Technology | The Guardian

Portrait of the colossally successful pornography website dithers between its defenders and critics and doesn’t really tell us muchDocumentaries about pornography are usually building to one of two different climactic conclusions: that porn is actually a hateful enabler of rape, or that porn is actually a sex-positive celebration of sensual pleasure. It seems to me that Suzanne Hillinger’s uncertain documentary about Pornhub isn’t exactly sure what its money shot should be.Pornhub is the colossally successful porn site, owned by a Canadian company with the airily tech-bro name of MindGeek; for years it provided a lucrative and arguably enlightened outlet for adult content creators and models who were providing a consensual, legal service to paying customers, and who were thus able to get away from the sleazier and more exploitative side of studio-based porn and sex work. But a 2020 exposé by New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof revealed that alongside this perfectly respectable material, people were uploading rape videos and child-abuse videos and the outrage meant that Pornhub’s activities were severely curtailed. Continue reading...

Endnight Games’ sequel sold vast numbers on Steam. What’s behind its remarkable success – and what should you know before you play it?Late last month, a game called Sons of the Forest launched on the Steam Early Access programme, which allows players to buy unfinished games still in active development, and immediately became one of the biggest new titles of 2023. Within 24 hours, it had sold 2m copies, and it has remained near the top of Steam’s top-sellers list ever since.Sons of the Forest’s phenomenal success has seemingly appeared out of nowhere, but the momentum has been quietly building for years. Canadian developer Endnight Games has carved out a niche, delivering immersive, tangible and thrilling survival games. Continue reading...

Meta’s head of chat app says it would not comply with the requirements set out in online safety billWhatsApp would refuse to comply with requirements in the online safety bill that attempted to outlaw end-to-end encryption, the chat app’s boss has said, casting the future of the service in the UK in doubt.Speaking during a UK visit in which he will meet legislators to discuss the government’s flagship internet regulation, Will Cathcart, Meta’s head of WhatsApp, described the bill as the most concerning piece of legislation currently being discussed in the western world. Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: The first Black student at the University of Mississippi looks back at segregation and his activism and legacy in Breaking Mississippi. Plus: five of the best Oscars podcasts

Breach in the systems of DC Health Link, a health insurance company, led to 170,000 records being compromisedMembers of the House and Senate were informed on Wednesday that hackers may have gained access to their sensitive personal data in a breach of a Washington DC health insurance marketplace. Employees of the lawmakers and their families were also affected.DC Health Link confirmed that data on an unspecified number of customers was affected and said it was notifying them and working with law enforcement. It said it was offering identity theft service to those affected and extending credit monitoring to all customers. Continue reading...

Joint investigation with police in London follows similar operartion in Leeds as part of wider crackdown on sectorThe City watchdog and local police have raided several sites in east London suspected of housing illegal ATMs distributing cryptocurrencies, as part of a widening crackdown on the sector.The joint operation between the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and Metropolitan police came just weeks after similar raids in Leeds. Those are believed to be the first to target crypto distribution in the UK, including machines that allow customers to buy or convert traditional currencies into cryptoassets such as bitcoin. Continue reading...

What should be a victory for esports has brought criticism from competitive gamers, as the genre’s biggest names are left out of competition

From boats to backyards, peer-to-peer lending services have gone well beyond spare rooms. While renting your assets to strangers can be lucrative, there are risks

Joel and Ellie try to survive the bleak midwinter – then encounter David and his strange meat-eating club. What unbelievably horrifying viewingThis article contains spoilers for The Last of Us. Please do not read unless you have seen episodes one to eight …After threatening it for a week or two, winter is now fully upon The Last of Us. Continue reading...

Cuts range from 4% on performance version of Model S to 9% on more expensive Model XTesla has cut prices on its two most expensive electric vehicles in the United States, according to the company’s website, days after its chief executive, Elon Musk, said recent price cuts on other models had stoked demand.The price cuts, Tesla’s fifth adjustment since the start of the year, ranged from 4% on the performance version of the Model S to 9% on the more expensive Model X. Continue reading...

