The British Academy’s game awards will reward titles with a social message as well as the year’s best acting performancesInnovative science-fiction shooter Returnal and creative co-operative platform game It Takes Two lead the nominations for Bafta’s 2022 Games Awards, with eight nominations each in categories from best animation to best game.Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, a flagship PlayStation 5 game from last summer, is in the running for seven awards, while driving-tourism racer Forza Horizon 5 and surreal psychological adventure Psychonauts 2 have six nominations each. In total, 39 games have been nominated across the awards’ 16 categories, celebrating excellence in everything from sound design and animation to narrative. Continue reading...
In an attempt to lure more viewers to the increasingly unwatched Oscars ceremony, a hashtag award has been introduced and quickly transformed into a circusUnless you happen to have a vested interest in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, it’s plain to see that the Oscars are trapped in a death spiral. Viewers are abandoning the ceremony in record numbers and, after last year’s debacle – a bizarre jokeless gushfest held in a train station – it’s hard to see how they will ever return.Fortunately, the Academy braintrust has schemed up two dramatic changes to this year’s ceremony that should help to bring things back into line. The first is that a bunch of awards won’t actually be televised live but edited into the broadcast, which will help to make the show’s runtime far less punishing. The second change, though, has already backfired. Continue reading...
In HBO series Gaming Wall Street, director Tobias Deml tries to get to the bottom of how Redditors turned a video game retailer into a financial frenzy“Money in, money out,” is how Tobias Deml, creator of the new HBO Max documentary miniseries Gaming Wall Street, explains the common perception of the stock market while on Zoom with the Guardian. “It’s got to come from somewhere, right? But it’s all based on belief in the future. Money’s all belief. We believe in the government, borders, lots of things that aren’t materially real, but nonetheless exist in our shared imagination. The history of humanity is driven by these beliefs.”Stocks are fake, is what he’s saying, as in not real – “fairy dust”, to borrow a term from Matthew McConaughey’s coke-huffing trader in The Wolf of Wall Street, one of the many pop culture figures that zips by in the rapid-fire torrent of memes frenetically edited into Gaming Wall St. Shares of a company are an intangible concept that nonetheless have physical, real-world consequences in their regular minting of princes and paupers. This alchemy has long been the sole purview of high-finance types, professionals who’d have us believe that their business school educations and sophisticated Bloomberg Terminals make them masters of financial systems too hopelessly complex for us knuckle-draggers to comprehend. But in an era when a degree’s worth of knowledge sits waiting on the internet, it was only a matter of time until some normal folks realized that everyone’s making it up as they go. “Anyone who claims to know everything about how the market works is lying to you,” Deml says. Continue reading...
Crypto’s ability to eschew bureaucratic red tape is the best way to provide immediate service to a vulnerable population, experts sayHe would bristle at the term but you might describe Dylan Schultz as a crypto bro. He runs Lavender.Five, a crypto validator service that authenticates transactions on the blockchain (imagine a deregulated branch of the Securities and Exchange Commission).On 25 February, he issued a plea to his 1,700 Twitter followers, “We’ll match any donation made to a charity in support of Ukraine, up to a total of $1,000.” The next day, Schultz posted the fruits of his initiative; 0.028 bitcoin, equaling the total donations of about $1,100, sent to a crypto wallet operated by a Ukrainian military NGO called Come Back Alive. He’s one tiny part of a chorus of countless other crypto holders all over the world who have raced to back Ukrainians in the face of an invading force. Reports claim that more than $30m in cryptocurrency has been funneled to the country since the war began. So has charity finally become decentralized? Continue reading...
Regulators will consider the techniques the company implements to attract young users and keep them watchingA bipartisan group of attorneys general are launching an investigation into whether TikTok is designed and promoted in a “manner that causes or exacerbates physical and mental health harms” for children and young people.Led by the Massachusetts attorney general, Maura Healy, the regulators are investigating whether the company violated consumer protection laws or put the public at risk. Continue reading...
