Technology | The Guardian

Experts say investing in identity theft protection may provide peace of mind, but won’t help recover lost information

Twitter owner says Apple gave no reason for the potential ban and had stopped advertising on the platformElon Musk has accused Apple of threatening to remove Twitter from its App Store without giving a reason to the social media platform.Twitter’s new owner also said the iPhone maker had stopped advertising on Twitter, prompting him to ask if the tech group hated free speech. Continue reading...

Revised online safety bill proposes fines of 10% of revenue but drops harmful communications offenceSocial media platforms that breach pledges to block sexist and racist content face the threat of substantial fines under government changes to the online safety bill announced on Monday.Under the new approach, social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter must also give users the option of avoiding content that is harmful but does not constitute a criminal offence. This could include racism, misogyny or the glorification of eating disorders. Continue reading...

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp owner has been fined nearly €1bn by EU since September 2021Facebook’s owner has been fined €265m (£230m) by the Irish data watchdog after a breach that resulted in the details of more than 500 million users being published online.The Data Protection Commission (DPC) said Meta had infringed two articles of the EU’s data protection laws after details of Facebook users from around the world were scraped from public profiles in 2018 and 2019. Continue reading...

Activity indicates ‘first major failure’ to stop government interference under ownership of Elon MuskTwitter has been flooded with nuisance posts designed to obscure news of the coronavirus lockdown protests in China, in an apparent state-directed attempt to suppress footage of the demonstrations.Chinese bot accounts – not operated by humans – are being used to flood the social networking service with adverts for sex workers, pornography and gambling when users search for a major city in the country, such as Shanghai or Beijing, using Chinese script. Continue reading...

Teachers and parents can’t detect this new form of plagiarism. Tech companies could step in – if they had the will to do soParents and teachers across the world are rejoicing as students have returned to classrooms. But unbeknownst to them, an unexpected insidious academic threat is on the scene: a revolution in artificial intelligence has created powerful new automatic writing tools. These are machines optimised for cheating on school and university papers, a potential siren song for students that is difficult, if not outright impossible, to catch.Of course, cheats have always existed, and there is an eternal and familiar cat-and-mouse dynamic between students and teachers. But where once the cheat had to pay someone to write an essay for them, or download an essay from the web that was easily detectable by plagiarism software, new AI language-generation technologies make it easy to produce high-quality essays. Continue reading...

FTX collapse | Replica of William the Conqueror’s ship | A seat for the privileged | Giant otters | Matt Hancock’s ‘junglewashing’Moya Lothian-McLean (Opinion, 25 November) appears to signal the death of “effective altruism” (EA) on the basis of the fall from grace of one of its most famous proponents, Sam Bankman-Fried. Just as Dr Andrew Wakefield’s discredited research into the MMR vaccine did not dishonour medical research in its entirety, nor should Bankman-Fried’s involvement in the collapse of the cryptocurency exchange FTX discredit EA. The aim of “doing good better” remains a laudable objective.

Online scams such as banking and credit card fraud are the most prevalent cyberthreat, says InterpolPolice and investigators fear organised gangs of fraudsters are expanding across sub-Saharan Africa, exploiting new opportunities as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and the global economic crisis to make huge sums with little risk of being caught.The growth will have a direct impact on the rest of the world, where many victims of “hugely lucrative” fraud live, senior police officials have said. Continue reading...

The American computer scientist, who coined the term ‘virtual reality,’ cautions against online ‘psychological operatives’Jaron Lanier, the eminent American computer scientist, composer and artist, is no stranger to skepticism around social media, but his current interpretations of its effects are becoming darker and his warnings more trenchant.Lanier, a dreadlocked free-thinker credited with coining the term “virtual reality”, has long sounded dire sirens about the dangers of a world over-reliant on the internet and at the increasing mercy of tech lords, their social media platforms and those who work for them. Continue reading...

Culture secretary Michelle Donelan to amend bill that, after Molly Russell case, will place duty of care on social media firmsPeople who use social media posts to encourage self-harm face criminal prosecution under government changes to the revived online safety bill.Culture secretary Michelle Donelan will update the bill to criminalise encouraging self-harm when the legislation returns to parliament next month. Continue reading...

