At the weather with matt taylor. Hello there. Sunshine developing a bit more widely again across parts of scotland and northern ireland, particularly in the west through this afternoon. Lots of you, though, sitting under grey skies for the rest of the day, particularly grey through parts of northern england, wales, towards the far south west. Heres where we will see outbreaks of rain or drizzle continue. Some showers working eastwards across scotland, and like yesterday, fairly bright towards east anglia and the south east with just a few showers through the english channel, but a chilly day for all. Now, as we go through into tonight, clearer skies for scotland, northern ireland, edging a little bit further south, but were likely to see a widespread frost develop. Scotland and northern ireland, though, coldest of all, shown by the blue colours on our temperature chart here. But further south and east, frost free, the cloud stays in place, further rain or drizzle, and into tomorrow it could be quite a windy and cloudy day, east anglia and the south east seeing rain at times close to the coast. The exception rather than the rule, though, because for most, at long last, a welcome window of dry and reasonably sunny weather. The frost clears, the fog largely clears it it a bit lingers throughout the day, though, it will be chilly, with temperatures above freezing. Hello, this is bbc news with me, shaun ley. The headlines Prince Andrew categorically denies having sex with an American Woman who says she was forced to sleep with him when she was just 17. I absolutely, categorically tell you that it never happened. The duke of york said he does not regret his friendship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. In the election, the conservatives promise all migrants will be treated equally after brexit, regardless of where they come from. But the foreign secretary rules out setting a target for the number of people entering the uk. The labour leader, jeremy corbyn, refuses to confirm whether or not Free Movement of people from the eu will be included in the partys general election manifesto. The government and the armed forces are accused of covering up illegal killings by british troops in afghanistan and iraq. Now on the bbc, its time for click. This week, the perils of the gig economy, checking for allergens, and fake birds. It is kind of hard to remember a time when we didnt have taxi hailing apps. And when i say taxi hailing apps, even though there are many more players out there, it is uber that comes to mind first. At its conception a decade ago, uber was really disruptive. The idea that you can have a taxi to you within minutes, it would know exactly where you were, you could see where it was and you didnt have to do have any money on you. It was revolutionary. The company grew at a rapid pace, becoming the highest valued start up in the world. This without ever turning a profit. In fact, in the last three months alone, uber lost an eye watering 5. 2 billion. Undeterred, uber continues to expand and has its name stamped on many apps that provide different types of services, all part of the so called gig economy. It has faced a lot of backlash in many of the countries that it operates in, from taxi drivers who have been losing out because of the platforms aggressive pricing strategies and from city authorities who have raised concerns over workers rights and passenger safety. Here in london, the transport authority says it has concerns about passenger safety and it will decide later this month whether to renew ubers licence. In the meantime, we have met up with a uber driver who has concerns too. Although this is about how uber controls his livelihood. It is monday morning, and i am catching a ride. Like so many parts of the Digital World, the gig economy was supposed to be a liberation. Apps like uber were supposed to transform how you worked, work when you want, where you want. But many fear that whether it is the platforms and how they work or their data and how it is collected, they dontjust represent a liberation but also something else. A potent new form of control as well. What i was told is that the closest driver gets the job. But i dont believe that to be right, because what happens is i have seen customers sitting in my car trying to book a ride and it is not bouncing to me. It is actually going to drivers who are far away, five, ten minutes. That was something i really couldnt believe, so we gave it a go. But although i was physically sitting next to him, the job went to someone several minutes away. Uber has now introduced a system that aims to reduce the waiting time for everyone, notjust a particular passenger. And this may lead to the counterintuitive situation where your driver can get to someone else quickly and another driver can pick you up soon too. Confused . Well, so is hadi. And although the driver app gives some information he is struggling to understand what factors really determine how work is allocated. In his five years of driving, the work has become scarcer. It is becoming even more important to hadi to understand how the algorithm that actually allocates the work that exists. It is important but also unknown. You drive around all day thinking, maybe that is the best way to beat this algorithm or to meet up with the algorithm that has been set. I dont know what is going on. On average, i used to work six to eight hours, five to six days a week. The number of days has not changed but the hours have increased. It is still 10 to 12 hours, five to six days a week. After costs are factored in, hadi says he and many of his colleagues are often struggling to make even the minimum wage. I have seen drivers sleeping in their car parking, actually. And you see them asleep, it is because they have overworked. Not only for him, but plenty of other drivers, it is the algorithm that lets him feed and clothe his family. It is cold, hard maths but with tremendously human consequences. U nfortu nately, we all depend on the algorithm. What we want is it to be fair, to be transparent. That is the most important thing. There was only one way