal co-founder says regulators envy industry’s success in US: ‘There are no successful tech companies in Europe’European regulators are clamping down on Silicon Valley companies because they are “jealous” of the success of the technology industry in the US, according to PayPal co-founder and investor Peter Thiel.Speaking about the looming threat of regulation for these companies, Thiel said that the “threat is probably greater in Europe” and there are “good reasons and bad reasons”.

Smartphones are only part of the picture; sleep problems are both cause and consequence of social disadvantageObesity used to be regarded as a disease of affluent societies. In a sense, of course, this is true: you cannot be obese if you cannot afford enough calories. But we now understand that the story is more complex, and that children from low-income groups are more likely to be obese than those from the highest-income groups.Our understanding of sleep deprivation has yet to see a similar evolution. Almost half the British population say they get six hours’ sleep a night or less, compared with around a twelfth in 1942. Experts blame developments such as electrification and the proliferation of entertainment; one neuroscientist went so far as to warn of a “catastrophic sleep-loss epidemic” recently. We need sleep for mental and physical recovery; for cognitive control, memory and learning. Sleep loss is associated with everything from obesity and Alzheimer’s disease to diabetes and poor mental health. Continue reading...

Ride-hailing app bids to prove its fitness to operate by becoming a ‘better partner’Uber is to share data from journeys made in London, as it bids to be what it terms a “better partner” and reclaim its licence to operate in the capital.The ride-hailing service said information arising from aggregating millions of journeys would help London planners in their work. Continue reading...

Kazuma Kiryu’s final outing is an emotionally charged tale of familial bonds and the violence that threatens to rip them asunderA video-game character’s story is often over after a single game; only a lucky few get to hang around longer. Few can equal Yakuza star Kazuma Kiryu’s run. His story stretches back to the PlayStation 2, spanning six games set all over modern-day Japan, two period spinoffs and a zombie-themed offshoot. In the pitiless Tokyo underworld of the Yakuza games, gangsters’ lives are often cut brutally short – but this is one goodbye that’s rare and special.To his chagrin, Kiryu is drawn back to Kamurocho, the Tokyo nightlife district where he made his name as one of the city’s most feared and respected figures in 2005’s first Yakuza game. This is a city constantly under renovation, overhauled every few years as technologyimproves. Kiryu might be reluctant to return to Tokyo, but for players it is a pleasure. At night especially, it feels alluring and dangerous, a maelstrom of neon and noise. You’ll bump into salarymen letting their hair down and youths staring at their phones, as well as groups of prowling thugs with suits as loud as the clamour and thumping beats emanating from clubs and pachinko parlours. Continue reading...

Adele wants to improve her backup options and has read that NAS devices are her best bet. It ain’t necessarily soI use a 1TB USB hard drive – it’s connected to my wifi router – as the main storage for my home laptop and mobile. I don’t have a secondary backup and have read that NAS drives are a better option for this. Would this be OK as backup storage? I also have some documents/pictures on OneDrive. AdeleThe most important thing to remember about hard drives is that they fail. In fact, the seven-year-old 2TB USB drive I was using to backup my desktop PC failed on Saturday. That wasn’t a problem because my PC’s hard drive was still fine and I had my 2TB backup backed up to an 8TB USB drive. (The 8TB drive also backs up the backups to two laptops.) On Monday, I replaced the dead drive with a new 4TB USB 3.0 drive, because you can never have too much backup space, and it’s really not worth buying anything smaller. Continue reading...

Bored of normal board games? A San Francisco company has developed a tablet system to ride the resurgence in tabletop gamingSan Francisco-based company Blok.Party has developed a new way to play board games using blockchain technology: the PlayTable, a hybrid of video games console and table-sized tablet.Designed to enhance the experience of playing tabletop games, the system will launch with digital versions of popular board games such as Catan, Ticket to Ride and Texas Hold ’Em, and a bespoke game called Battlegrids that illustrates how blockchain tech can change how you play. Continue reading...

The rebooted action heroine channels the spirit of Indiana Jones – and creepy daddy issues – in a dull, derivative rompDave Allen once said that men know they’re getting older when they watch Sunset Boulevard and realise they find Gloria Swanson quite attractive. Similarly, a certain generation will sense the grim reaper’s presence now that Angelina Jolie is no longer the screen face of Lara Croft, because the mantle has passed to Alicia Vikander.This Lara is notably more serious and sensitive, and unlike Jolie, or the figure in the 90s video game – or indeed Karen Gillan in the new Jumanji movie – she doesn’t have to wear cute shorts or revealing clothes, which is fair enough. But she does an awful lot of very pathetic and borderline creepy daddy-daughter pining for that all-important man in her life. It’s a fantastically lacklustre appearance from Dominic West as the stately parent from a stately home, the daring anthropologist “Lord Richard Croft” (the son of a duke or earl, perhaps?). Continue reading...

