Technology | The Guardian

Tesla’s massive Shanghai ‘Giga-factory’ pushes its workers to the limit to meet production targets amid an ongoing pandemic lockdownHow do you become the richest man in the world? In Elon Musk’s case, part of it involves making workers in China put in hours that would be unacceptable according to labor norms elsewhere.On Tuesday, the Tesla boss praised Chinese factory workers for pulling extreme hours while taking a shot at American workers. “There is just a lot of super talented hardworking people in China who strongly believe in manufacturing,” the billionaire said. “They won’t just be burning the midnight oil, they will be burning the 3am oil, they won’t even leave the factory type of thing, whereas in America people are trying to avoid going to work at all.” Continue reading...

The near-total crash of terra has fuelled real panic that the crypto sector may face existential problemsShockwaves swept through cryptocurrency markets on Thursday as tether, the largest “stablecoin” and a foundational part of the digital asset ecosystem, broke its peg to the dollar in the latest blow to the struggling sector.Bitcoin and ethereum, the two biggest cryptocurrencies, shed 5% and 12% respectively, extending losses that have seen both fall more than 20% over the past week. Losses have been even bigger for the smaller players, with dogecoin falling 10% on Thursday and 35% over the week. Continue reading...

Own-brand voice recognition update can replace Google or Alexa for faster, more private music commandsSonos, the wireless home-audio specialist, is launching a lower-cost model of its popular TV soundbars alongside its own new voice control system for its smart speakers after its public bust-up with Google.The new Ray soundbar is a more compact version of Sonos’s popular Arc and Beam models, designed to fit neatly in TV stands without affecting sound quality. It connects to a TV through an optical cable, has wifi for streaming music and can be controlled with the Sonos app or a TV remote. Continue reading...

Tesla’s CEO had tweeted that the company had secured financing from Saudi Arabia and would be taken privateA US judge has determined that Elon Musk’s 2018 tweets that funding had been secured to take electric car maker Tesla private was inaccurate and reckless, saying “there was nothing concrete” about financing from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund at that time.San Francisco-based US district judge Edward Chen’s pre-trial decision represented a major victory for investors in a lawsuit accusing the world’s richest person of inflating stock prices by making false and misleading statements, causing billions of dollars in damages. Continue reading...

Rights groups fear Twitter buyer could open door to conspiracy theorists and contravene UK online safety billElon Musk’s promise to reverse a Twitter ban on Donald Trump if he completes his takeover of the social media platform has prompted warnings that it will provoke a backlash among users and could clash with new internet safety laws.The Tesla CEO and world’s richest man is in the process of buying Twitter for $44bn (£35.6bn) and has described himself as a “free speech absolutist” with doubts about imposing permanent bans on Twitter accounts such as Trump’s, which was suspended after the Capitol riot last January. Experts also warned that Trump’s return could lead to breaches of proposed rules governing digital content in the UK and EU. Continue reading...

Xbox Series S/X, PlayStation 4/5, PC; Flying Wild Hog/ Devolver Digital

In this week’s newsletter: safer than two-factor authentication and easier than remembering dozens of codes, the ‘Fido’ system will make our digital lives smoother

Apple is discontinuing its MP3 player, bringing an end to device that transformed how we listen to musicApple has discontinued the iPod more than 20 years after it was launched.The most recent iteration of the music player, the iPod Touch, has not been updated since 2019, and many of its features are now available on other products. Continue reading...

Spain’s Pegasus spyware revelations have come to a head with the sacking of the country’s spy chiefTwo years after a joint investigation by the Guardian and El País revealed the apparent use of Pegasus spyware to target senior pro-independence Catalan politicians, the Spanish government finds itself beset by internal and external cyber-espionage scandals that have led to the sacking of the country’s intelligence chief. Continue reading...

