Technology | The Guardian

New owner plans widespread overhaul but he’ll need to work hard to keep advertisers onside

From lapsed millennials ageing reluctantly into their 30s to families and new players, a guide to which of the many Pokémon games might be your vibeWhen Pokémon first arrived on the scene, on cheerful coloured Game Boy cartridges inside unassuming cardboard boxes, few would have predicted that 25+ years later, there would be more than 50 games featuring these collectible pocket monsters. They’ve become a bit of a pest problem, actually, growing from the original 150 critters to more than 900. Thanks to the franchise’s gargantuan success – from anime to trading cards to several films, one of which starred Ryan Reynolds as Pikachu – there’s an overwhelming number of modern Pokémon games. If choosing between them has left you grasping your head like a Psyduck, here’s a breakdown of the best. Continue reading...

Social media has made finding love easier, but ending relationships even messier. Here’s how to finish things online without losing your mindWhen I was 16, back in 2009, I got my first boyfriend. The whirlwind romance began unexpectedly after a school trip and a few too many shots of cheap vodka. (Thankfully, the relationship outlasted the hangover.)Until this point, I had watched from the sidelines as my friends’ doomed teen romances played out on MSN Messenger. Here, a sign of true love was adding a significant other’s initials to your screen name. Adding a crush to your MSN name was a Very Big Deal and when it, inevitably, fell apart, it would be dramatically replaced with a broken heart or some sad song lyrics. Continue reading...

I tested one by hitting it against a wall – the wall took the damageI was born with Poland syndrome, a disease that prevented the formation of my right arm and pectoral muscles. I was bullied at school. People said things like, “It’s not your fault that you were born like this, it’s your mother’s fault.” Or asked me to catch a ball with my right hand. Stupid comments that wouldn’t affect me now, but back then they struck very hard.I would play with Lego a lot as a child. I got my first kit when I was five. My parents realised it was a great way to improve my dexterity. I just kept going, building planes and cars. I even built a guitar. Continue reading...

Ex-employees say they were not given enough notice under US federal law over job losses

Investing in risky stocks gave me the illusion of control in a time of uncertainty – until it derailed my entire lifeI kept the news in all the way out of the terminal until halfway through the airport parking garage, which was as far as I could hold it. It was the kind of announcement that was too voluminous for the inside of a car, so I blurted it out to my parents in the open air in a half-mumble, half-laugh.“So, umm, I turned $15,000 into $1.2m in the past year.” Continue reading...

Possible access to users’ data could pose national security risk and could be used to target kingdom’s dissidentsIt has been five years since Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who has been known for decades as among one of the richest Middle East investors, received a phone call summoning him to the royal court in Riyadh.The prince – who together with his investment firm has emerged as the second-largest investor in Twitter after Elon Musk’s takeover of the social media platform – became a prisoner. Continue reading...

The reduction, which will be delivered by email, comes as the new Twitter CEO was speculated to cut as much as 50% of staffElon Musk will begin mass layoffs at Twitter on Friday, sharply reducing the social media platform’s workforce, the company said in an email to staff on Thursday.“In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday,” said the email. The New York Times and Washington Post both reported on the layoffs and cited the internal email. Continue reading...

Cheerios and Lucky Charms cereal company joins General Motors Co and Audi among others in pulling money from the platformGeneral Mills is the latest to join a growing group of companies halting advertising on Twitter after the social media platform was acquired by billionaire Elon Musk for $44bn.The company, known for its Cheerios and Lucky Charms cereals, confirmed on Thursday it would pause advertising on the platform. “We will continue to monitor this new direction and evaluate our marketing spend,” said spokesperson Kelsey Roemhildt. Continue reading...

