Technology | The Guardian

We compare Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play Music, Deezer and Amazon Prime Music to see which hit the right notes for your on-demand listeningMusic streaming is on the rise: in 2015 in the UK fans played 26.8bn songs on audio-streaming services alone, with another 26.9bn streams of music videos on services like YouTube.

Report says users of adblockers are likely to be tech-savvy and see fewer ads overall

A new 3D printer which uses biodegradable materials to form a tissue shape and living cells as ‘ink’ could be used to print tissues and organsA bioprinter – a three dimensional printer that uses living cells in suspension as its ink, and injection nozzles that can follow a CT scan blueprint – brings the dream of transplant surgery a step nearer: a bespoke body part grown in a laboratory and installed by a robot surgeon.Scientists and clinicians began exploring tissue culture for transplant surgery more than 20 years ago. But researchers in the US report in Nature Biotechnology that they have harnessed a sophisticated, custom-designed 3D printer to print living muscle, cartilage and bone to repair battlefield injury. Continue reading...

Creative Cloud for Mac update removed the first folder in alphabetical order without permission, even if it had nothing to do with AdobeAdobe has pulled an update for its Creative Cloud desktop application for Mac computers after users complained that it was deleting important files from their machines without reason or warning.

The concept artist Kan Muftic, who has worked on games such as the Batman: Arkham series, Bioshock 2 and Destiny, on his diverse and abstract craftWhat’s your background?I’m a concept artist and illustrator, though I also do directing. For the past 10 years, I’ve mainly been doing concept art for video games and the film industry. Continue reading...

‘Design issue’ that causes power problems for £1,000+ single-port laptop prompts replacement programmeApple is recalling USB-C power cables for its new £1,000+ 12in laptop owing to a “design issue” which means they will fail to charge the computer, the company says.

The latest trends, from Fabulous Beasts, the toys-to-life game of building blocks of animals, to Mecha Monsters, real-world battling robots that work with a digital gameThere has been an explosion in the number of video games that are altered and unlocked by toys. This “toys-to-life” concept is simple: place small figurines on a platform connected to a games console, and those characters magically appear in-game. Continue reading...

A Quiet Passion actor suggests that celebrated 19th-century American poet was far from cut off, and would have been ‘emailing and tweeting all day long’Related: A Quiet Passion review - Terence Davies' Emily Dickinson biopic finds beauty in the little thingsContrary to received opinion, American poet Emily Dickinson was not uncommunicative and would have enjoyed modern social media, said Cynthia Nixon, the former Sex and the City actor who plays Dickinson in the new film, A Quiet Passion. Continue reading...

The Virgin Atlantic flight bound for New York turned back soon after passing over the west coast of IrelandPolice are investigating reports that a laser was shone at an aircraft that was forced to return to Heathrow airport on Sunday night when one of the crew fell ill.Related: BA pilot's eye damaged by 'military' laser shone into cockpit at Heathrow Continue reading...

Why do newspaper culture pages and serious radio and TV largely ignore the biggest entertainment medium in the world?Why do video games receive so little coverage in mainstream cultural media? It’s a question that’s troubled me for years – I even made a programme about it for Radio 4. Games are the largest entertainment medium in the world. And yet newspaper culture pages tend not to cover them (pace Observer Tech Monthly). Cultural programmes on TV and radio do a fun segment about games once a quarter at best while reserving discussion and analysis for interpretive dance or experimental opera.It’s very weird for me: my novels, which sell tens of thousands of copies, are shortlisted for prizes that appear on the news. My games, which have sold millions of copies, don’t make the news. Film and TV Baftas are a news story. Games Baftas are an industry event. Continue reading...

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

This good-looking gesture control device lets you browse the web or operate a slideshow without the need for a joystick or mouseI’d seen videos of the Myo before I received one. The black wearable device had always struck me as looking cool and slightly futuristic. As someone who speaks and presents often, here was a chance to take my “cool presentation” factor up a notch.Wearing the Myo, my hopes and dreams faded. Rather than being light and inconspicuous, it felt clunky. It was also cold – I hadn’t noticed the metal sensors in the promo videos. It felt as if I had a bionic arm. Continue reading...

