Texas and other states sue Google for abusing ‘monopolistic power’

Lawsuit accusing company of ‘tremendous violation of justice’ is latest bid to rein in big tech

Google is facing a new multi-state lawsuit, led by Texas, that accuses the company of abusing its “monopolistic power”, the latest in a slew of major legal efforts to rein in big tech.

In a video announcing the suit on Wednesday, the Texas attorney generalcharged Google with engaging in anticompetitive behavior, particularly in the online advertising market. Texas argues that the company dominates the pathways by which an advertisement gets from the agency that produces it on to a web page or mobile app.

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Facebook’s attempt to vilify Apple tastes like sour grapes

Analysis: Facebook says objections to Apple feature that affects apps are bid to defend small businesses – but do we believe it?

Never afraid of a challenge, Facebook appears to have embarked on a campaign to convince the world to hate Apple, love targeted advertising, and believe the social network when it says it is doing it all out of a desire to defend small businesses.

On Wednesday, the company launched a series of full-page newspaper adverts and a press conference where the company put forward small businesses who said they relied on app-tracking to find customers. It also announced it would be siding with the Fortnite developer Epic Games in the latter’s lawsuit over control of the iOS App Store.

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Trump’s Twitter account was hacked, Dutch ministry confirms

Public prosecutor states Victor Gevers did access US president’s site but as ethical hacker faces no charges

Dutch prosecutors have confirmed that Donald Trump’s Twitter account was hacked in October despite denials from Washington and the company, but said the “ethical hacker” would not face charges.

The hacker, named as Victor Gevers, broke into Trump’s account @realDonaldTrump on 16 October by guessing the US president’s password, Dutch media reports said.

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Outing of FSB hit squad highlights Russia’s data security problem

Analysis: trade in stolen data is a boon for investigators and a headache for Kremlin

In early 2019, the journalist Andrei Zakharov managed to buy his own phone and banking records in a groundbreaking investigation into Russia’s thriving markets in stolen personal data, in which law enforcement and telecoms employees can be contracted anonymously to dip into their systems and pull out sensitive details on anyone.

A year and a half later, investigators from Bellingcat and the Insider used some of the same tools and clever analysis to out a secret FSB team that had been tasked with killing Alexei Navalny using a novichok nerve agent.

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Cyberpunk 2077 review – could it ever live up to the hype?

PC (version tested), Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X, PS5, PS4; CD Projekt
Blade Runner meets Grand Theft Auto in this sprawling hellscape of a role-playing game, which is extraordinarily immersive but let down by misogyny and xenophobia

So here we finally are, in Night City. Almost a decade after it was first announced, CD Projekt’s massively ambitious role-playing game has launched into a swirling maelstrom of hype and controversy that befits its salacious, histrionic setting. Like the technological MacGuffin at the centre of the plot, Cyberpunk 2077 is highly advanced and ingenious, but also bug-ridden and irresponsible.

You play as V, a cybernetically enhanced street hustler looking to make their name on these squalid, vicious streets, taking infiltration and assassination jobs for the gangs who’ve carved up the criminal underworld. While attempting to steal a cutting-edge biochip from a powerful corporation, you implant it in your own head, unknowingly infecting yourself with the digital ghost of dead rocker and anarchist Johnny Silverhand (Keanu Reeves, essentially playing Theodore “Ted” Logan’s asshole brother). If you don’t get him out of your brain, you’ll both die.

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Google suffers global outage with Gmail, YouTube and majority of services affected

Error was due to lack of storage space in authentication tools causing system to crash

Google has suffered a worldwide outage, with failures reported across the company’s services, including Gmail, Google Calendar and YouTube. Beginning at about 11.50am GMT, the outages appeared to have affected the vast majority of Google’s services, apart from search, which operated largely unaffected.

Despite the universal nature of the outages, the company’s automated systems reported no problems for any services for the first 30 minutes, across both consumer-facing and its cloud tools for developers. At 12.25pm, the company published an update, saying “We’re aware of a problem … affecting a majority of users. The affected users are unable to access [Google services].”

