Technology | The Guardian

Feature-packed phablet has stylus, long battery life and unrivalled camera zoom, now made of recycled materialsWith the Galaxy S22 Ultra superphone, Samsung has brought back its popular Note line in all but name, equipping it with a built-in stylus and the competition-beating camera with both 3x and 10x optical zoom from last year’s S21 Ultra.Costing £1,149 ($1,200/A$1,849) it is one of the most expensive non-folding phones you can buy but it offers features you simply can’t get on other phones and will receive at least five years of software updates – longer than any other Android.Main screen: 6.8in QHD+ Dynamic Amoled 2X (500ppi) 120HzProcessor: Samsung Exynos 2200 (EU) or Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 (US)RAM: 8 or 12GB of RAMStorage: 128, 256, 512GB or 1TBOperating system: One UI 4.1 based on Android 12Camera: Quad rear camera: 108MP wide, 12MP ultra-wide, 10MP 3x and 10x telephoto; 40MP front-facingConnectivity: 5G, USB-C, wifi 6E, NFC, Bluetooth 5.2, UWB and GNSSWater resistance: IP68 (1.5m for 30 mins)Dimensions: 163.3 x 77.9 x 8.9mmWeight: 228g Continue reading...

Once regarded as a useful but dull tool for professional networking, the service has added features such as video profiles to attract a younger audience. But will it work?If you heard that there’s a social network attracting 200 new users every minute, has its users making 9,000 new connections, and which says that the often hard-to-reach gen Zers make up a growing fraction of that new activity, you would probably think it must be Snapchat, TikTok, or some new social network that you have never heard of – but you would be wrong.One further official company statistic would make the answer glaringly obvious: the site also handles 4,500 job adverts every minute, and claims that six people actually get a new job each minute too. With that detail, it could only be LinkedIn – the social media network many of us tend to forget exists. Continue reading...

The ads, some offering loans delivered ‘faster than a pizza’, appear to deliberately target those in financial troubleGoogle is profiting from ads promoting “instant” cash and loans delivered “faster than pizza” despite a pledge to ​protect users from “deceptive and harmful” financial products.The ads were served to people in the UK who searched terms like “quick money now” and “need money help”​ and directed users to ​firms offering high-interest loans. Continue reading...

Elizabeth Williamson’s book on the 2012 elementary school shooting is a near-unbearable, necessary indictment of Facebook, YouTube and the conspiracy theories they spreadEven in a country now completely inured to the horrors of mass shootings, the massacre at Sandy Hook remains lodged in the minds of everyone old enough to remember it. Ten years ago, 20-year-old Adam Lanza fired 154 rounds from an AR-15-style rifle in less than five minutes. Twenty extremely young children and six adults were killed.It was the worst elementary school shooting in American history. Continue reading...

Videos of the heists are all set to one song – Simon Latorre’s Chutero Yo Soy – which is now an anthem for those in the tradeHigh in the Bolivian Altiplano, Challapata is where the road from La Paz splits: one way to Potosí and the other to Uyuni and the salt flats. It seems an unremarkable place; many tourists steam through without even realising. But Bolivians know it to be home to the country’s biggest contraband car fair, a hub in a trade network that reaches from Japan to the Bolivian Amazon.Contraband cars – known as chutos – are nothing new in Bolivia. But those behind the business have recently received a fresh burst of attention, as a younger generation has taken to posting videos of their adrenaline-fueled border runs on Tiktok. Continue reading...

Ukraine’s previously booming tech sector has shown impressive resilience in face of Russian invasion

The Google-owned platform said the invasion of Ukraine fell under its violent events policy and violating material would be removedYouTube announced on Friday that it had begun blocking access globally to channels associated with Russian state-funded media, citing a policy barring content that denies, minimizes or trivializes well-documented violent events.The video platform had previously blocked the channels, specifically those of Russia Today and Sputnik, across Europe. Continue reading...

Ukrainian websites have been subjected to a relentless series of attacks – but what will happen when the sights are set on America?The war between Russia and Ukraine has been widely anticipated to play out online, in addition to on the ground.Moscow’s cyberwar capabilities have long been cause for concern. Russia has a record of coordinating cyber-attacks on the US, Ukraine and other adversaries. And the country has established itself in recent years as an international hub for cybercrime. Continue reading...

