Technology | The Guardian

While many apps gather ‘digital dust’, others foster dependent helplessness, writes Martin WillisJohn Harris’s critique of the internet revolution (Ignore the hype over big tech. Its products are mostly useless, 21 May) does not go far enough. While many apps gather “digital dust”, others foster dependent helplessness.Last week in Berlin, a young Bavarian visitor asked me, a non-German speaking British pensioner, for help in navigating a short journey on the underground. He looked bemused when I produced a map and traced the route he needed to take, to the extent that I offered to guide him as I was travelling in a similar direction. Continue reading...

As regulations come into force on Friday, inboxes fill with messages hoping to persuade customers to stay subscribedAs the GDPR deadline approaches, businesses have been resorting to ever more desperate attempts to get users to open their emails.

Renewed call to drop Facebook’s under-13s chat app backed by 21,000-strong petitionMore than 21,000 child health advocates are petitioning Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg to “pull the plug” on the company’s Messenger Kids app aimed at under 13s, warning of the “addictive power of social media”.In an open letter and petition led by two groups, the Campaign for Commercial Free Childhood (CCFC) and MomsRising, the campaigners urged Zuckerberg to use his “enormous reach and influence to promote children’s wellbeing.” Continue reading...

Playstation 4; Quantic Dream/Sony

Company gathered data from texts and photos of users and their friends, court case claimsFacebook used its apps to gather information about users and their friends, including some who had not signed up to the social network, reading their text messages, tracking their locations and accessing photos on their phones, a court case in California alleges.The claims of what would amount to mass surveillance are part of a lawsuit brought against the company by the former startup Six4Three, listed in legal documents filed at the superior court in San Mateo as part of a court case that has been ongoing for more than two years. Continue reading...

Facebook CEO exploited ability to access data from any user’s friend network, US case claimsMark Zuckerberg faces allegations that he developed a “malicious and fraudulent scheme” to exploit vast amounts of private data to earn Facebook billions and force rivals out of business.A company suing Facebook in a California court claims the social network’s chief executive “weaponised” the ability to access data from any user’s network of friends – the feature at the heart of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Continue reading...

Firm’s first non-US Advanced Technologies Centre will host Elevate programme and research into electric transportUber is opening a new research centre in Paris to develop the firm’s flying taxis as part of its Elevate programme.The new Advanced Technologies Centre, which will open in the autumn, will be Uber’s first development site outside the US. The taxi firm said that it would be investing €20m (£17.5m) over the next five years and is partnering with École Polytechnique on various research schemes. Continue reading...

Matt’s dad wants to organise files and make them accessible via his phone and tablet. Which program should he choose?My dad runs a small business and has problems organising his files – Word documents, PDFs, photos – alongside his emails. He wants to be able to easily save the emails and files in folders in date order in a single place. He also wants the folders to be accessible from anywhere on his phone/iPad.I’ve tried simply saving the emails and documents into a single folder on his Mac, but this is a huge pain for the amount of emails he receives. MattOne of the advantages of the digitisation of information is that we can now store many different kinds of data together. Videos and sound recordings now sit happily alongside letters, photos, paper receipts and invoices instead of in separate ledgers or folders, or on different physical media such as cassette tapes, CDs, DVDs etc.

Battlefield V aims to showcase the “unseen locations and untold stories” of war, with both epic battles and individual missions to engage in from Norway to north AfricaWARNING: video content not suitable for childrenThe Battlefield series is going back to where it started with its fifth incarnation, but this time with a goal of showcasing the “unseen locations, untold stories, and unplayed gameplay moments” of the second world war.For the first time in the series, that also includes a heavy focus on female soldiers, with a substantial chunk of the single-player mode starring women, and the option for players to bring female characters into multiplayer games. Continue reading...

The company will focus research efforts on Pittsburgh and continue to test in San FranciscoUber is to shut down its self-driving car programme in Arizona after one of its cars killed a pedestrian there in March.Related: Self-driving Uber kills Arizona woman in first fatal crash involving pedestrian Continue reading...

French president demands commitments from Silicon Valley to give back to societyThe French president Emmanuel Macron has warned a gathering of global tech bosses – including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg – that they cannot ride the coattails of the digital economy without giving back to society.Macron told key tech figures at the Elysée palace on Wednesday that they could not just be “free riding” without taking into account the common good. He called on them to help improve “social situations, inequalities, climate change.” Continue reading...

