Technology | The Guardian

Our digital profiles and possessions are ever-expanding, but what happens to them after our deaths? Tech companies are yet to offer a satisfactory solution, says the technology researcher Tamara KneeseTamara Kneese studies how people experience technology. She is a senior researcher at New York-based nonprofit Data & Society Research Institute. Her new book, Death Glitch, examines what happens to our digital belongings when we die, and argues that tech companies need to improve how they deal with death on their platforms for the sake of all our digital posterity.The posthumous fate of our digital belongings seems a morbid topic. Why is it important?

Look what happened when the Thai amateur photographer spotted a big pink taxiIt may be the smaller of Bangkok's two international airports, but hundreds of people can sometimes be found waiting in line for taxis outside Don Mueang. Unlike the black cabs on London's streets, or New York's distinctive yellow ones, Thai taxis come in a whole range of colours. Here we have green and yellow, pink, orange, light yellow, light green, light blue," Jirasak Panpiansin says.On the evening this shot was taken, in the early spring of 2022, he was waiting for a flight back to his home town in north-east Thailand. I was struck by this one pink taxi among the others, and the driver taking a drink." Continue reading...

Federal civil rights agency claims in lawsuit that employees were subjected to racist slurs and graffiti including noosesA US civil rights agency has sued Tesla, claiming the electric carmaker has tolerated severe harassment of Black employees at its flagship California assembly plant.The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) said in the lawsuit, filed in federal court on Thursday, that from 2015 to the present Black workers at the Tesla plant in Fremont have routinely been subjected to racist slurs and graffiti, including swastikas and nooses. Continue reading...

Some customers claim titanium frame of more expensive models becomes so hot it's too hot to hold'Apple is facing complaints from users about overheating in relation to its new iPhone 15 models, with some customers claiming the titanium frame becomes too hot to hold.The iPhone maker's community forum is carrying customer feedback about the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max claiming that the handsets are overheating. Continue reading...

Firms known for funding biased AI products would need to submit demographic information on foundersCalifornia would become the first state to require venture capital firms to disclose the race and gender of the founders of the companies they fund, under a bill currently awaiting Governor Gavin Newsom's signature.The business community strongly opposes the legislation, characterizing it as an example of bureaucratic overreach. But civil rights groups and female entrepreneurs say it could go a long way toward equalizing opportunity in Silicon Valley, where startup capital overwhelmingly flows to white men. According to the business data firm PitchBook, companies founded by all-female teams accounted for just 2% of venture capital funding last year. Those led by Black women and Latinas received even less, 0.85%, according to a report from Project Diane, a research effort focused on female founders. Continue reading...

I hate real life golf - too many things can go wrong. So why do I love playing PGA Tour 2K23?I'm sitting here trying to work out why PGA Tour 2K23 is the greatest video game of all time.Rationally, objectively and empirically it cannot be. It lacks the emotional gut punch of Final Fantasy VII, the engineering creativity of Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, the immersive storytelling of Red Dead Redemption or the existential horror of The Evil Within, but I really did have fun writing that sentence and hope in some way AI algorithms make it the headline for this game on Metacritic. Continue reading...

Critics decry media shut-out as judge permits evidence and testimony to be presented behind closed doorsThe landmark antitrust trial pitting the US justice department against Google is now in its third week, and the government continues to roll out its case arguing that the internet search behemoth abused its power and resources to maintain a monopoly.The trial has widespread implications for the tech industry, antitrust law and potentially the way that hundreds of millions of people engage with and access the internet. But in the courtroom, much of the proceedings have unfolded behind closed doors, in sessions that are inaccessible to the public or the media. Continue reading...

Mail-based service has had a 25-year run in the US but the streaming business eclipsed it long agoMost of Netflix's 238 million streaming customers around the world will be unaware that the company first launched 25 years ago as a DVD mailing service. Even fewer might realise that operation has continued, with under 1 million people still subscribing.But now the company is finally hitting the stop button, with its five remaining US distribution centres mailing out their final discs to American customers on Friday. Continue reading...

