Technology | The Guardian

Tech billionaire, 38, surprises onlookers by winning gold and silver medal at tournament in Redwood City, California

Ben Smith was BuzzFeed’s editor-in-chief when it was at its peak. He explains how the groundbreaking site and its rivals changed the media – and sowed the seeds for their own demiseIn any technological advance there is a golden age in which, for pioneers and believers, remaking the world seems within their grasp. For social media, that moment was just over 20 years ago, when to digital evangelists it felt like a new generation of “citizen journalists” – bloggers – might create a connected utopia of transparency, sweeping away those crusty media “gatekeepers” who had – the theory went – so long kept us all in the dark. This imagined paradise was a place in which no one had yet heard of cat memes and dick pics and Andrew Tate; where anti-vaxxers and anonymous “patriots” still just wrote furious letters to editors in green ink in their bedsits; where likes and follows and trolls and gifs and pile-ons were not yet the stuff of life.Ben Smith was in his mid-20s when the first wave of that revolution was breaking – “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!” – making his way as a political journalist in Washington and feeling the media landscape shift beneath his feet. Having been political blogger at the website Politico in the early days of that turmoil, he launched the newsroom of BuzzFeed in 2011 and established it as a credible and groundbreaking source of internet-only news, before leaving in 2020 to take up a role as media columnist of the New York Times. In April, having gone through successive waves of cuts and redundancies, BuzzFeed finally shut down its news operation. It felt like the end of an era. Continue reading...

In an important new book, US economists Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson propose ways in which digital technology can be repurposed for human flourishing as well as private profit“Those who cannot remember the past,” wrote the American philosopher George Santayana in 1905, “are condemned to repeat it.” And now, 118 years later, here come two American economists with the same message, only with added salience, for they are addressing a world in which a small number of giant corporations are busy peddling a narrative that says, basically, that what is good for them is also good for the world.That this narrative is self-serving is obvious, as is its implied message: that they should be allowed to get on with their habits of “creative destruction” (to use Joseph Schumpeter’s famous phrase) without being troubled by regulation. Accordingly, any government that flirts with the idea of reining in corporate power should remember that it would then be standing in the way of “progress”: for it is technology that drives history and anything that obstructs it is doomed to be roadkill.Power and Progress: Our Thousand Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson is published by John Murray Press (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply Continue reading...

With above-inflation increases, tips and tricks to find the right plan are even more importantThere’s a dizzying array of mobile phone tariffs, and with many providers recently imposing above-inflation increases, it is even more important to choose the right deal. So how can you navigate the networks to get a plan that is right for you? What are the top tips for saving money? Continue reading...

Scientists are warning machine learning will soon outsmart humans – maybe it’s time for us to take noteLast Monday an eminent, elderly British scientist lobbed a grenade into the febrile anthill of researchers and corporations currently obsessed with artificial intelligence or AI (aka, for the most part, a technology called machine learning). The scientist was Geoffrey Hinton, and the bombshell was the news that he was leaving Google, where he had been doing great work on machine learning for the last 10 years, because he wanted to be free to express his fears about where the technology he had played a seminal role in founding was heading.To say that this was big news would be an epic understatement. The tech industry is a huge, excitable beast that is occasionally prone to outbreaks of “irrational exuberance”, ie madness. One recent bout of it involved cryptocurrencies and a vision of the future of the internet called “Web3”, which an astute young blogger and critic, Molly White, memorably describes as “an enormous grift that’s pouring lighter fluid on our already smoldering planet”. Continue reading...

Employees at Lithuanian freight operator Girteka complain of hard conditions on the road, including one who says he fell seriously ill but co-drove his truck 800 miles after emerging from hospitalDrivers for one of Europe’s biggest delivery firms, which works for Amazon, Ikea and DHL, claim they are being left with no option but to sleep in their trucks for months and are earning well below the minimum wage in most of the countries they visit, according to an Observer investigation.In a series of interviews conducted in Belgium in March, drivers at the Lithuanian haulier Girteka, which says it employs 19,000 people across Europe, said they had spent weeks at a time sleeping in cramped cabs, often sharing a bunk with a co-driver. Continue reading...

