Technology | The Guardian

After the crypto firm collapsed, the executive who handled the Enron debacle was brought in – and said he’d never seen anything like it• ‘I don’t have this kind of money to lose’ – investors’ storiesCasual observers could be forgiven for thinking the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX is another typical tale of financial mismanagement. That’s how its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, terms it: a liquidity crisis that tipped over into a solvency one.FTX had deposits and loans and when depositors tried to get their money back, FTX didn’t have it to hand. Sure, the loans were in fancy digital money, rather than stale dollars, but at first glance, it appears like just another big company failure. Continue reading...

Tesla and SpaceX history showed how hard-edged the CEO could be. At Twitter, this pattern has proved disastrousElon Musk’s reputation precedes him.The seemingly impulsive and demanding boss of SpaceX and Tesla is known to place importance on the product above all. And whether the employees building the products agree with how he plans to achieve his ambitions, or the ambition itself, they are often expected to go above and beyond – at times sleeping on the company floor – to make it happen, or else. Continue reading...

The Spanish photographer’s shot of an Iranian woman in a hijab has recently acquired new resonanceDespite not being a religious person, José Luis Barcia Fernández has long been fascinated by the rituals, rules and uniforms of faith. After photographing the hooded capirotes of Seville’s Holy Week, and Jews, Muslims and Christians in Jerusalem, the Spanish photographer travelled to Iran four years ago, where he took this shot of a woman in a hijab silhouetted against a tree and a sky filled with birds. He already had the shot he wanted in mind when he came across the woman, who was standing by a stunning mosque in the Tajrish neighbourhood of Tehran.“There were lots of birds and a beautiful tree,” he says. “I saw this woman and got the shot, which seems to show her headscarf, with its floral motif, continuing up into the tree. And then you had the birds, which I like photographing because it’s fun.” Continue reading...

Swiss company uses algorithm to judge whether contested Portrait de femme (Gabrielle) is genuinely by French artist

Reports show nearly 1,200 workers left company after demand for ‘long hours at high intensity’, while Musk starts poll on whether to reinstate Donald TrumpElon Musk emailed Twitter staff on Friday asking that any employees who write software code report to the 10th floor of the office in San Francisco in the early afternoon, according to multiple news reports.The billionaire said in a follow-up email, “If possible, I would appreciate it if you could fly to SF to be present in person,” adding he would be at the company’s headquarters until midnight and would return Saturday morning, Reuters reported. The engineers should report at 2pm on Friday. Continue reading...

The harsh ruling sends a message to Silicon Valley that the government will hold founders accountable for what’s promisedElizabeth Holmes, founder of Theranos, has been sentenced to more than 11 years in prison over her role in the blood testing firm that collapsed after its technology was revealed to be largely fraudulent.Holmes was convicted in January on four counts of defrauding investors. She appeared on Friday afternoon at the San Jose, California, courthouse where her nearly four-month-long trial began in August 2021, alongside relatives and supporters, including her partner, Billy Evans. Continue reading...

How did Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX fail and what does the firm’s fate tell us about cryptocurrencies?The collapse of FTX, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, has unleashed another bout of volatility in the highly speculative digital asset market. The fortune of FTX’s founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, went from nearly $16bn to zero within days as his crypto empire filed for bankruptcy protection in the US on 11 November. Here we answer some of your questions about the story so far. Continue reading...

Hailed as a tech solution to crime, security cameras throw up questions of accountability and privacyThe hit BBC thriller The Capture has thrown the scale of camera surveillance into the spotlight. I ask Gus Hosein, director of Privacy International, just how advanced the technology is – and if it’s possible to avoid it.You’ve got to watch The Capture, Gus. It’s about a police officer who finds people hacking into the CCTV network, and it hit home how omnipresent cameras are.

Big-budget Jimmy Donaldson has overtaken PewDiePie to become the most subscribed person on the platformYouTube’s short 17-year history is one of human civilisation played on fast-forward. The first videos uploaded to the website were shabby, amateur productions from enthusiasts with cameras, made on a shoestring budget. Today, the most popular videos have eye-watering budgets more akin to TV shows.Few people demonstrate YouTube’s shift better than Jimmy Donaldson, better known to his 112 million subscribers as MrBeast. This week Donaldson, 24 and born in Wichita, Kansas, became YouTube’s king, surpassing Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg as the most subscribed-to individual on the platform. Continue reading...

