Technology | The Guardian

Many items sold through online marketplaces don't meet safety regulations. Then there are the counterfeits. Why is the law so powerless - and how can you protect yourself?In a bedroom in Highgate, north London, a delivery courier plugged his ebike into a mains socket to charge it. The lithium battery began to overheat and burst into flames, setting fire to surrounding furniture. The man tried desperately to put out the fire and sustained serious burns before the firefighters arrived. The London fire brigade concluded that the blaze was caused by a charging lead bought online a few days before.Lithium battery fires are occurring in the UK at a rate of at least six a week, often as a result of faulty batteries and chargers bought online. Self-employed delivery couriers, for example, may look to speed up their delivery times by using cheap parts to convert their pedal cycles into ebikes. They unwittingly buy unsafe goods from third-party sellers on online platforms such as Amazon Marketplace, eBay, Facebook Marketplace and AliExpress. But if just one cell inside a battery overheats, the high temperature can spread uncontrollably to others, causing rapid and devastating fires. These accidents happen due to a loophole in the law. According to Ian Mearns, the Labour MP for Gateshead, mainland Britain risks becoming almost a wild west, with unsafe products being peddled to unwitting consumers". The main area of concern is electrical goods. Continue reading...

Parliamentary committee says Britain is vulnerable because of poor planning and lack of investmentThe 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.In a damning report, the joint committee on the national security strategy warned that the UK could face a crippling cyber-attack on its critical national infrastructure (CNI) at any moment. The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) describes the CNI as national assets that are essential for the functioning of society, including energy supply, water supply, transportation, health and telecommunications. Continue reading...

Covid dealt the fatal blow to E3, known as video game Christmas', where gaming companies launched their splashiest titlesThe Electronic Entertainment Expo, once the largest and most prestigious trade show in video games, has been permanently cancelled.On Tuesday, the convention's website had gone nearly entirely blank but for a statement reading, After more than two decades of E3, each one bigger than the last, the time has come to say goodbye. Thanks for the memories." Continue reading...

As a bouncer, you might not think that trying to outwit guards would be relaxing for me - but stealth games do make me think about my job a little differentlyI've worked as a guard and bouncer for nearly 20 years, first putting on the black uniform not long after 1998's Tenchu: Stealth Assassins snuck on to the original PlayStation. Like that game, my job can involve hours of watching stuff and moving alone through darkened spaces, interspersed with moments of frantically trying not to get killed (thankfully, not by a Sengoku-era arrow - though I did once have a bloke throw a temporary bus stop sign through the window of a building I was guarding).I've always been intrigued by how the intruders I chase off in my job compare to the infiltrators we love to play in stealth games, all of whom seem able to slip past guards without a hitch. If they're discovered and a scuffle breaks out, those guards will fight to the death. That puts my own tenacity to shame, especially if they're on the same 12.03 an hour that I get. Maybe they studied a different emergency procedures module to the one I remember, which reminds you that a living witness is more useful than a dead hero. Continue reading...

The Facebook and Instagram owner is miles ahead of the competition, say regulators, who suggest that could change when it rolls out default end-to-end encryption for Messenger Don't get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereThere was a rare utterance from an internet regulator last month: praise for Facebook and Instagram's parent company, Meta.Australia's e-safety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, described Meta as one of the better detection performers" for reporting child sexual abuse material on its services, making around 27m reports to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) last year. Apple, for comparison, reported just 234. Continue reading...

Ross Levinsohn sacking was to improve the operational efficiency and revenue of the company', says board, two weeks after fake authors exposedThe Arena Group, publisher of Sports Illustrated, has fired the magazine's CEO not long after it was revealed Sports Illustrated had published articles written by fake authors with AI-generated headshots and biographies.The Arena Group's board announced on Monday that CEO Ross Levinsohn had his employment terminated, with Manoj Bhargava named as interim chief executive. The board said it followed a meeting on actions to improve the operational efficiency and revenue of the company". Continue reading...