Jürgen Schmidhuber believes AI will progress to the point where it surpasses human intelligence and will pay no attention to people

Stalking can be an all-encompassing trauma, but our lack of understanding about it undermines victim-survivorsMy husband and I had only been dating a few months when a stalker changed our lives. The moment remains crystalised in my mind. We’d spent the day with family and friends, and were encompassed by the sort of dopamine-fuelled joy new love brings. We were almost ready to call it a night when I heard a Facebook message request come through.Absentmindedly, I glanced at my phone, and saw there was a message request. Immediately the account didn’t ring true – there was no profile photo, the name clearly fake. Reading the cruel and vulgar words, I reeled. Profane and crass, the sender’s rage was unmistakable. Within minutes, three more messages came through. All similar in nature. Continue reading...

First, you’ve got to drive a long way before you overcome your EV’s embedded carbon debt. And then there’s the trouble with the minerals in its battery…So you’ve finally taken the plunge and bought an electric vehicle (EV)? Me too. You’re basking in the warm glow that comes from doing one’s bit to save the planet, right? And now you know that smug feeling when you are stuck in a motorway tailback behind a hideous diesel SUV that’s pumping out particulates and noxious gases, but you’re sitting there in peace and quiet and emitting none of the above. And when the traffic finally starts to move again you notice that the fast lane is clear and you want to get ahead of that dratted SUV. So you put your foot down and – whoosh! – you get that pressure in the small of your back that only owners of Porsche 911s used to get. Life’s good, n’est-ce pas?Er, up to a point. True, there’s nothing noxious coming out of your exhaust pipe, because you don’t have one; and the electric motors that power your wheels certainly don’t burn any fossil fuel. But that doesn’t mean that your carbon footprint is zero. First of all, where did the electricity that charged that big battery of yours come from? If it came from renewable sources, then that’s definitely good for the planet. But in most countries, at least some of that electricity came from non-renewable sources, maybe even – shock, horror! – coal-burning generating stations.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...

Feature allows users to set a list of friends and post tweets that only they are supposed to be able to readA privacy breach at Twitter published tweets that were never supposed to be seen by anyone but the poster’s closest friends to the site at large, the company has admitted after weeks of stonewalling reports.The site’s Circles feature allows users to set an exclusive list of friends and post tweets that only they can read. Similar to Instagram’s Close Friends setting, it allows users to share private thoughts, explicit images or unprofessional statements without risking sharing them with their wider network. Continue reading...

A software engineer who takes photographs as a hobby spotted this early one morning – and stood on the boat’s railing to get the shotAround 10pm the night before this photo was taken, Samsul, a watermelon farmer, had boarded his boat in Barishal, a district of Bangladesh. He’d sailed through the night to Dhaka, mooring in the capital’s Sadarghat port, on the Buriganga River.Around 5am, his trawler had taken its spot alongside another, selling pumpkins, and the farmer turned sailor transformed once again – this time into an auctioneer, selling off his produce at wholesale prices to local market sellers. Continue reading...

Commonly available software poses threat to tech company and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, leaked document saysGoogle has been warned by one of its engineers that the company is not in a position to win the artificial intelligence race and could lose out to commonly available AI technology.A document from a Google engineer leaked online said the company had done “a lot of looking over our shoulders at OpenAI”, referring to the developer of the ChatGPT chatbot. Continue reading...

