Category Archives: Technology

Who is Parag Agrawal? The new Twitter CEO replacing Jack Dorsey

Posted on by

The relatively unknown chief technology officer faces a political minefield in one of Silicon Valley’s top jobs

Jack Dorsey has stepped down as CEO of Twitter and passed the baton to the relatively unknown executive Parag Agrawal.

Agrawal, who has been with the company for 10 years – most recently as chief technology officer – has emerged from behind the scenes to take over one of Silicon Valley’s highest-profile and politically volatile jobs. But who is he, and what can we expect for Twitter under his leadership?

Continue reading...

MI6 needs tech sector’s help to win AI race with China and Russia – spy chief

Posted on by

New boss Richard Moore to say adversaries are ‘pouring money’ into technology and the agency needs outside funding to keep up

MI6 will have to become “more open to stay secret” and work with tech companies to counter threats posed by China and Russia who seek to gain advantage by mastering artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies.

In his first speech as the foreign spy agency’s head on Tuesday, Richard Moore is expected to admit that “unlike Q in the Bond movies”, MI6 cannot develop the tools it needs in-house to counter hybrid physical and virtual threats.

Continue reading...

Jack Dorsey steps down as Twitter chief executive

Posted on by

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has stepped down from his executive role at the social media company.

Dorsey will be replaced by chief technology officer (CTO) Parag Agrawal, the company announced on Monday.

Continue reading...

14in MacBook Pro review: putting power back in Apple’s laptop

Posted on by

New M1 Pro and Max chips, larger screen, long battery life and more ports make for huge upgrade

Apple’s MacBook Pro has been given its biggest upgrade in power, ports and screen quality since 2016, ticking almost every box on the wishlist of eager Mac users.

But the new 14in and 16in models are no longer machines for the average consumer. Costing from £1,899 ($1,999 or A$2,999) they are workstation laptops for creative pros and developers and priced accordingly. They leave the excellent £999 M1 MacBook Air as Apple’s foremost consumer laptop.

Continue reading...

Britain and Israel to sign trade and defence deal

Posted on by

Pact covers Iran as well as cybersecurity, despite controversy over use of Israeli firm NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware in UK

Britain and Israel will sign a 10-year trade and defence pact in London on Monday, promising cooperation on issues such as cybersecurity and a joint commitment to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

The agreement was announced by Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, and her Israeli counterpart Yair Lapid, despite evidence that spyware made by Israeli company NSO Group had probably been used to spy on two British lawyers advising the ex-wife of the ruler of Dubai, Princess Haya.

Continue reading...

The 20 best gadgets of 2021

Posted on by

From smartphones to folding skis, the year’s top gizmos selected by tech experts from the Guardian, iNews, TechRadar and Wired

Cutting-edge tech is often super-expensive, difficult to use and less than slick. Not so for Samsung’s latest folding screen phones. The Z Fold 3 tablet-phone hybrid and Z Flip 3 flip-phone reinventions are smooth, slick and even water-resistant, packing big screens in compact bodies. The Fold might be super-expensive still, but the Flip 3 costs about the same as a regular top smartphone, but is far, far more interesting. Samuel Gibbs

Continue reading...

Controversial Pegasus spyware faces its day of reckoning | John Naughton

Posted on by

The infamous hacking tool is now at the centre of international lawsuits thanks to a courageous research lab

If you were compiling a list of the most toxic tech companies, Facebook – strangely – would not come out on top. First place belongs to NSO, an outfit of which most people have probably never heard. Wikipedia tells us that “NSO Group is an Israeli technology firm primarily known for its proprietary spyware Pegasus, which is capable of remote zero-click surveillance of smartphones”.

Pause for a moment on that phrase: “remote zero-click surveillance of smartphones”. Most smartphone users assume that the ability of a hacker to penetrate their device relies upon the user doing something careless or naive – clicking on a weblink, or opening an attachment. And in most cases they would be right in that assumption. But Pegasus can get in without the user doing anything untoward. And once in, it turns everything on the device into an open book for whoever deployed the malware.

Continue reading...

