Technology | The Guardian

The site’s recent actions, such as banning critical journalists, appear to indicate policy is made on a whimFacebook’s community standards is a sprawling document, broken down into six top-level categories and 24 subcategories, distinguishing between content that is allowed and that which requires extra context, replete with examples of breaches and justifications for its choices. It is treated with quasi-legalistic power by the company’s oversight board, which incorporates its own precedent, as well as international human rights standards, to occasionally overrule Facebook’s own moderation choices.Twitter’s rulebook is simpler: don’t annoy Elon Musk. Continue reading...

Xbox, PC; Squanch Games

PC, PlayStation; Mads & Friends/Bedtime Digital Games

In this week’s newsletter: Working It from the Financial Times investigates how four businesses are trialling the perhaps revolutionary shorter work week. Plus: five podcasts to lift your spirits

After shedding thousands of jobs with Elon Musk’s takeover, the company is apparently shedding office furniture – and high-end cooking equipmentGreat news, holiday shoppers: you can finally get your hands on a 100% authentic, 3ft-tall statue of the Twitter bird.An online auction next month will feature hundreds of the company’s “surplus corporate office assets” that could add a certain je ne sais quoi to any home or workplace, from bizarre decor to high-end cooking equipment.A 6ft-tall planter in the shape of the @ symbol. Sure to be a hit with the tech-obsessed gardener in your life, this piece marries the ancient art of horticulture with a ubiquitous symbol of decaying public discourse. Expect heads to turn when you install this in front of your home, announcing to passersby that you have no soul. Continue reading...

Charges against Bankman-Fried include violation of campaign finance laws, as new CEO slams FTX in congressional hearing on the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange

After 70 years of research, experts in California have for the first time proven ignition is possible

I’ve been playing Dungeons and Dragons since I was a kid, but my first time directing the action was daunting. I certainly wasn’t expecting what came nextFour bedraggled adventurers stand together on the shore of a desolate island, shivering in the evening mist. They don’t know each other, and their motives for being here are unclear. But as they make stilted conversation they see, emerging from the briny waters, figures dressed in the rags of sailor outfits, moaning and shuffling and horrible. The adventurers stand around, roll some dice and chat some more, as the undead seamen lurch ever closer. Looking on at this desperate scene, I think to myself, “What the hell? Why can’t anyone make a decision? We’ve been here for half an hour! We’ve not even begun the proper adventure yet!”Dungeons and Dragons has always been there in the background of my life. When I was a kid in the late 70s, my dad’s best friend got into it; he’d show me the rule books and dice and tried to explain to me that this was a game about imagination, about pretending to be elves and wizards and warriors on a completely made up adventure. In the 1980s, as I got into video games, we saw the first fantasy adventures based around D&D lore – games with lots of stats on screen, and monsters inspired by Lord of the Rings. Then finally in the 90s I played with a group of friends at university. We huddled in cold rooms with rulebooks, character sheets and cheap supermarket cider and quested into the night. But I was never the Dungeon Master. Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: The leaks don’t reveal a hotbed of leftwing bias at the social media company – just a thin-skinned billionaire rehashing culture wars of years past

We test what devices consume, with households increasingly worried about rising energy pricesHow much does it cost to charge your phone or your toothbrush? Is it really cheaper to use the microwave to cook your food, as has been suggested? With the cost of electricity putting the squeeze on all our finances, and a house full of tech, I decided it was time to see how power-hungry everyday devices really are.We are constantly told that all manner of appliances chew through electricity, and that you can make huge savings by switching off “vampire devices” at the wall. But is that really true? To cut through the fug and find out myself, I grabbed a power meter and spent the last two months testing everything I could. Continue reading...

The firm’s turmoil appears to deepen since Elon Musk’s takeover with Yoel Roth forced to flee home amid personal attacksElon Musk’s Twitter abruptly dissolved its Trust and Safety Council on Monday night, just moments before it was scheduled to meet with company representatives.The council was an advisory group of nearly 100 independent civil, human rights and other organizations that the company formed in 2016 to address hate speech, child exploitation, suicide, self-harm and other problems on the platform. But Twitter informed the group via email that it was disbanding shortly before the meeting was to take place on Monday, according to multiple members. Continue reading...

