The phone app uses ‘neural networks’ to turn your frown upside down – but the results are nothing to smile aboutSometimes it’s hard to work up a smile for the camera. I don’t want people to think I enjoy having my picture taken. Even when I slavishly follow an instruction to smile, I try to make sure my eyes betray a little resentment. I may be saying cheese, but my face is saying: I hate cheese.Luckily, I’ll never have to smile for a picture again, because now there’s an app for that. FaceApp uses “deep generative convolutional neural networks†to turn your frown upside down. It is meant to be more realistic than previous selfie filters, making subtle adjustments to the eyes and the rest of the face to produce a look of genuine merriment, instead of a cheese-hating grimace. Continue reading...
Micah Weinberg of the Bay Area Council Economic Institute says homelessness is not helped by outdated laws and regulations that block new housingYour story (‘It’s a perfect storm’: homeless spike in rural California linked to Silicon Valley, April 13) on a spike in homelessness in California’s Central Valley highlights an important problem, but some additional context is needed. The skyrocketing housing costs that are pushing workers east and bidding up prices in the Central Valley are not just a Silicon Valley phenomenon. The entire Bay Area region is suffering the same, the result of constrained housing supply from decades of underproduction. Local and state leaders have refused to address the problem at its core: reforming rigid and outdated laws and regulations that make building affordable housing all but impossible and help arm anti-growth zealots with the tools they need to block new housing.The Bay Area Council does not, as your story wrongly suggests, view the Central Valley as a “bedroom community†for the purpose of enabling these policy failures. Although, without meaningful statewide housing reforms, we must build strong transportation links to respond to the continuing migration of lower- and middle-income workers from Silicon Valley to the Central Valley. A report by our Bay Area Council Economic Institute (The Northern California Megaregion, June 2016) examines this issue, and also makes recommendations for enhancing educational, workforce and economic development capacity in the Central Valley to support the expansion of the tech industry and jobs there.
Uber added fingerprinting code in effort to catch Chinese fraudsters, leading to CEO Travis Kalanick’s reported dressing down in Apple’s Cupertino headquartersUber broke Apple’s privacy rules in its iOS app in an effort to catch Chinese fraudsters, resulting in chief executive Travis Kalanick being hauled in to Cupertino for a personal dressing down from Tim Cook, it has been revealed.Apple prevents developers from identifying specific iPhones for privacy reasons, arguing that a phone that is completely wiped and resold should have no links to its previous owner; to that end, in 2012, the company stopped allowing apps on its App Store to access information like the “Unique Device Identifier†(UDID) and similar identifying information. Continue reading...
Email service developed a side business after it was acquired by Slice in 2014 – selling aggregated data about users to apps they were unsubscribing fromThe chief executive of email unsubscription service Unroll.me has said he is “heartbroken†that users felt betrayed by the fact that his company monetises the contents of their inbox by selling their data to companies such as Uber.Founded in 2011, the free web service allows users to unsubscribe en masse from mailing lists, newsletters and other email annoyances. To do so, it requires access to the users’ inboxes, and permission from them to scan the data for unsubscribe links. Continue reading...
The place to talk about games and other things that matterChatterbox is the Guardian’s daily venue for video game-themed discussion. It has been running as a comments-based forum for over a decade. Continue reading...
Virtual reality technology is making great advances, but it has also helped popularise a theory long debated by philosophers and now gaining supporters in Silicon Valley – that the outside world is itself a simulationHave you ever wondered if life is not exactly what it’s cracked up to be? OK, let’s take that thought a little further. Have you ever suffered from an identity crisis? Yes? One in which you suspected that you’re not a real person, but instead an extremely sophisticated computer simulation of a real person produced by an immensely more developed civilisation than that which we take to be our own?It’s just possible that I lost you on that last point, but stay with me, because the reality we take for granted is coming under increasing technological and theoretical threat. Continue reading...
Reading Laurie Penny’s article about AI will not pose many surprises for readers of classic science fiction (Opinion, 20 April). She suggests that we may have to “build robots with a capacity for moral judgmentâ€, which presumably would entail their having basic commands capable of overruling experience (experience of language being what so rapidly turns ’bots racist and sexist). Isaac Asimov long ago turned this idea into a series of books about his three laws of robotics. She also points to the role of language in forming preconceptions, citing our rigid system of pronouns. Poul Anderson, also long ago, proposed a whole new system, with “e†as the third-person pronoun, “uz†as its possessive, and the lovely word “marry†as a noun denoting a partner of whatever gender (“uz marryâ€). I wonder why we haven’t yet succeeded in imitating him.
