Technology | The Guardian

Ministers considering bringing punishment in line with GDPR, which can issue fine of up to £17.5mMultimillion-pound fines could be imposed for nuisance or fraudulent calls and texts under a proposed overhaul of the UK’s data rules.Companies behind nuisance communications can be fined £500,000 by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) but ministers are considering bringing the punishment in line with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which can issue a fine of up to £17.5m or 4% of global turnover. Continue reading...

Company is latest big US firm to offer education-focused perks to workers after Walmart, Target and KrogerAmazon has offered to pay the cost of college tuition fees for 750,000 of its frontline workers, the latest move by a major US company to offer perks to attract and retain staff amid a labour shortage.The company, which is investing $1.2bn (£0.86bn) in the scheme by 2025, said it would cover the cost of college tuition fees and textbooks for US hourly staff after 90 days of employment for as long as they remain at Amazon. Continue reading...

Nostalgia for the 80s has led to the revival of video cassettes – with fans setting up mini-libraries on street corners

The 2010s birthed games that changed the world, from Grand Theft Auto V to Pokémon Go. In a decade with so many exceptional games to pick from, which will win out?(Niantic, 2016) Continue reading...

Third-gen folding-screen Android irons out kinks with water resistance, faster performance and lower priceThe flip phone continues its march back towards the mainstream thanks to Samsung’s folding-screen technology. Now cheaper, smoother, water resistant and more durable than last year’s model, it may leave you questioning why you would buy a standard phone at the same price.The Galaxy Z Flip 3 replaces the original Z Flip (there was no version two) and costs £949 ($999/A$1,499) – £350 cheaper than its predecessor and on a par with the top smartphones, including Samsung’s £949 Galaxy S21+. Continue reading...

TikTok, Twitter and Facebook among companies bringing in new measures worldwide that protect childrenTikTok has turned off notifications for children past bedtime, Instagram has disabled targeted adverts for under-18s entirely and YouTube has turned off autoplay for teen users: moves seemingly triggered by Britain introducing a new set of regulations aimed at protecting children online.On Thursday the UK introduced a new set of regulations aimed at protecting children and at a stroke became a global leader in the field, with the prospect of multimillion-dollar fines for companies that breach its new “age appropriate design code” leading to a cascade of last-minute changes across some of Silicon Valley’s largest players. Continue reading...

The pandemic prompted a surge in the use of workplace surveillance programs – and they’re not going away any time soonDavid, 23, admits that he felt a twinge of relief when the first wave of Covid-19 shut down his Arlington, Virginia, office. A recent college graduate, he was new to the job and struggled to click with his teammates. Maybe, he thought, this would be a nice break from “the face-to-face stuff”: the office politics and small talk. (His name has been changed for this story.)“I couldn’t have been more wrong,” David says. Continue reading...

Is that little flickery square in the corner of the screen the real me?Something has become clear. I need to face up to my face. I’ve taken precisely two selfies in my life, and have long shunned mirrors. My face is a thing that I wear on my head, for protection of health and projection of emotion, but for many years I’ve learned not to think too much about it for fear of drowning. The world’s self-image has been dramatically knocked by technology, by filters and apps that allow portraits to be edited smooth and slippery but, while I don’t want to boast, my personal shame was already fully bedded in long before I got a phone. For many years I was upset at not being pretty, feeling alternately cheated and sad, but over time I came to terms with it, deciding to avoid mirrors, photos, and to store that prickly energy elsewhere. I look in the mirror once a day, to draw on eyeliner, which establishes a boundary and also nods to heroines, and to paint over blemishes, sometimes highlighting them by accident, but by that point the game is already up.I look in the mirror once a day, to draw on eyeliner, which establishes a boundary and also nods to heroines Continue reading...

The site in Boca Chica, south Texas is surrounded by protected lands that host a huge range of local wildlife including turtles and hundreds of bird speciesEverything seemed normal as SpaceX’s Starship juddered into the sky over south Texas last March, tangerine flames and white smoke pluming behind it. But roughly six minutes into the test flight, the spacecraft thudded back to Earth.SpaceX, the company founded by Elon Musk in 2002, has a “test, fly, fail, fix, repeat” method for its commercial space program. That approach is part of why Musk wanted to put the launch site on a tract of land just off the Gulf of Mexico, close to the Texas border with Mexico. “We’ve got a lot of land with nobody around, so if it blows up, it’s cool,” Musk reportedly said at a press conference in 2018. Continue reading...

