Technology | The Guardian

SoftBank, the world’s largest tech investment fund, partnered with the Kingdom to pump billions into America’s startupsIn December 2016, newly elected Donald Trump pulled a beaming Japanese billionaire named Masayoshi Son into a half-hug in front of cameras and reporters gathered in the golden lobby of Trump Tower. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Trump said with a smile, “this is Masa from SoftBank of Japan, and he has just agreed to invest $50bn into the United States.”Along with the promise of 50,000 new American jobs, the announcement was considered an early win for the president-elect. But, Son, the CEO of a Tokyo-based telecommunications conglomerate, had bigger ideas. He had already begun solidifying plans to build the largest tech investment fund in history, with an eye on Silicon Valley’s startups. Continue reading...

Former UK deputy PM says he ‘will no longer seek to play a public role’ in Brexit debateFacebook has hired Sir Nick Clegg, the former UK deputy prime minister, as its head of global policy and communications.Clegg, 51, will join Facebook as it struggles to cope with mounting political pressure over issues including fake news, data protection and the threat of government regulation. Continue reading...

Jordan Erica Webber asks robot maker and innovator Simone Giertz why she dislikes the robots she makes. And how digital technology might be useful for managing our wellbeingSimone Giertz is a self-professed maker of crummy robots. She’s made a drone that cuts hair, a robot that applies her lipstick and the Wake-Up machine, a DIY wall-mounted robot alarm clock with a rubber arm, that slaps her awake in the morning.Simone showcases her creations on her own YouTube channel. While she admits that none of her robots are meant to do their job well, Simone’s fascination for technology and electronics have made her a role model for young robot makers worldwide. So what does this queen of bad robots make of our increasingly robotics-reliant society? And does she recognise the possible pitfalls of human-robot interactions in her day-to-day work? Continue reading...

Lack of education and unpaid care work among reasons women trail men onlineThe internet is overwhelmingly male. Men are on average 33.5% more likely to have internet access than women, according to the Inclusive Internet Index, a survey of 86 countries that are home to 91% of the global population. In some poor, urban areas, men outnumber women online by as much as two to one.To understand why is to see inequalities collide. Globally, women have less access to education and less chance of entering the jobs market, where they will typically earn a quarter less than their male colleagues. It is no surprise that when asked about barriers to being online, not knowing how and not being able to afford it, come up time and again. Continue reading...

Corporation shows off room of engineers, data scientists and other experts but offers reporters few new specificsFacebook is promoting a new “war room” as a part of its solution to election interference, unveiling a team of specialists working to stop the spread of misinformation and propaganda.It’s unclear how well it’s working. Continue reading...

Online retailer to expand R&D operations in the city as well as in Edinburgh and CambridgeAmazon has said the UK will be “taking a leading role in global innovation” as it announced plans to hire 1,000 more technology, research and other skilled workers by next year.The US online retailer is to open its first office in Manchester, with room for 600 new jobs in the Hanover Building in the city’s Northern Quarter – once the headquarters of the Co-operative Group. Continue reading...

After report of 100-hour weeks, studio’s co-head Rob Nelson says: ‘We will not stop working to improve in this area’Rockstar North’s co-studio head Rob Nelson has defended the video games studio’s working conditions in the wake of a controversy sparked by a New York Magazine profile, in which founder Dan Houser said “we were working 100-hour weeks” on forthcoming game Red Dead Redemption 2.Houser later clarified his comments in a statement to games website Kotaku, saying that it applied only to himself and three other members of the senior writing team over a period of “weeks, not years” – not to all of the developer’s staff. “Across the whole company, we have some senior people who work very hard purely because they’re passionate about a project, or their particular work, and we believe that passion shows in the games we release,” read the statement. “But that additional effort is a choice, and we don’t ask or expect anyone to work anything like this […] No one, senior or junior, is ever forced to work hard.” Continue reading...

