Technology | The Guardian

Digital assistants have grown in both their abilities and adoption in the last few months, learning to pass as people and show empathy – and even loveIt started as a normal email exchange with a tech CEO. He was up for a coffee, and passed me to his assistant to find a date. But then it turned a bit strange.Her emails were too good: all written in the same carefully casual, slightly humourless style. All formatted the same. All sent at socially convincing times. And all at believable intervals from my own messages. But they were off just a little.

Out-of-hours work is a major cause of burnout. But it’s not just down to individuals to solve the problem: this is an economic, societal malaiseThe worst case of “work addiction” I have encountered was described to me by an ex-management consultant. A member of his team – let’s call him Gary – was forced by his employer to take a holiday. The firm saw yet another potential burnout victim on its hands, in what has become a costly epidemic in today’s economy. So Gary bid farewell and set off for sunny Crete for two weeks with his girlfriend.While he was away the firm noticed something mysterious was happening. Gary’s emails were periodically being cleared in compact 20-minute bursts. He was asked about it when he came back. It turned out he simply couldn’t sit by the beautiful seashore doing nothing all day. He felt as if he was dying inside. So he secretly smuggled his smartphone to the beach and slipped off to the toilet every once in a while to get his email fix. Gary’s co-workers found it hilarious, but also somewhat disconcerting. Continue reading...

Apple and Android are leading push to get systems that combine audio functions with vehicle information into cars from the world’s largest automakersOver the next few years, it’s reasonable to expect that any new car or truck you might buy will come equipped with one of two “infotainment” systems: Apple or Android.An infotainment system is the successor to the car stereo – a system that combines audio entertainment functions with vehicle information. Continue reading...

Oh no! Please don’t ban obligatory internet titles (Letters, 9 January). They provide me with endless hours of harmless fun. Whenever I am required to provide one, I just choose the least appropriate for the site or company in question. Having long since exhausted Dr and Prof, I’m now a Sir to one of my banks, and have been a Lord to another, with a chequebook to that effect. I’m also a Dame and a Father elsewhere. Having long since used up all of the offered titles, I now go for the Other option and create my own, much to the amusement of my postie. My favourite is The Reverend, accepted by a company that now calls me “The Revered”. But I’ve never knowingly benefited by my self-elevation within our class- and status-fixated society.

Halle Freyssinet is an ambitious €200m project city officials hope will attract 1,000 French and foreign tech entrepreneursIn a corner of a previously rundown district in south-east Paris, hundreds of workers are tackling the challenge of turning a listed railway goods yard into an ultra-modern global hub for internet development.The Halle Freyssinet is an ambitious €200m (£150m) development that city officials hope will become the world’s biggest startup incubator and attract about 1,000 French and foreign technology entrepreneurs. It is by far the biggest and most visually impressive of a series of projects that the Socialist mayor, Anne Hidalgo, hopes will put Paris on the international technology map.

Survey co-authored by Trae Vassallo, who testified in the Ellen Pao case, found that for women in tech and venture capital gender discrimination is commonSixty percent of the women working in Silicon Valley experience unwanted sexual advances, according to a new survey released this week. About two-thirds of them say that these advances were from their superior.The survey called Elephant in the Valley was conducted by seven women, one of whom was a key witness in the Ellen Pao trial last year. Continue reading...

Move puts Twitter ahead of Facebook but some see it as sign of failure to build dedicated Periscope community, and raises fears over data consumptionStarting today Twitter’s Periscope live streaming videos will appear in users’ feeds, right within the social network’s main app on iPhones and iPads.

‘Night Shift’ makes screen of mobile device redder at night, following research that suggests it can help with sleepIt’s not often that a smaller update of iOS, Apple’s operating system for mobile devices, comes with treats for users. But the forthcoming iOS 9.3, which has just been released in beta form to developers, comes with one big feature: a good night’s sleep.That’s thanks to a new feature called Night Shift, which adjusts the colour balance of the iPad or iPhone’s screen after sunset. The phone uses geolocation and its internal clock to tell when it’s sundown, and then shifts the colours onscreen so they’re warmer, with more orange and red tones and fewer blue and white. Continue reading...