Mercedes Wedaa claims she was forced to regularly climb out of a laundry room window to go to the toiletJeff Bezos is being sued by a former housekeeper who claims she was subjected to racial discrimination and forced to regularly climb out of a laundry room window to go to the toilet as she wasn’t allowed to enter the Amazon billionaire’s house except on “cleaning assignment”.Mercedes Wedaa, who worked cleaning Bezos’s Seattle mansion for three years, claimed in a lawsuit filed in Seattle state court that she and other hispanic cleaning staff were treated differently to white staff. Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: The journalist was killed in mysterious circumstances in South Sudan – who was he, and why was he there? A new show finds out. Plus: five of the best podcasts to exercise to

Reports suggest new owner Elon Musk aims to lose 3,800 roles of 7,500 staff with workers to be told as soon as Friday

In the wake of Elon Musk’s takeover of the company, rumors of job cuts swirl and employees report being left in the darkTwitter is facing fresh uncertainty amid a growing exodus of top management and reports that mass layoffs and major changes to the platform could be coming within days.The company’s advertising and marketing chiefs have recently announced their departures, as well as the chief people and diversity officer, the general manager for core technologies, the head of product and vice-president of global sales. Last week, Elon Musk fired the CEO, Parag Agrawal, the chief financial officer, Ned Segal, and the legal affairs and policy chief, Vijaya Gadde, shortly after taking over the company. Continue reading...

A follow-up to the company’s 2016 PlayStation VR is due to be released in February 2023Sony’s new PlayStation VR 2 virtual reality headset will be released on 22 February 2023, the company has announced. It will cost £529.99, more than the PlayStation 5 console needed to use it (currently £479.99).The price includes the headset itself, two motion controllers and headphones. An optional charging station costs an extra £39.99. Sony is billing it as a more premium device than the previous PlayStation VR, which was released in 2016 at £349. It features haptic feedback in the controllers, eye-tracking, higher fidelity OLED screens and 3D audio. Games bought for the older device will not be compatible with the newer one. Continue reading...

Classic songs are now remastered to compete with contemporary pop on streaming services. But what do we lose when Yellow Submarine is ‘de-mixed’ for generation playlist?Yellow Submarine, Ringo Starr’s turn on Revolver, has been a gateway for children into the music of the Beatles since its release in 1966. A new reissue of the album makes that relationship more explicit: Giles Martin, son of original producer George and the sonic custodian of the Beatles catalogue, says his “de-mixing” of the album – using AI to separate individual instruments that were originally squeezed together on four tracks – was done in part with a playlist-listening younger audience in mind.Martin recently told Variety that his teenage children listen to old and new music side by side, veering from Fleetwood Mac to Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo. “[W]hat I want to make sure is that when people hear the Beatles, that it has the same dynamic as the other stuff they’re listening to,” he said. He added that 1969’s Abbey Road, recorded on a then luxuriant eight tracks and the first Beatles album not released in mono, stands out from the band’s catalogue as “it sounds more hi-fi than the other Beatles albums”. This might be, he proposes, one reason why it performs so well on streaming services. Continue reading...

Privacy policy update confirms data of continent’s users available to range of TikTok bases including in Brazil, Israel and USTikTok is spelling out to its European users that their data can be accessed by employees outside the continent, including in China, amid political and regulatory concerns about Chinese access to user information on the platform.The Chinese-owned social video app is updating its privacy policy to confirm that staff in countries, including China, are allowed to access user data to ensure their experience of the platform is “consistent, enjoyable and safe”. Continue reading...

Foxconn plant in Zhengzhou, from which many workers have fled, now under seven-day Covid lockdownChinese authorities have announced a seven-day coronavirus lockdown in the area around the world’s largest iPhone factory, stoking concern that production will be severely curtailed ahead of the Christmas period.Foxconn’s plant in Zhengzhou, which employs about 200,000 people, produces the majority of Apple’s new phones, including the new iPhone 14. Continue reading...

