Technology | The Guardian

Adults should stop setting a bad example to young people, says Nisha GandhiLike most articles on smartphone usage, your editorial (10 April) discusses phone addiction among young people. This strikes me as hypocritical because, in my experience, adults look at their phones just as much as, or perhaps even more than, children.Most adults I know have their phone in their line of sight at all times. My 60-year-old mother, who used to scold me in my teens for always being on my laptop, recently confessed to being addicted to YouTube. I remember one article about parents being told to stop looking at their phones and pay attention totheir children instead. Continue reading...

More children and families extorted with AI-made photos and videos, says National Center for Missing and Exploited ChildrenChild sexual exploitation is on the rise online and taking new forms such as images and videos generated by artificial intelligence, according to an annual assessment released on Tuesday by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), a US-based clearinghouse for the reporting of child sexual abuse material.Reports to the NCMEC of child abuse online rose by more than 12% in 2023 compared with the previous year, surpassing 36.2m reports, the organization said in its annual CyberTipline report. The majority of tips received were related to the circulation of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) such as photos and videos, but there was also an increase in reports of financial sexual extortion, when an online predator lures a child into sending nude images or videos and then demands money. Continue reading...

Workers in Africa have been exploited first by being paid a pittance to help make chatbots, then by having their own words become AI-ese. Plus, new AI gadgets are coming for your smartphones Don't get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up for the full article hereWe're witnessing the birth of AI-ese, and it's not what anyone could have guessed. Let's delve deeper.If you've spent enough time using AI assistants, you'll have noticed a certain quality to the responses generated. Without a concerted effort to break the systems out of their default register, the text they spit out is, while grammatically and semantically sound, ineffably generated.The images pop up in Mophat Okinyi's mind when he's alone, or when he's about to sleep. Okinyi, a former content moderator for OpenAI's ChatGPT in Nairobi, Kenya, is one of four people in that role who have filed a petition to the Kenyan government calling for an investigation into what they describe as exploitative conditions for contractors reviewing the content that powers artificial intelligence programs. Continue reading...

Fourteen years in the making, this character-driven sci-fi tale is a wonder of technology and imagination so texturally convincing you'll want to touch itTicktock, ticktock. In the dripping confines of the Fedora 1, an aquatic space colony of exquisite retro-futuristic design, it's not water but time that exerts an unmistakable pressure on inhabitants. A cataclysmic meteor looms on the horizon, threatening to wipe them all out. But this cast of lovably eccentric characters, including the titular Harold, hurry for no one, preferring to amble about their days while staring down the barrel of cosmic disaster.It's fitting that an adventure game as laid back in pacing as Harold Halibut should have been made by a team with a similarly leisurely approach to time. Fourteen years have passed since game director Onat Hekimoglu had the initial idea, while studying for an MA at Cologne Game Lab. Back then, it was a strange point-and-click adventure with earthy stop-motion visuals. Elements of that version persist today, namely protagonist Harold, a depressed caretaker who spends his days gazing out at the sea. But the intervening years have seen it become more mechanically refined, narratively expansive and visually beautiful. Continue reading...

Firms such as Serco and Virgin Active pull facial recognition and fingerprint scan systems used to monitor staff attendanceDozens of companies including national leisure centre chains are reviewing or pulling facial recognition technology and fingerprint scanning used to monitor staff attendance after a clampdown by the UK's data watchdog.In February, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) ordered a Serco subsidiary to stop using biometrics to monitor the attendance of staff at leisure centres it operates and also issued more stringent guidance on the use of facial recognition and fingerprint scanning. Continue reading...

Offenders could face jail if image is widely shared under proposed amendment to criminal justice billCreating a sexually explicit deepfake" image is to be made an offence under a new law, the Ministry of Justice has announced.Under the legislation, anyone who creates such an image without consent will face a criminal record and an unlimited fine. They could also face jail if the image is shared more widely. Continue reading...