Lawsuit claims company knowingly sold defective car that led to Micah Lee's 2019 death while Tesla blames classic human error'The lawyer representing victims of a fatal Tesla crash blamed the company's autopilot driver assistant system, saying that a car company should never sell consumers experimental vehicles," in the opening statement of a California trial on Thursday.The case stems from a civil lawsuit alleging that the autopilot system caused the owner of a Tesla Model 3 car, Micah Lee, to suddenly veer off a highway east of Los Angeles at 65mph (105km/h), where his car struck a palm tree and burst into flames. Continue reading...

The lighthearted trend - using questionable numbers to justify indulgent purchases - has been accused of fueling sexismAnyone who watched 2000s episodes of What Not to Wear or read Cosmopolitan in the 90s knows girl math well. Back in the day, we used to call it fashion math. Let's say a designer bag costs $800. That's out of budget - until you remember you'll use it every day. That's, like, less than $1 per wear.Congratulations: you've just completed girl math 101. Women on TikTok say the trend, which began with a video made by the user Samantha James, pokes fun at the lengths we will go to justify life's indulgences. Maybe everything you want to buy on Sephora.com costs $38, but $40 will get you free shipping, so you're actually saving money if you go ahead and add a $15 mascara to your cart. Makes sense, right? Continue reading...

Amazon considers its Flex drivers' independent contractors - meaning they're not promised worker's compensation after a biteThe app told her to deliver to the porch. Jennifer Anderson, a 43-year-old gig worker for Amazon Flex and a single mother, had brought packages to the house before - so she didn't think much of it when she saw two unsecured dogs: a heeler and a chihuahua, which was barking at her. Dogs are everywhere in eastern Idaho, and Anderson's own dog was a herding breed similar to the heeler. I've never had a fear of dogs my entire life," she says.When she got to the doorstep, the chihuahua suddenly started biting her, but barely broke the skin. Anderson told the tiny dog to stop" and started walking to her car. That's when the heeler lunged, sinking his teeth into her ankle. Anderson screamed and managed to get back in her vehicle. The wound was bleeding badly. I was just shaking and completely shocked," she says. The owner came out but didn't seem overly apologetic. I know I need to get a collar for him," he told her casually, but my last dog was way worse." Continue reading...

News comes after EU says platform formerly known as Twitter has highest disinformation of social networks surveyedElon Musk, owner of X, has confirmed he has ditched his team working to prevent disruption to elections, just days after the EU announced the platform, formerly known as Twitter, had the highest proportion of disinformation in three European countries.Ahead of 70 elections around the globe in the coming year, the controversial businessman confirmed on X: Oh you mean the Election Integrity' Team that was undermining election integrity? Yeah, they're gone." Continue reading...

Report into toxic content aimed at young men finds drug use being promoted and risks downplayedYoung TikTok users in the UK have viewed videos that promote deadly and illegal bodybuilding drugs 89m times, a report has found.The report, titled TikTok's Toxic Trade, by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), looks into the promotion of bodybuilding drugs and a rise in toxic content aimed at young men. Continue reading...

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In this week's newsletter: Get unmatched access to the musician's story in the 12-part Life in Lyrics. Plus: five of the best podcasts about modern masculinity Don't get Hear Here delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereMcCartney: A Life in Lyrics

The EU report cards are in, and they must address the fact that one platform is falling far behind others in dealing with misinformationResults days for A-levels and GCSEs see pupils across the UK waiting with no small measure of anxiety for their grades. Big tech CEOs are having a similar experience this week, as the European Union announces the results of reports submitted by tech firms on the scale of fake news across social media. The reports were the first since the Digital Services Act gave the EU sweeping new powers to fine and otherwise punish those who perform poorly.The report cards were welcome reading for most companies, who have done decently in tackling the scourge of disinformation. But for Elon Musk's Twitter, now known as X, the message was clear: Could do better." Continue reading...

