Ilya Sutskever helped orchestrate dramatic firing and rehiring of ChatGPT maker's CEO last yearOpenAI's co-founder and chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, is leaving the startup at the center of today's artificial intelligence boom.After almost a decade, I have made the decision to leave OpenAI," Sutskever said in a post on X. Continue reading...
by Presented by Helen Pidd with Blake Montgomery and on (#6MTR5)
Almost all children have them by the time they are 11 years old - and some get them at four. But are they ruining childhoods? Blake Montgomery reportsThis episode was first played on our global news podcast, Today in Focus.Conversations around if and when children should be given mobile phones have being going on for years. But recently the question has been catapulted to the forefront of national debate. Continue reading...
Maryland employees at first US Apple store to unionize take historic step as progress for a first contract has stagnatedWorkers at the first Apple store in the US to have unionized, in Towson, Maryland, have voted to authorize a strike as progress in bargaining for a first contract has stagnated.They could be the first Apple retail store workers to ever go on strike. Continue reading...
by Samuel Gibbs Consumer technology editor on (#6MTD7)
Apple sets new standard in screen and power but Pro model verges away from consumer tablet needsApple's latest iPad Pro is thinner and lighter, and has a stupendous new OLED screen, plus oodles of power to do practically anything. But it is no longer just the super-premium iPad - it is also aiming to be an impressive tool for the creative industry.It still looks and acts like an iPad, ready to do regular iPad things such as browse the web, watch TV or chat to your family on the other side of the country. But to do only that with a machine this advanced is total overkill - Apple has many other iPad models suited to that sort of thing. Continue reading...
by Tom Perkins in Green Township, Michigan, and Amy H on (#6MT9C)
Michigan factory making battery components for electric cars may offer an economic lifeline, but for some residents there's a problem: the parent company is in ChinaSet among green rolling hills and tall pines, Lori Brock's storybook farm encapsulates northern Michigan. A five-day-old mare bucks around a pen, while small black pigs roam through a barn and donkeys graze in fields bordered by white fences.It is a bucolic way of life in Green Township, but one that Brock and many of her neighbours believe could be threatened by an unlikely adversary - China's Communist party. Continue reading...
by Dan Milmo Global technology editor and Nick Robins on (#6MSXK)
Tech giant also reveals AI assistant in progress, currently called Project Astra, and AI video generator Veo at annual I/O conferenceGoogle will use artificial intelligence to return summarized responses to search engine queries from US users as it continues to infuse generative AI into its most widely used products.The company has been testing AI overviews" that appear at the tops of search results, summaries created by its Gemini AI model that appear alongside the traditional link-based search results. Continue reading...
System can operate directly in speech, speeding up responses and noticing voice quirks, but it still needs the power of SiriIn the year and a half since the launch of ChatGPT, one nagging question has only got more pressing: if AI can do this, why is my phone's assistant still so bad?On Monday, the gulf grew larger still, as OpenAI announced a new model called GPT-4o - the o' stands for Omni - which gives the chatbot new abilities to understand and create audio, video, and still images. Continue reading...
Charles Elson accused EV company of strong-arming law firm where he consulted over his legal brief opposing Musk's payA leading professor of corporate governance has accused Tesla of threatening to fire one of its law firms over his objections to Elon Musk's claim to a massive $56bn compensation package.Retired professor Charles Elson of the University of Delaware alleged in a legal filing on Monday that Holland & Knight, a law firm that he has worked for over close to three decades, told him that Tesla threatened to end its relationship with the firm unless he dropped plans to submit a legal brief to a shareholder lawsuit opposing the controversial payout, the largest in US history. Continue reading...
The head of Amazon's most profitable and fastest-growing division will leave the company on 3 June after three yearsThe chief of the wildly profitable Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing unit will step down next month after a three-year term.Adam Selipsky, 57, who is also a member of Amazon's team advising CEO , will leave the company on 3 June, according to an Amazon statement on Tuesday. He will be replaced by Matt Garman, a senior vice-president who has overseen sales and marketing at AWS. Continue reading...
