Technology | The Guardian

It your children have a new Xbox, Playstation or Nintendo Switch waiting under the tree, here is what you need to know about subscriptions, parental controls … and getting the most fun out of it for all the familyThe days of game consoles being ready for action as soon as they’re plugged in are long gone, I’m afraid. Whether you’ve gone for an Xbox, PlayStation or Switch, your machine will need time to download the latest firmware updates before you can play anything. Depending on your broadband connection this can take anything from one to eight hours, so if you’re a parent, you may want to think about how you’re going to keep everyone entertained until that’s done. If it’s not already beautifully wrapped, it may even be worth sneakily unpacking the console and doing this prep-work before Christmas morning. If you have a spare ethernet cable (or can nick one from your PC for a day), consider setting up your console with a wired connection to your router rather than over wifi – this usually gives you a faster, more reliable connection. Continue reading...

Layoffs have made a precarious situation for noncitizens even worse, forcing them to play a game of chance to stay in the USLess than a year ago, K was working with a US-based team at Amazon from one of the e-commerce giant’s many international outposts in east Asia. While the distance between himself and those on his team had made his role tricky, he was at a stable job, at a company in his home country where labor laws protected workers from layoffs and sudden terminations.To make it easier for him and his team to work together, Amazon offered him a role in the US and said it would sponsor his L visa – a temporary worker visa available to employees of US-based companies who transfer from an international office. Though that meant uprooting his family, including his children who did not speak English, K took the job, confident in the importance of his department, the Amazon’s devices team, to the company. Continue reading...

Carolyn Ellison, former CEO of Alameda Research, and Gary Wang, co-founder of FTX, said to be cooperating with investigatorsTwo associates of Sam Bankman-Fried have pleaded guilty to criminal charges related to the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX and are helping investigators with their inquiries.News of the charges, guilty pleas and the pair’s cooperation with the investigation was only announced once the FTX co-founder was on a plane to the US from the Bahamas after he agreed to voluntary extradition to answer to charges tied to his role in the exchange’s failure. The aircraft touched down in New York at 10pm local time. Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: The new season of Queen of the Con tells the wild story of how the New York ‘rich girl’ stole $1m from the US government. Plus: five of the best documentary podcasts

Tesla shareholders hoping for the full attention of their distracted CEO are likely to be disappointedManagement by Twitter poll is such a silly idea that it remains hard to believe Elon Musk was being sincere when he invited the site’s users to determine if he should continue as chief executive. One suspects he had already decided to hire an executive to front the business – which is what, note, he told a Delaware court he would do several weeks ago. The poll merely created a buzz.In the unlikely event that users had voted to keep him as boss, Musk could have given roughly the same answer as the one he is giving now. In short, he will stay in charge for a while because a chief executive cannot be recruited overnight. Continue reading...

Elon Musk admits banning links to Twitter rival was a mistakeElon Musk’s chaotic autumn at Twitter has produced one clear winner: Mastodon, the open-source social network, has now grown to 2.5m users – triggering a land-grab for space on it from groups including browser makers, cryptocurrency advocates and other social networks.Despite the Twitter CEO’s best efforts to disparage the rival platform, Mastodon has grown by more than 800%, according to its founder and lead developer, Eugen Rochko, who said on Tuesday that it had jumped “from approximately 300k monthly active users to 2.5m between the months of October and November, with more and more journalists, political figures, writers, actors and organisations moving over”. Continue reading...

From robot-dinosaurs and hypersexual witches to epic clashes with mythological Gods and exquisite fantasies of supernatural wars, 2022 had it all – including a certain word game. Our critics pick the best

An entertaining election gave us twerking Shrek and an unexpected football tackle, but there was plenty of mayhem away from the campaign trail too

Incident has hit parts of media company’s technology infrastructure, with staff told to work from homeThe Guardian has been hit by a serious IT incident, which is believed to be a ransomware attack.The incident began late on Tuesday night and has affected parts of the company’s technology infrastructure, with staff told to work from home. Continue reading...

