Technology | The Guardian

They’re the best way to listen to music streamed through – or stored on – our phones. But which speakers are easiest to use, and which offer the best sound quality? We put six to the test£499; five amp drivers, 250W total output; AirPlay, Spotify, Bluetooth Continue reading...

‘Robo-mermaid’ able to reach depths too dangerous for human divers retrieves vase from wreck of Louis XIV’s flagshipRobotics scientists at the US’s Stanford University have achieved a remarkable first: they have successfully sent an automated avatar – which they describe as a robo-mermaid – down to an ancient shipwreck to retrieve a vase from the sunken vessel.La Lune, the flagship of Louis XIV of France, sank 20 miles off the south coast city of Toulon in 1664. Only a few dozen of the hundreds of men on board survived. The wreck, which lies at a depth of 100 metres, had never been disturbed until the OceanOne robot craft reached it two weeks ago and recovered the grapefruit-size vase. Continue reading...

New rules that slash roaming charges for using mobile phones in other European countries have come into effectControversial roaming charges holidaymakers pay to use their mobile phones in another European country will come down dramatically from today, and are set to disappear altogether from 2017 following EU intervention.For several years the European commission has been battling with the big mobile providers to force through cuts to the cost of making cross-border calls and using data in another country – the much hated roaming charges that leave many in “bill shock”. Continue reading...

If you’re one of those people who have been putting off responding to messages and are feeling the burden of guilt, here’s your quick chance to make amends“Adulthood is emailing ‘sorry for the delayed response!’ back and forth until one of you dies” – so the viral tweet goes.If this sparks recognition – and a twinge of guilt – the second annual Email Debt Forgiveness Day on Saturday offers the chance to make amends.

Tech firms such as Snapchat, Pinterest and Twitter are paying summer interns as much as $10,000 a month plus benefits, double the average US national wageSnapchat pays summer interns $10,000 a month plus $1,500 for housing, according to new survey data that highlights the jaw-droppingly high wages that Silicon Valley’s top tech companies pay students for summer gigs.The data, from former University of California Berkeley student Rodney Folz, comes from an anonymous survey of more than 500 college students who have landed highly coveted summer internships in tech, which are often engineering positions. Continue reading...

Video launched via Twitter Friday as part of efforts to raise awareness for the Invictus Games, an annual sporting competition for wounded military veteransBarack Obama left more than just cuddly toys behind at Kensington Palace, judging from a newly released comedy sketch that suggests the British royals have also developed a taste for White House-style social media promotion.The 40-second video routine featuring the Queen, Prince Harry, the president and first lady of the United States launched via Twitter on Friday as part of efforts to raise awareness for the Invictus Games, an annual sporting competition for wounded military veterans. Continue reading...

In Germany, they call them smombies – smartphone users who stagger about cities like zombies, oblivious to the risk. Now the city of Augsburg is fighting backThe word “smombie” is one of the most recent additions to the German language. Last November, the term – a mashup of “smartphone” and “zombie”, referring to oblivious smartphone users staggering around cities like the undead – was voted Youth Word of the Year in Germany.The disease is virulent. A recent study of 14,000 pedestrians in Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels, Paris, Rome and Stockholm found that 17% of people used their smartphone while walking. The heaviest users were 25 to 35-year-olds: almost a quarter of them exhibited smombie-esque behaviour. Continue reading...

The cute monster battling fun is extremely familiar, but Yo-Kai watch has plenty of its own charmYou won’t find many Yo-kai Watch reviews that don’t touch on the obvious parallels between it and Pokémon. Capturing cutesy monsters to fight for you, creating and managing a team of six on your adventures, giving them names and items to hold – it will all be familiar to fans of Pikachu and co.But unlike previous pretenders to the poké-throne, Yo-kai Watch is killing it in terms of sales. With its sequel outselling Pokemon Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire in Japan in 2014, we might just be witnessing the rise of the next big thing in acceptable kawaii animal combat. Continue reading...

Forgotten 300 was taken down in mid-March after NSW Police complaints that some of its content constituted bullyingNSW Police is being urged to withdraw its complaint against a Facebook page set up to support past and present officers struggling with mental illness.Related: 'I'd just burst into tears': the emergency workers dealing with PTSD Continue reading...

The cost of a one-minute phone call from a BT landline will be a minimum of 30p, while broadband customers will pay at least £2 a month moreMillions of households with BT landline and broadband services will see their prices rise in the summer.

