Disclosure of subpoenas for board members by blank cheque firm Digital World is latest blow to Donald Trump’s social media plansA US federal grand jury has issued subpoenas to the board members of the company merging with Donald Trump’s social media company, Truth Social.The disclosure, made on Monday by the blank cheque company Digital World Acquisition Corporation, is the latest blow to Trump’s plans to take Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), the creator of Truth Social, public. Continue reading...
by Samuel Gibbs Consumer technology editor on (#60SQ1)
They are essential tools but can be expensive. From trade-ins to refurb there are ways to get a better dealPrices for the same model regularly fluctuate between retailers. While manufacturers typically only sell their phones at the recommended retail price, third-party retailers can discount them depending on stock levels and age, so shop around and check multiple price comparison tools such as Google Shopping, Kelkoo, PriceRunner or Price Spy. Continue reading...
The founder of Binance, the world’s largest digital currency exchange, is on a mission to talk to governments and regulators even as investors retreatChangpeng Zhao does not like ambiguous words. Which is just as well: the crypto industry, in which he is a leading figure, is in turmoil and crying out for clarity.The 45-year-old founder and chief executive of Binance, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, meets the Observer in an upmarket London hotel after one of the most tumultuous weeks in the short history of digital money. Continue reading...
The Chinese tech giant is taking surveillance capitalism to a new level. It’s almost enough to make you feel sorry for ZuckerbergQuestion: what do men and Excel have in common?
Private information collected and retained by companies could be weaponized to prosecute abortion seekers and providersAfter the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade on Friday, calls increased for tech companies to take a stand about the use of online data to incriminate individuals seeking or providing abortion services.Abortion and civil rights advocates have warned that there are few federal regulations on what information is collected and retained by tech firms, making it easy for law enforcement officials to access incriminating data on location, internet searches and communication history. Continue reading...
The New York photographer on the mystery deli worker daydreaming while she workedMelissa Breyer has never met the woman she shot in the window of a Brooklyn deli on her morning run, but she considers the image something of a self-portrait. “When I first moved to New York,” she says, “I was an artist who was also working in a restaurant to make ends meet. There’s so much of that here: young women waiting for their lucky break. She depicted that time – of daydreaming and reverie, a moment of limbo before the next big thing – so beautifully.”Breyer describes photography as a blend of fiction and nonfiction, and “as much of a storytelling tool as a novel can be. There are so many incredible backstories out there that we never hear about. You could see somebody washing a window and just jog by, as I did. Or you could stop, look, and see this beautiful scene. You could pluck one person out of a crowd and take away that anonymity for a moment.” Continue reading...
Liberty hails decision that prior independent authorisation is needed for people’s communications dataThe security and intelligence services must acquire “prior independent authorisation” to obtain people’s communications data from telecom providers, a civil rights campaign group has said, after it won a high court challenge.Liberty hailed a “landmark victory” and said two judges ruled it was unlawful for MI5, MI6 and GCHQ to obtain individuals’ communications data from telecom providers without having prior independent authorisation during criminal investigations. Continue reading...
Consumption down by third since 11 June, with even sharper falls among other cryptocurrency networksThe amount of electricity consumed by the largest cryptocurrency networks has decreased by up to 50% as the “crypto winter” continues to eat at the incomes of “miners” and financial contagion spreads further throughout the sector.The electricity consumption of the bitcoin network has fallen by a third from its high of 11 June, down to an annualised 131 terawatt-hours a year, according to estimates from the crypto analyst Digiconomist. That still equates to the annual consumption of Argentina, with a single conventional bitcoin transaction using the same amount of electricity that a typical US household would use over 50 days. Continue reading...
Global analysis finds increase most sharp among age group, prompting concerns about impact on healthScreen time during the Covid pandemic increased the most among primary schoolchildren, by an extra hour and 20 minutes a day on average, according to the first global review of research.The sharp rise in screen time was associated with poorer diets in children, poor eye health, deteriorating mental health including anxiety, and behavioural problems such as aggression, irritability and increased frequency of temper tantrums, researchers said. Continue reading...