This is the first time the platform’s new owner has indicated he will pull back after calls for his ouster grewElon Musk said on Tuesday that he will not step down as chief executive of the company until he can find a suitable replacement, citing the state of the company’s finances as a reason to delay his promised departure.“I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job! After that, I will just run the software & servers teams,” Musk tweeted, before joining a Twitter livestream to discuss the company’s situation with a former intern. Continue reading...

The makers of the wheeled shoes promise to turbo-charge your daily stroll, allowing you to walk at 250% of your usual speed. Could they be the future of pedestrianism?Walking is all right, isn’t it, but it’s a bit slow. A bit ponderous. Wouldn’t it be good if you could walk, but, like, go faster? That is the premise of Moonwalkers: a pair of wheeled shoes that promise you can walk at running speed, without any of the effort of actually running. “Walk how you usually do, and our AI adapts to you,” reads the website blurb. “It’s not skating; it’s genuinely walking, so no new skills are necessary to learn.”The Moonwalkers sounded perfect. I don’t like learning new skills, but I do like the idea of going faster while putting in zero extra effort. That was enough. On a cold winter afternoon, I meet up with Joseph Yang, the lead software engineer on Moonwalkers at Brooklyn Bridge Park in New York City, looking out across a swirling Hudson River. Yang, 26, pulls a pair of the vaunted Moonwalkers out of a canvas bag and sets them on the ground. Continue reading...

Regional provider is owned by LetterOne, whose investors include Mikhail Fridman and Petr AvenThe UK government has ordered the Russian oligarch-backed investment company LetterOne to sell regional broadband provider Upp, saying its current ownership was a national security risk.The business secretary, Grant Shapps, said the risk to national security relates to “the ownership of Upp … and Upp’s expanding full fibre broadband network”. Continue reading...

Xbox, PlayStation, PC; Coffee Stain Studios

In this week’s newsletter: Musk has a talent for trying to wiggle out of trouble on Twitter, only to land deeper in it – this time by asking users if he should quit as chief executive

Crypto mogul’s lawyer in Bahamas says he wanted to see indictment before consenting to travel to face fraud chargesFallen crypto mogul Sam Bankman-Fried has now decided to agree to be extradited to the United States to face fraud charges, two of his lawyers said on Monday, just hours after one of them told a Bahamas judge the FTX founder wanted to see the US indictment against him before consenting.On Monday afternoon, Jerone Roberts, Bankman-Fried’s criminal defense lawyer in the Bahamas, told media outlets including the New York Times that his client had agreed to be voluntarily extradited and that he hoped Bankman-Fried would be back in court later this week. Continue reading...

Monochrome device offers reading and handwriting on a big e-ink screen with very long battery lifeAmazon’s latest Kindle is a supersized e-reader that wants to replace not only the printed book but paper itself, offering reading and on-screen writing with the included stylus.The Scribe costs from £330 ($340) and is the firm’s largest and most expensive model yet with a 10.2in screen, dwarfing the 7in Oasis and 6.8in Paperwhite. Continue reading...

I forgot the Freeletics renewal date but £75 was taken from my account and I can’t get it backDo I have any rights against an automatic subscription renewal?A year ago I signed up to Freeletics, an exercise app. Since then I have stopped using it, and, unsurprisingly, forgot about the renewal date. Continue reading...

The billionaire says only paid Twitter Blue subscribers will be able to vote in future policy-related polls on the platformElon Musk has tweeted for the first time since more than 10 million people voted in favour of him stepping down as Twitter’s chief executive, saying that only paid Twitter Blue subscribers will be able to vote in future policy-related polls.On Sunday, Musk asked Twitter users whether he should step down as the head of the company, promising to abide by the results of his poll. When the poll closed on Monday, 57.5% said he should step down. Continue reading...

Epic Games agrees with FTC to pay $275m fine for collecting data on children and refund customers $245m for deceptive practicesThe video game company Epic Games will pay a total of $520m in penalties and refunds to settle complaints involving children’s privacy and methods that tricked players into making purchases, US federal regulators said on Monday.The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said that it had secured the record-breaking settlements for two cases from Epic Games, which makes the popular game Fortnite. Continue reading...