The e-commerce giant saw a 28% rise in sales on same point last year, and 64% sales boost for Amazon Web Services, but costs remain a key factor for its futureAmazon.com traditionally has only faced one obstacle in its quest to infiltrate every aspect of consumers’ lives: it often lost money.For a straight year now, that’s no longer the case. Continue reading...

Industry giants’ call for biofuels over electric and fuel-efficient cars puts Europe’s carbon emissions targets at risk, say expertsVW and Shell have united to try to block Europe’s push for electric cars and more efficient cars, saying biofuels should be at heart of efforts to green the industry instead.The EU is planning two new fuel efficiency targets for 2025 and 2030 to help meet promises made at the Paris climate summit last December. Continue reading...

Could this be the most chaotic, disruptive and confusing era in games industry history?The history of the games industry has always been characterised by waves of panic and destruction. From the great crash of 1983, through to the rise of the smartphone, there have always been pundits on hand to tell us the end is nigh for consoles, PCs and for gaming itself.In this edition we look the collapse of big studios, the shortening of console lifecycles, and the dawn of strange new ideas like virtual reality and punk rock game design.

Wentworth and Karen Maynard file lawsuit against the company and the 18-year-old driver who was trying to get Snapchat filter to read 100 miles per hourA couple is suing Snapchat, claiming that the social media app’s “speed filter” tempted a woman to drive too fast, causing a crash.Media outlets report Wentworth and Karen Maynard filed a lawsuit in Spalding County state court against Snapchat and 18-year-old driver Christal McGee. Continue reading...

Bureau will not tell Apple about the security flaw it exploited to break into the iPhone 5C, in part because it didn’t buy the rights to the technical detailsWhen the FBI bought a hacking tool to break into an iPhone, it wasn’t sure what exactly it got for its $1.3m.On Wednesday, the FBI confirmed it wouldn’t tell Apple about the security flaw it exploited to break inside the iPhone 5C of San Bernardino gunman Syed Farook in part, because the bureau says it didn’t buy the rights to the technical details of the hacking tool. Continue reading...

Transport secretary tells MPs that incident reported by BA pilot on 17 April is now not thought to have involved droneA passenger plane believed to have been struck by an unknown object as it approached Heathrow is now not thought to have been hit by a drone, the government has said.The pilot of a British Airways flight from Geneva reported a suspected collision with a drone on 17 Aprilbut the transport secretary, Patrick McLoughlin, told MPs on Thursday that experts believed this was not “a drone incident”. Continue reading...

Since the early 1990s, John has stored all his records using the Superbase database, but he reckons it won’t run in Windows 10. Are there still ways to run 16-bit software or is it time to move on?All my personal records since the very early 1990s, my record catalogue, and my family research – which has been deposited as data DVDs in County Records in England and State Records in Australia – are based on 16-bit programming in Superbase.I’ve alerted the various organisations that my data DVDs will not install in Microsoft Windows 10. At this stage, they will have to keep PCs running earlier editions of Windows, but this is not a satisfactory long-term bet for them or me.Microsoft and the Superbase programmers have done well if a personal computer program has worked for more than 35 years, but you really should have moved on before now. Schofield’s First Law of Computing says that you should never put data into a program unless you know exactly how to get it out. Perhaps I should also have specified “when”. Continue reading...

Deal worth $83m to put GPS satellite into orbit on a Falcon 9 rocket ends Lockheed Martin and Boeing’s monopoly on military launchesThe US air force has awarded Elon Musk’s SpaceX an $83m contract to launch a GPS satellite, ending the monopoly that Lockheed Martin and Boeing have held on military space launches for more than a decade.

Stocks soar in after-hours trading on news that net income was $1.51bn for the first three months of the year, up from $512m in first quarter of 2015Facebook took the occasion of positive first quarter results to announce a plan to consolidate power within the company with CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg.Facebook’s net income nearly tripled year-over-year, according to first-quarter results filed on Wednesday, sending the company’s stock soaring more than 8% in after-hours trading, and bucking the trend of disappointing results in the tech sector. Continue reading...

Federal Trade Commission had reached settlement agreement with Apple and Google in 2014 on issue of parental consent and passwords for in-app purchasesA federal judge has ruled that Amazon is liable for in-app purchases made by children, the latest development in a suit filed by the Federal Trade Commission in 2014.The FTC reached a settlement agreement with Apple and Google in 2014 about in-app purchases made by children without parental consent but sued Amazon when the Seattle company did not agree to settle. All three companies now require a password for in-app purchases or an opt-in to enable purchases without a password. Continue reading...

