Parag Agrawal’s plan seen as step toward normalizing time off for men involved in childcare
Twitter’s new CEO, Parag Agrawal, is reportedly taking a “few weeks” off for paternity leave after the birth of his second child, a move that drew cheers from other fathers as a positive step towards normalizing men taking time off for childcare.
The 37-year-old became CEO of the company in November when its co-founder Jack Dorsey stepped down.
Continue reading...Wang Yam sent committee warnings about Britain’s involvement with telecommunications firm
A Chinese informant for MI6, now serving a life sentence for murder in a British jail, has given information about the telecommunications company Huawei to the parliamentary intelligence and security committee (ISC), the Guardian has learned.
He has been thanked by the chair of the committee, the senior Conservative backbencher Dr Julian Lewis, and told that he had raised “several important areas of concern” and that the committee’s findings may be “of interest” to him.
Continue reading...Exclusive: leak shows more than half of donations to convoy protest through GiveSendGo came from US
A hacker who leaked the names and locations of more than 90,000 people who donated money to the Canadian trucker convoy protest has said it exposed how money from abroad had funded “extremism” in the country.
In an exclusive interview, the hacker told the Guardian that Canada was “not safe from foreign political manipulation”. “You see a huge amount of money that isn’t even coming from Canada – that’s plain as day,” said the hacker, who belongs to the hacktivist group Anonymous.
Continue reading...Conspiracy theory songs claiming Covid-19 is fake and calling vaccine ‘poison’ are being actively promoted in Spotify playlists
Songs that claim Covid-19 is fake and describe the vaccines as “poison” are being actively promoted to Spotify users in playlists generated by its content recommendation engine.
Tracks found on the world’s largest music streaming service explicitly encourage people not to get vaccinated and say those who do are “slaves”, “sheep”, and victims of Satan. Others call for an uprising, urging listeners to “fight for your life”.
Continue reading...The CEO has changed the world – but he faces regulatory, technological and branding troubles in his push to do it again
It would hardly be hyperbole to say that since its founding in 2004, Facebook has taken over the world – counting more than 50% of the global population as its user base. But after years of domination built on advertising revenue, the company has nearly overnight tried to knock down that empire and build anew.
In October 2021, more than 15 years and 2.8 billion users after the then student Mark Zuckerberg launched the social media platform from his college dorm, Facebook announced it had become “Meta” and was refocusing on the company’s virtual reality endeavors.
Continue reading...In an internal survey, employees asked company to find ‘ways to connect’ which the 75-acre Trailblazer ranch will provide plenty of
Salesforce employees will soon be able to hold meetings in California’s redwood forests after the company announced plans to open its own luxury ranch to help staff “connect” after two years of remote working.
The 75-acre property known as Trailblazer Ranch is located near Santa Cruz, California, and boasts an outdoor amphitheater, a communal kitchen, fitness and learning centers and conference rooms. The property also features sleeping pods and suites equipped with fireplaces and employees will be able to partake in guided nature walks, yoga sessions, garden tours, group cooking classes, art journaling and meditation.
Continue reading...Kryptovault’s operation is part of a fightback against criticism of the famously energy-intensive industry
A line of large blue skips full of chopped wood sit at the back of a site belonging to Norway’s biggest bitcoin mining operation, a 5,000 sq metre warehouse on the outskirts of Hønefoss, a small town 40 miles west of Oslo.
Hot air is being pumped into the 12 skips through bendy corrugated pipes curling out from the warehouse. Despite the snow, it will take a few days for the logs to be dried out, after which a local lumberjack, grateful for the free service, will take them away for sale.
Continue reading...Ursula von der Leyen says chips are ‘bedrock of our modern economies’ but the pandemic has exposed supply vulnerabilities
The European Union has announced a €43bn ($48bn) plan to overcome its dependency on Asian computer chip makers as governments and businesses around the world battle with a global supply chain crisis that experts believe could persist for much of the year.