The Albanese government promises to treat video games as art – but developers must also be treated like artists, and supported to experiment, fail and flourish

It may be just a game but some players have gone on to careers in physics, engineering and aeronautics. Now the team behind Kerbal Space Program 2 is working with the European Space Agency to make it even more realisticWhen Dr Uri Shumlack was contacted by a video game developer who wanted to discuss his work on interstellar propulsion, for a game about spaceflight, he was wary. A professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the University of Washington, he was a busy individual, and not exactly an avid gamer. He asked some of his engineering undergraduates whether they had heard of a game called Kerbal Space Program, only to discover that half the class were there because of the game.First playable in 2011, Kerbal Space Program is an idiosyncratic and extremely difficult video game that involves getting little green aliens off the surface of their planet using rockets that you must cobble together from a library of parts. To do this, though – and leave the launchpad without exploding – you have to develop a pretty good understanding of the physics of space travel, calculating orbit trajectories and figuring out how much fuel you need, and whether you can carry it without messing up your thrust-to-weight ratio. It is beloved by space and astrophysics enthusiasts, who have posted thousands of hours of gameplay video showing off their unlikely crafts and ambitious missions in this simulated solar system. Continue reading...

Mouse movers have existed for years, but have recently become a symbol of resistance against workplace surveillanceWatching Premier League matches can be difficult when you live in the US. For midweek games, the kickoff is often in the middle of the work day, posing a challenge even for remote workers: how do you keep your online status from going idle?The solution is a mouse mover: a tool that keeps your cursor jiggling even as you turn your full attention to the game. And last month, the Premier League’s US Twitter feed endorsed goofing off by offering a “PLinUSA mouse mover” to a lucky winner. Continue reading...

Despite fears that AI will replace workers, research shows that in real work situations humans still have the edgeArtificial intelligence is getting everyone excited. It’s going to end or improve the world, depending on your optimism/pessimism. The latest hullabaloo was triggered by the release of ChatGPT – the progression of so called generative AI, which doesn’t just analyse data but actually creates new content (in this case written text).There’s been lots of speculation of what this might mean for education (the end of coursework?), but my focus is on the implications for the labour market. Now the first serious research on that front has arrived. Economists conducted an online experiment that saw about 450 professionals complete a writing task of the kind they’d do in their day job, with only some having access to ChatGPT to assist them. Continue reading...

Michelle Donelan says artificial intelligence represents a ‘massive opportunity’ for the civil service and beyondArtificial intelligence systems such as ChatGPT could play a role in Whitehall and represent a “massive opportunity”, the new science secretary has suggested.Michelle Donelan, who took over the new role after the prime minister’s departmental reshuffle last month, said the civil service should rely on its own experts but did not rule out a role for artificial intelligence in the future. Continue reading...

Information commissioner’s warning comes after leak of messages sent by Matt Hancock during Covid pandemicThe widespread use of WhatsApp by parliamentary ministers and officials in Whitehall poses risks for transparency, the information commissioner has said.Writing in the Telegraph, John Edwards said there was nothing necessarily wrong with the use of WhatsApp, but that the form of communication did pose questions for current policies and procedures. Continue reading...

Our tendency to humanise large language models and AI is daft – let’s worry about corporate grabs and environmental damageOn 14 February, Kevin Roose, the New York Times tech columnist, had a two-hour conversation with Bing, Microsoft’s ChatGPT-enhanced search engine. He emerged from the experience an apparently changed man, because the chatbot had told him, among other things, that it would like to be human, that it harboured destructive desires and was in love with him.The transcript of the conversation, together with Roose’s appearance on the paper’s The Daily podcast, immediately ratcheted up the moral panic already raging about the implications of large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3.5 (which apparently underpins Bing) and other “generative AI” tools that are now loose in the world. These are variously seen as chronically untrustworthy artefacts, as examples of technology that is out of control or as precursors of so-called artificial general intelligence (AGI) – ie human-level intelligence – and therefore posing an existential threat to humanity. Continue reading...

For the photographer, these women embody the harmonious life of her ‘dream destination’Last year, Magdalena Szurek wanted to fulfil all the travel plans the pandemic had stalled, and she saw Sarajevo as her “dream destination”. “I have family from Croatia,” says Szurek, who lives in Poland. “So I used to visit the Balkans every year, but only its coast. I’d heard a lot about Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina. It’s a city that has experienced a lot of pain and sadness but today Muslims, Catholics, Orthodox Christians and Jews live side by side in harmony.”Szurek had just arrived and was looking for somewhere to stop for a coffee. “There were two places next to each other, and these women were sitting on the steps outside a closed shop. I think they were waiting for a free table, too. Asking them to pose would have been against the rules of street photography. There was no opportunity to speak to them, but they smiled at me afterwards.” Continue reading...

