Technology | The Guardian

Maybe it feels satisfying to see the US elite in discomfort because we're so unlikely to see them face accountability in normal lifeIt feels important to note that most of the people at Burning Man, the week-long festival of radical self-reliance" held every summer in the inhospitable Nevada desert, are not evil. But the festival, which draws thousands of people for its music, experiments in self-governance, revealing costuming and ready availability of drugs, has become a stand-in for a certain kind of self-congratulatory excess.At least in the popular imagination, Burning Man has become associated with the kind of person who will rapturously tell you about their love for taxidermy, or polyamory, or electronic dance music, often while you smile stiffly and scan the room for an exit. Imagine a white person with dreadlocks: that person loves Burning Man. The clientele is heavy on privilege and light on self-awareness. But most of them, it should be emphasized, do not deserve to suffer. Their only crime is being annoying. Continue reading...

Xbox Series S/X, PC; Bethesda/Microsoft

Under the new restrictions, short-term renters will need to register with the city and must be present in the home for the duration of the rentalHome-sharing company Airbnb said it had to stop accepting some reservations in New York City after new regulations on short-term rentals went into effect.The new rules are intended to effectively end a free-for-all in which landlords and residents have been renting out their apartments by the week or the night to tourists or others in the city for short stays. Advocates say the practice has driven a rise in demand for housing in already scarce neighbourhoods in the city. Continue reading...

Mate 60 Pro mobile phone is said to use chip made in China that was thought impossible without access to restricted western technologyChina has produced a 5G smartphone using an advanced silicon chip on a scale of miniaturisation that was thought beyond its capabilities due to US-led export restrictions, analysts have said.Huawei's Mate 60 Pro is powered by a new Kirin 9000s chip that was made in China by the partly state-owned Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC), the analysis firm TechInsights said. Continue reading...

Investigation claims networks convert illicit cash to bitcoin to pay people who sell false streams on the platformCriminal gangs behind a rise in bombings and shootings in Sweden in recent years are using fake Spotify streams to launder money, a Swedish newspaper reported on Tuesday.Criminal networks have for several years been using money from drug deals, robberies, fraud and contract killings to pay for false Spotify streams of songs published by artists with ties to the gangs, an investigative report in Svenska Dagbladet claimed. Continue reading...

World's richest man claims civil rights group has falsely accused site formerly known as Twitter of being antisemiticElon Musk has threatened to sue the Anti-Defamation League after accusing the US-based civil rights group that campaigns against antisemitism and bigotry of trying to kill" his X social media platform.The owner of X, formerly known as Twitter, said the ADL was trying to shut down his company by falsely accusing it and me of being antisemitic". Continue reading...

The Chinese-owned app also announced a UK-based cybersecurity company will independently audit data controls and protectionsTikTok has begun shifting European citizens' user data to a newly operational site in Dublin as it moves to address western politicians' concerns about Chinese state influence over the company.The video-sharing app also announced that an independent UK-based cybersecurity company will vet any transfer of data outside Europe. Continue reading...

Twitter is not the only platform inviting political adverts back, as tech giants from Meta to YouTube compete for marketing money and eyeballs Don't get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up for the free newsletter hereX, the platform formerly known as Twitter, announced it will allow political advertising back on the platform - reversing a global ban on political ads since 2019. The move is the latest to stoke concerns about the ability of big tech to police online misinformation ahead of the 2024 elections - and X is not the only platform being scrutinised.Social media firms' handlings of misinformation and divisive speech reached a breaking point in the 2020 US presidential elections when Donald Trump used online platforms to rile up his base, culminating in the storming of the Capitol building on 6 January 2021. But in the time since, companies have not strengthened their policies to prevent such crises, instead slowly stripping protections away. This erosion of safeguards, coupled with the rise of artificial intelligence, could create a perfect storm for 2024, experts warn. Continue reading...

