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The White House will attempt to enlist major technology firms in its efforts to combat terrorism on Friday. The Guardian has obtained this copy of the agendaI. Introductions

New game from popular puzzle franchise could pave the way for multiplayer and even TV shows in the futureIn the two years between October 2013 and September 2015, Candy Crush Saga players spent just under $2.5bn (£1.7bn) on the puzzle game. That’s a lot of power-ups, extra lives and (virtual) gold bars.Despite the mobile game being released in late 2012, it was still the second top-grossing game on Apple’s App Store in 2015, with offshoot Candy Crush Soda Saga taking fourth place in Apple’s end-of-year chart. Continue reading...

A company maligned by fans is placing a $48m bet that it can create the ESPN of competitive gaming, but the scene’s greatest successes have come organicallyMajor League Gaming, a professional eSports organization, announced on Monday that it was acquired by video game publisher Activision Blizzard for a reported $46m, bringing MLG’s assets and infrastructure under Activision Blizzard’s Media Network. This is the latest event in a timeline that begins on 21 October, when the publisher announced it was creating a new eSports competitive video game division chaired by former ESPN CEO Steve Bornstein and senior vice president Mike Sepso of MLG. Bornstein has been a large proponent of eSports, and Activision Blizzard’s properties like Starcraft, Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm are competitive games. So why has the eSports community seemed less than thrilled about the acquisition in forums and comments sections all over the internet?Related: Activision acquires Major League Gaming to become 'ESPN of eSports' Continue reading...

Power company suffered a major attack that led to blackouts across western Ukraine, after an attack on a Ukrainian media companyA power blackout in Ukraine over Christmas and a destructive cyberattack on a major Ukrainian media company were caused by the same malware from the same major hacking group, known as Sandworm, according to security researchers at Symantec.The blackout, which affected large parts of western Ukraine, is believed to be the first example of a power outage deliberately caused by a hacking attack. The country’s state intelligence agency, the SBU, attributed the attacks to state-sponsored hackers from Russia. If true, that would link the hacking of the power grid to the general escalation of cyberwarfare between the two nations in the aftermath of the invasion of Crimea. Continue reading...

Language translation tool error converting ‘Russian Federation’ in Ukrainian to fictional dark land from Lord of the Rings down to automatic bug, says company

Exhibitors at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas hope the event will encourage some happy accident that will propel them into the futureI love a remote mountain cabin perhaps slightly more than the next person, so imagine, if you will, the opposite of that. It’s probably Las Vegas, where I am right now, sitting on a suspiciously wipe-clean faux leather chair in a hotel room with walls so thin I can hear humans on every side expelling every possible fluid in every possible way. It’s no less depraved and vulgar than when Hunter S Thompson came all those years ago, only he wasn’t here for the Consumer Electronics Show.CES is often described as revealing the future of technology, but really it’s about the now. Everything here has been in gestation for years, a slow and carefully managed process from conception to development to marketable product, and with a (usually) contrived finale of a January CES launch to bring it to a variously eager, ambivalent or completely ignorant public, depending on the product. As the public interest and appetite for technology has expanded, so has our recognition that it is no longer one industry but part of every sector. Continue reading...

Company advises users of Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 to upgrade before 12 January, when it stops issuing security updates for those operating systems

The Facebook founder has pledged to build his own artificial intelligence engine to run his house. CES gives us a taste of what that might be likeHints at Mark Zuckerberg’s possible dream home can be seen at a Las Vegas convention hall this week.

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On the day when tech group revealed its $599 headset, Palmer Luckey told Reddit he was ‘ill-prepared’ when he suggested the price would be about $350Palmer Luckey, the founder of virtual reality company Oculus, has apologised to fans for misleading them over the price of the company’s first consumer headset, the Oculus Rift.“I handled the messaging poorly,” the 23-year-old inventor wrote during a Reddit AMA on Wednesday. Luckey explained that he had been “frustrated” with media outlets suggesting the headset would cost $1500 last September when he responded to an interviewer’s question about a possible $350 price point by saying, “We’re roughly in that ballpark... but it’s going to cost more than that.” Continue reading...