Tech titans like Elon Musk and Sam Bankman-Fried have been feted for their wealth, but see the world in ways that also merit scrutinyThe new gods are running into a bit of trouble. From the soap opera playing out at Twitter HQ, the too-big-to-fail bankruptcies in the cryptocurrency space, to mass tech layoffs, the past month has seen successive headlines declaring a litany of woes facing the bullish tech boyos in Silicon Valley and beyond.The minute-by-minute coverage of Elon Musk’s escapades and the global levels of interest in the FTX collapse both go well beyond what you’d expect from a business story. I’m willing to gamble a few Bitcoins that the popular fixation has little to do with any particular interest in successful software engineering; rather it is the personalities who inhabit these spaces, and the philosophies that propel them in their godlike ambition. What is their end goal, we wonder. What drives them, beyond the pursuit of growth? It is easy to assume that money is all that motivates the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Musk and Jeff Bezos. Except, when you start to examine the mindsets of these men, it’s clear that cash is far from the whole story.Moya Lothian-McLean is a contributing editor at Novara MediaDo you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. Continue reading...

UK government blocked new Chinese ownership on security grounds, but Nexperia bosses had ‘planned to build two new plants’

The legendary designer behind Super Mario, Zelda and many other Nintendo classics understood how technological innovation and sharp ideas could work together. At 70, he’s lost none of his sense of fun

Tech companies aim to pick up experienced engineering talent by appealing to dislike of Tesla chief executive’s methodsPut off by Elon Musk’s muscular management style? Move to us! That’s the pitch being used by talent-starved technology firms trying to lure thousands of former Twitter employees laid off by the social media company under its new owner.Twitter has fired top executives and enforced steep job cuts with little warning following Musk’s tumultuous takeover of the social media platform. About half of the workforce – around 3,700 employees – has been laid off. Continue reading...

Oversight board says removal of Secrets Not Safe by Chinx (OS) suggests ‘over-policing of certain communities’Meta’s oversight board, the quasi-independent “supreme court” of Facebook and Instagram, has forced the company to reinstate a clip of drill music originally removed from Instagram at the request of the Metropolitan police.The clip, a short excerpt of the song Secrets Not Safe by Chinx (OS), was removed after the Met flagged the track to Meta, arguing that it could lead to “retaliatory violence” in the context of the London gang scene. Continue reading...

The 50 biggest claims against FTX total $3.1bn. Now a US court has to determine who gets what – if anything. Plus, what will be more valuable by the end of the year: Musk’s stake in Twitter, or a lettuce?

Barbara Otis on the Twitter CEO’s troubling behaviour towards employeesAs an organisational development practitioner, I have been watching the Twitter disaster unfold. As André Spicer’s article says, the kind of workplace behaviour exhibited by Elon Musk is not unusual among people in positions of power (The Elon Musk effect: have we reached our limit with awful bosses?, theguardian.com, 18 November).Good leaders don’t have to email employees to tell them that they are expected to work hard. Great employees will work hard and be loyal when a healthy environment exists, where they are self-motivated and feel safe. Continue reading...

Expert in device science at Imperial College London who developed the longer-life batteries that power electric cars and smartphonesThe development of much more efficient, next-generation lithium-ion batteries, with higher energy densities and longer life cycles, was just one of several significant innovations made by Mino Green, emeritus professor of electrical device science at Imperial College London, who has died aged 95.In the early 2000s, the advent of smartphones, mobile computing, and the distant possibility of ubiquitous electric cars, led to increased research into higher density energy storage. Two potential candidates for higher energy densities were the lithium-oxygen battery, which promised the highest possible theoretical energy density, and the lithium-silicon battery. Research at the time showed that both suffered from issues relating to cycle life – that is the number of times the battery could be recharged without losing significant capacity. Continue reading...

Platform’s paid verification system is being used to give sense of validity to accounts pushing health misinformationAs the troubled social media platform Twitter rolled out a paid verification system and laid off thousands of content moderators, health misinformation accounts on the social network began pushing their messages to a wider audience than ever.Under Elon Musk’s new direction for Twitter, several anti-vaccine accounts with tens of thousands of followers are now verified by paying $7.99 a month for Twitter Blue. Continue reading...

Company says cryptocurrency allegedly stolen in collapse being transferred to other exchangesThe collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX owes its 50 biggest creditors nearly $3.1bn (£2.6bn), according to a filing in a US bankruptcy court.The exchange owes about $1.45bn to its top 10 creditors, it said in a court filing over the weekend, without naming them. The largest creditor is owed $226m. Continue reading...