After a less happy time attached to triple-A games, Jayanth has settled on smaller, freer developers - and is using that freedom to speak up for causes bigger companies would rather ignoreCan a video game writer do her best work at the industry's biggest scale? Well: Meghna Jayanth is fine where she is. Last year, with Outerloop Games, she released Thirsty Suitors, a fluorescent fusion of messy flirting and sick skating; coming up next is All Rise, a climate action courtroom drama. These are indie games - Thirsty Suitors' hero is a queer Desi skater and the villain is her feelings; of course it is an indie game - and Jayanth, one of the star video game writers of her generation, is perfectly at home here, where a modest budget is the trade-off for making joyful games about colonialism, identity and sexuality, with people whose values align with hers.The money is smaller, and that hurts getting the work noticed. It was tough to come out when we did," Jayanth says of Thirsty Suitors. People were still playing Baldur's Gate III, because it's huge. The average gamer on Steam plays four games a year. That's the real problem for most indie studios: how do you reach people without millions and a marketing budget?" Continue reading...
Thanks to a new act that could reshape the internet, TikTok, Instagram and other platforms will need to tame' harmful content and algorithms Don't get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up for the full article hereThe Online Safety Act in the UK is, quietly, one of the most important pieces of legislation to have come out of this government. Admittedly, the competition is slim. But as time goes by, and more and more of the act begins to take effect, we're starting to see how it will reshape the internet.From our story last week:Social media firms have been told to tame aggressive algorithms" that recommend harmful content to children, as part of Ofcom's new safety codes of practice.The children's safety codes, introduced as part of the Online Safety Act, let Ofcom set new, tight rules for internet companies and how they can interact with children. It calls on services to make their platforms child-safe by default or implement robust age checks to identify children and give them safer versions of the experience.The Goldilocks theory of policy is simple enough. If Mummy Bear says your latest government bill is too hot, and Daddy Bear says your latest government bill is too cold, then you can tuck in knowing that the actual temperature is just right.Unfortunately, the Goldilocks theory sometimes fails. You learn that what you actually have in front of you is less a perfectly heated bowl of porridge and more a roast chicken you popped in the oven still frozen: frosty on the inside, burnt on the outside, and harmful to your health if you try to eat it.The code is weak on design features, however. While the research shows livestreaming and direct messaging are high risk, there are few mandatory mitigations included to tackle them. Similarly, the requirement for measures to have an existing evidence base fails to incentivise new approaches to safety ... How can you provide evidence that something does not work if you don't try it?As we celebrate the arrival of the draft code, we should already be demanding that the holes in it are fixed, the exceptions readdressed, the lobbyists contained.Chain-of-thought responses from language models improve performance across most benchmarks. However, it remains unclear to what extent these performance gains can be attributed to human-like task decomposition or simply the greater computation that additional tokens allow. We show that transformers can use meaningless filler tokens (eg, ......') in place of a chain of thought to solve two hard algorithmic tasks they could not solve when responding without intermediate tokens. Continue reading...
A new Netflix docuseries explores how the site that enabled married people to have affairs devolved into chaos back in 2015In theory, the internet promised, among other things, a solution to the age-old conundrum of finding a date. If you wanted romantic partnership, maybe you'd check out eHarmony. For fun and flings, try Tinder. If you wanted to narrow down the potential pool, there were Farmers Only and Christian Mingle, among other demographic-specific sites. And if you were married and wanted to have a clandestine affair, you could make an account on Ashley Madison.At least, that was the pitch. From its founding in 2002 until the summer of 2015, Ashley Madison, so-called for the two most popular girls names, billed itself as the premier destination for adulterers - no judgment, no risks, no strings attached other than the payments required to secure enough credits" to talk to other users. The Toronto-based company, founded by Darren Morgenstern based on a statistic that 30% of people on existing dating sites were already married, promised a certain fantasy, particularly aimed at men: a list of women ready and willing to have an affair; a secret good time outside the bounds of one's partnership; self-proclaimed extensive security measures to prevent torpedoing one's domestic life. The company's CEO, a Canadian businessman named Noel Biderman, appeared on news programs and daytime talkshows with his wife, touting the site as a way to resuscitate partnerships by covertly meeting one's extramarital needs while boasting of his own monogamous marriage. The site's tagline was simple and cheeky: Life is short. Have an affair." And it was popular - by 2015, the company had launched in 40 countries and claimed more than 37 million users. Continue reading...