This examination of today’s tech-zombie epidemic is worth putting your phone down for – at least for a whileAre you addicted to technology? I’m certainly not. In my first sitting reading Adam Alter’s Irresistible, an investigation into why we can’t stop scrolling and clicking and surfing online, I only paused to check my phone four times. Because someone might have emailed me. Or texted me. One time I stopped to download an app Alter mentioned (research) and the final time I had to check the shares on my play brokerage app, Best Brokers (let’s call this one “businessâ€).Half the developed world is addicted to something, and Alter, a professor at New York University, informs us that, increasingly, that something isn’t drugs or alcohol, but behaviour. Recent studies suggest the most compulsive behaviour we engage in has to do with cyber connectivity; 40% of us have some sort of internet-based addiction – whether it’s checking your email (on average workers check it 36 times an hour), mindlessly scrolling through other people’s breakfasts on Instagram or gambling online. Continue reading...
Nintendo’s karting franchise is designed to get everyone racing together no matter what their individual ability. This Switch remaster achieves that and moreBringing Mario Kart to the Switch feels like an easy win for Nintendo’s fledgling machine. It isn’t exactly a new game – it’s Mario Kart 8, with a few extras – but that doesn’t really matter, for three main reasons: the ability to play in portable mode opens up whole new contexts, not that many people owned a Wii U anyway, and Mario Kart 8 is still an absolutely fantastic racing game.For those who skipped the Wii U, Mario Kart 8 introduced bigger tracks to accommodate 12 racers and vehicles that defy gravity to drive up walls and along ceilings, and sprout gliders to soar through the air. Those tracks all still look great on this new console, especially in portable mode. And Mario Kart 8 Deluxe also includes what was DLC for the Wii U version, like the wonderful Animal Crossing track that comes in four seasonal flavours, so there are 48 tracks in total. Continue reading...
It might be a little off the pace but with great performance, excellent camera and good fingerprint sensor, the P10 is the Chinese firm’s best phone to dateHuawei hopes that its latest flagship smartphone, the P10, will help secure it as the world’s third-largest smartphone manufacturer. But has this Leica dual camera-equipped device got what it takes to compete?
Retail giant is looking for site in Brisbane, Sydney or Melbourne to become its first fulfilment centre in the countryThe retail giant Amazon is expanding its operations in Australia, announcing plans to build the first of several large warehouses on the east coast to allow for faster local delivery.The company announced the long-anticipated move on Thursday, and according to Business Insider reported is looking for warehouse space in Brisbane, Sydney or Melbourne to become its first 93,000 sq m Australian “fulfilment centreâ€. Continue reading...
Tribunal ruled last year that Uber drivers should be treated as employed workers with rights to minimum wage and sick payUber has been granted the right to appeal against last year’s landmark ruling that its UK minicab drivers should be treated as employed workers with rights to the minimum wage and sick pay.The employment appeals tribunal in London has set a date for a two-day hearing starting on 27 September. The San Francisco-based company will argue its 40,000 currently self-employed drivers in Britain are free to work when and where they want and enjoy more flexibility than traditional private-hire drivers who are self-employed. Continue reading...
Mark Zuckerberg’s social network is betting big on augmented reality, hasn’t given up on VR – but doesn’t have much to say about the ‘Facebook killer’As Apple has WWDC and Google has I/O, so Facebook has F8: the social network’s big annual conference has steadily grown, from a way to speak to developers about the upcoming changes to its platform to an event where the whole world hears about the exciting new products coming from the House of Zuckerberg.Facebook’s chief executive may not quite have Steve Jobs’ infamous “reality distortion field†– the social network’s ideal world is more like an artificial reality where none of the outside world penetrates – but he can still wow when he wants to. Here’s the eight biggest things to take away from the San Jose event. Continue reading...
Divorce is always hard, but it can be particularly messy in a land of huge wealth, alpha personalities and hard-nosed lawyers who don’t come cheapThe billionaire founder of Zynga, the San Francisco-based company that makes FarmVille, has found himself in (very messy) DivorceVille.Mark Pincus, an early investor in Facebook and Twitter who is worth $1.28bn, separated from his wife, Alison Gelb Pincus, the co-founder of home decor business One Kings Lane. The couple married in 2008, a year after Mark founded Zynga, which grew into a $1bn company within four years. There was a prenup, but in filing for divorce Alison has asked the court to nullify the agreement since Mark’s net worth soared during their marriage. Continue reading...