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Orion hack exposed vast number of targets – impact may not be known for a while

Analysis: eavesdropping on high-value targets is labour intensive so hackers may not have made most of access

If there is one silver lining to the months-long global cyber-espionage campaign discovered when a prominent cybersecurity firm learned it had been breached, it might be that the sheer numbers of potentially compromised entities offers them some protection.

By compromising one piece of security software – a security tool called Orion developed by the Texan company SolarWinds – the attackers gained access to an extraordinary array of potential targets in the US alone: more than 425 of the Fortune 500 list of top companies; all of the top 10 telecommunications companies; all five branches of the military; and all of the top five accounting firms.

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Suspected Russian hackers spied on US federal agencies

FBI to investigate after treasury and commerce departments believed to have been targeted

Suspected Russian hackers have carried out the biggest cyber-raid against the US for more than five years, US officials have said, targeting key government networks including the Treasury and commerce departments.

The hackers were able to monitor internal email traffic and may have compromised other government bodies, in what is being described as a highly sophisticated state-level attack. The situation is so grave it led on Saturday to a national security council meeting at the White House.

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Sci-fi surveillance: Europe’s secretive push into biometric technology

EU science funding is being spent on developing new tools for policing and security. But who decides how far we need to submit to artificial intelligence?

Patrick Breyer didn’t expect to have to take the European commission to court. The softly spoken German MEP was startled when in July 2019 he read about a new technology to detect from facial “micro-expressions” when somebody is lying while answering questions.

Even more startling was that the EU was funding research into this virtual mindreader through a project called iBorderCtrl, for potential use in policing Europe’s borders. In the article that Breyer read, a reporter described taking a test on the border between Serbia and Hungary. She told the truth, but the AI border guard said she had lied.

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Facial recognition for pigs: Is it helping Chinese farmers or hurting the poorest?

Automation is revolutionising China’s pork farms but leaving independent farmers behind

A slender snout. Shapely, upright ears. Like humans, pigs have idiosyncratic faces, and new players in the Chinese pork market are taking notice, experimenting with increasingly sophisticated versions of facial recognition software for pigs.

China is the world’s largest exporter of pork, and is set to increase production next year by 9%. As the nation’s pork farms grow in scale, more farmers are turning to AI systems like facial recognition technology – known as FRT – to continuously monitor, identify, and even feed their herds.

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Apple unveils its first over-ear headphones – the £549 AirPods Max

Surprise at high price as company looks to beat Bose and Sony with super luxury audio

Apple has announced its long anticipated first over-ear, noise-cancelling wireless headphones, AirPods Max, retailing at £549.

The new headphones look to take the good bits of Apple’s wireless earbuds, AirPods, and put them in larger Bluetooth headphones with high quality speakers and a very high price tag.

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Amazon Echo 2020 review: the best-sounding smart speaker under £100

Thumping bass, great sound and new spherical design propels Amazon to top of the pile

Amazon’s fourth-generation Echo Alexa smart speaker is a complete redesign in form and audio, with the popular device transformed into a ball of sound.

The Echo costs £89.99 and is Amazon’s mid-range speaker, sitting above the £49.99 Echo Dot and below the £189.99 Echo Studio.

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Not to be sneezed at: how 3D printing is supersizing the tiny world of pollen

Project allows students, scientists and even fashion designers to create giant models of pollen grains from around the world

As a former secondary school science teacher, Oliver Wilson knows the challenges of communicating big, complex issues. Now, the palaeoecologist is reaching global audiences with a project that brings to life the microscopic world of pollen by producing giant 3D-printed models from high-quality scans of pollen grains.