Tech company reveals new flagship model that is the future of interaction between ourselves and the machines'OpenAI announced on Monday that it was launching its new flagship artificial intelligence model, called GPT-4o, as well as updates that included a new desktop service and advances in its voice assistant capabilities.Chief technology officer, Mira Murati, appeared on stage to a cheering crowd in the OpenAI offices, touting the new model as a step forward in AI. The new model will bring the faster, more accurate GPT-4 AI model to free users, where it was previously reserved for paid customers. Continue reading...
Could office management software such as Slack and Notion optimise your relationship? A surprising number of people are trying it outName: Office romance.Age: Recently upgraded. Continue reading...
Developer Supergiant Games has released its hotly anticipated sequel to 2020's Hades in an early-access, unfinished state - but its powers are already godlikeTime comes for us all, and in Hades II, even the gods are not spared its wrath. This epic Greek-mythology-themed action game is the first sequel by arthouse studio Supergiant Games, meaning it has the tough task of surpassing a progenitor that won countless awards and widespread critical acclaim. Fortunately, time is on the side of the developers: while you can buy Hades II right now, it's under the guise of early access", meaning that there's still some placeholder content in here. Its creators are amassing feedback from players in the hope of eventually releasing a finished game that lives up to the impossible hype.Perhaps the closest parallel to what Hades represents within the world of video games is Emily Wilson's translation of The Iliad, which came on the heels of her highly regarded interpretation of The Odyssey. Where Wilson's work helps recontextualise Greek myth for modern audiences, the Hades series has the audacious aim of expanding those myths. The first game starred Zagreus, son of Hades, a rarely cited figure from the pantheon who sought to escape the grasp of the underworld. Hades II takes a similar route, placing players in the shoes of Melinoe, a character so obscure that scholars muse that she may be a syncretisation of Persephone. Esoteric figures like these are fertile ground for Supergiant Games, which has set up a familial drama that's only possible when it involves a cadre of bickering gods. Continue reading...
Firm has data from when criminals try to attack' and its Eagle-i technology suggests what action is neededBT has said it is increasingly using artificial intelligence to help it detect and neutralise threats from hackers targeting business customers amid repeated attacks on companies.The 10.5bn group is aiming to build up its business protecting customers from online criminals and has patented technology that uses AI to analyse attack data to allow companies to protect their tech infrastructure. Continue reading...
by Presented by Helen Pidd with Blake Montgomery and on (#6MRE1)
Almost all children have them by the time they are 11 years old - and some get them at four. But are they ruining childhoods? Blake Montgomery reportsConversations around if and when children should be given mobile phones have being going on for years. But recently the question has been catapulted to the forefront of national debate.From campaigning parents to bestselling books, a movement has emerged that believes smartphones are ruining childhoods and that young people should be banned from having them. It's not hard to come up with reasons why: they are addictive, keep children glued to screens instead of playing, can be used for online bullying and are one reason why so many children have seen pornography. Continue reading...
Researcher cautions against one-size-fits-all solutions' amid growing debate over impact, particularly on young peopleSpending time online is often portrayed as something to avoid, but research suggests internet use is associated with greater wellbeing in people around the world.The potential impact on wellbeing of the internet, and social media in particular, has become a matter of intense debate. Our analysis is the first to test whether or not internet access, mobile internet access and regular use of the internet relates to wellbeing on a global level," said Prof Andrew Przybylski, of the University of Oxford, who co-authored the work. Continue reading...
After the video of Peter Abbott screaming road-rage abuse through a car window went viral, we ask what's behind the fury so many feel - and expressLast week a video showing 60-year-old Peter Abbott screaming abuse at TV producer Samantha Isaacs gained a viral audience, after Abbott was found guilty at Poole magistrates court of using threatening words or behaviour to cause alarm, distress or fear of violence".In the phone-filmed video, Abbott is seen snarling and shouting as he presses his face up against Isaacs' car window. He looks as if he's channelling the Harry Enfield character Angry Frank, so cartoonishly aggressive are his contorted facial expressions and confrontational behaviour. Not only did he hammer on Isaacs' car but he also called her a slag" and a whore". Continue reading...