Records from the Department of Homeland Security show it sought to expand undercover operations online despite pushback from FacebookUS immigration officials sought to expand their abilities to monitor and surveil social media activity and allowed officers to create and use fake social media profiles in a wide range of operations, including covertly researching the online presence of people seeking immigration benefits, new documents show.Authorities within several Department of Homeland Security (DHS) immigration agencies, including Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), have repeatedly discussed using aliases", or undercover online accounts for investigations, according to records obtained through an open records request by the civil rights non-profit Brennan Center for Justice and shared with the Guardian. Officials have also expressed concern about social media sites' policies that prohibit the use of fake profiles and discussed bypassing those rules. Continue reading...

PlayStation 4/5, Xbox, PC

Company says it is investigating the potential exposure of referral letters, patient names, contact details and Medicare numbers

On the Lazzaretto Vecchio, the small island home of Venice film festival's Immersive section, I donned an XR headset and boldly went where most festivalgoers don'tTraditional cinema hogs the limelight at the Venice film festival but there's an array of wilder delights just behind the main site. Hang a right past the PalaBiennale theatre and a boat whisks you across to the Lazzaretto Vecchio, the small island home of the event's Venice Immersive section. It's a two-minute ride but it feels like light years away.Venice's self-styled Immersion Island" is dedicated to showcasing emergent technologies - and by definition emergent storytelling. There are 28 XR (extended reality) productions in the main competition, together with 24 world gallery" tours hosted by VRChat, and these run the gamut from interactive movies through 360-degree videos to the sort of imposing standalone installations you'd otherwise find in a modish art gallery. The medium is nascent and even the language around it is still bedding down. The works on the schedule aren't quite films or games or art displays, although most will contain elements from all three disciplines. We like to call them experiences," says the woman on the desk with a shrug. Continue reading...

Sick of space, shooting and samey franchises? Find something to grab you in our critics' selection of the strangest, most interesting forthcoming video games we played at this year's GamescomPlatforms: PC, PlayStation 4/5, Xbox, Nintendo Switch

Lawsuit says network discloses user data at request of Saudi authorities at much higher rate than for US, UK and CanadaThe social media company formerly known as Twitter has been accused in a revised civil US lawsuit of helping Saudi Arabia commit grave human rights abuses against its users, including by disclosing confidential user data at the request of Saudi authorities at a much higher rate than it has for the US, UK or Canada.The lawsuit was brought last May against X, as Twitter is now known, by Areej al-Sadhan, the sister of a Saudi aid worker who was forcibly disappeared and then later sentenced to 20 years in jail. Continue reading...

With its expose of digital scammers, fraud farms and gangmasters, Ao Shen's thriller is inventive and snappily directed. A shame, then, that it morphs into a public health warningIt is a shame that either Chinese authorities had a word, or producers decided to aim for brownie points by fitting No More Bets out as an anti-fraud public-messaging spot - because Ao Shen's thriller is otherwise a snappily directed and intriguing entree to the industry of online deception. Compared with the unrepentant and far more effective dramatic irony of The Wolf of Wall Street, a film this one often resembles, we get unnecessary scenes of government officials reading the riot act to digital scammers, and a patriotic after-credits montage of fraud and trafficking victims saying how much safer they feel back on Chinese soil.An unnamed south-east Asian country is the promised land for cheesed-off programmer Pan (Yixing Zhang), who, having been passed over for promotion, flies off to work for a new gaming company offering big bucks. But instead he finds himself passport-less and strong-armed into grinding for a fraud farm in a rural primary school run by gangmaster Bingkun (Chuan-jun Wang, doing a good approximation of the stooping slimeballs you used to get in old Shaw Brothers films). Among their sucker-baiting operations are catfishing, investing and casino gambling, with croupier and former model Anna (Gina Chen Jin) coerced into operating the honeypot. Continue reading...

Entrepreneurs want Haredi men, many of whom live in poverty, to have access to the opportunities of Tel AvivEntering Bnei Brak, an ultra-Orthodox neighbourhood just a few kilometres away from the gleaming towers that testify to Tel Aviv's prowess as a global hi-tech hub, feels like stepping into a different world.Despite the startups and advanced technology initiatives on their doorstep, much of Israel's ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, population still shuns modern inventions such as television and smartphones, which are viewed as a threat to their way of life. Continue reading...

