Technology | The Guardian

Struggling with Blizzard’s team shooter? This guide will help with everything from exploiting hidden shield effects to synchronising ultimate attacksBlizzard’s acclaimed team-based shooter is delighting millions with its brash visual style and surprising tactical depth. But while there are many online guides drilling down into the specific nuts-and-bolts of each character, some players are still struggling with the fundamentals of this fresh take on the first-person shooter.So let us take you through some basics, some not-so-basics and some dirty secrets. Continue reading...

Artificial intelligence can now win a game, recognise your face, even appeal against your parking ticket. But can it do the stuff even humans find tricky?One video, for me, changed everything. It’s footage from the old Atari game Breakout, the one where you slide a paddle left and right along the bottom of the screen, trying to destroy bricks by bouncing a ball into them. You may have read about the player of the game: an algorithm developed by DeepMind, the British artificial intelligence company whose AlphaGo programme also beat one of the greatest ever Go players, Lee Sedol, earlier this year.Perhaps you expect a computer to be good at computer games? Once they know what to do, they certainly do it faster and more consistently than any human. DeepMind’s Breakout player knew nothing, however. It was not programmed with instructions on how the game works; it wasn’t even told how to use the controls. All it had was the image on the screen and the command to try to get as many points as possible. Continue reading...

Kayvon Beykpour, the 27-year-old developer behind the live-streaming app, on the competition – and why footage of a puddle in Newcastle made such a splashIn March 2015, Twitter announced that it had acquired Periscope, a little-known startup. In the year since, the company’s app – which lets users stream video of themselves live from anywhere in the world – has been used to broadcast footage of refugees crossing the Turkish border, bomb scares at football matches, and a puddle in Drummond, Newcastle. Now, Periscope looks like it’s ahead of the game – and Facebook has started ploughing millions into live video.Related: Periscope phone app gives millions a way to live-stream their lives Continue reading...

Equally at home on tarmac and trail, this unusual hybrid from America offers the best of both biking worldsIn a world of carbon mania, Cannondale has remained resolutely loyal to the joys of aluminium. In this US builder’s hands, it is light, strong, sleek, reliable and – in a frame such as this – just as expensive. But the Slate 105, which has just been crowned Eurobike’s ‘best road bike’, is also a true game changer. It is two bikes in one: a road bike designed to go off-road, or maybe a trail bike with a fondness for tarmac. It features unusually relaxed geometry, an eccentric one-armed front suspension fork (called a Lefty Oliver) and a combination of heavy duty disc brakes and a road-going drivetrain. This means the Slate is both light and stiff for those long- distance schlepps, yet also agile and sturdy for rough ground. It’s a two-for-one fun machine…Price: £2,499

The parent company that owns the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times said it would now be known as a ‘content curation and monetization company’Tribune Publishing, the parent company that owns several storied and proud newspapers in the US including the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, announced on Thursday that it would be changing its name to “tronc Inc.”That’s with one lowercase t and one uppercase I.

The central character in this brilliant new game is haunted by a deadly illness – something with which creator Alex Preston is all-too familiarHyper Light Drifter is a game about struggle. Released in March to wide critical acclaim, it opens with a wordless three-minute animation in which an unknown land is ravaged by a blinding explosion; a lake of blood forms and quickly fills with the corpses of alien creatures. It looks like a standard science-fiction tale of doomed planets and extraterrestrial invasion, but it turns out these scenes of massacre are the visions of a single person, the titular drifter.Put in the eight or so hours to beat Hyper Light Drifter and it’s likely you won’t learn much more about its mysterious world. Ostensibly an action role-playing game, it borrows the best parts of classic titles such as The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Diablo, to produce something that looks like a classic 1990s console adventure. You dash through lush woods and crystal lagoons, and you fight poison wolves and old knights with an electric blue sword and a modifiable gun. Yet not much is told of the world along the way save the occasional slideshow of images that stand-in for the spoken words of the frightened locals. Continue reading...

Microsoft has announced its email program will stop working with services including Hotmail, Live Mail, MSN Mail and Outlook.com Continue reading...