Maybe it's my age, but the company's brash new vision of digital minimalism looks like a portal to a sad and lonely worldIt was my birthday last week, and being these days a quiet rural dweller with a sweet pea obsession rather than the inner-city Dorothy Parker wannabe of yesteryear, I welcomed my appropriately gentle gifts: flowers, plants, an original exhibition catalogue from decades ago, some scent promising to recreate beach walks. I counted among my blessings a recent eye test that showed no further deterioration, an unbroken Duolingo streak (Irish), a roof repair that seems to be holding - what we might call the joy of things not getting worse, small triumphs that often feel disproportionately large and lucky.On the same day, Apple CEO Tim Cook appeared to suggest that I have little need for all the funny little old-world analogue stuff that I hold dear. In an advertisement for the new iPad Pro - the chief attribute of which, according to same, is that it is extremely thin, indeed the thinnest it has ever been - viewers were treated to a hellish sight: a platform crammed with musical instruments, cameras, games, paints, a record player, an artist's mannikin, all reduced to splinters and dust beneath a giant industrial crusher. Get rid of all that crap, it seemed to say, for here is a gadget that renders the whole lot obsolete. Continue reading...
New Australian laws will make it a crime to distribute non-consensual deepfake pornography - but there are deeper issues at play, experts sayVery creepy," was April's first thought when she saw her face on a generative AI website.April is one half of the Maddison twins. She and her sister Amelia make content for OnlyFans, Instagram and other platforms, but they also existed as a custom generative AI model - made without their consent. Continue reading...
Far from making programmers an endangered species, AI will release them from the grunt work that stifles innovationWhen digital computers were invented, the first task was to instruct them to do what we wanted. The problem was that the machines didn't understand English - they only knew ones and zeros. You could program them with long sequences of these two digits and if you got the sequence right then the machines would do what you wanted. But life's too short for composing infinite strings of ones and zeros, so we began designing programming languages that allowed us to express our wishes in a human-readable form that could then be translated (by a piece of software called a compiler") into terms that machines could understand and obey.Over the next 60 years or so, these programming languages - with names such as Fortran, Basic, Algol, COBOL, PL/1, LISP, C, C++, Python - proliferated like rabbits, so that there are now many hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of them. At any rate, it takes quite a while to scroll down to the end of the Wikipedia page that lists them. Some are very specialised, others more general, and over the years programmers created libraries of snippets of code (called subroutines) for common tasks - searching and sorting, for example - that you could incorporate when writing a particular program. Continue reading...
A venture that uses methods applied to plastic bottles for old textiles aims to tackle the UK's mountain of unwanted garmentsFootball shirts, sports event banners and uniforms are piled up ready to be pumped into a machine which melts them down for recycling ready to be made into new clothes.In a world first in Kettering, Northamptonshire, Project Re:claim is taking technology used for recycling plastic bottles and adapting it to reprocess polyester textiles into granules that can be turned back into yarn for new clothes. Continue reading...
The Sao Paulo-based photographer captures the end of a hot day on the beachAdriano Brodbeck describes his image asthe perfect portrait of Rio". The Sao Paulo-based photographer was on a trip with friends, and they had headed toIpanema beach.The neighbourhood was made famous by the Brazilian bossa nova song Garota de Ipanema, or The Girl from Ipanema. Despite the district being expensive and elitist, the beach is frequented by people of all classes from around the world: tourists and locals; rich people and humble people," Brodbeck says. It makes for acrowded beach, as can be seen in the picture." Continue reading...
The moral panic following Raffaella Spone's deepfake' video spread around the world. She talks for the first time about being the centre of a story in which nothing was as it seemed ...Madi Hime is taking a deep drag on a blue vape in the video, her eyes shut, her face flushed with pleasure. The 16-year-old exhales with her head thrown back, collapsing into laughter that causes smoke to billow out of her mouth. The clip is grainy and shaky - as if shot in low light by someone who had zoomed in on Madi's face - but it was damning. Madi was a cheerleader with the Victory Vipers, a highly competitive all-star" squad based in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. The Vipers had a strict code of conduct; being caught partying and vaping could have got her thrown out of the team. And in July 2020, an anonymous person sent the incriminating video directly to Madi's coaches.Eight months later, that footage was the subject of a police news conference. The police reviewed the video and other photographic images and found them to be what we now know to be called deepfakes," district attorney Matt Weintraub told the assembled journalists at the Bucks County courthouse on 15 March 2021. Someone was deploying cutting-edge technology to tarnish a teenage cheerleader's reputation. Continue reading...