While the west is unlikely to follow the three-hour gaming limit for children, developers would be unwise to dismiss it too quicklyBeing a parent can feel, at times, like leading an authoritarian nation of one. You control what your subject can read, who they can speak to and what they can do; you deal with periodic revolts against your rule and occasionally engage in a simulacrum of democratic decision-making while knowing that you control the outcome.But for all that authoritarian leaders like to present themselves as a parental figure for the country at large, it’s rare that they actually get involved with the day-to-day work of, well, parenting. Which is why the news that China is taking on the job of limiting gaming time caught the attention of so many parents I know. Continue reading...

How much do these two generations understand about the lives of the other? We listened in on five family discussions to find outBob Smith sits upright on the sofa as his grandson, Louis Brow, prepares to quiz him on youth slang. We are sitting in the living room of Louis’s family home in Ilkley, West Yorkshire; Bob has travelled over from Walton-le-Dale, Lancashire, in his Nissan Micra. Continue reading...

Company says it will ‘collect input and make improvements’ after backlash from privacy groupsApple will delay its plans to begin scanning user images for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) before uploading them to the cloud, the company says, after a backlash from privacy groups.The company’s proposal, first revealed in August, involved a new technique it had developed called “perceptual hashing” to compare photos with known images of child abuse when users opted to upload them to the cloud. If the company detected enough matches, it would manually review the images, before flagging the user account to law enforcement. Continue reading...

Group of workers launched campaign to gather and share experiences of inequity, intimidation and abuse at companyA group of Apple workers is organizing to fight against what it says are patterns of discrimination, racism and sexism within the company and management’s failure to address them, in a rare public display of dissent within the notoriously secretive company.Last week, a group of employees launched #AppleToo, a campaign to gather and share current and past employees’ experiences of inequity, intimidation and abuse. The group hopes to mobilize workers at a time when workers across the tech industry are calling for greater accountability from their employers, and to push Apple to more effectively address such complaints. Continue reading...

PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, PlayStation 4; Eggnut/Raw Fury

They can go on research missions in stormy weather, dive to 150 metres and could soon be ‘singing’ signals. These penguin-like devices are helping to explain the eddies that are key to all lifeIf it looks like a penguin and swims like a penguin – but it’s actually a robot – then it must be the latest advance in marine sensory equipment.The Quadroin is an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV): a 3D-printed self-propelled machine designed to mimic a penguin in order to measure the properties of oceanic eddies. Continue reading...

It is time to evaluate how much transformational control we give billionaires over our societies, and our livesA few weeks ago, Elon Musk announced that his company, Tesla, plans to have a humanoid robot prototype ready next year. The intention is to create a 56kg machine that isn’t “super expensive” to retail. Oh, yes: the commercial application of the planned robot is absolutely to replace human jobs – the ones that Musk himself finds “boring”. Like ones working in factories, and supermarkets.Some argued the announcement was a troll. It wasn’t just that Musk’s speech was preceded by a dancer grooving to dubstep in costume as the robot, or that robotics companies with more skin in the long game than Tesla say the technology is nowhere near what Musk’s proposing. It’s that this convenient moment of dance theatre occurred amid a US federal investigation into Tesla self-driving cars after a series of collisions with parked emergency vehicles. Continue reading...

A survey has found only a fraction of 16- to 24-year-olds think phone calls are remotely important - so they’ve put their phones on vibrateName: Generation mute.Age: 16-24. Continue reading...

Nintendo Switch; Grasshopper Manufacture/Marvelous

Under-18s will be allowed to play online games for one hour on Fridays, weekends and holidaysChina has ordered its online gaming companies to further reduce the services they provide to young gamers, in a move intended to curb what the authorities described as “youth video game addiction”.Under the new rule, young gamers are only allowed to spend an hour playing online games on Fridays, weekends and holidays, according to the official Xinhua news agency. Continue reading...

Technology could help power a clean energy transition if it can overcome hurdles of cost, design and opposition from fishingIn the stormy waters of the North Sea, 15 miles off the coast of Aberdeenshire, in Scotland, five floating offshore wind turbines stretch 574 feet (175 metres) above the water. The world’s first floating windfarm, a 30 megawatt facility run by the Norwegian company Equinor, has only been in operation since 2017 but has already broken UK records for energy output.While most offshore wind turbines are anchored to the ocean floor on fixed foundations, limiting them to depths of about 165ft, floating turbines are tethered to the seabed by mooring lines. These enormous structures are assembled on land and pulled out to sea by boats. Continue reading...

