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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...

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

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...

At the stroke of midnight on 31 December, eager social media managers set free their 2016 messages. There was just one problem …Related: Dogs, the pope and JK Rowling: the best tweets of the year in 2015The dilemma: you’re a friendly, Twitter-loving organisation that wants to wish its followers a happy new year, but doesn’t want to be staffing a corporate social media account at the moment the party poppers start popping. Continue reading...

Retailer’s stock price falls 8% as fears grow that new online grocery delivery service could cause tremors in an already competitive sectorShares in Ocado dived more than 3% after fears that the online grocer faces increased competition from Amazon and is struggling to sign up an international partner.The British retailer took a hit on Wednesday after Amazon said this week it would rapidly expand its grocery delivery service in the UK. Ocado shares have now fallen 8% since Christmas Eve, closing at 315p on Wednesday. Continue reading...

Service that provided internet without data charges to more than 3 million Egyptians is closed, but the social network hopes to ‘resolve the situation soon’Facebook says a programme that had been giving free basic internet services to more than 3 million Egyptians has been shut down.In a statement to the Associated Press on Wednesday, Facebook says it is “disappointed” by the shutdown and hopes to “resolve this situation soon” so the programme can be restored. Continue reading...

Advertising Standards Authority rules article and video on Telegraph.co.uk did not make it clear they had been paid forThe Telegraph has been reprimanded by the advertising watchdog for failing to adequately label an online advertorial for Michelin tyres.The Advertising Standards Authority said the article and video on Telegraph.co.uk, which compared Michelin tyres with an unnamed budget brand, were misleading and did not make it clear they had been paid for. Continue reading...

Lamborghini - The Legend, from Italy’s AMBI Group, will detail the sports car maker’s passion for automobiles and his lavish lifestyleThe production company behind a proposed remake of La Dolce Vita is to embark on a biopic of the celebrated Italian sports car maker Ferruccio Lamborghini, according to the Hollywood Reporter.The AMBI Group, which announced in July that it had bought the rights to the classic Federico Fellini film, hopes to shoot Lamborghini – The Legend this summer on location in Italy.

Sidecar will close operations on New Years Eve, after the more successful transportation app companies Uber and Lyft see off major rivalUber has claimed its first major scalp, with San Francisco-based competitor Sidecar announcing on Tuesday that it will be shutting down operations at 2pm on New Year’s Eve.Despite raising $35m of venture capital funding over its four years in existence, from investors including Richard Branson and influential VC Fred Wilson, the company has announced it cannot continue in its present form. Continue reading...

From law and politics to film and music, we explore women’s achievements in the UK and its global industries, and the barriers still holding them back Continue reading...

Since 2006, the site insisted anything that wasn’t illegal should be tolerated. Under Ellen Pao’s brief leadership, all that changedHalfway through 2015, one of the largest white supremacist communities on the internet was closed down. The “Chimpire”, a loose network of forums with names like “CoonTown” and “Teenapers”, had started in 2013 with the founding of the virulently racist “GreatApes” forum.By this year, it included around 50 separate forums, some dedicated to specific topics such as sharing footage of black people dying or trying to live a “negro-free” life, and others providing a more general location for racists to socialise with each other over their shared interest in the dominance of the white race. Continue reading...

Ed Vaizey applauds UK tech strongholds and calls on next generation of digital entrepreneurs to also focus on largely state-backed sectorsThe government is urging tech companies to target the education and healthcare sectors as it encourages the industry’s growth outside London.The digital economy minister, Ed Vaizey, wants the next generation of tech entrepreneurs to focus on sectors that are largely state-backed. Wherever government is involved as a buyer of services, Vaizey said, it should make the most of new technology. “In education, universities and colleges are already using massive online courses, so lectures and courses can reach a much wider audience, costing less. Could schools benefit from similar innovations?” he said. Continue reading...

Chaos Communications Congress, Europe’s largest hacker conference, opened with call to action from Fatuma Musa Afrah: ‘Things are solved by human beings’Fatuma Musa Afrah was 16 when she touched a computer for the first time in Kenya. Somalian by birth, she insists that people use the word “newcomer” instead of “refugee” to refer to her.Musa Afrah inaugurated the largest hacker conference in Europe, the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg, by declaring she knew nothing about the field of IT. Linus Neumann from the Chaos Computer Club, which has organized the congress every year since 1984, had to work hard to convince her to come. Continue reading...

The new version of Google’s head-mounted computer has been revealed in a US government filing.Despite killing it off at the beginning of this year, Google has revealed a new version of its Glass wearable computer, aimed squarely at enterprise businesses such as healthcare and manufacturing.In filings with the American federal communications commission, the search firm has published the first pictures of the redesigned device, which now features a foldable arm holding a much larger screen. Continue reading...

Technology companies will be required to decrypt messages at the Chinese governments request, following the passage of a new law on SundayA new anti-terror law in China gives the government the explicit power to demand technology firms decrypt electronic messages stored on their servers, sparking concern – and confusion – from foreign companies.The law as enacted, however, falls short of a draft bill which would have required computer companies to explicitly install “backdoors” on their devices, allowing the Chinese government privileged access to the users’ communications. Continue reading...

The deathknell tolls for Flash as Google, Firefox, Amazon and other technology companies block it, while Adobe dumps the name from its own productsDeaths are rarely to be celebrated, but there is one passing that certainly won’t be widely mourned: that of Adobe’s Flash.2015 was the year the bug ridden security flaw finally went into terminal decline. Once the darling of the new interactive web (we’re talking in the late 1990s), enabling video, web apps and fancy ads, Flash has become bloated and dangerous, loved only by hackers on the open web. Continue reading...

User growth stalled, abuse was rife – but will it be able to break through in 2016?In 2015 Twitter lost one chief executive, gained another, and nearly tossed them too, before eventually settling down with him – incidentally, one of the men who had founded the company way back in 2006.It also finally admitted that it sucks at dealing with abuse on the site, made its first tentative steps from “platform” to “publisher”, and began testing the most controversial new feature it’s ever introduced. Continue reading...