Sanjay Bhandari says cuts in trust and safety team at platform could be taken as ‘green light for hate’The chair of the anti-discrimination body Kick It Out has voiced fears that Twitter will be unable to cope with online abuse during the football World Cup, after a wave of job losses at the social media platform.Sanjay Bhandari said he was deeply concerned by reports of cuts in the trust and safety team at Twitter, as well as the departure of the executive in charge of the department. Continue reading...

People are wondering what parts of their online selves, loved ones and favorite celebrities to save in case the bird goes belly upAmid ongoing fallout from Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, speculation of the platform’s imminent collapse is swirling – leaving users wondering what parts of their online selves they’ll get to keep.After Musk laid off thousands of workers, many users have reported signs the platform is falling apart in real time – from glitching home pages to log-in failures – and researchers are desperately urging users to download their tweets in case Twitter implodes completely. Continue reading...

US corporate restructuring expert John Ray says ‘never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls’In a stinging court filing posted on Thursday, John Ray III, the new boss of the bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, said the company had suffered an “unprecedented and complete failure of corporate controls”.Ray has overseen some of the biggest bankruptcies ever, including the collapse of the energy giant Enron, and has 40 years of experience in restructuring companies. He said he had never seen anything as bad as FTX.Alameda Research (FTX’s hedge fund) gave Bankman-Fried a $1bn personal loan and a $543m loan to the director of engineering, Nishad Singh.Bankman-Fried often communicated by using applications that were set to auto-delete after a short period of time, and encouraged employees to do the same.Many FTX entities never had board meetings.Because of “historical cash management failures” the debtors do not yet know the exact amount of cash that the FTX Group held.The debtors have been unable to even prepare a complete list of who worked for the FTX Group because of the chaotic state of its human resources.Many of the employees of the FTX Group, including some of its senior executives, were not aware of the shortfalls or potential commingling of digital assets and may be “some of the people most hurt by these events”. Continue reading...

Oxfordshire astronomer was locked out for three months after apparent automated moderation errorAn astronomer who was blocked on Twitter for tweeting a picture of a meteor that was deemed to have breached guidelines on intimate content has had her account restored.Mary McIntyre’s account was locked three months ago after she tweeted a video of a meteor passing through the night sky over her Oxfordshire home. She initially received a 12-hour ban after being told that the clip contained “intimate” content that had been shared without a participant’s consent. Continue reading...

Commons speaker suggests phones not be taken into meetings as UK cyber security centre issues 10 ‘top tips’MPs have been told their phones are a “potential goldmine” for hostile states who are targeting them to influence democracy in the UK.Advice was shared by the Commons speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, suggesting MPs should not take their phones into sensitive meetings, given the threat from state-backed hackers, as well as criminals and fraudsters. Continue reading...

For around 20 years, brothers Zach and Tarn Adams have been working on their idiosyncratic fantasy game – and it’s only just got graphicsIn 2015, players of the video game Dwarf Fortress – a wildly influential cult hit that has appeared at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and been cited as the inspiration for Minecraft – started finding vomit-covered dead cats in taverns. When the game’s creator, 44-year-old Tarn Adams, attempted to determine the cause, he discovered that cats were walking through puddles of spilled alcohol, licking themselves clean, and promptly dying of heart failure due to a minor error in the game’s code, which overestimated the amount of alcohol ingested.Most games don’t simulate anything nearly as complex as alcohol poisoning and feline grooming, but Dwarf Fortress does, and the way that its code generates these bizarre situations is symbolic of what people love about it. Dwarf Fortress has a unique, incredibly complicated approach to storytelling and play, but it looks like pure Matrix code, composed entirely of coloured text. Any casual observer would find it indecipherable. Continue reading...

Sam Bankman-Fried makes statement even as new boss begins formal bankruptcy processSam Bankman-Fried, the former chief executive of the collapsed crypto exchange FTX, has claimed the company he founded is still solvent, even as its new boss, who oversaw the final days of Enron, begins the formal bankruptcy process.In a series of tweets posted overnight on Tuesday, Bankman-Fried insisted the company had about $9bn (£7.6bn) of assets, in a mixture of semi-liquid and illiquid holdings, while owing customers only $8bn. Continue reading...

