Month: September 2023

Long battery life, great sound and solid noise-cancelling make for a good buy – but Sony can’t beat Bose Sony’s latest top-end Bluetooth earbuds are smaller, lighter and more comfortable, promising class-leading noise cancelling and quality sound – but that is no longer enough to stand out from the crowd. The WF-1000XM5 cost £259 ($299.99/A$419) …

Sony WF-1000XM5 review: smaller, better-fitting earbuds are no longer outright best Read More »

As jobs screening US, UK and EU platforms are shifted to India, viewing ‘gore’ to clean up the web has traumatised moderators ‘I had to watch every frame of a recent stabbing video … It will never leave me,” says Harun*, one of many moderators reviewing harmful online content in India, as social media companies …

‘I log into a torture chamber each day’: the strain of moderating social media Read More »

Schools minister Lotta Edholm moves students off digital devices and on to books and handwriting, with teachers and experts debating the pros and cons Since young children went back to school across Sweden recently, many of their teachers have been putting a new emphasis on printed books, quiet reading time and handwriting practice, and devoting …

Switching off: Sweden says back-to-basics schooling works on paper Read More »

Surveying everything from hunter gatherers to Elon Musk, the Cambridge politics professor debates whether our fate is sealed by the machines we’ve created Back in 2016, a month before the EU referendum, I went along to the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford to interview its director, the Swedish-born philosopher Nick Bostrom, who had just …

The Handover by David Runciman review – is the future out of our control? Read More »

Two studies use artificial intelligence to analyse ‘old master’ painting and return opposite verdicts Authenticating works of art is far from an exact science, but a madonna and child painting has sparked a furious row, being dubbed “the battle of the AIs”, after two separate scientific studies arrived at contradictory conclusions. Both studies used state-of-the …

Battle of the AIs: rival tech teams clash over who painted ‘Raphael’ in UK gallery Read More »

The fast-growing US writing platform has come of age, offering all kinds of newsletters from a range of writers and experts for a subscription or even free. But how do you find the good stuff? We pick some of the best by theme Substack – the American tech platform that enables anyone to create, publish, …

From me to your inbox: 33 of the best Substack newsletters Read More »

Geopolitics may affect sales in a big market – and customers may be annoyed by the new charging socket too Apple chief executive Tim Cook will hope that the launch of the latest iPhones on Tuesday will be enough to buoy consumers and investors in the face of a falling share price caused by deteriorating …

China troubles could upset Apple’s cart as it prepares to launch the iPhone 15 Read More »

The US firm best known for its gaming tech has long been ahead of the curve in supplying the tools needed by tech developers It’s not often that the jaws of Wall Street analysts drop to the floor but late last month it happened: Nvidia, a company that makes computer chips, issued sales figures that …

How savvy trillion-dollar chipmaker Nvidia is powering the AI goldrush | John Naughton Read More »

The Spanish photographer on teaching portraiture to children – and the muse he found among them The Senegalese village of Sare Soukande is home to fewer than 500 people. Ten-year-old Moussa, pictured here, is one of them. Attentive, passionate and a great football player, Moussa is one of the boys enrolled in an educational project …

‘The hands belong to Moussa’s friends’: Quim Fàbregas’s best phone picture Read More »

This misguided Tory crackdown won’t keep kids off social media. The best solution is for families to have open conversations It’s easy to talk tough on tech, as Michelle Donelan, the secretary of state for science, innovation and technology has shown this week. In an interview with the Telegraph, Donelan warned that social media platforms …

Take it from someone who was on the internet at 10 years old: a ban won’t keep children off TikTok | Chris Stokel-Walker Read More »