Technology | The Guardian

Signatories including Microsoft, Arm and Trend Micro agree not to take part in cyber-attacksMore than 30 global technology firms have signed up to a “digital Geneva convention”, committing never to partake in cyber-attacks against individuals or businesses.The signatories to the “cybersecurity tech accord”, which include Facebook, Microsoft, Arm and Trend Micro, are largely from the US and western Europe, and do not include companies from the countries seen as most responsible for the recent escalation of digital hostilities, such as Russia, North Korea and Iran. Continue reading...

Sindri Thor Stefansson escaped through window before reportedly boarding same flight to Sweden as prime minister Katrín JakobsdóttirThe suspected mastermind behind the theft of 600 computers used to mine bitcoin in Iceland has escaped from prison and fled to Sweden on an aeroplane reportedly carrying the Icelandic prime minister.

Most popular browser finally stops unwanted sound and moving image automatically on both desktop and mobileGoogle’s Chrome browser now blocks auto-playing video with sound, taking a big step forward in removing one of the most irritating things about the modern web.

City officials send cease-and-desist letters to electric scooter startups, as local residents complain the unregulated schemes are a nuisanceSome people are tossing the scooters into trash cans and lakes. Others are tripping over them on the sidewalk, complaining of broken toes and dangerous collisions.The San Francisco war over electric scooters – which several startups have dumped on to sidewalks in a competitive rush to launch unregulated rental programs – dramatically escalated on Monday when the city attorney sent cease-and-desist letters, warning that authorities would “impound” the motorized devices to stop the “dangerous” and “unlawful operation”. Continue reading...

Attorney general says inquiry into practices of platforms for trading Bitcoin and other currencies is an effort to protect consumers

The perfect @ identity is a must-have accessory for big companies and brand-conscious celebrities – at any costEverything has a price, even the top Twitter handles, and if somebody does not want to sell then they may be forced to relinquish their account.“We have a marketplace which allows the sale of Twitter handles,” says Philly, a subversive marketer who founded ForumKorner, an online gaming forum. “Unlike some websites, however, we do not allow the sales of stolen accounts that some people phish, or hack, to obtain before reselling them.” Continue reading...

Firm struggles to hit targets for mass-market electric car after reeling from excessive automation and mounting pressureTesla has temporarily suspended its Model 3 assembly line as Elon Musk’s electric car firm struggles to deliver on targets.The company said the move was a planned production pause of up to five days. It is the second time since February that Tesla has halted its production line for the Model 3 at its Fremont, California plant. Continue reading...

Telecommunication companies told not to deal with Chinese manufacturer, while US imposes fresh sanctions for illegal sale of sensitive technologyBritain’s cyber-security watchdog has warned telecommunications companies against dealing with the Chinese manufacturer ZTE, citing “potential risks” to national security.The US commerce department has imposed a seven-year-ban on companies selling products and services to ZTE – which makes mobile phones and network equipment – alleging it failed to crack down on personnel who sold sensitive US technology to Iran and North Korea. ZTE halted trading of its shares in Hong Kong and Shenzhen on Tuesday following the announcement of the US ban, while Beijing warned it would “safeguard” its companies if necessary. Continue reading...

No indication that Australian information was compromised in ‘malicious’ August offensiveAustralia has joined the US and UK in publicly blaming Russia for a “malicious” global cyber-attack last year. The attack appeared to be an attempt at espionage, stealing intellectual property and laying the foundation for a future attack on infrastructure.Australia joined a coordinated announcement sheeting the blame home to Russian state-sponsored actors. The US and the UK held rare coordinated conference calls on Monday to reveal their findings on the malicious activity identified in August 2017. Continue reading...

Security officials issue alert directly blaming Kremlin for attack as US warns Moscow it is ‘pushing back hard’The cyberwar between the west and Russia has escalated after the UK and the US issued a joint alert accusing Moscow of mounting a “malicious” internet offensive that appeared to be aimed at espionage, stealing intellectual property and laying the foundation for an attack on infrastructure.Senior security officials in the US and UK held a rare joint conference call to directly blame the Kremlin for targeting government institutions, private sector organisations and infrastructure, and internet providers supporting these sectors. Continue reading...