Data protection watchdog forces firm to sign an undertaking declaring it will not share user data with parent company before GDPRThe UK’s data protection watchdog has concluded that WhatsApp’s sharing of user data with its parent company Facebook would have been illegal.

Ads for cryptocurrencies, ICOs, wallets and exchanges will be blocked from June to prevent scams, following Facebook’s move in JanuaryGoogle will ban all adverts for cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin and initial coin offerings (ICOs), as it seeks to “tackle emerging threats”.

Nectome offers to preserve grey matter through ‘vitrifixation’ process tested on rabbits – but doesn’t have a method for uploading brains yetA US startup is promising to upload customers’ brains to the cloud using a pioneering technique it has trialled on rabbits.The only catch, according to the company’s cofounder? The process is “100% fatal”. Continue reading...

A small number of companies have become extraordinarily rich by harvesting our data. But that wealth belongs to the manyGoogle knows you’re pregnant. Spotify knows your favorite throwback jams.Is this convenient or creepy? It depends. One minute, you’re grateful for the personalized precision of Netflix’s recommendations. The next, you’re nauseated by the personalized precision of a Facebook ad. Continue reading...

Platform plans to launch a feature ‘in the coming months’ that will flag disinformation with additional info from WikipediaYouTube will flag conspiracy theory videos with additional information from Wikipedia in an effort to tackle the spread of disinformation on its platform.The feature, which will launch “in the coming months” will at first focus on “well-known” conspiracy theories that have significant debate on YouTube, for example videos suggesting that Nasa’s Moon landing was a hoax. Continue reading...

IMF chief says cryptocurrency’s own blockchain technology could be used to control itChristine Lagarde has called for a crackdown on bitcoin by using the technology behind the digital currency to “fight fire with fire”.The head of the International Monetary Fund said authorities around the world could harness the potential of cryptocurrencies to help bring them under control, warning that failure to do so would allow the unfettered development of a “potentially major new vehicle for money laundering and the financing of terrorism”.

Two-person, 110mph electric craft made by Google co-founder’s drone company begins regulatory approval process in New ZealandAutonomous flying taxis just took one big step forward to leaping off the pages of science fiction and into the real world, thanks to Google co-founder Larry Page’s Kitty Hawk.

Video games have often attracted moral outrage from religious groups. But the clergy are increasingly interested in how they can be used to explore spirituality in a Christian settingPut your screens away and worship God, I was often told on Sundays. Video games and church don’t mix. When they do, it’s usually fuelled by outrage or misunderstanding – PlayStation game Resistance: Fall of Man’s use of Manchester Cathedral for a violent gun battle in 2007 led to legal threats from the Church of England and an apology from Sony.

‘Facebook has now turned into a beast’, says United Nations investigator, calling network a vehicle for ‘acrimony, dissension and conflict’Facebook has been blamed by UN investigators for playing a leading role in possible genocide in Myanmar by spreading hate speech.Facebook had no immediate comment on the criticism on Monday, although in the past the company has said that it was working to remove hate speech in Myanmar and ban the people spreading it. Continue reading...

‘Virtual newsstand’ lets users read about 200 digital titles for a monthly subscription feeApple is to buy the digital magazine service Texture, which lets users read titles for a monthly subscription fee.The “virtual newsstand” gives readers online access to current and back issues of about 200 titles, including Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Vogue and Cosmopolitan, for a monthly fee of $9.99 (£7.19). Continue reading...

Humans must prioritise the colonisation of Mars so the species can survive in the event of a third world war, the SpaceX and Tesla founder, Elon Musk, said on Sunday.'It’s important to get a self-sustaining base on Mars because it’s far enough away from Earth that [in the event of a war] it’s more likely to survive than a moon base,” Musk said on stage at SXSW. It came days after Donald Trump announced plans to meet the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, in an attempt to defuse rising nuclear tension

Businessman wants links to articles about his criminal past to be removed from search engineA second businessman who wants links to articles about his criminal past removed from search engine results has launched a high court fight.The man, known as NT2, was convicted more than 10 years ago of conspiracy to intercept communications, a high court judge has been told.

