Technology | The Guardian

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

The British company, famous for bagless vacuums and bladeless fans, reports 20% rise in profit thanks to tripling Chinese revenueDyson, the British company famous for its bagless vacuum cleaners and bladeless fans, is planning to ramp up investment into new longer-lasting batteries after reporting a 20% rise in profits thanks to a tripling of revenues in China.Dyson said its growth in 2015 was driven by battery-powered purifiers, fans and vacuum cleaners, with Asia overtaking Europe to become its biggest market. Continue reading...

Slate columnist Fred Kaplan’s new book details – exhaustingly as well as exhaustively – the alarms and innovations that made mass surveillance

A classic touring bike with a modern twistThe Light Blue began life back in 1895 when John Townsend started building bikes for Cambridge University students. He used to make about six a week in a converted dairy in the city. John’s great-grandson Lloyd now runs the firm, and most of its range is all about heritage and retro appeal. But not all the bikes are quite so old school. Take a look at the Darwin – it’s the modern evolution (ha!) of the long-distance touring bike. The frame is super durable steel – the tubing is Reynolds 725. The sloping top tube and wide-set handlebars give you a relaxed riding position to soak up the miles. In terms of gears you can choose between a derailleur or reliable hub. There are disc brakes and space for mudguards, racks and three drink cages. You certainly won’t go thirsty… (thelightblue.co.uk)

The founder of the social media company met Liu Yunshan amid concerns about China’s crackdown on internet usersFacebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has held a rare meeting with China’s propaganda chief amid a crackdown by the Beijing authorities on the use of the internet.Related: Want to wrest back some privacy from Mark Zuckerberg? Continue reading...

Apple’s willingness to borrow billions to address the economic impact of climate change could pave the way for other businesses to do the sameOn the surface, green bonds seem counter intuitive: why would a company willingly take on debt to finance environmental efforts? But Apple’s recent decision to issue its first green bond suggests that this type of investment could play a key role in reining in global warming.Apple’s $1.5bn green bond, announced last month, will fund several initiatives, including the company’s conversion to 100% renewable energy, installation of more energy efficient heating and cooling systems and an increase in the company’s use of biodegradable materials. A green bond, like a typical bond, is simply a way to borrow money, but it’s issued specifically to fund environmental projects.

From waitstaff to care companions and legal researchers, the future of the machine worker is here. But where does that leave humans“It’s pure magic,” Eatsa promises.At San Francisco’s first fully automated restaurant, meals appear in little glass cubbies, just 90 seconds after customers order and pay on wall-mounted iPads. It’s a human-less experience – no waitstaff, no cashier, no one to get your order wrong and no one to tip. Continue reading...

The number of Wikipedia entries on female scientists is staggeringly low, but thanks to these editors that might be changing

So computers can now beat humans at Go – but why would they swap their game pieces for bombs?‘AlphaGo” is the sort of supercomputer name a pulp science fiction novelist might come up with. Nevertheless, the achievements of this Google DeepMind machine are only too real. It has become the first computer program to beat a professional human player of the Chinese strategy game Go, without handicaps, on a full‑sized 19×19 board.It shouldn’t surprise us when computers beat humans at board games. They can, after all, store and rapidly analyse hundreds of millions of moves, and work out the implications of strategies hundreds of moves ahead, something no merely human player can manage. But AlphaGo is different. Experts in Go strategy report that it (I initially wrote “he” …) played in non‑obvious ways, making unusual, sly and even bizarre moves that only belatedly revealed themselves as tactically worthwhile. Continue reading...

US regulator says the e-commerce retailer cannot omit a proposal addressing the pay gap and it should be voted on at the May shareholder meetingAmazon took legal action in an attempt to avoid having to hold a shareholder vote on whether it should work to reduce the gap between how much it pays male and female staff.

Once there were mods, rockers, punks and skinheads. Now, online possibilities are infinite and we can curate our own individual worldsWe hunt in packs. It’s human nature. We do it to protect ourselves from the threat of attack, loneliness and to gather food. And while we are at it, our packs develop their own cultures, beliefs and ways of behaving. That includes ways to amuse ourselves when not much is happening. Thankfully, we don’t have to go out and kill yaks any more, but while the technology has moved on from the wheel to the microchip, our mentality has not.We are still tribal; the old are still trying to control the young, and the young are still trying to break free from the mortal enemies of parents, poverty and boredom. The tensions are the same as ever. But now they are being worked out in a digital world and not the real one – a world where physical strength, or even physical presence, is no longer needed. Continue reading...