Social network criticised over feature that targets users who are likely to switch to an advertiser’s rival’s productFacebook has been criticised for hiding an advertising product that claims to be able to predict users’ future behaviours and target messages at them in an attempt to alter those behaviours.The product, named “loyalty prediction” by Facebook, is part of a suite of capabilities enabled by a machine learning-powered tool called FBLearner Flow. That tool was publicly introduced in 2016, but the advertising techniques it enables were only revealed in a pitch document leaked to the Intercept. Continue reading...

A study conducted on child-directed Android apps from Google Play Store found over half may break US privacy law for under 13sThousands of child-directed Android apps and games are potentially violating US law on the collection and sharing of data on those under 13, research has revealed.A study conducted on 5,885 child-directed Android apps from the US Play Store, which are included in Google’s Designed for Families programme, found that well over half of the apps potentially violated the US Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (Coppa). Continue reading...

‘Humans are underrated,’ says CEO after company failed to hit weekly production target in first quarter of 2018Elon Musk has admitted that automation has been holding back Tesla’s Model 3 production and that humans, rather than machines, were the answer.

The latest treatise on technology taking over our lives suggests democratic systems are incompatible with the digital age, but the theory lacks coherenceThere is a clear, algorithmic formula for writing books about technology and society in 2018. Authors are generally required to be male, their documented personal journey must have been from that of techno-optimist to techno-sceptic to techno-panicker. There must be an urgent existential threat to either democracy or humanity lurking in the code base of Silicon Valley companies. The intractable crisis is not so profound, however, that it cannot be solved by a hail of partially thought-through remedies tacked on in the appendix.This recipe is producing a growing body of what might be termed “techlash” literature: the backlash against Silicon Valley and its seemingly unstoppable accretion of wealth, data and cultural and political capital. Where once we might have read expansive works of science fiction creating vivid and ambiguous alternative realities to help us navigate the future, now we have worrisome documentaries of threats so present they have often played out by the time the galley hits the review pile. In the last year several notable techlash titles have appeared, including Franklin Foer’s World Without Mind, Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants and Jonathan Taplin’s Move Fast and Break Things. Continue reading...

Lords report stresses need for artificial intelligence to be used for the common goodBritain needs to lead the way on artificial intelligence regulation, in order to prevent companies such as Cambridge Analytica setting precedents for dangerous and unethical use of the technology, the head of the House of Lords select committee on AI has warned.The Cambridge Analytica scandal, Lord Clement-Jones said, reinforced the committee’s findings, released on Monday in the report “AI in the UK: ready, willing and able?” Continue reading...

My dream drive? No question, it has to be the magnificent Jaguar E-TypeJaguar E-Type

Company reportedly told employees it ‘caught 29 leakers’ last year and 12 were arrested, according to memo obtained by BloombergApple reportedly warned employees in an internal memo that it “caught 29 leakers” last year and that 12 were arrested, adding that workers who disclose information to the media have “everything to lose”.The memo about leaking, which was leaked to Bloomberg and published on Friday, threatened employees with criminal consequences and shines a harsh light on the Silicon Valley company’s aggressive surveillance of its own employees and intensive investigative efforts to catch and punish leakers. Continue reading...

When a worker alleged discrimination, the company sought to keep him quiet: ‘If there is media attention, there will be no deal’Tesla had a clear message to DeWitt Lambert, a black employee alleging racial discrimination: take our money and stay quiet.“In terms of settlement, we are willing to pay Mr. Lambert [redacted], but only if we are to resolve this matter before there is media attention, preferably within the next few hours,” the Tesla general counsel, Todd Maron, wrote to the worker’s lawyers last year. “If there is media attention first, there will be no deal.” Continue reading...