Connecting developed nations was relatively easy, but getting the rest of the world online will be far more difficult

iPhone, Android, PC; Devolver Digital/Nerial

Clause means children will be able to view content on social media and image-sharing sitesMillions of sexually explicit videos will still be available online to children in the UK after new age verification rules come into force, due to a “commercial basis” clause that exempts social media and image-sharing websites.Age verification (AV) regulations presented to parliament by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) last week do not include websites on which less than a third of content is pornographic material and where it is provided free of charge. Continue reading...

In Somalia, to be caught with a smartphone in the wrong place can mean death

Keith has just switched to a Windows desktop PC and needs a good monitor to go with itI have just switched to a Windows desktop computer and need to get a good monitor – about 21 inches and under £200. Do you have any advice? KeithThere are two ways to pick a monitor, and it’s worth using both approaches. The first is to go into a shop and see which one looks best. It’s much easier to compare screens side by side. The second is to compile a table of specifications and pick the monitor that meets your needs.

New phone reaches Apple-level of polish, with top-notch performance, fantastic camera and attractive designThe Pixel 3 is Google’s third stab at making its own top-end phone, attempting to outshine the likes of Apple and Samsung with a terrific camera and a highly polished experience.The Pixel 3 is the smaller of the two new Google phones, with a 5.5in FHD+ OLED screen that is bright, crisp and vibrant. It is a beautiful display that is a significant step up from last year’s Pixel 2, with wide viewing angles with minimal colour shift. Continue reading...

Prime minister wants tougher response to states responsible – including sanctionsTheresa May will urge EU leaders meeting in Brussels to create a new sanctions regime to crack down on governments found responsible for cyber-attacks.Amid growing fears about Russian meddling in foreign elections, including in Europe, and attempted cyber-attacks, most recently on the chemical weapons watchdog in the Netherlands, the prime minister will call on her fellow leaders to take tougher action. Continue reading...

Two misinformation campaigns spent years sowing discord in US and elsewhereMore than 10m tweets sent by state actors attempting to influence US politics have been released to the public, forming one of the largest archives of political misinformation ever collated.The database reveals the astonishing extent of two misinformation campaigns, which spent more than five years sowing discord in the US and had spillover effects in other national campaigns, including Britain’s EU referendum. Continue reading...

Company is first Chinese member of Partnership on AI, following, Google, Apple, Facebook and othersThe AI ethics body formed by five of the largest US corporations has expanded to include its first Chinese member, the search firm Baidu.The Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society – known as the Partnership on AI (PAI) – was formed in 2016 by Google, Facebook, Amazon, IBM and Microsoft to act as an umbrella organisation for the five companies to conduct research, recommend best practices and publish briefings on areas including ethics, privacy and trustworthiness of AI. Continue reading...

PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC; Activision

In Guardian interview, Marc Benioff calls out Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and others for failing to give back to city where they got richMarc Benioff, the Salesforce CEO, has escalated his attacks on fellow San Francisco billionaires, saying they are “hoarding” money and don’t want to help the homeless.In an interview with the Guardian on Tuesday, the tech entrepreneur intensified his criticisms of Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, saying: “He just doesn’t want to give, that’s all. And he hasn’t given anything of consequence in the city.” Continue reading...

Google-owned streaming service confirms issues affecting its services over Tuesday nightYouTube experienced widespread broadcasting issues, affecting YouTube, YouTube TV and YouTube Music, with the Google-owned streaming service down for almost two hours.YouTube said it was looking into reports of issues with its services, as users contacted them complaining about the website being down from about 1.30am GMT. Continue reading...

Australian union asks workplace tribunal deputy president to recuse himself over retweetAustralia’s Fair Work Commission has been asked to consider whether a retweet equals an endorsement, in a motion that accuses the commission’s own senior deputy president of bias.In March 2016, senior deputy president Jonathan Hamberger retweeted a tweet from Liberal minister Michaelia Cash that criticised the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU). Continue reading...

