Technology | The Guardian

Online collection of women’s stories has already launched in the US, Canada and China with content from Hillary Clinton and Oprah WinfreyAOL is to launch its online women’s platform, Makers, in the UK with high-profile names including singer Annie Lennox, Everyday Sexism Project founder Laura Bates and broadcaster Sandi Toksvig.Makers, an online collection of women’s stories which has content from Hillary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, and Girls writer and star, Lena Dunham, has already launched in the US, Canada and China. Continue reading...

Kathy Chen criticised by pro-democracy activists for her government and military background as she joins social media site still blocked by BeijingChina’s Communist party-controlled media has criticised “narrow-minded” and “prejudiced” online activists who are questioning Twitter’s decision to appoint as its first regional chief a former member of the People’s Liberation Army who once had ties to the country’s security services.Kathy Chen – a former Microsoft manager whose Twitter handle describes her as a “curious explorer” – was named as the social network’s managing director for mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan last week. Continue reading...

Students in Munich have crunched data on every Game of Thrones character to predict their likelihood of death – turns out Jon Snow’s was a statistical shocker

Date set for WWDC, latest developer event, as tech giant announces updates to MacBook rangeMark 13 June in your calendars. That’s the first day of Apple’s 2016 Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, when the company is expected to reveal the latest version of iOS, a bump to the Apple TV, and maybe even a renamed release of OS X – or “MacOS”, as it hinted at last week.The event was announced, bizarrely, through Siri, which started giving out a more precise answer to the question “when is WWDC?” than previously. Until Monday evening, the digital assistant had answered with “WWDC is not yet announced”, but now it correctly says that “the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) will be held June 13 through June 17 in San Francisco. I can’t wait!” Continue reading...

Good sound, nice design, Bluetooth freedom with a 12-hour battery life without breaking the bank. If only they don’t pinch your earsSkullcandy has made a habit out of producing pretty good sounding and attractive headphones that don’t cost the earth. The new Grind wireless headphones continue that trend but are ruined by one ear-crushing flaw.

The Dutch parliament will strive towards all-electric sales by midway through the next decade if senate passes motion into lawDutch politicians have voted through a motion calling on the country to ban sales of new petrol and diesel cars starting in 2025.The motion has only passed through the lower house of the Netherlands’ parliament, and would need to pass through the Dutch senate to become legally binding. But its success in a majority vote puts the earliest date yet on just when a major country might begin phasing out polluting transportation. Continue reading...

Sainsbury’s has doubled its digital and technology staff in the past year as competition from online retailers mountsSainsbury’s is hiring 150 digital and technology experts to help improve its online store as it finalises the buyout of Argos.The team, who will work out of an existing Sainsbury’s office in Manchester’s Arndale centre, will include software developers and engineers and will work in partnership with 900 other digital and technology experts based in London and Coventry. Continue reading...

Newspapers have been battered by the internet. But the industry could be about to fight back – with help from websites that aim to be the iTunes of journalismLast week a group of 17 American news organisations, including the New York Times and Washington Post, served a cease-and-desist legal order against a start-up news platform. The platform, called Brave, was launched in January by the creator of JavaScript, Brendan Eich. The Brave browser had been created in part in response to two recent trends in news delivery: the emergence of mobile platforms such as Apple News and Facebook’s Instant Articles, and the growing use of software that allows readers to block advertisements from news content.Eich’s model had ad-blocking software built in – but its new trick was to strip out ads sold with news content and replace them with ads of its own. This practice served, Eich argued, to enable quicker loading of news pages, and to “protect the data sovereignty and anonymity” of users. Unlike on Facebook, say, no data trail would be left by those who clicked on the items. Moreover, Brave would offer 55-70% of ad revenue directly back to the original publisher. Continue reading...