Host of celebrities to embody new assistants aimed at increasing young people's interaction with AIMeta is to launch artificial intelligence chatbots embodied by celebrities including Snoop Dogg, Kendall Jenner and Naomi Osaka.Mark Zuckerberg made the announcement at the company's annual Connect conference, where he spoke about new AI products at Facebook's parent company. Continue reading...

Landlord British Land says decision will knock earnings for six months to next MarchFacebook's parent company, Meta, has paid 149m to break its lease on a central London office building, in the latest sign of large corporates cutting back on workspace amid the post-pandemic boom in hybrid working.The decision comes just two years after the tech firm committed to occupying the site owned and recently redeveloped by British Land at 1 Triton Square near Regent's Park. Continue reading...

At the core of the case is whether the company used its position to disadvantage rivals and the power of the agency to rein in tech firmsThe Federal Trade Commission and attorneys general from 17 states have accused Amazon in a major antitrust lawsuit of illegally shutting out competition to become one of the world's most powerful companies.The landmark case presents a significant threat to Amazon's dominance in the online retail industry, and is a major test of antitrust law and the FTC's power. Continue reading...

Federal Trade Commission and 17 states sue retail giant in major antitrust caseThe Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and 17 state attorneys general have sued Amazon, alleging the e-commerce behemoth uses its position in the marketplace to inflate prices on other platforms, overcharge sellers and stifle competition.The lawsuit, filed in US district court for the western district of Washington on Tuesday, is the result of a years-long investigation into Amazon's businesses and one of the most significant legal challenges brought against the company in its nearly 30-year history. Continue reading...

Director Gareth Edwards draws together the many strands of our current AI debate with tremendous boldness, conjuring up an intriguing and stimulating spectacleThis colossal sci-fi thriller from Gareth Edwards features John David Washington and Gemma Chan in vast mysterious panoramas and vertiginous vistas which deserve to be shown at Imax-plus scale; it also shows that Christopher Nolan isn't the only British director in Hollywood thinking (and acting) big. After a stint making franchise movies such as Godzilla and the enjoyable and underrated Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Edwards has now crafted this ambitious original picture, co-written with Chris Weitz, which is closer in spirit to his ingenious 2010 debut Monsters.The Creator is an old-fashioned sci-fi actioner with some ideas to match to state-of-the-art digital effects, in the tradition of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner or Neill Blomkamp's District 9, with a creeping colonialist's fear of the unknown to match that in Coppola's Apocalypse Now. And given that Edwards has served some time on the Star Wars mother ship, it shouldn't be too surprising to find some holograms in the mix and a certain dustbin-sized droid which whimpers something poignant about what an honour it's been to serve his comrades before lumbering out to face the enemy on a kamikaze mission. Continue reading...

In this week's newsletter: Why an AI-generated image of Tiananmen Square jumping up Google search rankings is an omen for future disinformation Don't get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereA strange thing happened last week when you searched for tank man" on Google.Tap on image results and instead of the usual photos of Tiananmen Square in Beijing, and the iconic image of a brave protester staring down a convoy of tanks that was captured in 1989, the first result was the same historic moment - but from a different point of view. Continue reading...

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The move will bring the artificial intelligence chatbot closer to popular voice assistants such as Apple's Siri and Amazon's AlexaOpenAI's ChatGPT is getting a major update that will enable the viral chatbot to have voice conversations with users and interact using images, moving it closer to popular artificial intelligence (AI) assistants like Apple's Siri.The voice feature opens doors to many creative and accessibility-focused applications", OpenAI said in a blog post on Monday. Continue reading...

The social media fad championed by Gwyneth Paltrow is said to have multiple health benefits - but experts aren't convincedIt's a TikTok trend, has been championed by Gwyneth Paltrow, and was recently revealed as a habit of the former Countryfile presenter, Julia Bradbury. But is taping your mouth shut at night actually good for you?According to the Kent Community Health NHS foundation trust, breathing through the nose has benefits. Continue reading...