Organisations including NSPCC say app has chosen to deny the problem and must take meaningful actionTikTok has been urged to strengthen its content moderation policies around suicide and eating disorder material by organisations including the NSPCC and the Molly Rose Foundation.The groups claimed TikTok had not acted swiftly enough following the publication of research suggesting the app’s recommendation algorithm pushes self-harm and eating disorder content to teenagers within minutes of them expressing interest in the topics.In the UK, the youth suicide charity Papyrus can be contacted on 0800 068 4141 or email pat@papyrus-uk.org. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or by emailing jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org. You can contact the mental health charity Mind by calling 0300 123 3393 or visiting mind.org.uk. Continue reading...

PM had held talks with firm’s owner SoftBank in effort to make London first choice for tech flotationsThe Cambridge-based chip designer Arm is to pursue a US-only listing this year, dealing a major blow to Rishi Sunak’s ambitions to make London the first choice for tech company flotations.The company, which is owned by the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, confirmed its preferred plan of seeking a US-only main listing later this year, spurning the UK despite heavy lobbying by successive prime ministers. Continue reading...

Stock price of crypto-focused US bank plummeted in Thursday trading and it is assessing its ability to keep goingThe share price of cryptocurrency-focused US bank Silvergate plummeted by nearly 50% in early trading on Thursday after fresh revelations about the extent of its exposure to the collapse of crypto exchange FTX raised questions about its ability to survive.On Wednesday, it delayed publication of its annual report and announced a fresh sale of assets to repay debts, while warning that it was assessing “its ability to continue as a going concern” in a filing with the SEC, the US financial markets regulator. Continue reading...

Retailer says breach has not affected customer details, or had impact on website or general tradingWH Smith has been the target of a cyber-attack in which company data was accessed illegally, including the personal details of current and former employees, the retailer has revealed.The books and stationery chain said there was no impact on trading and its website, and that customer accounts and the customer database were on separate systems and “unaffected by this incident”. Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: Personal stories and platitudes abound in the former first lady’s The Light We Carry podcast. Plus: five of the best shows to help you organise your life

The federal workplace safety agency has issued citations against the company at multiple warehouses for various violationsThe US’s top workplace safety regulator and the justice department are pressuring Amazon to explain safety practices that have led to injury rates for warehouse workers that are on average close to twice as high as the company’s competitors and in one case five times higher.The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha) issued citations against Amazon at six warehouses in December 2022, January 2023 and February 2023 over unsafe working conditions, ergonomic hazards and failure to properly report injuries. Continue reading...

Omri Lavie appears to have gained control of blacklisted spyware company’s sharesOne of NSO Group’s founders appears to have gained control of the blacklisted spyware company’s shares after a legal fight over the group’s future, according to corporate filings in Luxembourg.Omri Lavie – the “O” in NSO Group, who in recent years has stepped back from day-to-day management – appears to have emerged as the company’s new majority owner. Continue reading...

Republican committee chair describes Chinese-owned social app as a ‘spy balloon in your phone’A powerful US House committee has applied further pressure to TikTok by backing legislation that could give Joe Biden the power to ban the social video app.The House foreign affairs committee voted on Wednesday along party lines to grant the administration new powers to ban the Chinese-owned app as well as other apps believed to pose security risks. The fate of the measure is still uncertain and it would need to be passed by the full House and Senate before it can go to Biden. Continue reading...

Default settings being rolled out have 60 and 100-minute restrictions but can be removedTeenagers joining TikTok will be limited to an hour of use each day, the social media company has announced – but only for as long as it takes them to realise they can change the settings manually.New default screen time restrictions will be enabled for every account known to belong to someone under 18, the company says. After the first hour’s use each day, the app will warn them their time is up, “so it’s easier to log off”. Continue reading...