Becoming first British politician to speak at SXSW tech conference in Texas, Khan will warn of abuse online and breakup of rights by sharing economyThe UK government is guilty of a “dereliction of duty” for leaving big technology firms unregulated, London mayor Sadiq Khan will warn, saying that no firm or industry is “above local rules”.Speaking on Monday at the South by South West technology conference in Austin, Texas - the first British politician to do so - Khan will criticise politicians for failing to ensure technological progress benefits all, saying that regulation is clearly out of date. Continue reading...

Violent, isolationist and misogynist desires course through games – and push rightwing ideologies on playersDonald Trump’s claim, in the aftermath of the Florida school shooting, that these events are the result of violent video games, resurrects old arguments about whether young people emulate the games they play. The World Health Organisation’s (WHO) recent decision to consider video game addiction an official illness shows comparable concern. However, these responses demonstrate anxiety about the right things for the wrong reasons.Gaming cultures are connected to violence – but should be considered in terms of the rise of far right political discourse and the prominence of “alt-right” misogyny and racism. While Trump is firmly on the right and the WHO may embody normative centrism, there is an aspect of gaming that should worry the progressive left. Continue reading...

Experts believe that how we handle finances is shaped by the age of seven – and board games and apps can helpThe cost of a mortgage or rents, meeting monthly utility bills, shelling out for a new car – all headaches most people get to worry about from their 20s. But while some may struggle to pay their bills after a few too many nights out at the start of the month, others will have a tightly followed plan for their repayments.So what is the difference between the savvy saver and the more knee-jerk spender? Continue reading...

Alibaba-backed Ofo targets 150,000 bikes in London alone as Tencent-sponsored Mobike expands in ManchesterDockless bike providers Mobike and Ofo will dramatically expand their operations in London and Manchester as the two Chinese companies continue their cut-throat multibillion-dollar battle for global domination. Continue reading...

Yes, my AI face-swap attempts might show how hard it is to make a deepfake – but it’s getting easier every dayMPs from the House of Commons inquiry into fake news were warned last week of a new AI technology that is about to change the world, and not for the better.“We’re rapidly moving into an era where the Russians, or any other adversary, can create our public figures saying or doing things that are disgraceful or highly corrosive to public trust,” Edward Lucas, the senior vice president of the Centre for European Policy Analysis told MPs. “And we’re not remotely ready for this.” Continue reading...

The inventor of the world wide web warns over concentration of power among a few companies ‘controlling which ideas are shared’Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web, has called for large technology firms to be regulated to prevent the web from being “weaponised at scale”. Continue reading...

I’m following a 30-day plan to wean me off it. I leave it in another room and, like an 18th-century gentleman, reply to messages only once a dayThere is something wrong with my phone, and it is not just that the predictive text feature thinks I’m obsessed with ducks. The real problem is that my phone is the first thing I look at in the morning, and the last thing I look at at night. I come running when it makes a “ding” noise. I think in tweets and look at meals and people and imagine them cropped into squares on Instagram. There is something mentally totalitarian about it.Smartphones are designed to addict us – nagging us with notifications, disrupting us with noise, making themselves indispensable. Social media apps harness neuroscience to the same end, triggering dopamine hits that lock us into them for hours. A terrifying new book, How to Break Up With Your Phone, says we are rewiring our brains so they are less organised for deep thought; killing our attention span, destroying our memory, sleep and happiness. Phones have changed the world, too; advertisers use them to hoover up our attention. We are no longer just consumers, but product. As Ramsay Brown, co-founder of app-designers Dopamine Labs, has said: “You get to use [Facebook] for free, because your eyeballs are what’s being sold there.” Continue reading...

By day, a glamorous film star, by night a technology pioneerIt is, as one interviewee says, the ultimate “crime fighter by night” story. By day, Hedy Lamarr was the most glamorous star in Hollywood. By night, she was an inventor whose frequency-hopping technology is now used in bluetooth and wifi. This rousing documentary charts the story of a brilliant woman who was, in some ways, handicapped by her beauty. Film-maker Alexandra Dean explores a fascinating life full of contradictions. Lamarr claimed that the world never saw her true self, yet she lived her final years as a recluse, hidden even from her family. She was an immigrant who gave her all to support her adopted country but who was always regarded as an outsider. Continue reading...

The latest luxury seven-seat SUV from Land Rover is as glossy as it is immense. Just be very careful when you try to squeeze into a parking spaceLand Rover Discovery