Billionaire chief executive of Tesla insists there is no successor in the wings at social media platform

Twitter owner promises to abide by the results of the poll, less than two months after appointing himself CEOElon Musk has asked Twitter users whether he should step down as the head of the company, promising to abide by the results of his poll.Musk assumed the role of CEO at the end of October after firing a host of senior executives and dissolving its board of directors. Within minutes of posting the poll, more than one million people had voted. Continue reading...

Delta software developed to help collect and disseminate information about enemy’s movements

From moon missions to fast-charging batteries and AI-sourced antibiotics, in no particular order, the year’s significant scientific developmentsThe year opened with a bang. Or rather, it didn’t. The successful film Don’t Look Up, in which a comet is found to be on a collision course with Earth, had been released just before Christmas 2021. In the bleak days of post-festive gloom, the news media were on an adrenaline high, chasing any and every story about potential asteroid collisions to cheer us all up. Five asteroids were to pass close to the Earth in January alone! Happily for the health and wellbeing of humanity, none was predicted to come within a whisker of hitting the planet. Nonetheless, the possibility of an asteroid colliding with Earth is a reality – the globe is covered in craters from previous impacts, and it is well known that 65m years ago, dinosaurs became extinct following the impact of an asteroid about 10km across. Can anything be done about saving us from this existential extraterrestrial threat? Fortunately, the international space community has taken the first steps towards reducing the risk of an asteroid catching us unawares. The joint Nasa- Esa mission Dart (Double Asteroid Re-Direction Test) was an ambitious attempt to alter the trajectory of a small asteroid (Dimorphos) as it orbited a slightly larger asteroid (Didymos), by sending a spacecraft to crash into it. In October, we learned that the mission had been even more successful than anticipated, and that the orbit of Dimorphos had changed – showing that we could, if given sufficient time, alter the path of an asteroid if it were on a collision course with Earth. Continue reading...

On the one hand, he’s a creative genius. On the other, he’s destroying a key debating chamberWatching what’s going on at Twitter is like watching a guy losing his mind in slow motion. The guy in question is Elon Musk, who once upon a time was the world’s richest man and now isn’t. (That slot is apparently occupied by Bernard Arnault, the luxury goods mogul.)Musk is in a hole but apparently doesn’t know Denis Healey’s First Law of Holes: when you’re in one, stop digging. The funny thing is that he dug the hole himself. First, he paid way over the odds for Twitter. Then, when Tesla shares (the main source of his wealth) tanked, and Twitter’s share price dropped, he tried to get out of the deal. That failed, so he was forced to borrow a lot of money – incurring interest payments of around a billion dollars a year – thereby becoming the reluctant owner of a loss-making company. And he hasn’t the faintest idea of how to make it work. Continue reading...

The cameraman captured the three girls bickering in a perfect movie-style shot. The next moment, they were smiling againThe argument broke out a few minutes into the rickety tram ride from Port de Sóller in Mallorca. Sisters Rosa, four, on the right, and Lois, seven, nearest the camera, were bickering with their friend Bibi, eight, all three a little cranky after a busy day on the beach. Their parents sat opposite, and Rosa and Lois’s dad, Joe Macdonald, used his iPhone 13 Pro Max to capture the scene.“It was late afternoon, maybe five or six, so the lighting was just right,” Macdonald says. “I work with camera and lighting for film and TV, so spend a lot of time looking at monitors, and know how fortunate it is to capture a moment that has drama but is also real. Continue reading...

The UN has said Twitter's decision to ban the accounts of a number of prominent US tech reporters sets a dangerous precedent and that it is 'very disturbed' by the move. The organisation's spokesperson, Stéphane Dujarric, said on Friday: 'Media voices should not be silenced on a platform that professes to be a space for freedom of speech.' After conducting a public poll on how to proceed, Twitter's owner, Elon Musk, decided to reinstate the accounts shortly after their suspension for what he said was their doxxing of his location

