Tesla chief executive Elon Musk said on Saturday there had been about 150,000 orders for the electric carmaker’s cybertruck, which was unveiled in Los Angeles on Thursday.
Related: Cybertruck: Tesla unveils new pickup truck but windows break during demo
Continue reading...From Gyneth Paltrow to Trump, today’s stars speak directly to their fans. But are they really controlling their message?
I have a friend, Adam, who is an autograph seller – a niche profession, and one that is getting more niche by the day. When we met for breakfast last month he was looking despondent.
“Everyone takes selfies these days,” he said sadly, picking at his scrambled eggs. “It’s never autographs any more. They just want photos of themselves with celebrities.”
Continue reading...Motorist filled up, popped into the attached M&S, used the car wash, then received a parking charge
First it was retail parks, then came station car parks. Now drivers who fill their car up at garages, or use the car wash are being hit with £100 demands from private parking companies for staying too long.
Both BP and Shell have been quietly signing up parking firms to install CCTV cameras at the entrances and exits to petrol stations, which are then used to enforce a maximum stay limit – which can be 30 minutes at a BP station and as little as 20 minutes at a Shell station. Fail to comply, and you’ll face £100 demands and the threat of debt collectors.
Continue reading...Tesla’s chief designer smashed the vehicle’s windows in an attempt to demonstrate their toughness
Does the act of someone’s net worth plummeting make an actual sound?
If so, then for Elon Musk it would be the thonk of a metal ball splintering the purportedly unbreakable glass of his long-awaited cybertruck.
Continue reading...Elon Musk has said he wants to build ‘supertruck with crazy torque’ as Ford and GM plan offerings of their own
Elon Musk has talked for years about building an electric pickup truck that would threaten Detroit’s automakers, and on Thursday he will finally take off the wrapping.
Tesla’s so-called “cybertruck” will debut at an evening event in Los Angeles.
In a tweet on Thursday, Musk referenced his longtime ambition to build “a Tesla supertruck with crazy torque, dynamic air suspension” that “corners like its on rails” (sic).
Continue reading...Blackout is part of growing trend of governments shutting citizens off from the world
Access to the internet is gradually being restored in Iran after an unprecedented five-day shutdown that cut its population off from the rest of the world and suppressed news of the deadliest unrest since the country’s 1979 revolution.
The digital blackout that commenced last Friday is part of a growing trend of governments interfering with the internet to curb violent unrest, but also legitimate dissent.
Continue reading...Whistleblower tells Guardian of growing alarm over secret transfer of medical history data, which can be accessed by Google staff
A whistleblower who works in Project Nightingale, the secret transfer of the personal medical data of up to 50 million Americans from one of the largest healthcare providers in the US to Google, has expressed anger to the Guardian that patients are being kept in the dark about the massive deal.
Related: Mick Mulvaney drops impeachment lawsuit but will not comply with House subpoena – live
Continue reading...Calculating the patterns and cycles of the past could lead us to an objective version of history. Could it also help us prevent a looming crisis? By Laura Spinney
In its first issue of 2010, the scientific journal Nature looked forward to a dazzling decade of progress. By 2020, experimental devices connected to the internet would deduce our search queries by directly monitoring our brain signals. Crops would exist that doubled their biomass in three hours. Humanity would be well on the way to ending its dependency on fossil fuels.
A few weeks later, a letter in the same journal cast a shadow over this bright future. It warned that all these advances could be derailed by mounting political instability, which was due to peak in the US and western Europe around 2020. Human societies go through predictable periods of growth, the letter explained, during which the population increases and prosperity rises. Then come equally predictable periods of decline. These “secular cycles” last two or three centuries and culminate in widespread unrest – from worker uprisings to revolution.
Continue reading...Dara Khosrowshahi scrambles after saying Saudi Arabia’s murder of dissident was a ‘mistake’ similar to self-driving car accident
Dara Khosrowshahi, the chief executive of Uber, has attempted to limit the damage after calling the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi “a mistake” similar to a fatal accident that occurred during tests of his company’s self-driving car.
Related: The Killing in the Consulate by Jonathan Rugman review – a dark fable of unaccountable power
Continue reading...Briton wins six-round cruiserweight bout in LA against fellow YouTube personality
Britain’s KSI has won his six-round cruiserweight boxing fight against fellow YouTube personality, the American Logan Paul, in Los Angeles.
The fight at the Staples Centre was won by the Watford man in a split decision by 55-56, 57-54, 56-55. The pair first fought last year in Manchester but a “majority draw” was declared after six rounds.
Continue reading...Goldman Sachs faces official inquiry as IT figures including Steve Wozniak say they got 10 times or more the credit limit received by their wives
The algorithm used to set credit limits for the new Apple Card will be the subject of an official investigation, following tweets from a tech entrepreneur blasting the company for gender discrimination.
New York’s Department of Financial Services has initiated the probe into the credit card practices of Goldman Sachs, which provides the Apple Card. In a series of Twitter posts starting on Thursday, David Heinemeier Hansson railed against the Apple Card for giving him 20 times the credit limit that his wife got, Bloomberg reported on Saturday.