If the experience of robot-served fast-food dining is any indication, the future of sex robots is going to be very unpleasantOn 1 April, the same day California's new $20 hourly minimum wage for fast-food workers went into effect, a new restaurant opened in north-east Los Angeles that was conspicuously light on human staff.CaliExpress by Flippy claims to be the world's first fully autonomous restaurant, using a system of AI-powered robots to churn out fast-food burgers and fries. A small number of humans are still required to push the buttons on the machines and assemble the burgers and toppings, but the companies involved tout that using their technology could cut labor costs, perhaps dramatically. Eat the future," they offer. Continue reading...

Owner of Al Condominio in Verona says response to the initiative during meals has been very positiveAn Italian restaurant is offering a free bottle of wine to customers who relinquish their mobile phones during meals.Angelo Lella, the owner of Al Condominio, a restaurant that opened in the northern city of Verona in March, said the aim was to encourage diners chat to each other instead of constantly glancing at their phones. Continue reading...

Tech giant is protesting proposed law that would require large online platforms to pay journalism usage fee'Google has temporarily blocked links from local news outlets in California from appearing in search results in response to the advancement of a bill that would require tech companies to pay publications for links that articles share. The change applies only to some people using Google in California, though it is not clear how many.The California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA) would require large online platforms to pay a journalism usage fee" for linking to news sites based in the Golden state. The bill cleared the California assembly in 2023. To become law, it would need to pass in the senate before being signed by the governor, Gavin Newsom. Continue reading...

Shares of Truth Social parent company have fallen 60% since March market debut as ex-president under financial pressureShares of the former president Donald Trump's social media company slumped 12% on Monday, extending their string of losses, after the company said in a regulatory filing that it could sell millions of additional shares in coming months.The filing showed a potential sale of 146.1m shares in Trump Media & Technology Group, including 114.8m shares owned by Trump himself. Documents also listed an additional 21.5m shares that could be sold upon the exercise of certain warrants issued when the company went public through a blank-check merger with Digital World Acquisition Corp. Continue reading...

Nine states are hashing out bills to protect minors online. Tech companies are fighting the laws with everything they've gotOn 6 April, Maryland became the first state in the US to pass a Kids Code" bill, which aims to prevent tech companies from collecting predatory data from children and using design features that could cause them harm. Vermont's legislature held its final hearing before a full vote on its Kids Code bill on 11 April. The measures are the latest in a salvo of proposed policies that, in the absence of federal rules, have made state capitols a major battlefield in the war between parents and child advocates, who lament that there are too few protections for minors online, and Silicon Valley tech companies, who protest that the recommended restrictions would hobble both business and free speech.Known as Age-Appropriate Design Code or Kids Code bills, these measures call for special data safeguards for underage users online as well as blanket prohibitions on children under certain ages using social media. Maryland's measure passed with unanimous votes in its house and senate. Continue reading...

The director of the Fallout TV series and the director of the modern Fallout video games sit down together to talk about the audacity of video-game storytelling and hope in a post-apocalyptic wastelandIf you had asked director Jonathan Nolan what his favourite film of the year was in the late 00s, more often than not he would have given you the name of a video game instead. Having grown up with the entire history of the medium - I started playing Pong with my brother Chris many, many years ago - that was when games started to take on this level of audacity in their storytelling, their tone, the things they were doing," he says. That's what I felt with [2008's] Fallout 3: the audacity. Frankly I wasn't feeling that in the film and television business at that time."Nolan, who has just finished directing the first series of Amazon Prime's Fallout TV show, is sitting next to Todd Howard, the video-game director who led development on Fallout 3 and 4, talking to me a few hours before the premiere of the first two episodes. It is evident within minutes that Nolan understands games almost as well as Todd does. He says he's drawn to games where your options are open, you decide who you want to be and your decisions have an effect on the world around you: in other words, a game like Todd Howard's. The two come across like old friends, easy in each other's company, and enthusiastic about each other's work. Continue reading...

Billionaire says there is nothing I hate more' than cutting staff as more than 10% of workforce to be affected

South Korean firm regains pole position amid biggest drop in iPhone sales since Covid-19 lockdownsApple has lost its spot as the world's biggest mobile phone seller after a steep sales drop as South Korean rival Samsung retook the lead in the global market share.Samsung had been the biggest seller of mobile phones for 12 years until the end of 2023, when sales of Apple's iPhone models overtook it. Continue reading...

