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My close read of the world's most powerful posting addict turned up surprising results. Plus, a viral press release about AI, and Nvidia is accused of unjust enrichment' Don't get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up for the full article hereI hope I don't have to cover Elon Musk again for a while," I thought last week after I sent TechScape to readers. Then I got a message from the news editor. Can you keep an eye on Elon Musk's Twitter feed this week?"I ended up doing a close-reading of the world's most powerful posting addict, and my brain turned to liquid and trickled out of my ears:His shortest overnight break, on Saturday night, saw him logging off after retweeting a meme comparing London's Metropolitan police force to the Nazi SS, before bounding back online four and a half hours later to retweet a crypto influencer complaining about jail terms for Britons attending protests.AI poses no existential threat to humanity - new study finds.LLMs have a superficial ability to follow instructions and excel at proficiency in language, however, they have no potential to master new skills without explicit instruction. This means they remain inherently controllable, predictable and safe.Large language models, comprising billions of parameters and pre-trained on extensive web-scale corpora, have been claimed to acquire certain capabilities without having been specifically trained on them ... We present a novel theory that explains emergent abilities, taking into account their potential confounding factors, and rigorously substantiate this theory through over 1,000 experiments. Our findings suggest that purported emergent abilities are not truly emergent, but result from a combination of in-context learning, model memory, and linguistic knowledge.

PC; Suspicious Developments

... but impressive, boundary-pushing device is priced so far out of reach for most that it isn't yet the next big thingOn a sweltering summer's day in London, I sat working in the middle of a snow-covered Yosemite national park surrounded by an array of floating apps and browser windows. Later I stared across a windswept Oregon beach reliving a holiday from years ago, and spent an evening sitting in a speeder on Tatooine watching Rogue One in 3D, before retiring for the night with some guided meditation.These are the sorts of immersive experiences that Apple's latest, most expensive gadget offers by blending the real and virtual world, all controlled by your eyes and hands. The Vision Pro may resemble virtual reality headsets such as Meta's Quest series but it is attempting to be so much more. Continue reading...

Boredom is linked to attention - so switching content or skipping forwards and backwards feels more tedious than watching one videoBrowsing videos on TikTok or YouTube can be a hit-and-miss affair, with gems lurking amid mediocre efforts. But researchers have found that switching to another video, or skipping forwards and backwards in the same one, actually makes people more bored.Dr Katy Tam at the University of Toronto Scarborough, the lead author of the research, said boredom was closely linked to attention. Continue reading...

Artist Butterbro accused of walking fine line between parody and discrimination and helping make racial slur mainstreamA song about immigrants whose music, vocals and artwork were entirely generated using artificial intelligence has made the Top 50 most listened to songs in Germany, in what may be a first for a leading music market.Verknallt in einen Talahon is a parody song that weaves modern lyrics - many of them based around racial stereotypes about immigrants - with 60s schlager pop. Continue reading...

There's been an exodus of users from X, propelled by Elon Musk's lurch to the far right, but the alternatives have drawbacks tooBeing on @Threads this week has been a bit like sitting on a half-empty train early in the morning while it slowly starts to fill up with people jumping on with horror stories about how bad the service is on the other line," posted the actor David Harewood on Meta's Twitter/X rival, which from the volume of new joiners asking Hey, how does this work?" appeared, in the UK at least, to be having a post far-right riots bounce last week.To which some might ask, what's taken the Threads newbies so long? To say Elon Musk's tenure as the owner of the social network formerly known as Twitter and now renamed X has been unconscionable - recent highlights include unbanning numerous far-right and extremist accounts and his one-man misinformation campaign about the UK's far-right anti-immigrant riots - would be a criminal understatement. Continue reading...