Criminals are cloning voices and making calls to trick victims into sending them money. How can they be stopped?Jennifer DiStefano, a mother of four, got a call one day from an unknown number. Two of her children were off snowboarding, so she picked up, worried that one of them might have been injured. It was her daughter Bree, screaming, crying and pleading for help. A man came on the line and told DiStefano that he had kidnapped her daughter and that if she didn't pay up, he would kill her.DiStefano was terrified, but her fear and horror was the only real thing about that phone call. Bree had not been kidnapped, she was with her brother, safe. Instead, scammers had used AI to replicate Bree's voice so accurately that her own mother could not recognise the difference - and they were using it to try to extort money from DiStefano. Continue reading...

Four years ago the venerable retailer fell out of the FTSE 100, suffering a humiliating blow to its prestige. But now it has turned things aroundIt's four years to the day since Marks & Spencer dropped out of the FTSE 100 for the first time since the City share index's 1984 inception.It was a major blow for one of the UK's biggest retailers - and symptomatic of a series of existential problems it faced. Share prices were close to a 20-year low; annual profits had slumped to less than 100m. But for newly appointed company chair Archie Norman, these figures were far from the only concern. Upon taking up his position, Norman promised a radical shake-up to fix the drifting business. Continue reading...

Experts aim to draw up UK legislation to protect against misuse of artificial intelligenceWe can't let existential risks blind us to the challenges we face today," says Gina Neff, a tech expert at the University of Cambridge and co-chair of a new TUC taskforce on artificial intelligence in the workplace. Those challenges are real, and they're faced by all of us."Rishi Sunak is hosting a global AI safety summit in November, amid hair-raising concerns raised by tech gurus - some of whom have even warned the technology could destroy humanity. Continue reading...

In unseen notes to be published in a new book, Douglas Adams foresaw the success of a host of technology we now take for grantedDouglas Adams created the most famous ebook reader - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - almost 30 years before the first Kindle was released, but he didn't restrict his ideas to his science fiction.In the late 1990s, at least a decade before Amazon's e-reader first came on to the market in 2007, the author and humorist made a series of notes uncannily predicting the rise of electronic books. Continue reading...

As brokers exploit the hunt for tests with an automated bot' system, many are paying extortionate fees to ditch their L-platesBritain's system of allocating driving tests is in disarray in many parts of the country as learner drivers are forced to travel hundreds of miles for their tests or pay unofficial brokers up to 400 to avoid the queues, reveals an Observer investigation.The number of drivers waiting to take their practical tests climbed above 500,000 this year, rising from 147,716 in January 2020 to 538,702 in August. Continue reading...

Banning phones in schools might help children concentrate in class but how will it impact their overall relationship with devices?Tuesday started like any other: before I was even really awake, I looked at my phone. Weather. Transphobes. Did Anybody Famous Die? Potential Polly Pocket/Scrabble/Settlers of Catan movies. But unlike other days, I then put it in a drawer.I'm not good at regulating my behaviour. This is obvious to anyone who has ever watched me order chocolate on the internet. So it was with both fear and curiosity that I accepted a challenge from my editor to experience a day without my phone. The challenge was in response to phone bans hitting public high schools around Australia, something Unesco has called for globally in an effort to reduce distraction, cyberbullying and improve learning.Sign up for a weekly email featuring our best reads Continue reading...

Officials reflected policing minister's enthusiasm to roll out controversial technology across the country, particularly in retail settingsSenior officials at the Home Office secretly lobbied the UK's independent privacy regulator to act favourably" towards a private firm keen to roll out controversial facial recognition technology across the country, according to internal government emails seen by the Observer.Correspondence reveals that the Home Office wrote to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) warning that policing minister, Chris Philp, would write to your commissioner" if the regulator's investigation into Facewatch - whose facial recognition cameras have provoked huge opposition after being installed in shops - was not positive towards the firm. Continue reading...

Work is needed to counter the oily' image of jobs for engineers, and stop the digital sector from luring the best graduatesIt is incredibly hard to recruit enough experienced people," says civil engineer Liz Chapman, head of design at the UK arm of global infrastructure business Stantec. I have never known it to be this tough to find engineering staff."While many companies are withdrawing job adverts, worried about higher interest rates and the threat of an economic slowdown, engineering firms are bucking the trend. Continue reading...

