Technology | The Guardian

The world's largest tech event has cutting-edge TVs and even a VW with ChatGPT - but cheap gadgets and big tech have dented its influence. Plus, HMRC comes for side hustlers Don't get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up for the full article hereThe Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which starts today in Las Vegas, is an odd beast. It is the biggest technology event of the year, a sprawling conference that spills over multiple casinos and convention centres to dominate a city that is hard to overshadow.But for the better part of a decade it has been an afterthought for some of the world's biggest businesses, led by Apple realising that if you can get the press to come to you, you don't need to risk burying your product launches under hundreds of competing newslines. The result is that CES is no longer where you see the future, but where you learn how that future will get copied into a thousand cheap plastic knockoffs. Continue reading...

Focusing on power and politics, this Macula Interactive docu-game draws on muralists, an assassination and newspaper reporting in painstakingly historically accurate detailHow many stories are hidden in the murals of Diego Rivera? What was it like to witness the creation of a modern Latin American nation, to sit in the classrooms of stridentism and surrealism? To travel in a tram through a capital city illuminated by the embers of a recent revolution yet disrupted by periodic presidential assassinations?These are just some of the questions that brought a young team of video game developers back 100 years to Mexico, 1921. Continue reading...

In 2008, Milda Mitkute and a friend set up a website to clear out her closet. It soon grew exponentially. Now Vinted has 16 million UK users and is the first Lithuanian unicorn'. Can it make secondhand our first choice?When is a jumble sale also a billion-euro tech startup? When it has 500m items for sale and 105 million users.I am in Vilnius, Lithuania, at the headquarters of Vinted, the slick, easy-to-use app where users can buy and sell secondhand clothes, shoes and gadgets. If you haven't used Vinted yet, you certainly know someone who has. In the UK, it has an astonishing 16 million users - nearly one-quarter of the population - and is taking on more established rivals, including Depop and eBay. Continue reading...

Beijing set the goal of being the global AI leader by 2030, but that was before the emergence of ChatGPTOf the many events that stand out as noteworthy in online discussions across Chinese social media in 2023, it's perhaps the rise of ChatGPT that will prove to be the most significant.Although the chatbot made by the US-based OpenAI was officially launched in late 2022, it took until 2023 for its unprecedented growth to raise eyebrows in China, where the government has set the goal of becoming the global AI leader by 2030. Continue reading...

Exclusive: Internal Revenue Service alleges Rodney Burton was part of a network that made fraudulent' presentations claiming high returns for investors based on crypto-mining operations that did not existA promoter of the HyperVerse crypto investment scheme has been arrested and charged in the US for his alleged role in the scheme, with court documents claiming he was part of a network that made fraudulent promotional presentations" to investors and potential investors.Rodney Burton, who goes by the name Bitcoin Rodney", was arrested in Florida on Friday and remains in custody pending transfer to Maryland, where the charges were laid. He has been charged with operating and conspiring to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business. Continue reading...

It gave me friends, fun and new horizons - but the dark side of social media was a threat to democracy long before Elon MuskLast year was the year when Twitter, now known as X, broke irreparably. In 2023 engagement fell off a cliff, advertisers withdrew and long-term influencers stopped - or greatly reduced - posting. What was a busy global public forum now resembles an aggressive wasteland filled with hate and rumour. On 18 December, the European Commission opened infringement proceedings against X for allegedly breaking EU law on disinformation. It is high time there was a broader discussion about the challenges social media poses to liberal democracy. But to do that, we need to understand why it can be so appealing. The battle for balance and truth may be lost on X, but it continues elsewhere.I used Twitter very heavily for several years, and know that social media is not necessarily trivial. Long before I started to comment myself, I enjoyed it as a treasure trove of information. By following authors, experts, journalists, lawyers, politicians, officials and institutions around the world whose work was relevant to mine, or about whom I was simply curious, I could curate my own, transnational newspaper. As a researcher, Twitter saved me vast amounts of time, as long as I made sure to triple-check my sources and never rely solely on the information provided on the platform itself. As a writer it forced me to be concise and persuasive. When you have only 140, and later, 280 characters, every syllable counts.Helene von Bismarck is a Hamburg-based historian specialising in UK-German relations Continue reading...