Judge Alexandre de Moraes had ordered X to block certain accounts as he investigated fake news and hate messagesElon Musk announced on Saturday that the social media platform X would close its operations in Brazil effective immediately" due to what it called censorship orders" from the Brazilian judge Alexandre de Moraes.X claims Moraes secretly threatened one of its legal representatives in the South American country with arrest if it did not comply with legal orders to take down some content from its platform. Brazil's supreme court, where Moraes has a seat, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Continue reading...

This summer organisers are asking festival-goers to stop filming the event and live in the moment insteadMany partygoers who attended Amsterdam's No Art festival this summer will have had the time of their lives - but you wouldn't be able to tell that from their social media channels.At the gates of the all-day dance event at the Dutch city's Flevopark in July, ticket holders were told to drop their smartphones into provided envelopes, with the strict instruction not to retrieve the addictive electronic device until the end of the night. Continue reading...

Impersonators love tarot readers. Regulators and social media companies don't care. Mystic practitioners fight back with Moonlight, software for witches'Since tarot practitioner Rebecca Scolnick first began reading cards professionally in 2018, she has been impersonated more than 50 times on Instagram. The scams typically follow a similar pattern: someone creates an account that mirrors hers, using a nearly identical username and reposting all of her photos. The scammer then approaches her followers with enticing spiritual messages. Hello beloved," they usually begin. Have you ever had an in-depth psychic reading before?"Scolnick, who has more than 11,000 Instagram followers, regularly receives messages from her fans saying they have paid for a reading from someone who is not actually her. After years of being inundated with fraudsters and impersonators, she and many tarot readers like her, along with other mystical practitioners, are exhausted and frustrated. Continue reading...

Startups around the world are engaging in clinical trials in a sector that could change lives - and be worth more than 15bn by the 2030sOran Knowlson, a British teenager with a severe type of epilepsy called Lennox-Gastaut syndrome, became the first person in the world to trial a new brain implant last October, with phenomenal results - his daytime seizures were reduced by 80%.It's had a huge impact on his life and has prevented him from having the falls and injuring himself that he was having before," says Martin Tisdall, a consultant paediatric neurosurgeon at Great Ormond Street Hospital (Gosh) in London, who implanted the device. His mother was talking about how he's had such a improvement in his quality of life, but also in his cognition: he's more alert and more engaged." Continue reading...

As the civic hacker' who became Taiwan's first transgender cabinet minister, she is used to breaking boundaries. What can the rest of the world learn from her vision of a happy and inclusive web?Audrey Tang didn't have the easiest of starts in life. The Taiwanese hacker turned government minister was told at the age of four that she had a 50-50 chance of dying unless she had a major operation to fix a hole in her heart. Her doctor told her she could drop down dead at any moment if she got overexcited - and she had to wait eight more years for the op. This kind of news might bring out someone's selfish side - if your life is going to be so truncated, live for yourself. Not Tang, though. She was a tiny child with a whopping IQ and a precocious capacity to think. She decided she wanted to learn everything she could and share it with the world. At five, living with her family in Taipei, she started reading prodigiously - mainly classical Chinese literature. Huge tomes. Then she'd recount her own version of the stories to her classmates. I liked storytelling. When I was seven I'd speak to the entire school about stories I'd learned from a book and retell them in a way I found more interesting." Did she realise she was super bright back then? She shakes her head. No, I realised I was super ill."By six Tang was studying advanced mathematics; at eight she started writing code for video games, using pencil and paper because she didn't yet own a computer. And whatever she learned, it was with the intention of sharing her knowledge. Before long it became apparent she was a digital genius. Tang, 43, is roughly the same age as the internet (1 January 1983 is considered its birthday). She grew up alongside the world wide web; it was her playmate. In her teens, Tang believed the internet was there to bring her vision to fruition: to democratise knowledge, to make everything accessible, to make the world a better place. But then she saw it changing, being used to spread falsehoods and generate all-powerful companies that made digital capitalism's founding fathers unfeasibly rich while creating unimagined levels of inequality. Continue reading...