Somerset House, London

An icon of millennials' childhoods languished for nearly two decades. Now it's attempting a comeback - banking on the fact that it hasn't changed at allIn the early 2000s, Olivia Packenham would get home from school, listen to the familiar sound of the dial up tone as her family computer connected to the internet, and navigate her AOL browser to the virtual gaming world of Neopets.Starting at the age of eight, Packenham played for years before losing interest when she was in high school. But in December 2023, after a nearly 15-year hiatus, she logged back on to neopets.com - and found the pets she had raised as a child waiting for her. Her favorite, a Bruce" (the Neopets version of a penguin) is more than 21 years old now. Continue reading...

The rise in mental health problems in young people should force politicians to actAcross the rich world, a problem emerges. Children are spending more time hunched over iPhones working on their personal brands and less time building mud huts in the woods with their friends. Social stakes have got higher: the right post, message, or photo cangive you a huge blast of approval; one mis-step could make you an outcast.Playful and elastic real-life interactions have been replaced by unforgiving virtual hierarchies, in which your position is precisely quantified, recorded and made tomatter more. Continue reading...

The material, discovered in 2004, was meant to be revolutionary. But only now is the technology coming of ageTwenty years ago, scientists announced they had created a new miracle material that was going to transform our lives. They called it graphene.Consisting of a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal pattern, it is one of the strongest materials ever made and, for good measure, it is a better conductor of electricity and heat than copper. Continue reading...

No one should be surprised that artificial intelligence is following a well-worn and entirely predictable financial arcAre we really in an AI bubble," asked a reader of last month's column about the apparently unstoppable rise of Nvidia, and how would we know?" Good question, so I asked an AI about it and was pointed to Investopedia, which is written by humans who know about this stuff. It told me that a bubble goes through five stages - rather as Elisabeth Kubler-Ross said people do with grief. For investment bubbles, the five stages are displacement, boom, euphoria, profit-taking and panic. So let's see how this maps on to our experience so far with AI.First, displacement. That's easy: it was ChatGPT wot dunnit. When it appeared on 30 November 2022, the world went, well, apeshit. So, everybody realised, this was what all the muttering surrounding AI was about! And people were bewitched by the discovery that you could converse with a machine and it would talk (well, write) back to you in coherent sentences. It was like the moment in the spring of 1993 when people saw Mosaic, the first proper web browser, and suddenly the penny dropped: so this was what that internet" thingy was for. And then Netscape had its initial public offering in August 1995, when the stock went stratospheric and the first internet bubble started to inflate. Continue reading...

Reesa Teesa chronicled how she met, dated, married and divorced' a pathological liar', leaving viewers obsessedApril Reign watched all 50 parts of the viral TikTok series, Who TF Did I Marry?Reign, creator of the 2015 viral social media campaign, #OscarSoWhite, was among the millions and counting who tuned in to see Reesa Teesa, whose real name is Tareasa Johnson, talk about how she met, dated, married and divorced" a man who she described as a real pathological liar". Continue reading...

Scientists say an overreliance on sight and sound is having a detrimental effect on people's wellbeing and that our devices should deliver a multisensory experienceWait a minute, wait a minute. You ain't heard nothing yet." So went the first line of audible dialogue in a feature film, 1927's The Jazz Singer. It was one of the first times that mass media had conveyed the sight and sound of a scene together, and the audience was enthralled.There have been improvements since: black and white has become colour, frame rates and resolutions have increased and sound quality has improved, but the media we consume still caters overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, to our eyes and ears. Continue reading...

The photographer was in Nepal when she happened upon a wedding ceremony and a once-in-a-lifetime imageJoyful, dancing wedding guests were following aceremonial procession and car through the streets ofBhaktapur, Nepal, when Callie Eh happened upon them. The Malaysian photographer was in the country for aphotography workshop.I try to attend themevery year or so," says Eh, who now lives in Switzerland. I can improve on existing skills and learn new ones, meet other photographers and exchange ideas." Continue reading...

