Bankruptcy filing says ‘questions arose’ about founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s leadershipThe collapsed crypto exchange FTX expects to have more than 1 million individual creditors, the company has said in its first bankruptcy filing, scattered across more than 100 companies in the wider group.According to the filing at the bankruptcy court in the US state of Delaware, where FTX US is based, Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and chief executive, stepped down at 4.30am on Friday, “after consultation with his own legal counsel”. Continue reading...
Reflexes start to decline in your 20s, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be competitive at first-person shooters any more. Keith Stuart shares some hard-won knowledgeIt is an unfortunate fact of life that human reflexes slow down as we get older. Medical studies suggest that reaction times peak at 24 and go downhill from there – and nowhere is this more ruthlessly illustrated than in the world of online first-person shooters. Head on to the average Call of Duty, Apex Legends or Overwatch server as a 35-year-old and it can feel as if you’re surrounded by superhuman teenagers with hair-trigger instincts who rack up multiple kills while you’re still deciding whether or not you should have inverted the controls.Fortunately, there’s much more to being good at these games than the ability to hit the fire button faster than anyone else. Approaching middle age doesn’t mean you have to hang up your laser gun and start playing train simulators. You just have to be more strategic. Continue reading...
Whistleblowers claim constant hazards, onsite accidents and wage theft while working on the manufacturing facility in AustinConstruction workers who toiled on one of Tesla’s sprawling so-called gigafactories will file a complaint and a case referral with the federal Department of Labor on Tuesday detailing exploitative work conditions they say they experienced while building the plant.Whistleblowers came forward to allege serious labor and employment violations during construction of the electric car manufacturer’s massive new facility in Austin, Texas, that left them vulnerable to injuries and wage theft. Continue reading...
Yuesheng Wang, a worker at Quebec’s power utility, is accused of sending trade secrets to ChinaCanada’s federal police have charged an electric vehicle battery researcher at Quebec’s power utility with espionage, alleging the worker was covertly sending trade secrets to China.The arrest of Yuesheng Wang, 35, comes as Canada grapples with a barrage of accusations of Chinese interference, including allegations of meddling in its federal elections, as well as reports of secret “police stations” in the country’s largest city. Continue reading...
‘Hard to imagine sector bouncing back quickly from this ordeal,’ committee is toldMost of the customers of failed crypto exchange FTX were institutions but the effects of its collapse are still likely to reverberate across the sector and may affect small retail investors, MPs have been told.“What we’re hearing … is that the majority of the funds in that platform were from institutional investors,” Ian Taylor, the executive director of the industry group Crypto UK, told the Treasury select committee on Monday. Continue reading...
Cuts would be largest in online retailer’s history and follow similar moves by tech companies including Meta and TwitterAmazon is planning to dismiss about 10,000 people in corporate and technology jobs starting as soon as this week, the New York Times reported on Monday, citing people with knowledge of the matter.The cuts would be the largest in Amazon’s history and come as other tech companies including Meta and Twitter are also shedding workers. Continue reading...
Tesla chief says ‘there’s no way to make everyone happy’ amid claims 4,400 contractors have been firedElon Musk has said he has “too much work on my plate” as it was reported that Twitter has axed more than 4,000 contractors working in areas including content moderation and engineering.The Tesla chief executive and the social media platform’s new owner told the B20 business leaders’ conference in Bali that “my workload has recently increased quite a lot”, in apparent reference to his $44bn (£37bn) acquisition of the social media platform on 27 October. Continue reading...
Amazon founder wants to donate much of $124bn wealth to causes such as climate crisis and world unityJeff Bezos has promised to give away the vast majority of his $124bn (£110bn) fortune during his lifetime, but admitted that ensuring that the most worthy causes benefit is proving as difficult as building his Amazon empire.The 58-year-old, the world’s fourth richest person, according to Forbes billionaires list, made the pledge after giving $100m to the country singer Dolly Parton to give to charities of her choice as part of Bezos’s annual Courage and Civility award. Continue reading...