Geoffrey Hinton recently quit Google warning of the dangers of artificial intelligence. Is AI really going to destroy us? And how long do we have to prevent it?The first thing Geoffrey Hinton says when we start talking, and the last thing he repeats before I turn off my recorder, is that he left Google, his employer of the past decade, on good terms. “I have no objection to what Google has done or is doing, but obviously the media would love to spin me as ‘a disgruntled Google employee’. It’s not like that.”It’s an important clarification to make, because it’s easy to conclude the opposite. After all, when most people calmly describe their former employer as being one of a small group of companies charting a course that is alarmingly likely to wipe out humanity itself, they do so with a sense of opprobrium. But to listen to Hinton, we’re about to sleepwalk towards an existential threat to civilisation without anyone involved acting maliciously at all. Continue reading...

Era of lofty valuations for upstart youth media appears to be over, with Vice ‘heading for bankruptcy’ and BuzzFeed News shutting down

Sections of industry back synthetic alternatives to fossil fuels, but case is much stronger for aviationMost bright red sports cars do not make much of their green credentials. Yet a test run in Bicester, Oxfordshire, by the startup Zero Petroleum last month gave a glimpse of a future in which combustion engines did not add new carbon to the atmosphere. The car was running on e-fuel: petrol made using electricity, hydrogen from water, and carbon captured from the air.The automotive industry is steadily moving away from fossil fuels, and a firm global consensus has emerged that battery electric vehicles are the way forward. Yet that consensus took a knock in March when the EU – to the shock of energy experts, environmental campaigners and much of the car industry – opened a small back door to e-fuels. Continue reading...

Positive report comes after company’s rare stumbles on revenue, profit and sales in February and highlights strength of the brandApple posted better-than-anticipated second-quarter earnings on Thursday, boosting hopes of a tentative tech recovery and sending company shares up.The company reported revenue of $94.84bn in its second-quarter earnings, up from a predicted $92.96bn, and an all-time record in its services division. It also reported a March quarter record for iPhone sales. Continue reading...

Experts warn Brussels it cannot afford to leave artificial intelligence in the hands of foreign firms such as GoogleThe EU has been warned that it risks handing control of artificial intelligence to US tech firms if it does not act to protect grassroots research in its forthcoming AI bill.In an open letter coordinated by the German research group Laion, or Large-scale AI Open Network, the European parliament was told that “one-size-fits-all” rules risked eliminating open research and development. Continue reading...

CMA to look at underlying systems of artificial intelligence tools amid concerns over false information

These tiny 1980s home arcade machines are returning to a table near you – updated, upgraded and packed with classic video gamesIn the early 1980s, before the arrival of affordable home computers and major consoles, handheld electronic games were the most desirable hi-tech toys out there. From Mattel’s Soccer and Auto Race, to the legendary Nintendo Game & Watch series, these pocket-sized gadgets were the kings of the Argos winter catalogue.Among the many emergent designs, however, the tabletop games were my favourites. Astro Wars, Caveman, Tron … these beautiful devices were designed to resemble miniature arcade machines, complete with teeny joysticks, buttons and detailed artwork. Most featured built-in vacuum fluorescent displays (VFDs) which were capable of emitting light and colour, unlike the dour monochrome screens found on LCD-based electronic games such as Game & Watch. They ate up batteries but that didn’t matter: they were designed to be played at home so most could be plugged in. Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: Why has the social network been in total chaos since the world’s richest man took control? Flipping the Bird investigates. Plus: five of the best podcasts about planet Earth

Federal Trade Commission says network has ‘repeatedly violated its privacy promises’ and misled parents over children’s message appThe US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is accusing Facebook of misleading parents about protections for children and is proposing to tighten an existing agreement on privacy to include a ban on profiting from minors’ data.The FTC said on Wednesday that Facebook misled parents about how much control they had over who their children had contact with in the Messenger Kids app and was deceptive about how much access app developers had to users’ private data, breaching a 2019 agreement on privacy. Continue reading...

Corporate clients that outsource work to Capita – including Aviva and Phoenix Group – must ‘assess fallout from data breach’The City regulator has contacted Capita’s corporate clients urging them to ascertain whether their customers’ data has been compromised after a cyber-attack on the outsourcer in March.The Financial Conduct Authority said it had written to firms it regulates and which outsource work to Capita to ensure they are “fully engaged” in assessing the fallout from the data breach. Continue reading...