Fisa allows for monitoring of foreign communications, as well as collection of citizens' messages and callsHouse lawmakers voted on Friday to reauthorize section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or Fisa, including a key measure that allows for warrantless surveillance of Americans. The controversial law allows for far-reaching monitoring of foreign communications, but has also led to the collection of US citizens' messages and phone calls.Lawmakers voted 273-147 to approve the law, which the Biden administration has for years backed as an important counterterrorism tool. An amendment that would have required authorities seek a warrant failed, in a tied 212-212 vote across party lines. Continue reading...

Plug in some prompts and the ChatGPT for music' whips up a song in seconds - if you don't mind slightly silly lyricsHeralded as the ChatGPT for music, Suno AI is the latest iteration of generative artificial intelligence to flood social feeds, wowing users with its (ahem) lyrical prowess.Plug in the musical style you want, a genre and a prompt for lyrics and Suno can spit out a full song for you in a matter of seconds.Coffee, you're my fuel for the soul (oh-oh)

Despite lay-offs and studio closures, the 20th edition of the ceremony saw Dungeons & Dragons-inspired Baldur's Gate 3 become the runaway winner in a hotly contested fieldIn London last night, the 20th Bafta games awards celebrated a year that was stacked with critically acclaimed games. Taking place against the backdrop of an unprecedented year of layoffs and studio closures in the gaming industry, acknowledged by Bafta chair Sara Putt in her speech at the beginning of the evening, it was a much-needed night of recognition of the creative efforts of the video game development community.The sprawling Dungeons & Dragons-inspired role-playing game Baldur's Gate 3 won five awards, including the public voted EE players' choice award and best game, alongside music, narrative and best performer in a supporting role (won by Andrew Wincott for his role at the devilish Raphael). Nintendo picked up the family and multiplayer awards for the exuberant Super Mario Bros Wonder, and technical achievement for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Alan Wake 2, the arresting, idiosyncratic horror game from Finnish studio Remedy, won artistic achievement and audio achievement. Continue reading...

Child safety group says Meta putting profits before protecting children', as messaging app lowers age limit from 16Campaigners have reacted with anger to the social media company Meta lowering the minimum age for WhatsApp users from 16 to 13 in the UK and EU.The change was announced in February and came into force on Wednesday. The campaign group Smartphone Free Childhood said the move flies in the face of the growing national demand for big tech to do more to protect our children". Continue reading...

Cross-party committee urges creation of strategy engage with new platforms that appeal to youngThe government needs a TikTok strategy to help combat misinformation directed at young people, MPs have said.Members of the cross-party culture, media and sport committee said the government needed to adapt to new apps and platforms that appeal to young people who are increasingly turning away from traditional sources of news. Continue reading...

Company says it is testing features as part of campaign to fight sexual scams and forms of image abuse'Instagram says it is deploying new tools to protect young people and combat sexual extortion, including a feature that will automatically blur nudity in direct messages.The social media company said in a blogpost on Thursday that it was testing the features as part of its campaign to fight sexual scams and other forms of image abuse", and to make it tougher for criminals to contact teens. Continue reading...

Concentration of power among just six big tech companies could lead to winner takes all dynamics'Just six major technology companies are at the heart of the AI sector through an interconnected web" of more than 90 investments and partnerships links, the UK's competition regulator has warned, sparking increased concern about the anti-competitive nature of the technology.Sarah Cardell, the chief executive of the Competition and Markets Authority, said AI foundation models - general-purpose AI systems such as OpenAI's GPT-4 and Google's Gemini, on which consumer and business products are frequently built - were a potential paradigm shift" for society. Continue reading...

As Tax Day approaches, accountants debunk some money-saving claims that are a little too good to be trueYou can find anything on TikTok from book reviews to sex education classes. So it's unsurprising that some people hit up the app for tax advice. Just try not to be one of those people yourself.The Washington Post reported this week that bad tax advice is multiplying on TikTok", with accountants-slash-influencers (or sketchy financial experts" who boast absolutely no credentials) supposedly revealing the one per cent's secret money-saving schemes. Continue reading...

