Technology | The Guardian

Stock price of crypto-focused US bank plummeted in Thursday trading and it is assessing its ability to keep goingThe share price of cryptocurrency-focused US bank Silvergate plummeted by nearly 50% in early trading on Thursday after fresh revelations about the extent of its exposure to the collapse of crypto exchange FTX raised questions about its ability to survive.On Wednesday, it delayed publication of its annual report and announced a fresh sale of assets to repay debts, while warning that it was assessing “its ability to continue as a going concern” in a filing with the SEC, the US financial markets regulator. Continue reading...

Retailer says breach has not affected customer details, or had impact on website or general tradingWH Smith has been the target of a cyber-attack in which company data was accessed illegally, including the personal details of current and former employees, the retailer has revealed.The books and stationery chain said there was no impact on trading and its website, and that customer accounts and the customer database were on separate systems and “unaffected by this incident”. Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: Personal stories and platitudes abound in the former first lady’s The Light We Carry podcast. Plus: five of the best shows to help you organise your life

The federal workplace safety agency has issued citations against the company at multiple warehouses for various violationsThe US’s top workplace safety regulator and the justice department are pressuring Amazon to explain safety practices that have led to injury rates for warehouse workers that are on average close to twice as high as the company’s competitors and in one case five times higher.The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha) issued citations against Amazon at six warehouses in December 2022, January 2023 and February 2023 over unsafe working conditions, ergonomic hazards and failure to properly report injuries. Continue reading...

Omri Lavie appears to have gained control of blacklisted spyware company’s sharesOne of NSO Group’s founders appears to have gained control of the blacklisted spyware company’s shares after a legal fight over the group’s future, according to corporate filings in Luxembourg.Omri Lavie – the “O” in NSO Group, who in recent years has stepped back from day-to-day management – appears to have emerged as the company’s new majority owner. Continue reading...

Republican committee chair describes Chinese-owned social app as a ‘spy balloon in your phone’A powerful US House committee has applied further pressure to TikTok by backing legislation that could give Joe Biden the power to ban the social video app.The House foreign affairs committee voted on Wednesday along party lines to grant the administration new powers to ban the Chinese-owned app as well as other apps believed to pose security risks. The fate of the measure is still uncertain and it would need to be passed by the full House and Senate before it can go to Biden. Continue reading...

Default settings being rolled out have 60 and 100-minute restrictions but can be removedTeenagers joining TikTok will be limited to an hour of use each day, the social media company has announced – but only for as long as it takes them to realise they can change the settings manually.New default screen time restrictions will be enabled for every account known to belong to someone under 18, the company says. After the first hour’s use each day, the app will warn them their time is up, “so it’s easier to log off”. Continue reading...

Attorneys cite Theranos founder’s two children as reasons why she should be allowed to remain free while she appeals convictionElizabeth Holmes has given birth to a second child, her attorneys revealed in a court filing seeking to delay the beginning of her more than 11-year prison sentence.The disgraced Theranos founder’s children, one an infant and one a toddler, were two of the close family ties cited by Holmes’s attorneys as reasons why she does not pose a flight risk and should be allowed to remain free while she appeals her conviction. Continue reading...

Duncan McCann’s complaint is first one alleging major tech firm has broken new codeA man has filed a formal complaint accusing YouTube of harvesting young children’s data, the first such complaint alleging a major tech firm has broken the new “age-appropriate design code”.Duncan McCann, a staff member at child advocacy group 5Rights, filed the AADC complaint with the Information Commissioner’s office (ICO), asking the data watchdog to order Google to stop collecting children’s data and potentially fine it as much as 4% of annual turnover. Continue reading...

Chaotic free speech on Ekşi Sözlük finally proved too much after devastating earthquakes hit countryLaunched on the eve of the millennium, Turkey’s most popular homegrown social media website has weathered lawsuits, criticism from the highest levels of government and even death threats directed at one of its founders. A simple editable online dictionary turned national obsession, Ekşi Sözlük has for more than two decades spurred its own biting form of social satire while providing a rare haven for free expression on the Turkish internet.But this year’s earthquakes that upended life across Turkey may prove to be the death knell for Ekşi Sözlük, which was abruptly blocked across the country in the weeks after the earthquakes first struck, without proper explanation. Continue reading...