New console, which remains a mystery, is thought to be a follow-up of the Wii U and could be a hybrid games and home entertainment systemNintendo has confirmed that its next gaming platform, the NX, will be released globally in March 2017.Unusually, the company made the announcement in its quarterly financial statement, telling shareholders: “For our dedicated video game platform business, Nintendo is currently developing a gaming platform codenamed ‘NX’ with a brand-new concept. NX will be launched in March 2017 globally.” Continue reading...

Flagship smartphone finally cuts it at the top end with great camera, good screen, 1.5-day battery life and snappy performanceHTC, once a smartphone champion, has been struggling in recent years at the top end with handsets that have just missed the mark. But celebrating its 10 anniversary of smartphones manufacturing, has Taiwanese company finally cracked it with the HTC 10?

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

Much of the falloff is attributable to the stuggling Chinese economy, still the second-largest market in the world for Apple products behind the USApple shares dropped on Tuesday afternoon after the company reported a nearly 13% fall in quarterly sales, the first time revenue at the world’s most valuable publicly traded company has declined in 13 years.As of publication time, shares were down more than 7% without appearing to hit bottom. Revenue was predicted by Apple itself to fall between $50bn and $53bn – it came in on the low end of that range, with a final tally of $50.6bn, a 13% drop. Continue reading...

An anonymous whistleblower claims to have new proof of human rights abuses, galvanising opposition onlineIn a bid to upend years of secrecy in the country dubbed “Africa’s North Korea”, a new Facebook page is publishing documents claiming to show how the Eritrean government abuses its citizens.In just two months, SACTISM – Classified Documents of the Dwindling PFDJ has garnered more than 16,000 followers on the social media site by alleging to have new information about human rights violations committed at the hands of president Isaias Afewerki’s ruling party, the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice. Continue reading...

Google, Uber, Lyft, Ford and Volvo – all developing self-driving car technology – have formed a lobbying group to take on regulation of autonomous vehiclesIf your self-driving car crashes, who gets sued? Google, Uber, and Ford would rather it be you, according to some experts.Tech companies making self-driving cars could become better protected under the law than those car’s owners, experts warn, as the announcement came of a powerful new coalition of automakers and big tech companies forming to take on US government regulations around self-driving vehicles. Continue reading...

Sites charge $100 a year to access private photos and videos of non-porn stars in the nude, usually posted by spurned ex-lovers – but it doesn’t end thereSix years ago, Rebekah Wells Googled her name to see what turned up. The results horrified her: nude photos of herself taken by her ex-boyfriend, along with her name and address, on commercial porn sites such as ImageFlea, ImageEarn and PinkMeth.She went to the police in her home town of Naples, Florida, and a sheriff’s deputy was assigned to her case. One year later she became romantically involved with the deputy, and after the relationship fizzled, Wells claims the police officer threatened to upload a new batch of her nudes. Continue reading...

Ubisoft’s New York-based strategy shooter is the company’s most successful ever release – but players say the experience is being ruined by cheatsIn financial terms, Tom Clancy’s The Division is a hugely successful video game. Released in March by French publisher Ubisoft, this New York-set third-person shooter quickly became the best selling new franchise of all time, generating more than $330m in sales in its first five days. But, just over a month after release, the best selling game in Ubisoft’s 30-year history looks to be heading for catastrophe.The Division has a cheating problem. Not just one, either, but a critical mass of glitches, exploits, and hacks that – in the eyes of the playerbase at least – threaten the game’s immediate and long-term future on the PC. Players stack items for unintended bonuses, farm missions in seconds, and – worst of all – using third-party hacks to cheat in player vs player (PvP) competition. Continue reading...

Company pays authors based on how much of their books have been read, but fraudsters are taking advantage - and it’s not Amazon that suffersAuthors are earning less from Amazon’s new pay-per-page model than they should be, thanks to a rash of scammers taking advantage of the company’s self-publishing platform.The scammers are exploiting a loophole in Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited service – which allows subscribers to read an unlimited number of books for a flat monthly fee – to earn much more money from short books than they ever would if they were sold fairly. Continue reading...

Australia records 12.5% of first episode’s piracy via BitTorrent, India comes second, followed by the US and the UKThe first episode of Game of Thrones’ sixth season has become the most-watched program in the history of pay television in Australia – but that’s not the only record it broke after premiering on Monday.Related: Game of Thrones recap: season six, episode one – The Red Woman Continue reading...

World money exchange tells 11,000 financial institutions to update their software after US$81m was stolen from account of Bangladesh central bankSwift, the global financial network that banks use to transfer billions of dollars every day, has warned its customers it is aware of “a number of recent cyber incidents” where attackers had sent fraudulent messages over its system.