Shareholder’s letter implies Mayer should leave as it calls for internet firm to separate Asian assets and auction off core business

The Federal Trade Commission also issued a general warning that it is on the lookout for companies cashing in on the popularity of health-related mobile appsIt seemed like a win-win for fans of the online “brain training” memory game Lumosity – as fun as Candy Crush (almost) but actually good for you: a mind gym to sharpen mental performance and, for older consumers, ward off senility.Forget that. The shine has come off Lumosity with an announcement by federal investigators that the makers must pay $2m to settle a charge that it made fraudulent claims and “preyed on consumers’ fears”. Continue reading...

Announced at CES, the move will make the streaming service available in almost every country, with the notable exception of China – for nowNetflix announced Wednesday that it’s launching in an additional 130 countries, making the streaming service available in almost every country, with the notable exception of China.Reed Hastings, the company’s CEO, said he’s hopeful it will launch in China in the near future. The company also pointed out that North Koreans won’t be able to access the wealth of western entertainment either – and Syria is out, too, due to US trade embargoes. Continue reading...

Segway’s promotional video for their new offering, a self-balancing transportation device which becomes a voice-recognising robot. The Ninebot Segway can be ridden like a handleless Segway, holding it steady between your legs, travelling up to 30km at speeds of up to 18kph. On arriving at the destination, the transportation device turns into a self-balancing robot, with a screen for a head, and arms Continue reading...

Rugged smartwatch is water resistamt and shockproofed to military standards with two displays, extra buttons, pressure sensors and compassCasio has launched the G-shock of smartwatches with its first Android Wear device that can last a month between charges.

Intel and Ninebot partner to create a self-balancing object which becomes a voice-recognising pal at the touch of a buttonIn the past, the Segway has often been, well, a little laughed at, if not ridiculed – the personal transportation devices are most often seen with a horde of slightly overweight tourists leaving the “walking” out of a walking tour.But the latest Segway could be about to change all that. It is a two-wheeled balancing scooter that turns into an adorable mini robot butler when you’re not riding it around town. Continue reading...

Smart augmented reality helmet allows wearers to overlay maps, schematics and thermal images to effectively see through walls, pipes and other solid objectsIntel has launched a set of glasses built into a helmet that give x-ray-like vision using its RealSense 3D camera.

Backers of the initial Oculus Rift Kickstarter will be able to claim a free virtual reality headset, four years after the initial crowdfunding campaignVirtual reality pioneer Oculus has announced that it will give a bundle of freebies, including the first consumer release of its Rift headset, to everyone who supported the initial Kickstarter campaign that funded the company’s early years.Any Kickstarter backer who supported the company with $275 or more back in 2012 will receive a free Rift headset, as well as the two free games that come bundled with it all pre-order buyers, Lucky’s Tale and Eve: Valkyrie. That free headset comes in addition to the rewards the backers were already promised – and given – for their support, including an early development unit of the Rift. Continue reading...

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International cyber activists call for tourists to boycott Thailand following widely condemned police investigationThe hacking collective Anonymous has declared war on the Thai police, taking down multiple websites in protest against what it said was the scapegoating of two Burmese men convicting of killing two British backpackers on Koh Tao island.The cyber activist group posted links to 15 Thai police websites, including the Bangkok Metropolitan Police Bureau, and published several Thai police email addresses, asking its members to hack them. Continue reading...

Every year scores of A-list (and D-list) celebrities flock to CES to flog branded gadgets, sign autographs for a corporate paycheck, or liven up a tech CEO’s keynote address.Test your knowledge of CES’s best and worst celebrity appearances with this CES Celebrity Endorsement Quiz Continue reading...

Would a new character limit be good news for open debate on Twitter – or would the end of brevity just be an excuse for more ads?What if Twitter ends up letting you make 10,000-character tweets? Well, why not?At last, we’ll have plenty of room to couch our situational comments in actual context. We’ve all been there before: two years ago, you livetweeted a movie. And yet, today, you get a baffled reply to one of the two-year-old livetweets from a stranger, who didn’t get your joke, or who didn’t understand what you meant. They might not even realize that you were watching a movie! Who are these people? Your tweet had a context, once. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you had enough space, enough characters, for it to have a context forever? Continue reading...