Academics decry algorithmic monitoring of workers and call for stronger standards - but US unions have been slow to actFrom algorithms firing staff without human intervention to software keeping tabs on bathroom breaks, technologies including artificial intelligence are already upsetting workers and unsettling workplaces.At call centers, AI systems record and grade how workers handle calls, often giving failing grades for not sticking to the script. Some corporate software spies on workers to see whether they ever write the word union" in their emails. Continue reading...

The online publishing service has been criticised for the way it has allowed extremist propaganda to flourish on the siteIt's funny how naive smart people can be sometimes. Take the founders of Substack, a US-based online platform that enables writers to send digital newsletters directly to subscribers. It also enables them to earn money from their writing if they wish to, though as far as I can see, most don't.I can personally testify to its merits. I've been a blogger for ever, but when Covid-19 arrived, I decided to also publish my blog as a free daily newsletter and started to look around for a way of doing that. Substack fitted the bill and it's delivered the goods; I've found it reliable, stable and easy to use. The experience has also been illuminating because the engagement one gets with newsletter readers is significantly more rewarding than is the case with a conventional online blog.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk Continue reading...

The photographer on bringing a fresh perspective to snapping dancersMichelle Z Simmons met up with ballet dancer Lucas Labrador in downtown Roswell, a suburb of Atlanta. Simmons had been aphotographer for only a few years, but had developed a love of shooting dancers. Ihad photographed my niece, who is now with Virginia's Richmond Ballet, and wanted to get more experience," she explains. Dancers have been photographed many, many times, so I wanted something different from the classicballet shot."With that in mind, sheasked Labrador to wear casual clothes instead of traditional ballet attire and arranged to meet in an area filled with restaurants and shops. Unfortunately, as the sun went down and the lights were coming on, the traffic and crowds increased, making the location feel messy," Simmons says. We walked around to aback alley and it was perfect. Igrabbed some sunglasses and a hat out of my car, and we just played ideas off each other until we got some shots we loved." Continue reading...

While my friends swapped funny videos on their smartphones, I enjoyed my freedom. Then society made that impossibleMy gran has a new smartphone, and I am trying to help her navigate it. But she doesn't see the point. She says her smartphone is malevolent, sneaky and sly" because things on the screen disappear and cannot be retrieved. Her old dumbphone" is more reliable. I love it," she says. It never lets me down." I ask how she travels without maps. I work it out before I go." What about tickets for trains or events? Your mum's always sorted tickets." Even though I'm a tech-savvy, gen Z 24-year-old, I understand her arguments perfectly. I also made a choice to go without a smartphone for a whole decade, from 2010 to 2020. In 2020, my final year of university, I caved and bought one, a choice encouraged by my mum, who was anxious for me to be more contactable.Back in 2010, when I was 11, the small number of kids in my year who had smartphones were treated like celebrities. We would crowd round, heads bent over a video game or YouTube, snatching the phone off each other to have a go. But then, over the next couple of years, smartphones became the norm, and suddenly everyone was posting pictures and sending messages or even nude shots from their own.Isabel Brooks is a writer living in south-east London Continue reading...

Acts gathering in Birmingham for Elvis championships welcome forthcoming hi-tech concert experienceEvery year for more than two decades, Elvis Presley tribute acts have gathered at the European Elvis Championships competing to become that year's king of rock'n'roll.But at this year's event in Birmingham there was one particular Elvis on everyone's lips - hologram Elvis, set to make his debut in an immersive concert experience" in London in November. Continue reading...