‘I’m happy to lose £10m by quitting Facebook,’ says Lush boss

Posted on by

Losing 10m followers on sites such as Instagram is a price worth paying for co-founder of ethical beauty empire

Quitting social media is hard to do, even when it doesn’t cost you anything. So when Lush’s chief executive, Mark Constantine, shut its thousands of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok accounts on Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year, he knew dropping off millions of customers’ screens would damage his business.

Its Facebook and Instagram accounts alone had 10.6 million followers and the void will result in an estimated £10m hit to sales but Constantine, one of the business’s co-founders, said it had “no choice” after whistleblowers called attention to the negative impact social media sites such as Instagram are having on teenagers’ mental health.

Continue reading...

‘Amoral 21st-century mercenaries’: problems mount for NSO Group

Posted on by

Israeli spyware firm goes from bad to worse as scathing Apple lawsuit follows US blacklisting

Shalev Hulio, the co-founder of Israel’s NSO Group, was in Washington DC on a mission to try to resuscitate the surveillance company’s battered reputation on Capitol Hill shortly before the news broke that he had probably arrived too late to make a difference.

With little advance warning to its allies in Israel, the Biden administration announced on 3 November that it was putting the spyware maker – one of the most sophisticated cyber-weapons companies in the world – on a US blacklist, citing use of the company’s software by regimes around the world for “transnational repression”.

Continue reading...

Battery power: five innovations for cleaner, greener electric vehicles

Posted on by

EVs are seen as key in transition to low-carbon economy, but as their human and environmental costs become clearer, can new tech help?

While the journey to a low-carbon economy is well under way, the best route to get there remains up for debate. But, amid the slew of “pathways” and “roadmaps”, one broad consensus exists: “clean” technology will play a vital role.

Nowhere is this truer than for transport. To cut vehicle emissions, an alternative to the combustion engine is required.

Continue reading...

Google to pay £183m in back taxes to Irish government

Posted on by

Firm’s subsidiary in Ireland agrees to backdated settlement to be paid in addition to corporation tax for 2020

Google’s Irish subsidiary has agreed to pay €218m (£183m) in back taxes to the Irish government, according to company filings.

The US tech company, which had been accused of avoiding hundreds of millions in tax across Europe through loopholes known as the “double Irish, Dutch sandwich”, said it had “agreed to the resolution of certain tax matters relating to prior years”.

Continue reading...

To fight global crime, Taiwan must be included in Interpol | Letters

Posted on by

Huang Chia-lu responds to the news that a Chinese official is seeking election to Interpol’s executive committee, and urges the international community to support Taiwan’s participation

You rightly point out the concerns of human rights activists and international politicians that China could misuse Interpol’s capabilities to track down overseas dissidents if Hu Binchen is elected as an executive committee member (Chinese official seeks Interpol role, sparking fears for dissidents, 15 November). One should also note that Taiwan is not included in Interpol, meaning there is a missing part in the global fight against international crime and cybercrime.

As cybercrime transcends borders, transnational cooperation is key to bringing international crime rings to justice. Taiwan’s police authorities have a hi-tech crime investigation unit and professional cybercrime investigators. Taiwan’s expertise will benefit global efforts to build a safer cyberspace.

Continue reading...

Can big tech ever be reined in?

Posted on by

The Biden administration has shown an early determination to tackle the power of Amazon, Google, Facebook and co. But is it already too late?

When historians look back on this period, one of the things that they will find remarkable is that for a quarter of a century, the governments of western democracies slept peacefully while some of the most powerful (and profitable) corporations in history emerged and grew, without let or hindrance, at exponential speeds.

They will wonder at how a small number of these organisations, which came to be called “tech giants” (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft), acquired, and began to wield, extraordinary powers. They logged and tracked everything we did online – every email, tweet, blog, photograph and social media post we sent, every “like” we registered, every website we visited, every Google search we made, every product we ordered online, every place we visited, which groups we belonged to and who our closest friends were.

Continue reading...

App outage locks hundreds of Tesla drivers out of cars

Posted on by

Dozen of motorists report error as company’s CEO, Elon Musk, apologises on Twitter

Hundreds of Tesla drivers were locked out of their cars at the start of the weekend after the manufacturer’s mobile app suffered an outage – and dozens voiced their complaints on social media.

Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, said on Friday that the company’s mobile application was coming back online after the app server outage. Musk was responding to a Tesla owner’s tweet, who said that he was experiencing a “500 server error” to connect his Model 3 through the iOS app in Seoul, South Korea.

Continue reading...

Dr Sarah Ogilvie: ‘Generation Z are savvy – but I don’t get all their memes’

Posted on by

The linguist and computer scientist discusses her optimistic assessment of a misunderstood generation – and delves into the nuanced ways to text ‘OK’

Dr Sarah Ogilvie is a linguist, lexicographer and computer scientist at Harris Manchester College, Oxford, who works at the intersection of technology and the humanities. With Roberta Katz, Jane Shaw and Linda Woodhead, she is the author of Gen Z, Explained: The Art of Living in a Digital Age, which paints an optimistic portrait of a much misunderstood generation that has never known a world without the internet.

Define Gen Zers.
They are people born from the mid-1990s to around 2010. They’re followed by Generation Alpha, who are aged 10 and under, though there’s a bit of an overlap.

Continue reading...

Is smart tech the new domestic battle ground?

Posted on by
Now that Alexa, Siri and Google have moved in, it’s only a matter of time before some of us are left out in the cold, says Emma Beddington

I came into the kitchen recently to find my husband cradling our electricity smart meter with the kind of tender attention more usually directed to a new-born, his phone clutched in his free hand. “You didn’t turn your office heater off last night,” he said. I didn’t like his tone.

“I did! I went in this morning to turn it on again!”

Continue reading...

Rio Tinto’s past casts a shadow over Serbia’s hopes of a lithium revolution

Posted on by

People in the Jadar valley fear environmental catastrophe as Europe presses for self-sufficiency in battery technology

Photographs by Vladimir Zivojinovic

A battery sign, flashing dangerously low, appears superimposed over a view of the globe as seen from space. “Green technologies, electric cars, clean air – all of these depend on one of the most significant lithium deposits in the world, which is located right here in Jadar, Serbia,” a gravel-voiced narrator announces. “We completely understand your concerns about the environment. Rio Tinto is carrying out detailed analyses, so as to make all of us sure that we develop the Jadar project in line with the highest environmental, security and health standards.”

Beamed into the country’s living rooms on the public service channel RTS, the slick television ad, shown just after the evening news, finishes with images of reassuring scientists and a comforted young couple walking into the sunset: “Rio Tinto: Together we have the chance to save the planet.”

Continue reading...

Can I give you a call bark? DogPhone lets pets ring their owners

Posted on by

When dog moves ball containing device it sends a signal to a laptop and launches a video call

Whether it is a silent stare or simply a rousing bark, dogs have found myriad ways to communicate with humans. Now researchers have created a hi-tech option for canines left home alone: a ball that allows them to call their owners on the old dog and bone.

The device – nicknamed the DogPhone – is a soft ball that, when moved, sends a signal to a laptop that launches a video call, and the sound of a ringing telephone.

Continue reading...

JPMorgan sues Tesla for $162m after Musk tweets soured share deal

Posted on by

Investment bank says it lost millions because of tweets by Elon Musk that he might take electric carmaker private

JPMorgan has sued Tesla for $162.2m, accusing Elon Musk’s electric car company of “flagrantly” breaching a 2014 contract relating to stock trading options that Tesla sold to the bank.

The options, or warrants, give the holder the right to buy a company’s stock at a set “strike” price and date. The suit, filed in a Manhattan federal court, centres on a dispute over how JPMorgan repriced its Tesla warrants as a result of Musk’s notorious 2018 tweet that he was considering taking the carmaker private.

Continue reading...

Israeli firm’s spyware linked to attacks on websites in UK and Middle East

Posted on by

Toronto-based researchers say new evidence suggests Candiru’s software used to target critics of autocratic regimes

Researchers have found new evidence that suggests spyware made by an Israeli company that was recently blacklisted in the US has been used to target critics of Saudi Arabia and other autocratic regimes, including some readers of a London-based news website.

A report by Toronto-based researchers at ESET, an internet security firm, found links between attacks against high-profile websites in the Middle East and UK, and the Israeli company Candiru, which has been called Israel’s “most mysterious cyberwarfare company”.

Continue reading...