The Facebook boss cannot rule for ever, no matter how many ‘new’ services his website providesPower and money are the two great aphrodisiacs, and few people or institutions are immune to their attractions. Not even the Economist, a posh magazine which resolutely sees itself as floating above the vulgar ruckus of journalistic hackery. Last week, like an elderly dowager seduced by Justin Bieber, the venerable publication checked its collective brains at the door and swooned over Mark Zuckerberg, the infant prodigy who now presides over Facebook, and so possesses both power and money.For the cover illustration, the magazine photoshopped a picture of a celebrated statue of Emperor Constantine the Great (272-337). Young Zuckerberg’s head, adorned with a wreath of gold laurel leaves, replaced Constantine’s. The sword in his left hand was replaced by a Facebook logo, and the emperor’s languidly drooping right hand was rotated 180 degrees so that it now gave the thumbs-up that is Facebook’s “like” symbol. (The gesture had a rather different interpretation in Roman times.) On the plinth of the statue were the words: “MARCVS ZVCKERBERGVS” and CONIVNGE ET IMPERA”, which is the nearest the photoshopper could get to “connect and rule”. Continue reading...

The 308 started life as a rather nice family hatch, but then the speed freaks at Peugeot Sport turned up the dialsPrice: £26,555

Customers should be able to leave contracts and get compensation if they have been misled by service providers, parliamentarians sayThe way broadband speed is advertised is misleading and must be reformed, a cross-party group of MPs has said.Customers should be able to leave contracts and be given compensation if they have been misled by service providers, according to the British Infrastructure Group. It also criticised the fact that only one in 10 broadband users need to be able to obtain the fastest advertised speed, under Advertising Standards Authority guidelines. Continue reading...

It’s unlikely you’ll feel moved to race anyone at the lightsBeware the car that companies buy you because they feel as though they have to; it will come with stupid conditions to make sure you don’t enjoy yourself. That is a generalised view, with no particular relevance to the Mazda 3 1.5D, except that it was devised to look as though it belonged to a mid-range marketing executive and to fit into a low carbon bracket at the same time, which is like wanting a handbag that is chic but will fit your wellies.Now, that is unfair: this looks a lot like the rest in the range, which is to say, slightly sharkish in the exterior styling, but with narrow, elegant features and an air of reliability – a bit like a slim, reasonable shark. It’s hard to imagine, but you’ll know it when you see it. Continue reading...

The European Union’s digital chief says he is worried about how clear some search engines are when displaying advertisements in search resultsThe European Union’s digital chief wants search engines such as Alphabet Inc’s Google and Microsoft’s Bing to be more transparent about advertising in web search results but ruled out a separate law for web platforms.European Commission vice-president Andrus Ansip, who is overseeing a wide-ranging inquiry into how web platforms conduct their business, said on Friday the EU executive would not take a horizontal approach to regulating online services. Continue reading...

Two days after head of AMC Theatres mulled openly about allowing texting in movie theaters, he says he’s heard audience opinion ‘loud and clear’Oops. The idea lasted about as long as a Snapchat text: the head of AMC Theatres mulled openly about creating texting-friendly movie theaters to appeal to smartphone-addicted youngsters. Two days later, after a backlash on social media, the company says it’s leaving the idea on “the cutting room floor”.

There is no magic bullet against cyberbullying and revenge porn, but education in school and clear company policies will bolster the laws we now haveAttitudes towards online abuse have undergone a sea change over the last decade. In the past, cyber-harassment – often a perfect storm of threats, impersonations, defamation, and privacy invasions directed at an individual – was routinely dismissed as “no big deal”.So it was for one Yale law student. Starting in 2007, on an online discussion board, a cyber-mob falsely accused her of having herpes and sleeping with her dean. Anonymous posters described how they would rape her; they chronicled her daily whereabouts and prior jobs. Yet law enforcement told the student to ignore the attacks because “boys will be boys”. Officers advised her to “clean up” her cyber-reputation, as if she could control what appeared about her. Trivialising online abuse and blaming victims was the norm. Continue reading...

Labour MP, who was a target of online abuse, says authorities and web companies need to use their resources to tackle issueTrolling is still not being taken seriously enough by police and technology companies who already have the tools to take action against internet abusers, the Labour MP Stella Creasy has said.Creasy, who was targeted three years ago by one of the most high-profile Twitter trolls to be jailed, said the key to dealing with online abuse was challenging the underlying inequality, misogyny and prejudice that fuels the problem. Continue reading...

