Technology | The Guardian

The Australian Centre for the Moving Image gets collaborative by opening office doors to Melbourne’s creative community with a 60-seat spaceWhen the Australian Centre for the Moving Image opened its doors in Melbourne 13 years ago, it couldn’t be known how ubiquitous the moving image would become. What does a museum that celebrates the moving image do in an era of smartphones, YouTube and Instagram, when every teenager on Twitter becomes a curator and formerly hard-to-come-by film and sound recordings are now just a few clicks away?For the director and chief executive of Acmi, Katrina Sedgwick, the new state of play means museums – as large cultural institutions, well-funded and well-resourced – must expand to “co-creation”. Continue reading...

Peter Clinkscales, a college student with stickers on his face at Clinton’s sort-of victory party, became a trending topic – though he’s still undecided on his voteMeet Sticker Kid. The true winner of Monday nights caucuses in Iowa.

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

Jack Worth could be forced to pay a fine and has been threatened with charges of misconduct from Emerson College in BostonA Boston college student is in trouble with his school for trying to rent out his dorm room on the accommodation website Airbnb.The student listed his dorm room at Emerson College in downtown Boston on the site in January, according to a petition on the website Change.org tiled “Free Jack Worth”, which is asking the school to drop disciplinary proceedings against him. Continue reading...

Phillip Fleitz, 31, was ‘architect’ of scheme that mined cellphone numbers and bombarbed them with messages that conned users into clicking marketing linksA man who helped send millions of illegal spam messages to US and international cellphones and computers has been sentenced to 27 months in federal prison.Phillip Fleitz, 31, was handcuffed and ordered to immediately begin serving the sentence by a federal judge in Pennsylvania. Continue reading...

The search engine’s parent company performed better than expected Monday with a value of $518bn after investors were given inside look into tech companyAlphabet, parent company of Google, looks set to take the crown from Apple and become the world’s most valuable company.The tech company announced better than expected results on Monday and gave investors their first proper look under the hood at the engine that drives its business. Operating income from its core businesses rose 23% in 2015. Investors liked what they saw and shares spiked 8% in after-hours trading. Continue reading...

Officials debating how European citizens’ data should be shared after safe harbour pact deemed invalid in wake of Snowden revelations

Highly critical report says proposed legislation must be reviewed to ensure obligations on tech industry are clearThe government’s investigatory powers bill lacks clarity and is sowing confusion among tech firms about the extent to which “internet connection records” will be collected, a parliamentary select committee has warned.The highly critical report by the House of Commons science and technology committee says there are widespread doubts about key definitions in the legislation, “not to mention the definability, of a number of the terms”.

From a reworked boardgame to the brilliant GTA, a new crop of games for iOSMaking the most of the relative paucity of major console releases early in the year has traditionally seen a good crop of gaming apps released into a cold, dark January. This year is no exception with colour and light illuminating the gloom from mobiles across a variety of genres – indeed, even the humble boardgame has proved susceptible to a makeover.It’s been done beautifully in Brass (Cubio, iOS, £3.99), which recreates an excellent table-top title set in the north of England during the Industrial Revolution. The idea is to build up cotton mills, coal mines and iron works and connect them through a series of canals and railroads, without going bankrupt. The rules can be daunting so it’s well worth playing on an iPad at first to make reading the text prompts and various cards easier. The tutorial doesn’t do the best job, so hunt around online for a full PDF of the rules. Perseverance does pay off, however, and once you are up and running there is a rewardingly complex challenge to discover, which can be enjoyed both online and offline. With every tiny mistake you make at the start resulting in dire consequences later on, it’s certainly not easy, but failure only increases the desire to learn and improve, making for a compulsive just-one-more-go experience. Continue reading...

When the game-playing system AlphaGo defeated a master of the Chinese game go five games to nil, its creators could not explain why. Is this a sign of intuitive AI?Last week, researchers at the artificial intelligence company DeepMind, which is now owned by Google, announced an extraordinary breakthrough: in October last, a DeepMind computing system called AlphaGo had defeated the reigning European champion player of the ancient Chinese game go by five games to nil. The victory was announced last week in a paper published in the scientific journal Nature.So what? Computers have been getting better and better at board games for yonks. Way back in the dark ages of 1997, for example, IBM’s Deep Blue machine beat the then world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, at chess. So surely go, which is played not with six different pieces but black and white tokens – would be a pushover? Not so: the number of possible positions in go outnumber the number of atoms in the universe and far exceed the number of possibilities in chess. Continue reading...