Site unavailable for users in latest technical difficulty suffered by site since its takeover by Elon MuskTwitter was unavailable for users around the world for over an hour on Wednesday morning, the latest in a spate of technical difficulties suffered by the site since its takeover by Elon Musk.Beginning at about 10:20am UK time, visitors to Twitter.com were greeted with error messages. Although the total outage was rapidly fixed, the site remained in effect nonfunctional until well into the afternoon, with users unable to access their “home” feed, despite notifications, profile visits and direct messages still working. Continue reading...

Unlike a lot of throwbacks, a new remastered version of the 3D space adventure plays even better than it did two decades ago. Plus, your gaming questions answered

As players spend more and more time and money in the digital hangout spaces provided by video games, it makes sense for fashion brands to join them there – opening up exciting worlds of rule-breaking designIn December 2015, the revered French fashion house Louis Vuitton made a surprise announcement about the advertising campaign for its forthcoming spring-summer collection. The new range of clothes and accessories would be modelled on screen and in the pages of glossy magazines not by a famous actor or popstar but by a video game character: the pink-haired warrior Lightning from Final Fantasy XIII. Nicolas Ghesquière, the brand’s creative director told the press he considered Lightning to be the “perfect avatar for a global heroic woman”. The fictional character even carried out interviews to promote the partnership.It was not the first time a fashion brand had collaborated with a major video game. Previously, H&M, Moschino and Diesel had made digital clothes for The Sims. Diesel had its own island in PlayStation 3’s ambitious metaverse forerunner, Home. But in the last two years we’ve seen an explosion: Balenciaga and Ralph Lauren in Fortnite, Balmain in Need for Speed, Tommy Hilfiger and Gucci in Roblox, Marc Jacobs and Valentino in Animal Crossing, Lacoste and Burberry in Minecraft. Most of the collaborations now involve both digital and physical collections: when Lacoste partnered with Minecraft, the company produced a full wardrobe of clothing and accessories; when Balmain partnered with Need for Speed Unbound last November, it produced a themed limited edition run of its B-IT slider shoes, while in-game racer Eleonore wears a dress from the house’s Autumn 2022 collection. Continue reading...

A new documentary acts as a cautionary tale urging us to be more aware of how we store and preserve what we film and watchThere’s a widely taken-for-granted consensus that in film lies immortality; in Damien Chazelle’s recent drama Babylon, a Tinseltown gossip columnist waxes rhapsodic about how actors captured on celluloid effectively live forever in posterity, her general sentiment reiterated in higher-minded terms by reams of film theory scholarship. Advertising lingo rebranded cherished memories as “Kodak moments” in response to our species’ innate desire to freeze a fleeting unit of time as a physical quantity we can revisit over and over at our leisure. This line of thinking is understandable, seeing as anyone can click over to the internet and watch 100-year-old footage of working-class daily life. But Inés Toharia needs everyone to know that it’s also fundamentally mistaken.“We’re going so fast as a society that we don’t always realize what we’re leaving behind,” she tells the Guardian from her home in Spain. “We should pause to think about saving our digital materials, because they don’t last forever. And a lot of video today isn’t even meant to last, things like security camera footage, a lot of what’s on YouTube. We’re producing more than ever, but we’re not taking care of it. A friend shows me a video of their kid taking their first steps, I think, ‘Oh, that’s not going to last.’” Continue reading...

Owner of Politico urges focus on investigative journalism and original commentary, as company prepares for job cuts at German papers Die Welt and BildJournalists are at risk of being replaced by artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT, the CEO of German media group Axel Springer has said.The announcement was made as the publisher sought to boost revenue at German newspapers Bild and Die Welt and transition to becoming a “purely digital media company”. It said job cuts lay ahead, because automation and AI were increasingly making many of the jobs that supported the production of their journalism redundant. Continue reading...

Twitter owner’s net worth reportedly grows to $187bn after precipitous drop in late 2022Elon Musk is once again the world’s richest man after a rally in Tesla’s stock price on Monday boosted the Twitter owner’s net worth by nearly $7bn to $187bn, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.Musk’s recovery of the top spot from the French luxury goods magnate Bernard Arnault follows a precipitous drop in his wealth in late 2022, when he became the first person ever to amass and then lose $200bn. His wealth peaked at about $340bn in November 2021 and fell to about $128bn at the start of 2023. Continue reading...