Quick delivery became a pandemic lifeline for many – but is the endless cycle of cardboard putting an undue strain on the planet, our infrastructure and workers?The pandemic turned the US into a next-day delivery nation. Amazon, in particular, saw sales surge during the dark days of Covid. In the first three months of 2021, the company watched its total sales tick up by 44%, constituting $8.1bn in profit. Those sales were led by the 200 million subscribers to Amazon’s super-fast delivery service Prime as people demanded everything from desk chairs to bananas delivered the next day.Amazon sold 44% more items during the pandemic, but the cost of fulfilling those orders increased by only 31%. This saving was one of scale – high-order volume allowed Amazon to operate even more efficiently. “It has run its warehouses closer to full capacity, and delivery drivers have made more stops on their routes, with less time driving between customers,” reported the New York Times. Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: When the New York Times removed the word ‘fetus’ from the game out of fear of making a political statement, they did just that

Petition alleges local workers subjected to irregular pay and inadequate mental health supportA former Facebook moderator has filed a lawsuit against its owner, Meta Platforms, alleging poor working conditions for contracted content moderators violate the Kenyan constitution.The petition, also filed against Meta’s local outsourcing company Sama, alleges that workers moderating Facebook posts in Kenya have been subjected to unreasonable working conditions including irregular pay, inadequate mental health support, union-busting, and violations of their privacy and dignity. Continue reading...

Russian operatives trying to escalate online conflict and seeking targets in countries opposing war, says Jeremy Fleming

‘Significant chance’ of lowered offer owing to slump in tech stocks and social media firm’s weak performanceA US firm known for betting against companies’ share prices has said Elon Musk could submit a lower bid for Twitter, owing to a slump in tech stocks and a weak financial performance at the social media platform.Hindenburg Research said there was a “significant chance” that the Tesla chief executive will seek to pay less than the agreed bid price of $54.20 (£43.90) a share, which values Twitter at $44bn and has been accepted by the company’s board. Continue reading...

I know it’s the height of toxic capitalism, but you get free stuff and money – so what’s not to like? Maybe the fact it’s really difficultFor the past two years, I have been trying really hard to become an #influencer. I just wanted to #influence people to live their best lives, to find their inner strength and – OK, I wanted free stuff. If you can’t beat it, join it. Capitalism, that is.Since I have 100,000 followers on Instagram who listen to what I say, to whom I often recommend my favourite products and services, why not double-check if the brands want to pay me to do so? I would rather they pay me than someone who isn’t me. What I am saying is: I wanted to do the very easy job of #influencing and get lots of money for it. Continue reading...

Republicans are mulling retaliation against firms providing benefits such as travel assistance for employees seeking abortionAfter a supreme court decision that overturns Roe v Wade was leaked and signaled the impending end of federal constitutional protection for abortions, a trickle of companies have slowly started to announce policies that provide abortion access for their employees. But while the protections may keep employees and consumers happy, the threat of retaliation from conservative lawmakers looms.Citigroup, one of the biggest banks in the US, quietly started covering the travel expenses of employees who want to get an abortion but are banned from getting one in their home state. Continue reading...

Unlike in 2010 and 2013 when the NBN rollout was a hot topic, it is yet to hit the headlines this election, but it remains front of mind for some

Don’t dismiss soil: its unknowable wonders could ensure the survival of our speciesBeneath our feet is an ecosystem so astonishing that it tests the limits of our imagination. It’s as diverse as a rainforest or a coral reef. We depend on it for 99% of our food, yet we scarcely know it. Soil.Under one square metre of undisturbed ground in the Earth’s mid-latitudes (which include the UK) there might live several hundred thousand small animals. Roughly 90% of the species to which they belong have yet to be named. One gram of this soil – less than a teaspoonful – contains around a kilometre of fungal filaments. Continue reading...

According to the New York Times, the dismissals are regarded as the company’s response to the recent unionization victoryAmazon has reportedly fired over half a dozen senior managers who were involved in a New York warehouse union.The firings, which took place outside the company’s employee review cycle, was regarded as the company’s response to the Amazon Labor Union which formed in Staten Island last month in a “historic victory” against the country’s second largest employer, the New York Times reported, citing former and current employees who spoke on the condition anonymity. Continue reading...

