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Technology | The Guardian
Tell us: have you experiences last-minute cancellations on Airbnb?

We’d like to hear from people who have made a booking for accommodation on an online travel platform, only for their host to cancel it at the last minute

We’re interested in hearing from people who have made a booking for accommodation on an online travel platform, only for their host to cancel it at the last minute.

Earlier this year, Taylor Swift fans in Australia were left without accommodation after Airbnb hosts cancelled their bookings. Airbnb’s “host cancellation policy” does not seem to have deterred hosts from then relisting their properties at a higher price. Has something similar happened to you? Are you a Swiftie whose plans to watch her European tour have been affected? Or have you made plans for a holiday elsewhere or another trip that have been thrown into disarray by a host’s cancellation?
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Technology | The Guardian
Google fires 28 staff after protest against firm’s contract with Israeli government

Google workers linked to No Tech for Apartheid denounce ‘flagrant act of retaliation’ in dispute over $1.2bn cloud contract

Google said on Thursday it had terminated 28 employees after some staff participated in protests against the company’s cloud contract with the Israeli government.

The Alphabet unit said a small number of protesting employees entered and disrupted work at a few unspecified office locations.
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Technology | The Guardian
Reigns Beyond review – sci-fi silliness meets rock band road trip

iPad/iPhone, Nintendo Switch (version tested), PC; Nerial/Devolver Digital
Quick-witted and hilarious, this madcap band tour/space caper is sold short by its premise
You may remember the Reigns series from its excellent Game of Thrones tie-in: its signature is Tinder-esque card swiping, where you make snap decisions on what to say or do by flicking left or right, before watching the consequences unfold. After crash-landing on a random planet, you are roped in to joining an intergalactic rock band, which seems only fair as you just accidentally killed their guitarist with your out-of-control ship. From there you set off across the stars, landing on whatever planets you come across, picking up stowaways and goopy space-creatures and occasionally making a discovery about the universe (or your mysteriously sentient ship).

You also die, a lot. Rarely have I played a game in which death is so frequent, and so funny. I have inhaled a deadly space fungus, been smothered by multiplying fluffy space bunnies, and had my head literally bitten off by my manager, who is also a shark. I have exploded, expired, aspirated, starved, and once I accidentally vaporised all life in a solar system by plugging in a guitar amp. Every time this happens, you are resurrected to the last planet you visited, ready to go again – there are no lasting consequences in Reigns, just momentary catastrophic setbacks.
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Technology | The Guardian
Nothing Ear (a) review: cheaper, smaller, longer-lasting earbuds

Funky transparent design backed by good sound and noise cancelling make these budget buds winners

The tech firm Nothing’s latest set of cut-price Bluetooth earbuds offer great sound and noise cancelling for an even more competitive price, while continuing to stand out from the crowd through cool design.

The London-based firm has launched the budget Ear (a), which keep almost everything that was great about previous Nothing earbuds and cost £99 (€99/$99). That is £30 less than its previous offering and the new £129 (€149/$149) Ear, which offer a few more customisations for sound and other features.
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Technology | The Guardian
Best podcasts of the week: How one woman’s private paradise turned into her own personal hell

In this week’s newsletter: Alice Levine’s The Price of Paradise follows the story of Jayne Gaskin, and the Caribbean island that wasn’t all it seemed. Plus: five of the best bad movie podcasts

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The Price of Paradise
Widely available, episodes weekly
The tale of Jayne Gaskin, who bought a private island off Nicaragua for a bargain price, is irresistible. In 2002, the ex-Playboy Bunny was the unexpected star of Channel 4 reality TV show No Going Back, but Alice Levine brings the saga to a new audience in all its disastrous glory. It’s a tale of a family who left their comfortable English life behind, but soon became embroiled in controversy, corruption and kidnap. Hannah Verdier
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Technology | The Guardian
Students turning to cyberfraud as huge phishing site infiltrated, police reveal

LabHost enabled users to set up websites designed to trick victims into revealing personal information – with 70,000 allegedly duped in the UK

University students have turned to cyber fraud to boost their income, police have said, as they revealed they have infiltrated a huge phishing site on the dark web responsible for scamming tens of thousands of people.

The site called LabHost was active since 2021 and was a cyber fraud superstore, allowing users to produce realistic-looking websites from household names such as the big banks, ensnaring victims around the world including 70,000 in the UK.
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Technology | The Guardian
TikTok questioned by EU over Lite app that ‘pays’ users for watching videos

European Commission has concerns about app’s impact on children, as well as addiction

The EU has given TikTok 24 hours to provide a risk assessment over a new service it has launched amid concerns it could encourage children to become addicted to videos on the platform.

The watch-and-get-rewarded application, TikTok Lite, launched in France and Spain this month, in effect offers users prizes such as Amazon vouchers, gift cards via PayPal or TikTok’s Coins currency for points earned through “tasks”.
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Technology | The Guardian
Tesla asks shareholders to back $56bn pay for Elon Musk rejected by judge

Delaware court in nullified compensation deal based on carmaker’s market value in January, calling it ‘unfathomable sum’

Tesla on Wednesday asked its shareholders to once again approve CEO Elon Musk‘s record-breaking $56bn pay that was set in 2018. A Delaware judge rejected the pay package in January, calling it excessive and saying the company’s board failed to justify it.