New capture and removal system could help in disarming unmanned aerial vehicles carrying explosive payload, without causing them to crash

Art and science will collide at the Arts Catalyst building in King’s Cross, London, in a showcase of projects from home and abroadThey’ve explored the future look of Antarctic research stations, co-commissioned studies into deformed amphibians and even probed cultural issues relating to nuclear technology. Now The Arts Catalyst is embarking on a very different project. Opening this month in Kings Cross, the Centre for Art, Science and Technology will build on the organisation’s 20-plus years of experience in marrying the two cultures, offering a permanent spot to publicly showcase projects from home and abroad, as well as foment new plans. But the venue on Cromer Street won’t be your typical gallery. “There will be big discursive programmes, talks, public events, workshops, residencies,” says curator Alec Steadman. “It will be dynamic rather than a static exhibition of objects.”Celebrating its opening is a twin exhibition, Notes from the Field, one arm of which will feature footage and activities relating to Wrecked on the Intertidal Zone – an ongoing project in the Essex town of Leigh-on-Sea. Highlighting the community’s relationship with the Thames Estuary, artists have worked with residents on activities ranging from citizen science projects to a “temporary monument” in the form of a reclaimed cockle boat that has been carved with the names of “lost species”, from plants and animals to local customs. “The idea is that we will put her back, but a bit further up, and then she will rot away where people can see her,” says Graham Harwood of artistic partnership YoHa that is working on the project. The second part of the exhibition, Arte Útil – translated as “useful art” – displays a different collection of works. “That’s an archive looking back all the way to the 1800s, applying this notion of usefulness to art history – so projects that have an actual social use,” says Steadman. Continue reading...

Gadget-makers in biometrics and tracking say they used to deal with the tinfoil hat brigade, but now everyone wants to know ‘how to stay secure’The man selling biometric equipment at the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas this week had never seen so much interest in his booth in nearly 30 years.And he’s horrified. He always thought widespread acceptance of their fingerprint scanners would be for convenience, not surveillance, but he’s not so sure any more. Continue reading...

UK’s largest mobile phone network tells Twitter users that issue affecting calls to landlines is ‘priority 1’The mobile phone networks EE and O2 have resolved a problem which left some customers unable to make voice calls to landlines.

Nearly 200 experts, companies and advocacy groups urge governments to end efforts to ‘mandate insecure encryption’ amid surveillance concernsAmid a sustained push by world governments to undermine secure digital communications, campaigners from more than 42 countries are making a concerted push to defend encryption.

Call from information commissioner Christopher Graham follows case of a woman who stole 28,000 driver records and received only a £1,000 fineThe head of the government’s privacy watchdog has called for stronger sentencing powers for people convicted of stealing personal data, after a woman who sold 28,000 pieces of sensitive driver data was fined just £1,000.In the wake of the case information commissioner Christopher Graham said the courts should be given tougher sanctions to deter prospective thieves, including suspended sentences, community service and even prison in very serious cases. Continue reading...

Cab hailing company needs a cash injection in the next three months to continue as a going concern, according to auditor’s report on latest accountsCab-hailing app Hailo only has enough cash to operate as a going concern for another three months, according to an auditor’s report released with the company’s 2014 accounts on Sunday.Over the course of that year, Hailo Network Holdings, Hailo’s parent company, made a loss of £21.8m. The majority of that loss, £11.8m, comes from the company’s now-discontinued North American business. Until October 2014, Hailo subsidiaries in Canada and the US offered its taxi-hailing service in cities including Toronto and New York. Continue reading...