The new Twitter owner, Elon Musk, was booed for almost 10 minutes after he was introduced on stage by comedian Dave Chappelle on Sunday at the Chase Center in San Francisco. 'Ladies and gentleman make some noise for the richest man in the world,' said Chappelle, as Musk walked on stage with his two arms in the air expecting cheers to ring out. The footage, originally posted to Twitter by a deleted account, showed Musk appearing caught off-guard as the crowd booed continuously, preventing him from getting a word in. 'Cheers and boos, I see,' said Chappelle in response to the crowd's reaction. 'It sounds like some of the people you fired are in the audience,' added the comedian shortly after

Those willing to pay $8 on the web or $11 a month via Apple’s app store will get more prominenceTwitter is relaunching its subscription service on Monday, offering users verified status for $8 (£6.50) a month or $11 a month on their iPhone.The move follows a botched revamp of the service last month that resulted in a host of impersonator accounts appearing on the platform as some users took advantage of the chance to launch bogus “verified” accounts for major companies and public figures. Continue reading...

Machine learning research into changing attitudes to women in the US reveals it’s not just technology that has progressedPeople love new technology. Last week, half the internet was experimenting with ChatGPT, a new artificial intelligence chatbot that can write text on almost any subject under the sun with only the most basic of instructions. You should have a go. Reactions so far focus on predicting the end of education (it can churn out an essay in seconds) or arguing that it’s fun but irrelevant to human progress.Sceptics should note that machine learning and big data analysis is supporting social science progress. Take the debate about cultural norms, where some emphasise the persistence of views passed between generations, while others argue ideas converge between places over time. We struggle to know which view is accurate (surveys of public attitudes are relatively recent or only national).Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk Continue reading...

Light infrastructure has expanded alongside population growth but it’s not only star gazing in jeopardy – cultures, wildlife, science and human health are all threatenedOn a clear dark Queensland night in 1997, Brendan Downs was staring up into the cosmos alongside a band of other amateur astronomers. He trained his telescope on a galaxy called NGC 6769, floating more than 169m light years away, and took a picture.“I had a reference image that I had in a book at the time, and I visually compared the object on the screen to the object in the book,” he says. “I counted the number of stars I was looking at.” Continue reading...

The impressive and wildly popular ChatGPT is the latest instalment in a long-running debate about whether we’re creating machines to help us or replace usThose who, like this columnist, spend too much time online will have noticed a kind of feeding frenzy over the past two weeks. The cause has been the release of an interesting chatbot – a software application capable of conducting an online conversation. The particular bot creating the fuss is ChatGPT, a prototype artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot that focuses on usability and dialogue and was developed by OpenAI, an AI research laboratory based in San Francisco.ChatGPT uses a large language model built via machine-learning methods and is based on OpenAI’s GPT-3 model, which is capable of producing human-like text when given a prompt in natural language. It’s an example of what has come to be called “generative AI”: software that uses machine-learning algorithms to enable machines to generate artificial content – text, images, audio and video content based on its training data – in a way that might persuade a human user into believing that its outputs are “real”. Continue reading...

As ITVX launches and the BBC gets ready to stream not beam, will event viewing become a thing of the past?Hard to miss the huge television events of the last fortnight. There was Matt Hancock emoting away in the jungle on ITV, England scoring actual goals in the World Cup, and then the former royal couple telling it their way in an orchestrated “drop” of the first episodes of an intimate documentary series on Netflix. And even if none of these offerings registered as a personal “appointment to view”, the noise created has certainly been insistent.All the same, there are strong hints that the days of the large, live TV audience, with everybody sharing a scheduled broadcast at the same time, are numbered. The plan, after years of rumour, is for all TV output to be available online only within the next 10 years or so. Broadcast channels, with their daily line-up of shows, are doomed. Programmes (originally so-called because they were “programmed”) will come into our homes as streamed, branded products, rather than being beamed to viewers on a pre-ordained timetable. Continue reading...

Former boss of collapsed crypto-exchange says he has duty to try to recoup investors’ lost moneySam Bankman-Fried, the former boss of the failed crypto-exchange FTX, has said he hopes to start a new business to help pay back the victims of his old firm’s collapse.Speaking to the BBC from the Bahamas, he said he would “give anything” to be able to begin a new venture in order to recoup his users’ lost investments. Continue reading...

Wider economic uncertainty is behind cuts at companies including CNN, BuzzFeed and Gannett, executives sayA wave of layoffs have hit the beleaguered American media industry as several major companies, including CNN, BuzzFeed and Gannett, have laid off hundreds of workers in recent weeks citing economic volatility and uncertainty.The job losses are the first major slate of cuts since the beginning of the pandemic, when a handful of companies laid off workers over the unpredictability of Covid’s impact on the economy. As the economy rebounded with the introduction of the Covid vaccine in 2021, the news industry saw the lowest number of layoffs in years. Continue reading...

