Category Archives: Internet

Overconfident of spotting fake news? If so, you may be more likely to fall victim

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Study suggests people who are most sure of their ability to discern fact from fiction are less likely to do so

Are you a purveyor of fake news? People who are most confident about their ability to discern between fact and fiction are also the most likely to fall victim to misinformation, a US study suggests.

Although Americans believe the confusion caused by false news is all-pervasive, relatively few indicate having seen or shared it, something the researchers suggested shows that many may not only have a hard time identifying false news but are not aware of their own deficiencies at doing so.

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‘Silicon Six’ tech giants accused of inflating tax payments by almost $100bn

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Study claims firms paid $96bn less in tax between 2011 and 2020 than the notional figures cited in their annual reports

The giant US tech firms known as the “Silicon Six” have been accused of inflating their stated tax payments by almost $100bn (£70bn) over the past decade.

As Chancellor Rishi Sunak called on world leaders to back a new tech tax ahead of next week’s G7 summit in the UK, a report by the campaign group Fair Tax Foundation singled out Amazon, Facebook, Google’s owner, Alphabet, Netflix, Apple and Microsoft.

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Work is where your laptop is: meet the globetrotting digital nomads

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Worldwide shift to flexible and home working in pandemic has led to rise of new kind of backpacker

Samantha Scott does not miss her daily commutes in London, particularly “the dread of having to wake up and get on the tube, and heading into work sweaty and flustered. I’m still waking up at 6 or 7am, but I’m able to go for a walk on the beach before I start work.”

When she and her partner Chris Cerra arrive with their luggage in a new city, they can easily be mistaken for tourists. But they are part of a new generation of “digital nomads” who hop from country to country to live and work.

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Russian SolarWinds hackers launch email attack on government agencies

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Microsoft says group targeted more than 15o American and foreign organisations using USAid account

The state-backed Russian cyber spies behind the SolarWinds hacking campaign launched a targeted phishing assault on US and foreign government agencies and thinktanks this week using an email marketing account of the US Agency for International Development (USAid), Microsoft has said.

The effort targeted about 3,000 email accounts at more than 150 different organisations, at least a quarter of them involved in international development, humanitarian and human rights work, the Microsoft vice-president Tom Burt wrote in a blog post late on Thursday.

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New cryptocurrency Chia blamed for hard drive shortages

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Speculators buy up vital components as demand surges for rival to bitcoin that requires huge storage space

A new cryptocurrency is being blamed for shortages of hard drives and other storage systems, as speculatorsbuy up critical components in anticipation of a price rise.

Chia is the creation of Bram Cohen, the entrepreneur behind the BitTorrent file-sharing system. It aims to improve on more popular cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ethereum by removing the incentives to burn massive amounts of electricity.

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EU cites ‘anti-vaccine campaign’ as reason to toughen social media code

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European Commission proposes more factchecking and algorithm changes to tackle disinformation

A “massive anti-vaccination campaign” has been cited by the European Commission as a reason for social media platforms to intensify their factchecking and revise the internal algorithms that can amplify disinformation.

Under a revised code of practice proposed by Brussels, companies such as Facebook, Google and Twitter would need to show why particular material is disseminated and prove that false information is being blocked.

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Suspected Russia-led cyber campaign targets Germany’s Green party leader

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Annalena Baerbock faces social media onslaught after voicing opposition to Nord Stream 2 project

Fears are growing in Berlin of a Russian-led cyber campaign against the leader of Germany’s Green party after she pledged to block a gas pipeline project between Russia and Europe.

Annalena Baerbock, who is running to succeed Angela Merkel as chancellor in September’s election, has been targeted in recent days by an increasingly vicious campaign across social media.

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No shame: the podcast taking on the Arab world’s sex and gender taboos

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Eib is now in its seventh season, fearlessly tackling subjects from Beirut’s drag queen scene to Jordanian widows’ rights

Rude, fault or blemish; flaw, disgrace or shame. The word has many shades, but nearly every woman who grows up in Arabic-speaking households knows its singular weight. “Anything related to women is eib,” says Tala El-Issa, from her home in Cairo. “If they want to talk about their bodies, it’s eib, their problems – eib. Just being a woman is almost eib.”

When the team at Sowt, an Arabic podcasting network based across the Middle East, wanted to create a show that charged fearlessly into the region’s taboos around sex and gender, the title was obvious. “Eib” is now in its seventh season, the company’s longest-lasting podcast and its most popular.

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Cyber-attack forces shutdown of one of the US’s largest pipelines

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Colonial Pipeline said it shut down 5,500 miles of pipeline, which carries 45% of the east coast’s fuel supplies

One of the largest pipelines in the US has been shut down after an apparent cyber-attack, its operator has said.

Colonial Pipeline said it had shut down its 5,500 miles of pipeline, which carries 45% of the east coast’s fuel supplies and travels through 14 southern and eastern US states, after the breach of its computer networks.

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Ransomware hackers steal plans for upcoming Apple products

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Group behind REvil ransomware claims stolen files include plans for two laptops and a new Apple Watch

Apple is facing a ransomware demand after a group of cybercriminals stole confidential plans for the company’s upcoming products from a supplier.

The “Sodin” group, which makes and runs a piece of ransomware called REvil, says it stole the plans from Quanta Computer, a Taiwanese company that assembles a number of Apple laptops.

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‘I blamed myself’: how stigma stops Arab women reporting online abuse

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Women in the Middle East and north Africa say social codes leave them unable to talk about social media abuse as pandemic pushes sexual harassment off the streets

The first pornographic picture sent shivers of shock through Amal as she stared in horror at the phone screen. Until now, she had responded politely to the older man who had been messaging her on Facebook, hoping to deter his questions about her life with curt, one-word replies.