Flannery Associates, the California group behind the $800m effort, launched a website showcasing renderingsThe Silicon Valley elites who have been quietly buying up northern California farmland for several years have gone public with their vision for the utopian city they hope to build from scratch on 55,000 acres in Solano county.This week the group behind the effort, Flannery Associates, launched a website for the initiative and released a series of sunny renderings showing Mediterranean-style homes and walkable and bikeable neighborhoods. Continue reading...

Publisher is latest news organisation to block the artificial intelligence company from harvesting content to create its toolsThe Guardian has blocked OpenAI from using its content to power artificial intelligence products such as ChatGPT. Concerns that OpenAI is using unlicensed content to create its AI tools have led to writers bringing lawsuits against the company and creative industries calling for safeguards to protect their intellectual property.The Guardian has confirmed that it has prevented OpenAI from deploying software that harvests its content. Continue reading...

Nintendo's Shiro Mouri and Takashi Tezuka talk through Mario's forthcoming return to 2DWhen I was about eight years old, someone in the playground at school told me that if you crouched down on top of one of the colourful platforms in a certain level of Super Mario Bros 3, Mario would fall through the scenery and you would be able to run through the background of the whole stage, emerging in a secret passage at the end. I assumed they must be lying. Playground information about video games was supremely unreliable in the 90s, before YouTube playthroughs could show you all a game's secrets with a single search.But when I got home, I tried the crouching-down-on-the-platform thing anyway - and it worked. Mario ran right past the end of the level and emerged in a hidden room, where he was given a whistle that warped him to a different world. I was awestruck. I felt as if I had just found Atlantis, as if I had been bequeathed some incredible secret and it was now my sacred duty to pass it on. It is impossible to recreate that pure wonder that video games made us feel as children, when they were new to us. But Nintendo always tries. In Super Mario Bros Wonder's case, its emotive goal is right there in the title. Continue reading...

Everstone's debut video game hopes to do for 10th-century China what Ubisoft's open-world series did for ancient Greece and renaissance ItalyAssassin's Creed and Total War have proven that video games can be better than any tattered textbook at bringing history alive - though they do tend to retread the same old battlegrounds of western Europe. China's Everstone Studio is hoping to change that, letting players loose on an open world 10th-century China in its debut game, Where Winds Meet.Here, we are put into the sandals of a nameless young martial artist and transported back to the dramatic fall of the Southern Tang dynasty, where the sudden poisoning of Emperor Li Yu thrusts our hero into a dangerous new world. Despite its indie origins, Where Winds Meet looks like a game with a big budget behind it, drawing comparisons to Sucker Punch's multimillion dollar samurai epic Ghosts of Tsushima. Its sprawling depiction of southern China is a sight to behold; comb through the gameplay videos and you'll see its hero roaming across a luscious countryside one minute, stumbling upon a serene wildlife-filled pond the next and then being pursued by bandits after dark, dodging arrows on rain-soaked rooftops. Continue reading...

Reports suggest plans for Project 42' included a glass structure that contained a residential element for the chief executiveUS prosecutors are investigating Tesla over alleged use of company funds for a secret project described internally as a house for Elon Musk, the electric carmaker's chief executive.Information sought from Tesla by the US attorney's office for the southern district of New York includes personal benefits paid to Musk, how much was spent on the project and its purpose, according to the Wall Street Journal. Continue reading...

PlayStation 4/5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox, PC; Sabotage Studio

In this week's newsletter: Psychologist Aleks Krotoski investigates the Silicon Valley scions trying to cheat death in The Immortals. Plus: five of the best US politics podcasts Don't get Hear Here delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereThe Immortals

Action by social media company comes after Facebook parent company Meta shut down 9,000 accounts tied to political spam network

Can't face another minute thinking about war, inflation or the climate catastrophe? Give your brain a break in a strange, surprising or entrancing corner of the internet. We've got riddles, we've got webcams, we've got an owl in a box ...I must be about 1,000 years old in internet years (which are even shorter than dog years). I remember doing a summer job as a student in 1995, being instructed to research something on the computer and sitting in front of AltaVista (a primitive search engine, young folk), with absolutely no idea what to do. I was supposed to press some buttons? Information would come out? What?As a digital migrant rather than a native, I also remember how amazing it felt to stumble my way around the internet in the 90s and early 00s, uncovering its unexpected nooks and crannies with astonishment and delight; it was an exciting and genuinely joyful time. Now I watch other people shout at each other, assailed by news of catastrophes and bombarded with adverts for horrible trousers and cryptocurrency for the further enrichment of billionaires. I scroll, jaded, trying to recapture that sense of wonder I used to feel. Continue reading...