ACLU releases documentation on Amazon Rekognition software, fueling fears of surveillance via police body camerasIn the aftermath of the uprising in Ferguson, Missouri, over the killing of Michael Brown, police departments and policy makers around the country hit upon a supposed panacea to racist policing and police brutality: body-worn cameras.Many hailed the move as a victory for accountability. But among the few dissenters was Malkia Cyril, executive director of the Center for Media Justice and a leader in the Black Lives Matter network, who warned early and often that the cameras could become tools of surveillance against people of color because “body-worn cameras don’t watch the police, they watch the community being policed, people like me”. Continue reading...

Attorney general says internet cannot be allowed to descend into a ‘lawless world’Britain will name and shame foreign states that hire hackers to carry out cyber-attacks or interfere via the internet in national elections, the attorney general has warned.In a speech referring to Russian and North Korean “campaigns of intrusion”, Jeremy Wright QC called for international sanctions to be applied against countries that exploit cyberspace for illegal purposes. Continue reading...

The format didn’t let MEPs question the Facebook boss too deeply – but there were worries over its monopoly1. The European Parliament’s chosen format was a terrible way to elicit answers from one of the most powerful people in the world.Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance in front of the European parliament’s conference of presidents was a long-awaited opportunity to press the founder of the world’s biggest social network – which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp – on his company’s global influence and use of personal data following the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Continue reading...

Facebook founder spends 30 minutes giving answers to 60 minutes of MEPs’ questionsMark Zuckerberg’s meeting at the European parliament ended in acrimony amid a chorus of complaints that the Facebook founder had been allowed to evade questions and give vague answers. Over the 90-minute session, the Facebook founder told MEPs there would be no repeat of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal as he fielded accusations that his company had too much power.The format meant Zuckerberg spent around 30 minutes giving answers to a 60-minute block of consecutive questions. The 12 MEPs asked dozens of overlapping questions that allowed the Facebook boss to pick and choose his answers. Guy Verhofstadt, the leader of the liberal group, slammed the “precooked format” as “inappropriate” and said it had permitted Zuckerberg to avoid questions. Continue reading...

Facebook’s co-founder will be speaking to the ‘conference of presidents’ made up of leaders of the eight major political groupings7.50pm BSTIf you’re looking for a handy guide to what, exactly, happened today (and even if you watched the whole thing, you may want that question answered), my colleague Jennifer Rankin has the wrap.7.30pm BSTDamian Collins, chair of the DCMS committee, repeats his frustration at the hearing:What a missed opportunity for proper scrutiny on many crucial questions raised by the MEPs. Questions were blatantly dodged on shadow profiles, sharing data between WhatsApp and Facebook, the ability to opt out of political advertising and the true scale of data abuse on the platform.Unfortunately, the format of questioning allowed Mr Zuckerberg to cherry-pick his responses and not respond to each individual point. Continue reading...

The tech giant’s algorithms could have been compromising rape victims’ anonymity – and it’s not the first time the company has been tripped up by AI-driven systemsSometimes, Google is just a bit too good at carrying out its stated goal to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. Take search suggestions, the helpful feature that sees Google autocomplete phrases typed into its search engine. Type “How can I cook macaroni ...” and the site will add “cheese” on to the end, saving you six whole keystrokes. Wonderful!But it turns out there could be some less desirable implementations of the technology. The search-suggestion feature, and a similar feature that offers “related searches” at the bottom of the results page, could be helping to compromise the right to anonymity of complainants in UK rape and sexual assault cases. Type in the defendant’s name with a little extra information and the search engine may suggest related searches that include the victim’s name. It’s not the first time that Google, or one of its competitors in big tech, has been caught out after handing control to AI-driven, crowdsourced suggestions. Continue reading...

Tredegar, the birthplace of Aneurin Bevan, offers a microcosm of the health and social care problems facing the nationGrowing up in Tredegar in the 1960s, Jackie Rowlands vividly remembers the long benches in the surgery waiting room. Patients would move along the bench until it was their turn to see the doctor: “They were absolutely shining, so people just slid along because they were polished all the time. When you were a child, they were wonderful. You might be at the surgery at nine o’clock in the morning and not be seen until 11 o’clock, and if the doctor was called out to an emergency nobody complained.” She recalls a spirit of camaraderie: “Women used to knit in the surgery. And you had conversations – you got to know people along the bench.”Coal mining had brought jobs and relative prosperity to the town: Rowlands remembers Tredegar as a thriving community, with two cinemas, a “massive library”, the Workmen’s Hall, which held weekly dances, and a snooker hall. But the industry took its toll on health: pneumoconiosis, a lung ailment caused by coal dust, was widespread. Continue reading...

