Category Archives: Technology

Von der Leyen: big tech firms need to be reined in despite Trump’s exit

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Internet giants that spread hate speech and conspiracy theories should face ‘democratic limits’, says European commission president

The end of Donald Trump’s tenure in the White House was celebrated by the EU’s Ursula von der Leyen on Wednesday, as she warned that the former US president’s rise highlighted the need to confront the internet giants who helped him spread “conspiracy theories and fake news”.

The European commission president spoke of her relief at Trump’s departure, but warned that the outgoing leader’s movement still existed, and that the digital platforms used to spread hate needed to be tackled.

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Facebook under pressure to resume scanning messages for child abuse in EU

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Half of referrals for child sexual abuse material could be falling under the radar after changes to EU e-privacy directive

The children’s charity NSPCC has called on Facebook to resume a programme that scanned private messages for indications of child abuse, with new data suggesting that almost half of referrals for child sexual abuse material are now falling below the radar.

Recent changes to the European commission’s e-privacy directive, which are being finalised, require messaging services to follow strict new restrictions on the privacy of message data. Facebook blamed that directive for shutting down the child protection operation, but the children’s charity says Facebook has gone too far in reading the law as banning it entirely.

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Global sales of electric cars accelerate fast in 2020 despite pandemic

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Sales of electric cars rose by 43% while overall car sales slumped by a fifth last year

Global sales of electric cars accelerated fast in 2020, rising by 43% to more than 3m, despite overall car sales slumping by a fifth during the coronavirus pandemic.

Tesla was the brand selling the most electric cars, delivering almost 500,000, followed by Volkswagen. Sales of electric cars more than doubled in Europe, pushing the region past China as the world’s biggest market for them, according to data published on Tuesday by EV-volumes.com, a Sweden-based consultancy.

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Galaxy Buds Pro review: Samsung’s AirPods Pro-beating earbuds

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Great sound, solid noise-cancelling, decent battery, comfortable fit and small case are potent combination

Samsung’s latest Galaxy Buds Pro earbuds add noise-cancelling, virtual surround and improved sound, making them a challenger to Apple’s AirPods Pro.

At £219, they are the new top-of-the-range earbuds from Samsung, sitting above the £179 Galaxy Buds Live and £159 Galaxy Buds+.

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Electric car batteries with five-minute charging times produced

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Exclusive: first factory production means recharging could soon be as fast as filling up petrol or diesel vehicles

Batteries capable of fully charging in five minutes have been produced in a factory for the first time, marking a significant step towards electric cars becoming as fast to charge as filling up petrol or diesel vehicles.

Electric vehicles are a vital part of action to tackle the climate crisis but running out of charge during a journey is a worry for drivers. The new lithium-ion batteries were developed by the Israeli company StoreDot and manufactured by Eve Energy in China on standard production lines.

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When film stars attack: Russell Crowe’s reaction to criticism could set a trend

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The actor’s unexpected response to a complaint about an 18-year-old film could pave the way for big-name actors to personally insult Twitter users

One of the most surprising new avenues to have formed for celebrities over the course of the pandemic has been Cameo. For the uninitiated, Cameo is a service where celebrities can create personalised messages for their fans. For £75, Hodor from Game of Thrones will wish you a happy birthday or – if you have £750 lying around – Richard Dreyfuss will put on a Jaws shirt and struggle to pronounce your name.

But maybe this isn’t enough for you. Maybe you want to find direct engagement, with a much bigger star than Cameo offers, and for free. If that’s the case, I can heartily endorse not liking a Russell Crowe movie. Because, even if it takes him a while, Crowe will do his best to respond to your criticism. And if you’re really lucky, he’ll sound like an out-of-touch bus stop crackpot in the process. Here’s what happened.

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Revealed: Tory MPs and commentators who joined banned app Parler

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Nadine Dorries, James Cleverly and Michael Gove joined the platform favoured by Trump supporters

At least 14 Conservative MPs, including several ministers, cabinet minister Michael Gove and a number of prominent Tory commentators joined Parler, the social media platform favoured by the far right that was forced offline last week for hosting threats of violence and racist slurs.

Parler was taken offline after Amazon Web Services pulled the plug last Sunday, saying violent posts and racist threats connected to the recent attack on the US Capitol violated its terms.

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Carbon capture is vital to meeting climate goals, scientists tell green critics

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Supporters insist that storage technology is not a costly mistake but the best way for UK to cut emissions from heavy industry

Engineers and geologists have strongly criticised green groups who last week claimed that carbon capture and storage schemes – for reducing fossil fuel emissions – are costly mistakes.

The scientists insisted that such schemes are vital weapons in the battle against global heating and warn that failure to set up ways to trap carbon dioxide and store it underground would make it almost impossible to hold net emissions to below zero by 2050.

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Nasa’s Boeing deep space rocket set for ‘once-in-a-generation’ test

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Test is step before first unmanned launch later this year, in push to land humans on the moon again by 2024

Nasa’s Boeing-built deep space exploration rocket, Space Launch System (SLS), is set to fire its behemoth core stage for the first time on Saturday, a crucial test for a years-delayed US government project facing mounting pressure from emerging private sector technology.

The SLS hot fire test, expected to begin at 5pm CST Saturday at Nasa’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, will cap a nearly year-long “Green Run” test campaign to validate the rocket’s design.

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Vaccine passports: what are they and do they pose a danger to privacy?

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Race to build app for people to demonstrate Covid jab or a negative test, but rights groups worry about ‘identity checks’

Vaccine passports, which would allow people with immunity to Covid to prove they were at low risk of spreading the disease, are being investigated by companies and countries around the world. But the proposals have also raised fears among critics that they could underpin an oppressive digital ID system, and put sensitive medical records in the hands of authorities and employers.