Supermodels, an extraordinary immersive show in London, uses animatronics and meticulous construction to create a hybrid digital-analogue beautyWhen the eerily accurate AI image generator Dall-E 2 was released for public experimentation by OpenAI this summer, most people immediately used it to create whimsical scenes such as “samurai dolphin painted in the style of Rembrandt” or “Bruce Willis angrily devouring a cheeseburger on the moon”. True, if you looked too closely at Bruce’s left ear you might have noticed it wasn’t there – but the freaky glitches were, though somewhat unsettling, part of the fun, not to mention a calming reminder that AI cannot entirely trick us that its images are real – yet.But more than one panicked architect also typed in, “Four-storey family home in forest in the style of Mies van der Rohe” or “Japanese-Scandi lounge area in office building lobby”, and let out a tiny scream when the results resembled the renders of projects that architects otherwise spend long hours churning out. If an AI could knock out a decent interior in seconds, did it promise to be a fabulous time-saver – or would it put everyone out of a job? Continue reading...

Founder’s net worth down about $70bn after fall in electric car maker’s share price since he bid for TwitterTesla has lost nearly half its market value since its founder, Elon Musk, bid for Twitter in April, reducing his net worth by about $70bn and putting his title as world’s richest person at risk.Shares in the electric car company traded at $340.79 on 13 April, the day before Twitter revealed in a securities filing that the billionaire had made a hostile bid to buy the social media company for $43.4bn. Since then the Tesla share price has plunged by 49% to $173.44 (£141.29), also due to concerns around disruptions at one of its factories in Shanghai. Continue reading...

Development of technology and tactics of groups like Islamic State have led to rise in online extremismMost convicted terrorists in Britain were turned to extremism by the internet, with half of those radicalised online having some problems with mental health, personality disorders, depression, or autism, the most authoritative study of its kind has found.The study for the Ministry of Justice, released on Thursday, examined official risk assessments of every convicted terrorist in prison since 2010 in England and Wales. The majority were radicalised at least in part online – a trend caused by technology and the tactics of groups such as Islamic State. Continue reading...

Caitlin Cassidy gives Nino Bucci the full picture of the latest ‘magic avatar’ generator and image editing app

In this week’s newsletter: Over the course of 60 hours of interviews from 1993, the revolutionary leader opens up in Mandela: The Lost Tapes. Plus: five of the best podcasts with massive archives

Draw the curtains, pull up your weighted blanket and hunker down with these cosy sims, expansive fantasies or, for actual goblins, subterranean dungeon crawlersEarlier this week, “goblin mode” was announced as Oxford’s word of the year, bringing a new level of awareness – and hopefully acceptance – to this previously misunderstood and maligned lifestyle choice. It is defined as “a type of behaviour which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations” (also known, throughout lockdown, as simply “existing”), though the exact parameters of the term have been much discussed. But one thing is certain: video games are the perfect goblin mode entertainment. They can be enjoyed from bed, they require little energy and yet they simulate a lot of real-world activities so you can at least pretend to be a functioning member of the human race.But not all games are suitable for goblin mode. Pokémon Go is an absolute no-go (you have to go outside) as are Just Dance (you have to stand up) and driving sims such as Gran Turismo 7 (waaaaay too intense). It is important to play games that complement your slovenly state of mind. Here, then, are some perfect picks for those dank, dungeon-dwelling days of duvet exile. Continue reading...

Term slightly longer than one given to Elizabeth Holmes for defrauding investors in now-defunct blood testing firmSunny Balwani, the former Theranos executive and ex-romantic partner of Elizabeth Holmes, has been sentenced to nearly 13 years in prison over his role in the now-defunct blood testing firm.The sentence is slightly longer than that given to Holmes, who was his accomplice in one of Silicon Valley’s biggest scandals, just a few weeks ago. Continue reading...