Always a step ahead of the curve, he spotted the potential of the internet as a venue in which to make, share and expand upon art

‘Games can elicit emotions that surprise players, provide ways for them to socialise and much more. They’re extremely powerful’In the third year of her university course studying computer systems, Helana Santos earned a placement at a tech company where she realised she had made a terrible mistake. “I immediately knew that I wanted to do something a lot more creative with my life,” she says. So she adjusted her sights toward the video game industry, securing a graduate role at a small studio in Bath. Her first year in the industry was tough – her first few projects were cancelled. Then after she joined Blitz Games in Leamington Spa, a video game studio that employs more than 200 staff, she was offered the chance to work on a dream project: a Mickey Mouse game, designed in collaboration with Disney.While Santos describes creating Epic Mickey 2 as an “amazing experience”, in September 2013 she left the company to set up her own independent studio, co-founding Modern Dream with a colleague, Oliver Clarke. The team has worked fast and hard, launching a number of games to date. The Button Affair, for example, is a game in the style of 60s spy capers in which you play a glamorous thief out to steal a diamond of Koh-i-Noor proportions from a business tycoon. As well as its striking aesthetic, Santos and the team had a philanthropic vision for the game: The Button Affair was offered as a free download to everyone who donated a pound to the charity Special Effect, which specialises in making video games accessible to disabled players. Continue reading...

‘I tend to enjoy pursuing simplicity in the games I create. I obsess over small details’Roberta Saliani left her home town of Bari, in Puglia, Italy, when she was 17, having grown frustrated at the way women “who preferred to focus on a career rather than a marriage” were treated.Seven days after she landed in London, Saliani joined Babel Media, a company that specialises in translating video games into and out of foreign languages. Continue reading...

‘I want to be very sure that I’m doing what I want – not what’s expected. I want to surprise people’In 2014, a 19-year-old William Pugh took to the stage at a glitzy ceremony in San Francisco to receive an award for The Stanley Parable, a video game he had helped create. Pugh’s acceptance speech was delivered via irreverent text scrawled on prompt cards, which he dropped to the floor, one by one, in silence.Pugh’s rebellious, anarchic streak is clearly visible in his games. The Stanley Parable, for example, is a clever exploration of the idea of player agency. You play employee 427, a man who loves his job in a towering office block and who one day looks up from his desk to find his co-workers have vanished. As you explore the office, your actions are commentated on by an omnipresent narrator (played by Kevan Brighting), who as well as reporting your movements offers prompts and clues as to what to do next. The narrator chastises you when you divert from his instructions and spoil the story ahead of time, restarting the game where appropriate without your consent. As the game progresses, a complicated relationship forms between you, the character, the game designer and the narrator. Continue reading...

The company’s Hue controllers allow you to change the colour and brightness of bulbs. But then Philips decided to block third-party suppliers.You know how frustrating it is when you put a cartridge in your printer, and it tuts at you about “not an approved part”, after which, printing becomes even more of a lottery than usual? Now you can get the same experience with light bulbs.In mid-December, Philips – best known for the fabulously popular compact cassette and then the fabulously unpopular digital compact cassette – released a firmware update for its Hue LED light bulbs and controllers. Apart from having a rather HAL-like appearance, with a glowing red centre surrounded by blackness, the Hue is meant to let you control the colour and brightness of your bulbs, all from the comfort of your smartphone. Continue reading...

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

Android-maker’s first own-brand tablet is a sleek, powerful, aluminium-clad slate with only a few shortcomings, but could it really be a workhorse?The Pixel C is Google’s first own-brand tablet, designed and made via China by Google and is the best Android tablet available at the moment.

Power stations, summits and the PM’s car are all potential targets for unmanned aerial vehicles carrying explosives, says Oxford Research Group

It is clear we are about to see far too much political power exercised by the US internet companies (Snooper’s charter will have limited shelf life, warns industry, 8 January). Before the Home Office and then parliament accepts the level of influence from the likes of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and Microsoft, as indicated in the criticism they level at the draft bill before a joint committee of both houses, we need a few homes truths on the table.The first is to spell out that not one of these companies could have started up business anywhere other than a western liberal democracy founded on the rule of law. Yes, that means that these companies that preach globalism would not have been able to start business in (say) Russia, where company lawyers get beaten to death; or China, where they just disappear. Continue reading...