Premium Windows 11 PC offers smooth and quiet experience but is showing its age compared with rivalsMicrosoft’s latest Surface Laptop has new chips, new connections and costs the same as last year but has a five-year-old design that makes it look aged.The Surface Laptop 5 starts at £999 ($999/A$1,699) for the 13.5in version, replacing the 18-month-old Laptop 4 as Microsoft’s idea of what a standard Windows 11 notebook should be. It sits above Microsoft’s entry-level Surface Laptop Go 2, which comes in at £529. Continue reading...

My brother-in-law has been charged for countless shipments which has forced him into the redWe are having a bizarre problem with Amazon that has resulted in countless boxes of the same Ninja cookbook being delivered to my brother-in-law.He lives in a supportive care establishment and, shortly after moving in, started receiving the boxes over several days, none of which he had ordered. Continue reading...

The collapse of digital ventures like FTX shows that no amount of hype and starry-eyed proselytising can escape realityThe tiny island nation of Tuvalu recently announced that it would be the first country to fully replicate itself as a virtual reproduction in the metaverse.Tuvalu, comprising of nine small islands in the Pacific situated between Australia and Hawaii, fears that its demise is inevitable due to human-induced climate change, and wanted to preserve “the most precious assets of its people … and move them to the cloud”. Continue reading...

Charlotte Fantelli’s documentary about activist Simon Sansome and his wife is let down by clichés and embarrassing reconstruction scenesThe intentions behind this documentary about disabled rights activist Simon Sansome and his wife, Kate, are noble, but the tacky, cliché-ridden execution doesn’t live up to them. Essentially, the film is built around one long interview with the Sansomes on how, not long after their wedding, Simon suddenly found himself paralysed from the waist down (“Little did we know it was going to be our final dance together,” he says). The combination of a clumsy chiropractor, a rare condition and misdiagnosis turned him into a wheelchair user.The change in circumstances would lead to Simon losing his job as a Liberal Democrat councillor in his Leicestershire district and much anguish for the couple. Eventually, he discovered a way to make a difference by starting a campaign to improve access for disabled people and change attitudes. When Facebook wouldn’t let him share a tasteful image of a nude woman with a partially amputated leg, he kicked up a fuss and taped one of their representatives on the phone explaining that, at the time, the social media company censored images that some people might find disturbing. This surely must have caused a terrible headache for former Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, now chief shill for Facebook, but the publicity did wonders for Simon’s Ability Access group, which forced the social media giant to apologise. Continue reading...

From armed robot dogs to target-seeking drones, the use of artificial intelligence in warfare presents ethical dilemmas that urgently need addressingThe security convoy turned on to Tehran’s Imam Khomeini Boulevard at around 3:30pm on 27 November 2020. The VIP was the Iranian scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, widely regarded as the head of Iran’s secret nuclear weapons programme. He was driving his wife to their country property, flanked by bodyguards in other vehicles. They were close to home when the assassin struck.A number of shots rang out, smashing into Fakhrizadeh’s black Nissan and bringing it to a halt. The gun fired again, hitting the scientist in the shoulder and causing him to exit the vehicle. With Fakhrizadeh in the open, the assassin delivered the fatal shots, leaving Fakhrizadeh’s wife uninjured in the passenger seat. Continue reading...

Dale Vince is not your run-of-the-mill power company chief. Here, the founder of Ecotricity talks about green energy, warring with Elon Musk – and his vegan football teamIt is fair to say that Britain’s alternative energy sector is not dripping with glamour, but within the world of turbines and micro-inverters, Dale Vince, the multimillionaire founder of Ecotricity, counts as a superstar.Vince has the directional haircut and the fancy electric motorcycle. He has the maverick past (as a New Age traveller) and the visions of the future (a vegan Britain entirely self-sufficient in green gas). And he has his fingers in many sustainably sourced pies, from rainforest regeneration to electric vehicles, documentaries like Seaspiracy to tidal lagoons, artificial diamonds to plant-based football. In addition to founding the world’s first green energy company – Ecotricity began life as a wind turbine that Vince had built next to his caravan in 1995 – he is the owner of Forest Green Rovers, the world’s first vegan, carbon- neutral football club, whom he has taken to the third tier of English football for the first time in its history. A timber stadium is one of the next items on the club’s agenda. Continue reading...