In an NFT world fraught with frauds, few pause to check for fakes: ‘The crypto mindset is they know it’s chaos and bullshit and they don’t care’Snoop Dogg has rapped that “It’s kind of hard being Snoop D-O-double-G”.But apparently not that hard for a Snoop Dogg impersonator who was hired “last minute” by a crypto startup to grab attention at an NFT conference in New York – and ended up fooling just about everyone there. Continue reading...
Report claims Milan-based RCS Lab developed tools to spy on private messages and contacts of targeted devicesAn Italian company’s hacking tools were used to spy on Apple and Android smartphones in Italy and Kazakhstan, Alphabet Inc’s Google said in a new report.Milan-based RCS Lab, whose website claims European law enforcement agencies as clients, developed tools to spy on private messages and contacts of the targeted devices, the report said. Continue reading...
The interests of a significant minority are being neglected as everyday tasks are conducted via smartphones and tabletsOn the eve of this week’s rail strikes, it was reported that industry bosses are planning to phase out paper train tickets and shut almost 1,000 station ticket offices in England. The government says nothing has been decided. But the transport secretary, Grant Shapps, has made no secret of his desire to see savings delivered in this way; some stations, Mr Shapps likes to point out, sell only a handful of tickets each week and the vast majority of transactions have moved online.Irrespective of the outcome of the current standoff with the RMT union, the direction of travel is clear. In the name of modernisation and cost-cutting, station ticket offices are likely to follow many high street bank branches and rural post offices into the vaults of sepia-tinted memory. For those of us who have grown used to the advantages of organising travel via a smartphone, there will be little to mourn. But for people without online access or skills – who tend to be older, poorer and more vulnerable – another small social barrier will have been erected. Continue reading...
Verification in US will require youngsters to provide video or find three adults to vouch for themInstagram will start testing strong age verification for the first time, requiring users who try to change their age from under-18 to over-18 to either upload a video selfie for automatic age verification, or find three adults to vouch for them.The changes, which are initially rolling out in the US, will apply only to users who have already indicated they are under 18, but try to edit their date of birth to gain access to age-restricted features. Continue reading...
Technology promises ability to ‘make the memories last’ by mimicking the voice of anyone it hearsAmazon plans to let people turn their dead loved ones’ voices into digital assistants, with the company promising the ability to “make the memories last”.The company is developing technology that will allow its Alexa digital assistant to mimic the voice of anyone it hears from less than a minute of provided audio, Rohit Prasad, its senior vice-president and head scientist, said on Wednesday. He added that during the coronavirus paramedic “so many of us have lost someone we love”. Continue reading...
by Alexi Duggins, Hannah Verdier and Rachel Aroesti on (#60NXD)
In this week’s newsletter: The comedian goes down the rabbit hole of petty local disputes in Welcome to the Neighbourhood. Plus: five podcasts that will make you smarter
Changpeng Zhao says people would have been happy with current $20,000 value four years agoBitcoin could stay below its historical high of $69,000 for the next two years after the latest digital asset market rout, according to the chief executive of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange.Changpeng Zhao, founder and chief executive of Binance, said people would have been “very happy” four years ago had they been told that bitcoin would be trading at $20,000 in 2022. The cornerstone crypto asset fell below that level at the weekend in a symbolic move that represented a wipeout of gains for many long-term bitcoin holders. Continue reading...
The comedian is ‘bad at the internet’, but has done her best at sharing her online faves – including a 1990s rugby league ad and a fight from Home and AwayI’m bad at the internet. I’ve always been more of an observer than a participant. My cousins were the first in our family to get a computer and the internet. I remember climbing on to a very high barstool watching my older cousin play The Sims while she ignored me. I’ve kept my distance ever since.Being asked to condense everything ever made into a tidy list of 10 is somewhat of an impossible task. And to be honest, the funniest things I’ve seen on the internet are screenshots in group chats I can’t share here. Thankfully, the Guardian made a big song and dance about how everything had to be “legal” and not “mean-spirited”, which reduces the size of the internet considerably. Continue reading...