Technology committee says UK government approach to artificial intelligence is behind EU and USThe UK should introduce new legislation to control artificial intelligence or risk falling behind the EU and the US in setting the pace for regulating the technology, MPs have said.Rishi Sunak's government was urged to act as it prepares to host a global AI safety summit at Bletchley Park, home of the Enigma codebreakers, in November. Continue reading...

Swift AI used technique called deep reinforcement learning to win 15 out of 25 races against world championsHaving trounced humans at everything from chess and Go, to StarCraft and Gran Turismo, artificial intelligence (AI) has raised its game and defeated world champions at a real-world sport.The latest mortals to feel the sting of AI-induced defeat are three expert drone racers who were beaten by an algorithm that learned to fly a drone around a 3D race course at breakneck speeds without crashing. Or at least not crashing too often. Continue reading...

Live service games that try to monopolise attention put immense pressure on developers to keep pace with players Don't get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereOne of the only announcements at this year's Gamescom, an event replete with games to play but usually light on news (as Keith wrote in last week's newsletter), was that the demon-killing, time-deleting action RPG Diablo IV's second season" would start on 17 October. That means new stuff for its 12 million players to do - vampiric powers feature heavily. But given that this game only came out in June and its first season of new content started in late July, it also means that its developers will have been working nonstop since its launch to get yet more game content ready to go.I have often wondered how the makers of live service games - forever games" that essentially wish to monopolise a player's attention over an extended period of time, a still relatively new genre and business model that's emerged in the last 10 years - manage these brutal schedules. Twenty years ago, studios would release a game and that would be it; 10 years ago, they'd be on the hook for a patch or maybe a downloadable expansion, but not such an endless stream of content. So I asked Diablo's GM, Rod Fergusson - who has been running games teams for more than two decades, most famously with Epic Games on Gears of War - how they manage it. Continue reading...

Announcement by the Elon Musk-owned social media platform has experts concerned over misinformation ahead of 2024 electionThe social media company formerly known as Twitter said on Tuesday it would now allow political advertising in the US from candidates and political parties, reversing previous policies and raising concerns over misinformation and hate speech ahead of the 2024 presidential election.Before the billionaire Elon Musk acquired the company, now called X, in October 2022, Twitter had banned all political ads globally since 2019. In January, the platform lifted the ban and began allowing cause-based ads" in the US that raise awareness of issues such as voter registration, stating that it planned to expand the types of political ads it would allow on the platform. Continue reading...

With Elon Musk in command, it can be hard to tell if changes at X are a mistake or a direct order from the boss. Plus, linkrot is coming for your movies and video games Don't get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up for the full article hereThere are roughly three categories of product news about Twitter, now known as X: the real product launches, the Elon whims and the bugs. The former are the meaningful changes to the service, the things that any site might have; the middle are anything that can be done within about 24 hours of the company's capricious owner demanding it be rolled out; and the latter are the inevitable consequences of a company doing the first two things on a skeleton staff, having laid off, fired or driven out around two-thirds of its employees in a tumultuous nine-month period.Sometimes it's hard to tell them apart. Take the news that the site had removed all pictures posted before 2014. From the Verge:X, which was formerly known as Twitter until its recent rebranding, is having a problem displaying old posts that came with images attached or any hyperlinks converted through Twitter's built-in URL shortener. It's unclear when the problem started, but it was highlighted on Saturday afternoon in a post by Tom Coates, and a Brazilian vtuber, @DaniloTakagi, had pointed it out a couple of days earlier. Continue reading...