A new brand from a familiar website, the Orro is a lightweight racer destined to become a classicChris Froome and Philippe Gilbert aren’t sure about them, but Tom Boonen is in favour… When it comes to disc brakes the riders may still be undecided, but as of this summer they will be used in major road events across Europe. Technical and racing fears aside, one thing is clear: the stopping power of discs in the wet is a massive step forward.A good example are those featured on this new model from Orro. The bike is the brainchild of the UK’s largest cycle distributor, i-ride.co.uk, which last year decided to create its own brand from its HQ in Sussex. A whole range of bikes are on offer, including this Pyro Disc. It’s lightweight, pleasingly stable, has impressive handling and comes with a generous level of kit for cash. But you can’t put a price on decent brakes on slippery roads (i-ride.co.uk). Continue reading...

Student engineers win right to build and test concept for high-speed ground transport tubes at new track to be built next to SpaceX headquartersMIT student engineers won a competition to transform SpaceX and Tesla Motors co-founder Elon Musk’s idea into a design for a Hyperloop to move pods of people at high speed.Related: Elon Musk: Tesla cars will be able to cross US with no driver in two years Continue reading...

The US giant’s flat results are in part due to low-cost rivals thriving in the world’s biggest smartphone marketThe idea that one of America’s most talismanic businesses – and the world’s biggest company by market value – might one day come to rely on China for its growth would have seemed strange just a decade ago. But for iPhone maker Apple, what happens on the other side of the world is suddenly crucial to its future.Speaking to analysts last week as the company released its fourth-quarter earnings, chief executive Tim Cook couldn’t assuage concerns. While proclaiming the “best results ever” in greater China, with revenues up 14% to more than $18bn, he also admitted that “we began to see some signs of economic softness [there] earlier this month, most notably in Hong Kong.” The shares, already down from $130 last May to $100, clattered down another few dollars. Continue reading...

As Silicon Valley firms hail the benefits of disruption, some European leaders are pushing to develop the industry’s moral compass. This is a real chance to make better decisions, fight fatalism and build a humane futureFacebook, Google, Amazon and other internet behemoths are involved in a form of technological innovation that is acting as a “wrecking ball”, the president of the European parliament declared in Brussels this week.“The aim is not just to play with the way society is organised, but instead to demolish the existing order and build something new in its place,” said Martin Schulz. “The internet lost its innocence long ago.” Continue reading...

Federal budget proposal seeks billions for grants to states and $100m for competitive grants for school districts over the next three yearsPresident Barack Obama said on Saturday he will ask Congress for billions of dollars to help students learn computer science skills and prepare for jobs in a changing economy.Related: Obama outlines rules for closing gender pay gap and giving women 'fair shot' Continue reading...

CEO Jack Dorsey’s turnaround effort has seen the social networking firm’s shares fall 41% since October. Perhaps it should stop trying to be what it is notTwitter’s chief executive, Jack Dorsey, dug deep at an emergency morale-boosting session at the company’s San Francisco headquarters on Thursday, urging staff to post tweets expressing their commitment to the embattled social networking firm.Related: Twitter's US users fall by a third in two years - report Continue reading...

Amazon leads the way into the real world as online real estate – once heralded as the next frontier for retail – becomes crowded and expensiveRemember when the future of retail was online? Now it seems that online retailers have decided they can’t get by without bricks and mortar.Amazon raised eyebrows in November when it opened its first brick and mortar extension – a bookstore in Seattle’s University Village. The online giant’s rise, after all, is blamed for laying waste to independent bookshops across the country.

Screens all around Golden Jubilee hospital in Clydebank reveal ‘brutally transparent’ stats on everything from hand hygiene to superbug ratesThe dials on the dashboard screen flicker between red and green, to indicate targets missed or met, outside the orthopaedic ward of the Golden Jubilee national hospital in Clydebank.The information displayed here is free of medical jargon and simple to understand, led by what relatives themselves said they wanted to know about the place where their loved ones were being cared for. And it is also brutally transparent – a single patient fall or pressure sore is a missed target, making angry red blots appear at the bottom of the screen. There has been one of each in this particular ward over the past month. Continue reading...