BeautifulPeople.com boasts ‘online dating for beautiful people only’, and at first there’s a joy to watching the mighty fall. But it could happen to any of us

Chairman recommends that the body approve the third-largest US cable company’s plan to purchase the second-largest, as well as Bright House Networks

Penetration testing unearths backdoor installed on Facebook’s company servers had been logging employee credentials and exposing securityHackers gained entry to Facebook’s internal corporate network for several months, with access to hundreds of the social network’s employee usernames and passwords.

Mötley Crüe and Sixx:AM co-founder wants to swell the chorus of criticism of Google service from musicians and persuade it to up its payoutsMötley Crüe co-founder Nikki Sixx is the latest musician to criticise YouTube over the royalties it pays out for music video streams. Sixx’s call for the video site to pay more to musicians for using their videos is part of a campaign by a coalition of prominent musicians launching this week, with pressure to be put first on YouTube, then on US legislators.Sixx and James Michael – partner in his current band Sixx:AM – are calling for more artists to speak out and put pressure on YouTube to match the royalty payouts of music streaming rivals. A number of big names are expected to speak out this week. Continue reading...

Volvo’s flagship SUV is already the safest on the planet. Now, with the T8 hybrid, it wants to be the greenest, too£55,455

A helpful note to the men of the tech capital: I don’t consider being female my primary identifier or interest. Let’s talk about something elseThe Silicon Valley season premiere panel was eight men and one woman, and anyone could predict what would happen.The interviewer onstage asked each man questions about the popular HBO show satirizing Silicon Valley’s tech boom. He asked the creator, Mike Judge, what inspired the show; asked a main character whether he knew it would be such a hit; asked an actor how much his comedic riffs got into the final cut. And then he turned to the one woman on stage, Amanda Crew: Continue reading...

iPad and iPhone users warned not to fall for fake emails and texts aimed at tricking them into handing over their login detailsApple iPhone and iPad users have been warned not to fall for fake emails and texts that aim to trick them into handing over their iCloud login so scammers can access all their personal information stored in the cloud.The messages claim to be from Apple and typically warn the user that their account has been “restricted in order to safeguard your information” and urge the recipient to “verify and update your account” using the link provided. Continue reading...

‘When I eventually plucked up the courage to take it out, one mate asked if I was offering a mobile dominatrix service’When the designers at Electra dreamed up the Glam Punk 3i in their sun-strewn Californian studio, they probably didn’t imagine it dodging glass on a bike lane in Moss Side in the rain. It languished in the office for ages while I agonised over what to wear astride such a ludicrous machine. You can’t rock a high-vis cagoule on a gold-and-black cruiser with leather handlebar streamers and a saddle studded like a camp Christingle orange. Electra’s website suggested I accessorise my ride with a mint-green beanie and cap-sleeved black T-shirt but it was 5C and chucking it down and I wanted to wear my helmet. “Turn sidewalks into runways,” they said, but Greater Manchester police had declared war on pavement cyclists the previous week and I didn’t fancy a fixed-penalty fine.When I eventually plucked up the courage to take it out, one mate asked if I was offering a mobile dominatrix service. Snoop Dogg slopes around Compton on a cruiser in his Gin and Juice video; I took mine for a drink in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. My friend Steve fell about laughing. “It’s so butch,” he said, “and yet it’s got a kickstand and a bell.” Continue reading...

Porsche, Volkswagen, Audi, Opel and Mercedes diesel cars will be recalled as part of a clampdown on nitrogen oxide emissionsGermany’s top carmakers will recall 630,000 vehicles to fix diesel engine software technology that has been blamed for causing high pollution, while the emissions scandal engulfing Japan’s Mitsubishi Motors deepened.Porsche, Volkswagen, Audi, Opel and Mercedes diesel cars will be recalled as part of a clampdown on nitrogen oxide emissions, according to a German government official. BMW, which invested in fuel-saving technologies earlier than most rivals, is not part of the recall, the official said. Continue reading...

Being a conservative within liberal tech culture isn’t easy, but a surprising number of group’s members are betting on the outsider who means businessThere are more timely polls of California’s Republican presidential primary, and certainly surveys that are more statistically representative. But the informal straw poll of the Silicon Valley Association of Republican Women earlier this year is one of the more intriguing.Related: Secretive group of Hollywood conservatives suddenly dissolves Continue reading...