Jack Dorsey’s first tweet sold for $2.9m in 2021 then could not get past $14,000 at auction last month. But some projects have thrivedIt was described as the Mona Lisa of the digital world and it came with a connoisseur’s price tag: $2.9m (£2.4m) for the first tweet by Twitter’s co-founder. This was March 2021 and non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, were bursting into the mainstream.One year on, an attempt to sell on Jack Dorsey’s Twitter debut for $25m was pulled after auction bids topped out at just $14,000 (£11,350). Explosive growth of NFTs over the past 12 months has levelled off, and may even be in decline, according to analysis of the sector, as attention consolidates around a few of the largest players. Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: Guardian video games editor and writer of Pushing Buttons Keza MacDonald picks her favourite games of the year

In this week’s newsletter: Colonia LeBaron was meant to be a Mormon utopia – then a family fallout saw organised crime reign. Find out more in Deliver Us From Ervil. Plus: five must-listen music podcasts

In this week’s newsletter: Dall-E 2 can conjure vivid pictures of dogs in berets to astronauts playing basketball. It also represents every major ethical concern there is about AI.

PC, Mac, Xbox, Nintendo Switch; Fellow Traveller

British MPs invite tycoon to discuss plans for platform in more depth before parliamentary committeeElon Musk has said Twitter may charge a “slight” fee for commercial and government users, in the latest hint of the changes the world’s richest person could introduce after he completes his takeover of the social media platform.“Twitter will always be free for casual users, but maybe a slight cost for commercial/government users,” Musk said in a tweet. In another tweet, he added: “Some revenue is better than none!” Continue reading...

Data leak reveals scale of potential surveillance by NSO Group client believed to be MoroccoMore than 200 Spanish mobile numbers were selected as possible targets for surveillance by an NSO Group client believed to be Morocco, according to the data leak at the heart of the Pegasus project.Details of the scale of the apparent targeting came as Spain’s highest criminal court opened an investigation into how the mobile phones of the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, and the defence minister, Margarita Robles, came to be infected with Pegasus spyware last year. Continue reading...

Rocket Lab test successfully hooks booster in midair before having to drop it into South PacificA space company has briefly managed to catch a falling rocket using a helicopter and a hook in a test described by its chief executive as “something of a supersonic ballet”.The test was part of Rocket Lab’s attempts to find relatively low-cost ways of recovering rockets for multiple missions to space. Continue reading...

Government fears damage of losing out to New York in battle to attract tech floatationsBoris Johnson has joined the lobbying effort to convince the British-based chip designer Arm to float in London, as the government fears the damage of losing out to New York in the battle to attract high-profile tech companies looking to list.After the collapse of the $66bn sale of the Cambridge-based business to US-based Nvidia earlier this year, Masayoshi Son, the chief executive of Arm’s Japanese parent company Softbank, immediately snubbed the UK for a flotation. Continue reading...

Japanese gaming company behind Final Fantasy series secures deal with Sweden-based EmbracerThe Japanese gaming company behind Final Fantasy is selling off three studios, including the rights to hit franchises including Tomb Raider, in a $300m (£240m) deal.Tokyo-based Square Enix has sold US-headquartered Crystal Dynamics and Canada-based Eidos Montreal and Square Enix Montreal to the Nasdaq-listed Swedish gaming group Embracer. Continue reading...

Cryptocurrency smothered by congestion due to high demand for plots of land in multiplayer game OthersideA multi-billion dollar cryptocurrency company has apologised to users after its sale of “metaverse land” sparked a frenzy that temporarily overwhelmed the Ethereum cryptocurrency.Yuga Labs, the company behind the Bored Ape NFTs beloved of Jimmy Fallon and Paris Hilton, announced the sale of its latest tokens – representing plots of land in a forthcoming multiplayer game called Otherside – on Sunday. A total of 55,000 plots were sold, at a flat price of 305 ApeCoin (a currency created by Yuga), which is worth about £4,500 at current exchange rates. Continue reading...