Despite the name, a vaccine passport is not a piece of paper; instead, in the most developed versions of the idea, it is an app or similar system that can prove the bearer has been vaccinated, tested positive for Covid antibodies, or recently received a negative test. There would be no need to build and operate a privacy violating centralised database.

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Wikipedia at 20: last gasp of an internet vision, or a beacon to a better future?

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The naysayers said the user-written encyclopedia would never work. Now it boasts 55m articles and 1.7bn visitors a month

Twenty years ago today, a tech startup called Nupedia launched a side project. The company had been hard at work producing a free online encyclopaedia, but it was slow going: its strict editing process, comprehensive peer review and focus on expert authors meant it finished only 21 articles in its first year.

The side project would do away with all of that. Instead, anyone would be able to write and edit articles. Nupedia’s founders were split over whether the trade-off – more content with a lower barrier to entry – was worth it, but by the end of its first year, the side project had amassed articles on more than 18,000 topics. Nupedia, by the time it shut in 2003, had finished just 25.

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Amazon.com and ‘Big Five’ publishers accused of ebook price-fixing

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Class action lawsuit filed in US claims the houses have colluded with the online giant to keep prices artificially high

Amazon.com and the “Big Five” publishers – Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Simon & Schuster – have been accused of colluding to fix ebook prices, in a class action filed by the law firm that successfully sued Apple and the Big Five on the same charge 10 years ago.

The lawsuit, filed in district court in New York on Thursday by Seattle firm Hagens Berman, on behalf of consumers in several US states, names the retail giant as the sole defendant but labels the publishers “co-conspirators”. It alleges Amazon and the publishers use a clause known as “Most Favored Nations” (MFN) to keep ebook prices artificially high, by agreeing to price restraints that force consumers to pay more for ebooks purchased on retail platforms that are not Amazon.com.

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Does Generation Z know how to email properly? An investigation

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A professor caused an internet storm when she asked if young people were capable of writing a formal message

This week, Prof Brittney Cooper from Rutgers University caused a small internet storm when she asked a simple question: “Why don’t modern college kids know how to send a formal letter/email?” She added that her students frequently email her simply saying “Hello.”

Why don’t modern college kids know how to send a formal letter/email? I thought everyone knew to begin Dear Prof. X or Dear Dr. X. Instead these kids stay emailing me Hello There! Or Hello (no name): Why are they like this?

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Noxious internet drama makes me nostalgic for the good old days of passive aggressive notes | Brigid Delaney

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TikTok artist Lubalin brilliantly captures the drama of low stakes online fights. But internet discord is increasingly spilling into everyday life

It was summer 2016 and I was looking after a friend’s flat in Kirribilli.

Out the back was a communal laundry and clothesline.

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South Korean AI chatbot pulled from Facebook after hate speech towards minorities

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Lee Luda, built to emulate a 20-year-old Korean university student, engaged in homophobic slurs on social media

A popular South Korean chatbot has been suspended after complaints that it used hate speech towards sexual minorities in conversations with its users.

Lee Luda, the artificial intelligence [AI] persona of a 20-year-old female university student, was removed from Facebook messenger this week, after attracting more than 750,000 users in the 20 days since it was launched.

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Twitter chief says Trump ban was right decision but sets ‘dangerous precedent’

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  • Jack Dorsey: ‘I do not celebrate having to ban Donald Trump’
  • ‘A ban is a failure of ours to promote healthy conversation’

Jack Dorsey, the chief executive of Twitter, has said that banning Donald Trump from the platform was the “right decision” but that it sets a dangerous precedent.

Related: Donald Trump becomes the first US president to be impeached for a second time – live

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Huawei: bullets sent to Meng Wanzhou while under house arrest, court hears

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Chief financial officer received multiple death threats during time in Vancouver, Canadian court told

Huawei’s chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, has received multiple death threats – including bullets in the mail – while under house arrest in Vancouver, a Canadian court heard on Wednesday.

The threats were revealed during testimony by Doug Maynard, chief operating officer of Lions Gate Risk Management, the company providing her security detail.

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TikTok to tackle grooming with safeguards for young users

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NSPCC welcomes changes as it says abusers are taking advantage of pandemic to target children online

Children on TikTok will face “groundbreaking” new restrictions in an attempt to prevent grooming on the platform, the video-sharing company has announced, with particularly strict new rules for users under 16.

The platform, which has a lower age limit of 13, said users under 16 would no longer be able to receive comments from strangers, have their videos used for “duets” or mark their posts as available to be downloaded.

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Blocked: how the internet turned on Donald Trump

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From Facebook and Twitter to Reddit and Amazon, tech firms are moving to silence the president, and his QAnon supporters

Twitter’s decision to suspend Donald Trump’s account on Wednesday evening has opened the floodgates for tech companies and platforms to remove the outgoing US president from their services.

Twitter’s suspension was followed by Facebook, which a day later announced the move would be “indefinite”. Twitter then announced a “permanent” suspension of Trump’s account.

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Twitter suspends 70,000 accounts sharing QAnon content

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The network said it acted after ‘violent events in Washington’ when a pro-Trump mob stormed the US Capitol

Twitter has said it has suspended more than 70,000 accounts since Friday that were primarily dedicated to sharing QAnon content as the social media site continued to crack down on content after supporters of Donald Trump stormed the US Capitol.

“Given the violent events in Washington DC, and increased risk of harm, we began permanently suspending thousands of accounts that were primarily dedicated to sharing QAnon content on Friday afternoon,” Twitter said in a blog late on Monday.

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