GMB union urges Health and Safety Executive to investigate shocking' figures revealed by the ObserverAmbulances have been called out to Amazon warehouses more than 1,400 times in the past five years, the Observer can reveal. The figures, which were described as shocking by the GMB trade union, raise fresh questions about safety at the American giant's UK workplaces.Amazon centres in Dunfermline and Bristol had the most ambulance callouts in Britain, listing 161 and 125 across the period respectively. Continue reading...

A lockdown bike ride through central London with his son led the photographer to a moment of serene, sunny solitudeCelebrating his 19th birthday with a six-hour bike ride through London's deserted streets was not the plan when photographer Gideon Mendel's son, Jonah, began university.He started the autumn before the first Covid lockdown and was flourishing and enjoying his social life," Mendel says. When lockdown was announced, he came home very abruptly and quite bewildered." Continue reading...

There is method to the apparent madness of the tycoon's prolific 24-hour outputElon Musk doesn't stop tweeting. Over just seven days last week, he made nearly 650 posts to the social network he bought in November 2022 and half-heartedly rebranded as X. In addition, he spent nearly three hours battling through technical problems he would later attribute to an unproved hacking attack in order to host a conversation" with Donald Trump, as well as livestreaming himself playing a couple of hours of Blizzard's swords-and-sorcery game Diablo IV.The sheer volume of his content would be impressive enough on its own, but even as someone so addicted to posting that he spent more than the budget of the Manhattan project to buy the site, Musk's consistency is alarming. Continue reading...

AI company bans accounts and says operation did not appear to have meaningful audience engagementOpenAI said on Friday it had taken down accounts of an Iranian group for using its ChatGPT chatbot to generate content meant for influencing the US presidential election and other issues.The operation, identified as Storm-2035, used ChatGPT to generate content focused on topics such as commentary on the candidates on both sides in the US elections, the conflict in Gaza and Israel's presence at the Olympic Games and then shared it via social media accounts and websites, Open AI said. Continue reading...

Fubo TV accuses Venu Sports - which also involves Hulu and Warner Bros Discovery - of anti-competitive practicesThe launch of Venu Sports will be delayed after a federal judge granted FuboTV's motion for a preliminary injunction against the planned sports streaming venture by ESPN, Fox and Warner Bros Discovery.US district judge Margaret M Garnett in New York said in her 69-page ruling that Fubo was likely to be successful in proving during a trial that the joint venture would violate antitrust laws, and Fubo and consumers would face irreparable harm in the absence of an injunction". Continue reading...

The creators of the Lego Star Wars and Lego Harry Potter games bring similar energy and humour to this gentle action-adventureEver since they first clambered into shops in 2010, Funko Pop figures have been an unavoidable part of pop culture fandom, lending their black-eyed large-headed charm to everything from Ms Marvel to Mr Bean. After a couple of minor smartphone releases it was inevitable they'd eventually make it into a major video game. But what could have been a lazy cash-in looks to be a lot more promising. Funko Fusion is the first title from Warrington-based studio 10:10, formed by Jon Burton and Arthur Parsons, the directors on most of the vastly successful Lego titles such as Lego Star Wars and Lego Harry Potter. Their aim is to bring the same energy and humour to the Funko universe.Funko Fusion, then, is a classic cartoon-style action adventure, beholden to the Lego titles naturally, but also to PlayStation favourites Ratchet & Clank and Jak and Daxter. Players get to explore seven themed worlds based around Funko Pop figures and key licensor NBC Universal. As Parsons recalls: I remember we got sent a spreadsheet, which listed everything that NBC Universal owns from back in the 1920s all the way to current day. And it was like, wow, where do we start?' That was the fun bit." Continue reading...