Company accused of abusing market position to limit rivals’ access to technology required for tap-and-go transactionsEU regulators have charged Apple with breaking competition law by limiting rivals’ access to technology that is key to making contactless payments, unfairly benefiting its own Apple Pay service.The European Commission said on Monday that Apple “sets the rules” on its closed platform and expressed concern that it has been limiting access to technology called near field communication (NFC), which rivals need for tap-and-go payments to be made in stores using mobile wallets. Continue reading...

Be bold and get close, try wide-angle lenses, and see if you can operate your camera on manualThe award-winning Guardian photographer David Levene offers tips on how to get a good picture. Continue reading...

Solar charging GPS watch has excellent health and fitness tracking and rugged designGarmin’s latest rugged solar-powered smartwatch, the Instinct 2, promises unlimited battery life. You just have to stay in the sun.Looking more like a rugged digital watch such as Casio’s legendary G-Shock than an Apple or Samsung smartwatch, the Garmin feels made to take a beating with its monochrome screen, physical buttons and sturdy body. Continue reading...

Andrew Rea’s ‘try, fail and try again’ YouTube cookery show – in which he often cooks food from films and cartoons – gets more viewers than Nigella, Jamie Oliver and Tom Kerridge combined. But its massive, viral success nearly cost the self-taught chef his mental healthAndrew Rea is one of the biggest chefs in the world, though that’s no guarantee you’ve heard of him. He has no TV show. No restaurant ever bore his name. He has never worked as a chef, nor attended culinary school. He is almost entirely self-taught, he says, from watching cookery videos online. This isn’t hard to believe. To watch Rea cook is as much an instruction of what not to do. Sauces are surrendered. Soufflés are sunk. He once took seven attempts to make cacio e pepe, a pasta dish famous for including just cheese and pepper. He succeeds mostly because he fails. It’s part of the charm. He’s not, he’ll happily admit, a professional cook in any meaningful sense – apart from the fact that he now earns millions doing it.Rea’s YouTube cookery channel, Babish Culinary Universe – named after his favourite character from The West Wing, a slightly incongruous call that rapidly became too big to fiddle with – currently boasts 9.5m subscribers. That’s a lot. Nigella Lawson’s latest TV series – Eat, Cook, Repeat, which aired during England’s second national lockdown – was considered a ratings smash with 3m viewers, over 1m more than her previous show. Rea’s videos, meanwhile, regularly rack up hits in the tens of millions. Continue reading...

The Washington DC shooting was the most recent to spawn out of the extremist culture of unregulated ‘chan’ message boardsWhen police in Washington DC burst into a fifth-floor apartment building on 22 April in search of a man who allegedly had shot four people at random, they found Raymond Spencer dead by his own hand, a cache of guns and ammunition, and a poster with an ironic white supremacist meme.The poster invoking the meme, popular on the extremist online forum 4chan, was a stark reminder that this attack blamed on Spencer, 23, was only the most recent mass casualty attack to spawn out of the ugly extremist culture of unregulated internet message boards such as 4chan. Continue reading...

Musk’s acquisition of the media platform will be a boon for free speech, he says. Governments are the ones to judge thatOn Friday 8 January 2021, Twitter kicked Donald Trump off its platform and an eerie calm enveloped parts of our global public sphere. Depriving him of his online megaphone was a compelling demonstration of how a tech platform had acquired an awesome power – the ability effectively to silence an elected president.But what kind of power is it really? Many years ago, in a landmark book, Power: A Radical View, the sociologist Steven Lukes wrote that power comes in three varieties: the ability to stop people doing what they want to do; the ability to compel them to do what they don’t want to do; and the ability to shape the way they think. Continue reading...

Scams relating to digital ‘coins’ are growing – but data reveals authorities are making record seizures of assets tooIn July 2021, specialist police officers in Manchester swooped on an international cryptocurrency scam, seizing USB sticks and an online safe containing £16m worth of digital coins, mostly ethereum.A month earlier, Leicestershire police had confiscated 10 types of cryptocurrency after raiding the home of a drug dealer who used digital assets to buy and sell class A drugs. Continue reading...