Apple is not the first corporation to deploy the free speech argument to support their position – corporations have been co-opting the principle since the 1970sThe first amendment to the US constitution – guarantor of freedom of speech and of the press, as well as the freedom of religion and assembly – is a sacred creed to many Americans.For most of its history, it was understood principally as a guardian of individual liberty and a protector of public discourse. Increasingly, and not accidentally, the business community is using the first amendment to block economic regulation.

The internet has suffered from tech giants’ command-and-control ethos, but open chat platforms offer an alternative way forwardOne of the great books covering the internet and what it means is the Cluetrain Manifesto, written in 1999. It describes a revolution in business happening because a more open and public style of communication has become possible and proclaims: “markets are conversations”.

Australian fast-food retailer convert military robot into Domino’s Robotic Unit, which could spell the beginning of the end of the pizza delivery boyPizza company Domino’s Australia has turned a military robot into a pizza delivery droid.DRU, Domino’s Robotic Unit, a prototype of what Domino’s says is the world’s first autonomous pizza delivery vehicle, was unveiled in Brisbane on Thursday night. Continue reading...

The newest and weirdest in wearables from the Wearable Technology Show 2016The wearable technology market has rocketed over the past several years, from 32m units sold in 2014 to 115m predicted to sell in 2016. And it’s not just smartwatches and fitness trackers: tech companies are competing to create new wearable experiences with the widest possible appeal.Olly Mann visited this year’s Wearable Technology Show at London’s ExCel to try out the gadgets we might all be using in the not-too-distant future: from wearable tech for your unborn baby and your pet dog, to virtual reality for surgeons, to augmented reality with dinosaurs. Continue reading...

Steve Wozniak said device has taken firm into ‘jewellery market’ and that it is no longer ‘the company that really changed the world a lot’The Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak said he no longer recognises the company he built, thanks to creations such as the Apple Watch.He wrote in an interview on Reddit: “I love my Apple Watch, but - it’s taken us into a jewellery market where you’re going to buy a watch between $500 or $1,100 based on how important you think you are as a person. Continue reading...

The place to talk about games and other things that matterHello Thursday! Continue reading...

An individual claiming to be Jason Dalton filed a complaint saying the company treated him as a ‘second-class citizen’ and forced him to launch the killing spreeAn individual purporting to be the Uber driver charged with fatally shooting shooting six people in western Michigan has sued the ride-sharing company, just one day after police reports showed he told investigators the app controlled him like “a puppet”.In a two-page handwritten complaint filed on Tuesday, an individual claiming to be Jason Dalton said the company caused “psychological damage” and treated him as a “second-class citizen”. The federal suit followed a series of police reports released on Monday, showing Dalton told investigators Uber’s app takes over “your whole body” and forced him to launch the killing spree that also left two wounded. Continue reading...

British gaming receives a wealth of talent and funding as a result of being in the EU. We couldn’t get by without it9.30am on a Saturday. The Europeans – including myself, Scottish and Irish gamers – in the H faction are waking up for the raids. Our US buddies comprise just under half the team. They’re asleep. If we don’t spend the next 12 hours working together, we will tumble down the world rankings, which in turn affects our ability to survive this murderous landscape. Later, the US side picks up the slack. The cycle continues … until every zombie is dead.Related: UK games industry is crowded, but small businesses are playing to win Continue reading...

Googlebot trawls the web for information, indexing and ranking sites for your searches. How significant is its switch to Android, and its plans for a bigger, 5in screen-size standard?Did you know Google’s been scouring the web identifying itself as an iPhone running iOS 8.3? Well, as of 18 April, that’s about to change, when Googlebot dumps its Apple skin and adopts the new Nexus 5X as its mobile standard.

Co-founder Steve Chen tells SXSW conference that ‘we thought dating would be the obvious choice’ – but internet users didn’t agreeIn 2016, YouTube is firmly established as online viewers’ first call for music videos, makeup tutorials and men screaming at games.But what’s little know is that when it was launched in 2005, the site had a different aim: dating. According to co-founder Steve Chen, it was designed as a way for people to upload videos of themselves talking about the partner of their dreams. Continue reading...