Attorneys cite Theranos founder’s two children as reasons why she should be allowed to remain free while she appeals convictionElizabeth Holmes has given birth to a second child, her attorneys revealed in a court filing seeking to delay the beginning of her more than 11-year prison sentence.The disgraced Theranos founder’s children, one an infant and one a toddler, were two of the close family ties cited by Holmes’s attorneys as reasons why she does not pose a flight risk and should be allowed to remain free while she appeals her conviction. Continue reading...

Duncan McCann’s complaint is first one alleging major tech firm has broken new codeA man has filed a formal complaint accusing YouTube of harvesting young children’s data, the first such complaint alleging a major tech firm has broken the new “age-appropriate design code”.Duncan McCann, a staff member at child advocacy group 5Rights, filed the AADC complaint with the Information Commissioner’s office (ICO), asking the data watchdog to order Google to stop collecting children’s data and potentially fine it as much as 4% of annual turnover. Continue reading...

Chaotic free speech on Ekşi Sözlük finally proved too much after devastating earthquakes hit countryLaunched on the eve of the millennium, Turkey’s most popular homegrown social media website has weathered lawsuits, criticism from the highest levels of government and even death threats directed at one of its founders. A simple editable online dictionary turned national obsession, Ekşi Sözlük has for more than two decades spurred its own biting form of social satire while providing a rare haven for free expression on the Turkish internet.But this year’s earthquakes that upended life across Turkey may prove to be the death knell for Ekşi Sözlük, which was abruptly blocked across the country in the weeks after the earthquakes first struck, without proper explanation. Continue reading...

Site unavailable for users in latest technical difficulty suffered by site since its takeover by Elon MuskTwitter was unavailable for users around the world for over an hour on Wednesday morning, the latest in a spate of technical difficulties suffered by the site since its takeover by Elon Musk.Beginning at about 10:20am UK time, visitors to Twitter.com were greeted with error messages. Although the total outage was rapidly fixed, the site remained in effect nonfunctional until well into the afternoon, with users unable to access their “home” feed, despite notifications, profile visits and direct messages still working. Continue reading...

Unlike a lot of throwbacks, a new remastered version of the 3D space adventure plays even better than it did two decades ago. Plus, your gaming questions answered

As players spend more and more time and money in the digital hangout spaces provided by video games, it makes sense for fashion brands to join them there – opening up exciting worlds of rule-breaking designIn December 2015, the revered French fashion house Louis Vuitton made a surprise announcement about the advertising campaign for its forthcoming spring-summer collection. The new range of clothes and accessories would be modelled on screen and in the pages of glossy magazines not by a famous actor or popstar but by a video game character: the pink-haired warrior Lightning from Final Fantasy XIII. Nicolas Ghesquière, the brand’s creative director told the press he considered Lightning to be the “perfect avatar for a global heroic woman”. The fictional character even carried out interviews to promote the partnership.It was not the first time a fashion brand had collaborated with a major video game. Previously, H&M, Moschino and Diesel had made digital clothes for The Sims. Diesel had its own island in PlayStation 3’s ambitious metaverse forerunner, Home. But in the last two years we’ve seen an explosion: Balenciaga and Ralph Lauren in Fortnite, Balmain in Need for Speed, Tommy Hilfiger and Gucci in Roblox, Marc Jacobs and Valentino in Animal Crossing, Lacoste and Burberry in Minecraft. Most of the collaborations now involve both digital and physical collections: when Lacoste partnered with Minecraft, the company produced a full wardrobe of clothing and accessories; when Balmain partnered with Need for Speed Unbound last November, it produced a themed limited edition run of its B-IT slider shoes, while in-game racer Eleonore wears a dress from the house’s Autumn 2022 collection. Continue reading...

A new documentary acts as a cautionary tale urging us to be more aware of how we store and preserve what we film and watchThere’s a widely taken-for-granted consensus that in film lies immortality; in Damien Chazelle’s recent drama Babylon, a Tinseltown gossip columnist waxes rhapsodic about how actors captured on celluloid effectively live forever in posterity, her general sentiment reiterated in higher-minded terms by reams of film theory scholarship. Advertising lingo rebranded cherished memories as “Kodak moments” in response to our species’ innate desire to freeze a fleeting unit of time as a physical quantity we can revisit over and over at our leisure. This line of thinking is understandable, seeing as anyone can click over to the internet and watch 100-year-old footage of working-class daily life. But Inés Toharia needs everyone to know that it’s also fundamentally mistaken.“We’re going so fast as a society that we don’t always realize what we’re leaving behind,” she tells the Guardian from her home in Spain. “We should pause to think about saving our digital materials, because they don’t last forever. And a lot of video today isn’t even meant to last, things like security camera footage, a lot of what’s on YouTube. We’re producing more than ever, but we’re not taking care of it. A friend shows me a video of their kid taking their first steps, I think, ‘Oh, that’s not going to last.’” Continue reading...