The actor takes a hopeful look at the ideas to save our environment, alongside guests from Adam McKay to Prince William. Plus: five investigative podcasts we couldn’t switch off

What is driving the box-office success of Sonic the Hedgehog 2, reboots of classic games such as Crazy Taxi and even talk of a Sega Cinematic Universe?Sega, it seems, is having a moment. The veteran publisher’s movie sequel Sonic the Hedgehog 2 has become a huge box office success, hitting $300m in revenue, despite lukewarm reviews. It was also revealed that a film version of classic brawler Streets of Rage is in development, scripted by John Wick creator Derek Kolstad; some are postulating that this could be the beginning of a Sega Cinematic Universe. And last week, sources within the company revealed to Bloomberg that reboots of classic early 2000s titles Crazy Taxi and Jet Set Radio are in development, part of a new Super Games initiative to build Fortnite-like communities around its titles.Why so much Sega? Why now? Sonic the Hedgehog 2 has perhaps arrived at a good time with families venturing out to cinemas once again, desperate for something lighthearted that everyone can enjoy – and not having much choice when they reach the multiplex. And whatever you think about the finer points of the movie, it’s fast and fun, with an amusing performance from Idris Elba as Knuckles and Jim Carrey back to his hammy, gurning best. It captures the feel of those original Mega Drive games, with their madcap, screwball energy and bright, blue-sky optimism. Continue reading...

Unicef says virus is ‘canary in the coalmine’ that shows up the gaps in vaccination campaigns for preventable illnessMeasles cases have surged nearly 80% worldwide this year amid disruption caused by Covid-19, the UN has said, warning that the rise of the “canary in a coalmine” illness indicated that outbreaks of other diseases were likely to be on the way.The coronavirus pandemic has interrupted vaccination campaigns for non-Covid diseases around the world, creating a “perfect storm” that could put millions of children’s lives at risk, the UN’s children’s agency Unicef and the World Health Organization (WHO) said in a statement. Continue reading...

The Facebook parent company is continuing a major rebrand of its products and focusing more heavily on the metaverseMeta made a cautious recovery on Wednesday with its first earnings report since a disastrous fourth quarter, sending shares up 13% in after-hours trading.The company’s reported total revenue for the quarter was $27.91bn, missing analysts’ estimates of $28.20bn, according to IBES data from Refinitiv. Wednesday’s earnings are Meta’s first since a dramatic report in February, when Meta lost a record $230bn in market value after revealing that Facebook had recorded its first-ever drop in daily user numbers. Continue reading...

Acquisition agreement allows Musk to tweet about deal but not to disparage firm or its representativesControversy grew on Wednesday over tweets from Elon Musk engaging with criticism of Twitter employees, despite a promise from the entrepreneur not to “disparage” the company or its representatives while he completes the deal to acquire the social media platform.The world’s richest man agreed to restrictions on his tweets as part of a 95-page agreement covering his $44bn acquisition filed on Tuesday. Continue reading...

Nintendo Switch; Nintendo

For his own good, my soon-to-be-18-year-old needs to understand sport. It’s the only way he’ll survive. Unfortunately, 90s video games are of limited useMy son Charlie will be 18 soon. Like all Scottish males before him, he will be dropped on a Hebridean island with nothing but a rusty knife and his own anger. If he can’t make it back to the mainland, he will live the rest of his life among feral, abandoned Scottish sons, and he will only survive if he likes sport, because that’s how any group of men get through enforced time together.He tried sport as a kid, but as he is on the autism spectrum, he was obsessed with rules to the point where if he felt another kid broke them, he would pick the ball up and stop the game. He was basically human VAR. It never ended well. So I’ve decided I’m going to use my favourite 90s video games as a Trojan horse. And there is only one place to start. Continue reading...