The fantasy tabletop role-playing game was conceived of by friends at the heart of Wisconsin's gaming community, and has evolved to become a global phenomenonThere are 15 of us crammed into a cellar beneath a nondescript house in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. To the uninformed observer, there's nothing to see down here: just two low rooms, bare breeze-block walls, a ceiling lined with pipes. Yet we're all looking about the place in hushed awe, like tourists staring up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The people I'm with are journalists, bloggers and historians, most of them specialising in table-top games, and we're here because this is not an ordinary basement. It sits beneath 330 Center Street, the one-time home of Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax. And in February 1973 something happened here that would change the world of gaming, culture and entertainment for ever.Across town, at the Grand Geneva Resort & Spa, Gary Con XVI is in full swing. The annual convention organised by Luke Gygax in honour of his father has been taking place every year since Gary died in 2008. It started with a few hundred devoted fans, but now several thousand come to play D&D and many other wargames, board games and role-playing games. They pack out the building's many conference rooms and corridors, hunched in groups around large tables laden with character sheets, dice and snacks; they dress up as warriors and wizards and attend talks. Many have clearly been playing for decades. Continue reading...

The Jackass legend Johnny Knoxville debuts a show celebrating slightly unhinged people' while the LRB investigates the sinking of the Belgrano. Plus: five of the best podcasts about motherhood Don't get Hear Here delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereHow Was It for You? Continue reading...

Video of official from Unit 8200 in February 2023 raises questions about Israel's denials of use of AI in GazaA video has surfaced of a senior official at Israel's cyber intelligence agency, Unit 8200, talking last year about the use of machine learning magic powder" to help identify Hamas targets in Gaza.The footage raises questions about the accuracy of a recent statement about use of artificial intelligence (AI) by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), which said it does not use an artificial intelligence system that identifies terrorist operatives or tries to predict whether a person is a terrorist". Continue reading...

Repairable electronics pioneer shows noise-cancelling Bluetooth earbuds do not have to be disposableFairphone, the repairable and ethical electronics pioneer, is back with a pair of some of the first Bluetooth earbuds to make it so easy and cheap to replace their batteries that you can do it at home in minutes.Bluetooth earbuds have become a ubiquitous part of life, driven by the success of Apple's AirPods. Until now they have all compromised on sustainability by being very difficult to repair, in effect making them disposable. Continue reading...

AI to be used by researchers to scour documents for information on women omitted from chronicles written by men about menFour centuries ago Dublin had an official city scavenger" who was tasked with running sanitation teams to clear streets of human and animal waste. In return, the scavenger earned tolls from shopkeepers and traders.It could have worked well, except the contractor decided to cut costs and maximise profits by deploying just two carts rather than six. Dung piled up and the city stank. Continue reading...

Regulating new technology is never simple, but the status quo offers inadequate protectionThe principle that some products are available to adults and not children is uncontroversial. Access to weapons, alcohol and pornography is curtailed in this way because a level of maturity is the precondition for access (but not a guarantee of responsible use).Until recently, few people put smartphones in that category. The idea of an age restriction on sales would be dismissed as luddism or state-control freakery. But ministers are reported to be considering just such a ban for under-16s. Opinion polls suggest that it could be popular with parents. Government guidance already calls for a de facto ban on mobile phone use in schools in England and Wales. Many headteachers had already imposed rules to that effect. If there is not yet a consensus that young people's use of smartphones needs stricter regulation, that is the trajectory. Continue reading...

PC, Xbox, Nintendo Switch; Balloon Studios/Whitethorn Games

With its giant inflatable Pikachu, fairground games and friendly vibe, this just might be my favourite esports event around, and it's touching to see kids living out their trainer dreams Don't get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereI spent much of my weekend at the ExCeL convention centre in London, where about 10,000 people from across Europe were gathered for the European Pokemon championships. There were 4,500 competitors, playing the perennially popular trading card game, Pokemon Go, the arena battle game Pokemon Unite and, of course, the video games (currently Scarlet and Violet).The Pokemon championships aren't like many of the other esports events I've been to over the years. The prizes are only a few thousand dollars and a lot of the 340 Pokemon professors (who act as judges and facilitators) attended on their own dime. The crowd is also significantly younger, as you might expect. Among the competitors were plenty of kids and teenagers, and there were even more among the spectators. Continue reading...