With consumers having to wait months for cars, dishwashers and other durables thanks to chip shortages, the bloc’s plan marks one of the most significant developments yet seen as a result of the tectonic shifts in the global economy set off by the coronavirus pandemic.
In the US, Harley Davidson said its customers would have to bear the brunt of component price rises, and Starbucks said it was raising its prices for the third time since October, while FedEx’s air cargo arm was booming as businesses sought a way around bottlenecks.
In Europe, the UK’s biggest private employer, Tesco supermarket, said food inflation will hit 5% this spring on the back of tighter supply, the price of beer was rising due a “vicious cycle of costs”, and truck maker Iveco reported protracted supply chain issues on Tuesday.
In Australia, analysts at Commonwealth bank this week said Covid-induced supply chain disruptions and labour shortages continued to drive a big lift in price pressures for businesses, weakening business confidence. On the upside, small-town butchers were thriving thanks to supply shortages leaving supermarket shelves bare.
Continue reading...A hashtag relating to the death of man employed at video platform Bilibili has been viewed hundreds of millions of times but company denies claims he was overworked
Claims that another Chinese tech worker has died after excessive overtime has reignited debate over the industry’s “996 culture”. The company denied that it overworked the employee, but said it would pay more attention to the health of its employees.
The 25-year-old reportedly died in hospital soon after he was taken to hospital from his home on Saturday afternoon. The video platform Bilibili, where the man was employed as a content auditor, said company representatives went to the hospital to assist and then notified his family.
Continue reading...Husband and wife, a rapper on TikTok, are accused in the US’s biggest-ever cryptocurrency theft case
The US justice department has announced the unraveling of its biggest-ever cryptocurrency theft case, seizing a record-shattering $3.6bn in bitcoin in a saga that has captivated the internet.
US officials said on Tuesday the recovered sum was linked to the hack of Bitfinex, a virtual currency exchange whose systems were breached by hackers nearly six years ago.
Continue reading...Oversight Board of Meta recommends exception to privacy rules should be removed
Facebook and Instagram should tighten privacy rules to protect against the revealing of private residential addresses and images online, known as doxxing, according to the independent body that decides if content should be on the social media platforms.
The Oversight Board of Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has recommended that an exception to the company’s privacy rules that allows the sharing of private residential information when it is considered “publicly available” should be removed.
Continue reading...Thiel, a major donor to the Republican party, was seen by critics as part of the reason why Facebook did not censor Trump
Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, is stepping down from the board of Facebook’s parent company, Meta, after 17 years.
Thiel, Facebook’s longest-serving board member and a major donor to the Republican party, plans to focus on backing Donald Trump’s allies in the November midterm elections, according to the New York Times. He recently donated $10m each to the Senate campaigns of Blake Masters, who is running for a seat in Arizona, and JD Vance, who is running in Ohio. Masters is the chief operating officer of Thiel’s family office and Vance used to work at one of Thiel’s venture funds.
Continue reading...GoFundMe blocked fundraising after Canadian city declared emergency over protests against vaccine mandates
A trucker-led protest against vaccine mandates in Canada has raised several million dollars on a Christian crowdfunding site after being removed from GoFundMe, sparking debate over how online platforms moderate campaigns.
GoFundMe blocked fundraising for the “Freedom Convoy” over the weekend, after the mayor of Ottawa declared a state of emergency over a week-long protest led by truck drivers over Covid-19 restrictions.
Continue reading...Top-of-the-line sports watch goes anywhere and tracks anything, with longer battery life, better GPS, stamina and a touchscreen
Garmin’s latest top-of-the-line Fenix 7 track-it-all adventure smartwatch introduces a number of new features, better GPS, longer battery life and improved tech – as well as a touchscreen to go with its buttons.
Starting at £599 ($699.99/A$1,049), it can hit £1,000 or more if you pick the largest, most fancy version. But the new luxury device does give us a preview on what the firm’s cheaper sports watches may feature later in the year.