About 12,000 people reported facing difficulty using the shopping portal, according to Downdetector, a site that tracks outagesAmazon said it has resolved an issue that prevented some users from accessing the shopping site on Wednesday.“We’re sorry that some customers may have temporarily experienced issues while shopping. We have resolved the issue,” a company spokesperson said, but did not provide any details on what caused the outage. Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: Give kids time, and they’ll find a game that captures their imagination – and yours too, if you’re lucky

For a generation of players, these colourful cabinets house not just ailing electronics, but formative memories. Meet the people who save them from landfillOn a rural industrial estate five miles outside Honiton, under the flight path of a nearby aerodrome, sits a rather nondescript warehouse. Only one feature marks it out: in front is a graveyard of stripped arcade cabinets, slowly rotting in the cold and damp.I am here to visit Play Leisure, a company that restores and sells old arcade games. It has a compelling TikTok account where it shares new discoveries – a recent post showed off a Deadstorm Pirates machine with its enormous sit-in cabinet and giant cinematic display. I’ve dragged my friend and fellow arcade fanatic Joao Sanches along, and now I’m feeling nervous and responsible because, walking up to the unmarked entrance, I’ve no idea if they will have anything interesting in stock after our 90-minute drive. Continue reading...

The company now known as Meta has spent staggering amounts on creating an immersive successor to the traditional 2D internet. But what has it got to show for it, apart from 11,000 job losses?What a difference a year makes. Last October, Facebook supremo Mark Zuckerberg could barely wait to show the world what he was up to. “Today, we’re going to talk about the metaverse,” he enthused in a slick video presentation. “I want to share what we imagine is possible.” Transitioning almost seamlessly from his real self into a computer-generated avatar, Zuckerberg guided us through his vision for the virtual-reality future: playing poker in space with your buddies; sharing cool stuff; having work meetings and birthday parties with people on the other side of the world; customising your avatar (the avatars had no legs, which was weird). Zuckerberg was so all-in on the metaverse, he even rechristened his company Meta.This month, we saw a more subdued Zuckerberg on display: “I wanna say upfront that I take full responsibility for this decision,” he told employees morosely. “This was ultimately my call and it was one of the hardest calls that I’ve had to make in the 18 years of running the company.” Meta was laying off 11,000 people – 13% of its workforce. Poor third-quarter results had seen Meta’s share price drop by 25%, wiping $80bn off the company’s value. Reality Labs, Meta’s metaverse division, had lost $3.7bn in the past three months, with worse expected to come. It wasn’t all bad news, though: Zuckerberg announced last month that Meta avatars would at last be getting legs. Continue reading...

‘Cross-check’ system appears to protect users who generate high revenue from content moderation more than ordinary usersA policy designed to protect high-profile Facebook and Instagram users from moderation was structured to satisfy their parent company’s business interests, Meta’s “supreme court” has found, and did not prioritise protecting free speech and civil rights.The oversight board, which scrutinises moderation decisions on Facebook and Instagram, said the platforms’ “cross-check” system appeared to favour “business partners” – such as users including celebrities who generate money for the company – while journalists and civil society organisations had “less clear paths” to access the programme. Continue reading...

PC; Bay 12/Kitfox

Exiled protest organiser Yusuf al-Jamri is beginning legal action against Bahrain and NSO Group after finding Pegasus spyware on his phoneYusuf al-Jamri had every reason to believe he was safe when he arrived in Britain in October 2017 and applied for asylum protection.The 41-year-old Bahraini activist had experienced sporadic periods of detention and torture beginning at the age of 16, when he was first held for five months without charge. In 2011, during the Arab spring, al-Jamri faced regular questioning and harassment by authorities because of his work as a protest organiser. But it wasn’t until 2017 – after multiple episodes of detention; alleged torture by Bahrain’s notorious intelligence agency, the National Security Apparatus; sexual assault; interrogations; and threats of rape – that he decided to flee Bahrain with his family. Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: OpenAI’s new chatbot isn’t a novelty. It’s already powerful and useful – and could radically change the way we write online

Brain-implant company accused of causing needless suffering and deaths amid pressure from CEOElon Musk’s Neuralink, a medical device company, is under federal investigation for potential animal-welfare violations amid internal staff complaints that its animal testing is being rushed, causing needless suffering and deaths, according to documents reviewed by Reuters and sources familiar with the investigation and company operations.Neuralink Corp is developing a brain implant it hopes will help paralyzed people walk again and cure other neurological ailments. The federal investigation, which has not been previously reported, was opened in recent months by the US Department of Agriculture’s inspector general at the request of a federal prosecutor, according to two sources with knowledge of the investigation. The inquiry, one of the sources said, focuses on violations of the Animal Welfare Act, which governs how researchers treat and test some animals. Continue reading...