Protesters opposed to expansion of the US electric vehicle maker Tesla's plant in Grunheide near Berlin clashed with police as some of them attempted to storm the facility. More than 800 people took part in the protest, according to the organising group Disrupt Tesla, which claims the expansion would damage the environment. Footage shows people wearing blue caps and masks coming from a nearby wooded area and attempting to storm the company's premises with police officers trying to prevent them
Demonstrators opposed to expansion of factory near Berlin claim it would damage environmentHundreds of protesters opposed to the expansion of a Tesla plant in Grunheide, near Berlin, clashed with police on Friday as some of them attempted to storm the electric vehicle manufacturing facility.About 800 people took part in the protest, according to the organizing group Disrupt Tesla, which claims the expansion would damage the environment. Tesla has attracted intense backlash since the company opened the factory in March 2022, and later announced plans to expand into a nearby forest to increase its production capability. Continue reading...
Exclusive: Defence ministry was told in recent days that staff details accessed but sources say SSCL knew in FebruaryThe IT company targeted in a Chinese hack that accessed the data of hundreds of thousands of Ministry of Defence staff failed to report the breach for months, the Guardian can reveal.The UK defence secretary, Grant Shapps, told MPs on Tuesday that Shared Services Connected Ltd (SSCL) had been breached by a malign actor and state involvement" could not be ruled out. Continue reading...
by Hannah Devlin Science correspondent on (#6MQ33)
Researchers find instances of systems double-crossing opponents, bluffing, pretending to be human and modifying behaviour in testsThey can outwit humans at board games, decode the structure of proteins and hold a passable conversation, but as AI systems have grown in sophistication so has their capacity for deception, scientists warn.The analysis, by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers, identifies wide-ranging instances of AI systems double-crossing opponents, bluffing and pretending to be human. One system even altered its behaviour during mock safety tests, raising the prospect of auditors being lured into a false sense of security. Continue reading...
Fire chief says incorrect disposal of devices powered by lithium-ion batteries are disaster waiting to happen'Fires caused by batteries in waste have gone up by 71% in the UK since 2022, as the rise of disposable vapes and other portable battery-powered devices leads to more lithium-ion batteries ending up in the bin.An increase in the number of these devices being thrown in household rubbish bins has led to more than 1,200 fires in the waste system in the past 12 months, compared with 700 in 2022, according to research conducted by the National Fire Chiefs Council (NFCC) and the campaign group Recycle Your Electricals. Continue reading...
Part newspapers, part fanzines, these titles were a lifeline to information-starved gamers and generated a sense of community to rival any YouTube streamerIn the 21st century, video game news is available in endless streams, 24 hours a day. But if you grew up in the 1980s and 90s, you went to magazines for your gaming news, reviews and gossip. For 30 years, the UK games mag industry was a thriving sector, providing players, not only with information about games on every format, but also a sense of community. They were part newspapers, part fanzines and their writers were the YouTube streamers of their day.I've been lucky enough to write for dozens of them, but before that I was an avid reader, spending all my money on these glossy celebrations of game culture. Here are, arguably, the 15 (ish) best ... Continue reading...
Exclusive: fraudsters impersonated WPP's CEO using a fake WhatsApp account, a voice clone and YouTube footage used in a virtual meetThe head of the world's biggest advertising group was the target of an elaborate deepfake scam that involved an artificial intelligence voice clone. The CEO of WPP, Mark Read, detailed the attempted fraud in a recent email to leadership, warning others at the company to look out for calls claiming to be from top executives.Fraudsters created a WhatsApp account with a publicly available image of Read and used it to set up a Microsoft Teams meeting that appeared to be with him and another senior WPP executive, according to the email obtained by the Guardian. During the meeting, the impostors deployed a voice clone of the executive as well as YouTube footage of them. The scammers impersonated Read off-camera using the meeting's chat window. The scam, which was unsuccessful, targeted an agency leader", asking them to set up a new business in an attempt to solicit money and personal details. Continue reading...