David Kaye, Jillian York, Jeff Kosseff and Roger NcNamee discuss the choices at the billionaire’s disposalHere’s a juxtaposition that many American observers may have missed in the hubbub over Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter: just last Friday the European Union provisionally agreed to the most far-reaching internet regulation in a generation. The Digital Services Act, or DSA, will force the largest online platforms to be transparent about their activities and assess and mitigate the harms their products may cause. And it’s just the start. Governments around the world have their sights set on regulating big tech. It’s a big enough issue for the billionaire owners of other platforms; imagine the pressures Musk will face when governments dangle benefits for Tesla or SpaceX in exchange for tougher content moderation against their critics.David Kaye is a law professor at UC Irvine and author of Speech Police: The Global Struggle to Govern the Internet Continue reading...

Supply issues, inflation and war in Ukraine fuel Google parent company’s first-quarter strugglesAlphabet’s first quarter revenue fell below analysts’ expectations on Tuesday, as the company confronts supply chain problems, inflation concerns, and fallout from the war in Ukraine.In its quarterly earnings report, Google’s parent company said it had made a quarterly profit of $16.436bn, or $24.62 per share, missing expectations of $25.76 per share. Continue reading...

Analysis: Experts warn against reinstating banned accounts and neglecting moderationWelcome back Donald Trump, Katie Hopkins, David Icke and Alex Jones? These are just some of the Twitter accounts that could be reinstated if the platform’s new owner-in-waiting, “free speech absolutist” Elon Musk, practices what he preaches.All of those accounts have been permanently suspended from the platform for infractions that include, most notoriously, the former US president’s alleged support for the Capitol riot on 6 January last year. Their reinstatement now appears to be back in play given that the world’s richest man has agreed a $44bn (£35bn) takeover of the platform that banned them and has stated that “free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy”. Continue reading...

The ultimate shitposter has bought up Twitter, and its denizens are angry – how entirely appropriateSpeaking a few hours ago about Twitter purchaser Elon Musk, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey declared: “I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness.” Bless. This feels like the first flashback scene we see in a dystopian drama after the words “SIX MONTHS EARLIER …” Quite where we’ll be in six months’ time as far as Twitter is concerned remains tantalisingly unclear, but it seems difficult to imagine it will be either a more or less pleasant space. It’s a social media platform. I’m not sure what further evidence humanity needs before we cotton on to the idea that such a thing might be an intrinsically toxic concept. Of course, there will always be some people who think it just hasn’t been done right yet. Like communism, or a British version of The Daily Show.Anyway, if Musk’s takeover goes through, he’ll assume control of a platform where the people on the right are incredibly angry about free speech, and those on the left are incredibly angry about hate speech. Which is to say: they have so much in common. As the tech visionary Jaron Lanier has long been excellent at pointing out, the best way to keep people on platforms is to make them angry. So the platforms are designed to make them angry. You might consider the anger worth it for your version of advertising (I myself will post this column on Twitter), but even then it is a weirdly grim cost of doing business that just conceivably ought to be weighed far more carefully than it is.Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...

Trevor Jacob parachuted from the single-engine aircraft and filmed it as it crashed into a remote forest in CaliforniaThe US Federal Aviation Administration has revoked a YouTuber’s pilot license after it concluded that he intentionally crashed his plane for the sake of gaining online views.On 24 November 2021, Trevor Jacob was flying over California’s Los Padres national forest in his small single-engine plane when his propeller stopped working. Continue reading...

The billionaire’s purchase of humanity’s ‘digital town square’ is a culmination of his controversial past on the platformOne of Twitter’s most controversial users became its owner on Monday, after Elon Musk brokered a $44bn deal to buy the company.The move was in many ways the culmination of the billionaire’s long history with the platform. Musk has been on Twitter since 2009 and tweeted as early as 2017 expressing interest in buying it. He has also been a vocal critic of Twitter, calling for changes including rolling back content moderation and prioritizing a “societal imperative” of free speech. Continue reading...