Models, athletes and TikTokers shun phone cameras as 35mm sales surge and a new Pentax film camera is launchedThis week, a new range of Google smartphones capable of AI image generation has been launched. But for an increasing number of people, the appeal of a less cutting-edge piece of equipment is proving hard to resist: the point-and-shoot camera.The US footballer Megan Rapinoe was seen snapping from the stands at the Paris Olympics. The model Alexa Chung captioned a recent Instagram of her with a camera: Just another Millennial with a dependency on Snappy Snaps, fighting digital threat with an analogue mode. " A recent glimpse of home life for Rihanna and A$AP Rocky showed a disposable camera lying among the clutter. Kim Kardashian and Taylor Swift have both been snapped holding their point-and-shooters. Continue reading...

Jools Lebron has become TikTok's satirical Emily Post, with etiquette for everything from job interviews to drag showsRest in peace, brat summer. There's a new buzzword-slash-ethos hitting TikTok, and it's basically the opposite of Charli xcx's party-girl character. Now, it's all about being demure.At least, that's according to Jools Lebron, the content creator behind the catchphrase, who advises her followers on how to come off as very demure, very mindful" in various life situations. Continue reading...

With a 34 mini computer and an emulator, gaming's entire back catalogue opens up to you to play. But there are important points to consider - not least questions of legalityIn the past, whenever I have written enthusiastically about a modern retro console such as the Nintendo Classic Mini: SNES or the Analogue Duo, there have been a smattering of comments below the article asking why people don't just buy a Raspberry Pi mini computer, download an emulator and play all the games they like for virtually nothing. My answer has usually been ease of use and accessibility. When you buy a mini console, you're getting a plug-and-play product without any complicated set-up or potential compatibility issues. Simple.But recently I bought a Raspberry Pi for an article on the beautiful PiDP-10 machine, so I thought I might as well check out its retro gaming credentials. Here is what I found. Continue reading...

New Meta security report finds that AI-powered deception campaigns provide only incremental' results for bad actorsRussia is putting generative artificial intelligence to work in online deception campaigns, but its efforts have been unsuccessful, according to a Meta security report released on Thursday.The parent company of Facebook and Instagram found that so far AI-powered tactics provide only incremental productivity and content-generation gains" for bad actors and Meta has been able to disrupt deceptive influence operations. Continue reading...

Tech company says group linked to Revolutionary Guard still actively targeting Biden, Trump and Harris associatesGoogle said on Wednesday that an Iranian group linked to the country's Revolutionary Guard has tried to infiltrate the personal email accounts of roughly a dozen people linked to Joe Biden, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris since May.The tech company's threat intelligence arm said the group was still actively targeting people associated with Biden, Trump and Harris, who replaced the US president as the Democratic candidate last month when he dropped out. It said those targeted included current and former government officials, as well as presidential campaign affiliates. Continue reading...

PC, PS5, PS4, Xbox Series XS, Xbox One; Red Thread Games; Spotlight by Quantic Dream

Meta has system for evaluating the effectiveness of its own moderation for Arabic language content but not HebrewMeta is struggling with moderating content related to the Israel-Palestine war, particularly in Hebrew, despite recent changes to internal policies, new documents have revealed.Internal policy guidelines shared with the Guardian by a former Meta employee who worked on content moderation outline a multilayered process for moderating content related to the conflict. But the documents indicate Meta, which owns the platforms Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, does not have the same processes in place to gauge the accuracy of moderation of Hebrew content and Arabic content. Continue reading...

Justice minister signs extradition order for Megaupload founder 12 years after FBI-ordered raid over filesharing siteKim Dotcom, who is facing criminal charges relating to the defunct filesharing website Megaupload, is to be extradited to the US, the New Zealand justice minister says, which could end more than a decade of legal wrangling.German-born Dotcom has New Zealand residency and has been fighting extradition to the US since 2012 after an FBI-ordered raid on his Auckland mansion. The high court in New Zealand first approved his extradition in 2017, with an appeal court reaffirming the finding the year after. In 2020, the country's supreme court again affirmed the finding but opened the door for a fresh round of judicial review. Continue reading...