Company also restricts use of custom neural voice technology owing to deepfake concernsMicrosoft is overhauling its artificial intelligence ethics policies and will no longer let companies use its technology to do things such as infer emotion, gender or age using facial recognition technology, the company has said.As part of its new “responsible AI standard”, Microsoft says it intends to keep “people and their goals at the centre of system design decisions”. The high-level principles will lead to real changes in practice, the company says, with some features being tweaked and others withdrawn from sale. Continue reading...
Elizabeth Holmes’s former partner could face 20 years in prison on charges he defrauded investors in blood startupSunny Balwani, the former Theranos executive and romantic partner of Elizabeth Holmes, could face a verdict this week on charges he defrauded company investors and patients, bringing the final chapter of the Theranos legal saga to a close.Lawyers in the case began final arguments in the trial on Tuesday in a courtroom in San Jose, California. After both parties rest their cases, jurors will begin deliberation. Balwani faces up to 20 years in prison on similar charges to those brought against his alleged co-conspirator, Holmes, whose case was decided in January of this year. Continue reading...
In this week’s newsletter: Crypto giant Celsius is freezing out users as it tries to solve a mammoth lending crisis. So what happens if money in the bank isn’t really there?
With exceptionally high turnover, the company risks churning though available labor pool by 2024Is Amazon about to run out of workers? According to a leaked internal memo, the retail logistics company fears so.“If we continue business as usual, Amazon will deplete the available labor supply in the US network by 2024,” the research, first reported by Recode, stated. Continue reading...
The ‘Lookalike Audience’ tool relies on algorithm that US said discriminates on the basis of race, sex and other characteristicsFacebook will change its algorithms to prevent discriminatory housing advertising and its parent company will subject itself to court oversight to settle a lawsuit brought by the US Department of Justice on Tuesday.In a release, US government officials said that Meta, formerly known as Facebook, reached an agreement to settle the lawsuit filed the same day in Manhattan federal court. Continue reading...
Sensor tech can alert wearer to Covid early, helping to prevent onward transmissionHealth trackers worn on the wrist could be used to spot Covid-19 days before any symptoms appear, according to researchers.Growing numbers of people worldwide use the devices to monitor changes in skin temperature, heart and breathing rates. Now a new study shows that this data could be combined with artificial intelligence (AI) to diagnose Covid-19 even before the first tell-tale signs of the disease appear. Continue reading...
‘I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form,’ she said in a petitionElon Musk’s 18-year-old daughter has legally changed her name to dissassociate herself from her billionaire father, legal filings that came to light Monday show.“I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form,” she said in a petition for both a name change and a new birth certificate. Continue reading...
Tests where you are asked to spot traffic lights or type out wobbly letters may be a thing of the pastAn annoyance, an important security feature, an uncomfortable existential request: however you feel about being asked to prove you are not a robot, it has become a daily occurrence for most of us, but perhaps not one we would miss.A new feature in the upcoming versions of iOS and macOS, Apple’s operating systems for iPhones and computers, promises to give the boot to “captchas” once and for all. Called “automatic verification”, the technology will allow sites to verify you are not a robot without you having to do anything at all. Continue reading...
Company co-founded by Silicon Valley’s Peter Thiel has been criticised for US defence and immigration contractsFor a company tipped to provide the NHS’s new overarching data platform, it is appropriate that Palantir Technologies is named after an all-seeing orb.Palantir, which draws its name from the powerful crystal balls deployed in JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, is the favourite to win a £360m contract for the NHS’s Federated Data Platform (FDP). Covering everything from individual patients’ data to vaccination programmes, waiting lists and medical trials, the FDP will aggregate data from multiple sources and different formats on to a single platform. Continue reading...
