The Trump administration’s acting budget chief is asking for a delay in restrictions against Huawei products, according to a letter to Vice-President Mike Pence and nine members of Congress.
Related: ‘All I have done, no credit!’ Enraged Trump defends US-Mexico migrant deal
Continue reading...Two military drones are crashing every month on average, according to research that raises questions about the safety of the technology, both in conflict zones and civilian environments.
Accidents Will Happen, a report published by the campaign group Drone Wars UK, reveals that there have been more than 250 crashes involving the large unmanned aircraft in the past decade. A Reaper drone has a maximum speed of 480kph, a range of 1,800km and is armed with up to four missiles and two 230kg bombs.
Continue reading...Censorship comes after bans on Washington Post, NBC, HuffPost and Wikipedia
The Guardian’s website has been blocked in China, amid a crackdown by the country’s authorities on international news websites to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
The Chinese government has regularly restricted coverage of the incident, where the military turned on protesters in Beijing who were taking part in nationwide pro-democracy demonstrations.
Continue reading...Human rights group calls on England and Wales to ban police use of AFR in public spaces
Automated facial recognition poses one of the greatest threats to individual freedom and should be banned from use in public spaces, according to the director of the campaign group Liberty.
Martha Spurrier, a human rights lawyer, said the technology had such fundamental problems that, despite police enthusiasm for the equipment, its use on the streets should not be permitted.
Continue reading...Neurologist says ‘metricising our lives’ is counterproductive when it comes to sleep
Smartphone sleep-tracking apps are making people so anxious and obsessed about their sleep that they are developing insomnia, a leading neurologist has said.
Speaking at the Cheltenham science festival, Dr Guy Leschziner, a sleep disorder specialist and consultant at Guy’s hospital in London, said a growing preoccupation with getting enough sleep was backfiring.
Continue reading...Idan Ofer allegedly hired Black Cube in 2014 but firm denies meeting and is suing TV show
An Israeli investigative TV show has claimed that one of the country’s richest men hired the Israeli intelligence firm Black Cube to dig up dirt on a cabinet minister. Black Cube denied the allegations.
Idan Ofer allegedly hired the firm in 2014 to investigate the then-finance minister Yair Lapid and other top officials, Uvda reported, as part of his efforts to influence tax policy on natural gas finds at the time.
Ofer, a billionaire with vast holdings in the shipping, drilling and mining industries, paid Black Cube to help him undermine an advisory panel appointed by Lapid that was aiming to raise taxes on his lucrative natural resources company, according to the TV investigation. The idea was to smear Lapid and the arbitrators in order to continue evading high taxes on his profits after Israel discovered a large offshore natural gas field.
Black Cube, a company of former Israeli intelligence agents, has drawn international attention for allegedly working to discredit officials within the former US president Barack Obama’s administration who helped negotiate the Iran nuclear agreement, as well as to protect the reputation of disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein.
Thursday’s investigation also explored Black Cube’s ties to former president of the Democratic Republic of Congo Joseph Kabila, who reportedly used the company’s services to suppress opposition activists.
Black Cube denied the allegations, saying it never met with Ofer or targeted politicians, judges or regulators. The company said it was suing the TV show and its anchor in a British court for £15m. A clerk at Britain’s Royal Courts of Justice confirmed that a lawsuit had been filed but said he was barred from providing further details.
A spokesman for Ofer confirmed he had contracted the agency for a brief period, but said Ofer ended up not using Black Cube’s intelligence. He stressed the company gathered evidence only from public sources.
Lapid, now co-leader of the opposition Blue and White party, said nothing influences his decisions and he would “keep working without fearing anyone”.
GCHQ technical director says he hasn’t seen anything that reassures him company is taking necessary security steps
China’s Huawei Technologies needs to raise its “shoddy” security standards which fall below rivals, a senior British cyber security official said on Thursday, as the company came under increasing pressure internationally.
The US has led allegations that Huawei’s equipment can be used by Beijing for espionage operations, with Washington urging allies to bar the company from 5G networks.
Continue reading...The iTunes app is dead, your iPhone will be faster and the $5,999 Mac Pro becomes firm’s most expensive computer
Apple has announced that the iPhone is going to get faster with iOS 13, the iTunes app is dead on the Mac with the new macOS 10.15 Catalina, and the iPad is getting its own operating system.
On stage at the firm’s annual developer conference in San Jose McEnery Convention Center, California, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook unveiled the next versions of iOS, iPad OS, watchOS, macOS and the long-awaited Mac Pro, which becomes Apple’s most expensive computer yet.
Continue reading...Demonstrators cover bodies with stickers to ensure nipples on display are ‘male’, in line with Facebook policy
Some were hairy. Some were pointy. Some were dark brown, some a pale pink. But the hundreds of nipples on display in front of Facebook’s New York City headquarters on Sunday were technically “male”, despite some being on female protesters.
More than 100 people lay nude on the sidewalk to call for a change to the company’s censorship policies. The action, called #wethenipple, was organized by the artist Spencer Tunick and the National Coalition Against Censorship.
Continue reading...Tim Cook will announce separate apps for music, TV and podcasts, according to reports
It was once heralded as a possible saviour of the music industry in the digital age, famously annoyed fans by forcing a U2 album on them, and its 20,699-word terms and conditions have even inspired a graphic novel, but now Apple is to replace its iTunes download service.
According to a report by Bloomberg, the tech company will announce that three separate apps for music, TV and podcasts will supersede iTunes, as Apple seeks to reposition itself as an entertainment service rather than a hardware company powered by products such as the iPhone.
Continue reading...Failure to tip, a refusal to chat … even where you sit could influence how drivers rate you and under a new policy could see you banned
Will your Uber rating be docked if youdon’t tip? What side of the car should you sit on? Small talk or silence?