Tory peer Nigel Lawson says ability for multinationals to move profits around world makes corporation tax redundant

Like many people I was incensed and embarrassed at the absurdly low tax settlement with Google (EU’s warning over Google tax deal row, 29 January). Yet another huge US corporation ducking and weaving to obtain spectacularly favourable concessions in rich European consumer bases. It pays armies of lawyers and accountants to flex their muscles on our hapless government departments with less able negotiators. I don’t just blame Mr Osborne. His team has proved to be a spineless disgrace in negotiations, worn down by relentless pressure from these huge corporations.Related: EU could force Google to pay more UK tax Continue reading...

Their films use the high-production standards seen in gaming and action movies in their quest to appeal and appal. But they’re not the only ones who have had that ideaRelated: Media jihad: why Isis's leaders bow to its propagandistsA recent, wearyingly grim clip from Islamic State shows six armed children sweeping a castle in search of bound hostages. One by one, they enter the ruin, their movement tracked by multiple cameras. When, at last, each boy finds a target, cringing in the shadows, he lines up a shot and, following a theatrical pause, squeezes the trigger. The footage invites many questions. Who are these children? Who are the men they kill? What perverted doctrine could ever defend such cruelty? How large was the production team? Continue reading...

Pilots call for action and warn the four category-A incidents at Heathrow, Stansted, City airport and Manchester are just the tip of the icebergAirline pilots have called for a clampdown on drones, warning of potential disaster after four separate near-miss incidents at UK airports were reported in a single month, including one in a passenger jet taking off from London Stansted.The pilots have called for urgent action after the four “category A” incidents in which a serious risk of a collision occurred. Continue reading...

Developed from surplus military parts in 1947 by designer Maurice Wilks on his Anglesey farm, Land Rover’s Defender has become a design classic and a royal favourite. It has covered the globe in a variety of guises, with most still running thanks to its durability and simplicity. The vehicle, which has been built at the Solihull plant since 1948, will cease production on Friday

Licensed Taxi Drivers Association weighs up court action claiming app’s licence should be reviewed over its corporation tax paymentsLondon’s black-cab drivers are considering court action to try to revoke Uber’s licence to operate in the city, citing the fact that the ride-hailing app firm pays no corporation tax in the UK.It emerged last October that Uber paid just £22,134 in UK corporation tax in the most recent financial year despite making an £866,000 profit. The tax paid related to amounts deferred from previous years when Uber’s UK operation made a loss. Continue reading...

Having gone from humble black-and-white beginnings, 2016 will see TV set free from the television set to be consumed wherever and whenever you wantSince its first demonstration in the mid-1920s television has gone through five major shifts that affect the way viewers consume it. Now we’re on the verge of a sixth shift that will bring it kicking and screaming into a brave new world of TV everywhere.The UK is the most advanced TV-watching country in the world, according to Ofcom, and has seen a record rise in the use of tablets for consuming media. The living room TV is no-longer the be-all and end-all of television consumption. Continue reading...

The social network’s 1.5bn users will soon be able to respond to posts with ‘love’, ‘haha’, ‘wow’, ‘sad’ and ‘angry’ buttonsFacebook is to expand its “like” feature with five new emoji options called Reactions. The social network’s founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, said the buttons would be pushed out to the site’s 1.5 billion users “pretty soon”.The “love”, “haha”, “wow”, “sad” and “angry” buttons are being tested in several countries, Zuckerberg said. Each one has an emoji-style face and will appear underneath users’ posts. Continue reading...

Renting a luxury house near Levi’s Stadium can exceed the country’s median per capita income, and some are hoping to spin their homes into Super Bowl goldOne million people are expected to travel to the San Francisco Bay area for Super Bowl 50, and some residents are hoping to spin their homes into gold.The going price for renting out a luxury house near where the champion football game will be played can exceed the country’s median per capita income of $28,155. The promise of that kind of payday is prompting some homeowners to test the waters of short-term rental platforms like Airbnb for the first time. Continue reading...

Shares in the online retailer dropped 12% after announcing a net profit of $482m in last months of 2015, a gain that was less than analysts had been expectingAmazon recorded it largest ever quarterly profit over the holiday quarter but missed Wall Street’s estimates by a wide margin, sending its share price into a tailspin.Shares in the world’s largest online retailer plunged 12% on Thursday after it announced a net profit of $482m for the three months ending 31 December – up from $214m a year earlier. The company notched up $35.75bn in sales in last year’s final three months. Continue reading...