Plenty of games have found real-world success through viral fame on the platform. But can gaming Twitter survive Elon Musk?The End Days of Twitter have provided plenty of entertainment lately – not least someone using Elon Musk’s new paid-for checkmark system to impersonate Nintendo of America and tweet a picture of Mario flipping the bird. But the chaos that has enveloped the funniest and most infuriating social media platform of them all is also causing consternation for game artists, developers and marketers, many of whom view it as integral to their careers. Very Online millennials make up a huge proportion of the video game workforce, and plenty of us have been networking and snarking on Twitter for our entire careers. If the platform either goes away or changes beyond recognition, it will affect the games industry and how it socialises.Plenty of games have found real-world success through viral Twitter fame. Trombone Champ is only the latest example, elevated from the crowded field of weekly Steam releases with a tweet shared by PC Gamer. Untitled Goose Game – the beloved comedy game about a foul fowl – also picked up a huge audience there. And Cult of the Lamb is another recent game that owes at least some of its success to developers and fans’ clever use of Twitter: it’s the modern version of word-of-mouth. I have discovered countless games from seeing interesting clips on Twitter. It’s where I first saw the Bafta-winning Unpacking. It’s also where many journalists, streamers and publisher talent scouts hear about forthcoming games, and where players go to find out what’s generating buzz. Continue reading...

Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4/5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X; Sega

Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has left many users wondering if they should join its rival, which promises a ‘different kind of social media experience’. But how different is it? I decided to find outHow did I choose this as the day I would leave Twitter, already semi-destroyed by an “eccentric” billionaire, and migrate to Mastodon? Easy, stupid: it was the day after I had sworn never to move to Mastodon. About 230,000 people had flocked to the site in the first week of November. Eugen Rochko, who devised and first published the software that underpins the platform in 2016, promised a “different kind of social media experience,” chiefly one that had “stringent anti-abuse and anti-discrimination policies”. Continue reading...

Hedge fund owned by Christopher Hohn urges Alphabet to emulate cost-cutting measures of Silicon Valley rivalsThe hedge fund of the billionaire Sir Christopher Hohn has written to Alphabet saying staff at the Google and YouTube parent are paid too much and its workforce should be drastically cut back.London-based TCI, which has been a significant investor in the company since 2017 and holds a stake valued at $6bn (£5.1bn), has written to its chief executive, Sundar Pichai, urging it to emulate cost-cutting measures introduced by big tech rivals including the Facebook-owner, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft. Continue reading...

Bankruptcy filing says ‘questions arose’ about founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s leadershipThe collapsed crypto exchange FTX expects to have more than 1 million individual creditors, the company has said in its first bankruptcy filing, scattered across more than 100 companies in the wider group.According to the filing at the bankruptcy court in the US state of Delaware, where FTX US is based, Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and chief executive, stepped down at 4.30am on Friday, “after consultation with his own legal counsel”. Continue reading...

Reflexes start to decline in your 20s, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be competitive at first-person shooters any more. Keith Stuart shares some hard-won knowledgeIt is an unfortunate fact of life that human reflexes slow down as we get older. Medical studies suggest that reaction times peak at 24 and go downhill from there – and nowhere is this more ruthlessly illustrated than in the world of online first-person shooters. Head on to the average Call of Duty, Apex Legends or Overwatch server as a 35-year-old and it can feel as if you’re surrounded by superhuman teenagers with hair-trigger instincts who rack up multiple kills while you’re still deciding whether or not you should have inverted the controls.Fortunately, there’s much more to being good at these games than the ability to hit the fire button faster than anyone else. Approaching middle age doesn’t mean you have to hang up your laser gun and start playing train simulators. You just have to be more strategic. Continue reading...

Whistleblowers claim constant hazards, onsite accidents and wage theft while working on the manufacturing facility in AustinConstruction workers who toiled on one of Tesla’s sprawling so-called gigafactories will file a complaint and a case referral with the federal Department of Labor on Tuesday detailing exploitative work conditions they say they experienced while building the plant.Whistleblowers came forward to allege serious labor and employment violations during construction of the electric car manufacturer’s massive new facility in Austin, Texas, that left them vulnerable to injuries and wage theft. Continue reading...