for hadi to figure out what was going on. Asking for his data. And when he got it back, it made things even more confusing. James farrar established the Worker Info Exchange to help people across the gig economy to actually make sense of their data. He told us the information hadi received refers to everything from speed to battery level, but crucially doesnt reveal the things he really wants to know, such as rates of pay or the actual time spent on the platform and not how to optimise his chances of earning more money. Drivers always want to understand that they are getting a fair deal, that the value, the quality, the quantity of the work is fairly distributed. What uber has always proposed to its workforce is that the workforce, the drivers are their own boss, they are free to make their own choices. They are effectively running their own business. But if that is true, then i must be able to access the endless amounts of data i am creating for uber every day. But could it also be a matter of the complicated and hidden nature of the information algorithms involved . The way in which drivers and passengers are matched via a platform is a complex calculation. So the gig Economy Today is considerably more complex, and that means that the questions about how scores are calculated, how data are utilised, and how that can be taken into account by service providers, that question is more important than it ever was. But a joint study between oxford researchers and uber itself found that, on average, drivers earned above london living wage and reported they were happier than the average worker across the city. Critics questioned whether the full costs of being an uber driver have really been factored in when those figures were arrived at. The same arguments now playing out in the streets of london have happened in city after city across the world. In what might have been a globalfirst, the powerful taxi and Limousine Commission in new york didnt just ask uber for data but demanded it. And until uber handed it over, they were banned from operating. We found out that conditions were worse than what was being described to us by drivers. 96 of drivers were making less than the citys minimum wage. But without that information, you only have anecdotes. You have stories from drivers about low wages, but you have no way to really quantify that and without quantifying it, you cant create a policy to bring those levels of wages up. In response, uber said that drivers were at the heart of everything they do and they are working to continue improve the experience of both drivers themselves and their passengers. Another brilliant report from carl there. And, carl, if you can sum up your thoughts about whether the gig economy really is eroding workers rights, not just pay, but workers rights in general. In some sense, it really has to. These are kind of old, old issues. They seem to be now raised in new ways. There used to be struggles with employers over rights. Now it is the struggle of workers being recognised at all. It used to be struggle over the control of the shop floor. Now it is struggle over data. These are issues that stretch back hundreds of years, but they are now being raised in all these strange new forms as the work increasingly transferred onto these platforms. Do you think we have been foolish to believe that the gig economy will be better than having traditional jobs . It is that paradox, its both a liberation and a new form of control both in the same thing. So we believed part of it, and we were right to. It is bringing flexible new forms of work, but it is also bringing these new hidden forms of control which, because they are working through the tech, through the complex way it works and data, it is actually quite hard for us to see and to recognise theyre there in the first place. Ok, if we can move on. In the few weeks time, you are going to be doing what i think its quite Ground Breaking report for us here on click. The week of the general election here in the uk, carl is going to be looking at the type of outrage and anger that flows across social media to and from members of parliament and candidates. Is that right . Thats right. This is the free for all election. I dont think we will ever see a larger gap between the influence of the Digital World on the outcome of the vote and the influence of laws on the Digital World. It is a free for all. The Digital World has become unbelievably important for campaigning, for candidates and for everyone to learn more about politics. But at the same time, the law simply hasnt kept up. They havent extended onto the Digital World. So we are going to be desperately trying to track one of the major social outcomes or consequences of what is happening, which is simply that everyone is getting angrier with almost everyone else across society. It seems at the moment that we are massively polarised and we are also very angry. Do you think the two go hand in hand and maybe in the future when we are not so polarised, we are not so angry, or do you think everything and everyone is just getting more hyperbolic, angrier on line and that will lead to just more polarisation forever . I think it is a powerful yet intricate interplay between the Digital World and Everything Else happening in society. So theres a lot of things that have nothing to do with Digital Technology for why we are angry, of course there is. But i think it is the platforms we live on, the way in which information flows around is actually part of that story as well. We are only seeing certain kinds of information. We are only speaking to certain kinds of people. We are seeing cherry picked facts from the other side being slotted into our own timelines and so on. All of that is part of the story. The platform engine, there are visible rules which determine what you see, what you experience online, how those platforms work. That is definitely leading us towards anger rather than the opposite. Look at the glee in his face. Look at the glee we look forward to it, carl. Good luck with your research. Hello, and welcome to the week in tech. It was the week disney officially