Google says it will appeal lawsuit accusing it of moving to quash competitors and charging unfair feesEpic Games, maker of Fortnite, has prevailed in an antitrust trial over Alphabet's Google Play app marketplace, Epic's chief executive said on Monday, hours after the federal jury took up the case.Victory over Google! After 4 weeks of detailed court testimony, the California jury found against the Google Play monopoly on all counts. The Court's work on remedies will start in January," Tim Sweeney wrote in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. Continue reading...

Ageing acts that can't even get radio time are going viral - and finding themselves playing arenas or even soundtracking Ukrainian resistance. But how do you follow up a hit no one can explain?Like most musicians, Ryan Guldemond of the Canadian indie band Mother Mother had an extremely quiet 2020. Towards the end of the year, however, the frontman noticed that songs from the band's 2008 album O My Heart were suddenly spiking on streaming platforms. Day after day, the numbers continued to rise. Something strange was happening. We were able to track it to TikTok and it was like, Well, what's TikTok?'" Guldemond recalls. There was this whole alternate universe of people enjoying Mother Mother songs written long ago."In 2008, Guldemond says, Mother Mother couldn't get a song on the radio or build a significant international following: There's a thing called the Canadian curse where you can do well in Canada but you can't break out." They grew used to operating at a modest level. Now, thanks to TikTok, they have 8 million monthly listeners on Spotify - almost double that of their more lauded Canadian contemporaries Arcade Fire. Hayloft, an oddball tale of rural violence, has surpassed 400m streams - more than any song by, say, REM (bar Losing My Religion). In February, five years after they played to 350 people at London's 100 Club, Mother Mother will headline the 12,500-capacity Wembley Arena. Continue reading...

Researchers say better representation could elicit interest in lesser-known organisms and help conservation effortsWhen Stefano Mammola and Francesco Ficetola went to an ecology conference in Prague in 2021, they met a scientist with an unusual complaint. Jennifer Anderson, an expert in aquatic fungi, lamented that the subject of her research was not available in emoji form.If you are doing the important work of trying to save the , you can use graphics to help you communicate this in a very relatable way," said Anderson, a microbial ecologist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. If you are working to save the aquatic fungi, you first must let people know that yes, aquatic fungi exist, then describe in words what they look like - usually not like mushrooms." Continue reading...

Pro-union workers are hopeful but realistic - and fear Musk's previous ruthlessness towards workers trying to unionizeElon Musk and a powerful US union may clash next year in what could be a defining moment for both the embattled tech titan and an American labor movement seeking to flex its muscles fresh off a dramatic victory over Detroit's car makers.The fight is shaping up as 2023 draws to a close - a great year for US unions and a complicated one for Musk. Continue reading...

Keeping everyone entertained during the festive season can be difficult. When tensions are high and patience and sobriety are in shorty supply communal video games could be the answerAt this time of year, we often find ourselves at festive gatherings with people of wildly varying ages and tastes. So, what's the best way to stave off boredom, avoid squabbling and keep everyone entertained over Christmas? One potential solution is a video game or, more specifically, a party video game. But is it possible to download a dancing, singing or fighting game and immediately get everyone, young and old alike, involved?To find out, I invited a bunch of friends and their kids around to my house to test five new party games. This is what we discovered ... Continue reading...

The more I navigated using my phone, the more unsettled I felt. Was it robbing something from me?In August this year I moved to Bristol. After spending most of my life living in villages or small towns, being constantly surrounded by the busyness of a city was a shock. Not owning a bike and not wanting to be reliant on Bristol's very creaky bus system, I walked everywhere. Almost automatically I used Google Maps to help me. Whereas on a traditional paper map I would first have had to locate relevant landmarks and street names before positioning myself within the map's landscape, the blue dot on my screen showed me exactly where I was. The procession of smaller blue dots stretching out to my destination revealed the fastest way to get there. I arrived at things mostly on time, and was very rarely lost.However, the more I used Google Maps, the more unsettled I felt. I often find inspiration for my writing as I walk. That can come from things I notice as I go, or from the way that walking seems to get my brain to think in a way it doesn't indoors. But this was not happening. Instead, I simply worried about not following the dotted line. Or in other words, getting lost.Ned Vessey is a freelance writer, with a particular focus on landscape and place Continue reading...