A new wave of indie horror games and remakes of haunting classics such as Silent Hill are getting more creative at trying to mess with your headHalloween might be over, but the scary memories last a lifetime, at least for me. I do not like horror. I am one of the world’s biggest wusses, and feeding my imagination with nightmare fuel will keep me up at night for weeks. I was recently so disturbed by a simple bus advert for the movie Smile that I read the Wikipedia summary of the plot, and just that was enough to screw with my sleep. My partner, meanwhile, cannot get enough of disgusting films and terrifying games, so he’s delighted to be living through something of a golden age for video game horror. Not only are haunting classics such as Silent Hill and Resident Evil getting endless remakes, there’s also an ongoing new wave of indie horror games that do ever more creative things with this medium’s ability to get inside your head.These days, I actively try to avoid horrible things, but the games that freaked me out formed some of my most vivid childhood memories. Zelda: Ocarina of Time had the Gibdos, desiccated corpses that lived in graveyards and dungeons. They could freeze Link in his tracks with a shriek, then walk towards him with horrible slowness, then speed up at the last second to leap atop his shoulders and try to suffocate him. And at the bottom of a well, there was an amorphous, eyeless, white monster whose many hands protruded from the Earth, ready to grab and ensnare. I had to play the entirety of the Shadow Temple, with its bloodstains and discordant choral music, through half-closed eyes and with a guide in hand.Simon Parkin interviewed Hideo Kojima for us in Tokyo. Kojima still won’t talk about exactly what happened during his infamous split with Konami, but gaming’s most famous director did discuss plenty of other interesting stuff, including how he feels about his past work and his conflicting relationship with social media.CD Projekt Red’s original Witcher game is going to be remade. I would love to revisit this game and I’m super-interested to see whether they will preserve the collectible “sex cards” Geralt collected by sleeping with every available female character. Those were gross at the time, but the idea has aged particularly badly over the past 15 years.Ikea is throwing a fit over a horror game set in an obvious satirical stand-in for its stores, which would be quite funny if it wasn’t also forcing the developer to revamp the entire thing for fear of getting sued.This greatly entertaining feature chronicles how players have come together over the years to translate Splatoon’s various in-game languages – only to discover that the dude who runs the clothing shop wears a T-shirt on Tuesdays that says “Fuck You”.The manager of an Amsterdam hotel is dismayed that the building features in the new Call of Duty game. “We have taken note of the fact that the Conservatorium Hotel is undesirably the scene of the new Call of Duty … More generally, we don’t support games that seem to encourage the use of violence. The game in no way reflects our core values and we regret our apparent and unwanted involvement.” Continue reading...

Elon Musk says setting up process over those barred, including Donald Trump, will take ‘at least a few more weeks’Banned Twitter accounts including Donald Trump’s will not be reinstated until after the US midterm elections at least, the platform’s new owner, Elon Musk, has said.The Tesla chief executive’s statement came as a study revealed that Twitter had taken down six disinformation networks on the platform linked to China and Iran that had been tweeting about the 8 November elections. Continue reading...

The platform is home to a devoted base of left-leaning communities – and no one billionaire can control itSince Elon Musk completed his purchase of Twitter last week, some of the social media app’s users have been looking for a new home – only to find there aren’t many great options. Twitter’s co-founder Jack Dorsey is beta testing a new app called Bluesky, but there’s no launch date yet.However, tech-savvy users are rallying around Mastodon, a six-year-old social media platform popular among a devoted base of left-leaning niche communities. Mastodon, named after the extinct tusked animal, is decentralized, which means it can’t be controlled by a single corporation or space billionaire. That’s clearly appealing to the flood of users who have signed up since Musk’s Twitter takeover, with more than 70,000 users joining Mastodon on the day after his announcement alone. Continue reading...

Match Group beat earning estimates for the third quarter, posting revenues of $810mTinder’s parent company, Match Group, beat revenue estimates for the last quarter as more users looking for matches took out paid subscriptions on the popular dating app.Their results were an outlier in what has been a quarter of poor performance for some of the biggest tech companies in the US. Match Group, who own a suite of dating apps including Hinge and OKCupid, saw their shares rise 16% on Tuesday. Continue reading...

The new owner justified the measure saying ‘we need to pay the bills somehow’Elon Musk has indicated that a verified account on Twitter in the future could cost $8 a month, despite facing a user backlash over proposals to charge for the feature.The new owner of Twitter described the current system for allocating blue check marks – which verify a user as a trustworthy source – as “bullshit” in a Twitter post to his more than 110 million followers on Tuesday. Continue reading...

US-based company hands over £615m to UK tax authorities after previously claiming it was exempt from VATUber is handing £615m to UK tax authorities to settle an investigation into unpaid VAT, as it reported better than expected results, sending its shares higher.The San Francisco-based ride hire and food delivery company said it achieved a UK tax settlement on Monday to resolve all outstanding VAT claims and would pay £615m to HM Revenue and Customs during the fourth quarter. Continue reading...