A carbon-framed bike that breaks the magical £1,000 barrier and still rides as good as it looksFor cycling fans, the word Eastway is loaded with history. The original circuit was built in London in the 70s as a traffic-free, road-racing track, and many of the sport’s greats spun their pedals on it, including Eddy Merckx. The ring was finally bulldozed to make way for the Olympic Park in 2006, but the name lives on in this British brand. The range has just been relaunched and the emphasis is now on ‘affordable performance’. If that’s what you are after, the Emitter R4 ticks both boxes. It performs well (it’s light, responsive and fast) and it’s affordable. Spending £1,000 on a bike never sounds like a steal, but believe me, for a carbon frame topped off with this level of kit, it is. My only quibble is the name: Emitter sounds like a projectile-vomiting baby… (wiggle.co.uk)Price: £950

Market hysteria has hit Twitter, with Wall Street and the site’s owners agreeing that it should be bigger and more like Facebook. They’re both wrong‘Twitter shares drop on faltering user growth,” said the headline last week. It turned out that the company had just released its last quarterly return for 2015. It had revenues of $710m (£490m) and a net loss of $90m, which means that – compared with the same quarter last year – revenue was up 90% and losses were down by 27%. If you know anything about technology companies, especially those with a global reach, this looks about par for the course: the company is on track to break even and reach eventual profit. Yet the technology babblesphere is full of fevered speculation about whether Twitter “has a future”. And the stock market, ever attentive to hysteria, marked the shares down accordingly.Insofar as all this hullabaloo had any rational basis, it lay in the revelation that Twitter’s active user base had declined from 307 million monthly active users to 305 million. Viewed through the distorting prism of Wall Street and the tech commentariat, this is apparently a catastrophe. Why? Because it has stopped growing! “So Twitter user growth (excluding SMS) has now declined,” tweeted one excitable commentator. “Brutal.” Continue reading...

In 1967, Lawrence ‘Larry’ Luckham was an operations manager at Bell Labs in Oakland, California. He brought a camera into work to capture a day in the life at a company churning out some of the biggest technological advances of the decade Continue reading...

Scientist Moshe Vardi tells colleagues that change could come within 30 years, with few professions immune to effect of advanced artificial intelligence

Lisa Markwell says senior staff ‘depressed’ at paper closures but feel organisation will come goodA culture in which people are more willing to pay for overpriced coffee than a newspaper ensured the downfall of the Independent papers after three decades in print, a senior executive has said.Lisa Markwell, editor of the Independent on Sunday, paid tribute to the Lebedev family for their investment in the titles since 2010, but said the news industry must search its soul to find a sustainable way of doing business in a changing media environment.

It’s trying to look kooky but grown up, like a stilt walker who still manages to look sexy

PCVA says company should have warned users their phones could be disabled after installing software updateA Seattle-based law firm has filed the first legal action against Apple after the Guardian revealed how the technology giant has been deliberately “killing” its customers’ iPhone 6s if they have had them repaired by a third party.Law firm PCVA said on Friday that it had brought a class-action lawsuit in the US district court for the northern district of California in response to Apple’s “error 53” iPhone controversy. Continue reading...

Apple Music division’s first TV project to be six-part series titled Vital Signs about rap mogul, whose headphones and streaming service were bought by tech giantApple’s new Apple Music streaming division did not have to look too far for the subject of its first TV project. According the Hollywood Reporter, it is none other than Dr Dre, the music and film producer who made hundreds of millions when the technology giant purchased Beats headphones and streaming service Dre, started with Jimmy Iovine.

Move follows a disastrous week for Facebook during which its free internet service was blocked in India and a board member praised colonialismFacebook India’s managing director Kirthiga Reddy has announced she will be stepping down and moving back to the US after six years in the role.The announcement follows an embarrassing week for the internet firm and its effort to grow its audience in a key developing market of 1.25 billion people. Continue reading...

Teacher wins right to sue over suspension of account after he posted photo of Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the WorldA court has ruled that Facebook can be sued in France over its decision to remove the account of a French user who posted a photo of a famous 19th-century nude painting.The ruling by the Paris appeal court could set a legal precedent in the country, where Facebook has more than 30 million regular users. Continue reading...

A grieving father’s heartbreaking memorial for his son demonstrates that the genre can be about more than entertainmentVideo games have long enjoyed making entertainment out of conflict, but mainly from the infantilisation and the belittling of what is at its heart. As Simon Parkin explored in his recent book Death by Video Game, gaming barely acknowledges death, despite how central it is to so many titles, let alone lingers on it, or considers the grief in its aftermath.Entertainment is what drives the industry. But it need not define the medium and that it can be more is evident in the recently released That Dragon, Cancer, a title with an uncomfortable subject at its heart. It is a game made by parents Ryan and Amy Green about their son Joel, who was diagnosed with brain cancer at 12 months old. Continue reading...

