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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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...