Technology | The Guardian

Some claim the rise in winter infections has been caused by the reduction of seasonal bugs during lockdowns. But experts are sceptical about these oversimplified explanationsThe deaths of at least 190 people, including 30 children, from the invasive bacterial infection group A streptococcus, or strep A, are the most extreme consequences of a wave of winter infections that have seemingly left most of the country coughing and sneezing. The parlous state of the nation’s health has prompted suggestions that we are now paying an “immunity debt” incurred by the reduction of common infections during the Covid-19 lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. But experts seem divided about whether the debt concept is genuine, let alone whether it explains the prevalence of non-Covid afflictions.As with so many of the debates about the outcomes of the pandemic, there do not appear to be simple answers – but no shortage of self-proclaimed “experts” ready to give them anyway. While there are good reasons to believe that the measures taken to reduce the spread of the coronavirus have broader implications for common infectious diseases, there is no one-case-fits-all explanation for the spate of winter bugs, much less any obvious conclusions to be drawn about pandemic management. Continue reading...

Investors are pursuing legal action against Virgin Galactic, claiming its carrier aircraft and space vehicle were not designed for regular space travelIn a desert basin in New Mexico, Richard Branson hopes history will be made later this year with the launch of Virgin Galactic’s first commercial flights to the edge of space, with tickets costing about $450,000 (£370,000) each.It is an ambitious schedule to launch the “world’s first commercial spaceliner” at Spaceport America, even though it is already more than a decade late. Continue reading...

An art historian, a critic and a gallerist are tasked with guessing whether a piece is by an important artist or a clever bot. It turns out it’s harder than it looksThe year 2022 was when AI-generated images went viral. Online, you may have come across very realistic yet suspiciously improbable images of, say, an astronaut riding a horse through space or an avocado doubling as an armchair.Numerous new generators – including Dall-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion – offer anyone with an internet connection the chance to conjure up their own strange apparition, simply by typing in a “prompt” for the AI. (For example, “astronaut astride horse on Mars”. Or, for this article, “Mark Rothko Abstract Expressionist oil painting” – yes, the image above isn’t a real Rothko.) The possibilities have been endless, the opportunity for meme-making infinite. Continue reading...

Ask the AI program a question, as millions have in recent weeks, and it will do its best to respond

For at least a decade, researchers have speculated that sex with robots is just around the corner but that is yet to materialiseThe man leans towards the woman on his couch. “What is your favourite meal?” he asks, his accent French. “Electricity,” she says, with a strong Scottish inflection. “It provides me energy and has a kick to it.”The slight, bespectacled, increasingly bemused man peppers her with questions as they sit. Her blond hair gleams, her dark-rimmed eyes are placid, her lips a full and glossy pout. “Can I call you Charlotte?” he asks. Continue reading...

Price of cheapest Model 3 saloon car dropped by £5,500 to £42,990 to combat slowing demand as carmaker shares dropTesla has cut the prices of its cars in the US and Europe by up to a fifth as it contends with slowing demand and increased competition.The US carmaker expanded its sales by 40% during 2022 to 1.3m, making it the world’s largest manufacturer of pure battery electric cars, ahead of China’s BYD. However, investors have started to worry that sales growth will be limited by economic slowdowns in some of its key markets. Continue reading...

Guardian science correspondent is put to the test in the panic-inducing VR world of a game that teaches breathing techniqueTethered to a chair, in a gloomy basement, I’m doing my best not to panic – by breathing in for four seconds, holding for seven, and slowly releasing for eight. But when a bloodthirsty monster appears at my feet and starts crawling towards me, I don’t need a dial to tell me that my heart is pounding, and I’m in imminent mortal danger.Welcome to the future of anxiety treatment: a virtual reality (VR) game that teaches you a breathing technique to help calm your nerves, and then pits you against a monstrous humanoid that wants to eat you, to practise deploying it in genuinely panic-inducing situations. Continue reading...

‘Compensation’ for CEO down from $99.4m in 2022 to an expected $49m for current yearThe Apple chief executive, Tim Cook, is expected to have his pay cut by almost 50% this year to about $49m (£40m) after the billionaire boss asked the company to “adjust his compensation” in the light of feedback from shareholders disappointed at the fall in the company’s share price.Cook, 62, who became CEO after the co-founder Steve Jobs stepped down before his death in 2011, was paid $99.4m in 2022 and $98.8m in 2021. But the company said in a regulatory filing late on Thursday night that it had set a “target compensation” of $49m for 2023. Continue reading...