The media critic on the malfunctioning tech economy, digital detoxes and why Facebook is unhygenicDouglas Rushkoff emerged as a media commentator in 1994 with his first book, Cyberia. His debut examined “the early psychedelic, rave roots of digital technology. I was trying to infer what a digital society might be like given the beliefs of these people,” he tells me during a phone interview from his Brooklyn home.He has published 10 books detailing an increasingly fierce critique of digital society. Along the way Rushkoff has coined terms that have slipped into the lexicon such as “digital natives”, “social currency” and “viral media”. He has also made several documentaries and written novels both graphic and regular; consulted for organisations from the UN to the US government and composed music with Genesis P-Orridge. In 2013 MIT named him the sixth most influential thinker in the world, sandwiched between Steven Pinker and Niall Ferguson. Continue reading...

Our new study on the associations between playing shoot-em-ups at a young age and aggression in adolescence highlights a complex link, surprising no one that actually plays video gamesIt was a headline in the Daily Mail that started it. ‘Computer games leave children with ‘dementia’, warns top neurologist’. It was annoying, because (a) there’s no evidence that games cause dementia in kids, and (b) the top neurologist wasn’t a neurologist. Scaremongering stories about the clear-cut negative effects of video games crop up in the news far too often, but when you start to dig into the evidence behind the claims, the story becomes murky. So rather than simply moan about the problem, Suzi Gage and I, along with some colleagues from the University of Bristol and UCL, decided to do some research for ourselves.A few years later, and the fruits of our labour have just been published in PLOS ONE. Using data from the Children of the 90s study, we set out to answer a (seemingly) simple question: is there an association between playing violent video games at young age, and aggressive behaviour during teenage years? Continue reading...

Australian Competition and Consumer Commission will demand Apple explain message that disables handset if it detects repairs by non-Apple techniciansThe competition watchdog says it will ask Apple to urgently explain an error message disabling iPhone users’ handsets and is considering whether it breaches Australian consumer law.Last week the Guardian revealed thousands of iPhone 6 users have received “error 53”, which permanently disables the handset if it detects that a repair has been carried out by a non-Apple technician. Continue reading...

Facebook board member Marc Andreessen’s offensive remarks about India on Twitter hint at an out-of-touch tech eliteAfter an irate Facebook board member wrote that India is better off under colonialism, many in Silicon Valley’s large and influential Indian population were offended.“People like [Facebook board member] Marc Andreessen are speaking from places of such massive privilege and are still so massively wrong,” said Rohit Sharma, a venture capitalist with True Ventures, which has raised $878m. “Someone in India’s needs are just the same as someone in San Francisco. How dare you imply otherwise? No.” Continue reading...

French taxi drivers argue that Uber sidesteps taxes and endangers passengers, while the company claims it is the French system that is behindTwo top Uber executives appeared Thursday in court in charges that could send them to prison, and hand the ride-hailing company one of its most serious legal challenges to date in France.

Only by going back several years can the technology company say that the rate of tax it pays is anything like the rate of UK corporation taxIt was with a straight face that Google’s global head of tax, Tom Hutchinson told MPs on parliament’s public accounts committee that the search group’s worldwide tax rate over the past five years was about 19%.“To me, that appears to be a fair amount of tax to pay,” he said, deadpan. It was a number he and Google’s European boss Matt Brittin kept coming back to in their evidence, on each occasion noting that it was “close to the UK [corporation tax] rate,” currently 20%. Continue reading...

Justin King said traditional retailers paid huge bills for services, while online rivals paid little but received same benefitsThe former boss of Sainsbury’s has waded into the row over the tax paid by multinationals such as Amazon and eBay, saying it was unfair that that traditional retailers must pay huge rates bills for services such as roads and waste collection, while their online rivals paid little but received the same benefits.Business rates, said Justin King, are a bigger problem for British retailers than the corporation tax scandal. Continue reading...