Laptop upgrade adds M3 chips, more power, longer battery life, brighter screen, lower price and darker colourApple's latest upgraded MacBook Pro adds a wider range of chip options, a cheaper price and a new black colour option, alongside even greater performance and battery life.The much-loved laptop now starts at 1,699 (1,999/$1,599/A$2,699), which isn't exactly cheap but is 450 less than its predecessor, lowering the barrier to entry significantly.Screen: 14.2in mini LED (3024x1964; 254 ppi) ProMotion (120Hz)Processor: Apple M3, Pro or MaxRAM: 8, 18 or 32, or up to 128GBStorage: 512GB, 1, 2, 4 or 8TB SSDOperating system: macOS 14.1 SonomaCamera: 1080p FaceTime HD cameraConnectivity: wifi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3, 2/3x USB/Thunderbolt, HDMI 2.1, SD card, headphonesDimensions: 221.2 x 312.6 x 15.5mmWeight: 1.55 to 1.62kg Continue reading...

Young people trust social media above politicians when it comes to the Israel-Hamas war. Is it any wonder, given the kind of politics they have grown up with?In a famous two-frame meme from The Simpsons, Principal Skinner asks himself: Am I so out of touch?" No," he decides, with resolve. It's the children who are wrong." It's the easiest thing, dismissing the views of young people when they question our beliefs. It's even easier when those views are mainly expressed on a social media platform that can also be dismissed as a lawless land of misinformation and clickbaiting. And so as Palestine- and Gaza-related content explodes on TikTok, predictable responses have arrived, and some have been pretty out there.The Republican presidential contender Nikki Haley called for the banning of TikTok altogether when she said in a primary campaign debate last week that for every 30 minutes that someone watches TikTok, every day they become 17% more antisemitic, more pro-Hamas based on doing that". Last month, a Republican congressman said that TikTok was digital fentanyl", brainwashing young Americans against their country and its allies. Over at the Telegraph, we are told that the app's threat is real".Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnistDo you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. Continue reading...

The long-running series in which readers answer other readers' questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical conceptsI've just been looking at my photos from a recent trip to the Grand Canyon and I'm thoroughly unimpressed. Why do photographs of beautiful scenery never do it justice? Alex Robinson, SuffolkSend new questions to nq@theguardian.com. Continue reading...

Rightwing conspiracy theorist was banned from platform in 2018, but could be back after 2m votes castThe social media platform X will reinstate the account of the US conspiracy theorist Alex Jones after a poll of the site's users backed his return, its owner, Elon Musk, has said.The people have spoken and so it shall be," Musk posted in reply to a poll on Saturday on whether to reinstate the Jones account. Close to 2m votes were cast by the time the poll closed, with about 70% voting in favour of Jones's return. Continue reading...

I laughed at the hapless gondola passengers, but I'm also in awe of them pursuing their vanity so publiclyI mean, I'll just come out and say it: it's pretty tempting to laugh out loud at the tourists who fell off their gondola into the canal in Venice last week because they just wouldn't stop taking selfies. Their gondolier had apparently asked them to sit down and quit all that dangerous posing, but they didn't listen and toppled right in, overturning the boat and throwing him into the tentacles of the lagoon, too. The poor man then had to try to get his very upset customers out of the big sink - there's a video of this online - and, well, let's just say he's a nobler man than I am, still trying to help them by this soaking point.So it's tempting indeed to laugh but, oh, I can't, because my secret hobby is taking ridiculous selfies, too. Only I do it when nobody is looking, so they can't judge me. Don't you? Don't you find a nice moment of sexy lighting in, er, a public lavatory, or a restaurant loo, or a lift, or a shop, or in the park with the dog, or in your friend's kitchen when she has left the room - I mean, I could go on. The reason I take so many is because none of them ever turn out the way I think they will, or because someone else has had the audacity to get into the lift and ruin my private moment with my phone. Continue reading...