The creators of Facebook’s Messenger app have made several predictions for the coming year – including doing away with with the time-honoured tradition of dialling with actual numbersAge: 127 yearsAppearance: Digity Continue reading...

Chief executive on creating value, the impact of adblocking, and why HuffPo isn’t chasing profitsWhen he joined AOL as chief executive in 2009, Tim Armstrong had to unravel “the biggest mistake in corporate history”, spinning the company off at a value of $2.5bn, not much more than a 100th of what it was worth when it merged with Time Warner at the height of the dotcom bubble. Last year, he oversaw its sale to mobile network Verizon for $4.4bn.“It’s a climb up,” Armstrong told the Guardian during a trip to the UK before Christmas. “AOL was a company that went from a $150bn valuation down to a billion dollars overall. At the same time that was happening, when I was at Google, we went from sub-$1bn valuation up to $150bn.” Continue reading...

‘Games are about pulling people into a world, making a space for creativity and building a dialogue’80 Days, the rip-roaring, award-winning iPhone and PC game in which you assume the role of Passepartout, put-upon butler to the world-travelling 19th-century explorer Phileas Fogg, boasts more than eight times the word count of the novel on which it’s based. The journey described in Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days is complete in a little over 60,000 words. 80 Days, by contrast, contains more than half a million – although you’ll have to play many times before you read them all.Meg Jayanth, a writer for video games who splits her time between London and her home city, Bangalore, was responsible for much of the sprawling word count. During 80 Days’ development, she wrote hundreds of thousands of lines of text, snippets of dialogue and the taut descriptions that fill out the game’s landscape as vividly as any 3D artist could. Continue reading...

‘Castles in the Sky evokes the awe and energy of being a kid. In a way, it helped me let go of childhood’When Dan Pearce was in primary school, he told his friends that he had won a competition to have one of his ideas made into a video game by an international video game publisher. It was a lie, but one Pearce coolly upheld, inviting his friends to pitch in ideas for how the game could be improved. “It basically turned into a two-year exercise in designing as a group and getting feedback on my ideas,” he recalls today. “That said, I do still feel very guilty about maintaining the lie for so long.”Thanks to this formative experience, by the age of 10, Pearce, who lives in Maidenhead, Berkshire, knew that he wanted to become a game designer. The following year he bought a copy of RPG Maker, a simple game-making tool for Sony’s PlayStation. The first game he made was a pastiche of his favourite Nintendo games – The Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy and Pokémon. “It was basically just me taking aesthetic elements that I liked in various pieces of media,” he says. “There was an island floating in the sky because I liked a Gorillaz music video. I once bunked off school for two weeks so that I could just work on that game.” Continue reading...

‘I’d like to see more games engage people politically. Playing a game can even be a form of activism’Midway through a university course in theoretical physics, James Long decided that he wanted to make video games for a living. “Video games are just more communicable than theoretical physics,” he says. “They’re more primal, more political.” Long’s realisation came at a key moment, not only in his development, but also in what he sees as the medium’s evolution. “Games were becoming a superset of all other art forms: painting, architecture, music, narrative,” he says. “And on top of that, they explore agency, discovery, and play itself.”Long’s first game, made with four friends for an international student competition, seemingly does little to meet this grandiose potential. Sculpty is an iPad game in which players must squeeze, squash, and stretch an anthropomorphic blob while guiding it through a jungle’s sweltering terrors. Despite the game’s simplicity and child-like appeal, Sculpty, which was nominated for a Bafta, was a crucial learning experience for Long. He describes the thrill of seeing people play and replay the game as instrumental in giving him confidence to continue. Continue reading...