Brooklyn residents are using air quality and traffic sensors to see how new warehouses affect their communityFor the past year, a pair of plain-looking buildings has been at the center of a simmering conflict in a close-knit waterfront community in New York City. They look like warehouses, with tall concrete walls, loading bays and few windows. They sound like warehouses, emitting the rev of diesel engines and the chirps of reversing trucks. But by all accounts, they’re something very different.The two newcomers to Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood are hubs for Amazon’s growing last-mile delivery network. Unlike traditional warehouses, they’re bustling with around-the-clock activity, attracting convoys of cars, delivery vans, and semi-trucks to a neighborhood of narrow two-lane streets. Every day, shipments jostle through Red Hook’s crowded truck routes and make their way across New York, fulfilling Amazon’s promise of blistering-fast delivery. Continue reading...

Beneath the billionaire’s blurry vision for Twitter lies the notion that it’s good to have a ‘marketplace of ideas’At the end of last month, just after Elon Musk had bought Twitter, I wrote that having him responsible for an important part of the world’s public sphere could turn out to be “like entrusting a delicate clock to a monkey”. This struck some readers, especially those with tech backgrounds, as intemperate, but everything that has happened since suggests that it was bang on the money.The world has watched transfixed as the monkey flails around wondering what to do with his shiny new plaything. He can do whatever he likes with it, so we watch breathlessly to see what he tries next and speculate endlessly on whether this stunt or that one will do the trick. We are like spectators watching a chess grandmaster playing some practice games – trying this gambit or that; moving pieces on a board; tearing up the board and refashioning it as a sphere; and so on. The fact that the pieces on this chessboard are human beings – with mortgages, dependents, health insurance, etc – is nowhere mentioned, except by Maria Farrell in her splendid, excoriating essay on the takeover. She too has been through a narcissistic acquisition and knows what it’s like for real people. Continue reading...

Social media giant ill-equipped to deal with traffic spikes after cuts imposed by Elon Musk, according to former employeeTwitter stands a 50% chance of a major outage that could take the site offline during the World Cup, according to a recently departed employee with knowledge of how the company responds to large-scale events.The former employee, who was granted anonymity because of the sensitivity of what was discussed, has knowledge of the workings of Twitter Command Centre, the platform’s team of troubleshooters who monitor the site for issues such as traffic spikes and data centre outages. Continue reading...

Smaller investors tell how they found themselves unable to withdraw money as rumours of the exchange’s troubles spreadThe UK parliament this week heard during testimony on the failed cryptocurrency exchange FTX that most of the money it held came from institutions. Yet with about $8bn still owed to depositors, its collapse has still left many individuals nursing significant losses.Here we speak to some of those retail investors about the huge sums they were unable to withdraw – as much as $110,000 in one case. All of them spoke on the condition of anonymity. Continue reading...

After the crypto firm collapsed, the executive who handled the Enron debacle was brought in – and said he’d never seen anything like it• ‘I don’t have this kind of money to lose’ – investors’ storiesCasual observers could be forgiven for thinking the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX is another typical tale of financial mismanagement. That’s how its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, terms it: a liquidity crisis that tipped over into a solvency one.FTX had deposits and loans and when depositors tried to get their money back, FTX didn’t have it to hand. Sure, the loans were in fancy digital money, rather than stale dollars, but at first glance, it appears like just another big company failure. Continue reading...

Tesla and SpaceX history showed how hard-edged the CEO could be. At Twitter, this pattern has proved disastrousElon Musk’s reputation precedes him.The seemingly impulsive and demanding boss of SpaceX and Tesla is known to place importance on the product above all. And whether the employees building the products agree with how he plans to achieve his ambitions, or the ambition itself, they are often expected to go above and beyond – at times sleeping on the company floor – to make it happen, or else. Continue reading...

The Spanish photographer’s shot of an Iranian woman in a hijab has recently acquired new resonanceDespite not being a religious person, José Luis Barcia Fernández has long been fascinated by the rituals, rules and uniforms of faith. After photographing the hooded capirotes of Seville’s Holy Week, and Jews, Muslims and Christians in Jerusalem, the Spanish photographer travelled to Iran four years ago, where he took this shot of a woman in a hijab silhouetted against a tree and a sky filled with birds. He already had the shot he wanted in mind when he came across the woman, who was standing by a stunning mosque in the Tajrish neighbourhood of Tehran.“There were lots of birds and a beautiful tree,” he says. “I saw this woman and got the shot, which seems to show her headscarf, with its floral motif, continuing up into the tree. And then you had the birds, which I like photographing because it’s fun.” Continue reading...