The removal of 800 pages and accounts came as a shock to many on the left and rightOn Thursday, Facebook announced it had removed more than 800 political pages and accounts for “coordinated inauthentic behavior” and spamming.This week, the people behind the pages Facebook purged for being inauthentic are angry. They feel they have been unfairly targeted for practices they say are common across the entire social network. Continue reading...

Valuation would make ride-hailing app worth more than three times as much as FordUber could target a valuation of $120bn (£91bn) in a stock market flotation planned for next year, according to reports in the US, after Wall Street banks advised the ride-hailing app that it was worth more than three times that of the carmarker Ford.The ride-hailing app, which has never made a profit, has said it wants to list shares on the New York stock market next year in what is likely to be the most eagerly awaited listing of 2019. Continue reading...

Microsoft co-founder who was a billionaire philanthropist and sports team ownerCo-founding Microsoft ultimately made Paul Allen, who has died of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma aged 65, one of the world’s richest men. But while he could buy anything he wanted – yachts, famous paintings, sports clubs – he lived with the threat of recurring cancer. His illness – initially diagnosed as Hodgkin’s lymphoma – was first treated with radiation therapy and a bone marrow transplant in 1982, and caused him to leave Microsoft the following year. He said: “It makes you that much more focused on realising your dreams and hopes, because all of our times on this planet are limited.”Allen will mainly be remembered for his association with Bill Gates, which started at Lakeside, a private school in Seattle. In 1968 the school’s mothers’ association funded the purchase of a Teletype ASR-33 text terminal to a remote General Electric GE-635 mainframe, and a small group of boys became fanatical users. As Allen wrote in his memoir Idea Man (2011): “I had discovered my calling. I was a programmer.” Continue reading...

Middlesex University's resident robot, Pepper, has become the first robot to appear before a parliamentary select committee. After introducing herself, Pepper answered questions from MPs on Caresses, the artificial intelligence project that is developing culturally aware robots to provide support for elderly people

Feature-packed Android phone is first widely available with scanner embedded in screen alongside 3D face unlockingHuawei’s new Mate 20 Pro has a massive screen, three cameras on the back and a fingerprint scanner embedded in the display.The new top-end phone from the Chinese firm aims to secure its place at the top of the market alongside Samsung, having recently beaten Apple to become the second-largest smartphone manufacturer in August. Continue reading...

Update of popular e-reader introduces thinner and lighter design, Bluetooth compatibility and audiobook supportAmazon has launched a new version of its popular Kindle Paperwhite e-reader, which is thinner, lighter and now finally water resistant.The new 2018 Kindle Paperwhite is the second Amazon e-ink device to be given the water resistance treatment following the launch of the Rolls Royce of e-readers, the £230 Oasis, in 2017. Continue reading...

It looks, feels and works great, is cheaper than the previous version and lasts longer on a charge, but it still doesn’t have USB-C or Thunderbolt 3The new Surface Pro 6 is the latest version of Microsoft’s category-defining detachable tablet PC, but do a price cut, faster chips and a new paint job make it worth buying?From the outside it looks like very little has changed, and that’s because the Surface Pro 6 is practically identical to its predecessor. Continue reading...

Repeatedly reproduced and reimagined since the 80s, the tropes of cyberpunk must evolve or dieThe future has looked the same for almost four decades. A skyline of densely packed skyscrapers, corporate logos lighting the night sky, proclaiming ownership over the city below. At street level, a haze of neon shines down from the cluster of signs above and shimmers at your feet in the rain that runs down the filthy streets. Here, the have-nots, excluded from the safe, luxurious enclaves enjoyed by the super-rich, are preyed upon by hustlers dealing in illegal tech and street gangs composed of green-haired, leather-clad technopunks, decked out with cyborg enhancements and high on synthetic drugs.You know this city. You’ve seen it a million times since it was first constructed in the 80s by the pioneers of cyberpunk, most notably William Gibson in Neuromancer and Ridley Scott in Blade Runner. Hollywood recently returned to it with Blade Runner 2049. In the first episode of Netflix’s Altered Carbon, an adaptation of Richard K. Morgan’s 2002 novel, protagonist Takeshi Kovacs gazes upon it from his window; fire flickers from the top of a tall tower, just as it did in opening scene of Blade Runner, prompting a double-take where you wonder whether the window is actually a screen replaying Scott’s movie. Continue reading...