More lurid pictures followed, some from pornographic magazines, others of the man himself in sexual poses. “I started to blame myself and feel that I invited this because I had replied to him,” says the 21-year-old, who is a university student in Amman, Jordan.

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‘Can babies see ghosts?’ The best of Yahoo Answers

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After 16 years, one of the internet’s first – and most surreal – Q&A platforms is to be shut down

Before Reddit’s Am I the Asshole? forum for the “frustrated moral philosopher”, or days-long Twitter debates about whether you wash your legs in the shower, there was Yahoo Answers: one of the first online crowdsourcing resources, now a repository of infamously idiosyncratic wisdom.

Established in 2005, the “knowledge-sharing” platform was where you might turn for help with a head-scratcher such as “How do I get black ink from a Biro out of coloured clothes?”, “What documents do you need to enter China?” or “Any ladies want to show me their boobs?”.

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Alibaba shares jump after record $2.8bn anti-monopoly fine

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E-commerce firm feels penalty by Chinese regulators means focus on company is at an end

Shares in Alibaba surged on Monday after the e-commerce company said that a record $2.8bn fine handed down by Chinese regulators marked the end of an investigation into anti-competitive practices at the company.

Top executives at the company, founded by the billionaire Jack Ma, told investors that while Chinese regulators continued a wider investigation into the sprawling conglomerates in the country’s tech industry, they believed the multibillion dollar fine announced at the weekend marked the end of the focus on Alibaba. The company is listed in Hong Kong and its shares climbed as much as 9% on the management’s comments.

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Covid listener surge sees podcast firm’s results perking up

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Shares and revenues at UK-based Audioboom are soaring despite stiff competition from the world’s digital giants

A year ago, podcast producer Audioboom was facing an uncertain future as management sought, ultimately unsuccessfully, to find a buyer to inject cash to expand the business. When the company gives its latest financial update this week, it will be telling a very different story: in the past 12 months its market value has more than tripled and a maiden profit is looming as Audioboom joins the ranks of the pandemic winners.

Digital entertainment services from Netflix to Spotify have been supercharged by lockdown viewing and listening, and Audioboom has been no exception. It now draws 25 million listeners a month with content from partners ranging from Formula One to the former Bake Off presenter Sue Perkins.

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A room with a view: the Twitter account that spent a year staring into people’s homes

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As the pandemic forced us inside and online, Room Rater was one Twitter account giving doomscrollers a well-needed levity break. A year on, co-founder Claude Taylor explains how he plans to keep going

With its stately lamp and verdant window view, Hillary Clinton’s “Zoom room” is nicer than most. So when Room Rater – a Twitter account which scores the video conference backgrounds of high-profile figures – gave it nine out of 10 last spring, Clinton took her disappointment to social media: “I’ll keep striving for that highest, hardest glass ceiling, the elusive 10/10,” she tweeted at the account.

Judging the backgrounds on video calls has been the armchair sport of the past year. Room Rater just happened to screengrab these moments. As we doomscrolled through bleak statistics online, it was cheering to see shots of Meryl Streep’s sterile shelves or the copies of Fahrenheit 451 and The Twits propped up behind Boris Johnson at a school in Leicestershire. Scrolling through the posts a year after it launched, these images have become emblematic of just how quickly coronavirus forced all of us inside and online.

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Hypnotic loops and self-soothing sounds: the rise of #OddlySatisfying and visual ASMR

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As a subreddit devoted to strangely satisfying video clips grows into a behemoth, a new wave of digital artists are manufacturing their own

The subreddit r/oddlysatisfying has always had a wholesome mission: it collects small moments of magic in the world – “those little things that are inexplicably satisfying”.

It began in 2013, when people started sharing gifs of high-pressure hoses and industrial pasta cutters on Reddit. Eight years later, it has grown into an entire subsection of the internet: r/oddlysatisfying has 5.6 million members, and there’s a multi-platform “media network” of the same name. It curates content for a combined 3.44 million followers across YouTube and TikTok. Videos with the hashtag #oddlysatisfying have clocked up 25.9bn views on TikTok alone.

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US military account’s gibberish tweet prompts viral mystery

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People joked it could be nuclear code but real explanation is every social media manager’s nightmare

The perils of working from home while managing the social media account of a major military power have been thrown into sharp relief after the US Strategic Command tweeted a confusing string of gibberish.

Thirteen mysterious characters long, the tweet – “;l;;gmlxzssaw” – prompted some on social media to jokingly suggest it was confidential information, for example a password or a nuclear launch code, that had accidentally been leaked.

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Looking up health symptoms online less harmful than thought, study says

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Results show increase in self-diagnosis accuracy after participants searched for advice online

That throbbing headache just won’t go away and your mind is racing about what may be wrong. But Googling your symptoms may not be as ill-advised as previously thought.

Although some doctors often advise against turning to the internet before making the trudge up to the clinic, a new study suggests that using online resources to research symptoms may not be harmful after all – and could even lead to modest improvements in diagnosis.

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Besieged MP Andrew Laming says his behaviour has been ‘reinvented into harassment’

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Queensland Liberal defends ‘completely dignified’ photo of woman bending over but apologises for ‘feelings I’ve caused’

Under-seige Morrison government MP Andrew Laming says his online behaviour has been “re-invented into harassment” and that the “facts are on my side”, claiming he only ever asked “hard questions” but apologised “for how it’s made people feel”.

The Queensland MP, who asked for privacy as he takes a month’s paid leave as he undertakes “clinical counselling”, and courses in “empathy and appropriate communication”, has explained his side of the story in a 16-minute interview with his local radio station. Laming has said he will not stand at the next election, but said he had no plans to leave the parliament until his term was completed.

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