Yuesheng Wang, a worker at Quebec’s power utility, is accused of sending trade secrets to ChinaCanada’s federal police have charged an electric vehicle battery researcher at Quebec’s power utility with espionage, alleging the worker was covertly sending trade secrets to China.The arrest of Yuesheng Wang, 35, comes as Canada grapples with a barrage of accusations of Chinese interference, including allegations of meddling in its federal elections, as well as reports of secret “police stations” in the country’s largest city. Continue reading...

‘Hard to imagine sector bouncing back quickly from this ordeal,’ committee is toldMost of the customers of failed crypto exchange FTX were institutions but the effects of its collapse are still likely to reverberate across the sector and may affect small retail investors, MPs have been told.“What we’re hearing … is that the majority of the funds in that platform were from institutional investors,” Ian Taylor, the executive director of the industry group Crypto UK, told the Treasury select committee on Monday. Continue reading...

Cuts would be largest in online retailer’s history and follow similar moves by tech companies including Meta and TwitterAmazon is planning to dismiss about 10,000 people in corporate and technology jobs starting as soon as this week, the New York Times reported on Monday, citing people with knowledge of the matter.The cuts would be the largest in Amazon’s history and come as other tech companies including Meta and Twitter are also shedding workers. Continue reading...

Tesla chief says ‘there’s no way to make everyone happy’ amid claims 4,400 contractors have been firedElon Musk has said he has “too much work on my plate” as it was reported that Twitter has axed more than 4,000 contractors working in areas including content moderation and engineering.The Tesla chief executive and the social media platform’s new owner told the B20 business leaders’ conference in Bali that “my workload has recently increased quite a lot”, in apparent reference to his $44bn (£37bn) acquisition of the social media platform on 27 October. Continue reading...

Amazon founder wants to donate much of $124bn wealth to causes such as climate crisis and world unityJeff Bezos has promised to give away the vast majority of his $124bn (£110bn) fortune during his lifetime, but admitted that ensuring that the most worthy causes benefit is proving as difficult as building his Amazon empire.The 58-year-old, the world’s fourth richest person, according to Forbes billionaires list, made the pledge after giving $100m to the country singer Dolly Parton to give to charities of her choice as part of Bezos’s annual Courage and Civility award. Continue reading...

PC, Xbox; Obsidian Entertainment/Xbox Game Studios

Changpeng Zhao announces plans for an industry ‘recovery fund’ for struggling crypto firmsThe head of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange has said after the collapse of rival FTX that no one can be protected from a “bad player” and announced plans for an industry ‘‘recovery fund” for struggling crypto firms.Changpeng Zhao, the founder and chief executive of Binance, said it was not “100%” the responsibility of watchdogs to protect consumers and the crypto sector had to play its own part. However, he said preventing a rogue figure from evading regulators was difficult. Continue reading...

The blood testing company’s founder could serve up to 20 years in prison after she was convicted in January on four counts of fraudElizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos, will be sentenced this week to up to 20 years in prison for her role in the blood testing company that tumbled from the heights of Silicon Valley after its fraudulent claims were exposed.The sentencing is set to take place in a California courtroom on Friday, after a federal judge denied Holmes’s request for a new trial last week. Holmes had requested a new trial after she said a key witness for the prosecution apologized for the role he played in her conviction. Continue reading...

Supersized smartphone offers regular iPhone performance with extended battery life, but costs extraApple’s new plus-sized iPhone 14 adds a larger screen and longer-lasting battery to a familiar formula, but with a bigger price tag too.The 14 Plus is a brand new iPhone model for this year, costing £949 ($899/A$1,579), making it £100 ($100/A$180) more than the base model 14 but cheaper than the 14 Pro line. Continue reading...

Organisations representing young people express concern amid fears that manifesto pledges on internet safety are under threatThe government is facing mounting criticism from children’s organisations over its failure to protect young people from harmful material online, amid fears that key legislation promised in the Tory party’s 2019 election manifesto to strengthen internet safety could be under threat.The Observer understands from sources close to the discussions that hugely controversial and sensitive changes to the online safety bill were to have been announced to parliament this week by the culture secretary, Michelle Donelan, after ministers across government had been consulted in recent days. Continue reading...