Sales of Adele’s 25 slow decline in music sales enough for music spending to rise for the first time in at least a decade

NRA publication tweeted a photo Monday of bullets strewn across polaroid pictures of New York state legislators sponsoring bill to limit ammunitionA National Rifle Association publication targeted a pair of New York state legislators who sponsored recent bills aimed at limiting ammunition by tweeting a threatening photo on Monday of several bullets strewn across polaroid pictures of the two women.New York state senator Roxanne Persaud and Assemblywoman Jo Anne Simon, both Democrats in Brooklyn, sponsored twin bills a few weeks ago to help control the sale of ammunition by limiting bullet purchases over a 90-day period to twice the gun’s capacity, and stopping the sale of ammunition to those unauthorized to own such a weapon. Continue reading...

Tech company considers expanding beyond 140-character limit as it looks to grow user base under recently appointed chief Jack DorseyTwitter is rumored to be considering increasing its per-tweet character count from 140 to 10,000 – a potential move that instantly sent the troubled tech company’s share price into a tailspin.Twitter shares plummeted more than 2% on the news, first reported by Re/code on Tuesday, which seemed to undermine the essential nature of the short-form social media platform. The company’s shares ended down 2.97% at $21.89, a new low. Continue reading...

Rikki Campbell denies her guests smoked cannabis and had sex at party in rented London flatThe woman who hosted a New Year’s Eve party at an Airbnb London flat has denied she broke any rules after its owner claimed it was trashed by more than 100 drug-taking revellers who caused £3,000 in damage.

British children’s entertainment firm Mind Candy also saw its net losses increase in 2014 as income from subscriptions and licensing declinedThe maker of hit kids’ game Moshi Monsters is in critical talks to extend the terms of a loan it cannot afford to start paying back after revenues slumped by more than half pushing the company into a £14m loss in 2014.Mind Candy, the British firm that also makes World of Warriors, reported a 57% slump in revenues from £30.6m to just £13.24m in 2014. Continue reading...

Babypod, a speaker inserted into the vagina, launches with ‘first concert for foetuses’ as 2009 Eurovision song contest contender sings to pregnant womenDoes anybody else remember when a Donny Osmond poster was found up a woman’s vagina? Because I do. I’ve never forgotten it, and I never will.Now, there’s another means of smuggling Osmond into one’s insides – a vaginal speaker. Spanish company Babypod has invented a speaker that is designed to be inserted into the vagina, stimulating foetal development. Continue reading...

Swedish manufacturer’s self-driving cars will be designed to help streaming services flourish, interruption-free, on enormous retractable screensSwedish car manufacturer Volvo is planning a future in which owners of self-driving vehicles will be able to sit back and enjoy a movie on Netflix during their daily commute.

Social network ran experiment to see how long users would wait before giving up and going elsewhere, but people ‘never stopped coming back’

Backed by Chinese tech billionaire Jia Yueting, the car firm’s first unveiling in Las Vegas revealed a modular high performance car, but little detailCalifornia-based Faraday Future revealed its first prototype high performance electric car, the FF01, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Monday, ending some of the mystery that has surrounded a company some believed was a front for Apple’s much-rumoured electric car.The US-based company is funded, in part at least, by Chinese billionaire Jia Yueting. Yueting founded China’s largest online video service and is rumoured to be worth some $6bn. While Faraday Future lists several of its high-ranking executives there is no information about who runs the business as a whole, and no chief executive is named on the company’s website. Continue reading...

A teenage boy describes the ‘eureka moment’ when he realised books (at least some books) could be as gripping as YouTube on his tablet, in the first of our new eureka reads seriesI realise now that my tablet/ipad addiction had been getting out of control and was stopping me from reading. So this is the story of how one book series changed that (or at least helped a bit…). Continue reading...

The world’s largest consumer technology event is opening its doors in Las Vegas. Here’s what to expectWhen the Consumer Electronics Show first opened in 1967, it featured just 14 vendors and was dominated by televisions. Sony launched their first VCR there three years later, and, in the 1980s, Nintendo debuted its first games entertainment system on the show floor.This year, 3,200 vendors will take over Las Vegas for a week for the technology industry’s pre-eminent trade show, offering the clearest window into a future in which everything, from your washing machine to your bra, has a computer chip. And there really is a vendor pitching a “smart bra”. Continue reading...

