Category Archives: Technology

Rocket men: how billionaires are using celebrities as PR for their space projects

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Critics see the ‘awful business’ of private space tourism as having little technological or exploration value

As Star Trek’s iconic Captain James T Kirk, he voyaged the universe for the good of humanity. The nonagenarian actor William Shatner’s brief, real-life thrill ride off the planet today, however, is much less about advancing the species as promoting the fortunes of Blue Origin, the private space company owned by the Amazon tycoon Jeff Bezos that’s taking him there.

Booking arguably the most famous fictional space traveler in history to front only the second crewed flight of Bezos’s New Shepard rocket system has secured a vast slew of positive publicity that not even the huge wealth of the world’s richest man could otherwise have purchased.

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William Shatner in tears after historic space flight: ‘I’m so filled with emotion’

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Star Trek actor, 90, says ‘I hope I never recover from this’ after becoming oldest human in space on Jeff Bezos rocket New Shepard

The Star Trek actor William Shatner declared himself “overwhelmed” at becoming the oldest human in space, at the age of 90, during a brief but successful second crewed flight on Wednesday of Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket ship from the west Texas desert.

The Canadian, who for four decades played Captain James Kirk, the fearless commander of the USS Enterprise, broke down in tears at the landing site as he described to the private space company’s founder, the Amazon tycoon Jeff Bezos, the profundity of his almost 11-minute leap to the stars.

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Apple may cut iPhone 13 production by millions as US warns of Christmas shortages

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Shares in Apple fall as global chip shortage and supply chain issues prompt White House to admit there could be empty shelves during festive season

Apple may slash the number of iPhone 13s it will make this year by up to 10m because of a shortage of computer chips amid a worldwide supply chain crunch that led the White House to warn that “there will be things that people can’t get” at Christmas.

Apple was expected to produce 90m units of the new iPhone models this year but has told its manufacturers that the number would be lower because chip suppliers including Broadcom and Texas Instruments were struggling to deliver components, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.

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‘She opens the app and gets bombarded’: parents on Instagram, teens and eating disorders

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Mothers describe their daughters’ dangerous experiences after whistleblower Frances Haugen’s testimony

Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, Michelle noticed her teenage daughters were spending substantially more time on Instagram.

The girls were feeling isolated and bored during lockdown, the Arizona mom, who has asked to only be identified by her first name to maintain her children’s privacy, recalled. She hoped social media could be a way for them to remain connected with their friends and community.

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Digital gender gap: men 50% more likely to be online in some countries – report

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Failure to ensure women have equal access to the internet hampering developing economies and fuelling gender inequality

A failure to ensure women have equal access to the internet has cost low-income countries $1tn (£730bn) over the past decade and could mean an additional loss of $500bn by 2025 if governments don’t take action, according to new research.

Last year, governments in 32 countries, including India, Egypt and Nigeria, lost an estimated $126bn in gross domestic product because women were unable to contribute to the digital economy.

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Facebook: Nick Clegg avoids questions on whistleblower Haugen’s testimony

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Facebook executive wouldn’t say if he believed platform bore responsibility for amplifying baseless claims of stolen election

The Facebook executive Nick Clegg took a damage-limitation tour of US political talkshows on Sunday, but remained evasive over questions about the social media giant’s contribution to the deadly attack on the US Capitol on 6 January this year.

The former British deputy prime minister, now Facebook vice-president of global affairs, was responding to a barrage of damaging claims from the whistleblower Frances Haugen.

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How do we talk to teens about sex in a world of porn?

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Teenage boys’ easy access to violent sexual images is creating a crisis for them – and for women, argues the anti-porn campaigner

Violence against women is never far from the news, but currently it is high on the agenda – and porn features again and again as a factor. From the murder of Sarah Everard to the paltry sentence handed down to Sam Pybus, the latest man to use the so-called “rough sex defence”, it seems the world is riven with misogyny.

Sarah’s killer Wayne Couzens was attracted to “brutal sexual pornography”, the court heard during his trial. Pybus – who was sentenced to four years and eight months last month for manslaughter after strangling a vulnerable woman during sex – was also known to use violent porn. Tackling porn culture is clearly a key part of tackling sexual violence towards women. I have campaigned to end the sex trade for decades, and am well aware of its role in the sexual exploitation of women.

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Missing apostrophe in Facebook post lands NSW real estate agent in legal hot water

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Court declines to dismiss defamation case against Anthony Zadravic, who said failure to punctuate social media post was trivial

A real estate agent’s failure to use an apostrophe in a Facebook post could prove costly after a New South Wales court declined to dismiss a defamation case against him on the basis it was trivial.

Late on 22 October last year, Anthony Zadravic posted that another real estate agent was “selling multi million $ (sic) homes in Pearl Beach but can’t pay his employees superannuation”.

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Tesla headquarters will move from California to Texas, Elon Musk announces

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CEO confirms move in shareholder meeting after clashes with California officials over pandemic restrictions

Elon Musk has announced that Tesla will move its headquarters from California to Texas, following through on a threat he had hinted at for several months.

The company has been building a new plant in Austin and the CEO confirmed the move in a shareholder meeting on Thursday. He gave no timeline, however, and said the electric car maker will keep expanding its manufacturing capacity in the Golden State.

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Twitter trials warnings about ‘intense’ conversations

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Users urged to ‘look out for each other’ and ‘remember the human’ as platform tries to limit abuse

Twitter users poised to dive into a heated online debate will be warned they are about to enter an “intense” conversation, under a safety trial.

The social media platform is testing a feature that drops a notice under a potentially contentious exchange, stating: “Heads up. Conversations like this can be intense.” Another prompt, which appears to be aimed at people making a reply, goes to greater lengths to calm down users and urges the tweeter to “look out for each other”, “remember the human” and note that “diverse perspectives have value”.