Since Uber first began to allow users to check their ratings on the app in 2017, riders have harbored growing anxiety about how many stars their behavior in the back seat will earn them.
Continue reading...Black Mirror is back. From an 80s lesbian romance to a murderous choose-your-own adventure, here are the essential dystopian stories you must watch before the new season drops next week
Season 2, Episode 1
Continue reading...The Femm app has users in the US, EU and Africa and sows doubt over the safety of birth control, a Guardian investigation has found
A popular women’s health and fertility app sows doubt about birth control, features claims from medical advisers who are not licensed to practice in the US, and is funded and led by anti-abortion, anti-gay Catholic campaigners, a Guardian investigation has found.
The Femm app, which collects personal information about sex and menstruation from users, has been downloaded more than 400,000 times since its launch in 2015, according to developers. It has users in the US, the EU, Africa and Latin America, its operating company claims.
Continue reading...GCHQ ‘ghost protocol’ would seriously undermine user security and trust, says letter
A GCHQ proposal that would enable eavesdropping on encrypted chat services has been condemned as a “serious threat” to digital security and human rights.
In an open letter signed by more than 50 companies, civil society organisations and security experts – including Apple, WhatsApp, Liberty and Privacy International – GCHQ was called on to abandon its so-called “ghost protocol”, and instead focus on “protecting privacy rights, cybersecurity, public confidence, and transparency”.
Continue reading...Elon Musk’s Starlink internet satellites ‘have no public consensus and may impair view of the cosmos’
Mega constellations of human-made satellites could soon blight the view of the night sky, astronomers warned following the launch of Elon Musk’s Starlink probes last week.
The first 60 of an intended 12,000 satellites were successfully blasted into orbit on Thursday by Musk’s company, SpaceX, which plans to use them to beam internet communication from space down to Earth.
Continue reading...Kingdom targeted satirist Ghanem Almasarir with Israeli malware, letter of claim alleges
Saudi Arabia has been accused of launching a sophisticated hacking attack against a prominent dissident in London who is allegedly living under police protection, according to a letter of claim that has been sent to the kingdom and seen by the Guardian.
The letter of claim, which was delivered to the Saudi embassy in London on Tuesday, was sent on behalf of the Saudi satirist Ghanem Almasarir, and alleges he was targeted by Saudi Arabia with malware developed by the NSO Group, the controversial Israeli surveillance company.
Continue reading...Autonomous machine expected to pick more than 25,000 raspberries a day, outpacing human workers
Quivering and hesitant, like a spoon-wielding toddler trying to eat soup without spilling it, the world’s first raspberry-picking robot is attempting to harvest one of the fruits.
After sizing it up for an age, the robot plucks the fruit with its gripping arm and gingerly deposits it into a waiting punnet. The whole process takes about a minute for a single berry.
Continue reading...Footage of House speaker deliberately slowed down to make her appear drunk or ill
Facebook says it will continue to host a video of Nancy Pelosi that has been edited to give the impression that the Democratic House speaker is drunk or unwell, in the latest incident highlighting its struggle to deal with disinformation.
The viral clip shows Pelosi – who has publicly angered Donald Trump in recent days – speaking at an event, but it has been slowed down to give the impression she is slurring her words. Several versions of the clip appeared to be circulating.
Continue reading...In 2017, I started getting regular messages from an anonymous Twitter user telling me my religion was ‘evil’. Eventually I responded – and he agreed to meet face to face. By Hussein Kesvani
In 2017, I started to receive messages from a Twitter user who called themself True Brit, telling me that my religion was “Satanic”, “barbaric” and “evil”. Bearing a profile image of the St George’s cross and a biography that simply read “Anti-Islam, stop Islamic immigration now”, True Brit often spammed me with pictures taken from anti-Muslim websites, blogs and Facebook groups. Sometimes they would be cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad as a sexual deviant. Other times, I would be sent memes I had seen circulating in rightwing communities online, depicting groups of south Asian men who had been arrested for child sexual grooming, or alleged Syrian refugees who were, supposedly, secret members of Isis. One meme showed a man with a long beard, in battle camouflage, brandishing a pistol in one hand and holding the hand of a woman wearing niqab. In bold white writing below the image were the words “EUROPE IN 2020”.
True Brit never said anything directly to me to begin with. I had seen social media profiles like this one, and much worse, for years. Like those accounts, True Brit had few followers – 65 in total. Their activity on Twitter predominantly consisted of retweets from rightwing news sites such as Breitbart and Fox News. They frequently posted videos of online celebrities who were popular on anti-Muslim forums and Facebook groups, including Milo Yiannopoulos, a rightwing “provocateur” who has referred to Islam as “the real rape culture”, and Paul Joseph Watson, a UK-based YouTuber and editor of the conspiracy-theory website Infowars.com, who produces weekly videos about the “dangers of Islam” in the west, with titles such as The Truth About Islamophobia and Dear Gays: The Left Betrayed You For Islam. True Brit was also a fan of the British rightwing commentator Katie Hopkins, who in 2015 likened Syrian refugees to cockroaches, and who until recently produced anti-Islam videos for Canadian far-right outlet The Rebel Media.
Continue reading...Panasonic joins Google, Intel and Qualcomm following US ban in what is beginning to shape up as a tech cold war
Panasonic has joined the growing list of companies to sever ties with Huawei by announcing that it will stop supplying some components to the Chinese technology conglomerate after a US ban over security concerns.
The decision by the Japanese firm on Thursday sent Asia Pacific shares falling again and came a day after four major Japanese and British mobile carriers said they would delay releasing new Huawei handsets.
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