by Samuel Gibbs Consumer technology editor on (#5GRNJ)
Top chips, good camera and four-year support make for a lot of phone if bought at a discountThe Galaxy S21+ is Samsung’s cheaper flagship handset that tries to be a more mainstream big-screen option than its more expensive stablemate, the S21 Ultra.The new Android phone has an RRP of £949 – making it £200 cheaper than the top-of-the-line S21 Ultra – but shop around and you’ll find it for less than £750, which makes it much more palatable. Continue reading...
Car ran off road and hit a tree north of Houston, before bursting into flames, local media saysTwo men died after a Tesla vehicle, which was believed to be operating without anyone in the driver’s seat, crashed into a tree north of Houston, authorities said.“There was no one in the driver’s seat,” Sgt Cinthya Umanzor of the Harris County Constable Precinct 4 said of the crash on Saturday night. Continue reading...
The miraculous machines had taken us to the moon the year before, surely now they could guess the outcome of a few football matchesA computer with less power than your phone had sent men to the moon in 1969, so getting one to predict the 1970 Mexico World Cup winner for the Observer Magazine should have been nailed on (‘Can England do it again? Computer forecast of the World Cup winner’, 10 May 1970).Look away now if you want to find out the made-up result later… It finished England 3 Brazil 2 (after extra time). Spoiler alert: it got the winner wrong and the score. And the fact it went to extra time. And one of the teams. But it did correctly predict that Brazil would be in the final. On the surface it does look suspiciously like the computer had simply chosen the previous winner (England in 1966) and Brazil because they were… Brazil. Continue reading...
This year has brought a glut of internet flotations – not just in the US but in London too - and more are on the wayAs markets on both sides of the Atlantic hit fresh highs, boosted by hopes of an economic rebound from the crisis inflicted by the pandemic, tech companies are choosing their moment and queuing up to make their stock market debuts.The first three months of the year are traditionally a quiet period for initial public offerings (IPOs), but in 2021 its was the busiest quarter for listings in the past 20 years, according to accountancy firm EY – and tech companies dominated. Continue reading...
Once a small port on the edge of a desert, Dubai is now a magnet for reality stars and a jet set crowd looking to beat the vaccine queue. But do the filtered images tell the whole story?On the electric blue tarmac of a helipad on the edge of Palm Jumeirah, an artificial island on the Dubai coastline, Busra Duran stands on tiptoes. Wearing multicoloured trainers and a pink tulle minidress, the 28-year-old Turkish influencer is posing for photos in front of a red helicopter. Her husband, Gökhan Gündüz, snaps away as she models her pink sunglasses in the shadow of the Atlantis, a blush-coloured hotel with green pointed rooftops which resembles the fake castles of Disneyland’s Magic Kingdom.‘Gündüz, 29, wears a striped T-shirt with the word “positive” emblazoned around the collar. Duran skips over to check the photos he’s taken, before they discuss her Instagram shots from the ride. Duran approached the helicopter company to request this free 12-minute tour, the shortest available, and they were happy to oblige. “It was amazing,” she says, flatly, sounding unconvinced. The trip is one of a whole roster of experiences Duran has set up for the benefit of her 608,000 Instagram followers. In a few days, the couple have arranged to play golf – another free gift – and Duran often poses for pictures at restaurants in exchange for a meal. Her glittering Dubai lifestyle is displayed on her Instagram: one day she’ll be perching on the side of a bubble bath in an upmarket hotel reading a copy of Gulf News; the next in a red swimsuit beside a pool, a glass of rosé in one hand and a copy of a Paulo Coelho novel in front of her. Continue reading...
