Month: January 2023

In this week’s newsletter: Investors threw millions at a coin themed on the Netflix hit – that never appeared. Find out how in The Squid Scam. Plus: five of the best podcasts about celebrity scandals Don’t get Hear Here delivered to your inbox? Sign up for the full article here History Listen: RockAudible, episodes weeklySt …

Best podcasts of the week: Inside the rapid rise and fall of a ‘Squid Game’ crypto scam Read More »

Workers received no warning before the termination of their jobs in December, shortly after Elon Musk’s takeover of the company Laureta, a single mother and janitor for years at Twitter’s offices in New York City, would like Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest people and the new owner of the social media giant, to …

‘It’s a nightmare’: Twitter’s New York City janitors protest over sudden layoffs Read More »

So much is happening, both wonderful and terrible – and it matters how we tell it. We can’t erase the bad news, but to ignore the good is the route to indifference or despair Every crisis is in part a storytelling crisis. This is as true of climate chaos as anything else. We are hemmed …

Why we need new stories on climate | Rebecca Solnit Read More »

Fans say the use of an accurate physics engine to reimagine historic shipwrecks makes it ‘difficult to look away’ A shark swims slowly and serenely beneath the Bismarck seconds before it sinks deep into the ocean. Seemingly out of nowhere, the battleship tilts and falls; its bow crashes on to the seabed. Its hull floods …

‘Uh oh … boom!’: TikTok is in love with simulated shipwrecks Read More »

The tech billionaire has reportedly lost $182bn (£150bn) since November 2021, largely due to the drop in Tesla’s share price Elon Musk has broken the world record for the largest loss of personal fortune in history, according to a Guinness World Records report. The tech billionaire has lost approximately $182bn (£150bn) since November 2021, although …

Elon Musk breaks world record for largest loss of personal fortune in history Read More »

Media firm says personal data of UK staff members was accessed in ‘highly sophisticated’ cyber-attack last month The Guardian has confirmed it was hit by a ransomware attack in December and that the personal data of UK staff members has been accessed in the incident. The Guardian Media Group’s chief executive, Anna Bateson, and the …

Guardian confirms it was hit by ransomware attack Read More »

Princeton senior Edward Tian says GPTZero can root out text composed by the controversial AI bot, but users cite mixed results A 22-year-old college student has developed an app which he claims can detect whether text is written by ChatGPT, the explosive chatbot raising fears of plagiarism in academia. Edward Tian, a senior at Princeton …

College student claims app can detect essays written by chatbot ChatGPT Read More »

In this week’s newsletter: The boom years of smartphone gaming have given way to a naked cash-grab that rewards player-unfriendly design Don’t get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up here In the first half of the 2010s, when smartphones became ubiquitous, mobile gaming was exciting new terrain for both developers and players. Here …

Pushing Buttons: The true cost of ‘free’ mobile games Read More »

A perfect storm of wider cultural and economic forces have been pulling the video games industry apart. Is this the year it remakes itself? There are, littered throughout the history of video games, certain years of radical, fundamental change. We can look at the major crashes in the US games industry in 1977 and 1983, …

Playtime’s over: how 2023 could reshape video games Read More »

The story of how investigative journalists exposed the frightening abuse of software that can infect your phone When asked what superpower they would wish for, quite a lot of people choose invisibility. The desire to be able to spy unnoticed on others appeals to something in our nature: a wish for knowledge without retribution. The …

Pegasus by Laurent Richard review – spyware hiding in plain sight Read More »