Changpeng Zhao announces plans for an industry ‘recovery fund’ for struggling crypto firmsThe head of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange has said after the collapse of rival FTX that no one can be protected from a “bad player” and announced plans for an industry ‘‘recovery fund” for struggling crypto firms.Changpeng Zhao, the founder and chief executive of Binance, said it was not “100%” the responsibility of watchdogs to protect consumers and the crypto sector had to play its own part. However, he said preventing a rogue figure from evading regulators was difficult. Continue reading...
The blood testing company’s founder could serve up to 20 years in prison after she was convicted in January on four counts of fraudElizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos, will be sentenced this week to up to 20 years in prison for her role in the blood testing company that tumbled from the heights of Silicon Valley after its fraudulent claims were exposed.The sentencing is set to take place in a California courtroom on Friday, after a federal judge denied Holmes’s request for a new trial last week. Holmes had requested a new trial after she said a key witness for the prosecution apologized for the role he played in her conviction. Continue reading...
by Samuel Gibbs Consumer technology editor on (#65SVW)
Supersized smartphone offers regular iPhone performance with extended battery life, but costs extraApple’s new plus-sized iPhone 14 adds a larger screen and longer-lasting battery to a familiar formula, but with a bigger price tag too.The 14 Plus is a brand new iPhone model for this year, costing £949 ($899/A$1,579), making it £100 ($100/A$180) more than the base model 14 but cheaper than the 14 Pro line. Continue reading...
Organisations representing young people express concern amid fears that manifesto pledges on internet safety are under threatThe government is facing mounting criticism from children’s organisations over its failure to protect young people from harmful material online, amid fears that key legislation promised in the Tory party’s 2019 election manifesto to strengthen internet safety could be under threat.The Observer understands from sources close to the discussions that hugely controversial and sensitive changes to the online safety bill were to have been announced to parliament this week by the culture secretary, Michelle Donelan, after ministers across government had been consulted in recent days. Continue reading...
Sources tell Reuters funds were part of $10bn founder Sam Bankman-Fried transferred to his hedge fundAmid the fallout of the implosion of FTX, once the second-largest cryptocurrency exchange, at least $1bn in investor assets appears to be missing, according to multiple reports.On Saturday morning, Reuters reported that FTX was missing at least $1bn in client funds, according to two anonymous sources who held senior positions at FTX and said they had been briefed on the company’s finances. The sources claimed the funds were part of $10bn in client funds that the FTX founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, secretly transferred to Alameda Research, the hedge fund he owns. Continue reading...
Theranos founder faces maximum of 20 years in prison after she was found guilty of fraud and conspiracyFederal prosecutors are asking a judge to sentence Elizabeth Holmes to 15 years in prison and require the Theranos founder to pay $800m in restitution, according to court documents filed on Friday.A jury found Holmes guilty in January of four counts of investor fraud and conspiracy. Her sentencing is scheduled for 18 November, and she faces a maximum 20 years in prison. Continue reading...
The 30-year-old wunderkind last week saw his giant FTX digital currency exchange collapse and his $17bn fortune disappearHe drives a Toyota Corolla to work, lives in a house with 10 roommates and a goldendoodle dog named Gofer, sometimes sleeps under his desk on a beanbag and was, until this week, worth tens of billions of dollars.But on Friday, Sam Bankman-Fried, a curly-haired crypto king and Democratic mega-donor who claimed to be reinventing digital finance, gave up a week-long fight to save FTX, which in three short years since being launched had become the world’s second largest digital currency exchange. He resigned as chief executive and the company and 130 affiliates were placed under US bankruptcy protection. Continue reading...