Moses Swaibu tells all about betraying the sport he loved in a news podcast. Plus: five of the best podcasts about great love stories Don't get Hear Here delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereConfessions of a Match Fixer

DoJ could force divestment of Android operation system and Chrome web browser following antitrust verdictA week after a judge ruled that Alphabet's Google illegally monopolized the online search market, the US Department of Justice is considering options that include breaking up the tech giant, worth some $2tn, according to reports from the New York Times and Bloomberg News.Divesting the Android operating system was one of the remedies most frequently discussed by justice department attorneys, the reports said. Continue reading...

Grok doesn't reject prompts depicting violent and explicit content as X owner calls it the most fun AI in the world!'The latest edition of Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok debuted a new image generation tool on Wednesday that lacked most of the safety guardrails that have become standard within the artificial intelligence industry. Grok's new feature, which is currently limited to paid subscribers of X, led to a flood of bizarre, offensive AI-generated images of political figures and celebrities on the social network formerly known as Twitter.The image generator can produce a variety of images that similar AI tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT have blocked for violating rules on misinformation and abuse. In prompts and images reviewed by the Guardian, Grok's output included representations of Donald Trump flying a plane into the World Trade Center buildings and the prophet Muhammad holding a bomb, as well as depictions of Taylor Swift, Kamala Harris and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in lingerie - all women who are already frequent targets for online harassment. ChatGPT, by contrast, rejects such prompts for images by citing terms of service that prohibit depictions of real-world violence, disrespect to religious figures and explicit content. Continue reading...

Robotic, peculiar wording in recent issues of Cody Enterprise tipped a veteran reporter offA quote from Wyoming's governor and a local prosecutor were the first things that seemed slightly off to Powell Tribune reporter CJ Baker. Then, it was some of the phrases in the stories that struck him as nearly robotic.The dead giveaway, though, that a reporter from a competing news outlet was using generative artificial intelligence to help write his stories came in a 26 June article about the comedian Larry the Cable Guy being chosen as the grand marshal of the Cody Stampede parade. Continue reading...

Facebook founder shares photo of sculpture of Priscilla Chan, rendered in green with a large silver cloakMark Zuckerberg has raised eyebrows by commissioning a giant sculpture of his wife, Priscilla Chan.In a photo of the statue, posted to Instagram, the Facebook CEO and co-founder said he was bringing back the Roman tradition of making sculptures of your wife". Continue reading...

State-sponsored hacking campaigns are evolving in social engineering strategies and technical aspectsRussia's state security agency is launching increasingly sophisticated phishing attacks against US, European and Russian civil society members, in some cases by impersonating individuals who are personally close to the targets of the attacks, according to a new investigation by security researchers.A new report by the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto and Access Now comes as the FBI has separately launched an investigation into suspected hacking attempts by Iran targeting an adviser to Donald Trump and advisers to the Harris-Walz campaign. Continue reading...

Harris's track record, and time as California senator and AG, has tech leaders wondering if she'd have a friendlier approach to the industryAbout 700 wealthy Democratic supporters packed into San Francisco's Fairmont hotel on Sunday to see Kamala Harris in her first return to the city since launching her campaign for president. Among the crowd at the fundraiser, where the cheapest tickets cost $3,300 and went up to $500,000, was a mixture of tech billionaires, executives and Silicon Valley venture capitalists who have quickly embraced the vice-president in her bid for the White House.The event, which raised more than $12m, was the latest in the Harris campaign's outreach to tech Democrats and an extension of a relationship with Silicon Valley elites that goes back more than a decade. Continue reading...