Teaching algorithms aim to change Brazilian education for ever – but where does the teacher fit into the classroom of tomorrow?It’s 10am on a sunny November day in Rio de Janeiro, and the scene inside the classroom is one of quiet application. At a dozen or so hexagonal tables, pupils work on laptops or in exercise books. At one of the clusters, a teacher sits to help a pupil, while another talks to a group of students at the far end of the room – a large salon in which almost half of the pupils at the school are seated. The rest of the school’s 213 students, aged between 11 and 14, are busy elsewhere in the building, which includes six small, more traditional classrooms.Through the windows that run the length of the classroom, dark blue sea is visible in the distance, past green hills, while above the school Rocinha favela surges up the mountain in a clutter of concrete and peach-coloured brick. Continue reading...

The future looks dim for film-style storytelling as more games enable you to plot your own adventuresFor a while, the trajectory of video games curved toward cinema. Technology’s advance allowed characters and scenes that were previously composed from rudimentary sprites (Super Mario’s porno moustache, for example, was grown because people found it difficult to make out an unadorned mouth on a 16-pixel-high character at the time) to be newly rendered in full detail. Hollywood actors and artists began to lend their talent to games. The Oscar-winning film composer Hans Zimmer provided the score to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Beyond: Two Souls, a cinematic game that stars Ellen Page as both the face and voice of its protagonist. In this way video games began to look like and sound like films and, in turn, through the use of point-of-view camera angles and stentorian set pieces, films began to look like video games.The enduring appeal of video games has always been in their ability to cast us into the role of an active participant Continue reading...

Headset pre-orders open as Twitter users express dismay over pricesUniversal Music Group – the label that boasts Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber and Madonna on its roster – has revealed it is teaming up with iHeartMedia to “virtualise” the gig experience, with the hardware now available for pre-order. Industry experts are in agreement: 2016 may be the year that “virtual reality” comes of age.Buying into the concept, however, is pricey. At £499 for UK buyers, the Oculus Rift box includes headset, sensor, games and controller, while next month, for $1,499 (£1,030), a package will be available for pre-order that includes a computer – should your ancient laptop not be quite up to speed. Continue reading...

The vibrator’s long, slow march from taboo to mainstream (and maybe even cool) has been all about figuring out what exactly women wantConsider the humble vibrator. Invented as a medical device in the 19th century, it has gone on to become a Mad Men plot line, a Sex and the City tie-in, a celebrity talking point and a feminist cause.

Nigel Broome’s south-east London flat was left trashed with holes punched in walls, flooding in kitchen and window ripped out

This bike has given me such joy that I’ll remember it for ever, like a boy I never got over

Obama administration acknowledges ‘complicated first amendment issues’ after top counter-terrorism officials traveled to California to woo technology executives from companies including Apple, Facebook and TwitterTechnology giants appeared to be open to helping the US government combat Islamic State during an extraordinary closed-door summit on Friday that brought together America’s most senior counter-terrorism officials with some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful executives.The remarkable rendezvous between Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft and others and a delegation from the White House revealed a willingness on the part of tech firms to work with the government, and indicated that the Obama administration appears to have concluded it can’t combat terrorists online on its own. Continue reading...

Among all the gadgets and equipment at the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Friday was Sony’s hotly anticipated PS–HX500 record player that allegedly not only offers great playback, but also a digital recording feature. This year’s CES has also seen a huge amount of virtual reality (VR) present with the famous Oculus Rift gaming headset entering the consumer market alongside other headsets aimed at professionals

Mark Warner locked horns with former European digital commissioner Neelie Kroes at CES in latest exchange between tech giants and governments on privacyA Democratic senator has accused Europe of using antitrust cases to disguise its own technology interests, the latest exchange in an ongoing tussle between American tech giants and European governments over privacy.Virginia’s Mark Warner locked horns with former European digital commissioner Neelie Kroes, who appeared alongside him at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The senator questioned the motives behind the EU’s plans for pan-European data privacy rules. Continue reading...

Someone is making lots of money from hoverboards, but it isn’t Shane Chen. He marketed his design under the name Hovertrax, which sold for around $1,000. Cheap imitations, made in Chinese factories, have flooded the market at about one quarter of the cost Continue reading...