Critics say Fraser Samson hiring is outrageous conflict of interest' as monitoring technology is rolled out in UK high streetsThe recently-departed watchdog in charge of monitoring facial recognition technology has joined the private firm he controversially approved, paving the way for the mass roll-out of biometric surveillance cameras in high streets across the country.In a move critics have dubbed an outrageous conflict of interest", Professor Fraser Sampson, former biometrics and surveillance camera commissioner, has joined Facewatch as a non-executive director. Continue reading...

The Filipino photographer on presenting the struggles faced by the people in his communityPhilip Am Guay's family home in Manjuyod in the Philippines is just a few metres from the beach where, one day in 2017, he found fisher Manong Ebrin checking his bunsod (fish corral) for a catch.Manong is a Filipino term, how we address an older man or a brother," Guay explains. I was an operations supervisor at a shopping mall in Cebu City during that time, staying in a boarding house. I would only go home to see my parents about five times a year, and the journey would take eight hours. When I did go, I would head straight to the beach." Continue reading...

Agreement between European Parliament and member states will govern artificial intelligence, social media and search enginesThe world's first comprehensive laws to regulate artificial intelligence have been agreed in a landmark deal after a marathon 37-hour negotiation between the European Parliament and EU member states.The agreement was described as historic" by Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner responsible for a suite of laws in Europe that will also govern social media and search engines, covering giants such as X, TikTok and Google. Continue reading...

Meta submitted nearly 95% of 29m reports of child sexual abuse material in 2022 and encryption will make it harder to detectMeta's decision to introduce end-to-end encryption for Facebook messages will hamstring the rescue of child sex trafficking victims and the prosecution of predators, according to child safety organizations and US prosecutors.This week, the tech giant announced it had begun rolling out automatic encryption for direct messages on its Facebook and Messenger platforms to more than 1 billion users. Under the changes, Meta will no longer have access to the contents of the messages that users send or receive unless one participant reports a message to the company. As a result, messages will not be subject to content moderation unless reported, which social media companies undertake to detect and report abusive and criminal activity. Encryption hides the contents of a message from anyone but the sender and the intended recipient by converting text and images into unreadable cyphers that are unscrambled on receipt. Continue reading...

Failures in the regulation of social media companies a generation ago must not be repeated

This open-world survival sim might be Minecraft lite, but it's luscious and relaxing, with a nostalgic, surprisingly emotional charmWhoever had the idea to combine three titans of the modern mass entertainment universe - Lego, Fortnite and Minecraft - into one experience is surely feeling rather smug right now. Launched on Thursday, Lego Fortnite is a new mode available within Fortnite, but it's essentially a whole new game - an open-world crafting survival sim in the unmistakable style of, yes, Minecraft. Players enter a procedurally generated world, unique to them, which somehow combines the aesthetic features of Lego and Fortnite, with its luscious, bright colours and toy-like charm.Like Minecraft, the main draw is the survival mode, where you can explore the wilderness, build houses, grow crops, tend to animals and combat a range of beasties. You start with a very limited set of building instructions and can only make a simple hut, but as you progress, gathering resources such as wood, granite and wool, you get access to more building materials. Continue reading...

In 1993, a team of five coders released what would become one of the most influential video games ever made. Three decades on, they explain how they did itIn late August 1993, a young programmer named Dave Taylor walked into an office block on the Lyndon B Johnson freeway in Mesquite, Texas, to start a new job. The building had a jet black glass exterior and sat utterly incongruent amid acres of car parks, single-storey industrial units and strip malls. Game designer Sandy Petersen called it the Devil's Rubik's Cube. Taylor's new workplace was on the sixth floor in office 615. The carpets, he discovered, were stained with spilled soda, the ceiling tiles yellowed by water leaks from above. But it was here that a team of five coders, artists and designers were working on arguably the most influential action video game ever made. This was id Software. This was Doom.By the time Taylor joined the company that day, fresh from his electrical engineering degree, id had already hammered out a dozen small-scale games for the digital magazine publisher Softdisk and the shareware pioneer Apogee. Its most recent title, Wolfenstein 3D, was an edgy Nazi shooter with fast-paced action and rudimentary polygonal environments. But when Taylor met id's charismatic designer and coder John Romero, he was shown their next project, whose name was partly inspired by a line from the movie Color of Money. (Doom" is what pool hustler Tom Cruise called his cue.) The concept was simple: Aliens meets The Evil Dead. But into this new project, Romero, the brilliant coder John Carmack and the artist Adrian Carmack had thrown all their obsessions: heavy metal, Dungeons & Dragons, gore, cutting-edge programming. Continue reading...