Video-on-demand apps competing with Sky Kids, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, DisneyLife, Hopster and PlayKids: how do they compare?Children in 2016 understand that they can watch TV shows “on demand” on a range of devices, from the family tablet to a parent’s smartphone.There is now a growing collection of apps serving these habits, from established broadcasters to internet companies and inventive startups. Some are free, while others charge a monthly subscription.

In the wake of Apple’s encryption battle with the FBI, the latest version of Facebook’s popular messenger tool will add strong encryption to texts and callsWhatsApp is updating its messenger app so that every text and voice call on one of the world’s most popular apps will be protected with strong encryption – potentially putting millions more conversations outside the purview of authorities.The development at the messenger company, which is owned by Facebook, is striking given Silicon Valley’s recent staredown with authorities over user data privacy. Continue reading...

Developer says Swipebuster is making a comment about privacy, but users of dating app are worriedTinder isn’t as private as many of its users think, and a new website which aims to exploit that is causing concern among users of the dating app.Swipebuster promises to let Tinder users find out whether people they know have an account on the dating app, and even stalk them down to their last known location. Continue reading...

When Alex Nawabi adapted a controller for someone with cerebral palsy, he reopened a whole avenue of experienceAt the beginning of March, 21-year-old PlayStation owner Peter Byrne sent an email to Sony. Byrne has cerebral palsy and he found that his left hand was hitting the large touchpad in the centre of the PlayStation 4 control pad, constantly pausing his game. He wanted to know if there was anything the console manufacturer could do. He did not expect what happened next.Alex Nawabi, a retail marketer at the company, got in touch. He told Byrne that he’d taken on the problem as a personal project. After 10 hours of work he’d managed to reverse engineer a PS4 controller, unwire the touchpad and rewire the button to the back of the controller. “Let me know if the button placement is uncomfortable,” he wrote. “If there are any changes you’d like made, please email me.” Continue reading...

Tech company beats rivals including Amazon and Facebook to broadcast 10 whole games worldwide

New automatic alternative text feature uses machine learning technology to identify objects in imagesFacebook is using an artificial intelligence system to automatically caption photos in an effort to increase the accessibility of its website and apps.The feature, called “automatic alternative text”, uses image recognition technology developed through machine-learning to identify the objects pictured. Continue reading...

Codemasters has been making rally games since the original PlayStation era, but it is now closer than ever to perfecting its craftThere have always been racing games that sell themselves on numbers. The dozens of circuits, the vast atlases of exotic locations, the garages crammed with authentically detailed vehicles. Other titles, meanwhile, push their glitzier production values; the lush menu systems, the licensed soundtracks, the trackside pizazz.The excellence of Dirt Rally, though, lies not in breadth, but in depth. Continue reading...

Lockscreen flaw allows attackers to quickly access personal information on a locked iPhone 6S or 6S Plus using Siri, Twitter and 3D TouchA security flaw with the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus will let anyone bypass the phone lock and access personal information without having to know the passcode.

The Beggars Group imprint, which released Thom Yorke’s solo albums, has made ‘first step’ in ownership move, raising speculation about the band’s next albumXL recordings has taken the first step in the transfer of Radiohead’s catalogue from Parlophone to the Beggars imprint, a spokesperson for the label has confirmed.Speculation surrounding the group’s catalogue activity started on Monday, when fans noticed that a number of Radiohead B-sides and rarities had disappeared from streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music. In addition, all albums up to and including Hail to the Thief listed on streaming sites are attributed to XL Recordings. According to XL, the “main albums” are being made available in their original form to begin with, “before non-LP material is reconfigured.”

Portrait is not a lost work by Dutch master but a 3D printed painting made by software that distilled the features of a RembrandtIf people think the portrait of a 17th-century thirtysomething man in black hat and white collar looks unmistakably like a Rembrandt, then Bas Korsten will be a happy man. The painting’s true creators are, however, data analysts and computers.On Tuesday in Amsterdam, an artwork called “the Next Rembrandt” will be unveiled for the first time. Continue reading...