New features on app to encourage travellers to consider renting single rooms rather than whole propertiesAirbnb is going back to its roots, the company has announced, with a renewed focus on renting out single rooms to travellers concerned about cost-of-living increases.Labelled Airbnb Rooms, the short-term rental app will launch a range of features designed to encourage travellers to consider renting a single room in a house to save money and have new experiences on the move. Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: A UK regulator blocked a $70bn acquisition last week not because of any threat now, but over worries about a future monopoly

Companies join forces to tackle unwanted tracking via Apple’s gadget and similar devices such as TileApple and Google are teaming up to thwart unwanted tracking through AirTags and similar gadgets.The two companies behind the iPhone and the software that powers Android phones on Tuesday submitted a proposal to set standards for combatting secret surveillance on Bluetooth devices that were created to help people find lost keys, keep tabs on luggage or to locate other things that have a tendency to be misplaced. Continue reading...

Group has removed AI images used to promote their reports on social media, including fake photos of Colombia’s 2021 protestsWhile the systemic brutality used by Colombian police to quell national protests in 2021 was real and is well documented, photos recently used by Amnesty International to highlight the issue were not.The international human rights advocacy group has come under fire for posting images generated by artificial intelligence in order to promote their reports on social media – and has since removed them. Continue reading...

Websites churn out content, often advancing false narratives, to saturate with adverts, says anti-misinformation firmChatbots pretending to be journalists have been discovered running almost 50 AI-generated “content farms” so far, according to an investigation by the anti-misinformation outfit NewsGuard.The websites churn out content relating to politics, health, environment, finance and technology at a “high volume”, the researchers found, to provide rapid turnover of material to saturate with adverts for profit. Continue reading...

The neural network pioneer says dangers of chatbots were ‘quite scary’ and warns they could be exploited by ‘bad actors’The man often touted as the godfather of AI has quit Google, citing concerns over the flood of misinformation, the possibility for AI to upend the job market, and the “existential risk” posed by the creation of a true digital intelligence.Dr Geoffrey Hinton, who with two of his students at the University of Toronto built a neural net in 2012, quit Google this week, as first reported by the New York Times. Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: The tech behemoth was set to acquire the Call of Duty makers, then the UK regulator stepped in – but not for the reason you might think

Technology presuming to recreate humanity is central to Mary Shelley’s masterpiece. It is more relevant today than ever

Royal watchers with hundreds of thousands of followers on the app are gearing up to cover the event for younger audiencesAmanda Matta, 28, is eagerly anticipating the king’s coronation. The TikToker, known as “matta_of_fact” posted her first video on the topic in December last year, and has “lots more coverage, explainers and analysis” coming up for her channel.Matta has 1.2 million subscribers, an enviable audience for even established media outlets, and has become an influential voice on the app when it comes to the royals. Continue reading...

I rumbled a chatbot ruse – but as the tech improves, and news outlets begin to adopt it, how easy will it be to spot it next time?A couple of weeks ago I tweeted a call-out for freelance journalists to pitch me feature ideas for the science and technology section of the Observer’s New Review. Unsurprisingly, given headlines, fears and interest in LLM (large language model) chatbots such as ChatGPT, many of the suggestions that flooded in focused on artificial intelligence – including a pitch about how it is being employed to predict deforestation in the Amazon.One submission however, from an engineering student who had posted a couple of articles on Medium, seemed to be riding the artificial intelligence wave with more chutzpah. He offered three feature ideas – pitches on innovative agriculture, data storage and the therapeutic potential of VR. While coherent, the pitches had a bland authority about them, repetitive paragraph structure, and featured upbeat endings, which if you’ve been toying with ChatGPT or reading about Google chatbot Bard’s latest mishaps, are hints of chatbot-generated content. Continue reading...