Social media bosses who breach child safety rules may face jail if Ofcom given powers to prosecute

Postal service has been unable to send letters and parcels overseas since Wednesday due to hackingRoyal Mail has been hit by a ransomware attack by a criminal group, which has threatened to publish the stolen information online.The postal service has received a ransom note purporting to be from LockBit, a hacker group widely thought to have close links to Russia. Continue reading...

Lawsuit targets Voyager after Guardian investigation uncovered police partnership and company’s claims it could predict crimeMeta has sued to block a surveillance company from using Facebook and Instagram, alleging the firm, which has partnered with law enforcement, created tens of thousands of fake accounts to collect user data.A complaint filed on Thursday asks a judge to permanently ban Voyager Labs from accessing Meta’s sites and comes after a Guardian investigation revealed the company had partnered with the Los Angeles police department (LAPD) in 2019 and claimed that it could use social media information to predict who may commit a future crime. Continue reading...

The Louis Thorold Foundation, set up by Rachael and Chris Thorold in memory of their son, campaigns for safer roadsLouis Thorold was “just a perfect little baby, smiley and happy”, recalls his father, Chris. One of the five-month-old’s favourite toys was a plush elephant with crinkly ears. His mother, Rachael, remembers how relaxed Louis was, sleeping easily and even nodding off in her arms when she took him for weekly swimming lessons. “We were so happy, we thought we had a lifetime of days like this ahead.”Yet for eight weeks after her son was killed in a road accident that left her with catastrophic injuries, Rachael had no memory that she had even had a child. Continue reading...

Nintendo Switch; Sidebar Games

Workers received no warning before the termination of their jobs in December, shortly after Elon Musk’s takeover of the companyLaureta, a single mother and janitor for years at Twitter’s offices in New York City, would like Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest people and the new owner of the social media giant, to know just how he ruined her Christmas.Like other janitors at Twitter – and many other employees at the troubled company, which has shed thousands of staff – she said she never received any explanation for her sudden layoff. Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: Investors threw millions at a coin themed on the Netflix hit – that never appeared. Find out how in The Squid Scam. Plus: five of the best podcasts about celebrity scandals

So much is happening, both wonderful and terrible – and it matters how we tell it. We can’t erase the bad news, but to ignore the good is the route to indifference or despairEvery crisis is in part a storytelling crisis. This is as true of climate chaos as anything else. We are hemmed in by stories that prevent us from seeing, or believing in, or acting on the possibilities for change. Some are habits of mind, some are industry propaganda. Sometimes, the situation has changed but the stories haven’t, and people follow the old versions, like outdated maps, into dead ends.We need to leave the age of fossil fuel behind, swiftly and decisively. But what drives our machines won’t change until we change what drives our ideas. The visionary organiser adrienne maree brown wrote not long ago that there is an element of science fiction in climate action: “We are shaping the future we long for and have not yet experienced. I believe that we are in an imagination battle.” Continue reading...

Media firm says personal data of UK staff members was accessed in ‘highly sophisticated’ cyber-attack last monthThe Guardian has confirmed it was hit by a ransomware attack in December and that the personal data of UK staff members has been accessed in the incident.The Guardian Media Group’s chief executive, Anna Bateson, and the Guardian’s editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner, confirmed the news in an update emailed to staff on Wednesday afternoon. Continue reading...

Princeton senior Edward Tian says GPTZero can root out text composed by the controversial AI bot, but users cite mixed results

In this week’s newsletter: The boom years of smartphone gaming have given way to a naked cash-grab that rewards player-unfriendly design

The story of how investigative journalists exposed the frightening abuse of software that can infect your phoneWhen asked what superpower they would wish for, quite a lot of people choose invisibility. The desire to be able to spy unnoticed on others appeals to something in our nature: a wish for knowledge without retribution.The arrival of the mobile phone, and then the smartphone, has brought that power of invisible oversight to governments willing to pay the comparatively small cost – some millions of pounds – of licensing invasive software that will silently monitor a phone. The most popular one (that we know about) is called Pegasus, created by an Israeli company called NSO. Continue reading...