It is being hailed as one of the greatest games of all time, but if you don’t yet know your Margit from your Elden, here is a guide to get you roaming the Lands Between like a proElden Ring has a Metacritic rating of 97%. If you type its name into Twitter you will be flooded with praise and anecdotes from players who have already spent many hours immersed in its arcane world. But what exactly is it? Why are people obsessed with it? And should you join them – or is it too hard? Continue reading...
Jack Sweeney has amassed 162,000 Twitter followers on a new account monitoring the private jets of billionaires and tycoonsThe teenager known for tracking Elon Musk’s jet has started to monitor the flight paths of Russian oligarchs as their movements come under increasing scrutiny following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.In a new Twitter account created over the weekend, 19-year-old Jack Sweeney from Florida has already amassed nearly 162,000 followers as the teen tracks the private jets of at least 21 Russian billionaires and tycoons. Continue reading...
The tech giant has many ways of gathering information about its users’ activity – from Prime to Alexa. But how much can it collect and what can you do to keep your life private?From selling books out of Jeff Bezos’s garage to a global conglomerate with a yearly revenue topping $400bn (£290bn), much of the monstrous growth of Amazon has been fuelled by its customers’ data. Continuous analysis of customer data determines, among other things, prices, suggested purchases and what profitable own-label products Amazon chooses to produce. The 200 million users who are Amazon Prime members are not only the corporation’s most valuable customers but also their richest source of user data. The more Amazon and services you use – whether it’s the shopping app, the Kindle e-reader, the Ring doorbell, Echo smart speaker or the Prime streaming service – the more their algorithms can infer what kind of person you are and what you are most likely to buy next. The firm’s software is so accomplished at prediction that third parties can hire its algorithms as a service called Amazon Forecast.Not everyone is happy about this level of surveillance. Those who have requested their data from Amazon are astonished by the vast amounts of information they are sent, including audio files from each time they speak to the company’s voice assistant, Alexa. Continue reading...
Services like PayPal and Square now need your tax information. Scammers are going to be on the prowl to get it tooThanks to new legislation that went into place at the beginning of this year, I predict that a lot of unsuspecting small business owners are about to fall victim to a fresh scam.The scam will relate to legislation around new tax reporting rules that will affect millions of freelancers and small businesses. As I explained in an earlier column, beginning for the 2022 tax year, if you receive more than $600 in total payments during the course of the year from a payment service like PayPal, Venmo (which is owned by PayPal), Square, Stripe or online sales of your products made through Amazon, Etsy and other marketplaces – regardless of how many customers are paying – that payment service is required to report that amount to the IRS and to you by sending a Form 1099-K – used for reporting payments via these third parties – in early 2023. Continue reading...
The New York-based photographer on how he glimpsed the collapse of civilisation during Covid – in the window of a pizza placeWhen Aaron Stern considers what inspires his work, he is reminded of the Leonard Cohen lyric, “There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” In March 2020, as New York City began to shutter and fall silent, the photographer’s busy schedule cleared. He had nothing to do but walk and shoot. “Seeing 80,000 people empty out of the city I’ve called home for 21 years – it was ominous, and fascinating,” he says. “I was trying to find some humour, some lightness.”In the end, he found it in the window of Arturo’s, a pizza place in Lower Manhattan. “The fake relic brought the collapse of Rome to mind, and the fall of that civilisation and democracy, while the glamorous Joe DiMaggio era that once embodied New York is also long gone,” he says. “Here I am, in this post-truth era, post-Capitol attacks, with this disease that’s killing thousands, and I stumbled across this juxtaposition of two previous eras that have also ended. It captured just what I was thinking about.” Continue reading...
What do you do with an online doppelgänger? Use their streaming logins, cancel their bookings or fight them for naming rightsAs I unsubscribe from the ninth email in three days urging me to “refinance now!” if I don’t want to miss a “special rate!”, I curse my email doppelgänger. She’s landed us on a marketing database again and now I’m being inundated with spam.My email doppelgänger is the person whose emails I receive in error, presumably due to an extra vowel or missing dash. I don’t know if she’s actually a “she”, but I’ve constructed an identity for her from the bits and pieces I think I’ve gleaned: female, teacher, resides in the US. Continue reading...
