Technology

I’m losing my patience. Not so long ago I’d happily wait ten minutes for a bus, or even whole days for the next instalment of my favourite television programme. It didn’t seem to bother me in the slightest that my holiday photos would not be seen until I’d picked them up from the chemist. I even went to the library to get information from an encyclopaedia. Life, in short, used to be a waiting game, and patience was not just a virtue but a habit. Now I wonder how I survived in a world without Google Maps, Uber or smartphones with in-built cameras. The whole direction and purpose of modern

Happy birthday to the Spectator. This week, we’re celebrating our 190th birthday. Lara Prendergast takes a walk down memory lane with three editors of the Spectator, past and present. But before that, it’s the podcast as usual. This week, we’re asking – do anti-Trump protests achieve anything other than virtue signalling? And are driverless cars on a road to nowhere? Donald Trump is soon to visit the UK, and after two false alarms, this time, it will actually happen. Next Friday, Trump will be welcomed by May in London and greeted with major protests. There is a carnival of resistance organised, with special guests such as Lily Allen and a

The Times reports this morning that Bournemouth business leaders are hugely annoyed with the BBC, whose weather app predicted thick cloud and thunderstorms for the recent bank holiday. In the event, it was sunny and warm, but the damage had already been done, and takings on the seafront were said to be down by nearly 40 percent as people decided to stay at home rather than risk a soaking. While weather forecasting is undoubtedly getting better, it seems fairly clear that ultra-local forecasts of the kind you find on weather apps can be very misleading: reducing the whole forecast to a single icon, as most apps do, removes all the

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

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,