Blockchain aficionados have long flocked to the island for its favorable tax laws. But as the industry wobbles, local residents are pushing backOn a humid December evening in Puerto Rico, more than 100 cryptocurrency and blockchain aficionados gathered at a mansion within a gated, jungle-like enclave of San Juan. A local band played softly while waiters served hors d’oeuvres to attendees who paid as much as $3,000 to attend CoinAgenda Caribbean, a three-day conference promising a VIP experience of networking opportunities and fireside chats about the future of the industry.The crypto crowd arrived in chartered buses to the party, where they sipped on cocktails from an open bar around a pristine white pool, frogs singing in the trees surrounding the property owned by Michael Terpin, founder of CoinAgenda. A private chef from Lyon, France, provided a five-course meal – a fusion of French dishes and Puerto Rican staples like a pig roast and rice and beans. Continue reading...

On a wild day of bans, sudden U-turns and chaotic messaging, Musk abides by Twitter poll result that favoured restoring the accounts of reporters he accused of ‘doxxing’ himElon Musk has lifted the suspensions of the Twitter accounts of several journalists he had banned a day earlier, after the second poll he conducted on the topic went against his preferred outcome.On Thursday, Musk suspended a group of tech journalists from the website, including Ryan Mac from the New York Times, Drew Harwell of the Washington Post and CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, for what he said were breaches of the company’s new rule about revealing people’s locations. Continue reading...

The former hedge fund manager warns the Twitter CEO – who also runs Tesla and SpaceX – could be in for a rough 2023Elon Musk’s chaotic management of the social media platform Twitter is hurting his brand, and investors should stay away from stock in his electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla, former hedge fund manager Danny Moses of The Big Short fame said this week.Moses’s remarks late Thursday came in an interview with CNBC on the same day that Twitter appeared to have at least temporarily suspended a number of prominent journalists who had reported on Musk and the operations of the platform which he acquired in October for $44bn. Continue reading...

Pressure grows on Elon Musk as EU says social media platform could face sanctions over suspensionsThe United Nations is “very disturbed” by Twitter’s abrupt suspension of a group of US journalists, a spokesperson has said, warning that the move sets a “dangerous precedent” – as the EU said the social media platform could fall foul of forthcoming digital regulations.Stéphane Dujarric said on Friday the UN was “very disturbed” by the barring of prominent tech reporters at news organisations including CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times who have written about Musk and the tech company he owns. Continue reading...

The site’s recent actions, such as banning critical journalists, appear to indicate policy is made on a whimFacebook’s community standards is a sprawling document, broken down into six top-level categories and 24 subcategories, distinguishing between content that is allowed and that which requires extra context, replete with examples of breaches and justifications for its choices. It is treated with quasi-legalistic power by the company’s oversight board, which incorporates its own precedent, as well as international human rights standards, to occasionally overrule Facebook’s own moderation choices.Twitter’s rulebook is simpler: don’t annoy Elon Musk. Continue reading...

Xbox, PC; Squanch Games

PC, PlayStation; Mads & Friends/Bedtime Digital Games

In this week’s newsletter: Working It from the Financial Times investigates how four businesses are trialling the perhaps revolutionary shorter work week. Plus: five podcasts to lift your spirits

After shedding thousands of jobs with Elon Musk’s takeover, the company is apparently shedding office furniture – and high-end cooking equipmentGreat news, holiday shoppers: you can finally get your hands on a 100% authentic, 3ft-tall statue of the Twitter bird.An online auction next month will feature hundreds of the company’s “surplus corporate office assets” that could add a certain je ne sais quoi to any home or workplace, from bizarre decor to high-end cooking equipment.A 6ft-tall planter in the shape of the @ symbol. Sure to be a hit with the tech-obsessed gardener in your life, this piece marries the ancient art of horticulture with a ubiquitous symbol of decaying public discourse. Expect heads to turn when you install this in front of your home, announcing to passersby that you have no soul. Continue reading...