Gregory Stevens resigns after tweets about Palo Alto, slamming tech industry greed and empty social justice promisesA Silicon Valley pastor has resigned from his church after calling the city of Palo Alto an “elitist shit den of hate” and criticizing the hypocrisy of “social justice” activism in the region.

Facebook chief initially agreed to closed-door meeting, but will now speak publiclyMark Zuckerberg will appear publicly before the European parliament on Tuesday, ending a terse standoff with the institution, but further inflaming tensions with the House of Commons, which has repeatedly requested an appearance from the Facebook founder.The president of the European parliament, Antonio Tajani, announced on Monday morning that Zuckerberg’s appearance would be publicly livestreamed, following criticism that the Facebook chief executive had initially managed to persuade the body to meet him behind closed doors. Continue reading...

A projected Princess Leia in Star Wars suggested a 3D future, but we’ll have to wait a while before we are playing holochessThe fragile apparition endured only long enough to say: “Help me Obi Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope” before flickering out. But R2D2’s 3D projection gave millions of young eyes, including mine, their first taste of holograms, and planted unrealistic expectations of a future playing dejarik, the gruesome game of holographic chess played on board the Millennium Falcon.The concept of the hologram was already familiar, invented in the 1940s by physicist Dennis Gabor, but since the force reawakened the idea almost 40 years later, things haven’t really moved on. Why aren’t real, moving, Leia-style holograms now part of our day-to-day lives? Continue reading...

Deal will create single giant catalogue of more than four million songsSony has announced a US$1.9bn (£1.4bn) deal to acquire EMI Music Publishing, one of the world’s largest music publishing companies with rights to songs by the likes of Queen and Pharrell Williams.

Jon Baines says NHS trusts and others misunderstand the General Data Protection Regulation, Richard Stallman says personal data is only harmless when not collected, and John Chen of BlackBerry says individuals should own their own dataThe General Data Protection Regulation does not require organisations to contact consumers to obtain approval for further communications (however the contact details were originally collected). And it certainly doesn’t require NHS trusts to “get explicit permissions from patients” to send appointment reminders (New data law raises fears for NHS messages to patients, 19 May). That some NHS trusts are apparently under this misapprehension (which is as a result of confusion regarding GDPR and the 2003 regulations relating to the sending of electronic direct marketing) is concerning. A reminder message is both a very useful service for a patient, and a sensible way of avoiding the cost to the NHS of missed appointments. What it is definitely not, however, is a direct marketing message.Indeed, if NHS trusts are using patient data in this way, and if the result is some patients wrongly not getting reminders, those trusts are arguably breaching the existing data protection law that requires data to be “adequate” for the purposes for which it is held.

Many firms have the required consent already; others don’t have consent to send a requestThe vast majority of emails flooding inboxes across Europe from companies asking for consent to keep recipients on their mailing list are unnecessary and some may be illegal, privacy experts have said, as new rules over data privacy come into force at the end of this week.Many companies, acting based on poor legal advice, a fear of fines of up to €20m (£17.5m) and a lack of good examples to follow, have taken what they see as the safest option for hewing to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR): asking customers to renew their consent for marketing communications and data processing. Continue reading...

Collective action seeking up to £3.2bn for claims Google bypassed privacy settings of Apple’s Safari browserGoogle is being sued in the high court for as much as £3.2bn for the alleged “clandestine tracking and collation” of personal information from 4.4 million iPhone users in the UK.The collective action is being led by former Which? director Richard Lloyd over claims Google bypassed the privacy settings of Apple’s Safari browser on iPhones between August 2011 and February 2012 in order to divide people into categories for advertisers. Continue reading...

The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation comes into force this week – here’s what it meansYou could be forgiven for thinking that Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a law created to fill your inbox with identikit warnings from every company you have ever interacted with online that “the privacy policy has changed” and pleas to “just click here so we can stay in touch”.But GDPR is far more than just an inbox-clogger. The regulation, seven years in the making, finally comes into effect on 25 May, and is set to force sweeping changes in everything from technology to advertising, and medicine to banking. Continue reading...

New faster dual-motor AWD variants added to lineup as firm continues battle to ramp up production of ‘mass market’ TeslaElon Musk has announced two new versions of the Model 3, including a high-performance model capable of hitting 60mph in 3.5 seconds, following months of production woes.

