Month: April 2021

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

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 …

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Google Nest Hub (2nd gen) review: wearable-free sleep tracking smart display

Radar-based gesture and sleep tracking turns top smart assistant into a great alarm clock too Google’s second-generation Nest Hub smart display now comes with radar-based sleep tracking as it attempts to keep Amazon’s Alexa at bay. The new Nest Hub costs £89.99 on launch, which makes it cheaper than its predecessor and slightly undercuts competitors …

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Outriders review – fountains of gore and hilarious carnage

PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC; People Can FlyCapturing exactly what makes the genre tick, this is perhaps the best looter-shooter game since Borderlands The first proper gun you pick up in Outriders, the latest looter-shooter where you run around sci-fi warzones blasting everything that moves, detonates enemies’ bones. While perhaps …

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How US Capitol attack surveillance methods could be used against protesters

The FBI has relied on a variety of technologies to track down rioters – and watchdogs are concerned those technologies could impede protesters exercising their first amendment rights Over the past months, federal law enforcement has used a wide variety of surveillance technologies to track down rioters who participated in the 6 January attack on …

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From the archives: Why Silicon Valley billionaires are prepping for the apocalypse in New Zealand – podcast

We are raiding the Audio Long Reads archives and bringing you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors. This week, from 2018: How an extreme libertarian tract predicting the collapse of liberal democracies – written by Jacob Rees-Mogg’s father – inspired the likes of Peter Thiel to buy up property …

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China’s vast bitcoin mining empire risks derailing its climate targets, says study

China powers nearly 80% of the global cryptocurrencies trade, but the energy required could jeopardise its pledge to peak carbon emissions by 2030 China’s electricity-hungry bitcoin mines that power nearly 80% of the global trade in cryptocurrencies risk undercutting the country’s climate goals, a study in the journal Nature has said. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies …

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Facebook says a breach that hit 533m is old news. Experts disagree

Regardless of when it was leaked, user data ‘is never really old’ – it’s still valuable to cybercriminals, analysts say After information from 533 million Facebook users was exposed to hackers, the company has tried to reassure users, saying that the data was leaked years ago and has since been secured. But experts say the …

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Guns and lies in America: decoding an unlikely gun violence success story

Why the Guardian US is launching a major project on the dramatic drop in gun homicides in the Bay Area Guns and Lies started in 2019 as a year-long project investigating what worked to reduce the daily toll of gun violence in California’s Bay Area, a region that had defied expectations and seen a dramatic …

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