Headphone and earplug sales are booming, but individual efforts to turn down the volume may alter our brains and surrounds in unexpected waysEverywhere you look, it seems, people are resorting to accessories to turn down the volume of life: over-ear headphones on public transport, long-haul flights and in open-plan offices; coloured earplugs nestled discreetly in the concha of concertgoers, bartenders and, if you're a snorer, perhaps the person you share a bed with.Silence is now big business: globally, the noise-cancelling headphones market generated $13.1bn in 2021, a figure that is expected to more than triple to $45.4bn by 2031, according to Allied Market Research data. Continue reading...

Fifty years since the death of the martial arts film superstar, we look at how he inspired generations of games developers - and helped take the beat-'em-up mainstreamHe had this disorder that filled him with too much energy," recalled Robert of his older brother, Bruce Lee, the martial arts movie superstar nicknamed Never Sits Still by his friends and family. Speaking with writer Matthew Polly for his definitive 2018 biography, Robert continued: Bruce was like a wild horse that had been tied up."This quote doubles as a perfect description for the dazzling way in which Lee - who died 50 years ago at 32 from cerebral oedema - fought on-screen. A demonic whirlwind of flying kicks, vengeful, air-popping nunchucks, feral animal noises (something Lee invented to unsettle his opponents) and double-fisted punches that hit enemies with the elegance of a championship fencer, Lee cemented martial arts in the global mainstream. And despite his short life, he smashed through the barrier that previously held back so many Asian actors in Hollywood. Continue reading...

Misleading Twitter handles displaying paid-for icon being used to carry out phishing attacksConsumers who complain of poor customer service on X are being targeted by scammers after the social media platform formerly known as Twitter changed its account verification process.Bank customers and airline passengers are among those at risk of phishing scams when they complain to companies via X. Fraudsters, masquerading as customer service agents, respond under fake X handles and trick victims into disclosing their bank details to get a promised refund. Continue reading...

Research suggests UK homes are uniquely unprepared to cope with rising global temperatures - but there are greener solutions to uncomfortable heat than air conditioningI can honestly say it's the best thing I've ever spent my money on," says 30-year-old Stephen about the unassuming waist-high plastic pillar that sits in the bedroom of his converted bungalow in Nottinghamshire. The retail worker has always found the room uncomfortably hot in summer, and his attempts to cool down using freestanding fans, electric air coolers and reading up on rudimentary fluid dynamics never seemed to cut it.When peak temperatures began creeping towards the 40C (104F) mark a few years ago, he splashed out on a portable air conditioner and has never looked back. If it were to break, I would immediately buy another without a second thought," he says. I don't think I could cope without it in summer now." Continue reading...

With the end of affirmative action, generative AI could democratize' admissions by giving students who don't have tutors or counselors a leg upChatter about artificial intelligence mostly falls into three basic categories: anxious uncertainty (will it take our jobs?); existential dread (will it kill us all?); and simple pragmatism (can AI write my lesson plan?). In this hazy, liminal, pre-disruption moment, there is little consensus as to whether generative AI is a tool or a threat, and few rules for using it properly. For students, this uncertainty feels especially profound. Bans on AI and claims that using it constitutes cheating are now giving way to concerns that AI use is inevitable and probably should be taught in school. Now, as a new college admissions season kicks into gear, many prospective applicants are wondering: can AI write my personal essay? Should it?Ever since the company OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public in November, students have been testing the limits of chatbots - generative AI tools powered by language-based algorithms - which can complete essay assignments within minutes. The results tend to be grammatically impeccable but intellectually bland, rife with cliche and misinformation. Yet teachers and school administrators still struggle to separate the more authentic wheat from the automated chaff. Some institutions are investing in AI detection tools, but these are proving spotty at best. In recent tests, popular AI text detectors wrongly flagged articles by non-native English speakers, and some suggested that AI wrote the US constitution. In July OpenAI quietly pulled AI Classifier, its experimental AI detection tool, citing its low rate of accuracy". Continue reading...