The news agency has since deleted the tweet promoting the sale and called it ‘poor choice of imagery’The Associated Press has withdrawn plans to sell a video “of migrants drifting in an overcrowded boat in the Mediterranean” as an NFT after facing a backlash online.The news outlet’s Thursday tweet advertising the clip, which came as Russia’s invasion raised fears of widespread displacement of Ukrainians, provoked accusations that the AP was seeking to profit off of suffering. Continue reading...
Kimbal Musk sold Tesla shares the day before his brother asked Twitter if he should sellThe US Securities and Exchange Commission has reportedly opened an investigation into whether recent stock sales by Tesla CEO Elon Musk and his brother Kimbal Musk violated insider trading rules.The SEC inquiry – first reported by the Wall Street Journal on Thursday – was sparked in part by the Tesla CEO’s own tweets. Continue reading...
In this week’s newsletter: Nintendo closing its Wii and 3DS digital storefronts is a reminder that it’s become so much harder to replay, and introduce the next generation to, our old favourites
Some users report problems registering on Truth Social, launched after Trump was banned from TwitterDonald Trump’s return to social media after being banned from several platforms last year is off to a bumpy start: the former president’s new social media venture, Truth Social, launched on Apple’s App Store on Sunday, rife with errors, malfunctions, and looming questions.Despite being available to download shortly before midnight eastern time and automatically downloaded to Apple devices whose users had pre-ordered it, the app prevented many users from creating an account. Continue reading...
Tim Sanders says socialising with people is more beneficial, while Anne Cowper recommends crosswords for a real challengeA Wordle habit probably wouldn’t protect Emma Brockes from dementia (My five-letter reaction to the New York Times taking over Wordle? I quit, 17 February). There is a myth about puzzles and brain health. The human brain is large because we are social beings. Meeting our fellow creatures is more likely to keep us well. The Lancet’s review, published in 2020, is useful for those interested in what makes a difference – eg exercise, eating well, voting for clean-air policies and embracing education. If your family tells you that your hearing is getting worse, get it checked. Gather with others in whatever way you can. If you like peace, quiet and indeed word puzzles, enjoy them in moderation.
Artificial intelligence has been identified as one of the top three emerging technologies in conservation, helping protect species around the worldThere’s a strand of thinking, from sci-fi films to Stephen Hawking, that suggests artificial intelligence (AI) could spell doom for humans. But conservationists are increasingly turning to AI as an innovative tech solution to tackle the biodiversity crisis and mitigate climate change.A recent report by Wildlabs.net found that AI was one of the top three emerging technologies in conservation. From camera trap and satellite images to audio recordings, the report notes: “AI can learn how to identify which photos out of thousands contain rare species; or pinpoint an animal call out of hours of field recordings – hugely reducing the manual labour required to collect vital conservation data.” Continue reading...
A reader has a poor mobile signal in a rural area and had every excuse in the book for the delayI live in rural Derbyshire and have been trying to get broadband installed since July last year. Since placing the order, I have received every excuse in the book from BT as to why my installation cannot go ahead.My near neighbour has a broadband service, but it appears that there is a problem with the pole in the road and it must be replaced. I took another call yesterday to learn that BT has just delayed installation by a further six weeks to March. That will be almost nine months since I placed the order – if it goes ahead. I have a very poor mobile signal which makes doing any work at home very difficult. Continue reading...
What does it feel like to be ‘12% machine’? An ex-soldier who lost both legs in Afghanistan examines the implications of advances in medical technology with intelligence and humanityIt is now 13 years since Harry Parker stepped on an improvised explosive device in Afghanistan, creating a blast that would result in the loss of both legs. Alongside the physical pain of the subsequent weeks, months and years, he also had to cope with a profound change in his sense of self. He compares the experience to that of Gregor Samsa, the subject of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis – “the strangeness of not being who you used to be, turned into something that sets you apart from those around you”.Equipped with two hi-tech prosthetic limbs, Parker can now walk holding hands with his wife and carry his children on his shoulders. From the outside, it would be easy to conclude that he has adapted extraordinarily well to the event – and he says that “being an amputee feels normal”. But he still considers himself to be a different person – a “new body with a new identity” who is “12% machine”. Continue reading...
