Duke of Sussex says issue needs to be tackled by policies including investment in local journalism
Prince Harry has described online misinformation as a “global humanitarian issue” that needs to be tackled by policies including investment in local journalism and cracking down on super-spreaders of false content.
The Duke of Sussex contributed to a report by a US thinktank into disinformation, which made 15 recommendations after a six-month study.
Continue reading...Russia fired missile at its own satellite, generating debris that US says ‘threatens interests of all nations’
The US has accused Russia of “dangerous and irresponsible behavior” after it conducted an anti-satellite weapons test that forced astronauts on the International Space Station to prepare for evacuation.
Russia fired a missile at one of its own satellites over the weekend, generating more than 1,500 pieces of trackable orbital debris and hundreds of pieces of smaller debris, which the US said “now threaten the interests of all nations”.
Continue reading...Top-priced, big screen, two-day battery life and cracking cameras – but just too heavy to beat the best
Apple’s latest super-sized smartphone is a beast in all directions, but is bigger really better?
The iPhone 13 Pro Max is Apple’s most expensive smartphone, starting at £1,049 ($1,099/A$1,849) – at least £100 more than other models. With the same chips, software, design and camera as the regular sized 13 Pro, size is the key differentiator.
Screen: 6.7in Super Retina XDR with ProMotion (120Hz OLED) (458ppi)
Processor: Apple A15 Bionic
RAM: 6GB
Storage: 128, 256, 512GB or 1TB
Operating system: iOS 15.1
Camera: Triple 12MP rear cameras with OIS, 12MP front-facing camera
Connectivity: 5G, wifi 6, NFC, Bluetooth 5, Lightning, ultra wideband and GNSS
Water resistance: IP68 (6 metres for 30 mins)
Dimensions: 160.8 x 78.1 x 7.7mm
Weight: 240g
Continue reading...In the future, will we find a better way to live, or will our homes be taken over by surveillance and despotic appliances?
Imagine, if you can, a small, bluish room. Wires, screens, sensors. A few keepsakes from the old world. The room’s fleshy inhabitant, confined indoors by a zoonotic pandemic, greenwashes a data-mining company from her bed. The government has made it illegal for her to step outside.
There is a communal kitchen down the corridor, which she shares with a few strangers she met online, but mostly she orders her meals via an interface and eats them here. Microphones record her interactions. A motion sensor on her wrist reminds her to optimise her performance. Filled with saudade for the dying world outside, she has bought a few rainforest plants to brighten the space. Her pocket surveillance device reminds her to water them. She catches the news: the world’s richest man has just left the Earth’s atmosphere.
Continue reading...The singing sensation belting out big numbers in the veg aisle, Britney’s Oops! redone as vintage jazz, how to flirt if you’re a woman in a musical … our critic takes her seat for theatre on TikTok
Theatre TikTok threw out a lifeline for actors during lockdown with musical spin-offs and plenty of theatrical silliness that has gathered momentum since. Sam Williams’s double-act with his grandma Judi Dench kept us laughing through the pandemic as he tried to tell her jokes and she foiled his punchlines. The duo seem to have retired but the videos are still up and enormously entertaining.
The best of thespian TikTok superstars combine fabulous voices with clever comic skits: Katiejoyofosho features highly among them, composing her own parody musicals including a Broadway show in one video “after Amazon buys its own theatre” which contains regular adverts and a branded backdrop among the rousing musical solos, and another called How to Flirt if You’re a Woman in a Musical. Meanwhile, Dales_drama is an 18-year-old “musical theatre kid” who performs a mix of kooky cosplay (Peter Pettigrew from Harry Potter pops up repeatedly) and gloriously sung duets such as George Salazar’s Michael in the Bathroom (from her own bathroom) and sometimes strums along on the ukulele.
Continue reading...Small updates keep Apple at top of smartwatch market, even if it’s not worth upgrading from recent models
The Apple Watch gets a bigger, better screen, faster charging and a small price cut for 2021, which is enough to keep it at the top of the smartwatch market.