Recall reportedly affects majority of cars firm has sold in China and follows recall of more than 2m Teslas in the US last monthTesla is recalling more than 1.6m Model S, X, 3 and Y electric vehicles exported to China for problems with their automatic assisted steering and door latch controls.The recall, Tesla's largest ever in China, affects the majority of the cars it has sold in the country, according to Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal. Continue reading...

British influencer posted a weekly video for 10 years, about everything from pegasus crossings to the National GridTen years ago, Tom Scott held up his phone camera and recorded a 90-second video about traffic lights on bridleways. In Britain, we have pelican crossings, toucan crossings and puffin crossings, he explained, and then, because all those are named after flying things, we have this: a pegasus crossing. And that is a thing you might not know."And then, a day later, he posted another thing you might not know", about Battersea heliport. And then another, about flammable orange oil. And more and more. The cadence settled down to one a week, but the videos kept coming. Continue reading...

Many feel unhappy with their dependence on their cellphone, a wide-ranging Guardian project has found, but some insist not all screen time is equal Sign up to our free coaching newsletter to help you spend less time on your phoneDoomscrolling, mindlessly cycling through apps and feeling an urge to check your phone - does this sound familiar?If so, you're far from alone. Many smartphone users have difficult relationships with their screen time, a wide-ranging Guardian project has found, with many recognising they are unhappy with their dependence on their cellphone but feeling unable to cut down their use. Continue reading...

After a labyrinth of menus as intuitive as dadaist poetry, players are rewarded with knockoffs of decades-old games too maliciously bad to have been designed by AII am trying out YouTube Premium's games, but I can't find them. I assumed I would boot up the app and there would be a big red button saying GAMES ... but no. I have to sign up to PREMIUM. Then find the YOUR PREMIUM BENEFITS section. Then find EXPERIMENTAL FEATURES and select TRY EXPERIMENTAL FEATURES. Then find the TRY GAMES ON YOUTUBE part therein and tap on TRY IT OUT. There is an EXPLORE tab and a SEARCH tab just to make things as intuitive as dadaist poetry. I go through more menus than an entire series of Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares. It was quicker to load up and play Lords of Midnight on the ZX Spectrum.When I find it, the GAMING section contains not games but a fetid hellscape of people alternately mumbling or shouting over video game playing. These must be those Content Creators. They're all torturous. I am sure they play these videos to those inmates at Guantanamo Bay who they can't break with Metallica songs. How many prisoners must have finally cracked while watching I DID THIS IN ZELDA AND MY NOSE FELL OFF FOR LOLZ by CoolRizz23. Continue reading...

As AI and tech make their presence felt, new companies are emerging and older ones are adaptingAfter a year in which industry was knocked off its axis by the coming of age of artificial intelligence and the transition to an online world continued apace, new businesses are emerging and old industries reinventing themselves to adapt. Here, we look at five companies making the most of these turbulent times. Continue reading...

Two licensed handhelds from Taito and Capcom come with a host of old favourites from their back catalogues, and the quality of the game emulation is excellentThe world is certainly not short of retro video game hardware these days. We have the array of official Mini consoles released by Sega and Nintendo, and then there are the very much unofficial handhelds by companies such as Anbernic, that will play thousands of games - as long as you don't mind about the shady legality of homebrew emulators and downloadable rom files. With its Evercade series, however, British company Blaze Entertainment is taking a different approach, producing solidly built gaming machines that run fully licensed versions of games from the original creators. And, even better, the games come on cartridges.The Super Pocket is the company's miniature handheld games machine, much smaller and lighter than its EXP device. Designed quite literally to fit in your pocket it has a crisp 2.8in (7cm) LED screen, cute front-facing speaker (as well as a headphone port) and lots of carefully positioned buttons including a range of shoulder buttons on the rear. It uses a rechargeable battery and a USB-C charging cable, so it's quick to fill up with juice and it'll last around four hours. Continue reading...