Been up to much lately? After a year of isolation, I’ve forgotten how to talk to people – but help is at handA good friend of mine, who started a new job six months ago, is about to meet his colleagues face to face for the first time. They have been buddied up in pairs to make socialisation less daunting, he said. It sounded like breeding pandas, or children being dropped off at summer camp, rather than grownups working in the civil service. Having interacted only through remote meetings, he knows everything about their interior decor and nothing about them. Small talk’s going to be weird, he texted me. A few seconds later, my phone buzzed. “What is small talk again?”Damned if I know. I’ve lost my conversational mojo, too. I used to pride myself on being a good listener, quick on my feet, self-aware. But I’ve noticed signs that I’m slipping. The first time someone asked how I was, after months of social isolation, I forgot to reply. I’d grown accustomed to seeing conversations as things that happened on TV, that didn’t involve me. When I did speak, my throat gurgled before the words emerged, like taps being run for the first time in a holiday home. The last time someone initiated a conversation with me, I babbled for eight minutes about how I’d been growing pineapples from other pineapples. I rambled on about water rooting, suckers and slips, the available research on crown splitting as observed in the Niger delta. My friend was not interested in pineapples. He had only asked what I’d been up to. The self‑evident answer was, “not enough”. Continue reading...
Fraud can have devastating consequences on victims, and not only financiallyMary Higgins’s life changed the moment the phone rang one afternoon in November. The caller claimed to be from the Metropolitan police fraud department and told her that her bank cards had been compromised.In an elaborate scam, involving two days of phone calls from fake officials, the 78-year-old was persuaded that she was helping police with a money-laundering sting in which her bank was complicit and agreed to transfer £10,000 from her Santander account to “safe” havens. Continue reading...
Emissions cut by 94% in three years, and company is aiming for net zero across its supply chain by 2030Facebook has reached net zero emissions, the company has announced, paving the way for it to achieve its wider target of net zero emissions across its entire supply chain by 2030.The social network said it had reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 94% over the past three years, and its operations were now supported by 100% renewable energy. Continue reading...
With a global audience of 800m monthly users, most of them under 21, the video sharing social media platform TikTok has always been a place where gaming culture is shared, celebrated and lampoonedShelbyRenae – @shelbyrenaeyt
Two experts on the significance of the ACCC court win that found Google ‘partially’ misled users over location dataIf you have ever used Google Maps on your phone without fiddling with the location settings, it goes without saying that the tech giant knows everywhere you’ve been. The really bad news is that even if you have previously tried to stop Google tracking your every movement, the company may have done so anyway.On Friday the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) won a legal action in the federal court, which ruled that, thanks to a peculiar set-up that required a user to check “No” or “Do Not Collect” to both “Location History” and “Web & App Activity” on some Android and Pixel phones, someone who ticked “No” to just one would still end up being tracked. Continue reading...
by Hannah J Davies, Hannah Verdier and Charlie Philli on (#5GNEK)
The makers of Serial examine a string of voter irregularities. Plus: how conspiracy theories and wellness overlap, and Esther Perel meets a couple struggling at work and at homeThe Improvement Association
Google collected data on some Android and Pixel phones even when customers ticked ‘No’ or ‘Do not collect’Google has been found to have “partially” misled Australian consumers about collecting their location data, according to a federal court ruling handed down on Friday.The court found that Google continued to collect “Location History” on some Android and Pixel phones, even for customers who ticked “No” or “Do not collect” on their settings. Continue reading...
by Andrew Roth in Moscow and Julian Borger in Washing on (#5GM9S)
Ten diplomats expelled as part of fresh package of sanctions announced by US president as Russia says retaliation ‘inevitable’The Biden administration has announced the expulsion of 10 Russian diplomats and broad sanctions against Russian officials and companies in retaliation for Moscow’s interference in elections and cyber-espionage campaigns such as the SolarWinds hack.The sanctions, which were the Biden administration’s largest punitive action against the Kremlin yet, also targeted six Russian cybersecurity companies deemed to be involved in the SolarWinds hack, as well as 32 individuals and entities deemed to be involved in efforts to influence the outcome of the 2020 US presidential election. Continue reading...