The trailer for Grand Theft Auto 6 is everywhere this week, the first game in the smash hit crime series in more than a decade. From its crude beginnings to its multiplayer mayhem, we look back at past releases - and the outrage that greeted themGTA is a series of crime-drama video games set in fictionalised cities (mostly) around the US. In each game, the player takes on the role of a criminal (or criminals) navigating the violent underworld of modern America, stealing cars and carrying out missions and heists for a range of shadowy kingpins. The later games in particular are home to vast, freely explorable cities or states and, outside of missions, players are free to do whatever they want, whether that's exploring the countryside on a bike or taking on side jobs for car thieves, drug smugglers or corrupt politicians.The original Grand Theft Auto was designed by a Dundee-based studio, DMA Design, which also produced the famed platforming series Lemmings. At the time, the game was an unloved project and publisher BMG Interactive almost canned it several times. Now it is one of the most successful franchises in existance, created by developer Rockstar's studios across the world, and led from Edinburgh by Rockstar North. Continue reading...

Price of shares in music streaming service leaped after announcement it was laying off almost a fifth of its workforceOne of Spotify's top executives cashed in more than $9m (7.2m) in shares as the value of the world's biggest music streaming service surged after it announced it was laying off almost a fifth of its workforce to cut costs.Paul Vogel, Spotify's chief financial officer, moved to sell the $9.4m worth of stock on Tuesday, a day after investors sent the company's share price soaring in response to reports that the cuts would help it sustain profitability amid slowing economic growth. Continue reading...

How can you lessen the climate impact of your clothes? Our writers spend a month selling, tailoring and mending to find outI spot-clean for a month and look no more dishevelled than usual'I feel I should begin by airing my dirty laundry: I'm a middle-aged mother of small children who doesn't do any of the laundry in our home. I know, I'm like the level of plastic particles in our waters: unprecedented. But it's my sartorially fastidious partner, Claire, who does the laundry while my duties include walking the dog, cooking, cleaning, shopping, birthing babies, wiping bums ... all of which casts a spectrum of stains across my wardrobe. So when I'm challenged to wash my clothes less - which is one of the small ways we can individually reduce the aforementioned microplastics entering the ocean - the first thing that happens is a row with my partner over the sensitive question of whether I can claim to wash less" considering the small matter of not actually doing any washing at all. Continue reading...

Let technology lend a hand this year, whether it's sourcing presents, balancing the books or providing new ideas for recipes and cocktailsIt's that time of year again, when the days are shorter, mince pies are back on the shelves and Mariah Carey is always playing somewhere. As plans for office Christmas parties and family gatherings are made, here are some apps that might come in handy for the holiday season.Elfster

The People v Gary McKinnon to dramatise what US authorities called biggest military computer hack of all time'The story of the computer hacker Gary McKinnon and his long battle against extradition to the US is to be turned into a feature film.It will tell the story of how a young man hunting for evidence of UFOs found his way into the Pentagon's system and carried out what US authorities described as the biggest military computer hack of all time" and then faced the possibility of a long sentence in a US high-security prison. Continue reading...

Billionaire is against the labour movement, and workers believe their country's traditions are under threatI disagree with the idea of unions," Elon Musk said during a rambling onstage interview this week. I just don't like anything which creates a lords and peasants kind of thing."His appearance at the New York Times event may be best remembered for Musk's diatribe against X's missing advertisers; but the anti-union outburst shed light on a clash taking place thousands of miles away in Sweden. Continue reading...

