Month: December 2021

In the early 2000s, the Discworld author frequented a forum dedicated to the Thief series of stealth games. His posts provide a fascinating insight into his fondness for gaming In November 2001, Terry Pratchett was in Chester, famed for its Roman ruins and well-preserved medieval architecture. Staying at a hotel in the city centre, Pratchett …

‘Help! I’ve been spotted!’ Terry Pratchett on Thief, his favourite video game Read More »

A grocery revolution is underway, with individual items available at your door in next to no time. What does it mean for supermarkets, our wallets, working conditions and the planet? In a warehouse by Farringdon station, in central London, I am watching people burn through millions of pounds of investment in real time. Great big …

Beware the emergency avocado: what does ultrafast delivery really cost us? Read More »

Case follows earlier legal victory over energy efficiency stickers on vacuum cleaners that firm said misled buyers Dyson, the vacuum cleaner firm, has said it will appeal against a ruling by an EU court that it is not entitled to £150m in damages over flawed energy efficiency regulation. Sir James Dyson, the company’s billionaire owner, …

Dyson says it will appeal after £150m damages claim rejected by EU court Read More »

Critics suggest the multibillionaire is annoyed that Tesla’s nonunion-made cars wouldn’t qualify for the subsidy Elon Musk criticized new incentives and infrastructure for electric vehicles in a huge spending bill backed by Joe Biden, saying he would “delete” the measures and even ditch the entire legislation if he had the power. Musk, the multibillionaire founder …

Elon Musk slams Biden’s Build Back Better bill and its electric car incentives Read More »

Annual list reveals most searched-for terms globally related to sports, investing, Covid and skinny jeans Squid Game, Bernie Sanders’ mittens and how to wear skinny jeans, were among the most searched for subjects on Google around the world this year, and in the UK the Euros dominated web queries. The annual search trends list released …

Google’s 2021 search list: Bernie Sanders ‘mittens’ and Squid Game top the trends Read More »

PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, PC; Heart Machine/ Annapurna InteractiveThis unquestionably beautiful game about saving a planet from an encroaching black hole boldly goes where few have remained awake Life is about the journey, not the destination, the saying goes, and the speed-obsessed Solar Ash is built on that principle. Kitting the player out with invisible …

Solar Ash review – ambitious sci-fi adventure leads to a boring new world Read More »

Ahead of hearing, platform said it will be stricter about the type of content it recommends to teens The head of Instagram will testify before US lawmakers on Wednesday about protecting kids online, in the latest congressional hearing scrutinizing the social media platform’s impact on young users. Instagram and its parent company, Meta Platforms (formerly …

Instagram chief to testify as Congress scrutinizes platform’s impact on kids Read More »

Up for discussion in this week’s newsletter: a mix of state support and entrepreneurial zeal means China is poised to win the next tech revolution – just as a former Google exec predicted Don’t get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up here China had its sputnik moment in March 2016. That month an artificial …

TechScape: how China became an AI superpower ready to take on the United States Read More »

The policy meant to tackle doxxing on the platform has left many anti-fascist activists locked out of their accounts How could a policy intended to protect against doxxing and harassment go so wrong, so quickly? Last week, Twitter announced it would start penalizing users who tweet “private media”, or images of other users shared without …

‘So vague, it invites abuse’: how Twitter’s new privacy policy helps the far right Read More »

Users in North America and Europe report patchy service after cloud computing goes down Several Amazon services – including its website, Prime Video and applications that use Amazon Web Services (AWS) – went down for thousands of users on Tuesday. Amazon said the outage was probably due to problems related to application programming interface (API), …

Amazon Web Services outage hits sites and apps such as IMDb and Tinder Read More »