Xbox One, PC; Undead Labs/Microsoft

Attempts to reinvent money such as bitcoin often create excitement, but achieve littleThe cryptocurrency revolution, which started with bitcoin in 2009, claims to be inventing new kinds of money. There are now nearly 2,000 cryptocurrencies, and millions of people worldwide are excited by them. What accounts for this enthusiasm, which so far remains undampened by warnings that the revolution is a sham?One must bear in mind that attempts to reinvent money have a long history. As the sociologist Viviana Zelizer points out in her book The Social Meaning of Money: “Despite the commonsense idea that ‘a dollar is a dollar is a dollar,’ everywhere we look people are constantly creating different kinds of money.” Many of these innovations generate real excitement, at least for a while. Continue reading...

Great screen, improved camera and dual-sim support make this high-performing £469 phone feel like a bargainThe new OnePlus 6 holds true to a winning formula: a premium smartphone with top-end specs that costs less than half the price of an iPhone X.

Britain’s record on employing female engineers is worst in Europe, says Hayaatun Sillem, CEO of the Royal Academy of EngineeringThe failure of British engineering companies to increase the proportion of women they employ above 10% is a source of embarrassment, one of the profession’s leading figures has said.Hayaatun Sillem, chief executive of the Royal Academy of Engineering, said the gender imbalance was particularly frustrating given the significant progress made by other countries and in professions like law and medicine. Continue reading...

It’s years since Silicon Valley gave us a game-changer. Instead, from curing disease to colonies on Mars, we’re fed overblown promisesBack in 1999, Google hit 1bn searches a year. Wifi began to make an impact about two years later. Thanks to the pioneers of Facebook and Twitter, the age of mass social media dawned between 2004 and 2006 – and non-stop posting, messaging and following was soon enabled by the iPhone, launched in 2007. These things have changed the world and, in hindsight, the way they became ubiquitous had a powerful sense of inevitability. But the revolution they represented is old now, and nothing comparable has come along for more than a decade.Despite this, a regular ritual of hype and hysteria is now built into the news cycle. Every now and again, at some huge auditorium, a senior staff member at one of the big firms based in northern California – ordinarily a man – will take the stage dressed in box-fresh casualwear, and inform the gathered multitudes of some hitherto unimagined leap forward, supposedly destined to transform millions of lives. (There will be whoops and gasps in response, and a splurge of media coverage – before, in the wider world, a palpable feeling of anticlimax sets in.) Continue reading...

Matt Hancock wants to rein in internet excess – just don’t ask him how it will work in realityTowards the end of the Conservatives’ 2017 general election manifesto was a largely overlooked chapter setting out the party’s stance on the future of the internet.

Last week it was revealed that Apple operates 55 driverless cars. What else is coming down the self-driving road?An Oxford University startup, Oxbotica, proposes to solve the problem of liability in a collision involving autonomous vehicles by allowing insurers access to the vast amounts of data the car generates, even allowing them to control a car in real time if it detects a dangerous situation. Continue reading...

The likable crossover has had a makeover. It’s not as extrovert as it used to be, but it still packs plenty of French flairCitroën Cactus

New laws will make Britain ‘safest place in the world’ to be online, culture secretary saysNew laws will be introduced to tackle the internet’s “wild west” that will make Britain the “safest place in the world” to be online, the culture secretary has said.Social media companies have already taken some positive steps to protect users, but the performance of the industry overall has been mixed, according to Matt Hancock. Continue reading...

The pop star is all the more human for swearing at a fan for changing his phone’s camera angleThere’s a short clip doing the rounds of Lana Del Rey posing for a selfie with a fan. All is polite until he tries to direct the shot by moving the phone towards, presumably, a more flattering angle. Anyone who has experienced the shock of opening the camera app to see myriad chins rather than a beautiful vista will understand his motivation. But Del Rey is not having it. “You know what? Fuck it,” she says abruptly and walks off.I feel for the fan, who looks shaken, but it made me like Lana Del Rey infinitely more. You hardly ever see bad behaviour from pop stars these days, thanks to a smartphone culture that monitors their every move – even Solange couldn’t smack Jay-Z in a hotel lift in privacy – so in that moment of frustration, she seemed less sad-chanteuse-bot, more worn-out human being. Continue reading...

Requiring companies to erase our information quarterly would offer us greater freedom online – without destroying profit marginsIt’s taken a long time, but people have finally discovered how much information companies like Google and Facebook have on them. We cannot keep sacrificing our privacy and dignity to continue using the internet. However, at the same time, new digital innovations that millions love and enjoy require our data. So what are we to do?The biggest issue with the software industry’s data collection is the span of time for which it hoards information. The industry simply does not believe in a delete button. For instance, Google has records of all my locations for the last six years, and Facebook has my deleted messages from nearly 10 years ago. Continue reading...