Despite the tech boom, cafeteria staff, security workers and bus drivers have told US labor secretary Thomas Perez they feel like ‘second-class citizens’At Intel’s corporate headquarters in Santa Clara, California, the highly paid engineers and developers directly employed by the computer chip company wear blue identification badges.Janitors, electricians, gardeners, security guards and cafeteria workers employed by various subcontractors wear green badges. Continue reading...

Despite its huge value, Silicon Valley developers are turned off by ‘secretive, controlling’ culture and its engineering is no longer seen as cutting edgeWhen developer James Knight was on the job market recently, he considered applying to several of the big tech companies and immediately crossed Apple off his list.“Apple’s culture is one that’s so negative, so strict, so harsh,” said Knight, a talented 27-year-old coder who left a job at Google for more lucrative freelance work. “At Apple, you’re gonna be working 60-80 hours a week and some VP will come yell at you at any moment? That’s a very hostile work environment.” Continue reading...

Highlights of the centre’s 2016-17 season include a digital trip into an orchestra, a year-long festival examining music and belief, plus Radio 3 celebrates its 70th by moving in for a fortnightLondon’s Southbank Centre is surely ambitious. Its 2016-17 classical music season will embrace life, the universe and pretty much everything in between.Central to the plans, which were announced on Thursday, are two leading partnerships. A digital collaboration with the Philharmonia, and a year-long festival, Belief and Beyond Belief, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Continue reading...

A self-driving electric shuttle bus, called a WEpod, is unveiled in Gelderland, Netherlands, on Thursday. There are already self-driving vehicles such as the Rotterdam Rivium shuttle bus and the Heathrow shuttles in London, but those vehicles operate on dedicated lanes. In Gelderland, the WEpods will be mixing with regular traffic Continue reading...

Chancellor brushes off widespread criticism of deal by arguing that internet giant had previously paid no tax in UKGeorge Osborne has repeated his controversial claim that the UK’s tax deal with Google is a “major success” despite a widespread backlash against the £130m agreement for being too lenient.The chancellor was criticised after hailing the deal as a victory for HM Revenue & Customs over the weekend, with Labour claiming it amounted to an effective tax rate of around 3% – compared with the corporation tax rate of 20%. Continue reading...

Improvised 90s drama disappears after brief online debut following complaint from DiCaprio and co-star Tobey MaguireDon’s Plum, the low-budget 90s indie drama starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire that appeared online last month, has disappeared once more into the Hollywood ether after its stars took action to have it removed from the web.Their move – a copyright complaint to Vimeo – parallels events in 1999 that also removed the film, at least partially, from view. Concerned that the black and white improvisational feature, tagged “not for public consumption”, might damage their reputations, DiCaprio and Maguire – who was then soon to star in the movie version of Spider-Man – were involved in legal action against the makers. They claimed they regarded Don’s Plum as the equivalent of an acting workshop and had never intended to make a full-length feature for theatrical release. Continue reading...

If you live in the UK you’re only worth one-third of a North American to the social network – and if you live elsewhere, it could be even lessFacebook has set new records for both the number of users it has, far outstripping every other social media company, and the amount of revenue it generates. But how much are you actually worth to Facebook?

Mark Zuckerberg tried to steal DeepMind’s Go-playing computer thunder. It didn’t really work out the way he had intendedHere’s a lesson for Mark Zuckerberg: if you’re trying to overshadow someone else’s big day, it’s best to make sure you have something good to do it with. Otherwise you just look a bit petty.On Wednesday morning, Zuckerberg posted a link on Facebook to a scientific paper from a group of AI researchers at his company. Continue reading...

‘It’s cool there’s another medium to represent the song now,’ says guitarist Phil Collen of venture that will put song Dangerous on Guitar Hero LiveThe rock band Def Leppard will be the first artist ever to debut a new music video through the long-running video game series Guitar Hero.

‘Immediate corrective action’ is needed at the blood-testing firm’s California lab, a health agency has told the Silicon Valley unicornTheranos has been hit with yet another major setback after a US government health agency described its blood-testing technology as posing “immediate jeopardy” to the public.The Silicon Valley firm has been valued at $10bn, raising $400m from investors through what it claimed was “breakthrough” technology that allowed it to do blood tests based on a pinprick, rather than a full blood draw. Continue reading...

Facebook poised to overtake Google as most powerful internet company, as net income more than doubled in fourth quarter of 2015Facebook signalled its increasing power and influence with an emphatic set of financial results that showed quarterly revenue passing $5bn for the first time, and putting it in a position to challenge Google’s dominance of Silicon Valley.The social networking company’s fourth-quarter report, released on 27 January, saw a better-than-expected 51.7% jump in revenues as new advertising formats and an improved mobile app drove a sharp rise in ad sales. Continue reading...