The Microsoft co-founder engaged in years-long missions for sunken ships and nurtured the Seahawks to three Super Bowls

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has died aged 65 from complications with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. He was first treated for the disease in 2009 but it returned this year. A childhood friend of Bill Gates, the pair started Microsoft in 1975. Allen was also an avid sports fan and went on to buy several sports teams. He was ranked among the world's wealthiest individuals, with an estimated net worth of more than $20bn, and dedicated much of his later life to philanthropic work.

Allen, diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, hailed as ‘a great technology pioneer’ and innovator of the personal computer

London remains European headquarters of cryptocurrency exchange, but a move to Ireland is plan BCryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is opening new offices in Dublin as part of the company’s contingency planning for a hard Brexit.The company, one of the largest members of the blockchain ecosystem, says that London will remain its European headquarters, but that Dublin’s EU membership, as well as its English-speaking workforce and diverse technology talent pool, made it the “clear choice” for a second European outpost. Continue reading...

Social network hopes launch of transparency tools will restore trust after series of scandalsFacebook will no longer allow British political groups to publish “dark ads” on its network, in an attempt to restore public trust after the Cambridge Analytica scandal and questions over its influence on the Brexit referendum.Related: Facebook 'dark ads' can swing political opinions, research shows Continue reading...

The US embassy in Australia spammed recipients with a picture of a cat this week – but that’s nothing compared with other recent message failsThe US embassy in Canberra, Australia, sent out an email invitation this week to untold numbers of recipients, in Latin, with a picture of a cat holding biscuits in a turquoise Cookie Monster onesie. It was, of course, an error, though not one I can see any reasonable person being truly irked by. It also wasn’t the first of its kind. In 2014, the retailer Fab followed up its own subscriber-destined email of nothing but a cat with another, featuring two cats, explaining that it had been “purrrly a mistake”, and attaching an apologetic 10% discount code.Messaging systems the world over seem to be having a bad year of it, spanning the full spectrum of societal anxiety, from A-level results to intercontinental ballistic missiles. Continue reading...

Appeal for £25m investment to rescue British team’s plan to break land speed recordPlans to build a British jet-powered car to speed at more than 1,000mph through the desert have hit quicksand, after the company behind the Bloodhound project entered administration.The dream of an ultra-fast car to break the land speed record led to the creation of Bloodhound Programme Ltd in 2007, with the idea of also engaging schools and students in engineering. Continue reading...

The 6,600km undersea cable will open in 2020 and is one of seven Google is building over the next two yearsTelecoms firm Orange has teamed up with Google to work on a private undersea cable connecting the Atlantic coasts of France and the United States.Measuring 6,600km in length, the undersea cable will be named Dunant after Henry Dunant, the first Nobel peace prize winner and founder of the Red Cross. When it comes online in 2020, it will provide Orange alone with a capacity of “more than 30 terabits per second, per [fibre] pair” – enough, the company says, “to transfer a 1GB movie file in 30 microseconds”. Neither Orange nor Google released information about the total capacity of the cable, nor how they would allocate it between them. Continue reading...

Cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin result in the concentration of wealth, not greater equalityWith the value of bitcoin having fallen by about 70% since its peak late last year, the mother of all bubbles has now gone bust. More generally, cryptocurrencies have entered a not-so-cryptic apocalypse. The value of leading coins such as Ether, EOS, Litecoin and XRP have all fallen by over 80%, thousands of other digital currencies have plummeted by 90%-99%, and the rest have been exposed as outright frauds. No one should be surprised by this: four out of five initial coin offerings (ICOs) were scams to begin with.Faced with the public spectacle of a market bloodbath, boosters have fled to the last refuge of the crypto scoundrel: a defence of “blockchain,” the distributed-ledger software underpinning all cryptocurrencies. Blockchain has been heralded as a potential panacea for everything from poverty and famine to cancer. In fact, it is the most overhyped – and least useful – technology in human history. Continue reading...