The compensation includes no salary or cash bonus, but sets rewards based on Tesla’s market value rising to as much as $650bn over the next 10 years. Tesla is now valued at over $500bn, according to LSEG data.
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Technology | The Guardian
Child sexual abuse content growing online with AI-made images, report says

More children and families extorted with AI-made photos and videos, says National Center for Missing and Exploited Children

Child sexual exploitation is on the rise online and taking new forms such as images and videos generated by artificial intelligence, according to an annual assessment released on Tuesday by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), a US-based clearinghouse for the reporting of child sexual abuse material.

Reports to the NCMEC of child abuse online rose by more than 12% in 2023 compared with the previous year, surpassing 36.2m reports, the organization said in its annual CyberTipline report. The majority of tips received were related to the circulation of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) such as photos and videos, but there was also an increase in reports of financial sexual extortion, when an online predator lures a child into sending nude images or videos and then demands money.
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Technology | The Guardian
TechScape: How cheap, outsourced labour in Africa is shaping AI English

Workers in Africa have been exploited first by being paid a pittance to help make chatbots, then by having their own words become AI-ese. Plus, new AI gadgets are coming for your smartphones

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We’re witnessing the birth of AI-ese, and it’s not what anyone could have guessed. Let’s delve deeper.

If you’ve spent enough time using AI assistants, you’ll have noticed a certain quality to the responses generated. Without a concerted effort to break the systems out of their default register, the text they spit out is, while grammatically and semantically sound, ineffably generated.

The images pop up in Mophat Okinyi’s mind when he’s alone, or when he’s about to sleep. Okinyi, a former content moderator for OpenAI’s ChatGPT in Nairobi, Kenya, is one of four people in that role who have filed a petition to the Kenyan government calling for an investigation into what they describe as exploitative conditions for contractors reviewing the content that powers artificial intelligence programs.
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Technology | The Guardian
As if Wes Anderson ran amok at Aardman: Harold Halibut, the visually stunning puppet adventure game

Fourteen years in the making, this character-driven sci-fi tale is a wonder of technology and imagination so texturally convincing you’ll want to touch it

Ticktock, ticktock. In the dripping confines of the Fedora 1, an aquatic space colony of exquisite retro-futuristic design, it’s not water but time that exerts an unmistakable pressure on inhabitants. A cataclysmic meteor looms on the horizon, threatening to wipe them all out. But this cast of lovably eccentric characters, including the titular Harold, hurry for no one, preferring to amble about their days while staring down the barrel of cosmic disaster.

It’s fitting that an adventure game as laid back in pacing as Harold Halibut should have been made by a team with a similarly leisurely approach to time. Fourteen years have passed since game director Onat Hekimoglu had the initial idea, while studying for an MA at Cologne Game Lab. Back then, it was a strange point-and-click adventure with earthy stop-motion visuals. Elements of that version persist today, namely protagonist Harold, a depressed caretaker who spends his days gazing out at the sea. But the intervening years have seen it become more mechanically refined, narratively expansive and visually beautiful.
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Technology | The Guardian
Leisure centres scrap biometric systems to keep tabs on staff amid UK data watchdog clampdown

Firms such as Serco and Virgin Active pull facial recognition and fingerprint scan systems used to monitor staff attendance

Dozens of companies including national leisure centre chains are reviewing or pulling facial recognition technology and fingerprint scanning used to monitor staff attendance after a clampdown by the UK’s data watchdog.

In February, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) ordered a Serco subsidiary to stop using biometrics to monitor the attendance of staff at leisure centres it operates and also issued more stringent guidance on the use of facial recognition and fingerprint scanning.
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Technology | The Guardian
Creating sexually explicit deepfake images to be made offence in UK

Offenders could face jail if image is widely shared under proposed amendment to criminal justice bill

Creating a sexually explicit “deepfake” image is to be made an offence under a new law, the Ministry of Justice has announced.

Under the legislation, anyone who creates such an image without consent will face a criminal record and an unlimited fine. They could also face jail if the image is shared more widely.
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Technology | The Guardian
Trump Media shares tank after company reveals plan to sell more stock

Shares of Truth Social parent company have fallen 60% since March market debut as ex-president under financial pressure

Shares of the former president Donald Trump’s social media company slumped 12% on Monday, extending their string of losses, after the company said in a regulatory filing that it could sell millions of additional shares in coming months.