The investor has released her annual batch of analysis and predictions, and says ‘always listening’ devices like Amazon’s Echo are set to boomIn the future, you probably won’t use your keyboard to get to this website.So predicts of one of the internet’s top oracles, Mary Meeker, a partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. On Wednesday Meeker, a long-time investor and financial analyst, unveiled her annual predictions of the technology industry’s future at a conference in southern California. The two big takeaways: people will do more talking to their computers and less typing on them. Oh – and the technology sector’s days of easy, red-hot growth may be behind it because an increasing percentage of the Earth’s population already owns a smartphone. Continue reading...

Cybersecurity reports reveal only a portion of all cyber-attacks on US central bank and identifies 51 cases of ‘information disclosure’ involving the Fed’s boardThe Federal Reserve detected more than 50 cyber breaches between 2011 and 2015, with several incidents described internally as “espionage”, according to Fed records.The US central bank’s staff suspected hackers or spies in many of the incidents, the records show. The Fed’s computer systems play a critical role in global banking and hold confidential information on discussions about monetary policy that drives financial markets. Continue reading...

This year’s instalment allows players to build their own on-screen Skylander characters from hundreds of componentsWhen the first Skylanders title arrived in 2011, it did much more than revive the career of cutesy PlayStation hero Spyro the Dragon – it invented a whole new type of video game.The so-called “toys-to-life” genre, mixes on-screen action with physical action figures that can be placed on a RFID-equipped portal and then digitally transferred into the game. Kids loved it because they got to collect cool figures as well as play a diverting action adventure; parents were less sure because the growing range of plastic toys was getting expensive after five instalments – especially when you factored in the rival franchises: Disney Infinity, Lego Dimensions and Nintendo’s Amiibo collection. Continue reading...

EU heads to take 57km maiden voyage in €11bn Gotthard base tunnel on WednesdayMeasuring 57 km in length, situated 2.3km deep under the Alps and having cost €11bn to complete, Switzerland’s Gotthard base tunnel is more than just the world’s longest and most expensive tunnelling project.At a time of rising nationalism and closing borders, European leaders will also hope it can serve as a reminder that the continent can still smash barriers when it manages to pull together.

From steampunk to surrealism, Star Wars to country cottages and futuristic cities to wildernesses, these aesthetics impress Continue reading...

Michael Hayden talks at Hay festival about Edward Snowden and how Facebook, not government, is new privacy battlegroundBritish people are not demanding more transparency from the intelligence services as loudly as Americans, the former director of the US National Security Agency (NSA) and CIA has said.Michael Hayden played a pivotal, leading role in American intelligence until he was replaced as director of the CIA shortly into the presidency of Barack Obama. Continue reading...

Rare Lorenz teleprinter, part of Hitler’s encryption equipment, snapped up by National Museum of ComputingFor codebreakers with the allied forces, it was more important a discovery than the Enigma machine, offering encryption for the Nazi command that, when cracked, would hasten the end of the second world war and lead to huge breakthroughs in modern computing.

As you point your phone at everything from Notre Dame to a slice of chocolate cake, remember these images will take on significance only after you have goneSummer begins again. Millions of people are packing their bags to get away from it all. Their eyes are ready for fresh sights: sun-drenched beaches, famous museums, parasolled cafes.More eyes than ever before will, however, see nothing fresher than the screens of their own smartphones. They will not need to look at sunsets and palm trees, for they will have flawless copies on their devices (click!). The great scale of the Notre Dame cathedral, in Paris, or the Colosseum, in Rome, will bring no risk of eyestrain: they will be able to see the grandeur of these sites in harmless digital miniature (click!). Screens will give them their own versions of the Mona Lisa or Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, versions that have this significant advantage over the originals: they can be owned, stored and used as material for a personal online story. Continue reading...

Finance minister Michel Sapin rules out UK-style deal with Google or McDonald’s and says more cases could followFrance will “go all the way” to ensure multinationals operating on its soil pay their taxes while more cases could follow after Google and McDonald’s were targeted in tax raids, the finance minister, Michel Sapin, has said.Sapin also ruled out negotiating a deal with Google on back taxes, as Britain did in January. “We’ll go all the way. There could be other cases,” Sapin said. Continue reading...