• Elizabeth Holmes plans to accuse Ramesh ‘Sunny’ Balwani• Blood-testing startup allegedly misled investors and patientsThe disgraced founder of the blood-testing startup Theranos plans to blame emotional and sexual abuse by her former boyfriend, also a senior executive at the company, at her federal fraud trial beginning next week, according to legal papers published on Saturday.Related: 'Americans have a fascination with fraudsters': Alex Gibney on the fall of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes Continue reading...

Japan’s Aramitsu Kitazono was left with cuts and bruises after being hit by the e-Palette vehicle at the athletes’ villageToyota has apologised for the “overconfidence” of a self-driving bus after it ran over a Paralympic judoka in the athletes’ village and said it would temporarily suspend the service.The Japanese athlete, Aramitsu Kitazono, will be unable to compete in his 81kg category this weekend after being left with cuts and bruises following the impact with the “e-Palette” vehicle. His injuries prompted a personal intervention from the president of Toyota, Akio Toyoda. Continue reading...

No apps can summon couriers in minutes, readers and riders tell of more unusual pandemic ordersMost online deliveries do not come with a health warning from the delivery driver but David Smith received one from a relieved courier who, on handing over Smith’s buzzing box, suggested the bees inside were “a bit angry”.Rather than new clothes or groceries the 60-year-old Smith had turned to the web to buy a bumblebee colony and “villa” to house them. “I decided that my garden needed bees and the bees needed a home,” he says. “They have given me a summer of pleasure and I’ll do it again next year.” Continue reading...

Benyamin Ahmed’s Weird Whales sell in cryptocurrency and ownership is stored on blockchainA 12-year-old boy had made about £290,000 after creating digital pictures of whales and selling tokens of their ownership which are stored on blockchain.Benyamin Ahmed’s collection of pixelated artworks called Weird Whales went viral during the school holidays. His success may be a harbinger of the digital business models that could disrupt the banking sector. Continue reading...

Investigation into US tech firm’s proposed acquisition of British chip designer expectedThe US multinational technology company Nvidia has said it will answer “any concerns” raised by the European Commission as regulators appeared set to launch an investigation into the firm’s proposed $54bn (£39bn) purchase of the British chip designer Arm.The world’s leading maker of graphics and artificial intelligence chips is expected to notify the commission early in September of its plan to purchase Arm, when regulators would probably undertake a preliminary review. Continue reading...

As OnlyFans ended the peen panic, Twitter was united by petty grievances. Think of the level of civilisation we have reachedThanks to the continued commitment of 2021 seemingly to give me simultaneous infarctions in every organ, the week opened with the news that Ian “Beefy” Botham is to become the new trade envoy for Australia and John Cleese is to host a new series looking at “wokeness” and “cancel culture”. Continue reading...

Uber, Lyft and other companies fighting Massachusetts lawsuit that would grant workers status as employeesFelipe Martinez began working full-time as an Uber driver in the Boston, Massachusetts, area in late 2017. He enjoyed the flexibility, being able to work nights while spending days with his children and focusing on his family, but then Uber began unilaterally implementing changes that he says progressively worsened over time.“You start thinking they’re just glitches on the app,” said Martinez, 51, who cited changes such as not being given the rides closest to you, and the removal of unlimited destination filters – which give drivers more ability to set their routes. “Little by little, they started changing the unlimited destination filters and saying that people were abusing them.” Continue reading...

First chickens, and now a worldwide shortage of microprocessors … the word ‘chip’ is the latest word to gain an Armageddon flavourAs if there weren’t enough disasters happening simultaneously, people are now speaking of the present “chipageddon”: the worldwide shortage of microprocessors that is affecting supplies of everything from toasters and games consoles to cars.A silicon “chip” was thus christened in the early 1960s simply because it is a small flat piece of material, like a chip of wood or stone – or, of course, potato – separated by a cutting action (the verb “chop” is related). In a modern chip factory, a small circular wafer of silicon is divided into many chips, each one holding billions of transistors, which is an improvement on the few thousand possible in the early 70s. The ever-flexible “-mageddon” suffix, meanwhile – as in snowmageddon or carmageddon – ultimately takes its form from the Hebrew place name Megiddo in the Book of Revelation’s account of the end of days. Continue reading...