A perfect storm of wider cultural and economic forces have been pulling the video games industry apart. Is this the year it remakes itself?There are, littered throughout the history of video games, certain years of radical, fundamental change. We can look at the major crashes in the US games industry in 1977 and 1983, where bloated software libraries and hardware gluts destroyed confidence in the medium and cleared out dozens of companies. We can also look at the arrival of the Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn in 1994, which made 32-bit processors and rendered 3D visuals the entire focus of the industry, expunging a generation of competing products, from the Philips CD-i to the Atari Jaguar. I think 2023 could be one of those years of radical change, not because of some major new technical landmark, but because the structure of the games industry is now dissolving and remaking itself.First, we’re going to see a lot more consolidation this year, as major corporations bet on continued growth in the gaming sector. The big precursors were Microsoft’s 2021 purchase of Bethesda and Take-Two’s acquisition of Zynga last year, but that was just the beginning. Tech giants Amazon, Alphabet and Meta are circling the industry eyeing up legacy publishers such as Square Enix and Electronic Arts to get a foothold in the industry, and a neat leg up toward what they all think is the next big thing: the metaverse. But it’s Microsoft’s ongoing attempt to take over Activision, currently being investigated by competition regulators in the US, Europe and the UK, that will be a major focus during 2023. Continue reading...

The restoration of communications to the war-torn Ethiopian region after last month’s peace deal has ended two years of extreme and destructive isolation for TigrayansWhen Lemlem read online that phone lines had been restored to parts of Ethiopia’s war-torn Tigray region last month, she spent the entire night trying to call her elderly mother, who lives in the Tigrayan town of Adwa.“I tried maybe 20 or 30 times but the call wouldn’t go through,” Lemlem said from her home in Maryland in the US. “When I finally heard her voice, it was so emotional. We were crying together and I was just so happy. For two years, I didn’t know if she was alive.” Continue reading...

Doncaster, Hemel Hempstead and Gourock sites to close as well as seven delivery sites, as retailer prepares two new facilitiesAmazon has announced plans to shut three of its 30-plus UK warehouses and seven small delivery sites, affecting more than 1,300 jobs.Workers from the large warehouses in Doncaster, Hemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire and Gourock in western Scotland will be offered roles at other Amazon locations. Continue reading...

From February advertisers will no longer be able to see young users’ gender or type of posts they have engaged withFacebook and Instagram are to tighten restrictions around the data available to firms to target ads at teenage users, the platforms’ parent company, Meta, has said.From February, advertisers will no longer be able see a user’s gender or the type of posts they have engaged with as a way of targeting adverts to them. Under the enhanced restrictions, only a user’s age and location will be used to show them advertising, Meta said. Continue reading...

Inside the social video app’s new scandal. Plus, Musk continues to Trump tech and Apple might finally make the metaverse interesting

Sarah, 59, and Martin, 56, met playing Words with Friends in 2019. They live at opposite ends of the world, but can’t wait to be togetherSarah never imagined that her online word-game addiction would become more than a hobby. But at the end of 2019 it led to an unexpected, long-distance love story. “I was living in Germany but spending a lot of time with my daughter in Switzerland,” says Sarah, who left the UK with her husband when she was 20. “She had had a third baby and needed some extra help. I’d also been widowed in 2018 and was still feeling a bit disoriented.”The Scrabble-style game Words with Friends soon became a nice distraction. “You can play with anyone in the world,” she says. “I would often be sitting in my grandchildren’s rooms waiting for them to sleep while I played.” Continue reading...

Wildlife departments in Washington and Oklahoma have led the way as government officials find a new voice“If you encounter a cougar, never approach or offer it food. You are not a Disney princess.”“Most grandma/reindeer collisions are entirely preventable. Please give wildlife plenty of space.” Continue reading...