Image-generators such as Dall-E 2 can produce pictures on any theme you wish for in seconds. Some creatives are alarmed but others are sceptical of the hypeWhen the concept artist and illustrator RJ Palmer first witnessed the fine-tuned photorealism of compositions produced by the AI image generator Dall-E 2, his feeling was one of unease. The tool, released by the AI research company OpenAI, showed a marked improvement on 2021’s Dall-E, and was quickly followed by rivals such as Stable Diffusion and Midjourney. Type in any surreal prompt, from Kermit the frog in the style of Edvard Munch, to Gollum from The Lord of the Rings feasting on a slice of watermelon, and these tools will return a startlingly accurate depiction moments later.The internet revelled in the meme-making opportunities, with a Twitter account documenting “weird Dall-E generations” racking up more than a million followers. Cosmopolitan trumpeted the world’s first AI-generated magazine cover, and technology investors fell over themselves to wave in the new era of “generative AI”. The image-generation capabilities have already spread to video, with the release of Google’s Imagen Video and Meta’s Make-A-Video. Continue reading...
Users fleeing Elon Musk’s takeover will find themselves in a different world – quixotic, communal and defiantly democraticMastodon feels like the old internet. “Welcome to Mastodon, where you can boost a toot from hellsite.site to mas.to, but remember to CW politics and boot doxers or your instance might be defederated” is a sentence that will make sense eventually – but is unlikely to mean anything on your first day.Social media startups are ten a penny, but few are so proudly distinct from the competition as the countercultural network that has gained millions of new users over the past week as Elon Musk triggers an exodus from Twitter. Continue reading...
Russian teenagers hanging out reminded the photographer of his own childhood in a workers’ settlementIt was in woods behind an apartment building that photographer Dmitry Markov noticed a group of teenagers hanging out on the old couch and rope swing. He was in Pskov, a Russian city close to the Estonian border. Markov had grown up 800km away, in Pushkino, which is just outside Moscow, and as rope-swinging was a pastime he fondly remembered from his own youth, he stopped to take a photo on his iPhone X.“I grew up in a workers’ settlement in the 80s and early 90s, where plenty of families faced social problems like unemployment and alcoholism,” he says. “Many children were left to their own devices, got into trouble and ended up with juvenile police records.” Continue reading...
Before Elon Musk took over the badge was granted to celebrities and journalists verified by the platform to prevent impersonationTwitter’s relaunched premium service – which grants blue check verification labels to anyone willing to pay $8 a month – was unavailable on Friday after the social media platform was flooded by a wave of impostor accounts approved by Twitter.The latest move caps a chaotic start for the new subscription service, one of the first major changes made by Elon Musk after taking over the company two weeks ago. Continue reading...
People have predicted robots will destroy the labour market, but Amazon believes investment in robotics could create jobsTrapped in a metal cage in a corner of a 350,000 sq ft Amazon warehouse outside Boston last week a lonely yellow robot arm sorted through packages, preparing items to be shipped out to customers who demand ever-faster delivery. Soon it will be joined by others in a development that could mean the end of thousands of jobs and, Amazon argues, the creation of thousands of others.As the robot worked, a screen displayed its progress. It carefully packed a tub of protein powder, next came a box of napkin rings then … a tube of hemorrhoid cream. As 100 journalists from around the world snapped pictures, someone switched the screen to hide the cream. Continue reading...
Founder Sam Bankman-Fried races to find funds to fill multibillion-dollar hole in exchangeThe Bahamas securities regulator has frozen the assets of the Bahamas subsidiary of FTX, as the world’s second largest cryptocurrency exchange struggles for survival.The Securities Commission of the Bahamas said on Thursday it had frozen the assets of FTX Digital Markets and related parties, as well appointing a liquidator for the unit. Continue reading...
