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The mayor of London, Boris Johnson, is rendered as a Minecraft character to promote a major new gaming festival in the capital. Games London is backed with £1.2m investment from the London Enterprise Panel, is a two-week video games festival taking place in venues around the city

Amnesty International says it has traced cobalt used in batteries for household brands to mines in DRC, where children work in life-threatening conditionsChildren as young as seven are working in perilous conditions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to mine cobalt that ends up in smartphones, cars and computers sold to millions across the world, by household brands including Apple, Microsoft and Vodafone, according to a new investigation by Amnesty International. The human rights group claims to have traced cobalt used in lithium batteries sold to 16 multinational brands to mines where young children and adults are being paid a dollar a day, working in life-threatening conditions and subjected to violence, extortion and intimidation. Continue reading...

The Australian prime minister tells the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington leaders are unwittingly aiding Isis by blaming IslamThe Iraqi government needs to “mock and disprove” Islamic State’s online propaganda more effectively and more quickly Malcolm Turnbull has told an elite audience in Washington, saying he will raise the problem when he meets US president Barack Obama.

Though it has been around since Mark Zuckerberg was just 15 years old, one of the original social networking websites is to closeFriends Reunited was a pioneer of social networking when it launched in 2000, but on Monday founder Steve Pankhurst announced its closure.In an emailed entitled “the sunset of an era”, Pankhurst wrote that “the world is now a very different place” and that Friends Reunited is no longer able to compete with Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Continue reading...

Our friend David Hadden, who has died from cancer aged 61, was an accomplished engineer specialising in blast damage to buildings. He was also an inquisitive, liberal-minded man, a music lover and devoted father and husband.Born in Belfast to John, who ran the Rosebank Weaving Company, and his wife, Louie, Dave was educated at Belfast Royal academy, where he enjoyed playing rugby and golf. We first met him when we all went to St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, in 1973. There we developed a shared affinity for traditional music. Dave had broad musical tastes, though he drew the line at jazz. Continue reading...

Users will never again have to pay to use WhatsApp, Facebook’s messaging serviceWhatsApp, the Facebook-owned messaging service, is to drop its token $1-a-year subscription to go fully free for every user, the company’s chief executive has announced.Speaking at the DLD conference in Bavaria, Jan Koum confirmed that the $0.99 annual fee will be scrapped, effective immediately. Previously, WhatsApp had been free for the first year, with the fee charged for every subsequent year. Long-term users of the iOS version were given free use for life, as a thanks for paying a fee to download the app when it had a one-off charge. Continue reading...

Brains images are becoming standard evidence in some of the country’s most controversial and disturbing death penalty trials – including the case of Steven NorthingtonIt’s hard to imagine Steven Northington killing two people. The 43-year-old says he likes to make people laugh, “like a comedian”. He’s a loyal son to his troubled mother and father. He sends his younger sister birthday cards from prison and draws elaborate smiley faces on them. His defense team laughs with affection when they hear his name because he is, they say, “a character”.Between 2003 and 2004, Northington was slinging for a drug ring that flooded his Philadelphia neighborhood with bloodshed. The Kaboni Savage Organization was responsible for nine murders during those two years alone, including the firebombing of a house that killed two women and four children. Continue reading...

Assassin’s Creed in India lacks charisma, it’s no holiday down on the farm simulator, while a vintage water racing game shows it still holds pole position(PS4, Xbox One, PC, Ubisoft, cert: 16) Continue reading...

Whether you are a newbie or a hardened rider, you’ll find much to like in this brilliant value classic tourerStrava, the tracker app which so many cyclists love, has just published a summary of last year’s usage. In Britain, the average ride was 41km and the most popular day of the year was 30 June. So you have plenty of time to get ready to join the throng.And if you are new to riding, be that commuting or touring, you won’t go wrong with this new model from Adventure. It’s called, rather hipsterishly, the Flat White, and it is staggeringly good value. With its classic lines, guards and racks, it may well remind you of your dad’s old tourer. It’s practical, comfortable and very easy to live with, though it won’t be for you if you have a speed habit. It has a terrific steel frame, but the brakes and gears are fairly basic. Still, you could upgrade them if you do catch the cycling bug (adventureoutdoor.co). Continue reading...

Food, finance, furniture, fashion and film could be transformed if these seven promising firms achieve their potentialWhat will be the next household-name app-based service like Uber? Where are the next “unicorns” – startup businesses which rapidly rise to a $1bn valuation?The biggest successes of the last few years have all been about software. “There’s an app for that” has gone from being an Apple slogan to a simple truism. But the low-hanging fruit has been picked, and what’s left is much tougher to deliver. It may be expensive to build, pose a tricky technical problem, or simply have some strong incumbents fighting back. Continue reading...

It is so poky in its upper ranges that a lesser driver might have hit 104mph without noticing

Survival Island 3 – Australia Story 3D removed from Apple and Google app stores after public outcry over gameplay showing an Aboriginal man being beaten to death with a stone axeA mobile game that purportedly rewarded players for bludgeoning Indigenous Australians to death has been removed from both Apple and Google app stores following public outcry.Survival Island 3 – Australia Story 3D tasked players with surviving in the outback. A cached snapshot of the game taken by Google as it appeared in Apple’s iTunes store on 12 January shows its description: “Your goal is to survive.” Continue reading...

