Michael Grade cites Molly Russell’s death as reminder of urgent need for new era of accountabilityThe death of the teenager Molly Russell is an urgent reminder that big tech needs to be forced into a new era of accountability and to prioritise trust and safety alongside “clicks and profit,” says the new chair of the UK media regulator Ofcom.Michael Grade said Ofcom was set to be given new powers under the government’s online safety bill that he would use to hold the biggest and most powerful tech companies to account. Continue reading...
Former streaming service subscribers on why they have ditched mod cons for MP3s, CDs and other DIY music formatsMeg Lethem was working at her bakery job one morning in Boston when she had an epiphany. Tasked with choosing the day’s soundtrack, she opened Spotify, then flicked and flicked, endlessly searching for something to play. Nothing was perfect for the moment. She looked some more, through playlist after playlist. An uncomfortably familiar loop, it made her realise: she hated how music was being used in her life. “That was the problem,” she says. “Using music, rather than having it be its own experience … What kind of music am I going to use to set a mood for the day? What am I going to use to enjoy my walk? I started not really liking what that meant.”It wasn’t just passive listening, but a utilitarian approach to music that felt like a creation of the streaming environment. “I decided that having music be this tool to [create] an experience instead of an experience itself was not something I was into,” she reflects. So she cut off her Spotify service, and later, Apple Music too, to focus on making her listening more “home-based” and less of a background experience. Continue reading...
Investigation finds video-sharing app may have breached UK data protection law between 2018 and 2020TikTok is facing the prospect of a £27m fine for failing to protect the privacy of children, the UK’s data watchdog has said.An investigation conducted by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) found the video-sharing app may have breached data protection law between May 2018 and July 2020. Continue reading...
Services such as Spotify and Apple Music give us access to the entire history of popular songs. But has that access made us lazy listeners? And could TikTok or TV really help us rediscover our passion for discovery?Earlier this year, Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill unexpectedly became the most popular song in the world. After it was used on the soundtrack of the Netflix sci-fi series Stranger Things, the streaming figures for Bush’s 1985 single rocketed by 9,900% in the US alone. Something similar was happening wherever Stranger Things was available: by 18 June, three weeks after season four of Stranger Things premiered, Running Up That Hill was No 1 on Billboard’s Global 200 chart, which, as its name suggests, collects sales and streaming data from 200-plus countries.It became a big news story, big enough that Bush – no one’s idea of an artist intent on hogging the media spotlight – was impelled to issue a couple of statements and give a rare interview. That was partly because it was an extraordinary state of affairs: the upper reaches of the Global 200 are usually the sole province of what you might call the usual suspects – BTS, Bad Bunny, Adele, Drake et al – and not a world that plays host to tracks from critically acclaimed 37-year-old art-rock concept albums. And it was partly because the unexpected success of Running Up That Hill seemed to say something about how we discover and consume music in 2022. Continue reading...
Mikhail Kalatozov’s 1930s film gives a fascinating account of a medieval-style society about the supposed blessings of the USSR’s modernising impactIn 1930, just as Luis Buñuel was releasing his classic L’Age d’Or, the Georgian director Mikhail Kalatozov gave us the 55-minute silent movie Salt for Svanetia, an equally rich, strange and mysterious work of ethno-fantasy and social-surrealist reverie. It is theoretically a documentary about the blessings which Soviet modernisation brought to the remote community of Ushguli in the Svanetia province of north-west Georgia; it contains a people governed by tribal traditions going back to the middle ages. Working with editor and formalist literary critic Viktor Shklovsky, and inspired by a magazine article by the writer Sergei Tretyakov, Kalatozov appears to have been initially undecided whether his film set in Svanetia would be fact or fiction. He settled – ostensibly – on the former.The fundamental idea is that Svanetia’s people are on the brink of starvation because they have no salt, which their cattle need to lick to get vital mineral nutrients. They are surrounded by impassable mountains and glaciers so little or no salt can be brought in. Cattle have to lick the sweat from other animals or humans – one of many bizarre closeup vignettes – or from urine, or even blood. Clearly, a road built with Bolshevik industry will help them. Continue reading...