entered the streaming market. And it didnt quite go to plan. Disney plus finally went live in the us, canada and the netherlands, but customers reported technical issues, with many unable to connect. Disney said demand had exceeded its highest expectations. Maybe ralph really did break the internet after all. In the fastest backflip and u turn since well, sonic, the updated and redesigned hedgehog has been officially revealed in a new trailer for the upcoming live action movie. The original trailer drew a deluge of complaints and mockery over the original cgi design of sonic himself, forcing animators quite from spinning hedgehogs to back flipping robots, these footballing, flipping robots from mit are called the mini cheetah. Its creators claim it is virtually indestructible and can right itself if it falls down. As well as some smooth soccer skills, it is also capable of walking over uneven terrain twice as fast as a human. Lets hope it can climb trees. And finally, in other robot news, if you are one of those people that dont like speaking to the shop assistants, maybe you would rather direct your questions to one of these welcoming faces instead. This humanoid shop assistant from Russian Company promobot can apparently show emotion and they claim they can make photorealistic clones like these dolls. Will you be back . You decide. For those with serious food allergies, knowing exactly what you are eating can be a matter of life or death. When it comes to packaged food, the ingredients are normally clearly on the label plus a warning if it may contain traces of nuts or any other allergens. But when it comes to eating in someone elses house or in a restaurant, things get a little bit more complicated. If you want to add an extra level of checking what those ingredients are, i have been putting some technology to the test that might be able to help. There is a version that tests for gluten and another that tests for peanuts. The idea is you put in a small sample of the food that you are eating, as small as a pea, into one of these capsules. That goes inside the device which syncs up to your smartphone and you can find out whether the ingredient you cant eat is in it or not. I am going to put both of them to the test with this cookie, which should contain gluten but shouldnt contain nuts. The device uses antibody based chemistry born out of Mit Technology to detect proteins or allergens. The companys algorithms then translate complex science into a smiley go ahead and eat it face or not. This is a pricey occupation though. Each one time use capsule currently setting you back five whole dollars. And the company does advise that this is an extra level of checking on top of your normal Due Diligence and of course carrying any medication. Ok, i can confirm that the device definitely got this correct. It says that gluten has been found. It comes up here on the device, and you can see here on the phone, 12 30 today, gluten has been found. If i tap on that, it gives me the option of notjust making a note for myself so i remember but also sharing the data to the nima database. As more people use these devices, that database will become a lot more valuable. Lets give the peanut tester a go. You can do this with liquids or solids. And we have a result in the form of a smiley face. During my limited experiment the results were accurate, but i am of course only testing a small piece of each bit of food, so i am working on the basis that the ingredients are consistent throughout. Whilst they are an entirely different entity, food intolerances can have a huge impact on peoples lives too. I tested this at prototype stage, but now i have the finished version of food marble here. This is a digestion tracking device. The way it works is you breathe in to the hole here, and it will track how much hydrogen there is in your breath. The idea behind this is that if you have eaten something that you havent managed to digest properly, then a small amount of hydrogen is released into the blood stream. That makes its way into your lungs and from your lungs into your breath. So you can figure out which foods might be affecting you negatively. Once you have a reading, you can sync that data up in the app with any sleep data or how stressed you are feeling, so you can measure all the factors to see if there is any correlation. You can manually make a note of symptoms and you can log all the ingredients that you have eaten in a meal. How much use are these readings taken at any given time . I think that the danger of that kind of result or variability is that you might not know where you are and restricting your diet in all sorts of ways, and you could compensate so that you didnt lose weight, for example, and become obviously malnourished, but subtle deficiencies of micro nutrients that are important. But there is a secondary use the device hopes to fulfil, and that should be able to really isolate the issue. The device can also be used to do food intolerance testing. For that, it would require some fasting, and you use a different mode within the app, but it comes with these samples of lactose, sorbitol and fructose to test for comment intolerances. It does seem to be as accurate as the big machines we use to measure hydrogen in the clinic are in the laboratory hospital. My problem with it, being practical, is that there are many people who have primarily methane producing bacterial populations. And what if you have actually got something really badly wrong with your intestine . And you are putting all of these symptoms down to irritable gut, nerves and intolerance of foods. And actually you have got Crohns Disease or coeliac disease . Or what if you are a slightly older person . You think you are too busy to go to the doctors for these symptoms that are abdominal and yet you are sitting on a cancer somewhere . And yet you are sitting so, of course, these devices dont eradicate the need for a doctors diagnosis or checking what is in your food. But for some maybe they could provide an extra layer of reassurance. That was lara. Now, iwonder whether you have seen this sort of thing going on