Europe’s top human rights body issues statement explaining how body works after what it deemed a series of inaccurate scare stories were publishedThe British press has been accused of whipping up a “misinformed media storm” over a court case in which judges decided that a man whose employer accessed his personal messages had not had his rights violated.Europe’s top human rights body took the unusual step of issuing a statement explaining how the European court of human rights works after a series of what it called “inaccurate scare stories” was published this week. Continue reading...

Ferocious momentum continues to build against social media giant’s bid to take charge of the country’s internet through a program called Free BasicsIndia is having its internet uprising, and many western activists can’t figure out what to do about it.Since the spring of 2015, Indian activists have built ferocious momentum against Facebook’s bid to take charge of the nation’s internet through a program called Free Basics. Continue reading...

Shareholders have been left unimpressed by the fall in price from $94 to $12 and are reaching for their lawyersIts specialist action cameras allow surfers, skiers and other thrillseekers to record their exploits. The devices have been strapped to eagles to give a real bird’s eye view of the landscape, and can even be attached to a specially designed harness so that dog owners can view the world through the eyes of their pet.When GoPro floated its shares on Wall Street in June 2014, there seemed to be no limit to how high they might go. Continue reading...

Mike Hearn, a prominent developer of the cryptocurrency, has sold his coins and quit work on bitcoin citing deep-seated issuesA senior bitcoin developer has declared the cryptocurrency a failed experiment, blaming the end of the currency on the refusal of the community to adopt new standards which would allow it to grow consistently while maintaining stability.Mike Hearn, a longtime senior developer on bitcoin and the former chair of the bitcoin foundation’s law and policy committee, announced in a blogpost that he would be selling his coins and quitting development on the project. “Despite knowing that bitcoin could fail all along, the now inescapable conclusion that it has failed still saddens me greatly,” he wrote. Continue reading...

Love, death, romance, regret – video games can tell us about all of these things and more. Here are our favourite examplesWe don’t often look to video games when we’re feeling confused about life, the universe or anything else. This is traditionally a medium of escape, the place you come to forget about the world and blow stuff up for a few minutes.But it’s not always that way. Since the beginning, games have also been a place to experiment with what it means to be human. When you think about it, it’s obvious: no other medium allows us to interact with and explore the possibilities of existence like games do. Continue reading...

Online encyclopedia reaches its 15th birthday preparing for challenges ahead around funding, mobile access and the developing world

If technology is increasing inequality, it is how it changes power, not how it affects marginal productivity, that mattersIs the World Bank – the institution that once championed the Washington Consensus – really breaking with the tech optimism of so many of the world’s companies and economic leaders? Not exactly.The report released on 14 January is an internally conflicted document – at times recognizing the severe limits on competition in networked industries and calling for regulation and open access requirements in telecommunications, at times calling for bank deregulation or cheerleading for Uber as a way of giving opportunities for occasional drivers to supplement their livelihood, with little recognition of the disruptions this contingent work model imposes on full-time drivers. Continue reading...

Streaming service will prevent those using proxies and VPN services such as Hola from watching content licensed for other regionsNetflix has announced plans to crack down on subscribers who use tools such as proxies or VPNs to watch video from other countries.Doing so gives users access to a much larger selection of titles, but breaks Netflix’s terms of service – as well as breaking the agreements Netflix has with the content providers. Continue reading...

Alphabet-owned internet of things company acknowledges problem that drains the battery of smart device leaving some users without thermostatic controlNest has acknowledged a software bug is affecting some of its smart thermostats causing the high-profile internet of things device to stop working.The bug drains the battery within the thermostat, even if the device is plugged in, forcing it to disconnect from boilers and air conditioning systems, turning them off before it shuts down. Continue reading...

The app became a viral hit but is no longer available in the app store after criticism from commentatorsStolen, the controversial online game that allows players to trade using representations of Twitter accounts, has closed doors, effective immediately.The app had become a viral hit, despite never becoming more than an invite-only service, with tens of thousands of users and a constant clamour for invitation codes from others. But it had also faced an increasing amount of criticism over the nature of its game, which involves playing at buying and selling the Twitter accounts of real people – most of whom had never signed up to the game. Continue reading...

Searching with regular sentences will only get you so far – if you need to find something a bit tricky turn to these advanced yet simple methodsSearch engines are pretty good at finding what you’re looking for these days, but sometimes they still come up short. For those occasions there are a few little known tricks which come in handy.So here are some tips for better googling (as it’s the most popular search engine) but many will work on other search engines too. Continue reading...