There is no standard diagnosis for phone addiction', and a debate rages about whether there should be. But will medicalizing a behavior help or harm those suffering from it? Sign up to our free coaching newsletter to help you spend less time on your phoneAnanya Jain never planned on becoming addicted to TikTok.Jain, who is 24 years old, downloaded the app right during the peak of Covid. She had heard about TikTok's data privacy issues, so she promised herself that she wouldn't post or comment on anything - just watch a few videos and call it a day. That lasted less than a month. Continue reading...

I know nothing online is private. I also won't be able to resist taking photos of my cute baby. Can a privacy girly have it all?I spent my teen years baring my soul on Blogger, Xanga, Friendster and Myspace, well before there was widespread acceptance and knowledge of the ways companies already did and would increasingly collect and share my data. The idea that there was no such thing as a free service and that, in fact, the cost of doing business with digital platforms is relinquishing control over your personal information is a relatively new one, and it's too late for me. After years of being extremely online, there's little hope left for me and my privacy on the internet.My yet-to-be-born son, on the other hand, has a squeaky-clean slate. His soon-to-be-mother is also a surveillance reporter, equipped with the knowledge of how few privacy protections we have online. I have been handed what has felt like both a unique opportunity and a daunting responsibility: managing and protecting my future child's digital footprint. Continue reading...

Mutual fund Fidelity, which owns stake in social media platform, marks down value of its shares in disclosure obtained by AxiosThe social media platform X has lost 71% of its value since it was bought by Elon Musk, according to the mutual fund Fidelity.Fidelity, which owns a stake in X Holdings, said in a disclosure obtained by Axios that it had marked down the value of its shares by 71.5% since Musk's purchase. Continue reading...

The apps on our phones are designed to be addictive, but if we recognize what is happening, we can claw back our free time Sign up to our free coaching newsletter to help you spend less time on your phoneIt was 3.30 in the morning when I realized I needed to break up with my phone. I was holding my baby in my arms as I scrolled through eBay, feeling a bit delusional with fatigue, when I had a brief out-of-body experience in which I saw the scene as if I were an outsider.There was my baby, gazing up at me. And there was me, looking down at my phone.Catherine Price is the author of How to Break Up With Your Phone and the How to Feel Alive newsletter, dedicated to helping people scroll less and live more. Continue reading...

From the future of X to Apple's Vision Pro headset, we make a call on the deals, products and technologies that could define this year Don't get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up for the full article herePartway through 2023, I caught up with a respected, high-ranking tech writer at another publication. We gossiped and nattered, and, a bit exasperated, empathised with each other: we were run ragged.The last two years have raised the stakes for what tech journalists do from serving a small niche community to covering stories that have an impact on the wider world. In part, that's due to the increasing importance of technology in our day-to-day lives. It's also down to the characters involved and what's at stake.If you want to read the complete version of the newsletter please subscribe to receive TechScape in your inbox every Tuesday. Continue reading...

In an extract from her book Not the End of the World, data scientist Hannah Ritchie explains how her work taught her that there are more reasons for hope than despair about climate change - and why a truly sustainable world is in reach

In week 1 of Rhik Samadder's detox, he tries aversion therapy. Can he use his phone to such excess it makes him sick of it? Sign up to our free coaching newsletter to help you spend less time on your phoneThey say you should never waste a crisis; I had a full deck of them.In April this year, I experienced complications following medical surgery. My recovery, which should have taken days, took many months. The impact on my finances was catastrophic. I became depressed, split up with my girlfriend and stopped seeing friends. Continue reading...

Momentum seemed to be on their side of US lawmakers this year to stop 150 million Americans from using TikTok. What happened?Banning TikTok in the US seemed almost inevitable at the start of 2023. The previous year saw a trickle of legislative actions against the short-form video app, after dozens of individual states barred TikTok from government devices in late 2022 over security concerns. At the top of the new year, the US House followed suit, and four universities blocked TikTok from campus wifi.The movement to prohibit TikTok grew into a flash flood by spring. CEO Shou Zi Chew was called before Congress for brutal questioning in March. By April - with support from the White House (and Joe Biden's predecessor) - it seemed a federal ban of the app was not just possible, but imminent. Continue reading...