Owner of Politico urges focus on investigative journalism and original commentary, as company prepares for job cuts at German papers Die Welt and BildJournalists are at risk of being replaced by artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT, the CEO of German media group Axel Springer has said.The announcement was made as the publisher sought to boost revenue at German newspapers Bild and Die Welt and transition to becoming a “purely digital media company”. It said job cuts lay ahead, because automation and AI were increasingly making many of the jobs that supported the production of their journalism redundant. Continue reading...

Twitter owner’s net worth reportedly grows to $187bn after precipitous drop in late 2022Elon Musk is once again the world’s richest man after a rally in Tesla’s stock price on Monday boosted the Twitter owner’s net worth by nearly $7bn to $187bn, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.Musk’s recovery of the top spot from the French luxury goods magnate Bernard Arnault follows a precipitous drop in his wealth in late 2022, when he became the first person ever to amass and then lose $200bn. His wealth peaked at about $340bn in November 2021 and fell to about $128bn at the start of 2023. Continue reading...

EU and parts of US already block access to Chinese-owned app amid concerns over data privacy and securityCanada has joined the US and EU in enacting a sweeping ban preventing TikTok from being installed on all government-issued mobile devices, as western officials take action over the Chinese-owned video-sharing app.Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, did not rule out further action. “I suspect that as government takes the significant step of telling all federal employees that they can no longer use TikTok on their work phones, many Canadians from business to private individuals will reflect on the security of their own data and perhaps make choices,” he said. Continue reading...

In a new exhibition at the Whitney, five artists tackle how concepts of self can cross between physical and virtual realmsAs technology takes an ever more significant role in shaping how we develop and embody our identities, the Whitney presents Refigured, a collection of five installations by artists using digital art to probe intersections of ourselves and our machines.“I want to create language for a calibration point for where we are in regard to our bodies and technology,” said artist Rachel Rossin, reflecting on her piece The Maw Of, a transmedia work that is spread out across a video screen and a QR code that can activate the artwork on visitors’ mobile devices. As Rossin put it, The Maw Of seeks to “address the black boxes of our bodies and technology”. Continue reading...

Federal agency best known for tracking down fugitives suffered security breach on 17 FebruaryThe US Marshals service fell victim to a ransomware security breach this month that compromised sensitive law enforcement information, a spokesperson said on Monday.The federal agency which is perhaps best known for its work in tracking down and capturing fugitives wanted by law enforcement notified the US government of the breach, and agents there began a forensic investigation, the chief of the Marshals’ public affairs office, Drew Wade, told Reuters in a statement. Continue reading...

We spell out the key terms behind the AI revolution – and why they matter. Plus, this week’s top tech stories

I started playing a video game about cleaning for a laugh – now it’s all gotten out of hand and I’m going for the Guinness World RecordAre video games better than sex? That’s the sort of ludicrous question that is only posed by someone who has never had sex, or is searching for an attention-grabbing way to open an article about a cleaning simulator. However, I will say this: last week I had the opportunity to have it off but I played PowerWash Simulator instead, and honestly I’m not sure I had a worse time.Maybe it’s to do with age. Like every middle-aged female gamer I know, I love Lara Croft. Back in my younger days I lost entire evenings, weekends, and the best part of an English literature degree to Tomb Raider. But now I’m 45 and, for the most part, I have swapped late-night gaming sessions for going to bed after I’ve read the kids stories. I’ll still be awake at 2am, but only because I’ve woken up in a cold sweat trying to remember where I put my Nectar card. Continue reading...

Feature-packed superphone has stylus, serious speed, longer battery life and unrivalled camera zoomThe Galaxy S23 Ultra is Samsung’s latest and greatest power-house smartphone with a more impressive chip, battery and camera than its predecessors. But do the improvements justify such a steep price?At £1,249 ($1,199/A$1,949), which is £100 more than last year’s model, it is one of the most expensive non-folding smartphones available. Continue reading...