Children’s health advocates urged Mark Zuckerberg to abandon the plan citing the negative effects of social media on childrenAn international coalition of children’s health advocates has called on Facebook to abandon its plans to build an Instagram product for kids, citing harm to teens from excessive use of social media.The campaign comes after Buzzfeed broke the news in March that Facebook seeks to build an Instagram product for people under the age of 13. The company currently requires users to be 13 years or older to create an account. Continue reading...
But company’s founder pushes back against criticism of its work practices in letter to shareholdersAmazon needs to “do a better job” for its employees, Jeff Bezos told shareholders in his final letter as chief executive of the online giant, but he also pushed back against criticism of the company’s work practices.Bezos, who reclaimed his title as the world’s richest person this year, said that Amazon’s recent defeat of an attempt by some workers to form the company’s first union in Alabama did not bring him “comfort”. Continue reading...
Social media platform says it was a ‘mistake’ and that harmful terms have been removed in an updateInstagram has apologised for a “mistake” that meant it promoted weight-loss content to users with eating disorders.A new feature on the social network provides users with suggested search terms based on their interests, with default prompts including terms such as “yard work”, “home decor” or “sunsets”. But some people with eating disorders found the app was prompting them to search for terms like “appetite suppressant” instead, raising the risk of a relapse or worse. Continue reading...
Women in the Middle East and north Africa say social codes leave them unable to talk about social media abuse as pandemic pushes sexual harassment off the streetsThe first pornographic picture sent shivers of shock through Amal as she stared in horror at the phone screen. Until now, she had responded politely to the older man who had been messaging her on Facebook, hoping to deter his questions about her life with curt, one-word replies.More lurid pictures followed, some from pornographic magazines, others of the man himself in sexual poses. “I started to blame myself and feel that I invited this because I had replied to him,” says the 21-year-old, who is a university student in Amman, Jordan. Continue reading...
After 16 years, one of the internet’s first – and most surreal – Q&A platforms is to be shut downBefore Reddit’s Am I the Asshole? forum for the “frustrated moral philosopher”, or days-long Twitter debates about whether you wash your legs in the shower, there was Yahoo Answers: one of the first online crowdsourcing resources, now a repository of infamously idiosyncratic wisdom.Established in 2005, the “knowledge-sharing” platform was where you might turn for help with a head-scratcher such as “How do I get black ink from a Biro out of coloured clothes?”, “What documents do you need to enter China?” or “Any ladies want to show me their boobs?”. Continue reading...
We asked Australian comedians to find the good bits online and share them with us. Diana Nguyen has delivered them hereSo a little strange thing about me – while looking for lovers on the traditional dating apps, I found myself on LinkedIn and started dancing on LinkedIn, which then went viral. If you are looking for light entertainment, just search #DancingDiana and you’ll find my 1,000 dancing videos on LinkedIn. Not even joking. But here are some funny videos I always go to during a lockdown. Continue reading...
US justice department says bureau hacked devices to remove malware from insecure softwareThe FBI has been hacking into the computers of US companies running insecure versions of Microsoft software in order to fix them, the US Department of Justice has announced.The operation, approved by a federal court, involved the FBI hacking into “hundreds” of vulnerable computers to remove malware placed there by an earlier malicious hacking campaign, which Microsoft blamed on a Chinese hacking group known as Hafnium. Continue reading...
by Samuel Gibbs Consumer technology editor on (#5GJ9P)
Smart speaker ditches puck shape but keeps solid sound and function with or without LED clock displayAmazon’s fourth-generation Echo Dot has evolved from its predecessors’ puck-like appearance into a small ball, shaking up the idea of what a small smart speaker can look like.The new Echo Dot is priced the same as the last one, costing from £50, although it will be frequently available at a discount at various retailers, and looks like the full-sized £80 Echo hit with a shrink ray. Continue reading...
Several digital currencies surge a day before launch of Coinbase trading platform on Wall StreetThe value of the cryptocurrency bitcoin has surged to a record high, reaching $63,000 (£45,800).The cryptocurrency, which has risen in value by 450% in the last six months, continued to climb by a further 5% during trading on Tuesday. Continue reading...
