‘Preying on investors’: how software firm MicroStrategy’s big bet on bitcoin went stratospheric

In the summer of 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic upended economies around the world, an obscure US software firm decided to diversify. MicroStrategy, whose head office is situated next to a shopping mall and metro station in Tysons Corner, Virginia, had decided the steady business of “software as a service” was not racy enough.Instead, it would branch out by investing up to $250m in alternative assets – “stocks, bonds, commodities such as gold, digital assets such as bitcoin or other asset types”.Less than five years later, that bitcoin side hustle has gone stratospheric. MicroStrategy’s share price has swollen twentyfold, lifting its market capitalisation to almost $75bn and catapulting the stock into the Nasdaq 100 index of top technology shares

The most important tech stories of 2024, and also my favorite ones

Last week, we looked back at how 2024 made Elon Musk the world’s most powerful man. Today, we’re looking at a few other important themes that will influence the online and offline worlds in 2025.Google: Ruled an illegal monopoly in August, Google could be broken up. The results are anybody’s guess, but what seemed impossible for a company worth $2.5tn is at play

How a batch of tinned meat fostered fears of the millennium bug

On New Year’s Eve 25 years ago, sane people worried that the modern world was about to melt down.The millennium bug seemed to be threatening to crash the world’s computer systems, as technology struggled to distinguish between the years 1900 and 2000. The public, faced with daily predictions of potentially terrible outcomes, braced themselves nervously.Dark jokes prevailed about avoiding being on “a life-support system at midnight on 31 December 1999”. In China, Zhao Be, then the head of the country’s millennium bug coordination efforts, commanded airline executives to be on a flight on 1 January 2000 to demonstrate any problems had been sorted

If crypto is incorporated into Australia’s financial system, we will be lucky to avoid contagious collapse | John Quiggin

As a principal adviser to the then treasurer Wayne Swan, Jim Chalmers had a ringside seat to observe the impact of the global financial crisis on the Australian economy and financial system. We were spared the initial impact of the GFC largely because, still bearing the scars of financial disasters in the 1980s and early 1990s, Australian financial institutions had been slow to embrace the exotic derivatives that brought down their counterparts in the US and UK. That delay allowed time for vigorous fiscal stimulus (here and in China, our main export market) to stave off the long and deep recessions seen elsewhere.But a few days ago, Jim Chalmers made comments suggesting that Australia’s financial system will not be insulated from a crisis that seems all too likely to emerge in the next few years. When Donald Trump assumes his role as the US president, it will bring an end to policies that have maintained a wall of separation between the traditional financial system and the crypto sector

AI tools may soon manipulate people’s online decision-making, say researchers

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools could be used to manipulate online audiences into making decisions – ranging from what to buy to who to vote for – according to researchers at the University of Cambridge.The paper highlights an emerging new marketplace for “digital signals of intent” – known as the “intention economy” – where AI assistants understand, forecast and manipulate human intentions and sell that information on to companies who can profit from it.The intention economy is touted by researchers at Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (LCFI) as a successor to the attention economy, where social networks keep users hooked on their platforms and serve them adverts.The intention economy involves AI-savvy tech companies selling what they know about your motivations, from plans for a stay in a hotel to opinions on a political candidate, to the highest bidder.“For decades, attention has been the currency of the internet,” said Dr Jonnie Penn, an historian of technology at LCFI

‘I deleted news apps’: Guardian readers on how to stop doomscrolling

Doomscrolling happens to the best of us. Algorithms across social platforms are finely tuned to feed you content and posts that keep you locked in. It can be hard to pull yourself away even when you’re consuming a barrage of news about the state of the world online.While we certainly don’t encourage people to turn away from the news, we also know it’s important to take breaks. A recent MIT study found that social media can create a negative feedback loop: those who are already struggling with their mental health are more likely to consume negative content, which makes their mental health worse