The world’s richest person is clearing house and causing chaos at one of the world’s top social media platforms. From verification to free speech, here’s inside Elon Musk’s first days of power

Twitter’s biggest tryhard has taken over the platform, but the social media industry could be heading for multiple crisesTwitter has been taken over by its least interesting troll for $44bn. When Elon Musk took a stake in the platform, he claimed it was to ensure the “future of civilisation” and preserve a “common digital town square”. Roughly translated, that means the world’s richest man has bought his favourite megaphone.Musk, with 112.1 million followers, is an obsessive Twitter tryhard: the attention economy’s biggest attention-seeker. From baselessly calling a British diver a “pedo”, to his baffling stunt at Twitter HQ – turning up with a kitchen sink and uttering the punchline, “let that sink in” – he clearly thinks comedy is his metier. He reminds me of Christopher Hitchens’ barb about an enemy: he “thinks he’s a wit and is half right”. Continue reading...

World’s richest person plans revamp of social media platform, asking users if he should bring back VineElon Musk is considering charging Twitter users $20 (£17.30) a month or $240 a year for a blue tick on their account, as the world’s richest person prepares an overhaul of the social media platform.The Tesla chief executive is planning changes to Twitter’s Blue subscription service, according to the tech newsletter Platformer, including raising the $4.99 a month fee to $19.99. Users verified by the platform – who carry a blue tick flagging them as an authentic source – would have 90 days to sign up to Blue or lose their check mark. Continue reading...

Reports that Musk will let go of 25% of its workforce, or nearly 2,000 employees, come as tech billionaire overhauls companyElon Musk has appointed himself CEO of Twitter and dissolved its board of directors, it was revealed in a company filing on Monday, as Twitter employees brace for extensive layoffs under a new restructuring that could target up to a quarter of staff.The Washington Post reported on Monday that Musk’s team has been discussing dismissing 25% of the company’s workforce in a first round of layoffs.Reuters contributed to this report Continue reading...

Shonda Rhimes and Sara Bareilles are among celebrities leaving the platform, but others are struggling with the decisionTwitter isn’t shaping up to be the party Elon Musk might have expected. Not long after the Tesla CEO officially gained control of the app, many users have contemplated an exodus – while others are debating the merits of staying.Some celebrities and pundits made it clear they were on their way out. Shonda Rhimes, the TV writer and showrunner, was one of the first. “Not hanging around for whatever Elon has planned. Bye,” she wrote on the site. Continue reading...

Disruption comes less than a week after multi-hour outage at WhatsApp, also owned by Instagram’s parent company, MetaInstagram is looking into the reasons behind an accidental wave of account suspensions, which have led many around the world to worry that their access to the social network has been curtailed for good.Users began reporting problems at about 1300 GMT, turning to other social networks to post baffled screenshots of the ban notifications. “We suspended your account on October 31, 2022,” the warning reads, before telling affected posters that their account “doesn’t follow our community guidelines” and that it will be permanently disabled in the event of the suspension being upheld. Continue reading...

Unverified videos shared on Chinese social media showed people who are allegedly workers at the Foxconn plant climbing over fences and carrying their belongings along a road.Workers from China's largest iPhone factory have reportedly been fleeing the factory amid fears of full-scale lockdowns in Covid-hit Zhengzhou.Foxconn, an Apple supplier headquartered in Taiwan, has about 200,000 workers at the Zhengzhou complex. It has not disclosed the number of infected workers nor the number who have left, but said on Sunday it would not stop them from departing

Musk, despite his wealth, good fortune and global influence, is not a serious person – but he is toying with dangerous ideasIt took less than 48 hours for Elon Musk to reveal just how dangerous his new toy can be to this world. Replying to a tweet from former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, the man worth more than $210bn with more than 112 million Twitter followers spread a dangerous conspiracy theory intended to distract people from an attempted political assassination just one week before a major US election.Clinton had warned that “the Republican party and its mouthpieces now regularly spread hate and deranged conspiracy theories”, in response not just to the attack on home and spouse of Nancy Pelosi but a slew of attempted kidnappings and threats against elected officials who have stood up to the Trump agenda and the attempted overthrow of the US government in January 2021.Siva Vaidhyanathan is a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia and the author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy Continue reading...