The game developer talks about how the hit smartphone card game is a brand new take on deck-builders – and why one simple quirk makes it irresistible• Read our review of Marvel Snap hereThere’s a lot that is surprising about Marvel Snap, the new free-to-play digital card game from one of the minds behind Hearthstone (and the money behind TikTok). A match takes just five minutes. Both players play their cards at the same time. There’s not a paid-for booster pack in sight. Perhaps the biggest surprise, as the game launches its second monthly season, is that it’s really, really good.I spoke to Ben Brode, the co-founder of Snap’s developer Second Dinner, about what Snap is, how the team set out to fix the problems of existing trading card games, and where they’re going from here. Continue reading...
Departures of top figures handling safety, security, privacy and compliance come amid warnings from Federal Trade CommissionAs Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter entered its third week, and following mass layoffs, the billionaire laid bare a delicate financial future for the social media platform, amid an exodus of top privacy and security executives.Yoel Roth, the head of safety and integrity who had been deputized to publicly address concerns advertisers and users had about the platform, is reportedly the latest to leave the company. Continue reading...
The service now allows users to pay $8 to appear ‘verified’. Celebrity impersonators are having a field dayGeorge W Bush “misses killing Iraqis”, and Tony Blair agrees. OJ Simpson says he did it. And Elon Musk is offering “free nightly dinners” and family vacations to anyone whose name happens to be that of his ex, Grimes.At least, that’s what these famous people appear to be saying on Twitter – and it must all be true, because they have a blue checkmark next to their names. Continue reading...
The blow comes soon after rival Binance backed out of a merger deal this week after due diligence of the exchange’s booksThe swift collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX sent more shockwaves through the crypto world on Thursday, with authorities now investigating the firm for potential securities violations and analysts bracing for a further downturn in crypto prices.FTX had agreed this week to sell itself to its bigger rival Binance after experiencing the cryptocurrency equivalent of a bank run. Customers fled the exchange after becoming concerned about whether FTX had sufficient capital. Continue reading...
Prof Hannah Fry is a joy, and will make you deeply excited about the weirdest things – like the magnetic strip on the back of your bank cardProf Hannah Fry brings her irresistible enthusiasm to the BBC for The Secret Genius of Modern Life (BBC Two), a documentary series about the seemingly simple everyday objects or ideas that we tend to take for granted, and how clever they really are. Fry, a mathematician by trade, who hosts podcasts, writes books and adds weekly cheer to Lauren Laverne’s morning show on 6 Music, is a host who is winningly awestruck at the facts she uncovers and the experiments she conducts. Her interest in finding out everything about everything is hugely contagious.In this first episode, she looks at the humble bank card, though naturally, it turns out to be not so humble after all. There is a lovely brisk pace to the show, which takes in history, science and technology, tracing as many elements as possible back to their roots. It begins with the Fresno Drop, in 1958, in which the Bank of America introduced a credit card to its suspicious customers and kickstarted a technological revolution. It whizzes through the introduction of the magnetic strip, via an acronym-friendly segment on how the CIA worked with IBM on inventing a new form of ID, and follows the money through to online shopping, chip and pin, contactless and what a biometric future may look like. Continue reading...
The behemoths of Silicon Valley face some serious shrinkage and a reckoning with the societies they work inFacebook, Instagram, Twitter, Amazon: these behemoths have shaped our world. This winter, however, the world is shaping them. Faced with a global downturn, a US economy that appears headed for recession and interest rates shooting up across the west, big tech is in big trouble. This week, Meta – the company that owns Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram – declared it will sack 11,000 employees, or more than 13% of its staff. Last week, Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, got rid of half the workforce. In August, Snap, the parent firm of Snapchat, reduced staff by 20%. Amazon has announced a hiring freeze, while the payments-processing platform Stripe is also shedding 14% of its workers.A bleak winter lies ahead for many of those employees and their families, as well as the firms servicing and supplying the big names in technology. And a moment of reckoning is in store for big tech. For some of these companies and many of their managers, this will be their first serious downturn, and the combination of rising interest rates even as the economy sinks could make it a real stinker. The past decade has gifted Silicon Valley easy money and investors desperate to buy growth as well as gangbuster sales of smartphones – the device that spawned millions of apps. Then came the pandemic, which prompted billions of consumers to buy and socialise online. As Mark Zuckerberg admitted this week, Meta was among those businesses that counted on this huge tide staying in for ever. It hasn’t. Continue reading...