Don’t worry about the equipment … the most important thing is the ideaEveryone, they say, has a story to tell, and increasingly those stories are being told directly into the ears of podcast listeners – which, according to Ofcom, was about 25% of the adult population in the UK in 2021. If you have something to say, podcasting provides an easy, accessible and low-cost way to say it. Continue reading...
Dan and Jackie Vecchitto created the internet’s latest obsession, with real-life trombonists’ firm approvalTrombone Champ, the musical computer game, has received more than 20,000 downloads since it was released last week, and gameplay videos have rippled through social media, featuring beloved songs ruined by terrible trombone playing.The game is like Guitar Hero, but with your mouse acting as a trombone. You move it up and down to simulate the slide, and click to blow the horn. Your goal is to play along with such trombone classics as Beethoven’s Fifth, Hava Nagila and Take Me Out to the Ballgame. Continue reading...
The software giant paying vastly over the odds for a small but strategically threatening company should alarm US regulatorsThe big tech news in a slow week was that the software giant Adobe is planning to pay the unconscionable sum of $20bn (£18bn) to acquire a small company called Figma. Why is this news? Well, first of all, there’s the price – way above any rational valuation of Figma. Second, there’s the question that we have finally learned to ask about tech mergers and acquisitions: is there a competition or antitrust issue here somewhere?We’ll come to the price later, but at first sight, the answer to the second question would seem to be no: the two companies are not direct competitors. Adobe dominates the market in software for creating and publishing digital and printed material – graphics, photography, illustration, animation, multimedia/video, motion pictures and print. If you’ve ever used Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat Reader or opened a pdf (portable document format), then you’ve used an Adobe product. Continue reading...
McDonald’s has shelved its meat-free burger trial and stock in one of the major manufacturers has dipped nearly 70%At the start of the year, McDonald’s launched a plant-based burger “sizzled on a flat-iron grill, then topped with slivered onions, tangy pickles, crisp shredded lettuce, Roma tomato slices, ketchup, mustard, mayo and a slice of melty American cheese”. For a while, it looked like a glimpse of the future.The US test run of the McPlant burger was quietly shelved last month (it is still available in some markets, including the UK) in one of a series of setbacks for a meatless-meat industry that only a year ago was claiming it could change the great American menu for ever. Continue reading...
The photographer was on holiday with friends and their twin boys when she spotted a chance to capture teenage ennuiIdentical twin teenagers Joe and Duke were fed up. Walking to a local supermarket in the midday sun with their parents and photographer Sarah Lee, a family friend, was not their preferred choice of activity while on holiday in Ibiza, yet here they were.Lee had known the boys since they were very small. In 2019 they were 17, right on the brink of adulthood. “They weren’t able to get into the clubs at night; they were still being cajoled into doing something dull in the day. It’s only their silhouettes, but you can see how bored they were. The epitome of pissed-off teenagers!” Continue reading...
TikTok searches soared amid flood of media coverage, raising questions about the response to extreme social media challengesInterest in NyQuil chicken appears to have substantially increased after the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a warning about the “recent social media video challenge” that drew widespread media coverage.The FDA issued a statement on 15 September warning of social media videos encouraging people to cook chicken in NyQuil: “The challenge sounds silly and unappetizing – and it is. But it could also be very unsafe. Continue reading...
Meta’s president of global affairs said it would be a decision ‘I oversee’ after the ex-president’s accounts were suspended in 2021Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, is charged with deciding whether Donald Trump will be allowed to return to Facebook and Instagram in 2023, Clegg said on Thursday.Speaking at an event held in Washington by news organization Semafor, Clegg said the company was seriously debating whether Trump’s accounts should be reinstated and said it was a decision that “I oversee and I drive”. Continue reading...
Tech behemoth could do more to protect user data from landing in the hands of police and other authorities, some sayFor years, Apple has carefully curated a reputation as a privacy stalwart among data-hungry and growth-seeking tech companies.In multi-platform ad campaigns, the company told consumers that “what happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone,” and equated its products with security through slogans like “Privacy. That’s iPhone.” Continue reading...