The Series 7 version costs from £369 ($399/A$599) and, despite being £10 cheaper than last year’s Series 6, is Apple’s most expensive smartwatch, above the Watch SE costing from £249 ($279/A$429). It requires an iPhone 6S or newer and does not work with Android.
Continue reading...From tap stars duetting with Gene Kelly to Gordon Ramsay twisting with his daughter, TikTok is where performers – large, small, amateur, pro – drop the facade and dance till their toes are raw
TikTok is made for dance. The most popular TikToker – Charli D’Amelio, 17, with 9.9bn likes – is a dancer, or started out as one. And it is the platform that’s launched or spread a thousand dance trends, from the #toosieslide to the #TheGitUpChallenge, via the Floss, the Dougie and the Milly Rock.
Unlike the slick pros of Instagram, or the archive performances on YouTube, TikTok is just about the pure joy of dancing, whoever you are. Size, shape, experience and natural grace are immaterial. It’s essentially the school playground writ very large, the silly routines and memes that used to get passed around, with everyone miming the lyrics to whatever was on Top of the Pops last night.
Continue reading...Other cryptocurrencies such as ethereum also reach records as investors hedge against inflation
The bitcoin price has reached a new record high, breaking through $68,000 (£50,000), and analysts predict that the world’s best-known cryptocurrency will rise further in the coming weeks.
This beats the previous record high set in late October, when bitcoin reached nearly $67,700 before falling back again when investors discovered a new cryptocurrency, shiba inu. Other cryptocurrencies have also risen to record highs, such as ethereum, which soared to $4,837.
Continue reading...Analysis: while identity of hackers is not known in this case, Palestinians have long been spied on by Israeli military
The disclosure that Palestinian human rights defenders were reportedly hacked using NSO’s Pegasus spyware will come as little surprise to two groups of people: Palestinians themselves and the Israeli military and intelligence cyber operatives who have long spied on Palestinians.
While it is not known who was responsible for the hacking in this instance, what is very well documented is the role of the Israeli military’s 8200 cyberwarfare unit – known in Hebrew as the Yehida Shmoneh-Matayim – in the widespread spying on Palestinian society.
Continue reading...World’s wealthiest person says proposed billionaires tax led to poll, the result of which sent price falling
Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and world’s richest person, asked his 62.8 million Twitter followers over the weekend whether he should sell $21bn (£15.5bn) worth of shares in the electric car company in order to pay tax. Tweeting he would “abide by the results of this poll, whichever way it goes”, 58% of those who responded said “yes”, he should sell the shares, sending Tesla’s share price down 5% in pre-market trading on Monday.
Why did he do it?
Musk, who is sitting on a paper fortune of more than $338bn in Tesla and Space-X shares, proposed selling 10% of his Tesla shares in order to generate enough money to pay a proposed “billionaires tax” on “unrealised capital gains”.
Investigation finds rights activists working for groups accused by Israel of being terrorist were previously targeted by NSO spyware
The mobile phones of six Palestinian human rights defenders who work for organisations that were recently – and controversially – accused by Israel of being terrorist groups were previously hacked by sophisticated spyware made by NSO Group, according to a report.
An investigation by Front Line Defenders (FLD), a Dublin-based human rights group, found that the mobile phones of Salah Hammouri, a Palestinian rights defender and lawyer whose Jerusalem residency status has been revoked, and five others were hacked using Pegasus, NSO’s signature spyware. In one case, the hacking was found to have occurred as far back as July 2020.
Continue reading...After Elon Musk asked his Twitter followers to vote on whether he should sell 10% of his Tesla stock, the architect of the proposed billionaires tax that prompted the move dismissed the tweet as a stunt.
“Whether or not the world’s wealthiest man pays any taxes at all shouldn’t depend on the results of a Twitter poll,” said Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and chair of the Senate finance committee. “It’s time for the billionaires income tax.”
Continue reading...Misleading images shared on social media after mosques vandalised and homes ransacked in Tripura state
Police in India are seeking the owners of about 100 social media accounts accused of sharing “fake news” after mob attacks on mosques in the north-east of the country.