Will KJ-T strike Olympic gold? Will Sunak go for an early election? How much will Taylor Swift fans bring to the UK economy? From tech to fashion, food to politics, the Observer's top writers predict who and what will make the headlinesby Ellie Bramley Continue reading...

As with the printing press and the dotcom boom, initial frenzy and speculation obscures the lasting legacy of new technologiesInnovation," wrote the economist William Janeway in his seminal book Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy, begins with discovery and culminates in speculation." That just about sums up 2023. The discovery was AI (as represented by ChatGPT), and the speculative bubble is what we have now, in which huge public corporations launch products that are known to hallucinate" (yes, that's now a technical term relating to large language models), and spend money like it's going out of fashion on the kit needed to make even bigger ones. As I write, I see a report that next year Microsoft plans to buy 150,000 Nvidia chips - at $30,000 (24,000) a pop. It's a kind of madness. But when looked at it through the Janeway lens, 'twas ever thus.The innovations that have repeatedly transformed the architecture of the market economy," he writes, from canals to the internet, have required massive investments to construct networks whose value in use could not be imagined at the outset of deployment." Or, to put it more crudely, what we retrospectively regard as examples of technological progress have mostly come about through outbreaks of irrational exuberance that involved colossal waste, bankrupted investors and caused social turmoil. Bubbles, in other words. In recent times, think of the dotcom boom of the late 1990s. Or in earlier times, of the US railway boom of the 1850s onwards in which no fewer than five different railway lines were built between New York and Chicago. In both bubbles, an awful lot of people lost their shirts. But, as the economist Brad DeLong memorably pointed out in his 2003 Wired article Profits of Doom, Americans and the American economy benefited enormously from the resulting network of railroad tracks that stretched from sea to shining sea. For a curious thing happened as railroad bankruptcies and price wars put steady downward pressure on shipping prices and slashed rail freight and passenger rates across the country: new industries sprang up." Continue reading...

A mass user protest six months ago over technical tweaks had big downstream effects, and now the front page of the internet' is changed for everIn June, thousands of Reddit communities plunged into darkness - making their pages inaccessible to the public in a mass protest of corporate policy changes. Users of a social network lambasting it is nothing new; but Reddit's moderators rebelled on a scale never seen before. Six months later, users and researchers say reforms sparked by the movement are still rippling through the social network, which bills itself as the front page of the internet".The changes are a mixed bag, they say. The quality of the posts on the forum site has changed, some say, but the social network's corporate parent appears more attentive, making changes long requested by users and moderators alike. The conflict with the company left Reddit's denizens angry and skeptical, but many say they're sticking around to see how things go with Reddit's new normal. Continue reading...

Guardian writers including Marina Hyde, John Crace (and a few other successful types) reveal what they won't be doing in the coming year Don't take yourself too seriously. Some of my biggest regrets in life are things I've turned down on principle. Continue reading...

An image of a seven-year-old utterly engrossed in a book is both nostalgic and poignantOn a previous visit to her brother's London flat, Francesca Jones had taken her own reading light. Margot, her almost seven-year-old niece, was quite taken with it, so for her next birthday, Jones gave it to Margot.Margot had a camp bed in her parents' room while I was staying. That night, she was snuggled up reading to me from her book, Jasmine the Present Fairy, light around her neck. It was such a special moment, so I captured it; I don't think she even noticed me taking it," Jones says. I'd have missed it had I gone off to get my digital camera, or she would have noticed and I wouldn't have captured something so authentic." In editing the image, she enhanced the saturation and lifted the shadows a little, but nothing more. Continue reading...