This endearingly ludicrous viral music game is more than a one-note comedyOn Wednesday morning, I saw a tweet from games magazine PC Gamer that made me leak from the eyes with laughter. It contained a video, in which a wide-eyed, pained-looking cartoon trombonist struggled to hit the notes of Beethoven’s Fifth while the composer himself stared sombrely out of the screen in evident disapproval. It is a golden comedic combination of terrible music, fart noises, earnestness and absurdity. This is the video game Trombone Champ, and it has since gone wildly viral.Of course I immediately downloaded it. I’ve been playing rhythm games for more than 20 years, from Beatmania to Guitar Hero to Amplitude via fun musical contraptions in Japanese arcades, and I take them embarrassingly seriously. Trombone Champ is not serious; it is a wonderful blend of accidental musical comedy, trading-card collection, made-up facts about trombones and hotdogs (“The first trombone was made in 200,000,000BC”), and true facts about baboons. (Don’t ask about the baboons. This game has unexpected secrets and the baboons are one of them.) Continue reading...
Regulator’s inquiry will also focus on messaging and smart devices as three ‘hyperscalers’ face scrutinyOfcom will investigate the world’s biggest tech companies to ensure their dominance in areas such as cloud computing, messaging and smart devices works for the people and businesses of Britain, the communications regulator has said.The cloud services investigation, which will take priority out of the three issues, will look at Amazon, Microsoft and Google. Continue reading...
The developer of the text-adventure game on how, at 20, she overcame 1980s misogyny to turn a Tolkien book into one of the most groundbreaking titles in the gaming canonAs a teenager, Veronika Megler was intent on becoming a statistician. She signed up for a computer science course at Melbourne University, reasoning it would assist her chosen career. “I think there were four women in a class of about 220 people, and it was pretty misogynistic,” she recalls. Megler had already built her own PC, buying the motherboard, chips, capacitors and diodes from an electronics shop in Melbourne. “In the store they’d say ‘tell your boyfriend we don’t have these’,” she recalls.Realising that statistics wasn’t for her, Megler answered a newspaper advert for a part-time programming job at a local software company called Melbourne House. It was 1980, and she was halfway through a course that focused on designing operating systems and developing programming languages. “The day I was hired, the first thing my boss said to me was, ‘write the best adventure game ever,’” she remembers. The eventual result of this instruction was The Hobbit, a landmark 1982 text adventure game that’s still fondly remembered today. Continue reading...
by Alexi Duggins, Hannah Verdier, Hollie Richardson, on (#63XT4)
In this week’s newsletter: Sirin Kale explores a complex case of online harassment in the Guardian’s first true crime podcast, Can I Tell You a Secret? Plus: a Serial special after Adnan Syed’s sentence is overturned
Feature marks latest relaxation of rules around how image-generating AI tool can be usedUsers of the image generating artificial intelligence Dall-E 2 will be allowed to upload faces to the system for the first time, creators OpenAI have said, as competition in the sector heats up.The feature marks the latest relaxation of the company’s rules around how its tool, which can generate high-quality images from a text prompt, can be used. When it first launched in a public beta, OpenAI banned users from generating any images with a realistic face. Continue reading...
The hugely popular fictional team will feature alongside spectrum of real-world sides in EA Sports’ final FIFA game, due out on September 30There’s almost no real-world professional football team that isn’t included in EA Sports’ Fifa games, from the Women’s Super League to Romania’s SuperLiga. They have now been joined by a fictional one: AFC Richmond, from the wildly successful feel-good TV series Ted Lasso.The lineup includes Lasso himself (modelled on actor Jason Sudeikis), grumpy veteran Roy Kent, wonderkid Sam Obisanya, the compellingly dislikable Jamie Tartt, and all the other characters from the series. Players can take control of the team, or join it with their own created character as either a manager or a player, in Career Mode and online multiplayer matches. The kit, Nelson Road stadium and club badge will also be unlockable in Ultimate Team and Pro Clubs modes.FIFA 23, the last product of the partnership, is out next week, on September 30. Continue reading...