Running a tea shop in the woods doesn't help arena fighter Alta to escape her trauma. Designers Davey Wreden and Karla Zimonja explain how this cosy dream-fulfilment fantasy turned into something much more metaAt first, Wanderstop appears to tap into the same restless urge as many other cosy games: the wish to leave our stressful lives behind and escape to an anonymous wilderness. The game opens with you taking an assistant job in a woodland tea shop, where you spend your days cleaning, tending the garden, and researching the perfect tea blend to satisfy the needs of visiting customers. Scratch a little deeper, though, and you find a game tearing at the hollow rewards of the escapist fantasy.The bucolic setting is born out of an image game designer Davey Wreden became fixated on in the months after the release of 2015's The Beginner's Guide. His mind would repeatedly wander to a daydream of going to a tea shop in the woods and lying on a bench by the water. He sketched variations of the scene for months before deciding to make it as his next game. Continue reading...

An attempt to expose the billionaire founder of Microsoft fails to land a killer blowHouston, we have a billionaire problem. There are 2,781 individuals in the world worth more than a billiondollars, according to Forbes, and together these people have a net worth of $14.2tn, roughly the GDP of the Eurozone. The US boasts more super-rich than any other country, including eight of the planet's 10 richest men. (The top of the chart is all men, until you get to the L'Oreal heiress Francoise Bettencourt Meyers, at number 15.) All but one of these eight made their fortunes in the tech sector, and you'll be familiar with many of their names: Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates.So what, you might say - there's no law against getting filthy rich. These people have worked hard for their Gulfstream jets and frigate-sized yachts. But with great piles of cash comes great power, and too often billionaires find ways around our frail systems of democratic oversight. They dodge taxes, bend politics and the media to their will, create monopolies, and disproportionately damage the planet. The problem isonly getting worse, since, as Thomas Piketty has pointed out, when the return on capital exceeds the rate of economic growth, big money grows faster than small money or no money at all. In 2024, according to Forbes, the billionaires are collectively $2tn better off than they were last year. Continue reading...

Campaign says cybersecurity measures prevented hacking but disclosure raises renewed fears of foreign interference

Plaintiff in New York case says he lost job after complaining that his manager openly celebrated terrorism against IsraelA Jewish former employee of Intel sued the chipmaker on Tuesday, saying he was fired after complaining that the senior executive he reported to openly celebrated antisemitism, Hamas and terrorism against Israel.The plaintiff, a former vice-president of engineering using the pseudonym John Doe, said Intel fired him on 2 April in a purported cost-cutting move barely two months after assigning him to report to Alaa Badr, vice-president of customer success. Continue reading...

New Pixel phones, foldable, watch and earbuds feature Gemini Live for free-flowing conversations with AI botGoogle is launching four phones, one of them foldable, two smartwatches and a set of earbuds packing its latest AI tech including the new advanced Gemini Live conversational experience, as the Android maker tries to outdo Apple and Samsung.The array of new Pixel products, announced at an event in California, mark the latest evolution of Google's own-brand Android devices as it attempts to prove its integrated AI and devices work better than rivals. Continue reading...

It started poorly with a 45-minute delay and rolling technical issues - and was lambasted on other platforms

The Democratic party has the chance to resurrect the zealous monopoly-busting spirit of its New Deal and Great Society heyday. They must use itGoogle is a monopolist." What has long been asserted by big tech skeptics is now the official position of the US district court for DC.Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google broke antitrust law by spending tens of billions annually to secure default search engine status across major web browsers, including Safari and Firefox. This coordinated campaign resulted in Google securing 90% of the global search market, despite its engine increasingly answering queries with spam pages, AI gibberish and product placements.Katrina vanden Heuvel is editor and publisher of the Nation, she is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and has contributed to the Washington Post, New York Times and Los Angeles Times Continue reading...