Driverless lorries designed to work specifically in underground tunnels are becoming a reality. How long before they appear on roads?In a disused military aircraft hangar buried deep in a granite hillside, Johan Tofeldt flicks a switch on the future of mining.“Look, no hands!” he beams, as the truck lurches backwards and executes a precise reverse. “It’s a little heavy on the clutch, but then it’s not designed for driver comfort.” Continue reading...

CMA claims some firms may be breaching consumer laws by changing storage terms at any time, for any reason and without noticeCloud storage providers are treating customers unfairly and risk users losing access to their photos and other personal possessions, the competition regulator said.An investigation by the Competition and Markets Authority found providers offered contract terms and practices that could breach consumer law. Continue reading...

Projects to install undersea cables from US to Spain would ensure fast enough connectivity for tech companies’ virtual reality and live video servicesFacebook and Microsoft are going underwater.The two technology companies announced on Thursday they are to install an undersea cable from the east coast of the US to Spain to help speed up their global internet services. Continue reading...

Those of a certain age may remember a BBC TV programme called Tomorrow’s World that reported on technological, scientific and medical innovations (If robots are the future of work, where do humans fit in? 24 May). The way these were described suggested an end to drudgery – soul-destroying jobs like stacking supermarket shelves. We’d all have shorter working hours and longer holidays; the production of abundant food would abolish famine; medical advances would eradicate deadly diseases like malaria and cholera. Science and technology would be used for the benefit of all humanity. We would all have longer, healthier, happier lives. It sounds like a utopian pipe-dream now that several of the advances talked about in Tomorrow’s World have come to pass. The patents and rights to these scientific, medical and technological advances have been acquired by big business and big pharma and used solely to make huge profits for the shareholders. Too many of us are now slaves to technology, working longer hours for less pay, with no holidays because of zero-hours contracts, living in glorified rabbit hutches, eating unhealthy, mass produced convenience foods and, in what free time we have, kept docile by TV talent shows, soap operas, football and endless repeats of Friends – the modern day equivalent of bread and circuses, the Roman emperors’ means of pacifying the plebs. Yes, the future may be brighter. But only for the few.

Steve Easterbrook’s comments came days after one of the fast-food giant’s former US CEOs suggested that a higher minimum wage could lead to using robotsMcRobots are not coming to a McDonald’s near you just yet, according to Steve Easterbrook, the company’s chief executive officer.His comments came two days after one of the fast-food giant’s former US chief executives suggested that a minimum wage of $15 an hour could lead to McDonald’s replacing its workers with robots. Easterbrook was speaking at the company’s annual shareholders’ meeting when he said that technology is not likely to lead to “job elimination” at McDonald’s. Continue reading...

Boost your mindfulness and try to rise above digital distractions with these apps to carve out time for peaceful reflectionThe first rule of mindfulness might be to switch your smartphone off. From checking emails at bedtime to constant, needy push notifications from mobile games, our phones can often feel like they amplify our daily stress.Turning to your smartphone for respite from the digital clutter may feel as ridiculous as holding an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in a pub, with your inbox, social networks and Candy Crush Saga just a couple of taps away. Continue reading...

Our new technology podcast, Chips With Everything, is coming next weekA month ago we told you that our audio team was working on a new digital culture and technology podcast. Today, we’re ecstatic to be able to share some exciting details about the new show.The show, titled Chips With Everything, is our new podcast all about when people and technology collide. We’ll be covering stories about how tech influences and impacts our lives on a daily basis; about how the digital world around us makes our lives better ... or not. And much, much more. All from the same team that creates all of the Guardian’s other brilliant shows. Continue reading...

Mobile provider claims network level adblocking is attempt to provide greater privacy, lower data costs and better experience accessing web on devicesMobile provider Three is to run a 24-hour adblocking trial in the UK in the first step towards removing ads for all its customers.The company is planning to contact customers and ask them to sign up for the trial, which will take place in mid June. Continue reading...

The place to talk about games and other things that matterIt’s Wednesday. Continue reading...