The father-son relationship in Sony’s smash hit shows how important actors have become to video games. Its creators discuss their blockbuster success – and the future of gamingIn Los Angeles last month, Al Pacino walked on stage at the Microsoft theatre in front of an audience of video game developers and performers to present a trophy at the Game awards. Looking pleased but mildly baffled, and struggling to read his autocue, he announced the winner: Christopher Judge, for his performance as Kratos in the video game God of War: Ragnarök. Dressed in a sparkling gold suit, Judge enveloped a surprised-looking Pacino in a giant hug before embarking on a 10-minute acceptance speech. “I was the last actor in California to read for this role,” he says. “Back then, if I’d known it was for a video game, I might not have taken it. Boy, how things have changed.”Back in the 00s, Sony’s God of War games were notable for several reasons – their jaw-dropping scale, the bite and immediacy of their combat, the sheer spectacle of their fantasy violence – but they were not exactly famed for their characters. Kratos, the protagonist, was an angry lump of muscle whose narrative arc mostly involved killing bigger and bigger things and getting more and more furious. So when Kratos and God of War returned in 2018 after a long hiatus, it was a surprise to find that not only had he left the realm of Greek mythology for Scandinavia, but he was now a widower, accompanied by a young son with whom he struggled to connect. Continue reading...

Is that Harry Kane and Stormzy arguing over a broken patio tile? This new, CGI-assisted comedy is astonishing to watch – but is it ethically OK?Spencer Jones beckons me into a Soho editing suite. “Do you want to see some of the stuff we’ve done so far?” he asks, readying a clip of his new ITV sketch show. It’s funny enough; a young impressionist does an impersonation of Tom Holland griping about something in his flat.But then Jones stands up and walks me through to a different room. He closes the door and opens up a laptop. “Now watch this,” he says, grinning. It’s the same clip: same script, same flat, same line delivery. But there’s one small difference – this time, incredibly, the sketch is being performed by Tom Holland. Except it isn’t. My jaw drops open, and my eyes start flitting around wildly, unable to compute what I’m seeing. In other words, I have just had my first experience of Deep Fake Neighbour Wars. Continue reading...

Work carried on as usual in the facility as workers were not informed of colleague’s death even as the body lay on the floorOn the morning of 27 December 2022 at the Amazon DEN4 warehouse in Colorado Springs, Colorado, 61-year-old Rick Jacobs died on the job after experiencing a cardiac event, right before a shift change. What happened next has angered his former colleagues.Witnesses say a makeshift barrier around the deceased worker using large cardboard bins was used to block off the area on the outbound shipping dock where the incident occurred, and workers criticized the response and lack of transparency about the incident. Amazon denied boxes were used to cordon off the area, but said managers stood around to make sure no one came near for privacy and security. Continue reading...

The British photographer didn’t want to climb Pulpit Rock in Dorset, but his wife didMatt Writtle wasn’t scared of heights in his youth, but says that over the years he’s become increasingly reluctant to take the risk. As such, the British photographer didn’t make it to the pinnacle of Pulpit Rock, on the Dorset coast, though his wife, Caroline, did. The couple were holidaying with their two young sons, Billy, six, and Thommi, four – a two-week affair of typical British weather and cloudy days by the water.Writtle took the shot from the rock opposite, on his iPhone 10. “I liked the juxtaposition of the young boy entering the frame to the left, and the old man exiting the frame to the right. The people look so small, like ants; the resulting shot is almost Lowry-esque. People have also suggested it reminds them of the evolution of man.” Continue reading...

As Amazon axes 18,000 roles and Tesla loses 65% of its value, we examine the causes of the glitch hitting Silicon ValleyAmazon announced 18,000 job cuts, Apple’s share price fell below $2tn (£1.7tn) and there was more bad news from Tesla: it has been another tough week for big US tech firms.But this has not been a one-off. The ongoing drama at Twitter since its takeover by Elon Musk in October has taken place against a backdrop of global economic uncertainty, retrenchment from aggressive expansion plans and China’s disruptive transition from Covid lockdowns to rocketing case numbers as restrictions ease. Continue reading...

AI-ovens, dual-display or 3D screen laptops and satellite SOS texting shine at Las Vegas tech showFrom colour-changing cars, dual-screen laptops and satellite emergency texts to AI-ovens and a urine-scanning smart toilet upgrade, the annual CES tech show in Las Vegas had more concepts of the future on show than ever before.The biggest consumer gadget show of the year was still quieter than pre-pandemic levels, with the global economic slowdown biting big tech along with everything else. Continue reading...