Swiss company uses algorithm to judge whether contested Portrait de femme (Gabrielle) is genuinely by French artist

Reports show nearly 1,200 workers left company after demand for ‘long hours at high intensity’, while Musk starts poll on whether to reinstate Donald TrumpElon Musk emailed Twitter staff on Friday asking that any employees who write software code report to the 10th floor of the office in San Francisco in the early afternoon, according to multiple news reports.The billionaire said in a follow-up email, “If possible, I would appreciate it if you could fly to SF to be present in person,” adding he would be at the company’s headquarters until midnight and would return Saturday morning, Reuters reported. The engineers should report at 2pm on Friday. Continue reading...

The harsh ruling sends a message to Silicon Valley that the government will hold founders accountable for what’s promisedElizabeth Holmes, founder of Theranos, has been sentenced to more than 11 years in prison over her role in the blood testing firm that collapsed after its technology was revealed to be largely fraudulent.Holmes was convicted in January on four counts of defrauding investors. She appeared on Friday afternoon at the San Jose, California, courthouse where her nearly four-month-long trial began in August 2021, alongside relatives and supporters, including her partner, Billy Evans. Continue reading...

How did Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX fail and what does the firm’s fate tell us about cryptocurrencies?The collapse of FTX, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, has unleashed another bout of volatility in the highly speculative digital asset market. The fortune of FTX’s founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, went from nearly $16bn to zero within days as his crypto empire filed for bankruptcy protection in the US on 11 November. Here we answer some of your questions about the story so far. Continue reading...

Hailed as a tech solution to crime, security cameras throw up questions of accountability and privacyThe hit BBC thriller The Capture has thrown the scale of camera surveillance into the spotlight. I ask Gus Hosein, director of Privacy International, just how advanced the technology is – and if it’s possible to avoid it.You’ve got to watch The Capture, Gus. It’s about a police officer who finds people hacking into the CCTV network, and it hit home how omnipresent cameras are.

Big-budget Jimmy Donaldson has overtaken PewDiePie to become the most subscribed person on the platformYouTube’s short 17-year history is one of human civilisation played on fast-forward. The first videos uploaded to the website were shabby, amateur productions from enthusiasts with cameras, made on a shoestring budget. Today, the most popular videos have eye-watering budgets more akin to TV shows.Few people demonstrate YouTube’s shift better than Jimmy Donaldson, better known to his 112 million subscribers as MrBeast. This week Donaldson, 24 and born in Wichita, Kansas, became YouTube’s king, surpassing Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg as the most subscribed-to individual on the platform. Continue reading...

Sanjay Bhandari says cuts in trust and safety team at platform could be taken as ‘green light for hate’The chair of the anti-discrimination body Kick It Out has voiced fears that Twitter will be unable to cope with online abuse during the football World Cup, after a wave of job losses at the social media platform.Sanjay Bhandari said he was deeply concerned by reports of cuts in the trust and safety team at Twitter, as well as the departure of the executive in charge of the department. Continue reading...

People are wondering what parts of their online selves, loved ones and favorite celebrities to save in case the bird goes belly upAmid ongoing fallout from Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, speculation of the platform’s imminent collapse is swirling – leaving users wondering what parts of their online selves they’ll get to keep.After Musk laid off thousands of workers, many users have reported signs the platform is falling apart in real time – from glitching home pages to log-in failures – and researchers are desperately urging users to download their tweets in case Twitter implodes completely. Continue reading...

US corporate restructuring expert John Ray says ‘never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls’In a stinging court filing posted on Thursday, John Ray III, the new boss of the bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, said the company had suffered an “unprecedented and complete failure of corporate controls”.Ray has overseen some of the biggest bankruptcies ever, including the collapse of the energy giant Enron, and has 40 years of experience in restructuring companies. He said he had never seen anything as bad as FTX.Alameda Research (FTX’s hedge fund) gave Bankman-Fried a $1bn personal loan and a $543m loan to the director of engineering, Nishad Singh.Bankman-Fried often communicated by using applications that were set to auto-delete after a short period of time, and encouraged employees to do the same.Many FTX entities never had board meetings.Because of “historical cash management failures” the debtors do not yet know the exact amount of cash that the FTX Group held.The debtors have been unable to even prepare a complete list of who worked for the FTX Group because of the chaotic state of its human resources.Many of the employees of the FTX Group, including some of its senior executives, were not aware of the shortfalls or potential commingling of digital assets and may be “some of the people most hurt by these events”. Continue reading...

Oxfordshire astronomer was locked out for three months after apparent automated moderation errorAn astronomer who was blocked on Twitter for tweeting a picture of a meteor that was deemed to have breached guidelines on intimate content has had her account restored.Mary McIntyre’s account was locked three months ago after she tweeted a video of a meteor passing through the night sky over her Oxfordshire home. She initially received a 12-hour ban after being told that the clip contained “intimate” content that had been shared without a participant’s consent. Continue reading...