Music streaming service nevertheless recorded widening losses in 2015 due to heavy investment and fiercer competitionRevenues at Spotify, the world’s biggest music streaming service, surged 80% last year to nearly €2bn (£1.5bn) but losses widened as it invested heavily amid tough competition from the likes of Apple Music and Tidal.Revenues jumped to €1.95bn, as the growth rate accelerated from 45% in 2014 and 74% in 2013. Most of the firm’s revenues comes from subscriptions, which rose 78% to €1.7bn, while advertising revenues nearly doubled to €196m. Continue reading...

Among the changes, you’ll soon be able to quote and retweet yourself, while infamous ‘.@’ will be no moreThe rumours are true: Twitter is going to stop counting photos and videos in its 140-character limit.But the changes go far beyond what was leaked to Bloomberg in mid-May, and will alter many of the rules that users of the service have come to take for granted. Continue reading...

With its open-world environment and emphasis on crafting, this is an interesting sequel, marred by glitches and frame rate issuesFor years, the mainstream games industry has been accused of lacking ambition. The default strategy is to rely on big-budget franchises that get updated on an annual basis – until they stop selling.It’s refreshing, then, when a developer attempts something that palpably aims to push boundaries. That’s what Dambuster Studios has done with Homefront: The Revolution, a fully open-world first-person shooter with an unusual cooperative multiplayer mode and an eye-catching story premise. Unfortunately, the resulting game is beset by technical problems. Continue reading...

Halfbrick Studios, the makers of the billion-selling fruit-slicing game, have announced plans to convert it into a live-action family comedyMobile phone game Fruit Ninja is to follow The Angry Birds Movie into cinemas, in a move sparked by the latter’s impressive box-office results.According to the Hollywood Reporter, Halfbrick Studios, the makers of the popular smartphone fruit-slicing game, have partnered with Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters producer Tripp Vinson to create “a live-action family comedy” inspired by the game. Few details of the proposed project have emerged, other than that the script is due to be written by JP Lavin and Chad Damiani, previously responsible for the as-yet-unproduced crime romance Kamikaze Love, which appeared on the 2007 Black List of most-liked screenplays.

When Annabelle Narey posted a negative review of a building firm on Mumsnet, the last thing on her mind was copyright infringementWriting a bad review online has always run a small risk of opening yourself up to a defamation claim. But few would expect to be told that they had to delete their review or face a lawsuit over another part of the law: copyright infringement.Yet that’s what happened to Annabelle Narey after she posted a negative review of a building firm on Mumsnet. Continue reading...

Organised crime believed to be behind coordinated raids across stores in JapanMembers of an international crime syndicate are suspected of stealing more than 1.4bn yen (US$12.7m) from cash machines in Japan in the space of less than three hours, in an audacious heist that involved thousands of coordinated withdrawals.

App-inspired film takes $39m in debut weekend, with young audiences praising movie despite critics’ mixed reviewsThe Angry Birds Movie soared to $39m in its debut weekend at the US box office, knocking Captain America: Civil War off its perch at the top. New adult comedies Neighbors 2 and The Nice Guys struggled to get their footing, according to comScore estimates on Sunday.Related: The Angry Birds Movie review – game spin-off that doesn't quite reach Lego Movie levels Continue reading...

Participants focus on ‘thinking nothing’ in public park in Seoul as retreat from stress and digital overloadDozens of people in one of the world’s most wired nations have taken part in South Korea’s “space out” competition aimed at promoting a life free from stress and information overload.About 60 contestants spent 90 minutes sitting in a public park in Seoul without talking, sleeping, eating or using any electronic devices during the event – under the slogan of Relax Your Brain. Continue reading...

Labels are facing off with Google’s video service over revenues and rights, yet it’s also their biggest partner for streaming musicYouTube and the music industry? It’s complicated. YouTube is the biggest music-streaming service in the world by some distance, but it’s also the biggest villain in the eyes of many within the music industry.This week, British industry body the BPI has attacked YouTube again over the “value gap” (sometimes “value grab” in the US) between the number of songs being streamed on its service, and the money that those streams are being generated for rightsholders and musicians. Continue reading...

