Month: August 2021

• Elizabeth Holmes plans to accuse Ramesh ‘Sunny’ Balwani • Blood-testing startup allegedly misled investors and patients The disgraced founder of the blood-testing startup Theranos plans to blame emotional and sexual abuse by her former boyfriend, also a senior executive at the company, at her federal fraud trial beginning next week, according to legal papers …

Disgraced Theranos founder will blame ‘abusive’ ex-boyfriend in fraud trial Read More »

Japan’s Aramitsu Kitazono was left with cuts and bruises after being hit by the e-Palette vehicle at the athletes’ village Toyota has apologised for the “overconfidence” of a self-driving bus after it ran over a Paralympic judoka in the athletes’ village and said it would temporarily suspend the service. The Japanese athlete, Aramitsu Kitazono, will …

Toyota pauses Paralympics self-driving buses after one hits visually impaired athlete Read More »

No apps can summon couriers in minutes, readers and riders tell of more unusual pandemic orders Most online deliveries do not come with a health warning from the delivery driver but David Smith received one from a relieved courier who, on handing over Smith’s buzzing box, suggested the bees inside were “a bit angry”. Rather …

From a villa of bees to a £7 onion: online deliveries take a strange turn Read More »

Investigation into US tech firm’s proposed acquisition of British chip designer expected The US multinational technology company Nvidia has said it will answer “any concerns” raised by the European Commission as regulators appeared set to launch an investigation into the firm’s proposed $54bn (£39bn) purchase of the British chip designer Arm. The world’s leading maker …

Nvidia vows to counter any EU concerns over $54bn Arm takeover Read More »

Benyamin Ahmed’s Weird Whales sell in cryptocurrency and ownership is stored on blockchain A 12-year-old boy had made about £290,000 after creating digital pictures of whales and selling tokens of their ownership which are stored on blockchain. Benyamin Ahmed’s collection of pixelated artworks called Weird Whales went viral during the school holidays. His success may …

Boy, 12, makes £290,00 in non-fungible tokens with digital whale art Read More »

As OnlyFans ended the peen panic, Twitter was united by petty grievances. Think of the level of civilisation we have reached Thanks to the continued commitment of 2021 seemingly to give me simultaneous infarctions in every organ, the week opened with the news that Ian “Beefy” Botham is to become the new trade envoy for …

Digested week: #binspace is the kind of Britain I want to live in | Lucy Mangan Read More »

Uber, Lyft and other companies fighting Massachusetts lawsuit that would grant workers status as employees Felipe Martinez began working full-time as an Uber driver in the Boston, Massachusetts, area in late 2017. He enjoyed the flexibility, being able to work nights while spending days with his children and focusing on his family, but then Uber …

‘I don’t like being treated like crap’: gig workers aim to retool a system they say is rigged Read More »

The acclaimed Dropout podcast returns to chronicle legal proceedings against the Theranos founder. Plus: good cops go bad in a new series with shades of The Wire The Dropout (available from 31 August)The polo neck wearing, deep voice-imitating, Stanford dropout turned entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes – who fell from grace when her billion-dollar blood-testing company was …

Elizabeth Holmes stands trial – podcasts of the week Read More »

Preliminary lawsuit settlement allows developers to circumvent the tech giant’s lucrative commission system Apple has conceded ground in the battle over app payments, agreeing to allow app developers to email users about alternative ways to pay other than the in-app payment system where the tech giant takes a cut of every purchase. The concession announced …

Apple agrees to App Store changes letting developers email users about payment options Read More »

First chickens, and now a worldwide shortage of microprocessors … the word ‘chip’ is the latest word to gain an Armageddon flavour As if there weren’t enough disasters happening simultaneously, people are now speaking of the present “chipageddon”: the worldwide shortage of microprocessors that is affecting supplies of everything from toasters and games consoles to …

‘Chipageddon’: how a global tech crisis came to sound quite tasty Read More »