EU and parts of US already block access to Chinese-owned app amid concerns over data privacy and securityCanada has joined the US and EU in enacting a sweeping ban preventing TikTok from being installed on all government-issued mobile devices, as western officials take action over the Chinese-owned video-sharing app.Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, did not rule out further action. “I suspect that as government takes the significant step of telling all federal employees that they can no longer use TikTok on their work phones, many Canadians from business to private individuals will reflect on the security of their own data and perhaps make choices,” he said. Continue reading...

In a new exhibition at the Whitney, five artists tackle how concepts of self can cross between physical and virtual realmsAs technology takes an ever more significant role in shaping how we develop and embody our identities, the Whitney presents Refigured, a collection of five installations by artists using digital art to probe intersections of ourselves and our machines.“I want to create language for a calibration point for where we are in regard to our bodies and technology,” said artist Rachel Rossin, reflecting on her piece The Maw Of, a transmedia work that is spread out across a video screen and a QR code that can activate the artwork on visitors’ mobile devices. As Rossin put it, The Maw Of seeks to “address the black boxes of our bodies and technology”. Continue reading...

Federal agency best known for tracking down fugitives suffered security breach on 17 FebruaryThe US Marshals service fell victim to a ransomware security breach this month that compromised sensitive law enforcement information, a spokesperson said on Monday.The federal agency which is perhaps best known for its work in tracking down and capturing fugitives wanted by law enforcement notified the US government of the breach, and agents there began a forensic investigation, the chief of the Marshals’ public affairs office, Drew Wade, told Reuters in a statement. Continue reading...

We spell out the key terms behind the AI revolution – and why they matter. Plus, this week’s top tech stories

I started playing a video game about cleaning for a laugh – now it’s all gotten out of hand and I’m going for the Guinness World RecordAre video games better than sex? That’s the sort of ludicrous question that is only posed by someone who has never had sex, or is searching for an attention-grabbing way to open an article about a cleaning simulator. However, I will say this: last week I had the opportunity to have it off but I played PowerWash Simulator instead, and honestly I’m not sure I had a worse time.Maybe it’s to do with age. Like every middle-aged female gamer I know, I love Lara Croft. Back in my younger days I lost entire evenings, weekends, and the best part of an English literature degree to Tomb Raider. But now I’m 45 and, for the most part, I have swapped late-night gaming sessions for going to bed after I’ve read the kids stories. I’ll still be awake at 2am, but only because I’ve woken up in a cold sweat trying to remember where I put my Nectar card. Continue reading...

Feature-packed superphone has stylus, serious speed, longer battery life and unrivalled camera zoomThe Galaxy S23 Ultra is Samsung’s latest and greatest power-house smartphone with a more impressive chip, battery and camera than its predecessors. But do the improvements justify such a steep price?At £1,249 ($1,199/A$1,949), which is £100 more than last year’s model, it is one of the most expensive non-folding smartphones available. Continue reading...

They may be digital natives, but young workers were raised on user-friendly apps – and office devices are far less intuitiveGarrett Bemiller, a 25-year-old New Yorker, has spent his entire life online. He grew up in front of screens, swiping from one app to the next. But there’s one skill set Bemiller admits he’s less comfortable with: the humble office printer.“Things like scanners and copy machines are complicated,” says Bemiller, who works as a publicist. The first time he had to copy something in the office didn’t exactly go well. “It kept coming out as a blank page, and took me a couple times to realize that I had to place the paper upside-down in the machine for it to work.” Continue reading...

Tesla and Twitter chief tweets that ‘the media is racist’ after hundreds of newspapers drop Adams’s comic stripElon Musk has deployed his 130 million-follower Twitter bullhorn to come to the rescue of a beleaguered cartoonist dumped by hundreds of newspapers across America for having delivered a virulent racist tirade.The Twitter and Tesla chief responded with his own controversial thought stream over the weekend after the mass termination of the Dilbert comic strip from US newspaper titles. Its creator, Scott Adams, recently denigrated Black people as a “hate group”, advising white people to “just get the hell away” from them. Continue reading...

According to the New York Times, the executive behind paid-for premium service revamp is among those affectedElon Musk has fired another 200 staff at Twitter including the executive behind the revamp of its paid-for premium service, according to a report.The latest round of job cuts equates to about 10% of Twitter’s vastly reduced workforce, which stood at 7,500 people before Musk bought the company in October. Continue reading...

Content created by chatbot must be treated like any other source and attributed when used, says IBSchoolchildren are allowed to quote from content created by ChatGPT in their essays, the International Baccalaureate has said.The IB, which offers an alternative qualification to A-levels and Highers, said students could use the chatbot but must be clear when they were quoting its responses. Continue reading...