Preliminary lawsuit settlement allows developers to circumvent the tech giant’s lucrative commission systemIndependent developers will be allowed to tell iPhone users about ways of avoiding the “Apple Tax” on their apps for the first time, as part of an out-of-court settlement concluding a class-action lawsuit against the company.The agreement, which is accompanied by a $100m payout from Apple to be distributed among App Store developers who have earned less than $1m over the past six years, represents a small but significant concession from the company, whose iron grip over the App Store has earned it billions in profit alongside accusations of unlawful monopolistic behaviour. Continue reading...

The acclaimed Dropout podcast returns to chronicle legal proceedings against the Theranos founder. Plus: good cops go bad in a new series with shades of The WireThe Dropout (available from 31 August)

The government says an overhaul will boost growth and increase trade – but it must be careful not to go too farThe government has announced plans to reshape the UK’s data laws such as GDPR requirements in an effort, it claims, to boost growth and increase trade post-Brexit. The digital, media and culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, says the UK wants to shape data laws based on “common sense, not box-ticking”. Continue reading...

Culture secretary says move could lead to an end to irritating cookie popups and consent requests onlineBritain will attempt to move away from European data protection regulations as it overhauls its privacy rules after Brexit, the government has announced.The freedom to chart its own course could lead to an end to irritating cookie popups and consent requests online, said the culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, as he called for rules based on “common sense, not box-ticking”. Continue reading...

App Store gave 14-year-old’s account access to apps rated ‘17+’ even though it knew user’s self-declared ageApple knowingly lets underage users access apps intended for adults, according to an investigation by the Tech Transparency Project (TTP), despite having asked for and recorded their dates of birth.The investigation asserts a disconnect between the information Apple knows about a user, which includes their self-declared age, and the ways it polices age restrictions on its App Store. Continue reading...

Experts say dangerous injuries can occur as videos of people falling off precariously stacked crates go viral on social mediaThe latest challenge to take the internet by storm involves milk crates, balance and some painful falls.In the milk crate challenge, which recently started on TikTok, participants take on a set of milk crates precariously stacked in the shape of a pyramid, attempt to climb to the top and then back down again without toppling over. Continue reading...

U-turn comes after resolution of issues with payment processors, says chief executive of user-generated adult content siteOnlyFans, the user-generated adult content site, is reversing course on plans to ban “sexually explicit” content after securing agreement with its payment processors, it has announced.Last week, OnlyFans said it would ban adult material from 1 October, to the dismay of its users and creators, who argued that doing so risked driving such work underground. Continue reading...

Up for discussion in the Guardian tech newsletter: what lies behind Roblox’s success … the ongoing saga of Facebook’s traffic ‘transparency report’ … and Elon Musk’s ‘onesie’ stuntUser-generated porn site OnlyFans will become … something else, the company announced on Thursday. From 1 October, it will ban “sexually explicit content”, the material that made it a billion-dollar company and refocus on becoming a more mainstream social network.For the uninitiated or those who are pretending to be, OnlyFans is, on a technical level, effectively Instagram combined with Patreon. Creators can post photos, videos and text to the service for their followers to peruse, and they can also lock any of those behind a personal paywall, and even charge to send and receive messages. Continue reading...

PC, Xbox, PlayStation 4; Double Fine/Microsoft

Guardian Australia picture editor Carly Earl explains the dos and don’ts of taking pictures of the moonWhen a full moon rises, many people will pull out their mobile phones to try and get an Instagram-worthy photograph, but unfortunately the moon is really challenging to get a great photo of.Two reasons: it is very far away and unless you have a telephoto lens (which makes the moon appear closer than it is) it will always appear as a very small glowing dot in the frame. Continue reading...

Company’s charitable arm will work with hosts willing to offer spaces, but has yet to say where or for how longAirbnb will help house up to 20,000 Afghan refugees, the company has announced, as part of its Airbnb.org charitable arm.The company will coordinate with Airbnb hosts who want to offer their homes to refugees for free, or at a discounted rate, with the charitable organisation picking up the rest of the bill, as well as any other operational expenditures. The Airbnb co-founder and chief executive, Brian Chesky, will also fund the effort. Continue reading...

Company won licences for Manchester and Sheffield but faces pressure from Chinese governmentChinese Uber rival Didi Chuxing has reportedly suspended plans to launch in the UK and Europe, as the ride-hailing company faces pressure from authorities in its home market.The company’s plans to launch in the UK and Europe have been pushed back at least 12 months, and staff working on the launch have been told they face possible redundancy, the Daily Telegraph first reported. Continue reading...