“Being able to identify pollen is important for many reasons,” he says. Because they can survive millions of years and are tiny and tough, they can help track changing climate patterns, reveal the quality of honey and even provide forensic evidence at crime scenes. “But I love seeing what else people do with the models,” he says. Already they have been used by bee ecologists in Brazil, US school teachers and Irish archaeologists, among others.

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Jeff Bezos: Blue Origin space company will take first woman to the moon

  • Amazon owner seeks Nasa lunar lander contract
  • Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Dynetics also in competition

Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin will take the first woman to the moon, the billionaire said as Nasa nears a decision over who will supply its first privately built lunar landers, meant to be capable of sending astronauts to the moon by 2024.

Related: Japan’s Hayabusa2 capsule returns to Earth carrying asteroid samples

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More than 1,200 Google workers condemn firing of AI scientist Timnit Gebru

More than 1,500 researchers also sign letter after Black expert on ethics says Google tried to suppress her research on bias

More than 1,200 Google employees and more than 1,500 academic researchers are speaking out in protest after a prominent Black scientist studying the ethics of artificial intelligence said she was fired by Google after the company attempted to suppress her research and she criticized its diversity efforts.

Timnit Gebru, who was the technical co-lead of Google’s Ethical AI team, wrote on Twitter on Wednesday that she had been fired after sending an email to an internal group for women and allies working in the company’s AI unit.

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‘Dirty methods’ in Brexit vote cited in push for new laws on Europe’s elections

Sites such as Facebook will have to publicly disclose identity of people and entities funding such advertising

The “dirty methods” of the Brexit referendum have been cited as a reason for new EU laws aimed at tackling disinformation and forcing online platforms including Facebook to publicly disclose the identity of people and entities funding political adverts.

Věra Jourová, a vice president of the European commission, said the EU rule-book needed to be updated to deal with on-line political campaigning, as she unveiled draft legislation at a press conference in Brussels.

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‘These images are a crime scene … it’s massive for us to find the child’

The Internet Watch Foundation is seeing a growing number of tipoffs about child abuse. We talk to one analyst about her work

Isobel* has been working throughout lockdown. With her colleagues in the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) analyst room in Cambridge she has been responding to a rising number of tipoffs from the public that child abuse images are circulating online. The work is gruelling.

“Today I started at 8.30 and I’ll be looking at content all day long: thousands and thousands of images in a day. We analysts come from all sorts of backgrounds. The main thing is your emotional resilience – it’s incredibly important that you can look at this content and then go home and not think about it.”

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‘Deeply dark criminal activity’ drives rise in child abuse images online

The use of webcams and live streaming has led to increased grooming by predators during the coronavirus pandemic

Child abuse experts are warning that an growing trend of children being groomed through webcams and live streaming by predators has led to a sharp rise in the number of abusive images circulating online since the beginning of the pandemic.

Much of this abuse is happening in children’s own homes while their parents or caregivers are in another room, according to the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), which says it had already dealt with an increased number of reports of online child abuse images this year. September was a record month with 15,000 reports from the public, 5,000 more than the same month in 2019.

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RoboDoc: how India’s robots are taking on Covid patient care

The pandemic has spurred on robotics companies building machines to perform tasks in hospitals and other industries

Standing just 5ft tall, Mitra navigates around the hospital wards, guided by facial recognition technology and with a chest-mounted tablet that allows patients and their loved ones to see each other.

Developed in recent years by the Bengaluru startup Invento Robotics, Mitra costs around $13,600 (£10,000) and – due to the reduced risk of infection to doctors – has become hugely popular in Indian hospitals during the pandemic.

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Jabra Elite 85t review: AirPods Pro-beating noise cancelling Bluetooth earbuds

Winning combo of great sound, noise cancelling, dual connection, long battery, small case and fit

Jabra is back with its fourth-generation Bluetooth true wireless earbuds, the Elite 85t, with improved fit, better sound and active noise cancelling to rival Apple’s AirPods Pro.

The Elite 85t cost £219.99 and top the range that includes its predecessors the £170 Elite 75t and £140 Elite 65t.

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