Last month’s violence in Tripura state erupted on the sidelines of a rally for hundreds of followers of a rightwing Hindu nationalist group. The incident appeared to be a revenge attack prompted by the killing of several Hindu worshippers across the border in Muslim-majority Bangladesh.
Continue reading...Tech companies are seeking to analyse data on the way we tap, scroll, text and call to monitor our mental health – with potential consequences for privacy and healthcare
We all fear our smartphones spy on us, and I’m subject to a new type of surveillance. An app called TapCounter records each time I touch my phone’s screen. My swipes and jabs are averaging about 1,000 a day, though I notice that’s falling as I steer shy of social media to meet my deadline. The European company behind it, QuantActions, promises that through capturing and analysing the data it will be able to “detect important indicators related to mental/neurological health”.
Arko Ghosh is the company’s cofounder and a neuroscientist at Leiden University in the Netherlands. “Tappigraphy patterns” – the time series of my touches – can, he says, confidently be used not only to infer slumber habits (tapping in the wee hours means you are not sleeping) but also mental performance level (the small intervals in a series of key-presses represent a proxy for reaction time), and he has published work to support it.
Continue reading...Elon Musk on Saturday asked his 62.5 million followers on Twitter if he should sell 10% of his Tesla stock.
“Much is made lately of unrealized gains being a means of tax avoidance, so I propose selling 10% of my Tesla stock,” Musk wrote in a tweet referring to a “billionaires’ tax” proposed by Democrats in the US Senate.
Continue reading...The promise of neurotechnology to make lives better is growing. But do we need a new set of rights to protect the integrity of our minds?
“The skull acts as a bastion of privacy; the brain is the last private part of ourselves,” Australian neurosurgeon Tom Oxley says from New York.
Oxley is the CEO of Synchron, a neurotechnology company born in Melbourne that has successfully trialled hi-tech brain implants that allow people to send emails and texts purely by thought.
Continue reading...Digital art is a billion-dollar business, with everyone from Paris Hilton to Damien Hirst trading in ‘non-fungible tokens’. But are NFTs just a get-rich-quick scheme masquerading as culture?
“It’s actually a lot simpler than you think.” It’s a Tuesday afternoon, and somewhat to my surprise, I’m on the phone to Paris Hilton, who is graciously explaining the world of NFTs.
Hilton is many things – a reality star, an heiress, an unlikely lockdown fitness guru who uses designer handbags instead of weights. But until now, she has never been considered a significant player in the art world. When artists have acknowledged her, often they’ve done so to fetishise her image. In 2008, Damien Hirst bought a portrait of her by the artist Jonathan Yeo, in which her body is constructed from collaged images cut from porn magazines.
Continue reading...Analysis: The question now is what effect the US move will have on Israel and on foreign governments who use NSO’s spyware
The US commerce department’s blacklist is usually reserved for America’s worst enemies, such as Chinese companies that have been accused of aiding human right abuses, and Russians who proliferate biological and chemical weapons programmes.
But on Wednesday, Israel’s NSO Group joined their ranks, marking a rare decision by the Biden administration to include a major technology company that is closely regulated by the Israeli government on its list of entities that threaten US national security.
Continue reading...Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook, also calls misuse of user data as unethical as child labour
A former adviser to Mark Zuckerberg has said democracy “may never recover” if Facebook does not change and has called for misuse of users’ data to be labelled as unethical as child labour.
Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook who has become a staunch critic of the business, said revelations from whistleblower Frances Haugen have created an opportunity for change at Zuckerberg’s social media empire.
Continue reading...The social media giant is putting a stop to its technology that identifies people in photos. We look at what prompted the move and what it means for users
Facebook has announced it is deleting about 1bn “faceprints” it used as part of a facial recognition system for photo tagging, citing concerns with the technology.
Meta, the company formally known as Facebook, announced on Tuesday it would end its use of facial recognition technology in the coming weeks. A third of Facebook’s users, or about 1 billion people, had opted into the service, Meta’s vice-president of artificial intelligence Jerome Pesenti said.
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