Some accounts claiming to support the Canada trucker protests are run by con artists abroadWhen Facebook removed dozens of groups dedicated to Canada’s anti-government “Freedom Convoy” protests earlier this month, it didn’t do so because of extremism or conspiracies rife within the protests. It was because the groups were being run by scam artists.Networks of spammers and profiteers, some based as far afield as Vietnam or Romania, had set up the groups using fake or hacked Facebook accounts in an attempt to make money off of the political turmoil. Continue reading...
by Jasper Jackson, Lucy Kassa and Mark Townsend on (#5WAXC)
Social media giant accused of inaction after users post ‘horrifying and hateful content’Facebook is under renewed scrutiny this weekend, accused of continuing to allow activists to incite ethnic massacres in Ethiopia’s escalating war.Analysis by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) and the Observer found Facebook is still letting users post content inciting violence through hate and misinformation. This is despite being aware it helps directly fuel tensions, prompting claims of inaction and indifference against the social media giant. Continue reading...
The Norwegian photographer on capturing his youngest daughter’s lockdown frustrationIt was April 2020, the sixth week of home schooling, and eight-year-old Lara was fed up. Her father, photographer Helge Skodvin, along with his wife and two elder daughters, was stuck inside with Lara at home in Norway. The first wave of Covid had closed schools across the country, so at 9am every day, each of Skodvin’s daughters took a room in the house to join online classes; his youngest was supposed to be in the kitchen. Instead, Skodvin found Lara hiding under her bed, refusing to go back to her screen, table and lesson. He is pretty sure it was maths she ran away from.“I was walking past her bedroom and spotted her legs sticking out. I had my phone in my hand, so I just snapped the scene,” Skodvin says. “I loved the colours, the chaos, the authenticity, and there was beautiful spring light coming in through the window. There was no need for my work camera, or even any edits.” Continue reading...
Gallery at site of uprising against colonial rule accuses US museum of stonewalling request for artefactA statue depicting the angry spirit of a Belgian officer beheaded during an uprising in Congo in 1931 is at the centre of a tug of war between a US museum and a Congolese gallery at the site of the rebellion.The statue of Maximilien Balot, a colonial administrator, has travelled to Europe but the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts is accused of stonewalling requests for a loan to the White Cube gallery in Lusanga in the Democratic Republic of the Congo Continue reading...
The company has been hit with several discrimination lawsuits but this from a government agency may have wider implicationsFor Black employees at Tesla’s flagship California plant, coming into work could mean being harassed, bullied by a supervisor or finding racist graffiti sprayed on factory walls.That’s according to a new lawsuit filed by California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH), which alleges that Black workers in the company’s Fremont factory experienced “rampant racism” that the company left “unchecked for years”. Continue reading...
The Tech Bro has become Hollywood’s go-to villain. Now, TV is finally grappling with Silicon Valley’s complex female entrepreneursIn the jaw-dropping saga of disgraced health-tech entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes, there was one aspect that attracted most of the public’s attention: her voice.Despite lying about her “revolutionary” pin-prick blood test technology that failed to work, then duping her patients with false diagnoses (she was convicted of four counts of defrauding investors earlier this year) it was her appearance – the Steve Jobs-esque black turtleneck jumpers and signature red lipstick – and her deep baritone, masculine-affected voice that people really zoned in on. So when The Dropout, the TV adaptation of Holmes’s life story – based on Rebecca Jarvis’s 2019 podcast of the same name – was first announced with Amanda Seyfried in the lead role, the internet was abuzz. Would Seyfried do “the voice”? Continue reading...