Twitter under the tech owner has become the perfect test case for the UK's new legislation - but critics say more needs to be done Don't get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up for the full article hereWhat can the UK government do about Twitter? What should it do about Twitter? And what does Elon Musk even care?The multibillionaire owner of the social network, still officially branded as X, has had a fun week stirring up unrest on his platform. Aside from his own posts, a mixture of low-effort memes that look as if they're lifted straight from 8chan and faux-concerned reposts of far-right personalities, the platform at large briefly became a crucial part of the organisation of the disorder - alongside the other two of the three Ts: TikTok and Telegram.In the short term, Musk and fellow executives should be reminded of their criminal liability for their actions under existing laws. Britain's Online Safety Act 2023 should be beefed up with immediate effect. Prime minister Keir Starmer and his team should reflect if Ofcom - the media regulator that seems to be continuously challenged by the output and behaviour of outfits such as GB News - is fit to deal with the blurringly fast actions of the likes of Musk. In my experience, that threat of personal sanction is much more effective on executives than the risk of corporate fines. Were Musk to continue stirring up unrest, an arrest warrant for him might produce fireworks from his fingertips, but as an international jet-setter it would have the effect of focusing his mind.I think very swiftly the government has realised there needs to be amendments to the Online Safety Act,' Khan said in an interview with the Guardian. I think what the government should do very quickly is check if it is fit for purpose. I think it's not fit for purpose.'Khan said there were things that could be done by responsible social media platforms' but added: If they don't sort their own house out, regulation is coming.'If we just look at the act alone, Ofcom has the power to regulate online media content because section 232 says a television licensable content service" includes distribution by any means involving the use of an electronic communications network'. Ofcom could choose to assert its powers. Yet this is highly unlikely because Ofcom knows it would face challenge from the tech companies, including those fuelling riots and conspiracy theories.There is no difference, for example, between Elon Musk putting out videos on X about (so called) two-tier policing, or posts on detainment camps', or that civil war is inevitable', and ITV or Sky or the BBC broadcasting news stories ... The Online Safety Act is completely inadequate, since it only is written to stop illegal' content, which does not by itself include statements that are wrong, or even dangerous. Continue reading...

From the writer of lockdown hit Before Your Eyes, the new game uses VR or plain old webcam tech to see how life looks as a paranormally gifted infantHow do you follow the game that made the world cry? It's a question that's haunted writer Graham Parkes ever since 2021's Bafta-winning Before Your Eyes. Released during the height of lockdown, Parkes' webcam-controlled yarn uses players' blinks to fast-forward through protagonist Benny's memories, blinking in and out of each uplifting and gut-wrenching moment of his existence. It quickly gained a reputation for being a Twitch tearjerker, its affecting tale and months of pandemic-fuelled misery creating a perfect, Kleenex-blowing storm. As a writer, that has definitely been intimidating.," says Parkes, I'm interested in using games to tell concise, emotional stories, but we can't say that every single time we're going to make you weep."Still, tears or no, things are already looking pretty promising for Before Your Eyes' intriguing followup, Goodnight Universe. Developed by Nice Dream, an all-new studio formed by creators Graham Parkes and Oliver Lewin, Goodnight Universe has already won the 2024 game award at the Tribeca film festival, beating the brilliant Thank Goodness You're Here! to the punch. Continue reading...

A big-money business pitch is threatened when a tech entrepreneur's unpredictable inner child is unleashed after hypnotherapyThe squirm factor is high in this dark comedy of social awkwardness from Sweden, ruthlessly directed by first-time feature director Ernst De Geer to maximise audience discomfort. There are a couple of scenes here so excruciating I would have found it less painful watching someone getting their fingernails prised out with pliers. The Hypnosis stars Asta Kamma August and Herbert Nordrum as Vera and Andre, a couple in their 30s who are the founders of an app that tracks women's reproductive health in developing countries. Dressed in tasteful knitwear and limited-edition trainers, they look the part of startup entrepreneurs, and seem pleasant enough - though it's immediately clear that Andre dominates Vera, who is quieter.Things start to go pear-shaped when Vera sees a hypnotherapist to quit smoking. This is just before an important pitching event where the pair will be competing against other apps in front of big-money investors. At the session, Vera's hypnotherapist gently observes that she seems to be holding back her true self; she should listen to her inner child more. And something inside Vera switches and she loses her social inhibitions - in a way that I didn't quite buy into - instantly, and at full throttle. Continue reading...