Josep Maria García got the shock of his life when he found his image associated with the phrase onlineSoon after the pandemic plunged Spain into confinement, Josep Maria García received a panicked call from his brother-in-law.“He told me not to worry, but that I should google the phrase ‘the worst person you know’,” said García. “I put it in and there I was, everywhere. I scrolled down and it was my face, my face, my face. I thought what is going on?” Continue reading...
The fuss about a bot’s ‘consciousness’ obscures far more troubling concerns‘I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person.” So claimed a Google software program, creating a bizarre controversy over the past week in AI circles and beyond.The programme is called LaMDA, an acronym for Language Model for Dialogue Applications, a project run by Google. The human to whom it declared itself a person was Blake Lemoine, a senior software engineer at Google. He believes that LaMDA is sentient and should be accorded the same rights and courtesies as any other sentient being. It even has preferred pronouns (it/its if you must know). When Google rejected his claims, he published his conversations with LaMDA (or, at least, edited highlights of some conversations) on his blog. At which point, Google suspended him for having made public company secrets and the whole affair became an international cause célèbre. Continue reading...
In the past week bitcoin has fallen 34% and Celsius has put a hold on withdrawals. Some fear the turmoil is far from overThe cryptocurrency market could do with some respite but its convention-breaking nature means there is no hiatus. Trading in digital assets such as bitcoin and ethereum runs 24/7, unlike their conventional peers in equities on the New York and London stock exchanges, which at least get the weekend off.So one torrid week tends to run into another for this most cutting-edge of markets. Bitcoin – the cryptocurrency cornerstone – fell below the key level of $20,000 on Saturday morning, meaning it has dropped 34% in the past seven days, according to CoinGecko, which showed that ethereum, the other pillar of the market, had fallen 40% to $994 in the same period. There are fears bitcoin’s fall will trigger more sell-offs, leading to another tumultuous seven days for digital assets. Continue reading...
Online sales stars enjoy huge influence but can fall foul of the authorities and vanish from the retail multiverseHua Shao stands knee-deep in water at the edge of the sea, behind a table piled high with large crabs. The famous Chinese TV host is sweaty, sunburnt and laughing with a co-host as a red-and-blue fishing boat bobs behind them.“The sea-ears taste so good, it must have been collected from a sea area where the water is very clear,” he tells more than 100,000 people who are watching online. Continue reading...
The use of synthetic data is a cost‑effective way to teach AI about human responses. But can it help eliminate bias and make self‑driving cars safer?You’re at the wheel of your car but you’re exhausted. Your shoulders start to sag, your neck begins to droop, your eyelids slide down. As your head pitches forward, you swerve off the road and speed through a field, crashing into a tree.But what if your car’s monitoring system recognised the tell-tale signs of drowsiness and prompted you to pull off the road and park instead? The European Commission has legislated that from this year, new vehicles be fitted with systems to catch distracted and sleepy drivers to help avert accidents. Now a number of startups are training artificial intelligence systems to recognise the giveaways in our facial expressions and body language. Continue reading...
Digital asset slides to lowest level since November 2020 as rate rises increase pressure on marketsThe price of bitcoin has fallen below $20,000 (£16,400) amid deepening turmoil in the cryptocurrency market.The cornerstone digital asset slipped to levels not seen since December 2020 on Saturday morning, at one point going under $19,000 before recovering to about $19,160, according to CoinDesk. Continue reading...
Kim Kardashian and Floyd Mayweather among those being sued, but prosecuting fraud in the crypto arena is notoriously difficultWith investors worldwide looking at a collective $1.5tn in recent cryptocurrency losses, a blizzard of class-action lawsuits are being prepared. One big question is: who, if anyone, is to blame – and who could be held to account?With inflation and interest rates rising, the best-known cryptocurrencies have been hit with heavy and continuing losses: Bitcoin has lost more than 50% of its value this year; Ethereum, its largest rival, is down 65%; and the total value of crypto assets has dropped to less than $1tn from its November 2021 peak of $3tn. US federal regulators say 46,000 people have reported losing $1bn in crypto to scams since January 2021. Continue reading...