Critics say the enormous electricity consumption needed to sustain cryptocurrency is fueling the climate crisis and now threatens a partial resurrection of coal in the USEnvironmentalists in Montana called it the “death watch”. Following years of financial losses one of the handful of remaining coal-fired power plants in the state appeared doomed, its likely fate offering a small but noteworthy victory in the effort to avoid disastrous climate change. But then a bitcoin mining company stepped in to resurrect it.The Hardin generating station, a 115-megawatt coal plant located a dozen miles from the historic site of the famous battle of Little Big Horn in southern Montana, was slated for closure in 2018 due to a lack of customers only to somehow limp on, operating on just 46 days in 2020. “We were just waiting for this thing to die,” said Anne Hedges, co-director of the Montana Environmental Information Center. “They were struggling and looking to close. It was on the brink. And then this cryptocurrency company came along.” Continue reading...
by Samuel Gibbs Consumer technology editor on (#5W8ZF)
Second-gen speaker lamp pairs improved sound with larger choice of colours, shades and designsThe second generation of Ikea’s novel Sonos-powered wifi speaker lamp looks a little sleeker than the first, sounds a bit better and comes in new shapes, materials and colour combinations.The idea is the same as for the rest of the Symfonisk range: hide a speaker in a piece of stylish furniture. In true Ikea fashion, the £179 ($169) lamp comes flat-packed, although thankfully only in three parts: the base, the plug and the shade. Continue reading...
by Hannah Verdier and Hollie Richardson on (#5W8YC)
The pop star defies expectations of the usual celebrity podcast. Plus: Paris Hilton opens up about her troubled experience at a behavioural centre and Nic Stone has something for Black Panther fans.Dua Lipa: At Your Service
The platform has been described as having a striking resemblance to Twitter, which was one of several sites that banned the former presidentDetails about Donald Trump’s new social media app “Truth Social” are trickling out as about 500 beta testers have begun using an early version of the platform.The former president announced his plans for the new social media platform in October, promising to rival the tech companies that banned him from their platforms after the Capitol insurrection. Continue reading...
Auschwitz museum says using photo of dictator is exploitative and ‘disrespects memory of all victims’Elon Musk has been criticised by the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum for comparing the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, to Adolf Hitler.The chief executive of Tesla tweeted a meme that showed a photo of Hitler with the words “Stop comparing me to Justin Trudeau” above the image and “I had a budget” below. The tweet was later deleted. Continue reading...
Shareholders urged to vote against deal for Cook, 61, whose pay last year was 1,447 times that of the average Apple employeeA powerful investors’ advisory group has called for shareholders to vote against the $99m (£73m) pay package awarded to Apple boss Tim Cook last year.In a letter to shareholders, the advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) wrote there were “significant concerns regarding the design and magnitude of the equity award” made to Cook in 2021, adding that half of the award “lacks performance criteria”. Continue reading...
Eye-popping motorcycle rides, wildlife rescue missions, turn-based battling and Wordle alternatives – the greatest games on the subscription serviceA little girl visits her grandparents on an idyllic Spanish island and spends a glorious summer rescuing wildlife. That’s pretty much all you need to know about this beautiful exploration game, designed to recall carefree childhood adventures and a treat to share with your own kids. Continue reading...
Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel are pouring huge sums into startups aiming to keep us all young – or even cheat death. And the science isn’t as far-fetched as you might thinkIn the summer of 2019, months before the word “coronavirus” entered the daily discourse, Diljeet Gill was double-checking data from his latest experiment. He was investigating what happens when old human skin cells are “reprogrammed” – a process used in labs around the world to turn adult cells (heart, brain, muscle and the like) – into stem cells, the body’s equivalent of a blank slate.Gill, a PhD student at the Babraham Institute near Cambridge, had stopped the reprogramming process midway to see how the cells responded. Sure of his findings, he took them to his supervisor, Wolf Reik, a leading authority in epigenetics. What Gill’s work showed was remarkable: the aged skin had become more youthful – and by no small margin. Tests found that the cells behaved as if they were 25 years younger. “That was the real wow moment for me,” says Reik. “I fell off my chair three times.” Continue reading...