Half the population of Turkey potentially opened up to identity theft and privacy violations after information posted to server hosted in RomaniaA database posted online allegedly contains the personal information of 49 million people on the Turkish citizenship database, potentially making more than half of the population of the country vulnerable to identity theft and massive privacy violations.The database, which has not been verified as authentic, was posted to a server apparently hosted in Romania on Monday with an introduction reading “Who would have imagined that backwards ideologies, cronyism and rising religious extremism in Turkey would lead to a crumbling and vulnerable technical infrastructure?” Continue reading...

The Uncharted series has always boasted beautiful cinematic action, but now it’s looking to add greater combat depth and a more expansive worldNathan Drake spots them first. In the distance, among the craggy ruins of an old look-out post, there’s a group of armed mercenaries unloading equipment and patrolling the area. The sun beats down, the sky is cloudless, in the still air you can just make out their voices. It’s a classic Uncharted set piece.“How do we deal with this?” asks Sully. Continue reading...

The app, Pashto Afghan News, was removed just days after it went liveAn app developed by the Taliban has been removed from the Google Play store, two days after the app’s launch was reported in English-language media.The app, which allowed users to access the group’s Pashto website, is part of a growing digital campaign by the Taliban to grow its audience. Taking cues from the recruitment efforts of IS, the Taliban’s website is now updated in five languages, including English and Arabic, while it also maintains a constant presence on Twitter and Facebook, despite attempts by the social networks to take down the accounts when these are discovered. Continue reading...

With this time-spanning opus, Remedy Entertainment hoped to unite narrative gaming and linear television for its Xbox One title. But neither comes out of the experiment wellThe problem for any writer of time travel fiction – at least, the kind that tries to fortify its premise with a spattering of science – is how to communicate the theory behind the time-hopping high jinks. In 1978’s Superman, we watch the hero fly around Earth, rewinding history like reeling back a spool of tape. In Back to the Future, by contrast, Doc Brown scribbles the word ‘Past’ on a chalkboard then draws a line toward the year 1985 to explain his invention. Quantum Break, a multimillion dollar video game turned TV series from Helsinki-based Remedy Entertainment, takes a more scholastic approach. There’s an early invitation for the player to – no joke – sit down and watch a short documentary outlining how the game’s swimming pool-sized time machine actually works.A failure to show rather than tell is just the first of this curious multimedia project’s problems, which ripple out far beyond the fiction and into the very structure of the whole enterprise. The idea is simple, if cumbersome: a five-act, action video game interspersed with four 20-minute long, luxuriously produced TV episodes. Your actions and choices in the game sections affect the plot in the live-action episodes – to some degree. Continue reading...

Is Slack slacking? The chat app couldn’t handle Uber’s relatively small workforce. Is this a serious failing or just a bump in the road for the $3.8bn company?What happens when two darlings of the American tech scene meet in the workplace? It seems that magic emphatically does not happen – at least if the parting of ways between Slack and Uber is anything to go by.The New York Times reports that the fancy chat app (latest valuation: $3.8bn) didn’t play nicely with the fancy minicab app (latest valuation: $62.5bn): “Recently, the ride-hailing service Uber dropped Slack because the service could not handle the thousands of Uber employees trying to communicate simultaneously, according to people who work at both companies.” Continue reading...

Leaked FBI advisory tells state and local law enforcement that they are ‘in this together’ and federal agency will aid unlocking of iPhones where possibleThe FBI has told other US law enforcement agencies that it will help them to unlock the iPhones of suspected criminals.

The place to talk about games and other things that matterIt’s Monday. We have heard reports that, due to the lateness of this box, some people have been forced to ‘do some work’. Obviously this is a scenario that we would prefer our users not to encounter and we apologise for any inconvenience or terror caused. Continue reading...

Elon Musk’s company took $276m in deposits for the ‘affordable’ $35,000 car, which is primed for a 2017 launchTesla Motors took almost $10bn (£7bn) worth of pre-orders for its newest car, the Model 3, in just two days, according to the company’s chief executive Elon Musk.By the end of 2 April, 276,000 pre-orders had been placed for the car worldwide. Although the Model 3 is Tesla’s first attempt at an “affordable” electric car, it will still cost at least $35,000 when it ships in mid–2017, meaning the company has secured $9.7bn worth of sales for a car still over a year away from rolling off the production line. Continue reading...