Continue reading...Like the big banks, big tech uses its lobbying muscle to avoid regulation, and thinks it should play by different rules. And like the banks, it could be about to wreak financial havoc on us all. By Rana Foroohar
‘In every major economic downturn in US history, the ‘villains’ have been the ‘heroes’ during the preceding boom,” said the late, great management guru Peter Drucker. I cannot help but wonder if that might be the case over the next few years, as the United States (and possibly the world) heads toward its next big slowdown. Downturns historically come about once every decade, and it has been more than that since the 2008 financial crisis. Back then, banks were the “too-big-to-fail” institutions responsible for our falling stock portfolios, home prices and salaries. Technology companies, by contrast, have led the market upswing over the past decade. But this time around, it is the big tech firms that could play the spoiler role.
You wouldn’t think it could be so when you look at the biggest and richest tech firms today. Take Apple. Warren Buffett says he wished he owned even more Apple stock. (His Berkshire Hathaway has a 5% stake in the company.) Goldman Sachs is launching a new credit card with the tech titan, which became the world’s first $1tn market-cap company in 2018. But hidden within these bullish headlines are a number of disturbing economic trends, of which Apple is already an exemplar. Study this one company and you begin to understand how big tech companies – the new too-big-to-fail institutions – could indeed sow the seeds of the next crisis.
Continue reading...Company workers reportedly obtained personal account information of critics of the government in Saudi Arabia
Two former Twitter employees have been charged with spying after they reportedly obtained personal account information for critics of the government of Saudi Arabia.
A complaint unsealed on Wednesday in US district court in San Francisco detailed a coordinated effort by Saudi officials to recruit employees at the social media giant to look up the private data of thousands of Twitter accounts.
Continue reading...President says user-edited site should be replaced with Big Russian Encyclopaedia
Vladimir Putin has called for the creation of a more “reliable” Russian version of Wikipedia.
The president told a Kremlin meeting on the future of the Russian language: “As for Wikipedia … it’s better to replace it with the new Big Russian Encyclopaedia in electronic form,” RIA Novosti news agency reported. “At least that will be reliable information, presented in a good, modern way.”
Continue reading...The company’s new logo is designed to bring a ‘sense of optimism’ to the brand that brought us the Cambridge Analytica scandal
Forget Facebook: meet FACEBOOK.
Amid antitrust investigations, Capitol Hill hearings, and a generally poor reputation, the company announced on Monday it is reinventing itself with a rebrand. In the coming weeks, a new multicolored, all-caps logo will begin appearing across its services. Instagram and Whatsapp, owned by the company, will proudly tell users that they are services “from FACEBOOK”.
Continue reading...Former presidential candidate criticises Facebook’s decision to let politicians lie in adverts
Mark Zuckerberg “should pay a price” for what he is doing to democracy, Hillary Clinton has said, as she expressed doubts about whether free and fair elections were even possible in the wake of Facebook’s decision to not factcheck political advertising.
Speaking in New York at a screening of The Great Hack, a Netflix documentary about the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate cited the threat to upcoming elections in both the US and UK as she made the damning remarks about Facebook’s decision to allow politicians to lie in adverts posted to its platform.
Continue reading...Calling the witness – Alexa. Police in Florida are investigating whether they have stumbled on a silent witness to a possible murder and are trying to get the truth from “her”.
Sylvia Galva Crespo, 32, was killed by a spear to the chest at home in Hallandale Beach, Florida, north of Miami, in July, which her husband, Adam Crespo, 43, has portrayed as a mysterious accident.
Continue reading...Activists speak out after being warned of alleged cyber-attack to infiltrate mobile phones
More than a dozen pro-democracy activists, journalists and academics have spoken out after WhatsApp privately warned them they had allegedly been the victims of cyber-attacks designed to secretly infiltrate their mobile phones.
The individuals received alerts saying they were among more than 100 human rights campaigners whose phones were believed to have been hacked using malware sold by NSO Group, an Israeli cyberweapons company.
Continue reading...Sidewalk Labs agreed to 12 acres for a hi-tech waterfront neighbourhood rather than the 190 announced in June
The Google sister company Sidewalk Labs has agreed to scale back and refine its approach to a controversial hi-tech neighbourhood it has proposed for a swath of Toronto’s prime waterfront land.
Instead of developing 190 acres of property, as it pitched in June, Sidewalk agreed on Thursday to scale back its plan to the 12 acres it first envisioned in its response to a request for proposals two years ago.
Continue reading...Social network’s move comes as Facebook faces controversy over ads that promote misinformation
Twitter will ban all political advertising, the company’s CEO has announced, in a move that will increase pressure on Facebook over its controversial stance to allow politicians to advertise false statements.
The new policy, announced via Jack Dorsey’s Twitter account on Wednesday, will come into effect on 22 November and will apply globally to all electioneering ads, as well as ads related to political issues. The timing means the ban will be in place in time for the UK snap election.
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