The attempt to bring big tech to heel promised much but, three years on, pleases no one – it’s the Brexit disaster writ largeThe online safety bill was tabled for discussion in parliament on Monday, resuscitating it from its deathbed and adding yet another chapter to this controversial attempt to bring the internet to heel. But rather than celebrate its return, we should greet it with a groan: an already unwieldy attempt to regulate the internet has become a confusing mishmash of competing interests.The bill has become a Frankenstein’s monster of legislation, in part thanks to the chaotic recent history of UK politics. Successive governments and successive culture secretaries have tried to put their stamp on the legislation, pulling it this way and that until it becomes meaningless. We are now on our fourth prime minister and fifth secretary of state since the idea of legislating the digital sphere was first introduced. Continue reading...

PC, PlayStation, Xbox; Striking Distance Studios/Krafton

When you’re infected by Pegasus, spies effectively hold a clone of your phone – we’re fighting backI was warned in August 2020. A source told me to meet him at six o’clock at night in an empty parking lot in San Salvador. He had my number, but he contacted me through a mutual acquaintance instead; he didn’t want to leave a trace. When I arrived, he told me to leave my phone in the car. As we walked, he warned me that my colleagues at El Faro, the Salvadoran news organization, were being followed because of a story they were pursuing about negotiations between the president of El Salvador and the notorious MS-13 gang.This may read like an eerie movie scene, but there are many Central American journalists who have lived it for real. The suspicion you’re being followed, ditching your phone before meetings, using encrypted messaging and email apps, speaking in code, never publishing your live location – these are ordinary routines for many in my profession. Continue reading...

Live and on-demand pay-TV delivered over wifi to an easy-to-use box is let down by some crummy appsSky has taken its satellite-free pay-TV service from the Glass television and shoved it into a tiny streaming box that you can plug into your existing kit and hook up to wifi.The Sky Stream box subscription starts at £25 a month with a £20 fee upfront, which gives you Sky’s entertainment package for 18 months plus a basic Netflix account. It then rises in price depending on any other channels or content you add. Alternatively, you can subscribe on a 31-day rolling contract and chop and change as you see fit, although without an active subscription the box becomes useless. Continue reading...

Flagship internet regulation has survived four PMs, shifting its focus to child protection and free speechThe online safety bill, the government’s flagship internet regulation, returns to parliament on Monday, after a five-month delay prompted by Conservative party factional warfare threatened to kill it off.The bill was postponed until after the summer recess in July in order to make room for Boris Johnson’s unusual decision to call a confidence vote in his own government, and its return has since been put back multiple times. An anticipated revival in late October was delayed to December, while this week’s return will not see the bill progress rapidly through parliament, the digital minister Paul Scully has said, as it will instead be sent back to committee stage for deeper scrutiny. Continue reading...

EU-funded survey of people aged 16-19 finds one in four have trolled someone – while UK least ‘cyberdeviant’ of nine countriesRisky and criminal online behaviour is in danger of becoming normalised among a generation of young people across Europe, according to EU-funded research that found one in four 16- to 19-year-olds have trolled someone online and one in three have engaged in digital piracy.An EU-funded study found evidence of widespread criminal, risky and delinquent behaviour among the 16-19 age group in nine European countries including the UK. Continue reading...

Latest chatbot from Elon Musk-founded OpenAI can identify incorrect premises and refuse to answer inappropriate requestsProfessors, programmers and journalists could all be out of a job in just a few years, after the latest chatbot from the Elon Musk-founded OpenAI foundation stunned onlookers with its writing ability, proficiency at complex tasks, and ease of use.The system, called ChatGPT, is the latest evolution of the GPT family of text-generating AIs. Two years ago, the team’s previous AI, GPT3, was able to generate an opinion piece for the Guardian, and ChatGPT has significant further capabilities. Continue reading...

Campaigners concerned that ‘same racist technology used to repress Uyghurs is being marketed in Britain’A Chinese security camera company has been advertising ethnicity recognition features to British and other European customers, even while it faces a ban on UK operations over allegations of involvement in ethnic cleansing in Xinjiang.In a brochure published on its website, Hikvision advertised a range of features that it said it could provide in collaboration with the UK startup FaiceTech. Continue reading...

