Technology

Right now, in some tasteful open plan office in California, Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘team’ is hard at work. Or at least they should be, because they have a lot to do. When he wasn’t trying to explain the 101 basics of how the internet actually works, Zuck was telling senators that his team would look into the details, and would be in touch.  The reason he was there at all, subjecting himself to five gruelling hours of intensive and sometimes wildly misdirected questioning, was to reassure three groups of people: Facebook users, who need to know Zuck cares about privacy. Investors, who need to know the company is dealing with the

Few readerships of any intelligent national magazine will be more alive to the perils and downsides of 21st–century cyber-life than you, fellow Spectator readers. Many of you might share my use of the generalised expression ‘the internet’ for the whole damn thing — while not being quite sure what we’re referring to. Few, on the other hand, will be more likely to show a lively appreciation of community, locality, the sense of belonging and of place that even in this fast-paced and mobile age, our country at its best can still nurture. You might think those two dispositions make comfortable bedfellows. The faithful little band of stalwarts at Evensong, the

Everything since the ZX Spectrum has pretty much left me cold. Ghetto blasters, Sony Walkmans, CDs, Apple Macs, iPods, PlayStations… I didn’t want any of them. Back in 1981, I did want a CB radio and I nearly got one too, but then my mother found out that lorry drivers were on them and the thorny issue of whether it would be appropriate for a nine-year-old girl to converse with a trucker put the kibosh on the whole thing. I was bitterly disappointed. I seem to remember I cried. I did not cry about not being bought a Commodore 64 or a BBC Computer, as the technological bee’s knees was

It must be about 25 years since the Rat first made an appearance in The Spectator. He started out as my girlfriend’s six-year-old boy, then became my stepson and featured here quite often over the years because, being a scaly-tailed creature of evil, he was always good for some copy. This new year, with his agreement, I upgraded him to full son status. Let me explain why in a way that I hope you’ll find charming, rather than one that makes you want to throw up. The first reason is purely mercenary. During Christmas, while over with his wife Chloe from Hong Kong, the Rat managed to find about £10,000

Blockchain is an idea whose time has come. By which I mean it’s still mostly an idea, and is currently the only thing tech people want to talk about. But it’s in danger of getting hyped out of control, which in the end will damage it. So what actually is a blockchain? Very broadly speaking, a blockchain is a way to store information. Boring, yet possibly revolutionary. A copy of every transaction between people is stored on a chronologically ordered, secure database, and identical copies of that database are hosted on multiple computers. New transactions can only be added once they have been verified by other computers, and it’s not possible to

Conmen and fraudsters thrive in confusion. And few places are more confusing and opaque than the jargon-ridden world of online advertising. Which is odd really, since the entire social media edifice – Google, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat – depends on it. 2017 was the year of the tech-lash, when people and politicians started to push back against tech-led disruption. But there’s potentially a far more significant threat looming for the tech giants: ad fraud. On one level, online advertising is very simple: you get shown endless adverts as you bounce your way around the net, and an advertiser pays whenever someone either looks at, or – the holy grail! – clicks

Everyone interested in technology has their own bitcoin story. As is the way with these things, the earlier you were on the scene the better. I cashed out back in 2012 when a bitcoin was worth just £7, says one. Well, I bought a pizza in 2014 with bitcoin which, at today’s rate, cost me almost ten grand, replies another. And so on. These stories are usually told with a hint of pride. The more you lost the better in fact, since it signifies that you were in the know before everyone else, long before it was cool. I have my own story too of course, involving dark net drugs markets back in 2013,

At last. And just what you’ve been waiting for. The official Wiki Man guide to the best gadgets and gizmos for giving this Christmas. The Philips AirFryer, from £70-ish. Spectator readers may remember a craze for cooking things via a French method called sous-vide. Using this senseless technology, you could cook soggy food for days at low temperatures by warming it gently in a colostomy bag; handy if you fancied a couple of days off work with botulism, but frankly bugger all use for anything else. The AirFryer is the opposite of sous-vide: it isn’t French and is actually useful. It quickly makes food hot and crispy as God intended,

Philip Hammond wants fully autonomous driverless cars on our roads by 2021. That’s not too far away, is it? I know it sounds like a science fiction year, but it’s only about fifty months off. Technologically, it’s plausible. Earlier this year I travelled over 100 miles in a driverless truck across Florida with the BBC. True, it was on long straight highways and not through Slough town centre in the rain, but still. Millions are being spent on this technology, and in the race between Google, Uber, Tesla and the rest, there will be rapid progress. And there is no doubt that driverless cars will be safer than these killing machines

Wasn’t the whole point of electric vehicles supposed to be to civilise our cities, making them safer and less-polluted places to live? I just wonder what the mung bean-eaters who act as cheerleaders for the industry are making of the latest performance by Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla. Launching his latest vehicle, a £150,000 ($200,000) roadster which apparently does 0-60 mph in 1.9 seconds, he was asked what the point of the vehicle was. He replied: “to deliver a hardcore smackdown to gasoline cars”.   A hardcore smackdown, eh? I am not sure that is quite what environment secretary Michael Gove had in mind in July when he announced that,

A strange thing happened after TFL’s decision last month not to renew Uber’s license to operate in London. The ride sharing app started a petition on the website change.org. To defend the livelihoods of 40,000 drivers – and the consumer choice of millions of Londoners – sign this petition asking to reverse the decision to ban Uber in London. Thousands of stranded bus-shy Londoners rushed to sign, making it the fastest growing petition in the UK this year. (At the time of writing it’s reached 855 thousand signatures). And of course it was accompanied by the mandatory hashtag #saveyouruber, which was shared by the official Uber UK Twitter account. Big

As a new school term starts, this often spells an expensive shopping list for parents. School uniforms that no longer fit, new schoolbooks and lunchboxes; research shows that the average parent spends £170 on each of their children at the start of a new school year. But although much of that spending can’t be avoided – after all, you can hardly send your child back to school with shoes that don’t fit – there is another area of the back-to-school routine where we might be missing a financial trick. Why? Well because the average child has £302 worth of gadgets in their school rucksack. Even among the under 6’s, one

In its hasty dismissal of James Damore, Google showed a worrying disregard for one of the most important freedoms within a company — the freedom to ask: ‘What if we’re wrong?’ A business culture that can attract and accommodate people with complementary talents benefits everybody. So even if you don’t believe Damore’s theories (in which case you probably shouldn’t hire any systems geneticists), he’s surely right to speak up if he believes the complex question of diversity has been hijacked by wishful dogma. It should be the province of first-rate scientific inquiry, not second-rate social theory. If the diversity agenda is pursued badly, the cure may well be worse than