New job postings reveal how the company plans to bring its autonomous cars to market, pointing to a large manufacturing operationAlphabet, the holding company for Google, is pushing forward with plans to spin-out its self-driving car project into a standalone business making and marketing autonomous vehicles, according to new job listings.An advert posted last week for a marketing manager reveals that Alphabet – now the world’s most valuable technology company – intends to bring “self-driving cars to market” and “apply [a] new brand identity” after the project “graduates” from the company’s secretive X division, dedicated to moonshot projects such as airborne power generators and drones providing internet access. Continue reading...

Public accounts committee chair tells internet company’s European boss Matt Brittin people are ‘very angry’ over tax dealGoogle’s executives have been accused of being out of touch with reality after the company’s most senior UK-based executive was unable to tell MPs how much he earned.Matt Brittin appeared before the public accounts committee on Thursday to be questioned alongside senior tax officials about £130m in back taxes that Google agreed to pay in a deal announced last month. Continue reading...

Uber built a following quickly because it was cheap and easy to book - if only its drivers weren’t protesting against their treatmentThere is a distinct but now amusing memory I have from a little over seven years ago of looking through all the apps in the iPhone app store, which was then brand spanking new. It seems unfathomable now, but in late 2008 apps were very far from the mainstream, and lacking the imagination and ubiquity of today. The success and pervasiveness of mobile computing, symbiotically, helped popularise them. And arguably the most successful app of all is Uber — now the most valuable private company in the world worth currently (and imminent verge-of-tech-crash status notwithstanding) $62.5bn.Uber started with an itch that needed to be scratched — that taxi cabs in San Francisco were unreliable and expensive. It built a following because suddenly there was another option that was cheaper, more frequent and easier to book. Uber has its own problems, from a customer point of view; I’ve had Uber rides where the driver got lost and I had to navigate him through the city, and also a ride that cancelled on me after making me wait 45 minutes in the arse end of nowhere. Continue reading...

Court rejected call by producers of Oscar-winning drama to be allowed to unmask 4,726 alleged Australian pirates of the movieAfter a two-year battle, a landmark case against Australian internet users accused of illegally downloading the film Dallas Buyers Club has been dropped by the plaintiff, DBC LLC.The company announced that it had decided not to appeal against a ruling from a federal court in December that rejected a proposal for contact between the film company and alleged downloaders Continue reading...

Updated terms of use ban game engine from use for anything ‘life or safety-critical’ except in advent of reanimated human corpsesIf the world ever ends via a virus that “causes human corpses to reanimate” – a zombie apocalypse by any other name - then Amazon’s got your back, sort of.Amazon’s web services arm has updated its terms of service with a special clause that kicks in in the event of corpses consuming human flesh and the fall of civilisation.

More than 200 million people are already using Windows 10, but will your old software and peripherals still work if you accept this recommended upgrade?I upgraded from Windows 7 to 10 and it looked like everything went fine, even though it changed my home screen saver and where the icons were listed. The one thing I cannot get to work is our HP OfficeJet 7310 All-in-One device, which functions as a printer, copier, scanner, and fax machine. Now the printer function is the only one that works. SteveNew operating systems usually require new drivers, and for full functionality, this usually means drivers provided by the manufacturer. If these aren’t available, Microsoft will install generic drivers. Perhaps that’s what’s happened here, by mistake. Continue reading...

With its little hero made of yarn, this short, sweet puzzle platformer has a story to tell about the way love connects usUnravel is promoted as a tale “told completely without words”, but that’s not entirely true. In the photo album where the story is collected, a handwritten message summarises the themes of the game: “Love forms bonds, like strands of yarn. Like yarn, those bonds can be fragile, or get all tangled. But when they’re kept and cared for, they can bridge any distance.”Words also appear in the first level of this much anticipated puzzle adventure, to tell you how to run, jump, grab, climb, swing, throw a lasso and build a bridge. These instructions are nicely arranged, floating in the sky at the point you need them, but that doesn’t disguise that this is a tutorial crammed into one level, expecting players to quickly grasp how to move through the world. Continue reading...

Designer Melissa Coleman draws attention to the frequency at which young women die unnecessarily in childbirthIt’s beautiful, intricate and elegantly simple. But this lace collar is also seriously flash.Called Political Lace and created by Melissa Coleman, a software engineer-cum-media design artist based in London, the accessory is fitted with an LED light that blinks every seven and a half minutes – the frequency at which young women die unnecessarily during childbirth. Continue reading...