The Tor-friendly site follows moves by Facebook and BBC who also had their platforms restricted on state-owned mediaTwitter has launched a privacy-protected version of its site to bypass surveillance and censorship after Russia restricted access to its service in the country.Russia has blocked access to Facebook and has limited Twitter in an attempt to try to restrict the flow of information about its war in Ukraine. Both companies have said they are working on restoring access to people inside Russia even as they restrict the country’s state media from their services. Continue reading...

The comedian and self-described ‘laggard’ shares what cracks him up online – including many long-forgotten morsels of Australian historyI never really got formally introduced to the internet. I was off wandering around when it came out. Been a bit of a laggard since; I still have a Hotmail account.Most of my time now on the internet is spent watching other people’s barbecuing techniques or looking at videos and articles about people having fights on planes. The following stuff has probably already passed across your desk because it’s old. I don’t care; there’s rewatch value. Continue reading...

Experts says both sides may understand that large-scale cyber-attacks will result in ‘mutually assured destruction of systems’As military conflict has mounted between Ukraine and Russia, so have fears of unprecedented cyberwar.Experts are monitoring both countries closely, fearing a volatile crisis involving one of the world’s leading hacking super powers could lead to a huge conflict playing out online – one that could outlast the physical battles. Continue reading...

House judiciary committee asks Merrick Garland to investigate whether retail giant obstructed Congress with misleading conductMembers of the Democratic-controlled House judiciary committee have referred Amazon to the Department of Justice, alleging “potentially criminal conduct” by the company and some of its senior executives.In a letter to the attorney general, Merrick Garland, lawmakers claim that Amazon had engaged in a “pattern and practice of misleading conduct that suggests” it was acting to influence the committee’s investigation into online market competition. Continue reading...

Action comes as officials increasingly voice concern that Russia may be using cryptocurrency to avoid the impact of sanctionsJoe Biden on Wednesday signed an executive order on government oversight of cryptocurrency that urges the Federal Reserve to explore whether the central bank should jump in and create its own digital currency.The Biden administration views the explosive popularity of cryptocurrency as an opportunity to examine the risks and benefits of digital assets, said a senior administration official who previewed the order Tuesday on the condition of anonymity, terms set by the White House. Continue reading...

A new documentary chronicles the adventures of the Grannies, a group of friends who went looking for the glitchy event horizon of Rockstar’s virtual-western epicThe story of online cowboy posse the Grannies starts, as video games so often do, in a character creation menu. Having played through the single-player story of Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption 2, Kalonica Quigley and Marigold Bartlett, Melbourne-based friends and game developers, decided to try the online multiplayer portion of the game. On separate PlayStation 4s, and without one another’s knowledge, they each created elderly women as their avatars. It was an opportunity, laughs Bartlett over a Discord call, to cosplay as themselves in the future.Not long after, friends and fellow game-makers Ian MacLarty and Andy Brophy, rendered as elderly men, joined them. The group hung out in Rockstar’s staggering, almost photorealistic depiction of the US on the brink of the 20th century, taking photos and making their own silly fun beyond the game’s murderous objectives. Then they started seeking out glitches, faults or weirdnesses in its code. Continue reading...

Musk lawyers accused US regulators of ‘micro-management’ but experts call the move an ‘exercise in legal silliness’Elon Musk has asked a federal judge to terminate his 2018 agreement with the top US securities regulator requiring some of his tweets to be vetted by a lawyer.Musk also asked the judge to block a US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) subpoena requesting records of pre-approval of a Twitter poll he conducted in November on potentially selling some of his stock. Continue reading...

John Barksdale faces up to 65 in prison in connection with Ormeus Coin as well as facing civil charges alongside JonAtina BarksdaleUS authorities on Tuesday filed criminal charges against a cryptocurrency executive and civil charges against him and his sister, accusing them of defrauding retail investors out of millions of dollars with a digital token known as Ormeus Coin.In papers filed in Manhattan federal court, the justice department said John Barksdale lied about the value and profitability of Ormeus Coin’s mining assets, including that the coin was backed by a $250m mining operation generating more than $5m of monthly revenue. Continue reading...