Musk calls the one-click move a win for both the public and media organisationsTwitter CEO Elon Musk said on Saturday that the social media platform will allow media publishers to charge users on a per-article basis with one click, calling it a win for both the public and media organisations.The feature, to be rolled out in May, will enable users who do not “sign up for a monthly subscription to pay a higher per article price for when they want to read an occasional article”, billionaire owner Musk tweeted. Continue reading...

National Crime Agency assessing risk after data of some National Smallbore Rifle Association members ‘compromised’Police are investigating a cyber-attack involving potentially thousands of British gun owners, raising concerns that organised criminals may target them for firearms.The National Crime Agency (NCA) is assessing the level of risk after the National Smallbore Rifle Association (NSRA) confirmed that data belonging to some of its members had been “compromised”. Continue reading...

Conservationists in the Brazilian Amazon are using a new tool to predict the next sites of deforestation – and it may prove a gamechanger in the war on loggingIt took just the month of March this year to fell an area of forest in Triunfo do Xingu equivalent to 700 football pitches. At more than 16,000 sq km, this Environmental Protection Area (APA) in the south-eastern corner of the Brazilian Amazon, in the state of Pará, is one of the largest conservation areas in the world. And according to a new tool that predicts where deforestation will happen next, it’s also the APA at highest risk of even more destruction.The tool, PrevisIA, is an artificial intelligence platform created by researchers at environmental nonprofit Imazon. Instead of trying to repair damage done by deforestation after the fact, they wanted to find a way to prevent it from happening at all. Continue reading...

Microchips are an issue, of course, but China also makes the alloy wheels our cars mostly roll on. And what about TikTok? We look at ways a conflict might inflict yet more harm on our struggling businessesAs the world struggles with the economic fallout from the Ukraine war, fears are mounting about a conflict that would be even more consequential: a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.Last week, Taiwan’s foreign minister said he was preparing for the possibility of a conflict with China in 2027, and a leaked memo from a four-star US general said his “gut” told him the US – which is committed to defending Taiwan – would be at war with China in 2025. Continue reading...

Three-day quest for innovations to tackle waiting list of 138,052 attacked as ‘wasting time on nonsense ideas that will go nowhere’The Home Office plans to use artificial intelligence to reduce the asylum backlog, and is launching a three-day hackathon in the search for quicker ways to process the 138,052 undecided asylum cases.The government is convening academics, tech experts, civil servants and business people to form 15 multidisciplinary teams tasked with brainstorming solutions to the backlog. Teams will be invited to compete to find the most innovative solutions, and will present their ideas to a panel of judges. The winners are expected to meet the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, in Downing Street for a prize-giving ceremony. Continue reading...

Now a co-founder of Semafor, formerly of Politico, BuzzFeed and the New York Times, the author expertly pulls readers inBen Smith is a willing passenger on the rollercoaster also known as the internet. He reported for Politico, was founding editor-in-chief at BuzzFeed News and did a stint as a columnist for the New York Times. Then he co-founded Semafor. Graced with a keen eye and sharp wit, he has seen and heard plenty.People and businesses crash, burn and sometimes rise again. BuzzFeed News is no more. The New York Times trades 75% higher than five years ago. Tucker Carlson is off the air. Roger Ailes is dead. Twitter ain’t what it used to be.Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral is published in the US by Penguin Random House Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: Surely we go to the cinema to be jolted and discomfited by someone else’s ideas – not to see ourselves in easy meetcute rom-coms with Marilyn Monroe

Scam calls are an industrial-sized nuisance. Aided by an ‘ethical hacker’, the BBC’s hit daytime breakout show Scam Interceptors is making must-see TV by turning the tables on the con artistsIt’s Thursday morning in the Scam Hub – a darkened room at the BBC’s Pacific Quay studio in Glasgow full of glowing screens and people feverishly tapping away on laptops under the glare of TV cameras – and the atmosphere is tense. We’re eavesdropping on a call between a man in the UK and a scammer in Kolkata, India, who has managed to talk her way inside the unwitting scamee’s Amazon account.Believing that he’s receiving a benevolent customer service call warning of rogue activity, the man has been conned into giving away a private passcode. Worse, the scammer has convinced him to download software to his phone granting remote access to his device, which could allow the harvesting of much more sensitive information including bank details. Continue reading...