His company managed billions in assets and made him one of the world's richest people. Then, almost overnight, it collapsed. With a fraud trial beginning next week, a documentary asks how he bewitched so manySunil Kavuri is not a novice investor. Sure, he hasn't always been involved in finance: 20 years ago, he was a model. He and his identical twin brother were the stuff of local newspaper human-interest stories, straight-A lads from Rugby in Warwickshire who got firsts in economics, were both on the way to do master's degrees in finance at Cambridge and got picked up by O2 to do the adverts for Big Brother. You might remember the ad: two floppy-haired guys horseplaying on a sofa.After that, though, Kavuri worked for Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley and then JP Morgan, leaving in 2012 to do his own investing. In 2015, he started investing in cryptocurrencies, mainly bitcoin, which he saw as digital gold": It has all the attributes of gold, but it's easier to store, so it's better than gold." The premise of bitcoin is that the supply is fixed at 21m, so it's a finite resource. I saw bitcoin as a better, more portable version," he says. It has finance supply, it's perfectly divisible, it's fungible." Continue reading...

I was attacked online for presenting evidence on Covid - it made me reflect on how we can rebuild public faith in scienceLast year, as the number of Italians getting a fourth booster dose of the Covid vaccine waned, the country's ministry of health asked me, as a scientist, to appear on a 50-second TV spot, explaining why vulnerable people should get another jab. It was aired hundreds of times on television. As a result, I received a lot of emails attacking me; on Twitter and Facebook I was (wrongly) denounced as someone in the pocket of big pharma.At the height of the pandemic in October 2020 I'd had a similar experience. At the time, I was president of the Accademia dei Lincei, Italy's most important scientific academy, and the second deadly wave of Covid was arriving. I argued in a long and reasoned article, highlighting the epidemiological situation in detail, that either drastic measures would need to be taken immediately or500 deaths a day could be expected by mid-November (unfortunately the prediction was accurate). Immediately after publication, I receivedemails telling me in the strongest of terms that I had better not get involved in other people's business.Giorgio Parisi is a theoretical physicist and the author of In a Flight of Starlings: The Wonder of Complex Systems. Together with Klaus Hasselmann and Syukuro Manabe, he won the Nobel prize in physics in 2021Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. Continue reading...

Tech company plays catchup after Microsoft's deal with ChatGPT developer in JanuaryAmazon is to invest up to $4bn (3.2bn) in the startup Anthropic, which has created a rival to ChatGPT called Claude, as the Silicon Valley giant seeks to keep pace with rivals including Microsoft and Google in the race to dominate the artificial intelligence space.Under the terms of the deal, Amazon will invest an initial $1.25bn into Anthropic, which was founded about two years ago by former research executives from the ChatGPT developer OpenAI, and take a minority stake in the business. Continue reading...

You will need time, space, fiddly components and patience - but it can be a deeply satisfying process that won't break your bankTwo years ago, I built my first PC - let's just say it did not go smoothly. After painstakingly constructing the entire machine, nothing happened when I switched it on. After several hours of disassembly and expletive-laden research, I discovered the motherboard needed a firmware update. I learned a lot that day, and after a few months of recovery, went on to build a couple more machines relatively painlessly.Now, with the economy flatlining and the cost of living high, I wanted to build another, a more budget-minded machine that wouldn't be too nightmarish to put together, and would play most of this winter's biggest games at respectable performance settings. The PC I put together is not cheap, but it performs very well and will still cope with next year's blockbuster releases. Whatever specs you go for, building it yourself is the most cost effective way to do it, and you get a great sense of achievement. As long as it works. Which it will, if you follow these handy hints. Continue reading...

At global summit in UK, Rishi Sunak will highlight risk of criminals and terrorists using technology to make bioweaponsConcerns that criminals or terrorists could use artificial intelligence to cause mass destruction will dominate discussion at a summit of world leaders, as concern grows in Downing Street about the power of the next generation of technological advances.British officials are touring the world ahead of an AI safety summit in Bletchley Park in November as they look to build consensus over a joint statement that would warn about the dangers of rogue actors using the technology to cause death on a large scale. Continue reading...