Launches within 12 hours of one another, and more activity expected in industry over summerOpenAI, Google, and the French artificial intelligence startup Mistral have all released new versions of their frontier AI models within 12 hours of one another, as the industry prepares for a burst of activity over the summer.The unprecedented flurry of releases come as the sector readies for the expected launch of the next major version of GPT, the system that underpins OpenAI's hit chatbot Chat-GPT. Continue reading...

Polls show significant support for curb to protect children but some Tories uneasy with idea of government microparenting'Ministers are considering banning the sale of smartphones to children under the age of 16 after a number of polls have shown significant public support for such a curb.The government issued guidance on the use of mobile phones in English schools two months ago, but other curbs are said to have been considered to better protect children after a number of campaigns. Continue reading...

Adam Schiff introduces bill amid growing legal battle over whether major AI companies have made illegal use of copyrighted worksA bill introduced in the US Congress on Tuesday intends to force artificial intelligence companies to reveal the copyrighted material they use to make their generative AI models. The legislation adds to a growing number of attempts from lawmakers, news outlets and artists to establish how AI firms use creative works like songs, visual art, books and movies to train their software-and whether those companies are illegally building their tools off copyrighted content.The California Democratic congressman Adam Schiff introduced the bill, the Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act, which would require that AI companies submit any copyrighted works in their training datasets to the Register of Copyrights before releasing new generative AI systems, which create text, images, music or video in response to users' prompts. The bill would need companies to file such documents at least 30 days before publicly debuting their AI tools, or face a financial penalty. Such datasets encompass billions of lines of text and images or millions of hours of music and movies. Continue reading...

Major elections around the world so far this year have not suffered from systematic malicious interference, says global affairs chiefGenerative AI is overblown as an election risk, according to Meta's Nick Clegg, who claims the technology is more useful for defending democracy than attacking it.Speaking at the Meta AI Day event in London on Tuesday, the social network's global affairs chief said that the evidence from major elections that have already been run this year around the world is that technology such as large language models, image and video generators, and speech synthesis tools aren't being used in practice to subvert democracy. Continue reading...

His claims come with a caveat that shortages of training chips and growing demand for power could limit plans in the near termSuperhuman artificial intelligence that is smarter than anyone on Earth could exist next year, Elon Musk has said, unless the sector's power and computing demands become unsustainable before then.The prediction is a sharp tightening of an earlier claim from the multibillionaire, that superintelligent AI would exist by 2029. Whereas superhuman" is generally defined as being smarter than any individual human at any specific task, superintelligent is often defined instead as being smarter than every human's combined ability at any task. Continue reading...

From hyperrealistic deepfakes to videos that not only hijack our attention but also our emotions, tech seems increasingly full of cognitohazards' Don't get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up for the full article hereLet's talk about sci-fi.Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel Snow Crash is the book that launched a thousand startups. It was the first book to use the Hindu term avatar to describe a virtual representation of a person, it coined the term metaverse", and was one of Mark Zuckerberg's pieces of required reading for new executives at Facebook a decade before he changed the focus of the entire company to attempt to build Stephenson's fictional world in reality.Seeing a watermark doesn't necessarily have the effect one would want, says Henry Parker, head of government affairs at factchecking group Logically. The company uses both manual and automatic methods to vet content, Parker says, but labelling can only go so far. If you tell somebody they're looking at a deepfake before they even watch it, the social psychology of watching that video is so powerful that they will still reference it as if it was fact. So the only thing you can do is ask how can we reduce the amount of time this content is in circulation?" Continue reading...