Concerns over data-driven factory' that significantly increases the number of targets for strikes in the Palestinian territory

We want to hear from parents from around the world: what is your child's relationship with smartphones?Whether you think being online offers educational benefits, are worried that your teenager is spending too much time scrolling Instagram, or are simply perplexed by the latest TikTok fad, we would like to know more about how parents around the world feel about their children's screen time.We're keen to hear from parents with children of all ages, from toddlers to teenagers. Has their relationship to smartphones changed over time - positively or negatively? Continue reading...

Ad revenue used to service debt unlikely to return soon, meaning deal with lenders or cash injection may be needed

Chopping virtual grass is a video game trope as old as it is satisfying - but where did it come from, and why does it keep growing?Jessica used to come for tea on Tuesdays, and all she wanted to do was cut grass. Every week, we'd click The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker's miniature disc into my GameCube and she'd ready her sword. Because she was a couple of years younger than me, she couldn't encounter a ChuChu or a Bokoblin without dying, so instead she'd spend hours slicing at virtual greenery.At the time, I found it a little annoying. In hindsight, I understand that Jessica was simply following in the footsteps of our ancestors. Grass-cutting has been a mainstay of video games for decades. From 1983's lawnmower sim Hover Bovver to Minecraft in 2009, numerous games have invited us to take a blade to the blades, and we can't seem to stop ourselves from doing it. Why is the mechanic so prevalent? Continue reading...

The next gen' consoles of 2013 invented high-definition gaming and cleared the way for streaming - but a decade on, what did they get wrong? Don't get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereIt was at this point 10 years ago that the future began. Obviously, I am referring to the almost simultaneous launch of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles in late 2013. These machines ushered in the era of universal high-definition gaming. They brought us into the cloud computing age, allowing games such as Forza Horizon and Titanfall to perform complex maths remotely, freeing up your processor for other tasks. They forged ahead into game streaming, allowing us to play retro games across broadband connections, and recognised the growing importance of sharing gameplay, including functions that made it easier to record and broadcast gaming experiences across social media and Twitch.It was an exciting time, but looking back, a lot of mistakes were made. Microsoft fell on its face with its awful Xbox One debut event in Redmond, talking up the machine's TV services and laying out a vision of an always-online console with digital-first software, seemingly destroying the idea of sharing and reselling our games. Although Microsoft was correct that digital downloads would soon dominate and that fast broadband connections would become almost universal among gamers, it was all too much, too soon. Continue reading...

Employees at facility in Kentucky allege Amazon is retaliating against them as they push for union representationWorkers at Amazon's largest air hub in the world allege Amazon is retaliating against them as they try to organize their first union.The workers at the 882-acre KCVG air hub in Hebron, Kentucky, have been organizing March on the Boss" actions at the Amazon facility in which staff confront managers en masse to demand an end to union busting", which they claim includes write-ups and other disciplinary actions against workers. Continue reading...

Ardent Health, which oversees hospitals in states including Texas, New Mexico and Oklahoma said it was targeted over ThanksgivingA cyber-attack has shut down emergency rooms in at least three states, a hospital operator warned on Monday, forcing the organization to divert patients to other facilities.Ardent Health, which oversees 30 hospitals in states across the US, including New Mexico, Texas and Oklahoma, said it had been targeted by a ransomware attack over the Thanksgiving holiday. The attack had shut down a significant number of its computerized services, the company said in a news release. Continue reading...

Private businesses, motivated by profit, can't be relied on to police themselves against the horrors unfettered AI could bringHow do we gain access to artificial intelligence's huge potential benefits - such as devising new life-saving drugs or finding new ways to teach children - without opening a box of horrors?If we're not careful, AI could be a Frankenstein monster. It might eliminate nearly all jobs. It could lead to autonomous warfare. Continue reading...