Asked to generate a story from an English translation of a letter in Welsh published in the Guardian, the AI chatbot came up with a lot of twaddle, reports Fiona CollinsIan Watson (Letters, 17 February) asks for a translation of my letter in Welsh (13 February). I did include an English translation in my letter, but only the Welsh was published. I sent a second letter asking the Guardian to publish the translation, as I was having a lot of stick from a certain friend who couldn’t read it, but with no luck. Hopefully Ian’s letter will change the letters editor’s mind.The English version was as follows: “Thank you very much for the excellent editorial article which sang the praises of the Welsh language … Since you are now so enthusiastic about Welsh, may I, from now on, write to you in the language of heaven?” Continue reading...

Research suggests traumatic childhood experiences embed themselves in our brains and put us at risk of mental illness, but epigenetic editing may offer us hope of removing themThe way depression manifested itself in mice in the laboratory of the psychiatrist and neuroscientist Eric Nestler was hauntingly relatable. When put in an enclosure with an unknown mouse, they sat in the corner and showed little interest. When presented with the treat of a sugary drink, they hardly seemed to notice. And when put into water, they did not swim – they just lay there, drifting about.These mice had been exposed to “social defeat stress”, meaning that older, bigger mice had repeatedly asserted their dominance over them. It is a protocol designed to induce depression in mice, but in Nestler’s lab, it affected some more than others: those with a history of early trauma. Continue reading...

Chris Smalls, who set up the retailer’s first union in New York, came to Coventry to back its workers in their pay disputeThe leader of Amazon’s first union has made his first trip outside the United States to support striking workers at the online retail giant’s Coventry warehouse.Chris Smalls, who helped coordinate a successful unionisation drive at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, New York, in April 2022, travelled to the UK last week to provide advice to British workers as they try to gain recognition from the company. Continue reading...

From fresh produce to medicines and computer chips, a cocktail of problems is playing havoc with supply chainsEarly on Saturday morning, as Paul Crane, a trader at London’s renowned Borough market, was arranging blood oranges from Valencia on his stall, he admitted that his industry is facing some of the toughest conditions in a quarter of a century.The wholesale price of tomatoes, peppers and aubergines has quadrupled, and English cauliflowers are up too. Some stallholders are not even selling vine tomatoes because they are just too expensive. Continue reading...

The government’s consultation document on cryptocurrency highlights the challenges that must be faced in the regulatory processFor my sins, I have been reading Future financial services regulatory regime for cryptoassets, 82 pages of prime Whitehall verbiage that was published recently, setting out HM Treasury’s plans to govern the clouds and hold back the tides.It opens with the statutory ringing endorsement by Andrew Griffith, economic secretary to the Treasury. He reminds readers that the government’s “firm ambition is for the UK to be home to the most open, well-regulated and technologically advanced capital markets in the world” – which “means taking proactive steps to harness the opportunities of new financial technologies”. He further believes that “crypto technologies” can have a profound impact across financial services and that “by capitalising on the potential benefits offered by crypto we can strengthen our position as a world leader in fintech, unlock growth and boost innovation”. Cont’d p94, as they say in Private Eye. Continue reading...

Nokia G22 has removable back and standard screws allowing battery swap in less than five minutes at homeNokia has announced one of the first budget Android smartphones designed to be repaired at home allowing users to swap out the battery in under five minutes in partnership with iFixit.Launched before Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Saturday, the Nokia G22 has a removable back and internal design that allows components to be easily unscrewed and swapped out including the battery, screen and charging port. Continue reading...

A lack of tourism in Thailand post-pandemic has cast the Bangkok-based photographer’s 2017 plane image in a new lightJoined by his wife Mai and daughter Milan, street photographer Tavepong Pratoomwong was on holiday in Phuket, a 90-minute flight from their home town of Bangkok, when he took this photo. He’d heard that the nearby Mai Khao beach – the longest on the island – was a great place to watch planes landing and taking off from the airport close by, so the trio set off from their hotel.“Milan was only five and we found out pretty quickly that the plane noises scared her, so Mai took her back to the hotel while I took some shots.” Continue reading...

Boss of messaging app says users’ trust at risk from powers in online safety bill to impose monitoringThe head of the messaging app Signal has warned that it will quit the UK if the forthcoming online safety bill weakens end-to-end encryption.Signal’s president said the organisation would “absolutely, 100% walk” if the legislation undermined its encryption service. Continue reading...