Plaintiffs allege their activity was tracked even when they set Chrome to incognito' and other browsers to private' modeGoogle has agreed to settle a lawsuit claiming it secretly tracked the internet use of millions of people who thought they were doing their browsing privately.US district judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, California, put a scheduled trial in the proposed class action, which was due to begin in February, on hold on Thursday after lawyers for Google and for consumers said they had reached the preliminary settlement. Continue reading...

Berrow's Worcester Journal is one of several papers owned by the UK's second biggest regional news publisher to hire AI-assisted' reportersOn 7 October 1779 a letter appeared in Berrow's Worcester Journal. To the printer," wrote a disgruntled reader. I take the liberty of informing you and the public that the account of a melancholy accident happening to a poor man at Evesham which was inserted in your last paper is utterly devoid of foundation."Reports of a man falling in a vat of boiling ale were, it turned out, greatly exaggerated, published on the back of an anonymous tip. But now the journal, which lays claim to being the oldest surviving newspaper in the world, says it has a cutting-edge new method to help reporters get out of the office and check their facts: artificial intelligence. Continue reading...

In this week's newsletter: Artist and activist Scottee cues you up for a healthier year with Self Help. Plus: five of the best podcasts hosted by families Don't get Hear Here delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereScottee: Self Help

Office of the Australian Information Commissioner launches inquiry into platform's use of marketing pixels to track people's online habitsAustralia's privacy watchdog has launched an inquiry into how TikTok harvests personal data and whether it is being done with consent.The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) will examine whether the social media platform has breached the online privacy of Australians through the use of marketing pixels, which track people's online habits. This can include where they shop, how long they stay on websites and personal information, such as email addresses and mobile phone numbers.Sign up for a weekly email featuring our best reads Continue reading...

Lawsuit says companies gave NYT content particular emphasis' and seek to free-ride' on paper's investment in its journalismThe New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft over the use of its content to train generative artificial intelligence and large-language model systems, a move that could see the company receive billions of dollars in damages.The copyright infringement lawsuit, filed in a Manhattan federal court on Wednesday, claims that while the companies copied information from many sources to build their systems, they give New York Times content particular emphasis" and seek to free-ride on the Times's massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment". Continue reading...

US government commission barred imports and sales of some smartwatches following dispute with medical-tech firm MasimoApple scored a victory on Wednesday when a US appeals court paused a government commission's import ban on some of the company's popular Apple smartwatches following a patent dispute with a medical-technology firm, Masimo.The tech giant had filed an emergency request for the US court of appeals for the federal circuit to halt the order, after appealing the US International Trade Commission's (ITC) decision that it had infringed Masimo's patents. Continue reading...

Customers will be given option to pay more for ad-free service in UK, Germany and US from early next year

This year, US consumers returned 20% of the items they ordered online, and the waste and environmental cost is highThe gifting is done. Some were successful, others less so - the wrong color, size, redundant, too impulsive, not suitable for re-gifting. US consumers return about 20% of all online purchases and the post-holiday period is when the massive, but often unseen, returns logistics industry - the reverse supply chain - goes into overdrive.According to the National Retail Federation, US consumers returned more than $816bn worth of retail merchandise in 2022, up 7% from a record $761bn a year earlier, and more than the US defense budget. Continue reading...

Mark Harper says vehicles can improve road safety and personal freedom, as autonomous cars face increased scrutinyAutonomous vehicles could be on UK roads as soon as 2026, the transport secretary has said, as ministers seeks to capture as much as 42bn of the international self-driving market within the coming decade.This technology exists, it works, and what we're doing is putting in place the proper legislation so that people can have full confidence in the safety of this technology," Mark Harper told BBC Radio 4's Today programme on Wednesday. Continue reading...