Instagram and Facebook parent company also knowingly allowed underage users to hold accounts, unsealed legal complaint saysInstagram and Facebook parent company Meta purposefully engineered its platforms to addict children and knowingly allowed underage users to hold accounts, according to a newly unsealed legal complaint.The complaint is a key part of a lawsuit filed against Meta by the attorneys general of 33 states in late October and was originally redacted. It alleges the social media company knew - but never disclosed - it had received millions of complaints about underage users on Instagram but only disabled a fraction of those accounts. The large number of underage users was an open secret" at the company, the suit alleges, citing internal company documents. Continue reading...

US carmaker claims discriminatory attack' after industrial action stops new cars receiving Swedish platesTesla is suing the Swedish transport agency, accusing it of a discriminatory attack" on the US electric carmaker, after strike action prevented its new vehicles from getting licence plates in Sweden.The lawsuit is an escalation in a row that started between the car company and the union representing Swedish Telsa workers, who are calling for collective bargaining rights and have been on strike for five weeks. Continue reading...

Pair speak about Gaza conflict but not online antisemitism nor controversial post made by X owner this monthElon Musk has joined the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in visiting a kibbutz that was attacked by Hamas on 7 October, after criticism of his endorsement of an antisemitic post on X.The owner of X, the site formerly known as Twitter, has been criticised for supporting a post on his platform that falsely claimed Jewish people were stoking hatred against white people. High-profile advertisers have also suspended spending on the site after a report that ads were appearing next to pro-Nazi content. Continue reading...

Protection groups call for urgent action to help pupils understand risks of making images that legally constitute child sexual abuseChildren in British schools are using artificial intelligence (AI) to make indecent images of other children, a group of experts on child abuse and technology has warned.They said that a number of schools were reporting for the first time that pupils were using AI-generating technology to create images of children that legally constituted child sexual abuse material. Continue reading...

Isaac Herzog's office says president will emphasize the need to act' against rising anti-Jewish hate during tech billionaire's visitThe tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, accused by civil rights groups of amplifying anti-Jewish hatred on his Twitter/X social media platform, will meet Israeli president Isaac Herzog on Monday, along with Israelis whose relatives have been held by Hamas in Gaza.Herzog's office announced the meeting on Sunday night, saying: In their meeting, the president will emphasize the need to act to combat rising antisemitism online." Continue reading...

The development of supersmart AI needs careful handling - and that probably won't be made easier by a bout of corporate chaosIn the 1983 movie WarGames, the US defence department runs a superintelligent central computer that is hacked into by a teenager, who unwittingly almost causes a nuclear Armageddon. The end of the world is averted when the computer, known as Joshua, learns, after playing tic-tac-toe with the teenager, that nuclear war cannot have a winner. The insight causes him to rescind missile launch orders with the comment: A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."Joshua embodied the idea that a superintelligent AI would have an anthropomorphic mindset. Yet it was a human who saved the world that year. Lt Col Stanislav Petrov disobeyed orders for a catastrophic retaliatory nuclear strike when the automated early warning system of the Soviet Union in September 1983 falsely indicated an American nuclear attack. Supersmart machines cannot just be left to their own devices. They - and their development - need to be properly handled. Continue reading...

The US reproductive health expert on being sued for $1m, and winning a top prize for her fight for free speech in the public interestDr Chelsea Polis is a reproductive health scientist based in New York City. She was sued for $1m by a medical device company after speaking out about misleading marketing claims it had made about the use of its digital fertility tracker as a contraceptive method. After a two-year battle, the case was thrown out of court. Last month in London she won the 2023 John Maddox prize early career award, which champions those who stand up for evidence-based science in the face of hostility. She is a senior scientist for epidemiology at the Population Council's Center for Biomedical Research.In May 2020, you were sued for $1m for defamation by Valley Electronics of Zurich, Switzerland, the manufacturer of the Daysy fertility tracker and the DaysyView app, for voicing your concerns about the device being marketed as a contraceptive. How did it feel as an individual to be sued for $1m?

Electrification nonprofit says annual federal report on winter-fuels costs is misleading and leaves out critical nuanceWith the holiday season underway in the US, how Americans heat their homes this winter - and how much that will cost them - is the latest focus of the gas v electricity climate culture war.Earlier this year, Republicans and the fossil fuel industry were furious at suggestions from US regulators that gas stoves could be phased out over concerns about dangerous indoor air pollution, prompting Joe Biden to rule out such a ban. Continue reading...