Uncrewed combat aerial vehicles, or attack drones, have become a common feature of the modern battlefield. Russia has deployed them to terrorise civilians in Ukraine and disable essential infrastructure, and Ukraine has also relied heavily on drones for attack, reconnaissance and surveillance. But these aren't the only 'killer robots' that armies are utilising. Josh Toussaint-Strauss explores how the weaponisation of general-purpose robots and the developments of a wider array of advanced mobile robotics and AI powered machine are changing the dynamics of modern warfare in ways that have prompted leading robotics companies and the UN to raise the alarm and call for greater restrictions

Low-cost device launched to solve mobile blackspots with SOS and two-way texting for Android and iPhoneThe Defy Satellite link gives any Android or iPhone an instant upgrade with the ability to send and receive text messages via satellite, solving the problem of mobile dead zones for emergencies and wilderness adventures.Announced ahead of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and produced by the British phone manufacturer Bullitt under the Motorola brand, the Satellite link connects to a normal smartphone via Bluetooth and uses an app to send not only SOS messages but general two-way chat via texts. Continue reading...

Interest groups have poured about £250,000 into all-party parliamentary groups in past five years• Crypto firm with links to parliamentary groups appears to have vanishedFor more than a decade, those worried about the reputation of parliament have warned that all-party parliamentary groups (APPGs) can be a problem.Their supporters say they are a place for like-minded parliamentarians to discuss topics of special interest. But despite their unofficial nature, and with no formal role in the legislative process, APPGs can be a magnet for those who want to get close to MPs and peers – or to pretend that they are for the sake of polishing their reputations. Continue reading...

With its frequent dismemberments, repulsive creatures and total immersion, Dead Space spliced horror and sci-fi to make a truly classic video game – even though it initially tankedIt’s one of the more memorable intros in video game history: as part of a five-person team sent to investigate a communications blackout aboard the mining ship USG Ishimura, engineer Isaac Clarke boots up the vessel’s computer while his colleagues pace around nervously. Suddenly, the lights go out, and shadowy monstrosities appear from the walls, spearing two of the team as Clarke watches helplessly before they turn on him, chasing him unarmed into the bowels of the Ishimura, where even more horrors await.Fifteen years, two sequels and countless books, comics and spin-offs later, and Dead Space has become synonymous with video game sci-fi horror. Its enemies, the zombie-like Necromorphs, are hideously metamorphosed humans, perverted by the machinations of the Marker, a strange alien artefact that has engendered a worryingly familiar religion known as Unitology. It’s an experience that few players forget, and is being discovered by new fans this year thanks to Motive’s remake – but it almost didn’t get made. Continue reading...

Mark Read says artificial intelligence is helping firm win clients keen to tap into technology’s potentialFrom Serena Williams playing against incarnations of her younger self to millions of personalised messages from a Bollywood superstar to support small businesses in India, artificial intelligence and machine learning is driving a revolution in the global advertising industry.Mark Read, the chief executive of London-listed WPP, the world’s largest marketing services company, said AI-led advertising practices were helping it win clients hungry to embrace the potential of a new technology. Continue reading...

Nintendo Switch; Hal Laboratories/ Nintendo

Parent company, ByteDance, says action is ‘misguided’ and has contacted commission to ‘set the record straight’The EU’s executive body has banned its thousands of staff from using TikTok over cybersecurity concerns, a decision the Chinese-owned social video app has criticised as “misguided” and based on “fundamental misconceptions”.The European Commission sent an email to employees ordering them to delete the app from all work phones and devices, and any personally owned ones that use the commission’s apps and email. Employees have until 15 March to comply. Continue reading...

Leading tech firms reportedly ordered to remove workarounds allowing access to US-based serviceChinese regulators have reportedly clamped down on access to ChatGPT, as Chinese tech firms and universities push forward with developing domestic artificial intelligence bots.ChatGPT, the popular discussion bot created by US-based OpenAI, is not officially available in China, where the government operates a comprehensive firewall and strict internet censorship. But many had been accessing it via VPNs, and some third-party developers had produced programs that gave some access to the service. Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: Reporter Kim Barker explores an unsolved murder in her ‘mean’ hometown, in The Coldest Case in Laramie. Plus: five of the best podcasts about friendship