A thriving new industry, matching people with pro gamers who advise and counsel, has exploded during the pandemicEighteen months ago, Fabio Dores was making good money as a drag queen. Performing under the name Felicity Suxwell, he had a club residency and worked hen nights throughout the UK, attracting enough bookings to quit his day job at a lettings agency. Then lockdown came and everything shut down.Bored at home, he was browsing Facebook and spotted an advertisement for LegionFarm, an online video-game coaching platform that offered to match pro gamers with clients looking to improve their abilities. As a skilled player of battle royale hit Apex Legends, he applied to become a coach. Four months later, he’s in the site’s top 20 pros, making $3,500 a month from around 80 hours of coaching to supplement his re-emerging drag career. Continue reading...

Government wants its own social media platform to replace Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and ZoomEthiopia has begun developing its own social media platform to rival Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp, though it does not plan to block the global services, the state communications security agency has said.For the past year Ethiopia has been engulfed in an armed conflict between the federal government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which controls the Tigray region in the country’s north. Continue reading...

Constance Bailey, 13, was offered a place at Hammond school but her mother could not afford the £90,000 neededA teenage ballerina with autism from the toughest housing estate in Leeds will be able to take up her place at one of the UK’s most prestigious dance schools after Guardian readers and others chipped in more than £97,000 to cover her fees.Constance Bailey, 13, received a place to study ballet at the Hammond school near Chester but her mother, Laura, a lone parent who works as a PA in the NHS, could not afford the £29,000 annual fees. Continue reading...

Escape to 1980s Oregon, get stuck in an art deco assassin game or liberate a Caribbean island with the help of a dog in this feast of new titlesAn indie game set in a beautiful lake town with a small cast of locals. Driving around and delivering mail in 1980s Oregon is not exactly the usual video game fantasy, but this looks like a calming, intriguing tale about a woman temporarily escaping urban life to revisit her roots.

Latest collaboration puts great sound behind fabric art panel that can be hung or leant against a wallThe latest device from Ikea’s novel partnership with the wifi-speaker maker Sonos is a bit different: a speaker hidden in a picture frame.The Symfonisk picture frame costs £179 ($199) and joins Ikea’s other unusual speakers – one is in a shelf while another is a table lamp – which are all fully compatible with Sonos’s whole-home wireless audio system. Continue reading...

Constance Bailey, from the deprived Seacroft estate, has a place at The Hammond School in Chester but cannot afford the costsBefore she was even accepted into one of the country’s most prestigious ballet schools, Constance Bailey’s audition immediately made her feel different.“Everyone else arrived in these really fancy cars – there were all these BMWs – and they had really nice leotards,” said the 13-year-old, who was wearing her old ballet uniform underneath a secondhand tracksuit. Continue reading...

Whether it’s chatting with small children, planning occasions or finding ways to socialise off-camera, after 18 months of lockdowns we’ve learned what worksWith many parts of Australia still in lockdown, connecting with others can feel increasingly challenging.Whether video calls are stifling your usual banter with friends, or the problem is actually hearing them at all over a patchy internet connection, Zoom fatigue is real. Continue reading...

The startling rise to wealth of the nation’s entrepreneurs has been an affront to Beijing’s political philosophy and increasingly, a threat to the communist partyIn a Politburo group study session on 23 November 2015, China’s president, Xi Jinping, recommended the book Capital in the Twenty-First Century by the French economist Thomas Piketty. “The rich data he used demonstrated that … unrestrained capitalism accelerates wealth inequality … [His] conclusion is worth us pondering on.”Back then, Piketty’s work on inequality was reported all over the world and sparked soul-searching among elites from Wall Street to Main Street. Some were surprised that Xi was paying attention, too. Continue reading...

Guardian Australia picture editor Carly Earl explains the dos and don’ts of taking pictures of this month’s blue moon, also known as a sturgeon moonWith a blue moon rising on Sunday night, many people will pull out their mobile phones to try and get an Instagram-worthy photograph of the August 2021 full moon, also known as a sturgeon moon, but unfortunately the moon is really challenging to get a great photo of.Two reasons: it is very far away and unless you have a telephoto lens (which makes the moon appear closer than it is) it will always appear as a very small glowing dot in the frame. Continue reading...

A workplace in Bucharest filled with anti-virus innovations could become the new normal in office design, its creators hope