Compact buds with solid battery life are boosted by Dolby surround sound for music and moviesBluetooth pioneers Jabra are back with a new set of noise-cancelling earbuds offering a comfortable fit and advanced Dolby Atmos spatial audio for Android and iPhone.The Elite 10 cost 230 (250/$250/A$380), undercutting chief rivals from Apple, Bose and Sony while offering all of their features regardless of what type of phone or tablet you have, which very few others manage.Water resistance: IP57 (case IP54)Connectivity: Bluetooth 5.3 (SBC, AAC)Battery life: 6 hours with ANC (up to 27 hours with case)Earbud weight: 5.7gEarbud dimensions: 19.6 x 18.8 x 28.2mmDriver size: 10mmCharging case weight: 45.9gCharging case dimensions: 24.4 x 46.9 x 65.4mmCase charging: USB-C, Qi wireless charging Continue reading...

Some say the existential dangers of a God-like' AI is overplayed but even then there are other impacts to be wary ofFor some AI experts, a watershed moment in artificial intelligence development is not far away. And the global AI safety summit, to be held at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire in November, therefore cannot come soon enough.Ian Hogarth, the chair of the UK taskforce charged with scrutinising the safety of cutting-edge AI, raised concerns before he took the job this year about artificial general intelligence, or God-like" AI. Definitions of AGI vary but broadly it refers to an AI system that can perform a task at a human, or above human, level - and could evade our control. Continue reading...

The developer of RunPee, the app that tells cinemagoers the best time to take a loo break, on what makes a good peetime' and how the program helped him meet his wifeCreated out of personal necessity by North Carolina-based developer Dan Gardner during a near three-and-a-half-hour King Kong screening, RunPee is an app that tells film audiences the best times to nip to the loo.Where did the idea come from?

After recent building failures, researchers are looking to ancient materials for inspiration in creating more durable materials that repair themselves using glue or even bacteriaConcrete research gets caricatured as the epitome of dull - until the roof falls in. The dangerous state of many British schools built partly from reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (Raac) has dominated headlines, alarmed parents and embarrassed the government, leading to emergency closures just as the new school term began. The crisis highlights that, however boring concrete might seem, our civilisation almost literally stands or falls on it.Far from being prosaic, concrete is a hi-tech substance at the forefront of materials research. One dream is to make concrete self-healing: able to repair its own cracks automatically. And modern research is drawing inspiration from an ancient source - the unassailable concrete of the monuments, aqueducts and harbours built by the Romans more than 2,000 years ago. Couple this with ingenious ploys such as entombing live, crack-sealing bacteria inside concrete, and research in this area could transform the way we build. Continue reading...

In his new book, Technofeudalism, the maverick Greek economist says we are witnessing an epochal shift. At his island home of Aegina, he argues it's no longer the global finance system that shapes us, but the fiefdoms' of tech firmsWhat could be more delightful than a trip to Greece to meet Yanis Varoufakis, the charismatic leftwing firebrand who tried to stick it to the man, AKA the IMF, EU and entire global financial order? The mental imagery I have before the visit is roughly two parts Zorba the Greek to one part an episode of BBC series Holiday from the Jill Dando era: blue skies, blue sea, maybe some plate breaking in a jolly taverna. What I'm not expecting is a wall of flames rippling across a hillside next to the highway from the airport and a plume of black smoke billowing across the carriageway.Because even a modernist villa on a hillside on the island of Aegina - a fast ferry ride from the port of Piraeus and the summer bolthole of chic Athenians - is not the sanctuary from the modern world that it might once have been. The house is where Varoufakis and his wife, landscape artist Danae Stratou, live, year round since the pandemic, but in August 2023 at the end of a summer of heatwaves and extreme weather conditions across the world, it feels more than a little apocalyptic. The sun is a dim orange orb struggling to shine through a haze of smoke while a shower of fine ash falls invisibly from the sky. A month later, two years' worth of rain will fall in a single day in northern Greece, causing a biblical deluge and never-before-seen levels of flooding. Continue reading...