Natural History Museum, London

‘The boy beat the Koreans with a few lines of computer code that no one else in the world could have thought of’Under the cover of darkness, a secret unit of the SAS, called the secret unit of the SAS and known only to two men in the entire United Kingdom, one of whom was Frederick Forsyth, raided a house in Luton, Bedfordshire, England. What they found there amazed even them.Three months earlier experts at Fort Meade, home to America’s top secret National Security Agency in Maryland, America, had noticed that their top secret computer defences had been breached. The discovery sent shockwaves through the American high command, who had believed their networks were unhackable. After the finest computer minds in America were put on the problem, the breach was located to an IP address in Luton, Bedfordshire, England. It was April 2019. Continue reading...

Automation will bring growth, but history tells us labour’s share of national income will declineThe World Bank has a reassuring message for those fearful of being made obsolete by automation. The robot age is nothing to be worried about. Just like all previous waves of technological advance, the fourth industrial revolution will create rather than destroy jobs, so fears of mass unemployment are largely unfounded.Nor should we be concerned that the arrival of the new machine age is going to widen the gap between rich and poor, because the idea that the world is becoming a less equal place is more perception than reality. Continue reading...

In our image-propelled social media era, some photographers fear for the future of the art, while others are galvanised by it. As technology increasingly shapes how we see and share the world, how is photography changing in response?In 2012, I wrote an essay about the shifting nature of photography in an era of unprecedented image overload. Back then, Facebook users alone were uploading 300m photographs a day, while the number of images posted on Flickr and Instagram had exceeded the 11bn mark. I quoted the American artist and writer Chris Wiley, whose 2011 article, “Depth of focus”, in Frieze magazine, had expressed the anxiety of many practitioners about “a world thoroughly mediatised by and glutted with the photographic image and its digital doppelganger”.Wiley’s conclusion was pessimistic: “As a result, the possibility of making a photograph that can stake a claim to originality or affect has been radically called into question. Ironically, the moment of greatest photographic plentitude has pushed photography to the point of exhaustion.” Continue reading...

Damian Collins says Scotland Yard must explain failure to look into potential crimes committed by three pro-Brexit groupsA senior Conservative MP has demanded that Scotland Yard urgently explain why it has not opened a criminal investigation into three pro-Brexit campaigns that the Electoral Commission found had broken the law.Damian Collins, chair of the Commons committee investigating the illegal use of data during the EU referendum, told the Observer he was concerned that the Metropolitan police had as yet failed to launch a formal investigation into potential crimes committed by pro-Leave groups before the 2016 referendum. Continue reading...

We can no longer count on our governments to protect us from a tide of disinformation. Our security rests in the hands of open source intelligence, as pioneered by BellingcatWhen the story of 2018 is told, historians may be hard pressed to say which was weirdest: that a deadly nerve agent was deployed in a quiet cathedral town on the edge of Salisbury Plain, at the heart of our military establishment. Or that the Russian suspects were identified not by British intelligence but a group described last week as “armchair investigators”.Because we now know not just the identities of the two men who travelled to Salisbury with a military-grade chemical weapon but also the arm of the Russian army that deployed them – thanks to Bellingcat, a citizen investigation site founded by Eliot Higgins, a former blogger who started it from a laptop on his sofa in breaks from caring for his daughter. Continue reading...

Benefits of automation must be passed on to staff, says thinktankA four-day working week could become commonplace in Britain as automation and artificial intelligence increase workplace efficiency, a new study has concluded.If the benefits of rolling out such new technologies were passed on to staff, then they would be able to generate their current weekly economic output in just four days. The research, by the cross-party Social Market Foundation (SMF) thinktank, found that even relatively modest gains from using robots and AI had the potential to give British workers Scandinavian levels of leisure time. Continue reading...