Blizzard gained many fans with its seminal MMORPG – but it’s the virtual card game Hearthstone that’s making it a household nameOne of the striking things about Blizzard, the superstar developer behind some of gaming’s biggest hits, including World of Warcraft, Diablo and Starcraft, is how little it actually does.That’s not to say the company’s employees aren’t constantly at work, although the Kendo lessons taking place on the lawn outside its headquarters in Irvine, California, on the sunny spring day I visit could give that impression. Continue reading...

The US giant, 40 years old and looking good, could soon go the dismal way of Sony and Microsoft unless it comes up with something better than the WatchDoes Apple have another 40 years ahead of it, now that it has 40 behind it? As the world’s most valuable public company hit its anniversary last week, it’s the obvious question, in a world where the pace of technological change, enabled by globalisation and the internet, is faster than ever. And the public pressures, from the row with the FBI over unlocking the San Bernardino killer’s iPhone to its tax avoidance through Ireland, aren’t shrinking either.Related: 40 years of Apple - in pictures Continue reading...

As video game makers turn their attention to social issues, design has never been more importantBut for a bed, a dresser, a mirror, a desk and a few scattershot piles of junk, the room is empty. The door is locked. Time is perilously short: you have 10 seconds till your abusive partner swaggers in, spoiling for another fight. Can you evade the seemingly inevitable? Now you’re a lonely parent, trying everything you can to quell the distraught cries of your terminally ill child. Now you’re an immigrant, fresh to America, hawking newspapers on the commuter trail. Sales are few and your rent is high. You arrive home to your forsaken flat to find a scrawled note from your landlord: lose the cat – your only companion – or face eviction.In the beginning, video game designers looked not to cinema but to sport for inspiration. Pong, Atari’s rudimentary game in which you bat a phosphorous ball across an onyx screen, is tennis redacted. Space Invaders is clay pigeon shooting on the day of Armageddon. Pac-Man is a game of famished hide-and-seek. These days, however, video game designers are searching closer to home for inspiration. 10 Seconds in Hell uses the medium to communicate the abject terror of the domestic abuse victim. That Dragon, Cancer is an unflinching document of a family’s experience of a child’s illness and death. Cart Life offers an affecting study of contemporary life in America for those working on the poverty line. Continue reading...

Flaunting assets on social media makes the world’s wealthy an easy target for fraudsters – and financial investigatorsFrom selfies on super-yachts to posing with private jets, the young heirs of the uber-wealthy have attracted worldwide envy and derision by flaunting their lavish lifestyles on social media.But these self-styled rich kids of Instagram are, often unwittingly, revealing their parents’ hidden assets and covert business dealings, providing evidence for investigators to freeze or seize assets worth tens of millions of pounds, and for criminals to defraud their families. Continue reading...

James Bond made timepieces stylish; but the under-40s want something much higher-techWhen film producer Cubby Broccoli made the first James Bond film, Dr No, in 1962, he was adamant that 007 should wear a Rolex watch, but the film’s budget didn’t stretch to buying one.Rolex, the story goes, refused to provide a free one. So Broccoli was forced to lend Sean Connery his own, with its black crocodile-skin strap – and a style image was born. Continue reading...

The implication is that you can have little accidents with no harm doneI noticed the Citroën Cactus before I ever drove it, for its natty sides: rubber panels they call air bumps, which are replaceable. I’ve thought about this a lot. The implication is that you can have little accidents with no harm done, so the panels are the car equivalent of a nappy; yet, until all other cars have replaceable side panels, it is unclear to me what you’d be able to prang into. Trees, I guess: except it’s not four-wheel drive and it doesn’t look remotely like a car you’d want to take off road.Silliness, we call this – like wearing a flak jacket on Oxford Street. The panels also managed to react with the stereo, so that the sides seemed to vibrate even at pretty low volume. If you are trying to impress the laydeez, this may be part of the point; it didn’t impress anybody I drove past, thumping with Adele. Continue reading...