Politicians will be banned from using social media platform for campaign fundraisingPoliticians on TikTok will no longer be able to use the app tipping tools, nor access advertising features on the social network, as the company tightens its policies around political issues in the run-up to the US midterm elections in six weeks’ time.Political advertising is already banned on the platform, alongside “harmful misinformation”, but as TikTok has grown over the past two years, new features such as gifting, tipping and ecommerce have been embraced by some politicians on the site. Continue reading...
This interactive series follows four friends as they navigate LA’s cut-throat music scene via heartfelt writing, playable music videos and lots of textingGorillaz may be the most famous example of a virtual band, at least in the west. Elsewhere, virtual idol Hatsune Miku is omnipresent, her personality projected on to her by fans. Four-piece outfit OFK are different: before you’ve heard a note of their music, you’re going to find out exactly who they are. The band itself is not real – it is an invention of the songwriters, composers and game designers working together at LA developer Team OFK – but the music is, and this is a novel and intriguing way to experience it.We Are OFK is a band biopic delivered over five animated episodes. Four friends come together through happenstance, sowing seeds of creativity and opportunity that blossom despite LA’s cut-throat music scene. As catchy as the band’s electro-pop earworms are, the real hook comes from spending time with them: manager/keyboardist Itsumi, vocalist Luca, producer Jey, and VFX artist Carter. Continue reading...
The writer, who learned her craft playing 90s adventure games, on her love letter to a lifelong passion, the problematic aspects of the industry and the transformative power of playGames have always been a part of writer Gabrielle Zevin’s life. Her first experience, she recalls, was playing Pac-Man at the Honolulu hotel where her grandmother ran a jewellery store. “I was about three years old at the time and I remember thinking, wouldn’t it just be perfect if I wasn’t limited to a single quarter … if I could just keep playing this game for ever and ever?” Now 44, the veteran author has written her first novel about games. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is the story of two programmers, Sam and Sadie, who set up a studio in the mid-1990s and over the course of a decade, make interesting games while their lives and relationships entwine in complex, often heartbreaking ways.It is a künstlerroman for the digital age, an engrossing meditation on creativity and love and perhaps the first novel to wrestle with the culture and meaning of this often-misunderstood medium. It’s also been a resounding success, shooting straight into the New York Times bestseller list and earning her an interview on Jimmy Fallon. Continue reading...
Cameras on turbines being trained to recognise lesser spotted eagles, which are endangered in countrySmall in size, sensitive of constitution and with only 130 breeding pairs surviving locally in the wild, the lesser spotted eagle of the Oder delta lives up to its name. In Germany, key questions over the country’s energy future hang on the question of whether artificial intelligence systems can do a better job of spotting the reclusive animal than birdwatchers do.Lesser spotted eagles (named after the drop-shaped spots on their feathers) are fond of riding thermals over many of the flatlands earmarked for a mass expansion of onshore windfarms by a German government under pressure to compensate for a pending loss of nuclear power, coal plants and Russian gas. Continue reading...
Video and images posted online as hacker also threatens to leak source code for Grand Theft Auto V and VIThe next instalment of Grand Theft Auto will include a female playable character for the first time and is to be set in Vice City, the in-game universe’s ersatz Miami, leaked footage confirms.More than 90 videos and images of the long-awaited Grand Theft Auto VI were leaked online over the weekend in one of the biggest confidential data breaches in gaming history. Continue reading...
Owners report opening camera in apps such as TikTok and Instagram leads to grinding sounds and vibrations in entire phoneA major bug in Apple’s latest iPhone is causing the camera to physically fail when using apps such as TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram, some owners have reported.The bug in the company’s iPhone 14 Pro Max, the most expensive model in the iPhone 14 range, appears to affect the optical image stabilisation (OIS) feature, which uses a motor to eliminate the effects of camera shake when taking pictures. Opening the camera in certain apps causes the OIS motor to go haywire, causing audible grinding sounds and physically vibrating the entire phone. Continue reading...
by Samuel Gibbs Consumer technology editor on (#63SPN)
With students’ finances overstretched, it’s important to get the right tech at the right price. Here are some of the best dealsThe end of the summer is here, and with it the start of a new semester at university. The landscape of learning certainly looks brighter than it has for the last couple of years but the need to have the right gear is just as big, with many universities offering a mix of in-person and online learning.From laptops and phones to headphones and note-taking tools, here’s a guide to some of the tech that will help make the most of the student experience at a time of stretched finances. Continue reading...