A trip to the dump resulted in a chance encounter with a dramatic herd of animalsJeremy Piloquet doesn’t like shooting people. Cows, he says, will always be more honest. “When I started out three years ago, I tried street photography, but I was so much more drawn to people’s shadows or silhouettes, their outline from behind – or, even better, when there was no one around. With social media and selfie culture, people are always trying to show their best smile, their best selves. I don’t like that. Animals don’t perform – they act just as they are.”Piloquet took this picture of the herd when returning from his local rubbish dump, having spent a summer’s day emptying his garage. He stayed on his side of the fence, pulled up some grass and lured them over with words of encouragement: “Come on, girl” and, “Time to eat.” Continue reading...
The hip-hop mogul loves to rap about his roots in Brooklyn’s Marcy housing projects. But classes in cryptocurrency show the billionaire is out of touch, residents sayMarcy Houses, the 28-acre public housing development in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, is best-known as a pillar of rapper-turned-mogul Jay-Z’s New York persona. Built in 1949 as part of a push by the New York City Housing Authority to house the city’s low-income residents, Marcy had fallen into a state of dangerous disrepair by the 1970s when Jay-Z, whose real name is Shawn Carter, was growing up there.“Where I’m from, Marcy son, ain’t nothing nice,” he raps in Where I’m From. “Marcy me, just the way I am always gonna be,” he declares in 2017’s Marcy Me. Continue reading...
by Vincent Ni China affairs correspondent on (#60F0C)
Chinese cyberspace is filled with videos showing violence against women and activists say only real social change will stop the abuseTang Ping, 31, a mother-of-two in the southern Chinese city of Nanning, says in 2014 when her first child was six months old, her husband – an academic – began routinely beating her. She felt hurt but also ashamed, blaming herself for not being a good enough wife. She did not know what to do.Five years ago, after another round of violence, she finally summoned the courage to report her husband to the police. “I was told my injuries were not serious, therefore they could not intervene,” she says, as she prepares to legally dissolve the marriage this week. Continue reading...
by Josh Toussaint-Strauss Ali Assaf Joseph Pierce Rya on (#60DVS)
Bitcoin requires vast amounts of electricity to facilitate its transactions around the globe. More than twice the energy usage per year of Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Amazon combined. This demand has led cryptocurrency mining companies to seek out the cheapest electricity possible, and it doesn't get much cheaper than coal. New bitcoin server farms are popping up across the US next to old power plants, many which had all but discontinued operations. Josh Toussaint-Strauss explores how these dying fossil fuel plants have been been revived in the name of cryptocurrency
The story of the modern web is often told through the stories of Google, Facebook, Amazon. But eBay was the first conquerorOne weekend in September 1995, a software engineer made a website. It wasn’t his first. At 28, Pierre Omidyar had followed the standard accelerated trajectory of Silicon Valley: he had learned to code in seventh grade, and was on track to becoming a millionaire before the age of 30, after having his startup bought by Microsoft. Now he worked for a company that made software for handheld computers, which were widely expected to be the next big thing. But in his spare time, he liked to tinker with side projects on the internet. The idea for this particular project would be simple: a website where people could buy and sell.Buying and selling was still a relatively new idea online. In May 1995, Bill Gates had circulated a memo at Microsoft announcing that the internet was the company’s top priority. In July, a former investment banker named Jeff Bezos launched an online storefront called Amazon.com, which claimed to be “Earth’s biggest bookstore”. The following month, Netscape, creator of the most popular web browser, held its initial public offering (IPO). By the end of the first day of trading, the company was worth almost $3bn – despite being unprofitable. Wall Street was paying attention. The dot-com bubble was starting to inflate. Continue reading...