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Facebook’s role in Myanmar and Ethiopia under new scrutiny

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Whistleblower Frances Haugen adds to long-held concerns that social media site is fuelling violence and instability

Whistleblower Frances Haugen’s testimony to US senators on Tuesday shone a light on violence and instability in Myanmar and Ethiopia in recent years and long-held concerns about links with activity on Facebook.

“What we saw in Myanmar and are now seeing in Ethiopia are only the opening chapters of a story so terrifying, no one wants to read the end of it,” Haugen said in her striking testimony. Haugen warned that Facebook was “literally fanning ethnic violence” in places such as Ethiopia because it was not policing its service adequately outside the US.

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Dubai ruler hacked ex-wife using NSO Pegasus spyware, high court judge finds

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Sheikh Mohammed used spyware on Princess Haya and five associates in unlawful abuse of power, judge rules

The ruler of Dubai hacked the phone of his ex-wife Princess Haya using NSO Group’s controversial Pegasus spyware in an unlawful abuse of power and trust, a senior high court judge has ruled.

The president of the family division found that agents acting on behalf of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, who is also prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, a close Gulf ally of Britain, hacked Haya and five of her associates while the couple were locked in court proceedings in London concerning the welfare of their two children.

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‘I don’t judge his decision to die’: the hit podcast about love, loss – and Britney Spears

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When Chris Stedman’s friend Alex took his own life, he left him a final puzzle to solve. Unread charts Stedman’s journey down a rabbit hole of grief and realisation

“When someone dies, there are always questions that will be left unanswered. But what happens when you lose someone and they leave you a trail to follow after they are gone?”

Chris Stedman is explaining the central conceit of his podcast Unread. The four-part series sees the writer and podcaster memorialise his friend Alex, who took his own life in late 2019, via narration, voice notes and testimonies from mutual friends. It also follows Stedman’s quest to better understand his friend’s life, digging into parts of his history that he didn’t know existed. Bringing together an affecting story and a compelling mystery, Unread garnered critical acclaim from the likes of Vulture, and has been among the podcast highlights of the year since its release in July.

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Mark Zuckerberg hits back at Facebook whistleblower claims

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Frances Haugen’s testimony that social networking company puts profit before people ‘just not true’

Mark Zuckerberg has hit back at the testimony of the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, saying her claims the company puts profit over people’s safety are “just not true”.

In a blogpost, the Facebook founder and chief executive addressed one of the most damaging statements in Haugen’s opening speech to US senators on Tuesday, that Facebook puts “astronomical profits before people”.

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Huawei hopes US decision on Meng Wanzhou heralds new era in relations

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US justice department suspended fraud charges against chief financial officer of Chinese telecoms giant

The Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei hopes that the US justice department’s decision to abandon its efforts to extradite Meng Wanzhou may mark the starting point in a new era in relations between the company, China and the US government.

Meng, the firm’s chief financial officer and daughter of its founder, was freed last month after three years of house arrest in Canada following an agreement with the justice department to suspend fraud charges against her.

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Facebook explains error that caused global outage

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Engineers’ command accidentally disconnected company’s network from rest of world, blogpost says

Facebook has said an error during routine maintenance of its network of data centers caused a cascade of problems that took down its platforms for more than six hours on Monday.

In a blogpost published on Tuesday, Santosh Janardhan, vice-president of engineering, said the global outage that saw Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp go dark for billions of users had begun when the company’s engineers issued a command that unintentionally disconnected Facebook data centers from the rest of the world.

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Facebook outage highlights global over-reliance on its services

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Shutdown heavily impacts ability to communicate and do business for many of platform’s 2.8 billion users

From bereft Brazilians to relaxed Russians and internet-savvy Indians, Facebook’s outage highlighted the dependence much of the world has developed on its social media products, and put the spotlight on its global power.

The fallout of Facebook’s unprecedented almost six-hour outage has mostly focused on the financial impact to the $1tn social media empire: $50bn (£37bn) was wiped off the company’s market value by jittery investors, founder Mark Zuckerberg’s paper fortune shrunk by $7bn and more than $13m of the advertising dollars that are its lifeblood disappeared each hour the platform was offline.

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Tesla ordered to pay $137m to Black former employee for racial abuse

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California federal court orders company to pay Owen Diaz who alleges he faced ‘daily racial epithets’ including the ‘N-word’

Tesla has been ordered by a federal court in California to pay almost $137m in damages to a Black former employee who said he endured racial abuse while working at a factory in Fremont.

Owen Diaz, a former contracted elevator operator who worked at the plant between 2015 and 2016, alleged he was harassed and faced “daily racial epithets” including the “N-word”. He also said employees drew swastikas and left racist graffiti and drawings around the plant.

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Facebook whistleblower to take her story before the US Senate

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Frances Haugen, who came forward accusing the company of putting profit over safety, will testify in Washington on Tuesday

A former Facebook employee who has accused the company of putting profit over safety will take her damning accusations to Washington on Tuesday when she testifies to US senators.

Frances Haugen, 37, came forward on Sunday as the whistleblower behind a series of damaging reports in the Wall Street Journal that have heaped further political pressure on the tech giant. Haugen told the news program 60 Minutes that Facebook’s priority was making money over doing what was good for the public.

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Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp hit by outage

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Users in UK, US and other countries find services inaccessible as company apologises

Facebook’s network of services including Instagram and WhatsApp has been hit by an outage in several countries including UK and the US, as the company admitted users were having “trouble accessing our apps”.

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp became inaccessible for large numbers of people at around 5pm UK time, with the downdetector.com site reporting more than 120,000 outages for Facebook users.

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