Online abuse pollutes the water in which we all swim. As the Guardian’s first female editor, it is important to me that we tackle itLast year, a few weeks before I started as the new editor-in-chief of the Guardian, I read a review in the New York Times of Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. The book looks at the emergence of public humiliations on social media, and the review ended by saying that “the actual problem is that none of the men running those bazillion-dollar internet companies can think of one single thing to do about all the men who send women death threats”. Since I was about to become the first woman to run the Guardian (not, sad to say, a bazillion-dollar internet company), I decided that I had a responsibility to try to do something about it.That’s why, over the past two weeks, the Guardian has published a series of articles looking at online abuse, with more to follow in the coming months. You might have read our interview with Monica Lewinsky in which she described the trauma of being subjected to what could be called the first great internet shaming, and how she still has to think of the consequences of talking about her past – whether by misspeaking, she could trigger a whole new round of abuse. Continue reading...

Forecasts show that Silicon Valley is at risk even under optimistic scenarios where rapid cuts in greenhouse gas emissions avoid the most severe increasesTechnology giants including Facebook and Google face the prospect of their prestigious Silicon Valley headquarters becoming swamped by water as rising sea levels threaten to submerge much of the property development boom gripping San Francisco and the Bay Area.Sea level forecasts by a coalition of scientists show that the Silicon Valley bases for Facebook, Google and Cisco are at risk of being cut off or even flooded, even under optimistic scenarios where rapid cuts in greenhouse gas emissions avoid the most severe sea level increases. Continue reading...

During an interview with Financial Times companies editor Brooke Masters on Thursday, FBI director James Comey says his investigators paid more than what he will earn in the next seven years to buy the software that hacked the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone. The director’s salary is $180,000 per year, so the total is at least $1.26m Continue reading...

Alphabet’s expansion plans don’t come cheap, with its empire set to include original YouTube series alongside Google, self-driving cars and virtual realityGoogle’s parent company Alphabet saw its revenue grow 17% during the first three months of this year, the company said on Thursday, but spent more money on its experimental moonshot projects, engineers, data centers and YouTube shows, causing it to miss investors’ profit expectations.Alphabet shares dropped more than 4% in the US during after-hours trading to about $724 a share. Continue reading...

The hefty price paid for the software that hacked Syed Farook’s iPhone, which Apple refused to help the FBI break into, signals a growing ‘exploit market’The FBI paid about $1.3m for software to hack into the iPhone of San Bernardino gunman Syed Farook, director James Comey told a London audience on Thursday.The staggering price illustrates the growth of the so-called “exploit market” for digital spy tools and cyber weapons as governments increasingly use hacker tricks for law enforcement and war. Prices for such software are rarely disclosed, although anything in the seven-figure range is extremely expensive. Continue reading...

HBO’s cult television series ‘Game of Thrones’ premieres its sixth season on Sunday, and now there’s a new tool for eager fans to keep up with the action: a computer program that predicts which characters are most likely to die. It’s a project called “A Song of Ice and Data” (a play on the name of George R.R. Martin’s fantasy book series, on which HBO’s show is based) created by a computer science class at the Technical University of Munich

Microsoft has stopped making its hugely successful console. Here are our favourite moments from its 10-year historyThe life of a games console is brutish and short, but some live longer and brighter than others.Launched in 2005, the Xbox 360, which has recently been discontinued by Microsoft, will be remembered as a classic games machine. Powerful and well-supported by publishers, the console was also perfectly set up for the coming era of online multiplayer gaming – via the robust XBox Live infrastructure. Continue reading...

What about all the information not available on Google? Lynch’s survey of reference books covers much ground and makes the case that for distillation of knowledge and serendipity of browsing, printed texts are easily bestFor some years now, the most satisfyingly passive-aggressive way of responding to a factual query on social media has been to reply with a link from the website “Let Me Google That For You”. On opening the link, your pesterer sees an animation of their exact query being typed into the Google search field, the “I’m feeling lucky” box being clicked and a page showing what is almost certainly the answer to their question. It is a sadistically elaborate vehicle for a simple message: you are wasting both our time by asking a person something, when you could ask a search engine.But the search engine is hardly infallible. It is commonly assumed these days that all useful information is on the internet, but it isn’t. Most academic research is held in databases that are prohibitively expensive for those without university affiliation or access to a good library. And there is an awful lot of stuff locked away in books that haven’t yet been digitised. The easy accessibility of what we can see tends to obscure the fact that so much is in shadow or missing altogether. We take the tip of the iceberg for the whole. If “knowledge” is now largely synonymous with “what you can find on Google”, its meaning has become dangerously shrivelled. Continue reading...