Gladys Berejiklian’s government gives qualified support to short-term letting of spare rooms and empty propertiesThe New South Wales government looks set to allow home owners to rent out spare rooms and entire homes using Airbnb and similar sites but has committed to giving strata corporations greater powers to deal with problems in apartment blocks.The state government on Wednesday released its long-awaited response to last year’s parliamentary inquiry into short-term holiday letting, offering “qualified support†to changes that would see the industry regulated in NSW for the first time. Continue reading...
Horizon Zero Dawn is a beautiful and exciting adventure, but its most interesting element is that it focuses on the intellectual curiosity of its heroSomething has only just occurred to me about Horizon Zero Dawn. The PlayStation 4 action adventure game, set in a post-apocalyptic world dominated by robotic dinosaurs, is thrilling and beautiful – that much is obvious right from the start. Also obvious is the fact that it borrows a lot of mechanics from the Far Cry series, and that it lacks the sheer depth and scope of role-playing adventures like Witcher 3 and Zelda: Breath of the Wild. But what dawned on me much more slowly was the fact that its wonderful lead protagonist, Aloy, is not so much motivated by some grand mission to save humanity (though that sort of comes into it), she is motivated by intellectual curiosity. She is fascinated by the mechanised monsters roaming the landscape and the ruins of an ancient technological culture that she first discovers as a child, and she wants to learn more. Her interactions with the world, the characters and the wider narrative within it, are all personal rather than heroic. In short, she acts like a human being.For a very long time, a huge percentage of action-adventure games were about saving the planet – sometimes even the entire universe – from some monstrous invading evil. The stakes were almost always that high. There were many intermingled reasons for this. Partly, there’s the huge influence that fantasy and science-fiction masterworks have had on game developers – the overbearing presence of Lord of the Rings and Star Wars in the collective imaginative canon. But also, a lot of early video games drew their story-telling approach directly from mythic sources – the great legends, folk and fairy tales – because with limited visual and narrative story-telling tools available, these primal tales were the easiest to communicate. Hence, a lot of games about lone heroes triumphing against the odds – rendering Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces into interactive life. Continue reading...
Mark Zuckerberg at the F8 conference hinted that AR encourages people to interact with others – although that experience is still mediated by a screenWe live in a time when society is divided and work is needed to bring people together, but Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg thinks it has the solution: augmented reality.Speaking on stage at the company’s annual developer conference F8, Zuckerberg outlined the company’s plan to turn the camera app into a platform that makes it easy for people to build augmented reality experiences, whereby digital objects and information are overlaid onto or used to enhance the physical space. Continue reading...
Privacy, security, artificial intelligence, net neutrality, big data and impact of internet on daily life among topics included in surveysThe EU is launching an unprecedented public consultation to find out what Europeans fear most about the future of the internet.A succession of surveys over the coming weeks will ask people for their views on everything from privacy and security to artificial intelligence, net neutrality, big data and the impact of the digital world on jobs, health, government and democracy. Continue reading...
The £6.2m settlement sets new precedent for pre-installation of third-party apps and search engines, including Russia’s YandexGoogle has been forced to open up Android to rival search engines and applications in Russia, after settling a two-year battle with competition authorities for 439m roubles (£6.2m).
Global crackdown on ‘inauthentic likes and comments’ launched on Friday targeting a single operationFacebook has purged tens of thousands of fake accounts from its platform as part of an ongoing bid to dismantle a sophisticated global spam operation.The worldwide crackdown on “inauthentic likes and comments†was launched on Friday and Facebook’s security team confirmed the step on Saturday in an official blog post attributed to Shabnam Shaik, a technical program manager, that said the platform had been working to disrupt a single network for six months. Continue reading...
British Chamber of Commerce reveals large firms most at risk from cybercrime, with many companies lacking even the most basic protectionCybercriminals have attacked one in five British businesses in the past year, many of which lack even the most basic security measures to protect confidential information. A report by the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) found that only 24% of businesses said they had security in place to guard against hacking, despite the rising danger of attacks and increasing publicity about the threat.Larger companies, defined as those with at least 100 staff, were more susceptible to cyber-attacks, with 42% of big businesses falling victim to cybercrime, compared with 18% of small companies. Continue reading...