Information posted on a hacking forum in ‘one of the most significant’ breaches of users’ email addresses and phone numbersHackers stole the email addresses of more than 200 million Twitter users and posted them on an online hacking forum, a security researcher said on Wednesday.The breach “will unfortunately lead to a lot of hacking, targeted phishing and doxxing”, Alon Gal, co-founder of Israeli cybersecurity monitoring firm Hudson Rock, wrote on LinkedIn. He called it “one of the most significant leaks I’ve seen”. Continue reading...

City agency approved raises for drivers by 7.42% per minute and 23.93% per mile but company filed lawsuitAt noon on Thursday, hundreds of Uber drivers gathered outside the company’s headquarters in downtown New York, and chants echoed across the 9/11 Memorial Plaza: “Shame on Uber.”Uber drivers were engaging in a 24-hour strike that began first thing on Thursday in response to Uber’s move to sue New York’s Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) for approving a raise and fare hike. Continue reading...

Administrators jailed for 32 years, and eight years, as activists warn of ploy to infiltrate websiteSaudi Arabia has infiltrated Wikipedia and jailed two administrators in a bid to control content on the website, weeks after a former Twitter worker was jailed in the US for spying for the Saudis.One administrator was jailed for 32 years, and another was sentenced to eight years, the activists said. Continue reading...

Company’s new feature hopes to challenge Google’s search engineMicrosoft is reportedly in the works to launch a version of its search engine Bing using the artificial intelligence behind ChatGPT, launched by OpenAI.The Information reported the news on Tuesday, citing two people with direct knowledge of the plans. Continue reading...

The US bank was forced to sell $5.2bn worth of assets for cash and booked a loss of $718m on those salesCustomers of the US bank Silvergate, one of the few mainstream financial organisations that focuses on providing services to the cryptocurrency sector, have pulled more than $8bn (£6.7bn) of their crypto-related deposits from the lender.More than two-thirds of customers’ deposits were withdrawn in the final three months of 2022, as the collapse of the FTX exchange reverberated around the cryptocurrency world. Continue reading...

Amazon boss blames economic uncertainty and recent rapid hiring while Salesforce cuts 8,000 roles, almost 1 in 10 staffThe jobs purge sweeping US tech firms has escalated as Amazon expanded staff-cutting plans to affect more than 18,000 workers and the software maker Salesforce said it would axe 8,000 employees.Amazon’s reductions are the biggest by a big tech firm over the past year and the largest set of layoffs in the company’s history. The online retailer’s chief executive cited “the uncertain economy” for the move and said Amazon had “hired rapidly over the last several years”. Continue reading...

Dominik Diamond’s 18-year-old son was setting off for his first Christmas away from home. How could he send him off with memories to savour?It was a strange Christmas in the Diamond household, because for the first time in 23 years as a parent, my family wasn’t complete. My 18-year-old son Charlie was spending it with his girlfriend and pals 3,000 miles away on the other side of Canada, so he was away for three weeks. This made me sad, for me, but also happy for him that he is mature enough to make these decisions. One of the aims of parenting is to get your kids into a position where they want to leave home and are able to do so, and my son is a man now.So, we had a Charlie Diamond Christmas before he left. Whatever he wanted to do, we would do. This involved going out for dinner to a place where I actually wore a shirt like a proper grownup and put on trousers that weren’t sweatpants; watching whatever movie he wanted; and playing whatever video games he wanted afterwards. I will admit that I wasn’t looking forward to the last two. He likes horror movies, and I tend to go more for upbeat stuff in my middle age, owing to the unending horrors of real life. Also, he would kick my arse at any of the games he likes. Continue reading...

Sean Monahan, who coined the term, sees a difficult year ahead for Silicon Valley and the music sceneYou may not need to be a trend-forecaster to know this but “2023 is going to be a bad year”. So says Sean Monahan, who writes the substack 8Ball, and last year correctly predicted the “vibe shift” popularized in a widely shared essay in the Cut by Allison P Davis.“It’s hard for me to predict or have a strong intuition on 2023, because the economy is behaving very strangely now,” Monahan tells the Guardian. Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: The British-born woman left London to join the Islamic State at just 15 – but is there more to the story? Plus: five of the best podcasts about music icons

Apple and Google’s AI turn in a booming market may sound less than human and raise the ire of voiceover actors, but it has cost benefitsFor the first few seconds, the narrator of Kristen Ethridge’s new romance audiobook, Shelter from the Storm, sounds like a human being. The voice is light and carefully enunciated, with the slow pacing of any audiobook narrator, as it begins: “There’s a storm coming, and her name is Hope.”Then, something about the pacing of the words grates on the ear. It’s a little too regular, even robotic. “I know that sounds a little crazy,” the breathy voice continues, grinding out the words. “That something so destructive could be labeled with such a peaceful name.” Continue reading...