Social media has been crucial to pro-democracy protests across the region, from Myanmar to the Milk Tea Alliance in Thailand and Hong KongWhen Thai journalist and free speech defender Pravit Rojanaphruk joined Twitter in 2011, the social media platform was for him just a home for a few academics and politicos arguing among themselves.But over the next decade – in tandem with Thailand’s pro-democracy and monarchy reform movement – young people and activists flocked to Twitter to organise, share information and exchange protest tactics across borders. Pravit himself increasingly turned to his 85,000 followers to get the word out about facing forced resignation and sedition charges for criticising the government. Continue reading...
The announcement comes as three top security officials leave the company and employees are asked to ‘self-certify’ complianceElon Musk has scrapped Twitter’s work from home policy and ordered its staff back to the office, days after firing 3,700 employees.The social media platform’s new owner told staff in an email, seen by the Guardian, that its “road ahead is arduous and will require intense work to succeed”. Continue reading...
Northern Ireland secretary calls on platform’s owner to eliminate fake news after false resignation emailThe battle to curb fake news and fake accounts has swerved into a linguistic debate over the meaning of tosh.“What does a tosh look like?” Elon Musk tweeted on Thursday in reply to a British government minister who appealed to him to intervene after a false claim that he had resigned. Continue reading...
Firm valued at $25bn in 2021 suffered bank run-style crisis as investors rushed to withdraw moneyThe founder of the world’s second largest cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, has apologised for his company’s near-collapse this week, saying he “fucked up” in his calculations and in his communications during the crisis.Sam Bankman-Fried, a billionaire and major donor to the US Democratic party who has lobbied Washington for tighter regulation of the crypto market, was speaking following a run on his Bahamas-headquartered FTX exchange. Continue reading...
In this week’s newsletter: What pushed the al-Qaeda founder to extremism, and to perpetrate the 9/11 attacks? A new show tells his whole story. Plus: five podcasts for nature lovers
The deal was conditional to due diligence of FTX’s balance sheet which raised enough concerns for Binance to back outCryptocurrency prices plunged for a second straight day on Wednesday after crypto exchange platform Binance announced it was pulling out of its deal to purchase its failing rival FTX Trading.Bitcoin sank to a two-year low after Binance confirmed earlier rumors and news reports that it was ready to back out of the FTX deal, struck between the CEOs of the two exchanges on Tuesday. The deal was pending Binance’s due diligence on FTX’s balance sheet. Continue reading...
Elon Musk’s takeover has seen an estimated million users leave the site. But was it already past its prime?Like much of what has happened in recent years, the possibility of Elon Musk taking over and actually managing to destroy Twitter had the quality of a fever dream: something that would probably be a disaster but would almost certainly never happen. It felt likely that, even in the most dramatic case, he would succeed only in making an already bad platform slightly worse. Which is why the last 10 days have awed even Musk’s harshest critics: since he took over Twitter on 27 October, after firing thousands of staff and the company’s entire board so that he became its sole member, the site has truly begun to tank. By Musk’s own admission, the company is losing $4m a day – reportedly in large part due to advertisers fleeing.In the few days after Musk’s takeover, more than a million people are believed to have left the site, many in pursuit of an alternative Twitter-esque platform. While there are several popular existing sites that allow users to create text posts shared to an online message board (like Discord, Reddit, and Tumblr), the emerging favourite is Mastodon: a social networking site which uniquely operates as a nonprofit, effectively pitching itself as “Twitter, but nice”. However, the idea that you can recreate a version of Twitter without Twitter’s pre-existing problems is a pipe dream. It won’t happen on Mastodon; it most probably won’t happen anywhere.Sarah Manavis is an American writer covering technology, culture and society Continue reading...