The ride-hailing firm will pay $12.25m to settle a California suit but will not classify its workers as employees, as analyst says company ‘got off lightly’Ride-hailing service Lyft has agreed to settle a proposed class action lawsuit in California by giving drivers additional workplace protections but without classifying them as employees, removing a major threat to its business model.

The bill, AB1592, would permit autonomous vehicles ‘not equipped with a steering wheel, a brake pedal, an accelerator, or an operator inside the vehicle’A California lawmaker has introduced a bill that would legalise autonomous vehicles without human drivers for the first time in the US.

Fan Hui, three-time champion of the east Asian board game, lost to DeepMind’s program AlphaGo in five straight gamesWhen Gary Kasparov lost to chess computer Deep Blue in 1997, IBM marked a milestone in the history of artificial intelligence. On Wednesday, in a research paper released in Nature, Google earned its own position in the history books, with the announcement that its subsidiary DeepMind has built a system capable of beating the best human players in the world at the east Asian board game Go.Go, a game that involves placing black or white tiles on a 19x19 board and trying to remove your opponents’, is far more difficult for a computer to master than a game such as chess. Continue reading...

BGL Group, parent of the well-known price comparison website, confirms it has appointed advisers for a possible £1bn flotationSimples! The owner of comparethemarket.com, which has enjoyed huge success with its meerkat advertising campaign, is considering a stock market flotation that could value the price comparison website at more than £1bn. Continue reading...

Drivers’ group complained that ridesharing app’s drivers were acting as traditional cabs and not returning to garage after each fareUber has been ordered to pay €1.2m (£910,000) to a French taxi union by a court in Paris, according to documents seen by Agence France-Presse.The payment to the national union of taxis followed a complaint that drivers for the ridesharing service were acting as traditional taxis, waiting in the street in the hope of picking up passengers. Continue reading...

Users have taken to social media to report that the native web browser is crashing across the company’s devices. There is, however, a temporary fixApple’s native web browser, Safari, is crashing for users around the world. Many angry iPhone and Mac users have taken to social media to report that typing into the address bar is causing the application to suddenly close.The bug, which doesn’t appear to be a problem for all users, seems to be connected to Apple’s Safari suggestions function, which responds to search requests and Url queries. Continue reading...

A new clinical trial is attempting to track how participants suffering from depression respond to mental health apps. Researchers and drug companies are paying close attentionIt was the second week of March 2015 and, as happens this time every year, downtown Austin, Texas, was overrun with conference goers glued to their smartphones.Adam Gazzaley, Daphne Bavelier and Eddie Martucci were seated in a fourth floor lounge at the W Austin Hotel. They had just finished giving a presentation at SXSW Interactive, the first segment of Austin’s annual festival dedicated to technology, film and music, on how video and mobile games can be integrated into healthcare. Like most conference goers, Gazzaley and Bavelier, both cognitive neuroscientists, and Martucci, the CEO of cognitive-therapy tech company Akili Interactive, were excited about mobile technology’s disruptive potential. (Akili is currently working to produce what they hope will be the first FDA-approved video game to be played by prescription.) Continue reading...

The live-streaming app announced it is now integrated with the wearable cameras, meaning that sometimes insane footage can now find a larger audienceGoPro action camera users can now broadcast their daring adventures live through Twitter’s Periscope app, opening the door to a whole new dimension of real-time video sharing.The live-streaming app announced on Tuesday that it was now integrated with GoPro, meaning that the sometimes insane footage captured on wearable cameras can now find a much larger audience – one that is drawn to the attraction of watching events on their phones as the action unfolds. Continue reading...

More than a million people have called for the firm to stop ivory sales though it claims it does not have ‘controlling ownership’ of its Japan auctions siteInternet company Yahoo has been accused of aiding in the slaughter of elephants by allowing the trade of ivory on its Japanese auction site.

Increased use follows introduction by Apple of ability to block ads on iPhones and iPadsAdblocking became almost as popular on mobile devices as on desktops and laptops at the end of last year, just months after Apple introduced the ability to block ads on iPhones and iPads.Data from the last three months of 2015 from GlobalWebIndex recorded a rise in those reporting they had used an adblocker on mobile devices within the last month, compared to 38% on computers, which was also up by 10 percentage points on previous quarters. Continue reading...