Musk and Zuck challenged each other to a fight; the former House speaker allegedly shoved a colleague. It was a bumper year for male insecurityThe first rule of insecure masculinity fight club? Tell everyone about it. And I mean everyone. Tweet about it, talk to reporters, shout about it from the rooftops. Make sure the entire world knows that you are a big boy who could beat just about anyone in a fistfight.Twenty twenty-three, as I'm sure you will have observed, was the year that tech CEOs stepped away from their screens and decided to get physical. Elon Musk, perennially thirsty for attention, was at the center of this embarrassing development. The 52-year-old - who challenged Vladimir Putin to single combat in 2022 - spent much of the year teasing the idea that he was going head-to-head with Mark Zuckerberg in a cage fight. At one point he suggested the fight would be held at the Colosseum in Rome. Continue reading...

Owner of RingGo and ParkMobile says data including parts of credit card numbers taken in cyber-attackEurope's largest parking app operator has reported itself to information regulators in the EU and UK after hackers stole customer data.EasyPark Group, the owner of brands including RingGo and ParkMobile, said customer names, phone numbers, addresses, email addresses and parts of credit card numbers had been taken but said parking data had not been compromised in the cyber-attack. Continue reading...

From cage fighting to rebranding Twitter: it was another controversial year for the multibillionaire

Our 20 favourite pieces of the yearWhen a US businessman took over a beloved garden a decade ago, he decided on a radical new approach, all in the name of sustainability. But angry critics claim it's just plain neglect Continue reading...

Crypto's crown slipped, an AI godfather spoke out and Apple entered the stuttering VR market - the stories that really mattered this year Don't get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up for the full article hereMerry Christmas! We have made it - almost - through another year without being churned into paste by a super-intelligent AI, conscripted into a Martian work camp by an insane billionaire or forced offline by a Carrington event.Even in the absence of civilisation-altering events it's been a busy year. But the advantage of a slow week (I hope that isn't tempting fate) is that you can reflect on the past 12 months and realise that, sometimes, there's only a few stories that really matter.The Guardian has confirmed it was hit by a ransomware attack in December and that the personal data of UK staff members has been accessed in the incident.We believe this was a criminal ransomware attack, and not the specific targeting of the Guardian as a media organisation," said Guardian Media Group's chief executive, Anna Bateson and the Guardian's editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner.The UK government is at high risk of a catastrophic ransomware attack" that could bring the country to a standstill" because of poor planning and a lack of investment, a parliamentary committee has warned.Future ransomware attacks could pose a threat to physical security or safety of human life", the report said, if cyber-attackers manage to sabotage CNI operations. The report also warned that cyber-physical systems" could be intercepted, including hackers taking control of the steering and throttle of a shipping vessel - lab experiments have shown this to be achievable.You need to imagine something more intelligent than us by the same difference that we're more intelligent than a frog. And it's going to learn from the web, it's going to have read every single book that's ever been written on how to manipulate people, and also seen it in practice." ... My confidence that this wasn't coming for quite a while has been shaken by the realisation that biological intelligence and digital intelligence are very different, and digital intelligence is probably much better."Intelligence has nothing to do with a desire to dominate. It's not even true for humans. If it were true that the smartest humans wanted to dominate others, then Albert Einstein and other scientists would have been both rich and powerful, and they were neither.With Vision Pro, you're no longer limited by a display. Your surroundings become an infinite canvas," the Apple chief executive, Tim Cook, said. Vision Pro blends digital content into the space around us. It will introduce us to spatial computing.Apple Vision Pro will change the way we communicate, collaborate, work and enjoy entertainment," Cook added. The company compared the device to a new TV, surround sound system, powerful laptop, and games console all in one - before revealing its price, an eye-watering $3,499, $500 more than the already high pricetag rumoured in the run-up to the event. The device will ship early next year" in the US, Apple said. No dates or prices were given for other regions. Continue reading...