Christina McQuillan found dozens of people at her flat – and a ‘mass orgy’ in bedroom – after concerned neighbours called herAirbnb says it is providing support to a user of the short-term home letting site who is at the centre of claims that her property was “trashed” after a tenant used it for a New Year’s Eve party.Christina McQuillan, a magazine designer from London, was reportedly summoned to the property in Putney after a neighbour alerted her to a party involving dozens of people.

The artist, whose work often involves appropriating the images of others, has been sued for his use of the photograph Rastafarian Smoking a JointRichard Prince, a New York-based artist whose work often involves appropriating that of others, has been sued for copyright infringement by Donald Graham, a photographer who claims Prince knowingly reproduced his photo Rastafarian Smoking a Joint without seeking permission.Artnet reports that Graham filed a complaint on 30 December against Prince, the Gagosian Gallery – where Prince’s New Portraits exhibition ran between September and October 2014 – and Lawrence Gagosian, the gallery owner.

Volvo dismisses idea that manufacturing fault caused wheel to fall off V70 car, which prompted Ukip leader’s speculation about an ‘assassination plot’Volvo has quashed suggestions that a known manufacturing fault with Nigel Farage’s car may have been behind an incident on a French motorway in which all four of the nuts on one of the wheels came loose and caused him to lose control.The Ukip leader told the Mail on Sunday that he feared his near brush with death last October may have been a failed assassination attempt, after he was told by French police who inspected the vehicle that “sometimes nuts on one wheel can come a bit loose – but not on all four”. Continue reading...

Tech company’s video division fades to black after struggling to draw viewers away from the likes of YouTube and traditional TV networksYahoo Screen is no more. The troubled tech giant has killed its highly-hyped and high-spending video division less than four years after its launch.The Yahoo division joins Xbox Entertainment Studios on the growing pile of ambitious video divisions trying to compete with television and failing.

Resident says his daughter alerted him to a fire in the bedroom caused by hoverboard on charge, but it was too late to stop it taking holdJust 10 minutes after a hoverboard was plugged in to charge, a Melbourne family was fleeing a fiery blaze that had windows exploding.

In 2015, the Facebook co-founder challenged himself to read one book every two weeks, but for 2016 he’s going to engineer a robot for his homeMark Zuckerberg wants to overtake Elon Musk to become the real-world version of Marvel superhero Tony Stark.The billionaire Facebook founder has expressed his desire (in a Facebook post, of course) to spend 2016 building an artificially intelligent assistant to help run his life at home and work – and directly compared it to Jarvis, the AI companion developed by Stark in the Iron Man films. Continue reading...

Elon Musk’s new electric car is still hard to find on the streets, but production is ramping upThe Model X, Tesla’s first new car in three years, was launched to much fanfare in 2015, but the company’s boasting of the “most advanced car yet” may have been a tad premature – just 208 cars were actually delivered in the fourth quarter of 2015, the first full quarter in which it was available to buy.A crossover (combining design cues from SUVs and more traditional cars such as hatchbacks), the Model X was unveiled in 2012, with plans for it to ship in 2013. That date slipped, first to 2014 and then to 2015, before it was finally launched in September of that year. Continue reading...

BBC3 going online only is set to be one of the biggest changes in the digital content worldYouTube stars such as PewDiePie and the multichannel networks that represent many of them will continue their youth-driven rise in 2016, but other media organisations will step up their efforts to get in on the game.John Kampfner of the Creative Industries Federation thinks 2016 “could be the year when media organisations truly break out of their silos”. He explains: “Whether free-to-access or heavily paywalled, websites continue to struggle to produce the revenues required to invest in strong journalism. While TV advertising revenues are strong, income for online services remains variable, at best. Continue reading...