Sources tell Reuters funds were part of $10bn founder Sam Bankman-Fried transferred to his hedge fundAmid the fallout of the implosion of FTX, once the second-largest cryptocurrency exchange, at least $1bn in investor assets appears to be missing, according to multiple reports.On Saturday morning, Reuters reported that FTX was missing at least $1bn in client funds, according to two anonymous sources who held senior positions at FTX and said they had been briefed on the company’s finances. The sources claimed the funds were part of $10bn in client funds that the FTX founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, secretly transferred to Alameda Research, the hedge fund he owns. Continue reading...

The cutting-edge technology is a faster, cheaper and more accurate way to raise the alarm on lightning strikes or flash floods, experts say

Theranos founder faces maximum of 20 years in prison after she was found guilty of fraud and conspiracyFederal prosecutors are asking a judge to sentence Elizabeth Holmes to 15 years in prison and require the Theranos founder to pay $800m in restitution, according to court documents filed on Friday.A jury found Holmes guilty in January of four counts of investor fraud and conspiracy. Her sentencing is scheduled for 18 November, and she faces a maximum 20 years in prison. Continue reading...

The 30-year-old wunderkind last week saw his giant FTX digital currency exchange collapse and his $17bn fortune disappearHe drives a Toyota Corolla to work, lives in a house with 10 roommates and a goldendoodle dog named Gofer, sometimes sleeps under his desk on a beanbag and was, until this week, worth tens of billions of dollars.But on Friday, Sam Bankman-Fried, a curly-haired crypto king and Democratic mega-donor who claimed to be reinventing digital finance, gave up a week-long fight to save FTX, which in three short years since being launched had become the world’s second largest digital currency exchange. He resigned as chief executive and the company and 130 affiliates were placed under US bankruptcy protection. Continue reading...

Image-generators such as Dall-E 2 can produce pictures on any theme you wish for in seconds. Some creatives are alarmed but others are sceptical of the hypeWhen the concept artist and illustrator RJ Palmer first witnessed the fine-tuned photorealism of compositions produced by the AI image generator Dall-E 2, his feeling was one of unease. The tool, released by the AI research company OpenAI, showed a marked improvement on 2021’s Dall-E, and was quickly followed by rivals such as Stable Diffusion and Midjourney. Type in any surreal prompt, from Kermit the frog in the style of Edvard Munch, to Gollum from The Lord of the Rings feasting on a slice of watermelon, and these tools will return a startlingly accurate depiction moments later.The internet revelled in the meme-making opportunities, with a Twitter account documenting “weird Dall-E generations” racking up more than a million followers. Cosmopolitan trumpeted the world’s first AI-generated magazine cover, and technology investors fell over themselves to wave in the new era of “generative AI”. The image-generation capabilities have already spread to video, with the release of Google’s Imagen Video and Meta’s Make-A-Video. Continue reading...

Users fleeing Elon Musk’s takeover will find themselves in a different world – quixotic, communal and defiantly democraticMastodon feels like the old internet. “Welcome to Mastodon, where you can boost a toot from hellsite.site to mas.to, but remember to CW politics and boot doxers or your instance might be defederated” is a sentence that will make sense eventually – but is unlikely to mean anything on your first day.Social media startups are ten a penny, but few are so proudly distinct from the competition as the countercultural network that has gained millions of new users over the past week as Elon Musk triggers an exodus from Twitter. Continue reading...

Russian teenagers hanging out reminded the photographer of his own childhood in a workers’ settlementIt was in woods behind an apartment building that photographer Dmitry Markov noticed a group of teenagers hanging out on the old couch and rope swing. He was in Pskov, a Russian city close to the Estonian border. Markov had grown up 800km away, in Pushkino, which is just outside Moscow, and as rope-swinging was a pastime he fondly remembered from his own youth, he stopped to take a photo on his iPhone X.“I grew up in a workers’ settlement in the 80s and early 90s, where plenty of families faced social problems like unemployment and alcoholism,” he says. “Many children were left to their own devices, got into trouble and ended up with juvenile police records.” Continue reading...

Before Elon Musk took over the badge was granted to celebrities and journalists verified by the platform to prevent impersonationTwitter’s relaunched premium service – which grants blue check verification labels to anyone willing to pay $8 a month – was unavailable on Friday after the social media platform was flooded by a wave of impostor accounts approved by Twitter.The latest move caps a chaotic start for the new subscription service, one of the first major changes made by Elon Musk after taking over the company two weeks ago. Continue reading...