It gave its customers low prices by making them wait. So why did the dream of affordable luxury end with a mountain of boxes in a Port Talbot warehouse?Every day since 16 November, 25 lorryloads of sleek, Scandinavian-inspired furniture have arrived at Europe’s largest indoor auctioneers in Port Talbot, south Wales. Staff at John Pye Auctions normally work from 8.30am to 5pm, but until Christmas the warehouse will be staffed from 5am to 2am as workers unload beige box after beige box into the 316,000 sq ft facility. From a metal balcony overlooking the warehouse, the stacked boxes look not unlike a towering cityscape. On the side of each is a white plus sign inside a circle – the logo of former furniture retailer Made.com.Seven days before the first truck arrived, Made.com went into administration. Launched in London in 2010, until very recently Made was a success story: a disruptive e-commerce model combined with a desirable mid-century style helped the brand earn £100m in sales by 2017. You have probably encountered Made.com furniture if you’ve ever been inside a millennial’s home or even so much as glanced at Instagram – bright velvets, tapered wooden legs and gold accents put Made.com on the map. But now, seemingly overnight, the brand has been unmade. Continue reading...

Tech billionaires seem intent on giving away a lot of money. But are those who support ‘effective altruism’ ignoring the very real problems of today?In the past few weeks a photograph of Tony Blair and his buddy Bill Clinton sharing a panel with a scruffy kid wearing a T-shirt, baggy shorts and trainers has been doing the rounds. The April event was in the Bahamas and funded by an outfit called FTX – a supposedly “user-friendly crypto exchange” – owned by the scruffy kid, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF from now on). Blair and Clinton are looking very pleased to be there, providing confirmation of the aphrodisiac effect of great wealth, because the lad who was playing host was apparently as rich as Croesus, or at any rate worth $32bn.And this was real wealth, it seemed. After all, the venture capitalists at Sequoia – who had backed Silicon Valley success stories such as Google and PayPal – had given him the green light (as well as some of their investors’ money). A few months after Blair and Clinton made their pilgrimage to the sun-soaked and regulation-lite Bahamas, one of Sequoia’s partners offered a breathless endorsement of SBF and his crypto exchange. “Of the exchanges that we had met and looked at”, she wrote, “some of them had regulatory issues, some of them were already public. And then there was Sam.” And FTX, which, Sequoia felt, was “Goldilocks-perfect”. Continue reading...

(Bad Viking; Iceberg Interactive; PC, Switch)

It’s 30 years since the first SMS landed. Writers, authors and comedians share the txt msgs that changed their lifeIt was 2007: the nation was saying goodbye to Tony Blair and the tightness of my jeans was outrageous. I was 22, fresh out of university and in a thrilling new relationship with the man who would, 11 years later, become my husband. For ages, I kept this relationship from my family, but towards the end of spring I was done with the indignity of sneaking around. I wanted to be open. I eventually told my fairly traditional Ghanaian mother that I was gay and had a boyfriend who I had been seeing for months. Let’s just say that the conversation involved increasingly heated uses of the word “No”. Continue reading...

The New York subway provided the inspiration for this photo of a woman waiting on a platformChris Maliwat describes the New York subway as the first slot in a pinball machine. “Whenever I head down there, I know it’s going to be a mini adventure, like I’m about to be launched into the world,” he says. “I saw this woman waiting at Metropolitan Avenue/Grand Street station and wondered which world she was about to shoot out into. Are there people like her where she’s going? Is she headed to her tribe? I think so. Everyone finds their tribe in New York – that’s why people come here.”He didn’t approach her but instead surreptitiously took her photo for his Instagram page Subwaygram. “The subway is full of people on their phones and the ubiquity means mine disappears. We’re all familiar with what we do when we feel a camera pointing our way; there’s a flit in the eyes, a tightening of the body. I don’t want that. I’m not a travel photographer, a hunter out on safari; I’m a fellow passenger making this a regular part of my day,” Maliwat says. Continue reading...

New head of trust and safety Ella Irwin says Elon Musk is urging Twitter ‘to take more risks’ in the wake of mass layoffsElon Musk’s Twitter is leaning heavily on automation to moderate content according to the company’s new head of trust and safety, amid a reported surge in hate speech on the social media platform.Ella Irwin has told the Reuters news agency that Musk, who acquired the company in October, was focused on using automation more, arguing that Twitter had in the past erred on the side of using time and labour-intensive human reviews of harmful content. Continue reading...

Super apps can revolutionise your life – but do you want to pay the price, wonders AI and innovation professor David ShrierAcross Asia, the trend for a single app that does everything – from deliveries to bookings to chatting – is spreading. Known as super apps, they are rumoured to be the inspiration for Elon Musk’s plan for Twitter. Could they take off here – and should they? I asked David Shrier, professor of practice, AI and innovation at Imperial College Business School in London.Have you tried a super app?