The Silicon Valley entrepreneur wants to solve humanity’s problems with his electric cars, space travel and solar panels. Where did he come from and what makes him tick?The hype about the information age has been going on for so long that you’d assume all Silicon Valley innovation these days is based on apps and the internet, rather than sophisticated physical engineering: bits, not atoms. It has got to the stage where many tech startups look like parodic solutions in search of problems, as with the dozens of companies hoping to become the Uber for laundry. Yet the most intriguing figure among the Valley’s billionaire entrepreneurs right now makes incredibly elaborate machines: electric cars and space rockets. While Mark Zuckerberg wants to change the world by enabling you to see more baby photos, the man who glories in the sci-fi name of Elon Musk wants to change the world by solving transport and global warming, and establishing a colony on Mars. Robert Downey Jr took inspiration from a visit to Musk’s rocket factory for his portrayal of Iron Man’s Tony Stark. “My mind is not easily blown,” Downey Jr reported, “but this place and this guy were amazing.” Musk has also been a guest star on The Simpsons. So who exactly is he, and can he be serious?Related: Elon Musk: the new It Boy of Silicon Valley | The Observer profile Continue reading...

Mark Dreyfus asks PM if his email server is used for sensitive material after failing to get freedom of information responseThe shadow attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, has called on the prime minister to confirm he has never used his private email server for national security matters, after lengthy delays by his office to respond to freedom of information requests.Related: Malcolm Turnbull’s own department doesn't have access to his private email server Continue reading...

Media company did not make clear the ‘fastest peak time speeds’ claim related to fixed-line performance only, says ASASky has had its claim that it offers the fastest broadband speeds in the UK shot down after BT lodged a complaint with the advertising watchdog.The media group ran a press ad claiming it offered the fastest broadband speeds in peak time, citing Ofcom research comparing it with rivals BT, Plusnet and EE on a 38Mb connection. Continue reading...

The tech company’s lawyers tried to lower the temperature in their fight with the FBI in a 26-page legal filing before a California court hears the encryption caseApple’s lawyers tried to lower the temperature in the company’s fight with the US government on Tuesday, telling a federal judge that America’s Justice Department is well-meaning but wrong in its privacy standoff with the iPhone maker.The 26-page legal filing is either side’s last argument before they face each other in a California court on 22 March over whether the government can order Apple to weaken the security settings on one of its ubiquitous phones linked to the San Bernardino shooting last December. Continue reading...

The device, which will retail at £349, will be one of the cheapest available, with experts predicting it could take VR technology to the mass-marketA major consumer electronics firm has become the first to launch a mass-market virtual reality headset, in what could be the move that takes VR technology into the mainstream.Sony said that its PlayStation VR headset, which works with the PlayStation 4 console, would be launched in October for $399 in the US and £349 in the UK.

Company will now control all of Sony/ATV, the largest music publishing company in the world, having bought the dead singer’s 50% shareSony is to buy Michael Jackson’s 50% share in Sony/ATV Music Publishing from the dead singer’s estate for $750m (£530m).The company is the largest music publishing company in the world and owns the rights to millions of songs including some of the Beatles’ work, as well as music by Taylor Swift, Bryan Adams, Beyonce, Lady Gaga and Manic Street Preachers. Continue reading...

There’s an insidious side to those stars. Ratings are forging new power structures – and soon we’ll be judged for every achievement or mistakeYou’re at a job interview and your prospective boss pulls out their phone to check your Employee Obedience score: 4.5. OK. When you get the job, your new colleagues use an app to see how previous colleagues have reviewed you. Your Overall Likability score is 3.2. They learn that you play Rihanna on repeat and hoard pens. Nevertheless, a girl in sales thinks you’re kind of hot, so uses an app to look up your Relationship score: 3.4. She reads reviews from former partners that cover everything from your table manners to your bedroom manners. It seems you always serve yourself first.Welcome to the future in which every aspect of our personalities and behaviour is assigned a star rating, available for all to see. Think this sounds crazy? Your Suspension of Disbelief score is probably low. Bear with me. You can rate my Credibility Quotient at the end. Continue reading...

Tech lovers usually visit the Austin festival in search of the next breakout app, but it was an event that tapped into ‘analog’ nostalgia that drew the big crowdsRelated: We all love to and the French are : what we learned about emojis at SXSWOne of the hottest demos at Austin’s annual South by Southwest (SXSW) tech conference was a pencil. Continue reading...

Google’s supercomputer AlphaGo defeated world Go champion Lee Sedol 4-1 on Tuesday, in what has been described as a landmark achievement for an artificial program. According to Demis Hassabis, Google DeepMind co-founder, AlphaGo improved its game by playing against itself millions of times. Have humans taken the 2,500-year-old game as far as they can?