Advert featuring huge hydraulic press crushing cultural objects struck wrong note with manyApple has apologised after an online backlash to an advert for its new iPad that features an industrial-sized hydraulic press crushing a collection of creative objects including musical instruments and books.The ad, launched by Apple's chief executive, Tim Cook, on Tuesday, shows the machine squashing various items - ranging from a piano and a metronome to tins of paint and an arcade game - before a single iPad Pro then appears in their place. A voiceover then states: The most powerful iPad ever is also the thinnest." Continue reading...
Critics say ChatGPT creator's proposal to allow erotica, slurs and other adult content undermines its mission statementOpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is exploring whether users should be allowed to create artificial intelligence-generated pornography and other explicit content with its products.While the company stressed that its ban on deepfakes would continue to apply to adult material, campaigners suggested the proposal undermined its mission statement to produce safe and beneficial" AI. Continue reading...
Industry's digital watermarking scheme will add to existing safeguards on TikTok's own toolsTikTok will flag users who upload artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC) to the video-sharing site from other platforms, the company says, becoming the first big video site to automatically label such content for users to see.Content created using TikTok's own AI tools is already automatically marked as such to viewers, and the company has required creators to manually add the same labels to their own content, but until now they have been able to evade the rules and pass off generated material as authentic by uploading it from other platforms. Continue reading...
by Hollie Richardson, Hannah Verdier and Rachel Aroes on (#6MP10)
In this week's newsletter: Celebrity anthology show Everything I Know About Me returns with the Towie star as its focus. Plus: five shows hosted by master podcasters Don't get Hear Here delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereHappily Never After: Dan & Nancy
Fears deadbots' could cause psychological harm to their creators and users or digitally haunt' themDigital recreations of dead people are on the cusp of reality and urgently need regulation, AI ethicists have argued, warning deadbots" could cause psychological harm to, and even haunt", their creators and users.Such services, which are already technically possible to create and legally permissible, could let users upload their conversations with dead relatives to bring grandma back to life" in the form of a chatbot, researchers from the University of Cambridge suggest. Continue reading...
New Mexico attorney general highlights real-world consequences of online dangers prevalent on firm's Instagram and Facebook appsThree men have been arrested and charged with sexually preying on children via Meta's social networks in New Mexico, the state's attorney general announced on Wednesday.The arrests stemmed from an investigation into the potential harm to children caused by Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, codenamed Operation MetaPhile". Undercover agents posed as children, whom the three men solicited for sex, according to the criminal complaint. The sting operation is part of an ongoing lawsuit launched by Raul Torrez's office in December that alleges Meta has allowed its social media platforms to become marketplaces for child predators. Continue reading...
Challenge cited California state law that allows plaintiffs and defendants to remove judge they believe can't grant impartial trialThe California judge presiding over Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, has removed himself from the case. Judge Ethan Schulman on Monday sustained a challenge from Musk's lawyers, which cited a California state law that allows plaintiffs and defendants to remove a judge they believe cannot grant an impartial trial.The law, known as California Code of Civil Procedure 170.6, does not require the person issuing the challenge to provide any factual basis for their claim that the judge is prejudiced against them. Each side in a case gets one such peremptory challenge, which is granted as long as it is filed with correct language and within a certain time frame. Continue reading...
CEO confirms once company has sold off remaining assets it will have more than amount requiredThe bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX has said it will be able to repay creditors the full $11bn (8.8bn) it owes, as the boom-bust cycle repeats itself with a sharp increase in bitcoin prices.John Ray III, who succeeded the disgraced Sam Bankman-Fried as the chief executive of FTX shortly after its collapse, said that once the exchange had sold off its remaining assets, it might have more than $16bn - well in excess of its debts. Continue reading...