There have been nearly 300,000 GoFundMe campaigns in the US related to homelessness over the last three years. Some see it as a sign of a broken social system and dwindling options for those in need

Facebook founder was lost for words as representatives asked questions about user trackingAs Mark Zuckerberg left Congress on Tuesday after testifying to the Senate, he may have felt relieved. The four-hour Q&A session had been largely dominated by mundane questions of fact about how Facebook works, requests for apologies and updates he had already given and was happy to repeat, and shameless begs for the social network’s cash pile to be used to expand broadband access in senators’ home states.Less than 24 hours later, however, a very different pattern of questioning in front of 54 members of the House of Representatives suggested a much more worrying outcome for Facebook – that this could be the week its crisis moves from being about mistakes in the past to inherent problems in the present. Perhaps, the representatives implied, Facebook doesn’t just have a problem. What if it is the problem? Continue reading...

Court focusing on two men whose criminal backgrounds are the subject of articles onlineAt the heart of the first high court ruling on the “right to be forgotten” principle in England and Wales is a battle between the right to privacy and the right to know.The cases focus on two businessmen, convicted of offences more than a decade ago, whose criminal backgrounds are the subject of articles online. Continue reading...

Users told smartphone’s software has been updated with monthly patches when it hasn’t, new research claimsSome Android smartphone manufacturers are skipping security patches without notifying users, instead claiming their smartphone’s software is up to date with Google’s monthly security releases, researchers say.

The mythological adventure takes five awards, but the best game honour goes to What Remains of Edith FinchHellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, a dark mythological adventure that follows a young warrior suffering from psychosis, was the big winner at the 2018 Bafta video game awards on Thursday night at Tobacco Dock, London.The game, which was developed in conjunction with psychologists and neuroscientists to ensure its accurate depiction of mental illness, was nominated in nine categories and won for best British game, best performance, artistic achievement, audio achievement and a new category, games beyond entertainment, which celebrates new releases with a political or social message.

This week, Jordan Erica Webber looks into reports that YouTube Kids might create an algorithm-free platform to prevent children viewing inappropriate content by clicking on seemingly benign video suggestions

New Zealand-born Joseph Herscher has created an absurdly complex machine for the simple purpose of serving a piece of cake. The device, which is known as a Rube Goldberg machine after the man who first came up with the concept, includes a hammer, melting butter, a falling laptop and a baby. The project took Herscher three months to complete with 90% of the time spent on trial and error

Government moves ahead with legislation despite criticism from the oppositionThe Australian government is pushing ahead with controversial legislation it says will create “back doors” into encrypted communication services – but still can’t say when it will introduce the bill.After originally aiming to have the legislation before parliament in the first quarter of this year, the government has delayed its introduction. A spokesman for the acting attorney general, Marise Payne, would only say it was in “the advanced stages of development”. Continue reading...

Retailer celebrates by slashing prices on smart doorbells, while deal includes transfer of customer data to companyAmazon’s reported $1bn acquisition of video-doorbell maker Ring has closed, giving the company a significant lead over rival Google in the potentially lucrative home security market.

New portability tool will allow users to extract copy of own content posted on social networkInstagram has confirmed it will let users download their personal data, including previously shared photos, videos and messages, as it prepares for the European data regulation GDPR.While its parent company, Facebook, had announced a suite of GDPR controls, which Mark Zuckerberg emphasised during his testimony to Congress this week, Instagram had been quiet on the issue. Continue reading...

There are rumours Sony is about to make a big hardware announcement – but it hasn’t wrung the last drops out of PlayStation 4 yetIt has begun. Rumours regarding a possible successor to the PlayStation 4 have been swirling around tech sites and forums for several days, prompting a few bites from larger news outlets. According to some sources, we could see the PlayStation 5 as soon as this winter.It all started last month, when games writer Marcus Sellars posted a tweet suggesting that PS5 development kits were already being sent out to studios around the world. This was followed last week by subscription-only site Semiaccurate.com claiming to have seen technical details of the machine. According to its report, the PS5 will be based around an AMD accelerated processing unit featuring the manufacturer’s next generation Navi-series GPU and its Zen 2 CPU. Continue reading...