Atiur Rahman learned of loss of funds only after the news appeared in the mediaBangladesh’s central bank governor, Atiur Rahman, said on Tuesday he had resigned after $81m (£75m) was stolen from the bank’s account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in one of the largest cyber-heists in history.Rahman told Reuters that the prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, had accepted his resignation. Continue reading...

Online retailer delivered age-restricted product, similar to weapon bought by teenage killer of schoolboy Bailey Gwynne, without age-verification

With over 30 hours battery life, great controls and a compact design, Marshall’s first wireless headphones carry on the good work of the vintage amplifier companyBritish audio brand Marshall has taken its first steps into the wireless headphone world with a brand new version of its Major II, which is claims has over 30 hours of battery life.

Computer scientist who helped to bring email to the massesRay Tomlinson, who has died aged 74, put the @ sign in your email address, and thus invented the name@host convention now used by billions of people every day. His logical but entirely personal choice of the asperand made a little used keyboard character into what the Museum of Modern Art in New York called a “defining symbol of the computer age”.At the time – the early 1970s – Tomlinson’s idea did not seem much of a big deal. He was a computer scientist at Bolt, Beranek and Newman, one of the US government contractors developing the Arpanet computer network, a precursor of the internet. Users of BBN’s PDP-10 minicomputers, such as BBN-TenexA, could send each other messages, but only to people who were using the same physical computer. They couldn’t email colleagues who were logged on to the identical computer right next to it, say BBN-TenexB. It would obviously be useful if they could and Tomlinson introduced that capability in 1971, as a side project to his real job, which was extending the minicomputer’s operating system. Continue reading...

Gun deaths correlate to searches for ‘ammo’, one expert says, as social media gurus look to work around federal gun research ban with an innovative websiteWhen it comes to data on shopping habits or driving, it’s all available and being constantly mined by advertisers and government offices who sell and legislate around it appropriately.But data around gun violence? There’s almost nothing. And that had been by design – until now. Continue reading...

Sean Parker’s plan to make Hollywood blockbusters available at home on the day of their cinema release ‘will expand audiences’, says JacksonHollywood titans Peter Jackson, Steven Spielberg and JJ Abrams are reportedly among backers of a new service that would make major blockbusters available at home on the day they hit cinemas.Lord of the Rings director Jackson has been a vocal opponent of previous attempts to consign to history the longstanding “theatrical window” that separates cinema release dates from home video debuts. But he became the most high-profile backer of Napster founder Sean Parker’s Screening Room service when he told Variety that the new technology would expand the audience for films rather than killing off cinemas. Continue reading...

A mandatory code of conduct would solve most issues raised surrounding noise and amenities, parliamentary inquiry toldAirbnb and Stayz have called for regulation of short-term holiday rentals to be consistent across New South Wales.Executives from the two companies, as well as the Holiday Rental Industry Association, have appeared at a parliamentary inquiry into the adequacy of regulation. Continue reading...

The second dotcom boom may seem like a way for money to flow from older, richer people to talented young entrepreneurs. But it hasn’t worked out that wayPicture a startup founder.Chances are you went straight for a Mark Zuckerberg-type: male, white, nerdy and, above all, young. Zuckerberg founded Facebook in 2004, three years after the collapse of the dotcom bubble, at the age of 20. Continue reading...

Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide festival centre

We might not have realised it, but emojis have given us a powerful shorthand emotional vocabulary – even if most of us are cry-laughing 20% of the timeLinguists, and perhaps everyone else, started taking emojis a bit more seriously after Oxford Dictionaries made the “tears of joy” emoji its word of the year in November. The first, very basic, emojis were created in Japan around 1998, but the rich, color emojis we use now didn’t make it to a full emoji keyboard on Apple’s iOS devices until 2011 and Android in 2013.The alternative keyboard app SwiftKey found in August that 70% of emojis are used to express positive emotion, 15% neutral and only 15% negative. SwiftKey co-founder Ben Medlock told a packed room at SXSW that this might be because we tend to feel we have to present a positive image to the world. So we’re self-editing in favor of happy, shiny emojis. Continue reading...