The tech giant has taken billions from game developers but failed to reinvest it, leaving the App Store a confusing mess for mobile gamersIn the 15 years since it launched the App Store, Apple has proved again and again that it cares very little about games – though it is happy to make billions from them. I should know: I was an App Store games editor for seven years.It all started so well. When the iPhone and iPad arrived, those devices transformed games almost as much as they upended the rest of the tech world. Suddenly everyone had powerful games machines in their pockets, and it was amazing. Some wonderful developers broke through. Zach Gage kickstarted his career with the artsy Tetris-meets-wordsearch game SpellTower; Adam Saltsman’s Canabalt turned platforming tropes into a desperate post-apocalyptic dash; ingenious gothic puzzler Helsing’s Fire gave us our first glimpse into the mind of Lucas Pope, later the creator of Papers, Please. Continue reading...

Chores such as shopping likely to have most automation, while caring for young or old least likely to be affected, says reportA revolution in artificial intelligence could slash the amount of time people spend on household chores and caring, with robots able to perform about 39% of domestic tasks within a decade, according to experts.Tasks such as shopping for groceries were likely to have the most automation, while caring for the young or old was the least likely to be affected by AI, according to a large survey of 65 artificial intelligence (AI) experts in the UK and Japan, who were asked to predict the impact of robots on household chores. Continue reading...

Algorithm-based sources lead to more polarised and conflicting views in society, as people are exposed to a less diverse diet of current affairs, writes Ollie DaviesYour editorial on disinformation (17 February) highlights a great challenge, but of arguably greater importance are the sources of news young people use. In a 2022 study, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford provided quantitative evidence on the growth of social media as a news source for 18- to 24-year-olds. TikTok as a source had increased fivefold between 2020 and 2022, and YouTube stabilised its share of young readers in Asia, the fastest growing populace in the world.Combined with Facebook and Twitter, these sources supply 66% of young people their main news source, and all rely on algorithms. To increase views, clicks and advertising revenues, they show stories that viewers want to see – and slant viewpoints further. The result? Increasingly polarised and conflicting views in society, as people are exposed to a less diverse diet of actual current affairs. Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: Though costly, the PSVR2 is the most usable virtual gaming device yet – even for sceptics like me

How an undercover investigation revealed a team of Israeli contractors who claim to have manipulated more than 30 elections around the world using hacking, sabotage and automated disinformation on social mediaLast year, coordinated by the French media organisation Forbidden Stories, a group of journalists from around the world, including from the Guardian, embarked on a project: to get inside the murky world of disinformation and expose those who profit from it.Among the reporters were Gur Megiddo, an Israeli investigative journalist for the business newspaper TheMarker. With him was Omer Benjakob, a reporter with the Israeli daily paper Haaretz, and Frédéric Métézeau, a journalist with Radio France. As part of an undercover investigation, they held meetings with a secretive team of Israeli contractors selling “black op” influence campaigns to those with the means to pay for them. Continue reading...

Lawsuits brought by families of terrorist attack victims will consider whether companies are responsible for users’ contentA pair of cases going before the US supreme court this week could drastically upend the rules of the internet, putting a powerful, decades-old statute in the crosshairs.At stake is a question that has been foundational to the rise of big tech: should companies be legally responsible for the content their users post? Thus far they have evaded liability, but some US lawmakers and others want to change that. And new lawsuits are bringing the statute before the supreme court for the first time. Continue reading...

Computer programmer Cassius John-Adams explains how he mashed up Crazy Taxi and The Fifth Element during an obsessive three-year period, single-handedly creating the game he’d always dreamed ofOver lunch one day at work, Cassius John-Adams, a computer programmer for a Canadian TV network, was moaning to his co-workers that things aren’t as good as they used to be. “We got on to how everything, from video games to science-fiction films, was better in the late 90s and early 00s when we were all much younger,” explains the 45-year-old from his house in Toronto. Someone mentioned The Fifth Element, Luc Besson’s wildly inventive 1997 sci-fi film. John-Adams brought up Crazy Taxi, Sega’s cartoonishly energetic driving game. And then, “I was like: ‘Man, I wish there was a mix between the two.’ Everyone around the table went, ‘Yeah, that would be the perfect mix.’”It was the spark for one of the great passion projects in recent video-gaming history. Doing nearly all of the work himself, fitting it around his day job, John-Adams has made that very hybrid, a new game called Mile High Taxi that splices the vibe of Besson’s movie and the hurtling mayhem of Crazy Taxi into a heady compound of millennial nostalgia. Continue reading...