Charges against Bankman-Fried include violation of campaign finance laws, as new CEO slams FTX in congressional hearing on the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange

After 70 years of research, experts in California have for the first time proven ignition is possible

I’ve been playing Dungeons and Dragons since I was a kid, but my first time directing the action was daunting. I certainly wasn’t expecting what came nextFour bedraggled adventurers stand together on the shore of a desolate island, shivering in the evening mist. They don’t know each other, and their motives for being here are unclear. But as they make stilted conversation they see, emerging from the briny waters, figures dressed in the rags of sailor outfits, moaning and shuffling and horrible. The adventurers stand around, roll some dice and chat some more, as the undead seamen lurch ever closer. Looking on at this desperate scene, I think to myself, “What the hell? Why can’t anyone make a decision? We’ve been here for half an hour! We’ve not even begun the proper adventure yet!”Dungeons and Dragons has always been there in the background of my life. When I was a kid in the late 70s, my dad’s best friend got into it; he’d show me the rule books and dice and tried to explain to me that this was a game about imagination, about pretending to be elves and wizards and warriors on a completely made up adventure. In the 1980s, as I got into video games, we saw the first fantasy adventures based around D&D lore – games with lots of stats on screen, and monsters inspired by Lord of the Rings. Then finally in the 90s I played with a group of friends at university. We huddled in cold rooms with rulebooks, character sheets and cheap supermarket cider and quested into the night. But I was never the Dungeon Master. Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: The leaks don’t reveal a hotbed of leftwing bias at the social media company – just a thin-skinned billionaire rehashing culture wars of years past

We test what devices consume, with households increasingly worried about rising energy pricesHow much does it cost to charge your phone or your toothbrush? Is it really cheaper to use the microwave to cook your food, as has been suggested? With the cost of electricity putting the squeeze on all our finances, and a house full of tech, I decided it was time to see how power-hungry everyday devices really are.We are constantly told that all manner of appliances chew through electricity, and that you can make huge savings by switching off “vampire devices” at the wall. But is that really true? To cut through the fug and find out myself, I grabbed a power meter and spent the last two months testing everything I could. Continue reading...

The firm’s turmoil appears to deepen since Elon Musk’s takeover with Yoel Roth forced to flee home amid personal attacksElon Musk’s Twitter abruptly dissolved its Trust and Safety Council on Monday night, just moments before it was scheduled to meet with company representatives.The council was an advisory group of nearly 100 independent civil, human rights and other organizations that the company formed in 2016 to address hate speech, child exploitation, suicide, self-harm and other problems on the platform. But Twitter informed the group via email that it was disbanding shortly before the meeting was to take place on Monday, according to multiple members. Continue reading...

The new Twitter owner, Elon Musk, was booed for almost 10 minutes after he was introduced on stage by comedian Dave Chappelle on Sunday at the Chase Center in San Francisco. 'Ladies and gentleman make some noise for the richest man in the world,' said Chappelle, as Musk walked on stage with his two arms in the air expecting cheers to ring out. The footage, originally posted to Twitter by a deleted account, showed Musk appearing caught off-guard as the crowd booed continuously, preventing him from getting a word in. 'Cheers and boos, I see,' said Chappelle in response to the crowd's reaction. 'It sounds like some of the people you fired are in the audience,' added the comedian shortly after

Those willing to pay $8 on the web or $11 a month via Apple’s app store will get more prominenceTwitter is relaunching its subscription service on Monday, offering users verified status for $8 (£6.50) a month or $11 a month on their iPhone.The move follows a botched revamp of the service last month that resulted in a host of impersonator accounts appearing on the platform as some users took advantage of the chance to launch bogus “verified” accounts for major companies and public figures. Continue reading...

Machine learning research into changing attitudes to women in the US reveals it’s not just technology that has progressedPeople love new technology. Last week, half the internet was experimenting with ChatGPT, a new artificial intelligence chatbot that can write text on almost any subject under the sun with only the most basic of instructions. You should have a go. Reactions so far focus on predicting the end of education (it can churn out an essay in seconds) or arguing that it’s fun but irrelevant to human progress.Sceptics should note that machine learning and big data analysis is supporting social science progress. Take the debate about cultural norms, where some emphasise the persistence of views passed between generations, while others argue ideas converge between places over time. We struggle to know which view is accurate (surveys of public attitudes are relatively recent or only national).Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk Continue reading...

