Mini model trounces competition with great camera and performance, but isn’t the best iPhone for the year
The iPhone 13 mini takes what’s great about the full-size iPhone 13 and squeezes it into a body not much larger than the iPhone 5S without cutting back on features or power.
The smallest of Apple’s 2021 lineup costs £679 ($699/A$1,199), sitting above the £389 iPhone SE and below the £779 iPhone 13.
Continue reading...LightBasin hackers were able to obtain subscriber information and call metadata, says CrowdStrike
At least 13 phone companies around the world have been compromised since 2019 by sophisticated hackers who are believed to come from China, a cybersecurity expert group has said.
The roaming hackers – known as LightBasin – were able to “search and find” individual mobile phones and “target accordingly”, according to CrowdStrike, a group regularly cited by western intelligence.
Continue reading...Disarmament ambassador casts doubt on ability to defend against technology after reports of test
The United States is “very concerned” about China’s development of hypersonic technology, the US disarmament ambassador, Robert Wood, has said, after reports that Beijing had recently launched a hypersonic missile with a nuclear capacity.
“We are very concerned by what China has been doing on the hypersonic front,” Robert Wood told reporters in Geneva.
Continue reading...Social network says it wants to ensure virtual world is built responsibly
Facebook is creating 10,000 jobs in the EU as part of its push to build a virtual world for its users.
The company has trumpeted the “metaverse” as the next big phase of growth for large tech companies and recently announced a $50m (£36m) investment programme to ensure that this metaworld is built “responsibly”.
Continue reading...Beanless brews can cut deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions dramatically – but what will happen to workers in traditional coffee-growing regions?
Heiko Rischer isn’t quite sure how to describe the taste of lab-grown coffee. This summer he sampled one of the first batches in the world produced from cell cultures rather than coffee beans.
“To describe it is difficult but, for me, it was in between a coffee and a black tea,” said Rischer, head of plant biotechnology at the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, which developed the coffee. “It depends really on the roasting grade, and this was a bit of a lighter roast, so it had a little bit more of a tea-like sensation.”
Continue reading...Dutch team designed and built two-person van with kitchen, bed, shower, loo and range of up to 450 miles a day
A team of students from the Netherlands are due to complete an 1,800-mile (3,000km) road trip across western Europe in a solar-powered camper van that they designed and built themselves.
The Stella Vita is designed for two passengers and has a kitchen, sitting area, bed, shower and toilet. Using solar energy alone, the vehicle can cover up to 450 miles on a sunny day, reaching a top speed of 75mph, as well as powering all the inside amenities, a TV and a laptop.
Continue reading...Security experts say technology on iPhones could open door to mass surveillance and be misused
Technology like that proposed by Apple to search iPhones for child sexual abuse images would open the door to mass surveillance and be vulnerable to exploitation, world-leading security and cryptography experts have said.
Client-side scanning (CSS) gives access to data on users’ devices, including stored data, which “brings surveillance to a new level”, according to analysis from academics at Harvard Kennedy school, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Cambridge, among others.
Continue reading...Company cites ‘challenging operating environment’ in announcing site will be replaced with jobs app without social networking features
Microsoft says it will shut down LinkedIn in China, citing a “challenging operating environment” as Beijing tightens control over tech firms.
The US-based company will replace the career-oriented social network in China with an application dedicated to applying for jobs but without the networking features, according to the senior vice-president of engineering, Mohak Shroff.
Continue reading...Exclusive: UK institution was in line for huge donation but has paused talks due to concerns Gulf state used hacking software
The University of Cambridge has broken off talks with the United Arab Emirates over a record £400m collaboration after claims about the Gulf state’s use of controversial Pegasus hacking software, the university’s vice-chancellor has said.
The proposed deal, hailed by the university in July as a “potential strategic partnership … helping to solve some of the greatest challenges facing our planet” – would have included the largest donation of its kind in the university’s history, spanning a decade and involving direct investment from the UAE of more than £310m.
Continue reading...After election humiliation and Brexit, the former UK deputy prime minister swapped Westminster for a £2.7m job in Silicon Valley. The catch? Serving as the public face of the crisis-hit company
On Sunday, Nick Clegg did a succession of interviews with some of the US’s biggest TV news shows. In his role as Facebook’s vice-president for global affairs and communications, he was defending his company after weeks of headlines about its latest crisis – this time involving Frances Haugen, a Facebook staffer turned whistleblower who had testified days earlier before a committee of the US Senate. The story centred on a stash of company documents that Haugen had given to the Wall Street Journal. The central allegation, which Facebook vehemently denies, was that the company had ignored its own research into the harms caused by some of its products in favour of the pursuit of “astronomical profits”.
Anyone au fait with the five grim years Clegg spent as the UK’s deputy prime minister would have had the familiar impression of someone emphasising his good intentions in almost impossible circumstances. His facial expression regularly expressed a sort of righteous exasperation; his words seemed to imply that if only his critics could grasp the facts, everything would quickly die down. Like any well-briefed politician, he emphasised a handful of statistics: the 40,000 content moderators Facebook employs, the $13bn (£9.5bn) it says it has spent cracking down on misinformation and hate speech; the company’s claim that the latter accounts for only five of every 10,000 Facebook posts.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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”.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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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