Fuelled by music fandom and social media, young British people's slang is evolving to include words with pidgin, patois and Arabic roots - even where strong regional English dialects existThere's a video format spreading on TikTok. Recorded in towns across suburban England, teenage interviewers stop their peers on the street, fielding questions that range from fashion choices to humorous hypotheticals and local neighbourhood dramas, in the process building a large social media following and showcasing their patch of land to the world. 950 [pounds] for that, you know my ting," a teenage white boy says about his Canada Goose jacket in a video recorded in Bury St Edmunds. We're checking his drip, ya dun know, you heard my man," someone says in another video.Both the hosts and many of the interviewees speak with this distinct drawl - Multicultural London English (MLE), a dialect born in London's African-Caribbean communities in the 1970s and 80s. (Some, like researcher Ife Thompson, argue that Black British English" is a more fitting term.) It's rooted in Jamaican patois with influences from cockney, and more recently Arabic, the US and West African Pidgin English. Continue reading...

Quality earbuds with improved Bluetooth, great battery life, good controls and future-proofed techSennheiser's latest high-end earbuds aim to retake the crown as the best-sounding noise-cancelling earbuds you can buy, with cutting-edge chips, tricks and future-proofed tech.The Momentum True Wireless 4 earbuds cost 259.90 (299.90/$299.95), pitting them directly against the best from Bose and Sony.Water resistance: IP54 (splash)Connectivity: Bluetooth 5.4, SBC, AAC, aptX adaptive, LC3Battery life: Seven hours; up to 28 hours with caseEarbud weight: 6.2g eachDriver size: 7mmCharging case weight: 66.4gCase charging: USB-C, Qi wireless charging Continue reading...

Walter Huang was killed when his car steered in to a highway barrier and Tesla will avoid questions into its technology in a trialTesla has settled a lawsuit over a car crash which killed an Apple engineer in 2018 after his car veered off a highway near San Francisco, court documents showed on Monday.The settlement was made as the trial was about to start over the high-profile accident involving Tesla's driver assistant technology, ending a five-year legal battle over the case. Continue reading...

This week, Somerset House houses a selection of avant garde games on the theme of liminalityFor a week or so every year, Somerset House in London becomes home to a mini-festival of experimental video games: last year's were all on the theme of love. Now Play This has been running for 10 years, and this year's theme - liminality - is especially well-suited to the medium. Video games are in-between spaces: they are fictional worlds in which real-world relationships are made; they are an art form that exists across and between technology and culture. You could make a case for the inclusion of plenty of games in this selection, and the ones that are here explore the theme from some unexpected angles. There are games here about transition, expansion, life and death, borders, and skateboarding through cyberspace.The variety of interactive experiences here is, as ever, huge, showing the full range of what games and digital art can be. There are relatively conventional pieces of interactive entertainment here - such as Ed Key and David Kanaga's Proteus, in which you walk through a procedurally generated dreamscape - and Sad Owl Studios's Viewfinder, a superb game about perception and photography. And then there's Labyrinth, a lattice of interconnected ropes that light up bright LED cubes when they touch, and a playable suitcase (Pamela Cuadros's Moving Memories). In one room a film about journeying to the broken, glitchy edgelands of the game Cyberpunk 2077 plays opposite a game (Crashboard) where you wear 3D glasses, stand on a skateboard and tilt your way through an obstacle course of pixellated imagery from the early days of the internet. Continue reading...

Trend seeks to dispel myths of a perfect life with experts saying it can help users feel less alone in difficult momentsWhether it's a recipe for last night's dinner, pictures of a recent trip to a gallery or a track-by-track review of Beyonce's new album, the routine of chronicling our daily lives and thoughts on social media is now so commonplace that it's no longer clear what actually counts as oversharing.But an emerging trend in which users are encouraged to post their most soul baring, often uncomfortable truths is taking online candour to a whole new level.In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org. Continue reading...

Multibillionaire called for resignation of judge who ordered platform to block far-right usersElon Musk faces a legal investigation in Brazil after becoming embroiled in a public row with a supreme court judge over an order requiring the social network X to take down some far-right accounts.Justice Alexandre de Moraes had issued a court order forcing the site formerly known as Twitter to block several users as part of his investigation into the former president Jair Bolsonaro's attempts to stay in power after his 2022 election defeat. Continue reading...