Small, sharp and easy to live with: the only big decision you face when buying an Audi TT is whether to go soft or hardPrice: from £29,915

Dating apps to which you have to apply to join promise to end time-wasting mismatchesNew year, new love life. It’s a resolution that hundreds of thousands will make this month and January 2016 is expected to see the highest ever number of sign-ups to dating apps. But this year the apps are going in a new direction – instead of spreading the net as widely as possible, the new ones are all about keeping out “undesirable” people.The League is one such app. It heavily vets members, boasts that only 20-25% of those who apply are allowed in, and has more than 75,000 people on its waiting list. It launched in America last year and is now coming to the UK. Applicants must provide access to their profiles on LinkedIn, the business-oriented social network, to check out their academic achievements and employment history. Continue reading...

The vast Consumer Electronics Show traditionally predicts the hit technologies of the year to come - but is a sales event really the best predictor of consumer demand?Twenty years almost to the day, on 6 January 1995, Nintendo revealed its new Virtual Boy virtual reality headset at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Technologists had been experimenting with virtual reality since the 1960s, but the headset was a significant milestone by the then thriving Japanese games company. The press were unwilling to write off anything by Nintendo, but VR aficionados were not convinced. And as it turns out, they were right: players complained of dizziness, nausea and headaches and Nintendo sold only 770,000 – a tenth of predicted sales. The device was canned.“When Virtual Boy was introduced there was a lot of excitement about virtual reality and augmented reality as part of the future of gaming, but it didn’t happen that way for a variety of reasons,” said Regina Joseph, a forecasting expert and lead at New York University’s Future Lab. “The technology simply wasn’t at the same level as it is now, and there were some fundamental ergonomic issues. The hype concentrated in the press, and in a press run by fanboys, often doesn’t pan out. History is littered with the corpses of devices, projects and ideas that people got behind in a big way but that failed.” Continue reading...

You may have been delighted to get that smartphone for Christmas, but using it to send a smiley face will not make you happy when your bill arrivesIf you received a smartphone, and particularly an iPhone, for Christmas, be careful how you send any future text messages, because you may well find yourself facing an unexpected bill for picture messages – even though you haven’t sent any.It’s a little known fact that, depending on your handset and network, adding an emoji – a picture icon such as a smiley or a sad face – to a text message, or sending a text to an email address, can result in you being charged as much as 40p a time. On some phones, even typing a simple emoticon such as ;-) can cost you money when the software replaces it with an image file. Continue reading...

Newspaper said Apprentice star was ‘careless’ for being tricked into retweeting image of serial killer Harold ShipmanAlan Sugar has angrily criticised the Sun over its coverage of how he was tricked on Twitter into retweeting a fake birthday message containing a photoshopped image of serial killer Harold Shipman.The business magnate and star of BBC show The Apprentice fell victim to a prankster, who claimed the image was of his father and asked Sugar to wish him a happy birthday. Continue reading...

Moazzam Begg stresses the importance of encryption programs while convert Cerie Bullivant says ‘Muslims are the canaries in the mine’ of civil libertiesMoazzam Begg, the former Guantánamo Bay detainee, was unable to address Europe’s largest hacker convention in person because the British government confiscated his passport. The British Pakistani who spent two years at the US detention facility – but who has been declared not guilty of terrorism charges – spoke to the event by video link, urging developers to continue building free software encryption tools for political resistance.“What did I ever do to these governments? They took me from my home in Pakistan to the world’s most notorious prison,” Begg said. “If seeking justice and accountability they think will harm them, then I will continue to do that. Nobody is above the law.” Continue reading...

Father Albert San Jose has found himself in a lot of bovver over a hover after singing to his congregation during Christmas Eve mass while riding and spinning down the aisle on a hoverboard. Some parishoners seem delighted at the Catholic priest’s stunts on the self-balancing scooter. However, the diocese of San Pablo in Laguna has suspended him saying ‘the Eucharist demands utmost respect and reverence’Read: priest suspended for riding hoverboard up aisles during Christmas Eve massWatch: Mike Tyson left down for the count by hoverboard fail Continue reading...

From the prime minister’s porcine university shenanigans, to Donald Trump making a consistent fool of himself, we vote for our favourite political tweets of the yearWhat the hell is going on here? This looks like a character selection screen in a shite version of Mortal Combat. pic.twitter.com/Ru7WfxBwlZ Continue reading...

The place to talk about games and everything else that mattersIt’s New Year’s Eve! Continue reading...