recently. This is my face on Donald Trumps body. It was made using deepfakes, an ai algorithm that is capable of taking a face from one video and animating it onto someone elses head in another video. It is fairly easy to get hold of the software, but it does require some technical know how. But recently researchers in israel have published a paper that says face swapping can now be done without all of the complicated training and processing. We train the different components in our algorithm on the vast number of human faces such that it is not adjusted to a particular person but any human face. One of the main dangers of this kind of technology is that if it progresses much more, and it will, it will be utilised by those who are interested in undermining the Publics Trust in news and then it will be able to undermine a new domain. As the tech behind faked video to get more sophisticated, faked speech is also becoming scarily realistic. Mouths can be animated to match words, and the words can be faked also. Most of the deepfake videos do it by either cutting together genuine audio recordings of the subjects or by using an impressionist. As this amazing video illustrates. Better to crumble into dust than wind up an impressionist. The definition of cheap thrill. Like watching Farm Equipment trust is watching an impressionist. But we have also seen software which can listen to your voice, analyse it, and then make you say things you havent. Even birds arent safe from this fakery. In one art installation, at least. Lj rich has been to Somerset House to meet an artist who is deepfaking bird song in a darkened room. So in this room we have got real birds in one area and fake birds generated by an ai in this area. That is a fake bird. That is a real one. Listen closely, and you can hear several species like great tits, robins and chiff chaffs. Artist Alexandra Daisy ginsberg trained her ai birdsong using a generative adversarial network, or gam. This system is often used to make new video from existing video footage, commonly called deepfa kes. It is not the first time she has used tech to make the impossible exist. At her studio there is a digitally derived rhino, a computerised mars landscape, as you do, and even the scent of a long extinct flower. But creating deepfake birdsong is a new challenge for the artist, both technically and ethically. So this is what we used to train the dawn chorus. Deepfakes themselves are worrying in some applications. Deeply worrying. So you may have watched the Mark Zuckerberg false testimony videos. The words look like they are coming from his mouth, and they are not words that he has said. It has been trained to mimic him. In the same way, in this project we are using the same technology essentially to mimic natural birds. It is like trying to drop a pencil on its tip and expecting it to stand up on the end of the pencil. That is how hard it is to train one of these networks. So how do we make a deepfake bird . Start with thousands of real sound recordings. Ajob in itself. That is day one. At this point we are like, that is not going to be a great sound installation. Next, play all these snippets to the gam programme, which then argues with itself about whether something it makes sounds enough like, say, a robin. By day seven, maybe we have something more like this. Add in generous amount of computing time, and you get something that sounds a bit like a bird. Eventually. And then by day ten, it is much more sympathetic. An ethical issue with this project is that we have advanced the technology of deepfakes by working with them. You end up with something that is very lifelike but not real, and that is an uncomfortable thing to listen to. Now, reasonably keen ears can spot the real songbirds from the imposters. And although the end result is a technicalfeat, it also sounds a little strange. And as deepfakes continue to improve, our best defence is to educate ourselves and each other on how to discern what is fake and what is real, whether it is birds or people. That was lj tweeting furiously from Somerset House. And that is all we have time for this week, but if you do want to get hold of us any time during the week, dont forget we live on social media on facebook, youtube, instagram and twitter. Thanks for watching, and we will see you soon. Hello there. Sunshine developing a bit more widely again across parts of scotland and northern ireland, particularly in the west through this afternoon. Lots of you, though, sitting under grey skies for the rest of the day, particularly grey through parts of northern england, wales, towards the far south west. Heres where we will see outbreaks of rain or drizzle continue. Some showers working eastwards across scotland, and like yesterday, fairly bright towards east anglia and the south east with just a few showers through the english channel, but a chilly day for all. Now, as we go through into tonight, clearer skies for scotland, northern ireland, edging a little bit further south, but were likely to see a widespread frost develop. Scotland and northern ireland, though, coldest of all, shown by the blue colours on our temperature chart here. But further south and east, frost free, the cloud stays in place, further rain or drizzle, and into tomorrow it could be quite a windy and cloudy day, east anglia and the south east seeing rain at times close to the coast. The exception rather than the rule, though, because for most, at long last, a welcome window of dry and reasonably sunny weather. The frost clears, the fog largely clears it it a bit lingers throughout the day, though, it will be chilly, with temperatures above freezing. The duke of york has been widely criticised in the press following an interview with the bbc in which he denied having a sexual encounter with a 17 year old in 2001. Virginia roberts says she was groomed by Prince Andrews billionaire paedophile friend Jeffrey Epstein to have sex with the prince. Hes admitted that staying with epstein after the businessman was convicted was a mistake. Heres our royal correspondent nicholas witchell. Your royal highness, weve come to buckingham palace