Cheapest iPhone gets 5G plus updated iPad Air and new power computer aimed at creative prosApple has announced a new version of its cheapest iPhone, an updated iPad Air tablet and a new powerful professional desktop computer called the Mac Studio.During a livestreamed event on Tuesday, Apple’s chief executive Tim Cook also announced that the firm would begin showing Friday night Major League Baseball games on its Apple TV+ service in the US, UK, Australia and other markets. Continue reading...

Too many of us found ourselves hotly arguing about a pointless question last week. Why can’t we help wasting time on inconsequential online queries such as what colour is The Dress or how dogs would wear trousers?The internet is no place for reasonable discussion. This is a lesson that was recently learned in the most painful way by Auckland resident Ryan Nixon, who last weekend made the innocent mistake of asking Twitter whether there were more doors or wheels in the world.A whopping 223,347 people replied and filled out his poll, with 53.6% of them guessing there were more wheels in the world. One guy worked out a complex formula on a piece of paper. Others argued that a wheel can be a door but a door cannot be a wheel. One particularly deep thinker pointed out that, while wheels are a human invention, doors “are primal – even celestial – in nature”. The debate, which will never be definitively resolved, continues. Sorry for putting it into your brain. Continue reading...

The Russian artist – who spent two years in a Siberian jail for singing an anti-Putin ‘punk prayer’ – is using NFTs to fight the dictator, raising $7m in five days. At a time like this, she says, only activism will keep you saneNadya Tolokonnikova is in a geographically undisclosed location, speaking to me on Zoom, in a Pussy Riot T-shirt, looking purposeful, driven and singleminded. Her feminist protest art has been deadly serious since its inception, when she founded Pussy Riot in 2011. The watching world may have been entertained by its playful notes, the guerrilla gigs in unauthorised places, culminating in the event for which she was prosecuted, in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, when she sang Punk Prayer: Mother of God, Drive Putin Away.But the consequences have always been seismic and severe. Tolokonnikova, along with two other members of Pussy Riot, were sentenced to two years in prison for hooliganism in 2012, separated from their very young children, went on hunger strike, endured unimaginably harsh conditions and were named prisoners of conscience by Amnesty International. Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: Interface design is a serious science, yet gamers have embraced FromSoftware’s dodgy menus

Chinese-owned video platform blocks new content after Kremlin criminalises reporting of Ukraine invasion

MPs want restrictions placed on the company, known as Russia’s Google, which also runs the Yango Deli grocery service

The Russians are unexpectedly losing the battle on social media. But defeating Putin on the ground is another matterSo is the conflict in Ukraine – as some of the world’s media seem to think, the “TikTok war” – or, more generically, “the first social media war”? As Russian tanks rolled into the country, videos of frightened people huddling together, explosions blasting through urban streets and missiles streaking across Ukrainian skies suddenly replaced TikTok’s usual fare of memes, jokes, fitness and dance videos. “Ukrainian social media influencers,” reported Reuters, “uploaded bleak scenes of themselves wrapped in blankets in underground bunkers and army tanks rolling down residential streets, juxtaposed against photos of blooming flowers and laughing friends at restaurants that honoured more peaceful memories of their home towns. They urged their followers to pray for Ukraine, donate to support the Ukrainian military and demanded Russian users in particular to join anti-war efforts.” TikTok users across the country began livestreaming the war and the buildup of Russian forces, denying Vlad the Invader the ability to dominate the narrative about what was happening.All of which is impressive. It was a light (sometimes the only light last week) shining in the darkness. What we were seeing, wrote Chris Stokel-Walker on Vice, was the “meme-ification of the Ukraine invasion”. In a networked world, this is supposedly a big deal because memes can be used to dominate the information space – now believed to be an important element of any conflict. The strange thing is that, up to now, we thought that the Russians were the Olympic champions of this stuff. Continue reading...