Question of the social network’s role in amplifying crime has intensified after it took several hours to remove a brutal video seen millions of times“This is a horrific crime and we do not allow this kind of content on Facebook.â€The “content†the Facebook spokesperson was referring to was the apparent killing of 74-year-old grandfather Robert Godwin, shot at close range in Cleveland on Sunday afternoon as he walked home from an Easter meal with his family. Godwin’s suspected attacker, 37-year-old Steve Stephens, filmed a first-person view of the shooting and uploaded it to his Facebook page, where it remained for more than two hours before being taken down – not before the video had been copied, reposted and viewed millions of times. Continue reading...
Former employee has alleged in lawsuit Evan Spiegel said the app was ‘only for rich people’ sparking a backlash among IndiansSnapchat is facing a public relations crisis in India, the world’s fastest growing smartphone market, after allegations its founder said the app was “only for rich people†and that he did not want to “expand into poor countries like Indiaâ€.The remarks, allegedly made by Evan Spiegel in a 2015 meeting, are contained in a recently unsealed complaint by Anthony Pompliano, a former employee of Snap Inc, the parent company of Snapchat. Continue reading...
Jonathan Taplin reveals how just three companies subverted the internet’s utopian idealsThe internet, defined as the network switched on in January 1983, is now 34 years old. When it began, it was a gloriously decentralised, creative, non-commercial system that evoked in many of its early users utopian hopes about liberation, empowerment, creativity and sticking it to The Man. In those heady days, only a few sceptics wondered how long it would take for capitalism to get a grip on it. Now we know: it took only 21 years.Opinions vary about the timing, of course. For my money, the critical year was 2004, the year Google had its IPO, Facebook was launched and the business model that became known as “surveillance capitalism†really got a grip on the network. This is the model that provides supposedly free services to users in return for “consent†to mine and exploit their personal data and digital trails in order to target adverts at them. Continue reading...
As Facebook’s chief operating officer, she is one of the most powerful women in the world. How did she cope with the sudden death of her husband?• Scroll down for an exclusive extract from Sandberg’s new bookSheryl Sandberg’s last words to her husband, like all last words, assumed a haunting poignancy. “I’m falling asleep,†she told him, oblivious to the imminence of tragedy, and curled up on a cushion for a nap.It was Friday 1 May 2015. She and Dave Goldberg, 47, had left their two children at home with her parents in northern California and flown down to Mexico for a weekend break to celebrate a friend’s 50th birthday. They were Silicon Valley royalty’s power couple; he the CEO of a tech company worth more than $1bn, she the chief operating officer of Facebook and author of global bestseller Lean In, a feminist call to arms for working women to emulate the self-belief and ambition of men. Sandberg had featured on Forbes’ list of the most powerful women on the planet, served as chief of staff to the Treasury secretary in Bill Clinton’s government, been widely tipped as a future member of a Hillary Clinton cabinet and earned a personal fortune well in excess of $1bn. At 45 she was mother to a 10-year-old son and seven-year-old daughter; weekends away were rare and precious. No wonder she was tired. She fell asleep that afternoon a happily married wife, and woke up an hour later a widow. Continue reading...
The retail giant is expanding into the physical world with a series of trials in its home town. First came a book shop, but the real prize is in groceryThe buzz of a text message heralds the latest offer on Amazon’s Treasure Truck – a funky lorry bedecked with funfair lights and retro signs that appears at random in the streets of Seattle with a one-off discounted product for sale.Alaskan cod, four fillets for $17, was the most recent item; a few days earlier it was two 16oz prime steaks for $40. Click on your Amazon app to buy your “treasure†and you’ll be told where the truck is so you can pick it up. Continue reading...
It would be great for a prospector gang, roaming a lawless landscape, unlikely to be chastised for not wearing a seatbeltFlatbed trucks always have names like speciality condoms – Titan, Hilux, Trojan – and the Amarok Aventura took this one step further (I’m a rock, I’m a roll, I’m adventura! I’m your worst nightmare and your wildest dream). But it was a sensitive vehicle with a highly responsive automatic gearbox. In sports mode, it sounded like it was having a panic attack, which made me think masculinity exacts its own heavy price; but how handy it was never to have to think, “Will this fit in my car?†Everything fits in this car. It was a constant battle between civic duty and fun-seeking, as children asked to be ferried about on the flatbed and I had to say no.You couldn’t forget you weren’t driving a regular car, but at speed it never laboured or showed its bulk. The question is: who would need it? While there are sweet touches – a lid over the back that you can pull closed with a rope and pretend you’re in The Grapes Of Wrath; six decent speakers for the transmission of bluegrass – unless you often need to transport bulky items the weight makes you long for a fitting purpose, as if you had a border collie and no sheep. Continue reading...