We want to hear about the best Yahoo Answers posts you have encountered since it started in 2005Since 2005, Yahoo Answers has been one of the longest-running platforms providing reader posted questions and answers. Last week it was announced that the platform would be shutting down on 4 May.To celebrate the best of Yahoo Answers, we would like to hear about the best posts you have seen on the platform over the last 16 years. Continue reading...
by Julia Carrie Wong in San Francisco and Jeff Ernst on (#5GGZV)
Juan Orlando Hernández falsely inflated his posts’ popularity for nearly a year after the company was informed about itFacebook allowed the president of Honduras to artificially inflate the appearance of popularity on his posts for nearly a year after the company was first alerted to the activity.The astroturfing – the digital equivalent of a bussed-in crowd – was just one facet of a broader online disinformation effort that the administration has used to attack critics and undermine social movements, Honduran activists and scholars say. Continue reading...
Want to go viral on Twitter? Steer clear of positive terms, Spanish researchers sayYou’ve treated your Twitter followers to a pithy 280-character comment about the government’s latest gaffe – but what gives your tweet the fuel to spread like wildfire? It’s how negative the tweet is, say researchers, that raises its chances of going viral, at least in the political context.Previous studies have suggested that the main factors affecting the virality of a tweet are user features (such as the number of followers), specific tweet features (number of URLs, hashtags and so on), and aspects of the tweet topic – but few have investigated the importance of a specific type of sentiment as an overarching link among these factors. Continue reading...
by Samuel Gibbs Consumer technology editor on (#5GGPV)
Cheaper wifi speaker has Bluetooth plus Google or Alexa for great indoor and outdoor musicSonos’s new smaller and cheaper Roam portable speaker is one that won’t end up relegated to a drawer collecting dust as it sounds great at home too.The £159 Roam joins the much bigger and heavier £399 Move as the second of firm’s battery-powered models and proves itself as one of the best options in a saturated market. Continue reading...
In 1842, the US patent office registered 14 designs, including a bathtub and a ‘corpse preserver’. It now handles 35,000 a year. Why did this once sedate world became a corporate arms race?It was designed to make sharpening a pencil feel as thrilling as flying a jet. A gleaming chrome teardrop, tapered to a point and adorned with a bullet-like handle, Raymond Loewy’s aerodynamic tail-fin pencil sharpener brought the glamour of the machine age to the humble office desk.As the godfather of American industrial design, Loewy gave his streamlined signature to trains, planes and Coca-Cola vending machines, defining the sleek art deco look of the 1930s. But his go-faster pencil sharpener never made it into production, deemed one chrome-plated, deco-styled step too far. The design does survive in the form of its patent, filed in 1933 and now republished as one of 1,000 such protected inventions, brought together in a new book. Continue reading...
Surge in share price of parent company Alphabet moved pair on to eight-man listThe Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have joined the $100bn club of super-rich people with 12-digit fortunes after a surge in the share price of the tech firm’s parent company, Alphabet.Page and Brin, who co-founded Google in 1996, joined a group of six others with paper fortunes of more than $100bn (£73bn), according to the Bloomberg billionaires index. Continue reading...
Making a plan now can prevent identity theft, save records and stop friends getting painful pop-up reminders when you’re goneTwo things are certain in life: death and the internet.With so many day-to-day functions, tasks and memories now taking place online, the question of what will become of your digital legacy – who will preserve, control or delete your accounts when you are gone – has become increasingly important. Continue reading...
Firm takes action after criticism by UK competitions regulator for failing to clamp down on illegal tradeFacebook has removed more than 16,000 groups trading fake reviews after the UK’s competition regulator criticised the company for failing to make good on a previous promise to clamp down on the practice.In January 2020, the Competition and Markets Authority secured an agreement from Facebook to “better identify, investigate and remove groups and other pages where fake and misleading reviews were being traded, and prevent them from reappearing”. Continue reading...