The man in red's distinct visage emerges by algorithm, proving not any old bearded man looks like himSanta impersonators watch out. Scientists have created a Santa-detection machine and used it to prove what children have been telling adults for generations - that Santa has a unique face which clearly distinguishes him from other elderly bearded men.Previous research has suggested that children as young as three can identify Santa Claus based on his distinctive appearance. Continue reading...

Amid all the hysteria about ChatGPT and co, one thing is being missed: how energy-intensive the technology isWhat to do when surrounded by people who are losing their minds about the Newest New Thing? Answer: reach for the Gartner Hype Cycle, an ingenious diagram that maps the progress of an emerging technology through five phases: the technology trigger", which is followed by a rapid rise to the peak of inflated expectations"; this is succeeded by a rapid decline into the trough of disillusionment", after which begins a gentle climb up the slope of enlightenment" - before eventually (often years or decades later) reaching the plateau of productivity".Given the current hysteria about AI, I thought I'd check to see where it is on the chart. It shows that generative AI (the polite term for ChatGPT and co) has just reached the peak of inflated expectations. That squares with the fevered predictions of the tech industry (not to mention governments) that AI will be transformative and will soon be ubiquitous. This hype has given rise to much anguished fretting about its impact on employment, misinformation, politics etc, and also to a deal of anxious extrapolations about an existential risk to humanity. Continue reading...

From insight into our human ancestry and breakthroughs on the moon to a flourishing of AI and terrifying new developments in the climate, it was a year of scientific dramaWhile western billionaires were busy sending rockets to space only for them to crash and burn, scientists in India were quietly doing something no one had accomplished before. Their Chandrayaan-3 moon lander was the first mission to reach the lunar south pole - an unexplored region where reservoirs of frozen water are believed to exist. I remember my heart soaring when images of the control room in India spread around social media, showing senior female scientists celebrating their incredible achievement. Continue reading...

The competitors at the GeoGuessr World Cup can do just that. The clues are in brick houses, distinctive trousers and unusual telegraph polesPicture a specific image from Google Street View. You're going to try to guess exactly where in the world the photo was taken. The cloudless sky and desert landscape indicate somewhere hot. The grey road stretches far ahead of you with few defining characteristics. There are telegraph wires to the left of the road, above some short trees. You can zoom into the photo. You can pan around. You can't, however, zoom out for added context. Can you guess? Oh, and you had one minute. Now you have about 30 seconds. In a 450-seat arena in Stockholm, one 31-year-old Dutch man doesn't just correctly surmise that this photo was taken in Jordan; he guesses the location within 3 metres.To the uninitiated, watching the GeoGuessr World Cup might not just sound unexciting, it might sound like a cruel and unusual form of punishment. Attending the tournament involves sitting in an arena and watching two nerds (Everyone in this room is a nerd," says one of the commentators confidently) sit in front of two computers and try to identify locations based on Google Street View photos. The closer you get to the exact location, the more points you get. That's it. One nerd wins; both nerds are replaced by two different nerds. Well, call me a nerd because this simple spectacle turns out to be one of the most thrilling days of my life. Continue reading...

Despite being more like a refrigerator than a gas boiler, this home heating technology could slash Britain's emissions, and billsOnly 1% of British homes have a heat pump, but to hit the government's climate goals, an estimated 80% of homes should be heated by one in the next 25 years.Whereas gas boilers burn gas to produce heat, heat pumps do something more complicated. Sometimes described as working like a fridge in reverse", they use a mixture of evaporation and condensation to transfer heat from outside to inside a building. In a cold winter, it can be hard to understand how these devices work. Continue reading...

It was an easy decision for the Vancouver dentist to convert his wintry photograph to black and whiteIt rarely snows in the city," Ivor Levin says of Vancouver, where he lives. When it does, it really declutters the urban landscape - something I find most favourable for creating minimalist urban photography."Levin - a dentist, who photographs as a hobby - was crossing a bridge on his way home from visiting a friend when he noticed the geometric configuration of the car tracks in the snow. Continue reading...