Setting one’s unease at delighting in hi-tech warfare aside, this is a precisely tooled, intensely immersive combat simulatorIt is almost comforting in this era of “games as a service”, where franchises exist as endless monetisation machines designed to consume every second of our free time, that Call of Duty still gets an annual retail release. Once upon a time, these games sold 30m copies a year, and people queued outside stores at midnight to buy them. Those days are gone, but Modern Warfare II shows there is still guilty pleasure to be had in these ridiculous yearly instalments of macho combat gymnastics.The campaign story takes place three years after the close of 2019’s Modern Warfare. The newly created Task Force 141 is sent to track down an Iranian terrorist who has somehow acquired a set of American nuclear missiles. It’s slickly produced, fast-moving stuff, ricocheting around the world, from the Middle East to Mexico, while gruff guys yell macho spec-ops phrases at each other. En route, there are a few spectacular set-pieces. A section where you infiltrate a convoy of military vehicles as it zooms along a civilian highway might be one of the best driving sequences I’ve ever played in a mainstream shooter; and there’s a brilliant gun fight on the deck of a cargo boat in rough seas, where massive shipping containers slide all over the place, squishing unwary combatants. Continue reading...

It’s close to midnight and something evil’s lurking in your console. Many things, in fact, but here are some of the top scarers, from eldritch Victoriana to teen slasher horror and the video game equivalent of black metalFolk horror meets point-and-click adventure in this richly atmospheric narrative yomp over the desolate moors of Victorian England. Thomasina Bateman is an archeologist and woman of science, summoned to excavate an ancient mound near a remote rural village – and terrible forces are brought forth. With its engaging protagonist, brooding yokels and atmospheric locations, it’s like taking part in a chilling BBC costume drama starring Suranne Jones and Sean Harris. Continue reading...

Smaller Android phone offers great software, smart AI and performance for much less than rivalsGoogle appears to have triumphed again. The new Pixel 7 offers the same the top-flight software, camera and smart AI systems that have made its phones winners, but at a knockdown price that significantly undercuts rivals.Costing £599 ($899/A$1,299) it sits in between the top £849 Pixel 7 Pro and the budget £399 Pixel 6a, competing very favourably on price and specs with rivals from Samsung, Apple and others that are typically in the £700-800 range. Continue reading...

The social media platform has had its fair share of run-ins with misinformation, data privacy and child safety concerns

Post comes days after Musk takes over social media platform amid concern that hate speech will run rampant under his leadershipElon Musk was criticized on Sunday after posting a baseless conspiracy theory about the assault of Paul Pelosi to Twitter – the social media giant he took over several days ago with a promise to impose fewer restrictions on its content.Paul Pelosi, husband of US House speaker Nancy Pelosi, was attacked with a hammer at their California home on Friday. The attacker, identified by authorities as David DePape, allegedly said “Where is Nancy?” during the attack; Joe Biden said that she appeared to be the intended target. Continue reading...

Unsecured mobiles, email accounts and WhatsApp chats could pose national security risk, intelligence experts warnMinisters risk creating “wild west” conditions in matters of national security by the increased use of personal email and phones to conduct confidential business, intelligence experts and former officials have warned.After a week tainted by a row over the use of a personal email account by the home secretary, it was revealed on Sunday that Liz Truss’s mobile is alleged to have been hacked by overseas agents. Continue reading...

We may never know just what happened with Liz Truss’s mobile, but it’s clear that ministers need to up their security gameIt is no longer news to point out that a mobile phone, if hacked, can be the ultimate tool for surveillance. But the question is whether it is a surprise to British politicians – and whether they are using their devices sensibly or carelessly.We will almost certainly never know precisely what happened to Liz Truss’s phone. The then foreign secretary had to abruptly drop her main number and take up a new, government-issued handset in the summer, just as it emerged she was likely to be the next prime minister after Boris Johnson. Continue reading...