Administrative appeals tribunal had ruled that former Fairfax journalist Ben Grubb’s mobile data, held by Telstra, was not considered ‘personal information’The privacy commissioner, Timothy Pilgrim, has launched a federal court challenge to a ruling that a journalist was not entitled to access parts of his personal mobile phone data.The landmark challenge is believed to be the first time the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner has sought to appeal a case before the federal court. Continue reading...

Price of stock falls 13% in after-hours trading after hitting an all-time low earlier this week on news its number of monthly users has stopped growing entirelyTwitter lost users in the last three months, the company said on Wednesday, and the news sent share prices into a nosedive.Co-founder Jack Dorsey returned to lead the company last year and has shaken management to its core, laid off staff and instituted numerous changes to the service. So far his plans do not appear to be taking flight. Continue reading...

Entire-home listings were targeted for removal as the home-sharing tech company was facing intense criticism from New York authorities over its serviceAirbnb “purged” more than 1,000 listings from its site in order to rig a survey of its New York City hosts, according to a new report released on Wednesday.The move came as the home-sharing tech company was facing intense criticism from New York authorities. The report is based on the data collected by Murray Cox, who runs a watchdog website Inside Airbnb, and Tom Slee. According to the report, the “purge” targeted entire-home listings, which allow Airbnb users to rent an entire apartment, from people with multiple properties on the service, a particular issue with New York authorities. Continue reading...

Thousands of London’s traditional black taxis bring the streets around Westminster to a standstill during a protest against car-sharing service Uber and government pressure on their regulatory body on Wednesday. Len Martin from the United Cabbies Group says Uber needs to be subject to the same regulations as black cabs Continue reading...

Report finds average advertised pay for digital roles is about £50,000, as industry’s combined annual turnover hits £161bnEmployees in the UK’s growing digital technology sector can expect to earn better salaries than in the rest of the economy, according to the latest government-backed analysis of the industry.According to the Tech Nation 2016 report, the average advertised salary in digital roles is just under £50,000, 36% higher than the national average. The advertised pay for such jobs grew by 13% between 2012 and 2015. Continue reading...

Symantec warns of malware disguised as cheating tools for Blizzard’s collectible card gameHearthstone cheaters: all that bad karma is coming back to bite.Security researchers Symantec report that cybercriminals are disguising malware as cheating add-ons for Blizzard’s wildly popular collectible card game. Continue reading...

From Machine Code For Beginners to Computer Spacegames, the books that taught a generation of children to program have returned for freeA generation of children in the 1980s learned about programming from a series of computing books by Usborne Publishing. Now the company has rereleased them in free digital versions.Originally aimed at children learning to program their ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro and Commodore 64 computers, the series included books like Practical Things To Do With a Microcomputer, Machine Code for Beginners, and Write Your Own Adventure Programs. Continue reading...

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

Whether it’s a natural disaster, bioterrorist attack or pandemic, experts reckon society as we know it will collapse within 13 days of a catastrophic event. So what do you do next?On 22 June, 2013, Tara O’Toole and Thomas Inglesby of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies, organised a war game like no other. The two researchers, working with an array of bodies such as the ANSER Institute for Homeland Security, set out to simulate the effects of a biological attack on the US. The project was called Operation Dark Winter.What they discovered was that the country was ill prepared to cope. Within two weeks there would be enormous civilian casualties, a catastrophic breakdown in essential institutions, and mass civil unrest. Food supplies, electricity and transport infrastructures would all collapse. Continue reading...

Facebook reports Irish same-sex marriage referendum and US supreme court decision has driven increase in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex usersThe number of Australians coming out as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex or queer on Facebook daily has doubled since the start of 2015, the social media network has announced.Facebook measured the number of LGBTIQ Australians by monitoring which of its 14 million Australian users changed the “interested in” field to reflect a same-gender interest, an interest in both genders, entering into a same-sex relationship, or used a custom gender on their profile. Continue reading...

Alphabet convinces federal transportation safety board that the software in its self-driving cars is considered the driver, not the human insideGoogle has managed to persuade the US government that the tech company’s computers – rather than humans – should be defined as the “drivers” of a growing fleet of autonomous vehicles.In a significant precedent for Google and other companies developing autonomous car technology, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) has ruled that the software behind some automated cars should be considered the driver. Continue reading...

James Clapper did not name specific agency as being involved in surveillance via smart-home devices but said in congressional testimony it is a distinct possibilityThe US intelligence chief has acknowledged for the first time that agencies might use a new generation of smart household devices to increase their surveillance capabilities.