It’s the most popular messaging service in Ukraine, and used by protesters of all kinds. Now it must find a way to make moneyIn the days after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of his country, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, used his Telegram channel to send a defiant video message from the centre of the capital, Kyiv, calling on the nation to unite and resist the Russian attack.The WhatsApp-like messaging service, co-founded by exiled Russian billionaire brothers Pavel and Nikolai Durov, has become a key weapon in a digital propaganda battle that will ultimately boost its usage and investor profile ahead of a possible $50bn stock market flotation next year. Continue reading...

The British photojournalist on following the Kuch migration in the mountains in IranIt wasn’t navigating rocky paths, herding hundreds of animals or the prospect of spending 14 nights in a tent that Emily Garthwaite was thinking about on her first day on the Zagros mountain range. It was where she fitted within Hossein and Jahan’s family.The British-born photojournalist, who has lived in northern Iraq since 2019, was joining the husband and wife, three of their nine children, other relatives, plus donkeys, dogs, sheep, goats and horses, for their biannual Kuch (migration). The nomad family of the Bakhtiari tribe were moving to warmer pastures for the winter months of 2020, a 250km walk. Continue reading...

Social media platform is a popular news source for young adults, but misinformation is commonplace• Russia-Ukraine war: live newsTrucks carrying large cylindrical containers sweep down a snowy road to a soundtrack of hollering and an alarming, if amateurish, caption: “RUSIA NUCLEAR BOMB”. The video was taken down, but not before it received 18m views. Welcome to the Russia-Ukraine conflict on TikTok.TikTok has 1 billion users worldwide and is an important news source for adults and particularly those under 25. A quarter of US adults say they always use TikTok to get the news, with nearly half of US millennial and Gen Z adults – under-41s and under-25s respectively – indicating the same, according to analysis firm Forrester Research. Continue reading...

In the new series Super Pumped, Joseph Gordon-Levitt brings ‘ruthless’ Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick to life along with his extreme career highs and lowsIn dark jacket, grey sweater and white undershirt, Travis Kalanick was relaxed in comfy chair, coffee mug before him, shooting the breeze with late-night TV host Stephen Colbert. Then came a cry from the studio audience.“Shame! Respect drivers’ labour! Respect professional full-time work!” The camera picked out a T-shirt-wearing protester who, standing and cupping his hands to his mouth, yelled: “Uber exploits taxi drivers for profit and kills professional full-time work in the taxi industry!” Continue reading...

Trading platform boss says "‘crypto is too small for Russia’ and more focus should be placed on the banking systemThe founder of Binance, the cryptocurrency trading platform, has dismissed fears that virtual money could be used by the Kremlin to evade sanctions as he claimed that “crypto is too small for Russia”.Changpeng Zhao said cryptocurrencies also defeated attempts to work around sanctions by being too traceable, adding that more focus should be placed on banks. In a statement Zhao said the media and politicians should be focusing on conventional lenders and the oil and gas market. Continue reading...

Ban extends to users from those countries trying to book, after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine

The psychological illusionist has a new series that could help ease people’s anxieties. Plus, what really happened when plane passengers were taken hostage by Saddam HusseinDerren Brown’s Bootcamp for Life

People are paying but not staying, as rental platform offers free housing to 100,000 Ukrainian refugees

The British Academy’s game awards will reward titles with a social message as well as the year’s best acting performancesInnovative science-fiction shooter Returnal and creative co-operative platform game It Takes Two lead the nominations for Bafta’s 2022 Games Awards, with eight nominations each in categories from best animation to best game.Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, a flagship PlayStation 5 game from last summer, is in the running for seven awards, while driving-tourism racer Forza Horizon 5 and surreal psychological adventure Psychonauts 2 have six nominations each. In total, 39 games have been nominated across the awards’ 16 categories, celebrating excellence in everything from sound design and animation to narrative. Continue reading...

In an attempt to lure more viewers to the increasingly unwatched Oscars ceremony, a hashtag award has been introduced and quickly transformed into a circusUnless you happen to have a vested interest in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, it’s plain to see that the Oscars are trapped in a death spiral. Viewers are abandoning the ceremony in record numbers and, after last year’s debacle – a bizarre jokeless gushfest held in a train station – it’s hard to see how they will ever return.Fortunately, the Academy braintrust has schemed up two dramatic changes to this year’s ceremony that should help to bring things back into line. The first is that a bunch of awards won’t actually be televised live but edited into the broadcast, which will help to make the show’s runtime far less punishing. The second change, though, has already backfired. Continue reading...