The comedian and writer on Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell shares some of his favourite online findsWe first got “the Internet” on our family computer in 1996. I recall staring at the thick CRT monitor for about 15 minutes as images on the Thomas the Tank Engine homepage appeared line by line and thinking this was pretty tedious.Skip forward to 1999 when a friend and I realised we could use our modem to make prank phone calls. The recipient – typically a classmate we didn’t like or, more often, their parent – would pick up the phone and hear something akin to a fax machine trying to establish a connection. We, on the other end, would hear confused voices coming out of the modem’s internal speaker. Continue reading...
by Duncan Campbell and Richard Norton-Taylor on (#5W71Q)
Wang Yam sent committee warnings about Britain’s involvement with telecommunications firmA Chinese informant for MI6, now serving a life sentence for murder in a British jail, has given information about the telecommunications company Huawei to the parliamentary intelligence and security committee (ISC), the Guardian has learned.He has been thanked by the chair of the committee, the senior Conservative backbencher Dr Julian Lewis, and told that he had raised “several important areas of concern” and that the committee’s findings may be “of interest” to him. Continue reading...
FCA says it has limited powers to object to Paysafe deal despite concerns about cryptocurrency platformThe City watchdog has raised concerns about a deal to give the cryptocurrency platform Binance access to the UK payments network just months after it ordered the company to stop all regulated activities in Britain.The Financial Conduct Authority said it had limited powers to object to the arrangement with Paysafe, a London-based payments provider, despite its concerns about Binance offering complex and high-risk investments to consumers. Continue reading...
Activists have argued that the tools in use – drones and towers equipped with night vision and radar – make the region dangerous to migrantsWhen the United States’ Department of Homeland Security announced in early February it was training quadruped “robot dogs” to help secure the US-Mexico border, the department’s spokesperson described the nearly 2,000-mile region as “an inhospitable place for man and beast, and that is exactly why a machine may excel there”.But, of course, people do live, work, and try to eke out a living in this “inhospitable” desert space – leaving one to question what, exactly, the robot dog is meant to excel at? Continue reading...
Exclusive: leak shows more than half of donations to convoy protest through GiveSendGo came from USA hacker who leaked the names and locations of more than 90,000 people who donated money to the Canadian trucker convoy protest has said it exposed how money from abroad had funded “extremism” in the country.In an exclusive interview, the hacker told the Guardian that Canada was “not safe from foreign political manipulation”. “You see a huge amount of money that isn’t even coming from Canada – that’s plain as day,” said the hacker, who belongs to the hacktivist group Anonymous. Continue reading...
Move is part of an investigation into suspected VAT fraud scheme involving 250 fake companiesThe UK tax department has seized three non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as part of an investigation into a suspected VAT fraud scheme involving 250 fake companies.HM Revenue and Customs said on Monday it had seized the NFTs and arrested three people on suspicion of attempting to defraud it out of £1.4m. It is the first time a UK law enforcement agency has seized an NFT. Continue reading...
by Jessica Kiang, Brian Logan, Keza MacDonald , Skye on (#5W46N)
From a mind-scrambling breakup drama to a tender video game, our critics suggest popular culture inspired by matters of the heartYes, it all takes place after Joel (Jim Carrey) and Clementine (Kate Winslet) have bitterly broken up, but Michel Gondry’s inventive, mind-scrambling sci-fi Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is actually perfectly romantic. On the pretext of annihilating the painful memories of his ex, Joel relives them, learning not just how much this elective amnesia will cost him, but also how much happiness is locked in the permafrost of the past, waiting to be thawed out. Inasmuch as any film this entertaining can be, it’s really an exhortation to listen to what your future self is screaming at you from another dimension right now: to turn off your TV, wrap your lover in your arms and notice this present, perfect moment as it’s happening. Jessica Kiang Continue reading...
Technology | The Guardian