Light infrastructure has expanded alongside population growth but it’s not only star gazing in jeopardy – cultures, wildlife, science and human health are all threatenedOn a clear dark Queensland night in 1997, Brendan Downs was staring up into the cosmos alongside a band of other amateur astronomers. He trained his telescope on a galaxy called NGC 6769, floating more than 169m light years away, and took a picture.“I had a reference image that I had in a book at the time, and I visually compared the object on the screen to the object in the book,” he says. “I counted the number of stars I was looking at.” Continue reading...

The impressive and wildly popular ChatGPT is the latest instalment in a long-running debate about whether we’re creating machines to help us or replace usThose who, like this columnist, spend too much time online will have noticed a kind of feeding frenzy over the past two weeks. The cause has been the release of an interesting chatbot – a software application capable of conducting an online conversation. The particular bot creating the fuss is ChatGPT, a prototype artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot that focuses on usability and dialogue and was developed by OpenAI, an AI research laboratory based in San Francisco.ChatGPT uses a large language model built via machine-learning methods and is based on OpenAI’s GPT-3 model, which is capable of producing human-like text when given a prompt in natural language. It’s an example of what has come to be called “generative AI”: software that uses machine-learning algorithms to enable machines to generate artificial content – text, images, audio and video content based on its training data – in a way that might persuade a human user into believing that its outputs are “real”. Continue reading...

As ITVX launches and the BBC gets ready to stream not beam, will event viewing become a thing of the past?Hard to miss the huge television events of the last fortnight. There was Matt Hancock emoting away in the jungle on ITV, England scoring actual goals in the World Cup, and then the former royal couple telling it their way in an orchestrated “drop” of the first episodes of an intimate documentary series on Netflix. And even if none of these offerings registered as a personal “appointment to view”, the noise created has certainly been insistent.All the same, there are strong hints that the days of the large, live TV audience, with everybody sharing a scheduled broadcast at the same time, are numbered. The plan, after years of rumour, is for all TV output to be available online only within the next 10 years or so. Broadcast channels, with their daily line-up of shows, are doomed. Programmes (originally so-called because they were “programmed”) will come into our homes as streamed, branded products, rather than being beamed to viewers on a pre-ordained timetable. Continue reading...

Former boss of collapsed crypto-exchange says he has duty to try to recoup investors’ lost moneySam Bankman-Fried, the former boss of the failed crypto-exchange FTX, has said he hopes to start a new business to help pay back the victims of his old firm’s collapse.Speaking to the BBC from the Bahamas, he said he would “give anything” to be able to begin a new venture in order to recoup his users’ lost investments. Continue reading...

Wider economic uncertainty is behind cuts at companies including CNN, BuzzFeed and Gannett, executives sayA wave of layoffs have hit the beleaguered American media industry as several major companies, including CNN, BuzzFeed and Gannett, have laid off hundreds of workers in recent weeks citing economic volatility and uncertainty.The job losses are the first major slate of cuts since the beginning of the pandemic, when a handful of companies laid off workers over the unpredictability of Covid’s impact on the economy. As the economy rebounded with the introduction of the Covid vaccine in 2021, the news industry saw the lowest number of layoffs in years. Continue reading...

Supermodels, an extraordinary immersive show in London, uses animatronics and meticulous construction to create a hybrid digital-analogue beautyWhen the eerily accurate AI image generator Dall-E 2 was released for public experimentation by OpenAI this summer, most people immediately used it to create whimsical scenes such as “samurai dolphin painted in the style of Rembrandt” or “Bruce Willis angrily devouring a cheeseburger on the moon”. True, if you looked too closely at Bruce’s left ear you might have noticed it wasn’t there – but the freaky glitches were, though somewhat unsettling, part of the fun, not to mention a calming reminder that AI cannot entirely trick us that its images are real – yet.But more than one panicked architect also typed in, “Four-storey family home in forest in the style of Mies van der Rohe” or “Japanese-Scandi lounge area in office building lobby”, and let out a tiny scream when the results resembled the renders of projects that architects otherwise spend long hours churning out. If an AI could knock out a decent interior in seconds, did it promise to be a fabulous time-saver – or would it put everyone out of a job? Continue reading...