Commons speaker suggests phones not be taken into meetings as UK cyber security centre issues 10 ‘top tips’MPs have been told their phones are a “potential goldmine” for hostile states who are targeting them to influence democracy in the UK.Advice was shared by the Commons speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, suggesting MPs should not take their phones into sensitive meetings, given the threat from state-backed hackers, as well as criminals and fraudsters. Continue reading...

For around 20 years, brothers Zach and Tarn Adams have been working on their idiosyncratic fantasy game – and it’s only just got graphicsIn 2015, players of the video game Dwarf Fortress – a wildly influential cult hit that has appeared at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and been cited as the inspiration for Minecraft – started finding vomit-covered dead cats in taverns. When the game’s creator, 44-year-old Tarn Adams, attempted to determine the cause, he discovered that cats were walking through puddles of spilled alcohol, licking themselves clean, and promptly dying of heart failure due to a minor error in the game’s code, which overestimated the amount of alcohol ingested.Most games don’t simulate anything nearly as complex as alcohol poisoning and feline grooming, but Dwarf Fortress does, and the way that its code generates these bizarre situations is symbolic of what people love about it. Dwarf Fortress has a unique, incredibly complicated approach to storytelling and play, but it looks like pure Matrix code, composed entirely of coloured text. Any casual observer would find it indecipherable. Continue reading...

Sam Bankman-Fried makes statement even as new boss begins formal bankruptcy processSam Bankman-Fried, the former chief executive of the collapsed crypto exchange FTX, has claimed the company he founded is still solvent, even as its new boss, who oversaw the final days of Enron, begins the formal bankruptcy process.In a series of tweets posted overnight on Tuesday, Bankman-Fried insisted the company had about $9bn (£7.6bn) of assets, in a mixture of semi-liquid and illiquid holdings, while owing customers only $8bn. Continue reading...

Plenty of games have found real-world success through viral fame on the platform. But can gaming Twitter survive Elon Musk?The End Days of Twitter have provided plenty of entertainment lately – not least someone using Elon Musk’s new paid-for checkmark system to impersonate Nintendo of America and tweet a picture of Mario flipping the bird. But the chaos that has enveloped the funniest and most infuriating social media platform of them all is also causing consternation for game artists, developers and marketers, many of whom view it as integral to their careers. Very Online millennials make up a huge proportion of the video game workforce, and plenty of us have been networking and snarking on Twitter for our entire careers. If the platform either goes away or changes beyond recognition, it will affect the games industry and how it socialises.Plenty of games have found real-world success through viral Twitter fame. Trombone Champ is only the latest example, elevated from the crowded field of weekly Steam releases with a tweet shared by PC Gamer. Untitled Goose Game – the beloved comedy game about a foul fowl – also picked up a huge audience there. And Cult of the Lamb is another recent game that owes at least some of its success to developers and fans’ clever use of Twitter: it’s the modern version of word-of-mouth. I have discovered countless games from seeing interesting clips on Twitter. It’s where I first saw the Bafta-winning Unpacking. It’s also where many journalists, streamers and publisher talent scouts hear about forthcoming games, and where players go to find out what’s generating buzz. Continue reading...

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Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has left many users wondering if they should join its rival, which promises a ‘different kind of social media experience’. But how different is it? I decided to find outHow did I choose this as the day I would leave Twitter, already semi-destroyed by an “eccentric” billionaire, and migrate to Mastodon? Easy, stupid: it was the day after I had sworn never to move to Mastodon. About 230,000 people had flocked to the site in the first week of November. Eugen Rochko, who devised and first published the software that underpins the platform in 2016, promised a “different kind of social media experience,” chiefly one that had “stringent anti-abuse and anti-discrimination policies”. Continue reading...

Hedge fund owned by Christopher Hohn urges Alphabet to emulate cost-cutting measures of Silicon Valley rivalsThe hedge fund of the billionaire Sir Christopher Hohn has written to Alphabet saying staff at the Google and YouTube parent are paid too much and its workforce should be drastically cut back.London-based TCI, which has been a significant investor in the company since 2017 and holds a stake valued at $6bn (£5.1bn), has written to its chief executive, Sundar Pichai, urging it to emulate cost-cutting measures introduced by big tech rivals including the Facebook-owner, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft. Continue reading...