LinkedIn is not a place to be honest. It's a place to sell your products, your services and most of all yourselfEver notice how fabulous everyone is on LinkedIn?Honored to have shared the stage with such great thought leaders!" posts one keynote speaker, implying that she's also a great thought leader because why else would she be sharing the stage with other great thought leaders? Continue reading...

The Harvard scientist on his search for alien technology, academic jealousy and why we must fund space explorationAbraham Loeb, known as Avi, is a professor of astrophysics at Harvard University and he has done the unthinkable. He has repeatedly been willing to contemplate the existence of nonhuman technology and how it may explain certain perplexing astronomical observations that mainstream science struggles with. Loeb, 61, is the author of Interstellar: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Our Future Beyond Earth, a follow-up to his New York Times bestseller Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth. On the day we spoke, the US government was preparing to hold a House of Representatives oversight and accountability committee hearing on UFOs with retired air force officer and former intelligence official David Grusch, who turned whistleblower in June, claiming that the US government had retrieved pieces of crashed alien spacecraft.When it comes to UFOs, why is it always a government cover-up? Why don't astronomers see UFOs - aren't they the people looking at the sky the most?

Group Flannery Associates, backed by prominent investors, quietly buy 55,000 acres of farmland in northern CaliforniaAfter weeks of local speculation, the purchasers of 55,000 acres of northern California land have been revealed. The group Flannery Associates - backed by a cohort of Silicon Valley investors - has quietly purchased $800m worth of agricultural and empty land, the New York Times has reported. Its goal is to build a utopian new town that will offer its thousands of residents reliable public transportation and urban living, all of which would operate using clean energy.The project was spearheaded by Jan Sramek, a 36-year-old former trader for the investment banking firm Goldman Sachs, and is backed by prominent Silicon Valley investors including Michael Moritz, a venture capitalist; Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of Linkedin; Laurene Powell Jobs, the founder of the philanthropic group Emerson Collective and wife of Steve Jobs; Marc Andreessen, an investor and software developer; Patrick and John Collison, the sibling co-founders of the payment processor Stripe; and the entrepreneurs Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman, the Times reported. Continue reading...

The Colorado-based photographer on the importance of capturing the little thingsIt was only last year, but Kelley Dallas is already a little nostalgic for her daughter's time with her violin. Emmy, pictured here practising on her bedroom floor in the mid-morning light, had begun playing aged six, three years earlier.The Colorado-based photographer has developed a careful eye for these shafts of light now, their ability to highlight a subject becoming something of a signature style for her. My eye has developed to seek these slices out, but they create extremes that an iPhone automatically tries to balance out," Dallas says. I didn't want that, so I manually brought down the exposure to correctly capture the shaft of light and to let the rest fall into shadow." Continue reading...

By posting his mugshot, Trump joins Ron DeSantis and Marjorie Taylor Greene in transforming site now known as XMore than two years after Donald Trump was banned from Twitter over concerns that his words would incite violence, Elon Musk welcomed the former president's return in a move that showed how rapidly the site has transformed under his ownership.Musk purchased the platform, now known as X, last year with the intention of restoring free speech". He had described Twitter's decision to bar Trump in the aftermath of the January 6 attack on the Capitol a mistake", and within weeks of his takeover promptly ended the ban. Continue reading...

Big events place a strain on networks but when 6G arrives, many of today's problems will evaporateThis bank holiday weekend is one of the last big dates in the UK summer festival calendar, with Reading and Leeds, All Points East and Creamfields North expected to draw huge crowds.With large attendance numbers at festivals come overloaded mobile phone networks, resulting in friends losing touch with one another and parents being unable to contact their teenagers on their first big weekend away at Reading and Leeds, long a bacchanalian rite of passage for post-results GCSE and A-level students. Continue reading...

Some concerns about artificial intelligence are very speculative, but there are genuine risks, says the man aiming to demystify the technology in the Royal Institution Christmas lecturesIt has been touted as an existential risk on a par with pandemics. But when it comes to artificial intelligence, at least one pioneer is not losing sleep over such worries.Prof Michael Wooldridge, who will be delivering this year's Royal Institution Christmas lectures, said he was more concerned AI could become the boss from hell, monitoring employees' every email, offering continual feedback and even - potentially - deciding who gets fired. Continue reading...