Agreement caps regulator’s investigation into cryptocurrency’s compliance with requirements to prevent money launderingUS-based cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has reached a $100m settlement with New York’s Department of Financial Services (DFS), the exchange and the regulator said in statements on Wednesday.The settlement, which includes a $50m penalty, caps the regulator’s investigation into the firm’s compliance with requirements to prevent money laundering. Continue reading...

Annual wraps remind me I’m tethered to my phone like a sad puppy. So give me a round-up from the app with the plainest of truthsOver the last few weeks a particularly pernicious form of alert has been clogging up our phones. It is the beast with many heads – all of which are designed to attack me specifically – morphing into different shapes and appearing in the least expected of places. It is the year in review: the content sent out by our favourite and least favourite apps to confirm how much we have depended on them in the past 12 months; how much we are tethered to them like sad puppies waiting for treats (notifications) from our masters.Spotify is the progenitor of this degrading trend: its annual Wrapped began in 2016, when seeing all your data crunched by a corporation was “fun” instead of “a haunting reminder of surveillance capitalism”. With its aggressive kookiness and promises of personal branding, it became a hit among those of us who defined our entire lives by consumption – not the chic kind that befalls a waify Victorian heroine, but a consumption far more prosaic. Suddenly, listening to your depression playlist on repeat 50 times wasn’t just cause for concern, it was also a shareable, snackable badge of pride. Continue reading...

Hands-free, AI buggy on display at CES 2023 automatically brakes, warns of danger and can pilot itself while emptySelf-driving technology has been seen in cars, delivery robots and now a $3,300 (£2,700) “hands-free” motorised stroller that can cruise along with the parent, using AI to detect obstacles and danger on the pavement.The Ella smart stroller by the Canadian startup Glüxkind aims to be the “driver assist” of parenting to bring the buggy into the 21st century. It is being shown off at the annual CES tech show in Las Vegas alongside various other gadgets. Continue reading...

Landlord alleges the social media company owes back rent for its California Street branch in San FranciscoElon Musk is trying to slash expenses at Twitter as close to zero as possible while his personal wealth shrinks – and this apparently has included falling behind on rent payments at the company’s offices.Twitter owes $136,260 (£113,601) in overdue rent on its offices on the 30th floor of a building in downtown San Francisco, according to a lawsuit filed by the building’s landlord last week. Continue reading...

In the 13 years since Ties Carlier and his brother started their e-bike company, it has grown to over 1,000 employees but, he says, there is a lot more to do to improve urban environmentsThe rebuilt Battersea power station in south-west London is an impressive architectural feat: its landmark towers were carefully deconstructed and then rebuilt while the derelict structure beneath was filled with modern conveniences. It has also received its fair share of opprobrium, with critics objecting to the privatisation, monetisation and gentrification the project has entailed.All of which makes it an apt place to meet Ties Carlier, at the new London store of VanMoof, the e-bike company he founded with his brother in 2009. He, too, is out to reinvent an old classic, building it from the ground up for the modern era, injecting convenience and polish where others prefer the more rustic charm of what came before. Continue reading...

With the acquisition of game developer Activision Blizzard in the works, the company is facing investigations by trade commissions the world over. If the deal goes through, could it help the forgotten tech giant gain new relevance?

Twitter bans | New year honours | A flummoxed philosopher | Brief giggles | Hung up on hoi polloiHaving read of Andrew Tate’s attempt to belittle Greta Thunberg, it cheered me up to hear of his arrest. What did surprise me was to read that his vile Twitter account had been reinstated after a ban (Andrew Tate put in 30-day pre-trial detention in Romania after arrest, 30 December). I’m still waiting to get my account back after being mildly rude about Nadine Dorries.