Cryptocurrency exchange run by Changpeng Zhao pulled out of deal to rescue its rival

People have predicted robots will destroy the labour market, but Amazon believes investment in robotics could create jobsTrapped in a metal cage in a corner of a 350,000 sq ft Amazon warehouse outside Boston last week a lonely yellow robot arm sorted through packages, preparing items to be shipped out to customers who demand ever-faster delivery. Soon it will be joined by others in a development that could mean the end of thousands of jobs and, Amazon argues, the creation of thousands of others.As the robot worked, a screen displayed its progress. It carefully packed a tub of protein powder, next came a box of napkin rings then … a tube of hemorrhoid cream. As 100 journalists from around the world snapped pictures, someone switched the screen to hide the cream. Continue reading...

Founder Sam Bankman-Fried races to find funds to fill multibillion-dollar hole in exchangeThe Bahamas securities regulator has frozen the assets of the Bahamas subsidiary of FTX, as the world’s second largest cryptocurrency exchange struggles for survival.The Securities Commission of the Bahamas said on Thursday it had frozen the assets of FTX Digital Markets and related parties, as well appointing a liquidator for the unit. Continue reading...

The game developer talks about how the hit smartphone card game is a brand new take on deck-builders – and why one simple quirk makes it irresistible• Read our review of Marvel Snap hereThere’s a lot that is surprising about Marvel Snap, the new free-to-play digital card game from one of the minds behind Hearthstone (and the money behind TikTok). A match takes just five minutes. Both players play their cards at the same time. There’s not a paid-for booster pack in sight. Perhaps the biggest surprise, as the game launches its second monthly season, is that it’s really, really good.I spoke to Ben Brode, the co-founder of Snap’s developer Second Dinner, about what Snap is, how the team set out to fix the problems of existing trading card games, and where they’re going from here. Continue reading...

iPhone, Android, PC; Second Dinner/Nuverse

Departures of top figures handling safety, security, privacy and compliance come amid warnings from Federal Trade CommissionAs Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter entered its third week, and following mass layoffs, the billionaire laid bare a delicate financial future for the social media platform, amid an exodus of top privacy and security executives.Yoel Roth, the head of safety and integrity who had been deputized to publicly address concerns advertisers and users had about the platform, is reportedly the latest to leave the company. Continue reading...

The service now allows users to pay $8 to appear ‘verified’. Celebrity impersonators are having a field dayGeorge W Bush “misses killing Iraqis”, and Tony Blair agrees. OJ Simpson says he did it. And Elon Musk is offering “free nightly dinners” and family vacations to anyone whose name happens to be that of his ex, Grimes.At least, that’s what these famous people appear to be saying on Twitter – and it must all be true, because they have a blue checkmark next to their names. Continue reading...

The blow comes soon after rival Binance backed out of a merger deal this week after due diligence of the exchange’s booksThe swift collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX sent more shockwaves through the crypto world on Thursday, with authorities now investigating the firm for potential securities violations and analysts bracing for a further downturn in crypto prices.FTX had agreed this week to sell itself to its bigger rival Binance after experiencing the cryptocurrency equivalent of a bank run. Customers fled the exchange after becoming concerned about whether FTX had sufficient capital. Continue reading...

Prof Hannah Fry is a joy, and will make you deeply excited about the weirdest things – like the magnetic strip on the back of your bank cardProf Hannah Fry brings her irresistible enthusiasm to the BBC for The Secret Genius of Modern Life (BBC Two), a documentary series about the seemingly simple everyday objects or ideas that we tend to take for granted, and how clever they really are. Fry, a mathematician by trade, who hosts podcasts, writes books and adds weekly cheer to Lauren Laverne’s morning show on 6 Music, is a host who is winningly awestruck at the facts she uncovers and the experiments she conducts. Her interest in finding out everything about everything is hugely contagious.In this first episode, she looks at the humble bank card, though naturally, it turns out to be not so humble after all. There is a lovely brisk pace to the show, which takes in history, science and technology, tracing as many elements as possible back to their roots. It begins with the Fresno Drop, in 1958, in which the Bank of America introduced a credit card to its suspicious customers and kickstarted a technological revolution. It whizzes through the introduction of the magnetic strip, via an acronym-friendly segment on how the CIA worked with IBM on inventing a new form of ID, and follows the money through to online shopping, chip and pin, contactless and what a biometric future may look like. Continue reading...