Musk said he was done selling Tesla stock back in August, before Twitter’s legal action sealed the deal for the $44bn takeoverTesla CEO Elon Musk has sold 19.5 million of his shares in the electric car company, according to filings published by the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday, in a transaction worth $3.95bn.The move comes in the wake of his purchase of Twitter for $44bn. Continue reading...
Twitter troubles | I Spy in Yorkshire | Gavin Williamson’s defenestration | Dishonours system | Don’t forget the editorSeeing the damage that Elon Musk has done to his Twitter brand in such a short time brings to mind the example of Gerald Ratner when, 30 years ago, he described some of his products as “total crap” and remarked that one set of Ratners earrings were cheaper than an M&S prawn sandwich, but probably would not last as long.
Holmes faces up to 20 years in prison after being convicted on 12 counts of fraud and conspiracyA federal judge denied the Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes’s bid for a retrial on investor fraud charges after finding that an attempt by a remorseful prosecution witness to contact her didn’t introduce material new evidence or establish government misconduct – and it wasn’t enough to award her another trial.The ruling issued late Monday by US district judge Edward Davila is a setback for Holmes, who faces up to 20 years in prison at sentencing on 18 November. Holmes was convicted on 12 counts of fraud and conspiracy in January and had previously been denied a request for an acquittal. Continue reading...
Meme artist @Sunday.nobody builds $1,200 sarcophagus for cheesy snack ‘for future civilizations to find’A small bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos has been sealed in an elaborate, 3,000lb, concrete sarcophagus with a gold leaf headstone “for future civilizations to find” by a 28-year-old TikTok user who says “there’s nothing else I’d really want to spend my money on” other than completing a project of this nature.Meme artist @Sunday.nobody, based in Seattle, Washington, said on the TikTok social media video platform that everything about the sarcophagus had been designed and built from scratch, including the exterior moldings and the headstone that lists the Cheetos ingredients. Continue reading...
Three years’ research and a lot of very expensive materials have gone into Steve and Nick Tidball’s thermal camouflage jacket. Can its wearer really blend into the background?Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak arrived in a parcel for Christmas, with a note from Dumbledore: “Use it well.” Ron Weasley’s reaction was, as you might expect, to be insanely jealous. Who, after all, hasn’t dreamed of having the power of passing through the world without being seen?Well, there might just be some good news for Ron and the rest of us. A pair of twins have created something very like an invisibility cloak. No, not the Weasley twins, but real-life brothers Steve and Nick Tidball. They call it the thermal camouflage jacket, and I’ve come to see it and Steve, in the offices of the brothers’ futuristic clothing company, hidden away behind a Travelodge in King’s Cross, London. Continue reading...
Elon Musk’s chaotic first week as chief twit has crystallised fears that the site is in a death spiral. Here’s a handy guide to other platforms – from a Slack-style chatroom to the anti-Twitter
Whether you need something sturdy for your kids or a noise-cancelling haven for yourself, here are gaming headset recommendations for all budgetsRazer’s budget headsets are always very good and though they’re lightweight, they’re pretty strong and reliable – my careless teenage sons have had their Krakens for almost two years and they’ve survived admirably. The Kraken X model is compatible with all the current consoles, it’s comfortable, has decent sound and looks pretty good. The newer, slightly more expensive Razer Barracuda X is another excellent option in the unde-£100 price category. Continue reading...
Verification is free, toots are twice as long as tweets – but you might find it hard to replace your Twitter follower list. Here’s how to use it, find a server to join and navigate the fediverseInterest in the open source social media platform known as Mastodon has spiked again as users look for an alternative to Twitter, should Elon Musk’s takeover spell the end of that website as we know it.If you’re fleeing the sinking ship of Twitter for the potential life raft of Mastodon – or wondering whether to – here’s what you need to know. Continue reading...
Technology | The Guardian