More and more smart baby monitors and AI-powered toys are entering the Australian market, but these expensive products can have a significant privacy cost

Platform says 300 accounts carried out 50,000-plus tweets in ‘organised effort to make users think firm has changed content policy’

Nearly six in 10 teenagers count themselves as daily users of the app yet little is known about the impacts on the brain

If this week’s results show a profit like last quarter’s, the company may at last be on the road to respectabilityIt has 120 million customers, takes $10bn worth of bookings a month, and, it transpired this year, more or less had the French president on speed-dial, doing its bidding. But can Uber turn a profit?The San Francisco-based ride-hailing giant squealed into “free cash flow”, as it puts it, in the last quarter, after racking up $23bn (£20bn) in losses in its first heady decade or so. On Tuesday, investors will see if it can repeat the trick in its third-quarter results. Continue reading...

Some sites that mediate the sale of hacked data use Reddit-style upvoting systems to weed out scammers and law enforcement

To mark the site’s takeover by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, we present a survey of its most media-friendly momentsTwitter has great influence for a social media platform. It has a comparatively modest 230 million users, given that the likes of Instagram, Facebook and TikTok have user bases that run into the billions. But Twitter is beloved of politicians, celebrities, commentators and journalists and can have a great impact on the political and news cycle as a result. Here are some of the best-known and notorious tweets in the company’s 16-year history. Continue reading...

Fears have grown that the world’s richest man would remove the social network’s controls on hate speech – but can he really afford to?Elon Musk is not buying Twitter to make more money: he’s doing it to help humanity.In a message to advertisers last week, the world’s richest man said it was important to the future of civilisation to have a “common digital town square”. But bettering the species is going to cost money, given that Musk has paid $44bn for a social media platform to achieve that aim. Continue reading...

After the astonishing wealth earned during lockdown, investors fear times may never be as good again for Silicon Valley’s giantsLast week was a bad time to be a tech billionaire. When the pandemic drove the world online, the founders of Facebook, Google and Microsoft reaped wealth gains described as “pornographic” and cemented their position as among the richest cohort ever to have trod the planet. Well, the “good times” are over. Sort of.The world’s biggest tech companies reported their latest earnings last week and, for most, the news was bad. Meta (formerly Facebook), Alphabet (formerly Google) and Microsoft saw billions wiped off their values as investors began to worry that the best days of the tech titans were behind them. As investors made for the exit, the five biggest tech stocks crashed by a combined $950bn (£820m) at their lowest point. The slide also hit the fortunes of their creators. Continue reading...

Techniques which allow the sharing of data whilst keeping it secure may revolutionise fields from healthcare to law enforcementRachel is a student at a US university who was sexually assaulted on campus. She decided against reporting it (fewer than 10% of survivors do). What she did, however, was register the assault on a website that is using novel ideas from cryptography to help catch serial sexual predators.The organisation Callisto lets a survivor enter their name in a database, together with identifying details of their assailant, such as social media handle or phone number. These details are encrypted, meaning that the identities of the survivor and the perpetrator are anonymous. If you hacked into the database, there is no way to identify either party. Continue reading...

Conservative users began recirculating conspiracy theories as others voiced concerns over allowing hate speech and disinformationAmong the most urgent questions facing Twitter in its new era as a private company under Elon Musk, a self-declared “free speech absolutist”, is how the platform will handle moderation.After finalizing his takeover and ousting senior leadership, Musk declared on Friday that he would be forming a new “content moderation council” that would bring together “diverse views” on the issue. Continue reading...

Experts say the recent prominence of data breaches is just companies being more forthcoming and the media more focused on reporting them

Shares delisted and top execs reportedly fired as world’s richest man closes deal to buy social media platformThe world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has completed his $44bn acquisition of Twitter, amid warnings from politicians and campaigners that hate speech on the platform must be held in check.The social media group confirmed the deal in a brief filing on the New York Stock Exchange on Friday morning, disclosing the deal had closed the day before. Shares in the company have been suspended and will delist on 8 November, capping a chaotic saga that began when the Tesla CEO first announced his plans to take the tech business private in April. Continue reading...