Expo in east London shows how important augmented and virtual reality will be, as attractions move with the timesIn the fight for theme park visitors the battle lines have been drawn – monster trucks, virtual reality zombie warfare and “smellscaping”, just thankfully not all at the same time.And while there was a sombre atmosphere around parts of London as tens of thousands lined up to pay their respects to the Queen, there were 10,000 more gathered in a convention centre in East London experiencing the future of the theme park. Continue reading...
A court in Delaware will decide whether the Tesla chief can back out of his $44bn offer to buy the platformAs the Twitter whistleblower Peiter Zatko was telling US lawmakers of “egregious” security failings at the company last Tuesday, shareholders in the social media platform overwhelmingly voted to hand those problems over to someone else: Elon Musk.It is unlikely that the Tesla CEO, who owns more than 9% of Twitter and agreed to buy the company in April, was among the 99% of voting shareholders who backed that $44bn (£38.5bn) deal, given he is now determined to abandon it. A Delaware judge will decide at a trial beginning on 17 October whether Musk gets to walk away, or be forced to acquire the business on the terms that he had agreed upon. Continue reading...
Speaking to animals has long been a fantasy. But now a dizzyingly ambitious project is harnessing all the power of modern science in an attempt to understand what whales say – and then hold conversations with themTom Mustill was kayaking with his friend Charlotte in Monterey Bay, California, when an animal three times the size of the largest Tyrannosaurus Rex hurtled from the water and crashed down on their tiny craft. As the flying humpback whale fell upon them and their kayak was sucked beneath the waves, Mustill assumed he would die. Miraculously he and Charlotte found themselves gasping for breath, clinging to their capsized kayak. How had they survived a smash with a creature three times the weight of a double-decker bus?What happened next was almost as weird. Mustill and Charlotte went viral. Passing whale-watching tourists had videoed the pair’s near-death encounter and stuck it on YouTube. Mustill, a wildlife filmmaker, became what he calls “a lightning conductor for whale fanatics”. Interviewed by the global media, he was soon quivering with different and extraordinary stories of whale meetings from around the world: a submariner told him about whales singing to his ship; a book publisher reported being apparently scanned by the sonar-like echolocation of a pregnant female dolphin – a few days later, she discovered that she too was pregnant. “It was really addictive finding out all these other stories,” says Mustill, “because each one was like another lens on the animal and our relationship to them.” Continue reading...
Do Kwon’s whereabouts are still unknown since a South Korean court issued an arrest warrant earlier this weekDo Kwon, the South Korean founder of the failed cryptocurrency Terra wanted by police, has denied he was on the run after Singapore investigators said he was not in the city-state as had been believed.Kwon’s whereabouts have been thrown into question after a statement from Singapore police late on Saturday, and his tweets did not reveal where he was. Continue reading...
If you want to be an internet-age version of General Motors or IBM, you need to sell something people want and steer clear of political pitfallsA question: what’s the average lifespan of an American company? Not any old company, mind, but one big enough to figure in Standard and Poor’s index of the 500 largest. The answer is surprising: the seven-year rolling average stands at 19.9 years. Way back in 1965 it was 32 years and the projections are that the downward trend will continue.Remember that we’re talking averages here. The trend doesn’t mean that no companies currently extant will get to their first century. Some almost certainly will, as some have in the past: AT&T, for example, is 137 years old; General Electric is 130; Ford is 119; IBM is 111; and General Motors is 106. But most companies wither or are gobbled up long before they qualify for a telegram from the president. Continue reading...
