A gripping audio series about a killer-for-hire scam on the dark web is a reminder of how technology holds up a mirror to human nature

This column comes to you as a break from listening to a riveting podcast series called Kill List . It’s about a secret website that journalist and author Carl Miller discovered on the dark web, the slimy underbelly of the internet. The site essentially runs what one might call an “assassination market” or a murder-for-hire service. Customers identify and profile someone whom they wish to have killed and pay (in bitcoin, natch) for the service they require. Hence the title of the podcast series.

The story starts in 2020 in the early days of the pandemic lockdown when a gifted IT expert and hacker, Chris Monteiro, was browsing the site and found a security vulnerability that, once exploited, gave him complete access to it. Inside, he found a “kill list”, rather like an Excel spreadsheet, of 175 people all over the world whom clients wanted murdered. For each target, there was usually lots of detailed information – address, photographs, habits, routes regularly travelled etc. It looked, I guess, superficially mundane – until you read the “instructions” attached for each one. “How much bitcoin should I pay?” “Tell me the execution time in advance – I can’t be there.” “I would just like this person to be shot and killed. Where, how and what with does not bother me at all.” You get the idea.

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Matt Garman, head of AWS unit, says ‘there are other companies around’, according to transcript

A senior Amazon executive has suggested that staff who do not like the company’s new five-days-a-week office-working policy should quit.

The head of the tech company’s cloud computing business told an internal meeting that if employees did not support the change they could look for a job elsewhere, according to a transcript reviewed by Reuters .

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New York Times reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac paint a damning portrait of the billionaire who turned the social media platform into a smaller business and a larger cesspool

If Elon Musk is a name that sounds as if it was invented by Ian Fleming, there’s more than a hint of the Bond villain about the South Africa-born American billionaire. It’s not just the extraordinary wealth, which hovers around the quarter of a trillion dollars mark, but the SpaceX business that sends rockets into space and seeks Martian colonisation (very Hugo Drax and Moonraker ) and the hypersensitive ego.

All of these sides of Musk are on painful display in Kate Conger and Ryan Mac’s book Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter . So unappealing is the portrait this pair of New York Times technology reporters paint that a more fitting title might be Character Assassination. Or it would if it wasn’t for the fact that Musk himself provides most of ammunition discharged in this damning account.

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Telecom has so far extracted 3,300 tonnes of potential 200,000 tonnes of cables amid £15bn rollout of full-fibre broadband

BT has received £105m as an upfront prepayment for the sale of surplus copper cables from its old network which it is replacing in a £15bn rollout of high-speed full-fibre broadband to 25m homes in one of the UK’s biggest private national infrastructure programmes.

The telecoms company has struck a deal with a recycling company and received the sum after entering into a forward agreement to sell copper granules created from surplus copper cables which are being replaced by its new full-fibre network. The £105m transaction is the first of its kind.

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Agency accuses Meta, Google, TikTok and other companies of sharing troves of user information with third-parties

Social media and online video companies are collecting huge troves of your personal information on and off their websites or apps and sharing it with a wide range of third-party entities, a new Federal Trade Commission (FTC) staff report on nine tech companies confirms.

The FTC report published on Thursday looked at the data-gathering practices of Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, Discord, Reddit, Amazon, Snap, TikTok and Twitter/X between January 2019 and 31 December 2020. The majority of the companies’ business models incentivized tracking how people engaged with their platforms, collecting their personal data and using it to determine what content and ads users see on their feeds, the report states.

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The Oscar-winning actress goes back to her roots in Mind Your Own. Plus: five of the best comic book podcasts

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All journalists know that what they produce matters, but sometimes it can be easy to forget just how much.

The man who fell to earth , an excellent episode of the Guardian’s Today in Focuspodcast, tells the story of how Esther Addley reported on an airplane stowaway whose dead body was found in a west London car park – only to be contacted by the deceased’s brother 23 years later. The reason: his family had kept her article as a family treasure for decades, prompting him to learn enough English to be able to read the account of his much older sibling’s life – then travel to the UK on his trail. “It is genuinely one of the most powerful and emotional things anyone has ever said to me about my work,” says Addley. “It brings home the responsibility of every story we do.”

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It’s easy to blame viral videos – and far harder to change the culture in which they thrive

Among those swiftly convicted and sentenced last week for their part in the racist rioting was Bobby Shirbon , who had left his 18th birthday party at a bingo hall in Hartlepool to join the mob roaming the town’s streets, targeting houses thought to be occupied by asylum seekers. Shirbon was arrested for smashing windows and throwing bottles at police. He was sentenced to 20 months in prison.

In custody, Shirbon had claimed that his actions had been justified by their ubiquity: “It’s OK,” he told officers, “everyone else is doing it.” That has, of course, been a consistent claim from those caught up in mass thuggery down the years, but for many of the hundreds of people now facing significant prison sentences, the “defence” has a sharper resonance.

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Labour minister says she removed social media platform’s app from her mobile phone when Elon Musk took over

A government minister said she has scaled back her use of social media platform X, arguing it had become “a bit despotic” and was “a place of misery now”.

Jess Phillips, the minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, said although she had previously been “massively addicted to Twitter”, referencing the former name of X, she had removed the app from her phone after Elon Musk took over the company in October 2022.

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President accuses social network’s owner of using it to ‘incite hatred’ after the country’s disputed election

President Nicolás Maduro said he had ordered a 10-day block on access to X in Venezuela, accusing the owner, Elon Musk, of using the social network to promote hatred after the country’s disputed presidential election.

Associated Press (AP) journalists in Caracas found that by Thursday night posts had stopped loading on X on two private telephone services and state-owned Movilnet.

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