This lushly detailed game with a chunkily retro polygonal protagonist is a gorgeous homage to landmark titles of the pastSFB Games; PC, PlayStation, XboxIt is fascinating to be playing games made by developers who have been raised on 3D games - and Crow Country's affectionate referencing of Silent Hill is a prime example of this. A survival horror game about the dark secrets lurking within and beneath an abandoned theme park, it is also a gorgeous homage to landmark games of the past.The look of the game is breathtaking: the thick, grainy patina over the screen gives the impression of playing on a CRT monitor in somebody's dimly lit bedroom in 1997. The chunky polygonal figure of the protagonist, the mysterious Mara Forest, serves a stark contrast against the set and landscape, which give the impression of the lush pre-rendered backgrounds of Final Fantasy VII. However, these environments are not static in the way of their predecessors, but fully and delightfully interactive - this is a game made with real attention to detail, and clear passion for the particular period of game design. It is a sublime treat to look at, and to listen to, the sound design perfectly in keeping with the aesthetic, adding even more tension to the already grungy, bleak world we must navigate. Continue reading...
You'll need to hand over your phone before you can grab a coffee at the Netherlands' Offline Club, or attend a music event from Off the Radar. Why are the Dutch so keen on digital detoxes - and are there lessons for the rest of the world?When I walk into Amsterdam's Cafe Brecht, I immediately want to take a picture. The old-fashioned bar - with its plush sofas, vintage art and warm lighting - is what the Dutch would call gezellig", a word with many meanings but perhaps best summed up as cosy" or pleasant". My instinct is to whip out my phone and take a photo. For friends? Future reference? Who knows? But I'll have to rely on my memory, as I've checked it at the door.I'm at the cafe for a Sunday morning digital detox hangout", organised by the burgeoning Offline Club. I've dropped my phone off in slot seven of a fancy-looking lockbox, committing to spend the next few hours unplugged. There's a set schedule: we have some time to chat at the beginning, then 45 minutes to ourselves, another 30 minutes to connect, followed by another 30 minutes of quiet time. During the quiet time, we are invited to do any sort of activity - I brought a book - provided we don't interrupt others. Continue reading...
A new docuseries, from Insecure showrunner Prentice Penny, explores how a section of Twitter became an inventive and impactful communityHow to explain Black Twitter? It's less of an actual place than a general practice, sometimes a secret society and then sometimes a prominent advocacy bloc, neither a standalone digital platform nor its own hashtag per se. Yet when cops kill, Kendrick Lamar drops or Harlem shakes, we know Black Twitter when we see it.In the almost 20 years that Twitter (or X now, if we must) has been a thing, Black Twitter has been the mystical life force that has kept it real, riveting and rich. But where does one even start, much less catalog a seemingly endless stream of killer punchlines? I remember when the Alabama brawl stuff came out and there were a lot of jokes about Terrence Howard and the way he says mayne' in Hustle and Flow," says the comedy guru Prentice Penny. And then somebody calls the [teen who dived off a riverboat to join the fight] Aquamayne. Just using the kid coming out of the water as a set-up to call back to mayne is hilarious. Like, I just wanna keep being this funny." Continue reading...
I phoned the police and the bike was seized, but eBay and my bank won't help over reimbursementI bought a used electric cargo bike on eBay for 3,300 but, when it arrived, I discovered a cut in the frame. I put the frame number into the national BikeRegister database, which confirmed it had been stolen.The seller did not reply when I contacted them, so I phoned the police and the bike was seized. I was given crime reference and property log numbers. Continue reading...
by Carmen Aguilar García, Sarah Marsh and Philip McM on (#6MN08)
Exclusive: Vast web of fake shops touting designer brands took money and personal details from 800,000 people in Europe and US, data suggestsMore than 800,000 people in Europe and the US appear to have been duped into sharing card details and other sensitive personal data with a vast network of fake online designer shops apparently operated from China.An international investigation by the Guardian, Die Zeit and Le Monde gives a rare inside look at the mechanics of what the UK's Chartered Trading Standards Institute has described as one of the largest scams of its kind, with 76,000 fake websites created. Continue reading...
Regulator calls on social media firms to use robust age checks to keep harmful content away from childrenSocial media firms have been told to tame aggressive algorithms" that recommend harmful content to children, as part of Ofcom's new safety codes of practice.The children's safety codes, introduced as part of the Online Safety Act, let Ofcom set new, tight rules for internet companies and how they can interact with children. It calls on services to make their platforms child-safe by default or implement robust age checks to identify children and give them safer versions of the experience. Continue reading...
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