E-commerce behemoth, in the midst of aggressively cutting costs including laying-off 27,000 workers, reported revenue growthAmazon shares jumped more than 11%, as income from its cloud computing and advertising units beat estimates for the first quarter of the year.The e-commerce behemoth, which is in the midst of aggressively cutting costs including laying-off 27,000 workers, said revenue for the quarter was $127.4bn, a 9% growth compared with the $116.4bn it reported during the same period last year.Reuters contributed reporting Continue reading...

Downing Street responds to stinging attack from US firm’s president over blocking of $69bn Activision dealDowning Street has defended the UK as an “extremely attractive” place for tech startups after Microsoft’s president said Brexit Britain was worse for business than the EU, in a stinging attack on the UK’s decision to block a $69bn (£55bn) deal to take over Activision Blizzard.Microsoft rounded on the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) on Thursday after a surprise decision to block its planned takeover of the Call of Duty games developer, with its president, Brad Smith, describing it as the “darkest day in our four decades in Britain”. Continue reading...

Park theatre, London

In this week’s newsletter: From couples keen to bring in a third party to exploring your bi-curiosity, the ‘sexologist’ has it all covered in Sex Therapy. Plus: five of the best podcasts with a purpose

Judge in Autopilot death case says defence argument ‘deeply troubling’ and wants Tesla CEO interviewed under oath on safety claimsA California judge has tentatively ordered Elon Musk to be interviewed under oath about whether he made certain statements regarding the capabilities of Tesla’s Autopilot features after the company questioned the authenticity of the remarks, claiming Musk is a “target for deep fakes”.The ruling came in a lawsuit against Tesla, filed by the family of Walter Huang who was killed in a car crash in 2018. Continue reading...

Lawyers for the disgraced entrepreneur told a judge she would not be turning herself in as she is appealing custody rulingTheranos founder Elizabeth Holmes has again delayed the start of her 11-year prison sentence for fraud charges, after appealing a previous decision that would have required her to turn herself in on 27 April.Lawyers for Holmes, who is currently out on bail, informed US district judge Edward Davila on Wednesday that she will not be reporting to prison as scheduled, because she is appealing Davila’s ruling that she remain in custody while it is determined whether she should get a new trial. Continue reading...

CMA surprised sector by saying deal would give Seattle firm undue power to shape cloud gamingMicrosoft’s attempted acquisition of Activision Blizzard, the development conglomerate behind games including Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and Candy Crush Saga, has been blocked by the UK’s competition watchdog in a surprise move. The $70bn (£65bn) purchase would have been the largest in gaming history but now, unless the two companies can convince a tribunal to overturn the ban on appeal, it is dead globally.But what does this mean for tech, gaming and Rishi Sunak’s goal for the “Unicorn Kingdom”? Continue reading...

PlayStation 5 (version tested), Xbox Series X/S, PC; Respawn Entertainment/EA

The British comedian shares what makes him laugh online, which is mainly grandmas falling over (don’t worry, no nanas were hurt in the making of this list)

Competition and Markets Authority blocks what would have been biggest acquisition in gaming historyThe Call of Duty developer Activision Blizzard has accused the UK of being “closed for business” after the competition regulator blocked its attempted takeover by Microsoft, which would have been the largest acquisition in gaming history.The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) prevented the $68.7bn (£55bn) cash purchase because of concerns it would squash the cloud gaming market, sparking furious pushback from both sides of the deal. Microsoft said it would “discourage technology innovation and investment in the UK”, while Activision Blizzard vowed to “reassess our growth plans for the UK”. Continue reading...