In HBO series Gaming Wall Street, director Tobias Deml tries to get to the bottom of how Redditors turned a video game retailer into a financial frenzy“Money in, money out,” is how Tobias Deml, creator of the new HBO Max documentary miniseries Gaming Wall Street, explains the common perception of the stock market while on Zoom with the Guardian. “It’s got to come from somewhere, right? But it’s all based on belief in the future. Money’s all belief. We believe in the government, borders, lots of things that aren’t materially real, but nonetheless exist in our shared imagination. The history of humanity is driven by these beliefs.”Stocks are fake, is what he’s saying, as in not real – “fairy dust”, to borrow a term from Matthew McConaughey’s coke-huffing trader in The Wolf of Wall Street, one of the many pop culture figures that zips by in the rapid-fire torrent of memes frenetically edited into Gaming Wall St. Shares of a company are an intangible concept that nonetheless have physical, real-world consequences in their regular minting of princes and paupers. This alchemy has long been the sole purview of high-finance types, professionals who’d have us believe that their business school educations and sophisticated Bloomberg Terminals make them masters of financial systems too hopelessly complex for us knuckle-draggers to comprehend. But in an era when a degree’s worth of knowledge sits waiting on the internet, it was only a matter of time until some normal folks realized that everyone’s making it up as they go. “Anyone who claims to know everything about how the market works is lying to you,” Deml says. Continue reading...

Crypto’s ability to eschew bureaucratic red tape is the best way to provide immediate service to a vulnerable population, experts sayHe would bristle at the term but you might describe Dylan Schultz as a crypto bro. He runs Lavender.Five, a crypto validator service that authenticates transactions on the blockchain (imagine a deregulated branch of the Securities and Exchange Commission).On 25 February, he issued a plea to his 1,700 Twitter followers, “We’ll match any donation made to a charity in support of Ukraine, up to a total of $1,000.” The next day, Schultz posted the fruits of his initiative; 0.028 bitcoin, equaling the total donations of about $1,100, sent to a crypto wallet operated by a Ukrainian military NGO called Come Back Alive. He’s one tiny part of a chorus of countless other crypto holders all over the world who have raced to back Ukrainians in the face of an invading force. Reports claim that more than $30m in cryptocurrency has been funneled to the country since the war began. So has charity finally become decentralized? Continue reading...

Regulators will consider the techniques the company implements to attract young users and keep them watchingA bipartisan group of attorneys general are launching an investigation into whether TikTok is designed and promoted in a “manner that causes or exacerbates physical and mental health harms” for children and young people.Led by the Massachusetts attorney general, Maura Healy, the regulators are investigating whether the company violated consumer protection laws or put the public at risk. Continue reading...

It is being hailed as one of the greatest games of all time, but if you don’t yet know your Margit from your Elden, here is a guide to get you roaming the Lands Between like a proElden Ring has a Metacritic rating of 97%. If you type its name into Twitter you will be flooded with praise and anecdotes from players who have already spent many hours immersed in its arcane world. But what exactly is it? Why are people obsessed with it? And should you join them – or is it too hard? Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: Google, Meta, Twitter, TikTok (and Elon Musk, obviously) have been dragged into the conflict

Changpeng Zhao, founder of Binance, says exchanges will comply with curbs on individuals, but rejects blanket ban

Jack Sweeney has amassed 162,000 Twitter followers on a new account monitoring the private jets of billionaires and tycoonsThe teenager known for tracking Elon Musk’s jet has started to monitor the flight paths of Russian oligarchs as their movements come under increasing scrutiny following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.In a new Twitter account created over the weekend, 19-year-old Jack Sweeney from Florida has already amassed nearly 162,000 followers as the teen tracks the private jets of at least 21 Russian billionaires and tycoons. Continue reading...