PlayStation 4; Sony/Santa Monica Studio

When it came to data collection, the CEO cleverly deflected lawmakers’ scrutiny. Here are the claims that don’t stand up

In an exclusive interview, Susan Fowler – the engineer who kickstarted a reckoning on sexual harassment in Silicon Valley – says the industry must end an obscure legal clause that prevents people like her seeking justice

The Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, again faced lengthy questioning from Congress on Wednesday. The key topic of debate was the company's ability to track users in areas such as shopping habits, browsing histories and users' locations. Zuckerberg also revealed that his own personal data had been handed over to the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.

In his second day on Capitol Hill, Zuckerberg says his own data was handed to Cambridge Analytica

On second day, Facebook CEO faced a House hearing to address data misuse in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica revelations

Digital secretary Matt Hancock says social media firm not above the law and must do moreThe digital secretary, Matt Hancock, has warned Facebook that it was not above the law, as he threatened the social media firm with regulation if it failed to protect users’ data more effectively.At what government sources said was a “robust but constructive” meeting, Hancock warned Facebook the relationship between government and social media firms would have to change.

Amazon has filed a patent that could allow its Echo devices to one day listen in on conversations to help with user recommendations. A handy feature or more fodder for conspiracy theories?Should you whisper around your Amazon Echo, lest it whisper back to you?That’s the future suggested by a patent recently filed by the company, which examined the possibility of eavesdropping on conversations held around its voice-activated devices in order to better suggest products or services to users. Continue reading...

As embattled Facebook founder appears before Congress again, here is what should be put to him

Giant cushion used by Facebook CEO in Senate hearing is widely mocked on social mediaThere was worldwide interest in Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance before joint Senate committees on Tuesday, but for some people a less important question than those about Facebook’s use of data and privacy issues was just as pressing - what was Mark Zuckerberg sitting on?The 33-year-old CEO of Facebook appeared to spend the session perched atop a large cushion, swiftly dubbed a “booster seat” by social media users.

WebAuthn will eliminate need for passwords by moving to methods of authentication such as biometrics, says web standards controllerA new web standard is expected to kill passwords, meaning users will no longer have to remember difficult logins for each and every website or service they use.

Beautiful screen, excellent keyboard, great trackpad – Huawei’s new machine shows it has what it takes to build a great laptopThe MateBook X Pro is Huawei’s more powerful follow up to last year’s excellent MateBook X, and as the name might imply it is aimed squarely at Apple’s MacBook Pro.

Analysis: even as senators challenged the social media CEO, they were directing listeners to the social network he created

Facebook’s CEO appeared before Congress in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal to address concerns over users’ dataMark Zuckerberg, the Facebook chief executive, warned on Tuesday of an online propaganda “arms race” with Russia and vowed that fighting interference in elections around the world is now his top priority.

Mark Zuckerberg gives testimony to Senate committees in light of revelations that Cambridge Analytica used Facebook data to influence US voters

Home secretary pledges £9m to help combat online criminals dealing in drugs, child pornography and guns

Barclays analysts compare speculation in digital currency to spread of infectious diseaseThe rise of bitcoin has comparisons with the spread of an infectious disease, according to economists who argue the digital currency may have peaked in value as more consumers become immune to its appeal.Analysts at Barclays said the soaring value of the digital currency last year, when prices rose by more than 900%, was helped by new buyers being “infected” by the euphoria surrounding bitcoin. The price has since crashed from almost $20,000 before Christmas to less than $7,000.

The video for Despacito, which had more than five billion views, was defaced and temporarily removedA number of high-profile music videos disappeared from YouTube and had their titles and hold images defaced, after the video streaming website was targeted by hackers.Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s Despacito is the most viewed YouTube video of all time, with more than 5bn views, but temporarily disappeared from the site and had its hold image replaced by a photograph of a masked gang holding guns. Hackers calling themselves Prosox and Kuroi’sh replaced the description beneath the video with: “Free Palestine.” Continue reading...

People who fear their information may have been used by Cambridge Analytica can go to a new help page

Software update disables touchscreen on £700-plus smartphones that have not had their screens repaired by AppleApple’s latest iOS 11.3 software update is causing iPhone 8 devices with third-party repaired screens to stop working.