What better way to show you’re too cool to be ‘on’ all the time; that you need space to think great thoughts?It was a death as intensely private as the mourning was public. David Bowie was cremated this week in New York without fuss or fanfare, following an illness he managed to conceal from the world. Not for him the gawping graveside circus, the paparazzi stalking famous mourners. He turned his back on all of that years ago, by choosing to make so little of his recent life – apart from his music – available for public consumption.And perhaps that’s the only really radical thing left to do, in an era saturated with way too much information – to just stop talking. Run away from the attention everyone else seems to be compulsively seeking; disappear, disengage. There is no status symbol so powerful now as not having a status – or not, at least, in the “look at me” Facebook sense – at all. Continue reading...

Many of the security systems at the perimeter protection trade fair, previously the preserve of protective states, are now being deployed in homesAnyone who steps unwanted over the threshold of a property with a Peperosso atomiser installed can expect an immediate burning sensation as chilli paprika is sprayed in their face. The instruction booklet promises “tears and coughing” and “a lot of slime”.“We usually talk about paprika as the most popular ingredient in our national cuisine,” says Erika Madlena, from the Hungarian company Umirs that makes the Peperosso. “But in this case it provides an effective and good value way of safeguarding your home from intruders”. Continue reading...

How can we use tech more wisely to make the most of our professional lives?

Jonas Savimbi is portrayed as a ‘barbarian’ in Call of Duty: Black Ops II say three of his children who seek €1m damagesVideo game publisher Activision is being sued by the family of Angolan rebel chief Jonas Savimbi, who have objected to his depiction in the game Call of Duty: Black Ops II.Three of Savimbi’s children, who are now based in France, contend that the game depicted their father – the founder and leader of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (Unita) – as a “barbarian”. They are seeking €1m in damages from the French branch of Activision Blizzard. Continue reading...

A new kind of digital violation is hitting Twitter users, who can now be ‘owned’ and traded with virtual moneyHere is an idea for a fun game. Imagine playing with online trading cards, where you’re buying and selling virtual people. Like baseball cards – remember those? Except instead of baseball players, they’re real people, pulled from real people’s Twitter accounts. Like yours! If you use Twitter, some player might be buying and selling you right now, without your knowledge or permission. And if they “own” you, they can write anything they want on your “trading card”. Sounds fun, right?Actually, it sounds mega gross. But that’s the basic idea behind Stolen, a brand-new app by a company called Hey, Inc. that promises to let you “collect and trade your favorite people on Twitter!” Essentially, the app crunches all kinds of publiclyavailable data about your Twitter account to assign you a monetary value in pretend money which the game calls “social currency”, and then other users can spend virtual money to become your “owner”. Your value will continue to depend on how many people are competing to buy you in a constantly-fluctuating market, and, of course, you cannot be the owner of your own account. Continue reading...

YouTube vlogger BuleBritish tests out a new hoverboard only to watch it spontaneously combust. Increasing concern over the fire risks from some brands of hoverboards led Amazon to withdraw them from sale last month. In December 2015, Britain’s trading standards authority warned buyers to beware, and revealed that 88% of the hoverboards imported from outside the EU, that it had tested, had failed basic safety checks

Student’s incognito mode browsing reappeared after closing private window when he loaded video game Diablo IIIFrom privacy protection and present buying to porn, incognito mode in Google’s Chrome is a popular way for the web browser’s more than a billion users to ensure that their surfing habits aren’t visible to other people with access to the device.Spare a thought, then, for Toronto student Evan Andersen, who was surprised to find his incognito browsing come back to haunt him. Continue reading...

CityDash, and its younger sibling Undercover, offer the most accessible introduction to live gaming yetFor most of the past 30 years, live games have straddled a bizarre divide. They have, simultaneously, been a niche subcategory of an already niche pursuit, while also being enjoyed by millions across the world daily.The latter, you’ll know as playground games like hide and seek and tag; the former, if you know it at all, as LARPing, or live-action role-playing – the practice of playing dungeons and dragons-style role-playing games in the real world. Both take play into the outside world, away from tabletops or video games, but they do so in a way less focused on pure skill and athletic ability than conventional sports. Continue reading...

The on-demand ride-hailing app will pay the fine to resolve a dispute over the amount of data it provided to regulators

Home secretary Theresa May answers questions from MPs about the implications of her draft investigatory powers bill on Wednesday. She attempts to reassure the committee that judicial commissioners would have sufficient flexibility to examine decisions taken by cabinet ministers to order intrusive snooping operations Continue reading...

Revelmode will make videos, launch games and raise money for charity, with Felix Kjellberg joined by JackSepticEye, Markiplier and other YouTubersYouTube star Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg is turning online-talent mogul, by launching his own network of gamers called Revelmode.Described as an “Avengers-like talent squad”, it will sit within Maker Studios, the multi-channel network (MCN) to which PewDiePie has been signed since 2012. Continue reading...

How ingestibles and mood-impacting technologies are changing our relationship with wearablesWearable tech is well and truly mainstream – but what does the future hold? What could their potential new forms mean for our day-to-day lives, businesses and wellbeing?The aim of wearables should be to operate silently but powerfully in the background, blurring the interface between ourselves and the device. For this tech to go beyond slapping a fitness band on our wrists (valuable as that might be), it will need to hone in on the issues that are core to our health and long-term wellbeing. Continue reading...

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...