The tech giant has many ways of gathering information about its users’ activity – from Prime to Alexa. But how much can it collect and what can you do to keep your life private?From selling books out of Jeff Bezos’s garage to a global conglomerate with a yearly revenue topping $400bn (£290bn), much of the monstrous growth of Amazon has been fuelled by its customers’ data. Continuous analysis of customer data determines, among other things, prices, suggested purchases and what profitable own-label products Amazon chooses to produce. The 200 million users who are Amazon Prime members are not only the corporation’s most valuable customers but also their richest source of user data. The more Amazon and services you use – whether it’s the shopping app, the Kindle e-reader, the Ring doorbell, Echo smart speaker or the Prime streaming service – the more their algorithms can infer what kind of person you are and what you are most likely to buy next. The firm’s software is so accomplished at prediction that third parties can hire its algorithms as a service called Amazon Forecast.Not everyone is happy about this level of surveillance. Those who have requested their data from Amazon are astonished by the vast amounts of information they are sent, including audio files from each time they speak to the company’s voice assistant, Alexa. Continue reading...

Services like PayPal and Square now need your tax information. Scammers are going to be on the prowl to get it tooThanks to new legislation that went into place at the beginning of this year, I predict that a lot of unsuspecting small business owners are about to fall victim to a fresh scam.The scam will relate to legislation around new tax reporting rules that will affect millions of freelancers and small businesses. As I explained in an earlier column, beginning for the 2022 tax year, if you receive more than $600 in total payments during the course of the year from a payment service like PayPal, Venmo (which is owned by PayPal), Square, Stripe or online sales of your products made through Amazon, Etsy and other marketplaces – regardless of how many customers are paying – that payment service is required to report that amount to the IRS and to you by sending a Form 1099-K – used for reporting payments via these third parties – in early 2023. Continue reading...

The New York-based photographer on how he glimpsed the collapse of civilisation during Covid – in the window of a pizza placeWhen Aaron Stern considers what inspires his work, he is reminded of the Leonard Cohen lyric, “There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” In March 2020, as New York City began to shutter and fall silent, the photographer’s busy schedule cleared. He had nothing to do but walk and shoot. “Seeing 80,000 people empty out of the city I’ve called home for 21 years – it was ominous, and fascinating,” he says. “I was trying to find some humour, some lightness.”In the end, he found it in the window of Arturo’s, a pizza place in Lower Manhattan. “The fake relic brought the collapse of Rome to mind, and the fall of that civilisation and democracy, while the glamorous Joe DiMaggio era that once embodied New York is also long gone,” he says. “Here I am, in this post-truth era, post-Capitol attacks, with this disease that’s killing thousands, and I stumbled across this juxtaposition of two previous eras that have also ended. It captured just what I was thinking about.” Continue reading...

What do you do with an online doppelgänger? Use their streaming logins, cancel their bookings or fight them for naming rightsAs I unsubscribe from the ninth email in three days urging me to “refinance now!” if I don’t want to miss a “special rate!”, I curse my email doppelgänger. She’s landed us on a marketing database again and now I’m being inundated with spam.My email doppelgänger is the person whose emails I receive in error, presumably due to an extra vowel or missing dash. I don’t know if she’s actually a “she”, but I’ve constructed an identity for her from the bits and pieces I think I’ve gleaned: female, teacher, resides in the US. Continue reading...

Restrictions come after Facebook limits Kremlin-backed media accounts in wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

Battersea Arts Centre, London

For some generations, voice notes have replaced text messages and even phone calls. But are they the future of communication – or just plain annoying?

The news agency has since deleted the tweet promoting the sale and called it ‘poor choice of imagery’The Associated Press has withdrawn plans to sell a video “of migrants drifting in an overcrowded boat in the Mediterranean” as an NFT after facing a backlash online.The news outlet’s Thursday tweet advertising the clip, which came as Russia’s invasion raised fears of widespread displacement of Ukrainians, provoked accusations that the AP was seeking to profit off of suffering. Continue reading...

Kimbal Musk sold Tesla shares the day before his brother asked Twitter if he should sellThe US Securities and Exchange Commission has reportedly opened an investigation into whether recent stock sales by Tesla CEO Elon Musk and his brother Kimbal Musk violated insider trading rules.The SEC inquiry – first reported by the Wall Street Journal on Thursday – was sparked in part by the Tesla CEO’s own tweets. Continue reading...