‘Hidden’ version of the US investigative outlet’s site is response to concerns about online privacy and surveillanceThe US investigative outlet ProPublica has launched the world’s first major news site designed for the dark web in a bid to provide absolute privacy for its readers.The non-profit organisation has set up a version of its site optimised for use over the Tor network, which provides security all the way between the user and Pro Publica’s servers. Users could already hide their identity using the Tor browser, but the “hidden site” optimised for the network makes it even less likely they will be exposed. Continue reading...

Smartphone manufacturer Lenovo will dump US mobile phone pioneer’s name following its acquisition two years ago, hanging up the line on a famous brandMotorola, the brand which invented the mobile phone, brought us the iconic “Motorola brick”, and gave us both the first flip-phone and the iconic Razr, is to cease to exist. Continue reading...

From a new cab app to rival Uber to Google’s Cardboard Camera, we present this month’s best apps and games Continue reading...

Patent-infringing clampdown comes after legal action by original balancing scooter manufacturerA Chinese manufacturer’s booth at CES in Las Vegas has been raided by US marshals in a crackdown on patent-infringing hoverboards.The raid, which led to the confiscation of the self-balancing, one-wheel Surfing Electric Scooters, signs, branding and show-floor stalls from Changzhou First International Trade, is one of the first of its kind within the clone-culture of CES. Continue reading...

We love emojis and all the possibilities of this visual language. But who would ever need to send a person a push-pin or a large orange diamond?An emoji was named as Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year in 2015. It’s a visual language most of us use every single day. It can be a nuanced and creative means of communication. Certain demographics have their own emoji lingo. Think pieces abide.But some of those little characters? Meh. Entirely, utterly pointless. Here are eight of the most pointless: Continue reading...

No kitchen is complete without a posh juicer. But are they really a shortcut to a healthy diet, and which is the best? Nutritionist Dr Aedin Cassidy puts the latest machines through their pacesDr Aedin Cassidy doesn’t dislike Gwyneth Paltrow, but tactfully suggests the actress ought to have “a couple more degrees” before offering nutritional advice. Cassidy has three, and is a professor of nutrition at UEA and a visiting professor at Harvard.“The public are bombarded with quirky herbs, magic berries, crazy diets, but in nutrition, it’s evidence-based science that counts,” she says. Continue reading...

All the latest from the biggest tech event on the planetThis week Las Vegas’s usual parade of gamblers, newly-weds and Elvis tribute acts were joined by the biggest gathering of tech companies on the planet – 3200 of them.They’re all there for CES 2016, with everything from smart bras to hoverboards vying for the attention of the 170,000 delegates who flock there from all over the world. Continue reading...

The DJ on how the USB stick changed her life, her lovely old iMac and keeping in touch with her rock star husbandAre you a gadget fiend or a technophobe?I love a gadget and I’ve got my dad to blame for that. When I was growing up, he always had the latest thing: cine-cameras, VHS players, enormous mobile phones. I’ve definitely inherited his gadget fiendness. Continue reading...

Freemium may be the dominant way to play on your smartphone and tablet, but there are still games worth paying for upfrontRemember when you paid for a game, and then you played it? Hard as it may be to recall, this was once the norm. Since smartphones came along, Freemium games - where you play for free but pay to speed things up or unlock more - have been in the ascendancy. And while in-app purchases aren’t always a bad thing, sometimes it’s nice to just pay upfront and settle down to play.With that in mind, here are 10 of the best recent mobile games – all released in the second half of 2015 – that are worth shelling out for, with no subsequent in-app purchases. Prices are correct at the time of writing.

The place to talk about games and other things that matterYay, it’s Friday! Continue reading...

Robert Kyncl told CES that with more than a billion people watching YouTube every month, internet video is becoming a major cultural powerYouTube’s PR rep assured me there would be no news at their chief business officer Robert Kyncl’s keynote talk at tech’s largest consumer showcase this week.True to her word, there wasn’t. But it didn’t matter. Continue reading...