Health service joins UK firms in rushing to comply with new data protection rulesThe National Health Service is texting patients to warn they could lose alerts about hospital and doctor appointments, joining the deluge of more than 1bn “GDPR” messages currently hitting personal inboxes to meet an EU deadline this week.GDPR, which stands for General Data Protection Regulation, has been described as the biggest overhaul of online privacy since the birth of the internet, and comes into force on Friday May 25. It gives all EU citizens the right to know what data is stored on them and to have it deleted, plus protect them from privacy and data breaches. If companies fail to comply, they can be hit with fines of up to €20m (£17.5m) or 4% of global turnover.

After Yanny and Laurel, a new audio illusion is dividing the internet. This time, it was taken from a 2014 YouTube review of a children's toy. The toy is saying 'brainstorm', but many people are saying they can also hear 'green needle', depending on which word they concentrate on before hearing the sound. What do you hear? Continue reading...

The latest CoD instalment is ditching its Campaign mode and going multiplayer-only, taking lessons from Overwatch, Fortnite and PlayerUnknown’s BattlegroundsThe latest title in the multimillion-selling Call of Duty series will abandon the once-staple single-player Campaign and add a Fortnite-style battle royale mode, Activision has revealed.At a unveiling event in Los Angeles on Thursday, the company showed off Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 for the first time, promising major changes to the franchise, now in its 15th year. The latest title in the Cold War conspiracy-fuelled Black Ops series will lose the futuristic elements of its predecessor with no wall-running or jetpacks, returning – like last year’s Call of Duty: WWII – to “boots on the ground” combat. Continue reading...

At the world’s largest blockchain conference, female leaders in the industry sought to shake off bitcoin’s boyish image

Original audio clip comes from vocabulary.com and features voice repeating one word – but which one do you hear?A short audio clip of a computer-generated voice has become the most divisive subject on the internet since the gold/blue dress controversy of 2015.The audio “illusion”, which first appeared on Reddit, seems to be saying one word – but whether that word is “Yanny” or “Laurel” is the source of furious disagreement. Continue reading...

Celia’s working day was almost ruined after she was caught out by an enforced update. Can she stop it happening again?Yesterday, I intended to take my laptop to visit a client, but when I was about to set off, yup, I couldn’t turn it off without allowing Microsoft to do its upgrades. We all know how long that takes, and I had a train to catch, so I ended up having to wing the whole presentation.

Digital laundering funds terror and will ‘double by 2020’ – and the UN’s anti-crime chief says it must be tackled“We all have a stake in stopping cybercrime, which also enables so many other crimes, from human trafficking and migrant smuggling to trafficking in drugs, illicit firearms and wildlife, and money laundering,” said Yury Fedotov, the director general at the United Nation’s Office on Drugs and Crime, this week.States are meeting at the UNODC in Vienna to discuss criminal justice responses to prevent and counter cybercrime, which uses new technologies to generate some $1.5tn in revenue per year, with a rapidly increasing amount laundered via equally cutting-edge digital methods that often avoid detection. Continue reading...

The Xbox adaptive controller features two large buttons for hands, elbows or feet, as well as 19 ports to accommodate extra devices including mouth-operated ‘sip and puff’ quadsticksMicrosoft is launching a new Xbox controller, developed to meet the needs of people with disabilities.Set for release later this year, the Xbox adaptive controller is a customisable device intended to support a wide range of needs and disabilities, making video games more accessible. It will retail for $99 (£73.50) and will be sold worldwide via Microsoft digital stores. Continue reading...

Policy change designed to help verify identity has sparked a backlash by inadvertently excluding undocumented Americans

Smart speakers influence debate about switching off analogue signal in UKThe popularity of Amazon’s Echo smart speakers has helped push the audience for digital radio past that of FM and AM in the UK for the first time. The milestone, which was reached in the first quarter of this year, could prompt the government to launch a review to evaluate whether it should switch off the FM signal.Digital, which covers listening via digital audio broadcasting (DAB) sets in homes and cars, televisions and through services such as Echo, hit a record share of 50.9% of all radio listening in the three months to March. Continue reading...

But resolution requires passage in House and Trump’s signature – an unlikely outcome before FCC’s repeal goes into effect in JuneAdvocates for net neutrality won a symbolic victory Wednesday when the Senate voted 52-47 to preserve Obama-era regulations that require internet service providers to treat all web traffic equally.But the resolution also requires passage by the Republican-controlled House and Donald Trump’s signature to be enacted – an unlikely outcome before the Federal Communications Commission’s repeal of net neutrality rules goes into effect next month. Continue reading...

David William Hall, 72, charged with improper use of a public electronic communications network