Tech wizards from some of India’s poorest towns are earning millions by helping uncover security flaws in Facebook and Google sitesNobody thought Anand Prakash would end up a multi-millionaire.Raised in a small town of Bhadra in western India, Prakash preferred to spend his free time playing computer games in cybercafes rather than outdoors playing cricket with the other boys his age. Continue reading...

Some users claim to have lost their jobs over Google’s Gmail April fool ... while we round up the best of the rest of the day’s gagsThe first of April is normally a day of frothy fun, where newspapers and brands compete to produce the best jokes and the worst puns to fool their readers.But this year some of the more complex pranks did not go quite to plan. Continue reading...

Local law enforcement officials want access to Apple phones to solve crimes but Apple might be able to patch security flaws if secret technique is widely sharedAny day now, Hillar Moore is expecting a call from the FBI.Moore, a district attorney in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, has publicly lamented that Apple’s iPhone encryption is keeping local police out of a victim’s phone in a recent murder. On Monday, Moore’s ears perked up when the FBI announced it would drop its court battle with Apple after it figured out a way to pull data from the iPhone of Syed Farook, the San Bernardino gunman. Continue reading...

The firearm that resembles a mobile is ingenious, but surely its creator has missed a trick – a phone that actually is a gun. It’s going to happenUntil so recently the selfie-stick was the top gizmo of choice for gadgety-minded people everywhere. But in the United States, something else is now hogging the limelight: the Ideal Conceal, a .38 calibre handgun that folds up to look exactly like an iPhone-sized smartphone. Unfolded, it fires two shots before needing to be reloaded and costs $395 (£275).Advance orders are flooding in. Its inventor, Kirk Kjellberg of Minnesota, says the idea came to him when he was walking through a restaurant. Being in possession of a “concealed carry” permit, his weapon was just visible. A small child said: “Mommy, mommy, that man’s got a gun!” And Kjellberg says he thought to himself: “There’s got to be another way to carry without bothering other people.” Continue reading...

iOS 9.3.1 update should fix bug and make links on affected iPhone and iPads work again after disruption of Universal Links system by errant third-party appsApple has pushed out an update for iPhones and iPads to fix a bug that caused devices to lock up, batteries to drain and links to be completely inoperative.

Every Friday we apply critical attention to things that don’t normally get it. This is an important function that might hold civilisation together. Or, more likely, not. Drop your suggestions for reviews in the comments or tweet them to @guideguardian Continue reading...

From Soylent to a $700 juice box, men are being praised for releasing us from the prison of food. So why was it low-brow when women did that with SlimFast?I tried explaining Soylent, the protein shake meal replacement popular in Silicon Valley, to my mom and she tilted her head: “Oh, you mean SlimFast?” she said.I balked. No, Soylent is definitely tech, I explained, and it’s on my beat. It has a minimalist label and comes in iterative versions like software (we’re at Soylent 2.0). It has a young white male founder who philosophizes about it and connects it to broader themes of life efficiency and has raised $20m in venture capital funding on its promise of releasing us from the prison of food. Continue reading...

From mistimed jumps to save game mishaps, here are the gaming errors we all make again and againThere are some mistakes that we make habitually. We can’t help ourselves. Even as we’re doing it, a part of our brain is screaming: “This is absolutely the wrong thing to do.” But somehow, before we know it, we’ve gone ahead done it; we’ve bought a ticket to see Batman v Superman.Sometimes those things happen in games too. It doesn’t matter how experienced you are at Call of Duty, there are moments you think you can take out several incoming players at once by charging at them with your pistol and two bullets in the clip. Even if you’ve been playing Tomb Raider games for 10 years you’ll still occasionally walk up to a gigantic chasm and think, I wonder if Lara can survive that fall? And then you discover that she can’t. And the last checkpoint was several miles back. Continue reading...

Andrés Sepúlveda said he and other hackers installed malware to monitor opponents during 2012 campaign as part of ‘black propaganda’ operationA digital dark arts campaign by mercenary hackers helped Enrique Peña Nieto win Mexico’s 2012 presidential election, according to an imprisoned Colombian hacker who says he was involved.Andrés Sepúlveda, an online campaign strategist, claimed he had also helped to manipulate elections in nine countries across Latin America by stealing data, installing malware and creating fake waves of enthusiasm and derision on social media.