GV, the investment arm of Google’s parent company, is revealed to have backed online lender which now falls under ‘dangerous products’ categoryJust days after Google proudly announced it had banned the morally dubious payday loan sector from its advertising platforms, its parent company has been revealed to be a repeat investor in a payday loan lender.GV, the venture-capital investment arm of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has backed online lender LendUp since before its launch in 2012 and has provided capital for every equity round LendUp has done since, the Wall Street Journal first reported. Continue reading...

The Iraqi government cuts off fixed-line and mobile broadband services to discourage children from smuggling mobile phones into state testsIraq has been turning off the internet across the country to stop children cheating in exams.

A startup founded by ex-Google, Tesla and Apple engineers believes self-driving truck are a good fit for the nation’s long, straight, lonely roadsEveryone in San Francisco these days wants to build a self-driving car.So in a company town that prides itself on going against the grain, this startup wants to build a self-driving truck. Continue reading...

US tech firm says Britain’s membership of the EU makes it ‘one of the most attractive places in Europe’ to make investmentsMicrosoft is the latest business to come out in support of the UK remaining in the EU, in a letter to more than 5,000 of its UK staff. The tech firm said Britain’s membership in the union made it one of “the most attractive places in Europe” to make investments.In a letter to employees on Tuesday, Microsoft’s chief executive in the UK, Michel Van der Bel, said: “We appreciate and respect that there are a range of reasons that motivate people on both sides of the debate, but as a business that is very committed to this country, our view is that the UK should remain in the EU. Continue reading...

Inspired by thousands of romantic novels, technique creates verse that rivals that of Douglas Adams’s VogonsAfter its attempts to digest romance novels, one of Google’s artificial intelligence projects is now accidentally writing poetry, some of which would make the fictional Vogons proud.

The former Uber driver says his support for the settlement in a landmark lawsuit seeking to reclassify drivers as employees was obtained ‘under false pretenses’The original plaintiff in the landmark class-action lawsuit seeking to reclassify Uber drivers as employees has spoken out against the settlement and accused the drivers’ attorney of obtaining his support for the agreement “under false pretenses, duress, and misinformation”.Douglas O’Connor, a former Uber driver, filed suit against the ride-hail company in August 2013, kicking off a three-year legal battle that resulted in a proposed settlement of $84m on 21 April. It allowed Uber to continue classifying drivers as independent contractors. Continue reading...

UK surveillance agency launches official account as part of attempt to improve its image after Edward Snowden revelationsSpooks at GCHQ have been snooping on our tweets for years, but now members of the public who use Twitter can see theirs following the launch of the surveillance agency’s first official account.More than 10 years after Twitter began, GCHQ dipped its public toe into the social networking water with the words “hello, world” just after 11am on Monday. Continue reading...

Jarett Kobek’s self-published diatribe against San Francisco startup culture has become a sensation, winning plaudits from the New York Times and Bret Easton EllisAmong the poetry racks on the second floor of San Francisco’s legendary City Lights bookstore, an audience member is confronting the author Jarett Kobek with a spirited defense of the revolutionary power of Twitter and Bernie Sanders. His harangue, delivered during a book reading in February, was in atavistic beatnik dialect. “I do Tweet about it, Jack!” he shouted, stirring an erstwhile polite audience to shout things like “Sit the fuck down!” and “Let him talk!”It’s hard to imagine a more appropriate reception for Kobek’s second novel, I Hate the Internet, a savage satire of internet culture set in 2013 San Francisco.. It centers on the fallout from a surreptitious recording posted to Youtube, its narrator describing real-world events of the city rendered in the hyperbolic language that has come to represent online interactions, and diverging into off-topic invective to expose its “ intolerable bullshit”. Continue reading...

Watch as a drone is taken down by Russian man with a spearWhat’s the greatest weakness of a drone? Partial marks if you said an eagle, a radio frequency jammer, or another drone.But no, the real answer is “Russian historical re-enactors armed with a spear”, as this video from Russia’s Rusborg gathering earlier this month reveals. Continue reading...