A moment at a Rohingya refugee camp gave the photojournalist a sense of the surrealIn the shadow of Tangkhali refugee camp in Bangladesh, photojournalist Jashim Salam stood by a projection screen and surveyed the crowd of Rohingya refugee children. They were watching a health and sanitation awareness film.“In that particular moment it looked like a scene from thousands of years ago,” says Salam, who has documented the fallout from the crisis. “The landscape, the lighting just after sunset, the bewildered look in people’s eyes; it all felt surreal to me.” Continue reading...
President appears at Detroit auto show, where EVs are this year’s stars – but the road to electrification promises to be a bumpy oneFresh off signing legislation aimed at propelling the nation’s electric vehicle (EV) transition, Joe Biden was in Detroit last week to reaffirm his support for electrification ahead of the opening of the US’s largest annual car show.“The great American road trip is going to be fully electrified, whether you’re driving along the coast, or on I-75 here in Michigan,” he declared as the first North American International Auto Show since 2019 prepared to open its doors. Continue reading...
Rising interest rates, dampened growth and the public’s shifting views on Big Tech are giving experts pauseHuge layoffs at Snapchat, dramatic valuation drops at Meta and Apple, and hiring freezes at other Big Tech firms have given new fuel to an increasingly common question: Is Silicon Valley’s golden era coming to an end?The answer is complicated, experts say. The tech industry has been on a run of impressive growth for some time, bolstered in recent years by a pandemic that forced most of the world online and sent demand for tech services booming. That explosion – and the high salaries and office perks that came with it – seems to be slowing. Continue reading...
Bodegraven-Reeuwijk has been plagued by a conspiracy theory and wants tweets spreading it removedA small Dutch town took Twitter to court on Friday to demand the social media company take down all messages relating to a supposed ring of Satan-worshipping paedophiles alleged to have been active in the town in the 1980s.Bodegraven-Reeuwijk, a town of about 35,000 inhabitants in the middle of the Netherlands, has been the focus of conspiracy theories on social media since 2020, when three men started spreading unfounded stories about the abuse and murder of children they said took place in the town in the 1980s. Continue reading...
Ride-hailing company confirms attack after hacker compromises Slack app and messages employeesUber has been hacked in an attack that appears to have breached the ride-hailing company’s internal systems.The California-based company confirmed it was responding to a “cybersecurity incident”, after the New York Times reported that a hack had accessed the company’s network and forced it to take several internal communications and engineering systems offline. The hacker claimed to be 18 years old, according to the report. Continue reading...
Generational divide threatens future of tech firm as it seeks approval for $400m takeover by Facebook owner MetaIt is rare for a multimillion-dollar company to explicitly state that its business is dying because it is simply too uncool to live.But that is the bold strategy that the gif search engine Giphy has adopted with the UK’s competition regulator, which is trying to block a $400m (£352m) takeover attempt by Facebook’s owner, Meta. Continue reading...
by Alexi Duggins, Hannah Verdier, Hollie Richardson a on (#63NA5)
In this week’s newsletter: The British Somali migrant was wrongfully found guilty of murdering Cardiff shopkeeper Lily Volpert in 1952 – a new podcast finds out why. Plus: five of the best long podcasts
by Hannah Devlin Science correspondent on (#63N4B)
Research team hopes system could improve natural conversations between humans and AI systemsLaughter comes in many forms, from a polite chuckle to a contagious howl of mirth. Scientists are now developing an AI system that aims to recreate these nuances of humour by laughing in the right way at the right time.The team behind the laughing robot, which is called Erica, say that the system could improve natural conversations between people and AI systems. Continue reading...
The case mirrors a District of Columbia complaint alleging the company pushes sellers to maintain higher prices on other sitesCalifornia is suing Amazon, accusing the company of violating the state’s antitrust laws by stifling competition and engaging in practices that push sellers to maintain higher prices on products on other sites.The 84-page lawsuit filed on Wednesday in San Francisco superior court mirrors another complaint filed last year by the District of Columbia, which was dismissed by a district judge earlier this year and is now going through an appeals process. Continue reading...