Go champion Lee Sedol scores his first victory against Google’s AlphaGo on Sunday, after suffering three consecutive defeats to the supercomputer. Sedol, who was visibly happy after the game, says the victory is priceless and he had hoped to win at least one round. CEO and founder of Google DeepMind says while AlphaGo may have lost, his team will learn important lessons about the program’s limitations

The Zuck has his eye on 3.5bn social media accounts – that’s a lot of data handed on to advertisers. Here’s how to cover your tracksMark Zuckerberg has a gargantuan social network. If you add up the number of accounts from the services he owns – Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram – you get a figure of 3.5bn, which is roughly half the world’s population. Granted many people will have multiple accounts and belong to multiple services, but still, that’s a lot of pokes, likes and cat gifs. Especially impressive given the scepticism and the love-hate relationship many have with his empire, particularly the Facebook mothership – or Dark Star, depending on your point of view. Being part of modern society without being involved somehow with the Zuck is increasingly tricky: instant messaging is hard without going via Facebook’s servers; you’ll need Instagram if you want to show off your perfectly arranged avocados and children’s fancy-dress outfits to the world; and if you want to date, no Facebook means no Tinder. Even if you’re one of those refuseniks who proudly claim “I’m not on Facebook”, you probably are – what about that chemically inconvenienced stag weekend in Tallinn that your pals created a Facebook album for? Yes, you’ll have to join to find out.It’s a Faustian pact: in return for these sometimes useful services we give up our privacy and allow Facebook to mine our lives for data to sell to advertisers – but it’s a deal we can finesse a little to reclaim a bit of our dignity. Here are some suggestions how… Continue reading...

The internet amplifies harassment and bullying in the physical world, but politicians, tech companies and society all need to make the internet safe for allExtra security guarded the door at the day-long online harassment summit Saturday at Austin’s SXSW tech festival.It’s for a good reason: threats of violence often accompany those who speak about the online hate mob Gamergate and its impact on women and minorities in the video game community. Those threats led the SXSW organizer Hugh Forrest, citing “threats of on-site violence”, to shut down the Gamergate discussion session. After public outcry, organizers relaunched it as a full-day program. Continue reading...

The San Francisco-based company valued at $2bn will cut shoppers’ per-item commission by 50%, and drivers will see a 63% drop, according to reportsInstacart, the San Francisco-based grocery delivery startup valued at $2bn, is slashing pay for its shoppers and drivers, according to reports.In San Francisco, shoppers who select items off the shelves to fulfill individual customer orders will have their per-item commission cut 50% to $0.25, and delivery drivers will see their commission drop 63%, from $4 to $1.50 per trip, according to the Wall Street Journal. Continue reading...

Naoto Kan, who presided over country during Fukushima disaster in 2011, cautions over plans to build new UK plantsNuclear power is unsafe and too expensive to justify building new plants anywhere in the world, according to the Japanese prime minister at the time of the Fukushima nuclear accident.Related: Hinkley Point C: what you need to know about the nuclear power project Continue reading...

A legal filing implies that Department of Justice has a plan B, which involves demanding the company’s electronic signatureIf Apple doesn’t comply with the court order requiring it to weaken the security on the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone, it may be asked to hand over the source code to the entire operating system instead, the Department of Justice has implied.In its formal legal rebuttal to Apple, the department addressed one of Apple’s key legal arguments: that forcing it to write the code, which would remove key security features from Syed Farook’s iPhone would be unduly burdensome. Continue reading...

Just another Apple product or a digital magic wand? Guardian illustrator Chloe Cushman takes it for a spinThe Apple Pencil is a cursed product, haunted by a single Steve Jobs quote from 2010: “If you see a stylus, they blew it.” Jobs thought that the stylus, a pen-like device used to write or draw directly on a digital screen, was a useless appendage. If you couldn’t operate a device with only your fingertips its design was flawed. This may be the real reason behind the very literal design of the Apple Pencil. Apple seems to have deliberately designed its latest accessory to look, feel and function like a creative tool – and not the technological appendage that Jobs famously hated.The new Pencil is exclusive to the latest and largest iPad, the iPad Pro, and is intended to let everyone from amateur artists to creative professionals draw on their tablets as freely as if they were putting pencil to paper. I tested it out and discovered that despite its simple purpose, the Pencil could not be more complex; in its attempt to harness the effortless beauty of the elementary writing and drawing instrument, Apple has crafted its own magic wand. Continue reading...

The proposed California 1099 Self-Organizing Act would allow workers such as Uber and Lyft drivers to join together to negotiate wages and conditionsA bill in California aims to allow the new class of “gig economy” workers to use an old strategy to collectively bargain.The proposed California 1099 Self-Organizing Act, which was introduced this week, would create a legal framework for workers classified as independent contractors – such as Uber and Lyft drivers – to join together and negotiate wages and working conditions with the on-demand companies they work for. Continue reading...

The label famed for licensing classy classic and contemporary cinema comes to Britain in April – but what impact will it have?