They may be digital natives, but young workers were raised on user-friendly apps – and office devices are far less intuitiveGarrett Bemiller, a 25-year-old New Yorker, has spent his entire life online. He grew up in front of screens, swiping from one app to the next. But there’s one skill set Bemiller admits he’s less comfortable with: the humble office printer.“Things like scanners and copy machines are complicated,” says Bemiller, who works as a publicist. The first time he had to copy something in the office didn’t exactly go well. “It kept coming out as a blank page, and took me a couple times to realize that I had to place the paper upside-down in the machine for it to work.” Continue reading...

Tesla and Twitter chief tweets that ‘the media is racist’ after hundreds of newspapers drop Adams’s comic stripElon Musk has deployed his 130 million-follower Twitter bullhorn to come to the rescue of a beleaguered cartoonist dumped by hundreds of newspapers across America for having delivered a virulent racist tirade.The Twitter and Tesla chief responded with his own controversial thought stream over the weekend after the mass termination of the Dilbert comic strip from US newspaper titles. Its creator, Scott Adams, recently denigrated Black people as a “hate group”, advising white people to “just get the hell away” from them. Continue reading...

According to the New York Times, the executive behind paid-for premium service revamp is among those affectedElon Musk has fired another 200 staff at Twitter including the executive behind the revamp of its paid-for premium service, according to a report.The latest round of job cuts equates to about 10% of Twitter’s vastly reduced workforce, which stood at 7,500 people before Musk bought the company in October. Continue reading...

Content created by chatbot must be treated like any other source and attributed when used, says IBSchoolchildren are allowed to quote from content created by ChatGPT in their essays, the International Baccalaureate has said.The IB, which offers an alternative qualification to A-levels and Highers, said students could use the chatbot but must be clear when they were quoting its responses. Continue reading...

Asked to generate a story from an English translation of a letter in Welsh published in the Guardian, the AI chatbot came up with a lot of twaddle, reports Fiona CollinsIan Watson (Letters, 17 February) asks for a translation of my letter in Welsh (13 February). I did include an English translation in my letter, but only the Welsh was published. I sent a second letter asking the Guardian to publish the translation, as I was having a lot of stick from a certain friend who couldn’t read it, but with no luck. Hopefully Ian’s letter will change the letters editor’s mind.The English version was as follows: “Thank you very much for the excellent editorial article which sang the praises of the Welsh language … Since you are now so enthusiastic about Welsh, may I, from now on, write to you in the language of heaven?” Continue reading...

Research suggests traumatic childhood experiences embed themselves in our brains and put us at risk of mental illness, but epigenetic editing may offer us hope of removing themThe way depression manifested itself in mice in the laboratory of the psychiatrist and neuroscientist Eric Nestler was hauntingly relatable. When put in an enclosure with an unknown mouse, they sat in the corner and showed little interest. When presented with the treat of a sugary drink, they hardly seemed to notice. And when put into water, they did not swim – they just lay there, drifting about.These mice had been exposed to “social defeat stress”, meaning that older, bigger mice had repeatedly asserted their dominance over them. It is a protocol designed to induce depression in mice, but in Nestler’s lab, it affected some more than others: those with a history of early trauma. Continue reading...

Chris Smalls, who set up the retailer’s first union in New York, came to Coventry to back its workers in their pay disputeThe leader of Amazon’s first union has made his first trip outside the United States to support striking workers at the online retail giant’s Coventry warehouse.Chris Smalls, who helped coordinate a successful unionisation drive at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, New York, in April 2022, travelled to the UK last week to provide advice to British workers as they try to gain recognition from the company. Continue reading...

From fresh produce to medicines and computer chips, a cocktail of problems is playing havoc with supply chainsEarly on Saturday morning, as Paul Crane, a trader at London’s renowned Borough market, was arranging blood oranges from Valencia on his stall, he admitted that his industry is facing some of the toughest conditions in a quarter of a century.The wholesale price of tomatoes, peppers and aubergines has quadrupled, and English cauliflowers are up too. Some stallholders are not even selling vine tomatoes because they are just too expensive. Continue reading...