Company didn’t disclose leak for months to avoid a public relations headache and potential regulatory enforcementThis March, as Facebook was coming under global scrutiny over the harvesting of personal data for Cambridge Analytica, Google discovered a skeleton in its own closet: a bug in the API for Google+ had been allowing third-party app developers to access the data not just of users who had granted permission, but of their friends.If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s almost exactly the scenario that got Mark Zuckerberg dragged in front of the US Congress. The parallel was not lost on Google, and the company chose not to disclose the data leak, the Wall Street Journal revealed Monday, in order to avoid the public relations headache and potential regulatory enforcement. Continue reading...

‘How much have you given’ Marc Benioff asked Jack Dorsey as the two sparred over proposed tax to assist those on the streetsThe CEOs of two of the world’s most prominent tech companies got into an online spat on Friday over who was doing the most to address homelessness.The Salesforce CEO, Marc Benioff, and Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, were tweeting at each other about a proposed tax on high-earning San Francisco businesses. It would redirect millions of dollars to help thousands of people who live on the streets, including outside the headquarters of both companies. Continue reading...

Hackers were able to access name, birthdate and other data in nearly half of the 30 million accounts that were affectedFacebook has revealed 30m accounts were affected in a data breach last month. The company said hackers were able to access personal information for nearly half of those accounts.That information included name, relationship status, religion, birthdate, workplaces, search activity, and recent location check-ins. The company had initially said 50m accounts were affected. Continue reading...

Decades after women were pushed out of programming, Amazon’s AI recruiting technology carried on the industry’s legacy of biasA recent report revealed Amazon’s AI recruiting technology developed a bias against women because it was trained predominantly on men’s résumés. Although Amazon shut the project down, this kind of mechanized sexism is common and growing – and the problem isn’t limited to AI mishaps.Facebook allows the targeting of job ads by gender, resulting in discrimination in online job advertisements for traditionally male-dominated jobs from construction to policing. The practice has long been illegal in traditional print media – but Facebook’s targeting tools encourage it. Not only can this affect whether women and non-binary people can see ads; it also affects male job-seekers who are older and therefore viewed as less desirable by many employers. Facebook has come under fire for illegal advertising practices in the past: notably, it scrapped thousands of microtargeting categories after a 2016 ProPublica report showed how it allowed racial discrimination in housing ads. Continue reading...

Billionaire tweets ‘visual approximation’ of bottle as company applies to use the name for tequila branded after the electric carsElon Musk is hitting the bottle – well, probably. Tesla has trademarked “Teslaquila”, a tequila branded after his electric car company.The product started as an April Fool’s joke when Musk claimed Tesla was going bankrupt and that he had been found “passed out against a Tesla Model 3, surrounded by ‘Teslaquilla’ bottles, the tracks of dried tears still visible on his cheeks”. Continue reading...

We saw the UK and France face off to defend their undefeated records in the Overwatch World Cup, competitive gaming’s answer to the global football tournamentIt’s a Friday morning in late September and 2,000 fans are packed into the underground arena of La Grande Arche de la Défense, ready for the Paris stage of the Overwatch World Cup. It’s a fairly mixed-gender crowd, predominantly young adults, mostly French, many wearing game-themed clothing. Overwatch is one of the world’s most popular competitive video games: matches are fast-paced, chaotic battles between two teams of six players. Using colourful characters with outlandish powers, they take turns to attack and defend objectives. Fights can be over in seconds or turn into minutes-long scraps. The sense of unpredictability makes for very exciting viewing.The Overwatch league works like football’s Premier League, with teams signing players across nationalities, but the Overwatch World Cup evokes a sense of home pride among viewers. Each of the Paris leg’s 15 matches had their share of intense moments as national teams fought for the two remaining places at the finals, which will take place later this month in Anaheim, California. The previous group stages in Incheon, South Korea; Burbank, USA; and Bangkok, Thailand. Continue reading...