Technology | The Guardian

Louise Haigh, Labour MP for Sheffield Heeley, tells parliament on Wednesday that an internet troll told her he ‘would not rest until I was murdered’ after she proposed a debate on the far-right group Britain First. Police are investigating the threats

Writer Kate Gray spent the year exploring indie game events around Europe; what she learned about creativity and community has left a lasting impressionOver the summer, I spent a month at Stugan, a Swedish “game development acceleration camp”. That may sound like a faintly sinister concept, but it was in fact stupidly idyllic. The eight-week event, organised by alumni from game publishers Rovio and King, took place in adorable red wooden cabins perched on a hill overlooking a lake – apparently called “Bjursen”, although we just called it The Lake, because we couldn’t pronounce anything correctly. While not working on our game development projects, we watched meteor showers from a nearby mountaintop, swam beneath the Northern Lights, and sat around a campfire getting sloshed on schnapps.The Stugan attendees were from all over the world, but we’d ended up in this tiny corner of Scandinavia, brought together by the one thing we shared: the desire to create and play video games. I turned up three weeks late, and already an outsider as the only journalist, but within a few days I felt like I’d been welcomed as one of the team. There with me were people like Ivan Notaros, an incredibly talented Serbian developer who was ostensibly making a game called House of Flowers based on his experience and knowledge of the war in Yugoslavia in the 90s, but spent much of his time making tiny games, procedurally generated art, and incredible low-res photogrammetry of us as a group. There were Michael and Laura, a married team who were making a game despite being animators rather than programmers, using their artistic style to inform what their project, Thin Air, would become. Continue reading...

In the run-up to the US election, aide to John Podesta spotted phishing email but flagged it as ‘legitimate’ instead of ‘illegitimate’Russian hackers were able to access thousands of emails from a top-ranking Democrat after an aide typed the word “legitimate” instead of “illegitimate” by mistake, an investigation by the New York Times has found.The revelation gives further credence to the CIA’s finding last week that the Kremlin deliberately intervened in the US presidential election to help Donald Trump. The president-elect has angrily denied the CIA’s assessment, calling it “ridiculous”. Continue reading...

As factory manager in the 1970s for Pye Unicam, a manufacturer of scientific instruments in Cambridge, my dad, Bill MacKenzie, introduced advanced equipment from around the world. His talents were noticed by Philips when they bought the company in the mid-1970s, and Bill’s international career began.For 20 years Bill, who has died aged 82, managed and modernised factories for Philips in Turkey, Venezuela, Brazil and Quebec. He was an excellent linguist, and his success and achievements were due in part to communicating with his teams in their own languages. However, he was also a forward thinker, practising corporate social responsibility long before it became commonplace. His genuine desire to improve conditions for people working in those factories earned their admiration and respect. Continue reading...

We were thrilled with your creative contributions last time we asked – a year on, we want to see what you’ve been making in 2016

Google’s timelapse project allows users to see how anywhere in the world has changed in the past 32 years using Landsat satellite images. These images of Australia show the extent of development around its largest cities, as well as the changes brought by projects such as the Cubbie Station cotton plantation in Queensland, the Fimiston goldmine in Western Australia and mining development in the New South Wales Hunter Valley.Google’s satellite timelapses show the inconvenient truth about our planet Continue reading...

Agency reportedly believes individuals acting for Moscow hacked Democrat party emails and gave them to WikiLeaksUS intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia interfered in last month’s presidential election to boost Donald Trump’s bid for the White House, according to reports.A secret CIA assessment found that Russian operatives covertly interfered in the election campaign in an attempt to ensure the Republican candidate’s victory, the Washington Post reported, citing officials briefed on the matter.

With an estimated 50 million users on Tinder, how are digital platforms like this changing the way we date? And the way we think about love? Leah Green reaches out to Moira Weigel and Dr Jenny Bristow in search of answersWith more and more of us turning to digital platforms in the hope of finding love, we ask whether there’s any truth in the claim they are the harbingers of romance’s death. Further – what can their popularity tell us about our ever-changing conceptions of love itself? Continue reading...

Ride-share company releases guidelines that include no vomiting and other ‘not OK’ behaviors that could see people permanently banned from serviceUber released a new set of rules for passengers on Thursday, banning vandalism, “vomiting due to excessive alcohol consumption” and flirting.

Nintendo’s legendary platformer runs and jumps on to smartphones on 15 December, but will it spring to new heights or plumb the depths?Quirky social app Miitomo wasn’t the “proper” game fans were looking for when Nintendo announced its long-anticipated move into smartphone games. Super Mario Run almost certainly is that game though.Unveiled at Apple’s WWDC event in June, it will be an iOS exclusive when it launches on 15 December, although an Android port is expected to follow in 2017. Continue reading...

Ranking of 12 highest-earning YouTube stars by Forbes shows they are increasingly monetising their popularity on platformTheir talents range from comedy to gaming and from singing to playing pranks, often captured with nothing more than a handheld camera. But YouTubers are at the vanguard of an industry worth tens of millions of pounds.Forbes’ ranking of the 12 highest-earning YouTube stars shows they collectively earned £55m in the past 12 months, an increase of 23% on last year.

Unanimous decision holds that patent violators do not have to surrender profits from sales of products that use stolen designs for componentsThe US supreme court on Tuesday sided with Samsung in its big-money smartphone patent fight with Apple, throwing out an appeals court ruling that said the South Korean company had to pay a $399m penalty to its American rival for copying key iPhone designs.

The tech companies plan to create a shared database of ‘unique digital fingerprints’ that can identify images and videos promoting terrorismGoogle, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft have pledged to work together to identify and remove extremist content on their platforms through an information-sharing initiative.

Fumito Ueda’s PlayStation 4 title has been a decade in the making. From the game’s exquisite animation to its emotional intelligence, it has been worth the wait“I awoke to find myself in a strange cave.”This is the fairy tale opening of Fumito Ueda’s heavily anticipated game, 10 years in the making and only the forty-six year old Japanese director’s third major work. But then, of course, the first two – Ico and Shadow of Colossus – are legendary. Film director Guillermo del Toro once described them as the medium’s sole masterpieces; anticipation is accordingly high. Continue reading...

Search company removes antisemitic and sexist autocomplete phrases after Observer article highlights offensive resultsGoogle has altered autocomplete suggestions in its search engine after it was alerted to antisemitic, sexist and racists entries.

Electric-car evangelist is the target of concerted negative online campaign linked to influential rightwing networkHe is the charismatic Silicon Valley entrepreneur who believes his many companies - including the electric car manufacturer Tesla Motors, solar power firm Solar City, and SpaceX, which makes reusable space rockets – can help resist man-made climate change.South African-born Elon Musk is a billionaire green evangelist, a bete noire of the fossil fuels industry who talks about colonising Mars and believes it may be possible that we’re living in a computer simulation. Continue reading...

BS Detector was created by Daniel Sieradski (not Facebook) and was a reaction to the network’s failure to flag false information – until Facebook blocked itIt’s a fable for our times. Someone creates a tool that flags fake news on Facebook with big red warning signs. Someone else installs said tool, forgets about it, and then mistakenly assumes that the red warning signs are evidence of Facebook’s own efforts to tackle the problem. A reputable technology website then writes a story about Facebook’s new experiment without doing any fact checking, thus generating its own piece of fake news. The icing on the cake? The fake news detector fails to recognize it as fake news.Related: Fake news: an insidious trend that's fast becoming a global problem Continue reading...