Chelsey Glasson alleged she had been discriminated against while pregnant and had witnessed others being treated similarlyWhen Chelsey Glasson found out she was pregnant with her second child in 2019, she did not anticipate the first three years of her new baby’s life would be overshadowed by an epic legal battle against a trillion-dollar company.The 38-year-old sued Google, her former employer, in 2020 alleging she had been discriminated against while pregnant and witnessed others being treated similarly, and faced retaliation from her manager when she spoke up about it. Continue reading...
Hundreds of rare PlayStation 2 demos have been uncovered and archived, revealing how favourite games were developedIf you worked on video game magazines in the 90s, there was one sight you got used to pretty quickly. On every desk, in every drawer, there were dozens of DVD-R discs with the titles of games scrawled on them with Sharpies. These were the prerelease versions of games that were sent to us by developers to preview and review. We’d play them on debug consoles (the machines used by developers to build and test games), write our thoughts, then chuck the discs in a pile, or a bin.Fast forward two decades and game players now realise that such early and unreleased versions of games have genuine historical value. Celebrating its 15th anniversary next month, the website Hidden Palace is a collective dedicated to tracking down and archiving video game prototypes, source code and other overlooked artefacts from the development process. Last month, the site made headlines across the video game world when it announced it had secured more than 700 PlayStation 2 demo and prototype discs – all provided by a single anonymous source. The site staff have logged each disc, digitised the builds and worked with the Internet Archive to make them available. Continue reading...
Regardless of when it was leaked, user data ‘is never really old’ – it’s still valuable to cybercriminals, analysts sayAfter information from 533 million Facebook users was exposed to hackers, the company has tried to reassure users, saying that the data was leaked years ago and has since been secured.But experts say the issue is still grave – whether it happened in 2021 or years prior – largely because of the nature of the leaked data. Continue reading...
Why are young people imagining themselves as the protagonist in fictionalised versions of their lives?Staring longingly out of a window watching the sunset across the New York skyline, or sitting on a balcony while Summertime Sadness by Lana Del Rey plays softly in the background. These are just a couple examples of a TikTok trend which sees young people act out scenarios and imagine themselves as a protagonist or the “main character” in a fictionalised version of their life – usually based on film cliches.With more than 5.2bn views of the app’s #maincharacter hashtag – psychologists say the trend has gained momentum because lockdown and the feelings of isolation that come with it have created a gap once plugged by social connection. Continue reading...
ONS survey shows proportion of older people going online has shot up from 29% in 2013 to over half in 2020The proportion of people aged 75 and over using the internet has nearly doubled in the last seven years, official data shows.Figures compiled by the Office of National Statistics show that while there has been little change in internet use for adults aged 16 to 44, the number of older people going online has shot up from 29% in 2013 to 54% in 2020. Continue reading...
National Labor Relations Board found that Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa were terminated last year after circulating a petitionAmazon illegally fired two employees who advocated for better working conditions during the pandemic, the US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has found.The online retailer last year terminated the employment of Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa after they publicly protested its environmental and labor policies. Continue reading...
Smart-home devices like thermostats and fridges may be too smart for comfort – especially in a country with few laws preventing the sale of digital data to third parties
South Korea firm promises service and software support as it shifts focus to more profitable businessesSouth Korean electronics manufacturer LG has decided to wind down its mobile phones unit after admitting defeat in the global smartphone market.LG said on Monday it had made a “strategic decision to exit the incredibly competitive mobile phone sector” to focus on growing businesses such as supplying electric car parts. Continue reading...
Covid shutdowns and Texas storms behind dearth of chips needed for semiconductors to make array of productsA global shortage of one crucial piece of technology is causing delays in everything from cars and televisions to video game consoles and Australia’s National Broadband Network rollout.A temporary shutdown in the production of silicon computer chips at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, as well as severe storms in Texas causing more recent delays, has caused worldwide chip shortages, with a knock-on effect for the production of phones, laptops and even automobiles. Continue reading...
Technology | The Guardian