by Alexandra Topping and Decca Aitkenhead on (#2K5Y9)
Sandberg says Facebook founder and his wife ‘did so much’ for her after the sudden death of her husbandSheryl Sandberg has credited Mark Zuckerberg with saving her life after the sudden death of her husband, saying the Facebook co-founder and his wife, Priscilla, were “why I’m walkingâ€.In an interview with the Guardian, Facebook’s chief operating officer spoke candidly about dealing with the loss of her husband, Dave Goldberg, who died of a heart attack in 2015 when they were in Mexico for the weekend. Continue reading...
Investment in education and retraining is needed to equip people to adapt as automation shakes up their workplacesAsk an economist or a technology expert and they will happily tell you that decades of data reliably show automation has created more jobs than it has destroyed.Far fewer of us now work on farms, for example, thanks to super-efficient machines that do the bulk of the work. Such technology has boosted productivity and, with it, living standards. As a result, more people work in leisure industries such as hospitality or hairdressing, serving all those people with higher disposable incomes and more free time. Continue reading...
Study calls for billions to fund retraining after pinpointing hospitality, retail, transport and manufacturing sectors and poorest parts of UK as most at riskA leading thinktank has urged the government to spend billions of pounds helping poorly skilled workers in the less prosperous parts of the UK cope with the threat of the looming robot revolution.The left-leaning Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) said in a new report that those most at risk from automation were concentrated in low-skill sectors of the economy and were least able to adapt to change. Continue reading...
David Cameron’s former blue-sky thinker says the rise of populism is due to the super-rich’s inability to put themselves in the shoes of those less well off – before accepting a free cab ride and becoming lost for words about his own wealthSteve Hilton’s office looks so typically San-Fran tech-startup that it could be the work of a set designer. Surfaces are matt white, the centrepiece is the kitchen, and there are various bins for different types of recycling. The only thing missing is Hilton.He can’t call to say he’s running 45 minutes late, because he doesn’t own a smartphone. The CEO of Crowdpac ditched his five years ago. This presents another problem when he arrives, because he has to leave again in 15 minutes, having promised to attend an exhibition at his sons’ school. Would I mind coming too? We could do the interview in the back of an Uber? Continue reading...
The iPhone maker has been awarded a permit to test autonomous cars, moving into a highly competitive space that includes Google, Tesla and FordApple is joining the fiercely competitive race to design self-driving cars, raising the possibility that a company that has already reshaped culture with its iPhone may try to transform transportation, too.Ending years of speculation, Apple’s late entry into a crowded field was made official Friday with the disclosure that the California department of motor vehicles had awarded a permit for the company to start testing its self-driving car technology on public roads in the state. Continue reading...
Artist says VR will change our outlook as he prepares Somerset House display based on Henry Fox Talbot’s seminal exhibitionArt galleries have long specialised in transporting visitors to another world, allowing them to dive into Hockney’s swimming pool, hear the clamour of war in Picasso’s Guernica or feel the spray of the sea from a Turner scene – all within the confines of four white walls.But a new dimension is making its way into museums and galleries across the UK, one that extends the physical space into an experimental virtual world. Continue reading...
The AI composers that are helping people make their own personal soundtracksHow can machines help with composing music? Ed Newton-Rex of Jukedeck reveals how his company uses machine learning to create instant customisable music that’s different every time.
by Hannah Devlin Science correspondent on (#2K0PM)
Machine learning algorithms are picking up deeply ingrained race and gender prejudices concealed within the patterns of language use, scientists sayAn artificial intelligence tool that has revolutionised the ability of computers to interpret everyday language has been shown to exhibit striking gender and racial biases.The findings raise the spectre of existing social inequalities and prejudices being reinforced in new and unpredictable ways as an increasing number of decisions affecting our everyday lives are ceded to automatons. Continue reading...
Before joining – and quitting – scandal-hit Uber, Whetstone advised senior Conservatives and led communications at GoogleFor the best part of two decades, Rachel Whetstone has served as public relations guru to some of Britain’s most powerful Conservative politicians and the world’s best-known corporations.Born in East Sussex to a wealthy family, the 49-year-old has a Conservative pedigree. Her grandfather, Antony Fisher, made his fortune importing intensive chicken farming from the US to the UK; he used his millions to help set up right-leaning thinktanks and lobby groups, such as the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) and the Adam Smith Institute. Continue reading...
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