Musk blames cyber-attack as conversation is delayed, resembling glitchy launch of Ron DeSantis's campaignAs a high-profile conversation between Donald Trump and Elon Musk was about to begin, users of X, formerly Twitter, were confronted with the message: This Space is not available."Spaces, X's livestreaming audio feature, was the chosen forum for the dialogue, but it wasn't working. Clicking on the link to the broadcast, hosted by Trump's dormant @RealDonaldTrump account, froze the site and rendered it unusable. Tweeters said they couldn't dial in; some said their browsers had crashed. Continue reading...

Bruce Daisley calls for beefed-up' online safety laws and compares tech billionaires to unaccountable oligarchs

It cannot be right that Musk can sow discord without personal risk. He's a jetsetter: perhaps fear of unexpected detention will concentrate his mindThe way social media is making headlines currently is not without precedent: a fragile narcissist posting relentlessly on a social network he's made his own. We know well how this has ended in the past; Donald Trump's furious posts after his election defeat led to the assault on the Capitol on 6 January 2021. The aftermath of that episode saw the then president suspended from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and even, to the dismay of those hoping to mood-board the Mar-a-Lago aesthetic, Pinterest.This time is likely to be different, not least because the person agitating the social media furore, Elon Musk, owns the platform he is using. Continue reading...

Summerhall, Edinburgh

X owner, who will interview Trump on Monday, has cast doubt on mail ballots and spread false claimsWhen Elon Musk took over as owner of Twitter, researchers and elections officials feared a rampant spread of misinformation that would lead to threats and harassment and undermine democracy.Their fears came true - and Musk himself has emerged as one of its main drivers. Continue reading...

It's easy to blame viral videos - and far harder to change the culture in which they thriveAmong those swiftly convicted and sentenced last week for their part in the racist rioting was Bobby Shirbon, who had left his 18th birthday party at a bingo hall in Hartlepool to join the mob roaming the town's streets, targeting houses thought to be occupied by asylum seekers. Shirbon was arrested for smashing windows and throwing bottles at police. He was sentenced to 20 months in prison.In custody, Shirbon had claimed that his actions had been justified by their ubiquity: It's OK," he told officers, everyone else is doing it." That has, of course, been a consistent claim from those caught up in mass thuggery down the years, but for many of the hundreds of people now facing significant prison sentences, the defence" has a sharper resonance. Continue reading...

An abandoned Australian experiment' shows that the public can successfully object to what companies and politicians claim is inevitable progressScratch a digital capitalist and you'll find a technological determinist - someone who believes that technology drives history. These people see themselves as agents of what Joseph Schumpeter famously described as creative destruction". They revel in moving fast and breaking things" as the Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, used to put it until his PR people convinced him it was not a good vibe, not least because it implied leaving taxpayers to pick up the broken pieces.Tech determinism is an ideology, really; it's what determines how you think when you don't even know that you're thinking. And it feeds on a narrative of technological inevitability, which says that new stuff is coming down the line whether you like it or not. As the writer LM Sacasas puts it, all assertions of inevitability have agendas, and narratives of technological inevitability provide convenient cover for tech companies to secure their desired ends, minimise resistance, and convince consumers that they are buying into a necessary, if not necessarily desirable future". Continue reading...

The networking site one is calling a cesspool' is riddled with oversharing and lunatics - it's time for changeIn need of a laugh? Spend an hour or two on the subreddit LinkedInLunatics. Trust me.There's the financial expert who believes it necessary to share with his friends, clients and community that he enjoys watching porn (in moderation, mind you!). There's the usual crowd of pundits who use cultural events like the Olympics competitions to teach us life lessons. Or the matchmaking company that thinks LinkedIn is Hinge. Continue reading...