Consumer champion Justin Gutmann alleges older iPhones made slower to cope with software updatesApple is facing a multimillion-pound legal claim that could reimburse millions of iPhone owners over a secret decision to slow down older phones in 2017.An undocumented battery management system, released in a software update in January that year, slowed down the performance of older iPhones in order to stop them shutting down without warning. But Apple didn’t give users the option to disable the setting, and did not warn them that their phones were being “throttled” deliberately. Continue reading...
A tech watchdog group reveals users can buy materials to build high-powered, automatic weapons in a few clicksGuns, weapon parts and ammunition are widely available for sale on Facebook and Instagram, new research shows, as experts say Meta is not doing enough to stop deadly weapons getting into the wrong hands.Meta policy since 2016 has banned the “sale or use of weapons, ammunition or explosives” between individuals, including “firearms parts”. However, the study from Media Matters for America, a non-profit tech watchdog group, shows users of Instagram and Facebook can buy materials from unregulated sources to build high-powered, automatic weapons in just a few clicks. Continue reading...
The comedian shares his favourite online laughs, including an Instagram account dedicated to terrible real estate agents and a rooster attacking a weatherman
A researcher says Google has created an AI being with smarts and soul, but my own attempt reveals the truth behind those claims. Plus, the latest crypto crash
by Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Washington on (#60BZY)
Deal – which would require approval from US and Israel – would give L3Harris control over controversial Pegasus toolThe US defence contractor L3Harris is in talks to take over NSO Group’s surveillance technology, in a possible deal that would give an American company control over one of the world’s most sophisticated and controversial hacking tools.Multiple sources confirmed that discussions were centred on a sale of the Israeli company’s core technology – or code – as well as a possible transfer of NSO personnel to L3Harris. But any agreement still faces significant hurdles, including requiring the blessing of the US and Israeli governments, which have not yet given the green light to a deal. Continue reading...
It’s easy to be fooled by the mimicry, but consumers need transparency about how such systems are usedThe Google engineer Blake Lemoine wasn’t speaking for the company officially when he claimed that Google’s chatbot LaMDA was sentient, but Lemoine’s misconception shows the risks of designing systems in ways that convince humans they see real, independent intelligence in a program. If we believe that text-generating machines are sentient, what actions might we take based on the text they generate? It led Lemoine to leak secret transcripts from the program, resulting in his current suspension from the organisation.Google is decidedly leaning in to that kind of design, as seen in Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai’s demo of that same chatbot at Google I/O in May 2021, where he prompted LaMDA to speak in the voice of Pluto and share some fun facts about the ex-planet. As Google plans to make this a core consumer-facing technology, the fact that one of its own engineers was fooled highlights the need for these systems to be transparent.Emily M Bender is a professor of linguistics at the University of Washington and co-author of several papers on the risks of massive deployment of pattern recognition at scale Continue reading...
World’s richest person to take questions from employees amid concerns over attempted takeoverElon Musk will speak to Twitter employees this week for the first time since launching his $44bn (£36bn) bid in April, a source said on Monday, citing an email from Twitter chief executive, Parag Agrawal, to staff.The meeting is scheduled for Thursday, and Musk will take questions directly from Twitter employees, the source added. Continue reading...
More than 100 of the coffee shop’s locations have unionized, while just one Amazon warehouse has managed itIn a historic win in December, baristas in Buffalo voted to make their Starbucks the first of more than 9,000 corporate-operated Starbucks in the US to unionize. Since then, 143 other Starbucks have unionized and workers at 120 other locations have petitioned for union elections.In another historic victory, a vote count on 1 April showed that workers at an 8,300-employee Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, New York, had voted to make theirs the first unionized Amazon facility in the country. Since then, however, no other Amazon warehouse has even petitioned for a union election (although workers at a 1,500-employee Amazon facility in Staten Island later voted to reject unionization). Continue reading...
Technology | The Guardian