Agnieszka Pilat calls herself a propaganda artist' for technology. But when the machines are sold to governments, police and military, what's the line between art and an ad?The artist is completely focused, a black oil crayon in her hand as she repeatedly draws a small circle on a vibrant teal canvas. She is unbothered by the three people closely observing her every movement, and doesn't seem to register my entrance into this bright white room inside the National Gallery of Victoria.The artist is a robot; more specifically, Basia is a 30kg Spot" robot dog designed by Boston Dynamics. You've probably seen videos of these dogs opening doors, climbing stairs and decorating Christmas trees, while performing eerily fluid actions that cause people to write comments like, Can't wait to have a pack of these chase me through a post-apocalyptic urban hellscape!" The robots are designed to perform tasks that are dangerous for humans: they tend to be bought by mining and construction corporations, as well as police and the military. You may have also seen them enforcing social distancing in Singapore, delivering food to hostages during a home invasion in Queens, dancing in a baseball stadium in Japan, or even in an episode of The Book of Boba Fett. Now you can watch them paint. Continue reading...

The chaos at OpenAI reveals contradictions in the way we think about the technologyAt times it felt less like Succession than Fawlty Towers, not so much Shakespearean tragedy as Laurel and Hardy farce. OpenAI is the hottest tech company today thanks to the success of its most famous product, the chatbot ChatGPT. It was inevitable that the mayhem surrounding the sacking, and subsequent rehiring, of Sam Altman as its CEO would play out across global media last week, accompanied by astonishment and bemusement in equal measure.For some, the farce spoke to the incompetence of the board; for others, to a clash of monstrous egos. In a deeper sense, the turmoil also reflected many of the contradictions at the heart of the tech industry. The contradiction between the self-serving myth of tech entrepreneurs as rebel disruptors", and their control of a multibillion-dollar monster of an industry through which they shape all our lives. The tension, too, between the view of AI as a mechanism for transforming human life and the fear that it may be an existential threat to humanity. Continue reading...

The Iranian photographer, in his hometown, flashed back to his youthIn Ahmad Abad, a suburb of the Iranian city of Tabriz, a gaggle of children were playing on a gas pipe. Akbar Mehrinezhad often took photographs here, on the edge of the city, drawn to the subjects he found. When he saw these children some way off in the distance, he had to move quickly. I ran to capture it. Even without seeing their faces, it's storytelling," he says of his choice to focus on their shadows, and one pair of dangling feet. Continue reading...

Challenging each other to cage fights, building apocalypse bunkers - the behaviour of today's mega-moguls is becoming increasingly outlandish and imperialEven their downfalls are spectacular. Like a latter-day Icarus flying too close to the sun, disgraced crypto-god Sam Bankman-Fried crashed and burned this month, recasting Michael Lewis's exuberant biography of the convicted fraudster - Going Infinite - into the story of a supervillain. Even his potential sentence of up to 115 years in prison seems more suitable for a larger-than-life comic book character - the Joker being carted off to Arkham Asylum - than a nerdy, crooked currency trader.But that's the way this generation of tech billionaires rolls. The Elon Musk we meet in Walter Isaacson's biography posts selfies of himself as Marvel comic character Doctor Strange - the Sorcerer Supreme" who protects the Earth against magical threats. Musk is so fascinated with figures such as Iron Man that he gave a tour of the SpaceX factory to the actor who plays him, Robert Downey Jr, and the film's director, Jon Favreau. As if believing he really has acquired these characters' martial arts prowess, in June Musk challenged fellow ubermensch Mark Zuckerberg to a cage match" after Zuck launched an app to compete with the floundering Twitter. Musk and Zuck exchanged taunts in the style of superheroes or perhaps professional wrestlers. I'm up for a cage match if he is," tweeted Musk. Send Me Location," responded Zuck from Instagram's Threads. Continue reading...