US ruling on works created through artificial intelligence gives boost to creative workers fighting for livelihoodsThe use of AI in art is facing a setback after a ruling that an award-winning image could not be copyrighted because it was not made sufficiently by humans.The decision, delivered by the US copyright office review board, found that Theatre d'Opera Spatial, an AI-generated image that won first place at the 2022 Colorado state fair annual art competition, was not eligible because copyright protection excludes works produced by non-humans". Continue reading...

Authors have entered a war over words with OpenAI for using their books as training' feedstockBattles between human and artificial intelligence are no longer science fiction. The strikes in Hollywood led by the united guilds of actors and screenwriters have a common, intangible enemy: the algorithms and computer-generated imagery that are increasingly programmed by studios to render them redundant.In New York last week, a new front in that stand-off was opened by a group of American novelists - including John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and Jonathan Franzen - who are suing OpenAI, the creators of the ChatGPT program. The writers claim the software company has trampled over their copyright by feeding" its program with their books, training it" not only in natural language, but perhaps eventually to produce page-turners of its own. (The lawsuit alleges, for example, that ChatGPT has already created an unauthorised and detailed outline for a prequel" to George RR Martin's Game of Thrones novel series, entitled, not entirely convincingly, A Dawn of Direwolves.) Continue reading...

The chatbot GPT-4 has produced more viable commercial ideas more efficiently and more cheaply than US university studentsIn all the frenzied discourse about large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 there is one point on which everyone seems to agree: these models are essentially stochastic parrots - namely, machines that are good at generating convincing sentences, but do not actually understand the meaning of the language they are processing. They have somehow read" (that is, ingested) everything ever published in machine-readable form and create sentences word by word, at each point making a statistical guess of what one might expect someone to write after seeing what people have written on billions of webpages, etc". That's it!Ever since ChatGPT arrived last November, people have been astonished by the capabilities of these parrots - how humanlike they seem to be and so on. But consolation was drawn initially from the thought that since the models were drawing only on what already resided in their capacious memories, then they couldn't be genuinely original: they would just regurgitate the conventional wisdom embedded in their training data. That comforting thought didn't last long, though, as experimenters kept finding startling and unpredictable behaviours of LLMs - facets now labelled emergent abilities". Continue reading...

The supermarket has used data from menus, online cuisine and social media posts to shape its Japanese rangeUnder fake pink cherry blossom, guests sipped House of Suntory cocktails and picked at plates of chicken karaage, prawn gyoza and cauliflower tempura from a kaitenzushi-style conveyor belt ... This was the London launch of Waitrose's new Japanese range.But without knowing it, and even if you live hundreds of miles away, your food choices may have had a hand in shaping the supermarket's 26-dish Japan Meny range. That is because it was developed with input from Tastewise, an artificial intelligence (AI) platform that analyses menus, social media and online recipes to pinpoint food trends. Continue reading...

Refining the metal - which is essential for electric car batteries - in Europe would ease the EU's precarious reliance on ChinaIt has been called the new gold rush - a rush to catch up with China in producing and refining the materials needed in everything from computers to cars: but has it come too late to save Europe's car industry?Deep inside a former East German town lie the first fruits of the EU's grand plan to de-risk" and wean itself off dependency on imports for the green revolution. In Bitterfeld-Wolfen, 140km south-west of Berlin, an Amsterdam-listed company is scrambling to complete construction of a vast factory that will be the first in Europe to deliver battery-grade lithium. Continue reading...

A sweltering day's work led the film-maker to a group of children with one goal in mindGiven the unforgiving August heat, most people were keeping to the shade of the trees in a nearby plaza. These boys, however, were playing football with a foam buoy. Juan Carlos Castaneda had sought out shade, too, and a bottle of water, having wrapped filming for the day. He was in Cite Soleil, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to shoot a short film on the community and its leaders.The kids in the picture were only 12, and they live in Haiti's poorest and most dangerous neighbourhood. None of them can afford proper shoes or a ball to play with - they're not even sure when they'll get their next meal," Castaneda says. However, when they discovered this yellow buoy, they became Messi, scoring a goal in the World Cup and, just for a second, leaving the heaviness of their lives behind." Continue reading...