Continue reading...Non-English speakers may soon rival the millions playing the original version of the viral word game
It only took two days for Louan Bengmah’s French-language version of the viral Wordle game to run into trouble. His online dictionary threw up “slush”, Québécois slang that was essentially an English word co-opted in North America.
French players hoping to join the hundreds of thousands of English speakers cluttering up social media with boastful grids showing how quickly they had guessed a mystery word, were frustrated.
Continue reading...Streaming firm is facing a cocktail of crises, from culture wars to competition concerns
He was supposed to be Spotify’s biggest acquisition, one who would transform the music streaming company into a one-stop shop for all kinds of online audio.
But controversy over “misinformation” on Joe Rogan’s podcast precipitated a hellish week for the Swedish firm as high-profile boycotts, a social media backlash and a share price drop challenged the viability of its meteoric growth.
Continue reading...Finding the right medicine at the right price was once a lottery – now the crowdsourcing service I set up is bringing down the cost of illness
In July 2015, as my 82-year-old grandmother, Sophie Mafuku, lay dying of a terminal illness in Zimbabwe, I spent a day speaking to fellow pharmacists as I tried to fill her morphine prescription. If it takes 24 hours for the grandmother of a well-connected medical professional to access scarce drugs, I thought, how long is it taking people with no connections? It set me off on a journey.
In Zimbabwe, systemic shortages are common. Sometimes, only a handful of pharmacies have particular drugs in stock. The shortages are caused by well-documented economic challenges, which affect Zimbabwe’s capacity to manufacture or import medicines.
Continue reading...A historic plunge in the stock price of Facebook’s parent company has erased more than $230bn in its market value, easily the biggest one-day loss in history for a US company.
The 26.4% wipeout in Meta comes amid concerns about its future after the company reported its first ever drop in daily user numbers in its Wednesday earnings report. Facebook rebranded to Meta last year as part of its strategic pivot to becoming a virtual-reality based company. The company’s advertising model has also been hit hard by privacy changes at Apple, which Facebook has said it expects will cost them billions.
Continue reading...Will the hit game imminently be locked behind a paywall or stay as it is? What about ads? The NYT’s head of games explains the plan
In a month of spectacular video game industry buyouts, symbolised by Microsoft’s incredible $68bn swoop for Activision Blizzard, there is one purchase that has sent paroxysms of fear across the planet. On Monday, the New York Times revealed that it had bought the viral megahit Wordle for a “low seven figure sum”. The web-based word puzzle, which launched in October, was originally intended as a gift from software engineer Josh Wardle to his partner. But it has become a viral sensation, amassing an audience of millions – and key to its appeal is the fact that it’s free, with no ads.
So what does a big newspaper like the New York Times want with a game like Wordle, and what happens next?
Continue reading...This weird postmodern drama sees a lonely teenager join a virtual world where she becomes a hugely successful singer
There’s some amazing big-screen spectacle in this weird postmodern emo photo-love drama from Japanese anime director Mamoru Hosoda, whose previous film Mirai elevated him to auteur status. Suzu, voiced by Kaho Nakamura, is a deeply unhappy and lonely teenager at high school, who lives with her dad. Her mum died some years ago, attempting (successfully) to save a child from drowning and Suzu can’t come to terms with the zero-sum pointlessness of this calamity: a total stranger was saved but her mother died. Or not zero in fact: while her loss increased the sum-total of unhappiness, the most popular boy in school – a friend since they were little – is tender and protective towards Suzu.
Her life is complicated further when she is persuaded to join a virtual reality meta-universe called U, a glittering unearthly city like a next-level Manhattan or Shibuya. (Presumably entry into this fantasy world needs a VR headset, although oddly this is not made plain.) Participants have their biometrics read and get an enhanced avatar of themselves and Suzu finds that she is now “Belle”, an ethereally beautiful young woman with quirky freckles and a wonderful singing voice. To her astonishment, Suzu finds that Belle is becoming a colossally famous singer – but at the very high point of this meta-success she comes across the Beast, who disrupts one of her concerts: a brutish, aggressive outcast figure loathed by the self-appointed vigilante guardians of U.
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