The filing showed a potential sale of 146.1m shares in Trump Media & Technology Group, including 114.8m shares owned by Trump himself. Documents also listed an additional 21.5m shares that could be sold upon the exercise of certain warrants issued when the company went public through a blank-check merger with Digital World Acquisition Corp.
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Technology | The Guardian
Battle lines drawn as US states take on big tech with online child safety bills

Nine states are hashing out bills to protect minors online. Tech companies are fighting the laws with everything they’ve got

On 6 April, Maryland became the first state in the US to pass a “Kids Code” bill, which aims to prevent tech companies from collecting predatory data from children and using design features that could cause them harm. Vermont’s legislature held its final hearing before a full vote on its Kids Code bill on 11 April. The measures are the latest in a salvo of proposed policies that, in the absence of federal rules, have made state capitols a major battlefield in the war between parents and child advocates, who lament that there are too few protections for minors online, and Silicon Valley tech companies, who protest that the recommended restrictions would hobble both business and free speech.

Known as Age-Appropriate Design Code or Kids Code bills, these measures call for special data safeguards for underage users online as well as blanket prohibitions on children under certain ages using social media. Maryland’s measure passed with unanimous votes in its house and senate.
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Technology | The Guardian
‘They even got a real jetpack in there!’: Todd Howard and Jonathan Nolan on Fallout

The director of the Fallout TV series and the director of the modern Fallout video games sit down together to talk about the audacity of video-game storytelling and hope in a post-apocalyptic wasteland

If you had asked director Jonathan Nolan what his favourite film of the year was in the late 00s, more often than not he would have given you the name of a video game instead. “Having grown up with the entire history of the medium – I started playing Pong with my brother Chris many, many years ago – that was when games started to take on this level of audacity in their storytelling, their tone, the things they were doing,” he says. “That’s what I felt with [2008’s] Fallout 3: the audacity. Frankly I wasn’t feeling that in the film and television business at that time.”

Nolan, who has just finished directing the first series of Amazon Prime’s Fallout TV show, is sitting next to Todd Howard, the video-game director who led development on Fallout 3 and 4, talking to me a few hours before the premiere of the first two episodes. It is evident within minutes that Nolan understands games almost as well as Todd does. He says he’s drawn to games where your options are open, you decide who you want to be and your decisions have an effect on the world around you: in other words, a game like Todd Howard’s. The two come across like old friends, easy in each other’s company, and enthusiastic about each other’s work.
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Technology | The Guardian
Tesla to cut 14,000 jobs as Elon Musk aims to make carmaker ‘lean and hungry’

Billionaire says ‘there is nothing I hate more’ than cutting staff as more than 10% of workforce to be affected

* Business live – latest updates

Tesla is laying off more than 10% of its global workforce, equivalent to at least 14,000 roles, as the electric carmaker reacts to slowing demand and pressure on prices.

The chief executive, Elon Musk, announced “the difficult decision” in a memo first reported by the online publication Elektrek. Tesla employs 140,473 people, according to its annual report.
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Technology | The Guardian
‘Eat the future, pay with your face’: my dystopian trip to an AI burger joint

If the experience of robot-served fast food dining is any indication, the future of sex robots is going to be very unpleasant

On 1 April, the same day California’s new $20 hourly minimum wage for fast food workers went into effect, a new restaurant opened in north-east Los Angeles that was conspicuously light on human staff.

CaliExpress by Flippy claims to be the world’s first fully autonomous restaurant, using a system of AI-powered robots to churn out fast food burgers and fries. A small number of humans are still required to push the buttons on the machines and assemble the burgers and toppings, but the companies involved tout that using their technology could cut labor costs, perhaps dramatically. “Eat the future,” they offer.
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Technology | The Guardian
Now Play This 2024 review – the eccentricity is the point

Somerset House, London
A world away from Fortnite and Call of Duty, the UK’s biggest festival of experimental games celebrates quirky one-offs and making it up as you go along
Video game conventions are typically boisterous affairs, as thousands of visitors queue under a constellation of screens for the chance to play one of the hundreds of as-yet unreleased titles on display.

Now in its 10th year, Somerset House’s Now Play This is to mainstream exhibitions what folk festivals are to raves. None of the experimental games presented here are destined to be advertised on the sides of buses, not least because many are one-offs that use bespoke controllers – a hatching of thick ropes and copper bands, or an old suitcase lined with speakers – connected to laptops via an umbilical tangle of wires. Few of these games adhere to the conventional rules or fashions seen in mainstream video game design, either. They might have no “win state”, or provide an “open play” tool set with which visitors can create their own rules. The eccentricity is the point. You’ve played those other games, the programme suggests: now play this.
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Technology | The Guardian
How Neopets’ nostalgic revival tripled users in six months

An icon of millennials’ childhoods languished for nearly two decades. Now it’s attempting a comeback – banking on the fact that it hasn’t changed at all

In the early 2000s, Olivia Packenham would get home from school, listen to the familiar sound of the dial up tone as her family computer connected to the internet, and navigate her AOL browser to the virtual gaming world of Neopets.

Starting at the age of eight, Packenham played for years before losing interest when she was in high school. But in December 2023, after a nearly 15-year hiatus, she logged back on to neopets.com – and found the pets she had raised as a child waiting for her. Her favorite, a “Bruce” (the Neopets version of a penguin) is more than 21 years old now.
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