Two years after tech trend that swept up artists and celebrities, researchers estimate 23 million people hold worthless investmentsTens of thousands of NFTs that were once deemed the newest rage in tech and dragged in celebrities, artists and even Melania Trump have now been declared virtually worthless.According to a new report by dappGambl that reviewed data from NFT Scan and CoinMarketCap, 69,795 out of 73,257 NFT collections have a market cap of 0 Ether, leaving 95% of those holding NFT collections - or 23 million people - with worthless investments. Continue reading...

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Meet Cute on company's intranet allows employees to advertise family and acquaintances to colleaguesTikTok has an internal matchmaking service for employees to introduce their colleagues to friends and family members, it has been revealed.The channel, called Meet Cute, sits on the workplace tool used by thousands of TikTok employees around the world for document hosting, video conferencing. It also helps people find a potential romantic partner from among their colleagues. Continue reading...

The $69bn acquisition is expected to go ahead as revised proposal addresses regulator's concernsMicrosoft's $69bn (54bn) deal to buy Activision Blizzard, the maker of games including Call of Duty and World of Warcraft, looks set to be cleared after the UK competition regulator said a revised deal had addressed its concerns.The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) moved to block the biggest tech deal in history in April, citing concerns that Microsoft would dominate the nascent cloud gaming market. Continue reading...

Deputy prime minister to urge UN general assembly to create international regulatory systemArtificial intelligence is developing too fast for regulators to keep up, the UK's deputy prime minister is to announce as he aims to galvanise other countries to take the threat seriously in advance of the UK's AI safety summit in November.Oliver Dowden will use a speech at the UN general assembly on Friday to sound the alarm over the lack of regulation of AI, which he says is developing faster than many policymakers thought possible. Continue reading...

Many feel decision to delay ban of petrol and diesel cars flies in face of environment and industry alike, while some see it as pragmatismRishi Sunak's announcement that he will delay banning the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by five years to 2035 in a U-turn on the government's climate commitments has triggered international condemnation and anger from industry.The policy shift came on Wednesday, as the prime minister stated that there would also be a slowdown in the phasing out of gas boilers and that the requirement for landlords to make their properties energy efficient would be scrapped. Continue reading...

As Square Enix gears up to release the second chapter of its FFVII Remake trilogy, the game's creators reflect on making the original - and remaking a classicThere are few fictional locales as iconic as Final Fantasy VII's Midgar. Originally envisioned as a rain soaked New York-esque metropolis, the final sprawling cityscape kept the Big Apple's detective noir grit - but imbued it with a quietly ominous steampunk flavour. Boot up the PS1 original today, and its blurry pre-rendered backgrounds still conjure up a startling sense of place - Midgar's billowing chimneys and dusty streets blending seamlessly with skyscrapers that could preside in modern-day Tokyo.Drawing visual comparisons to Blade Runner and the character-led melodrama of Star Wars, this PlayStation 1 role-playing game has attained an almost mythological status - a pioneering playable parable about climate change destined to be retold time and time again. It was to fans' delight, then, when 23 years after the release of the low-poly original, 2020's Remake saw Final Fantasy VII reborn in high definition. Continue reading...

In this week's newsletter: Hear the gripping, tragic yet funny story of Alan Cooper and his dolphin friend in Hooked on Freddie. Plus: five of the best podcasts rewriting history Don't get Hear Here delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereHooked on Freddie

From stalkers to authoritarian states, the use and abuse of facial recognition techGet people talking about the gadgets they wish existed but don't, and soon the idea of glasses with a computer built in that tells you who you're looking at" comes up. Such augmented reality" devices seem so obviously desirable that someone usually says: When will they start selling those, eh?"In fact, two different companies have built working prototypes in the past six years. Facebook had an internal version in 2017, fed by the colossal number of profile photos on its site. The other is Clearview AI, a secretive American startup that first came to the attention of the New York Times journalist Kashmir Hill in November 2019. Continue reading...