Technology | The Guardian

Company says ruling is against consumer interests after court dismisses Dyson’s argument that tests discriminate in favour of bagged vacuum cleaners and lead to misleadingly high ratings Continue reading...

11 November 1988: This new phone is bound to be an improvement on the ‘brick’ mobile phones currently on the marketA pocket telephone, smaller and lighter than most calculators were a decade ago, yesterday heralded the second surge of radio communications which could eventually remove the wired phone from office and home.It weighs 130 grams, sits easily in a shirt pocket, needs no external aerial, and will sell for about £150. It is the first product to be demonstrated in Britain’s pioneering of CT2 - a halfway house between the cheap cordless phone in the home and the costly (and overcrowded) cellular car-phone services.

Hamburg prosecutors say managing director may be held responsible for social platform’s alleged failure to remove hate speechProsecutors in Hamburg have launched an investigation into the European head of Facebook over the social platform’s alleged failure to remove racist hate speech, a spokeswoman for the prosecutor has said.The move was announced on Tuesday as German politicians and celebrities voiced concern about the rise of xenophobic comments in German on Facebook and on other social media as the country struggles to cope with the influx of about 1 million refugees this year. Continue reading...

Move comes after EU declared Safe Harbour – the treaty that enabled data to be transferred to the US from Europe for storage – invalidMicrosoft is opening data centres in the UK for the first time, the company’s chief Satya Nadella has announced.

Mark Little, who set up News Corp owned social news agency, takes up role as vice-president of media for Europe and AfricaMark Little, the founder of News Corp owned social news agency Storyful, has been hired as a senior executive across Twitter’s international operation.Little, who sold Dublin-based Storyful to News Corp for £15m in December 2013, left in June after just 18 months saying it’s best to “quit while you’re ahead”.

Slipped into the new investigatory powers bill is a law that could spell the end of encrypted services such as WhatsApp and iMessage.Technology firms could be forced into a no-win situation if the UK government’s investigatory powers bill passes without substantial changes from its current draft form.The legislation includes a number of clauses which are scaring technology firms. Under the proposals they can be required to provide assistance to the government to hack their own users; they can be mandated to open their networks up to bulk interception of data; and they can be required to modify their technologies to make the interception of data easier, even to the extent of removing “electronic protections” applied to them. Continue reading...

This video was posted on Facebook by Barack Obama. Speaking on the White House lawn, he talks about his hope for real conversations, where followers will hear directly from him, with some just-for-fun stuff too. He appeals to Americans to engage with the arguments on climate change

Across Britain, events are being held to bring the humanities to life with a strong digital flavourFrom reconstructing the past to experiencing sound, venues up and down the country will be hoping to win visitors over to the humanities this week.Kicking off on 12 November , the 11-day Being Human festival will not only feature lectures, discussions and analogue activities, but a smorgasbord of digitally infused events. Continue reading...

New Android Wear device follows traditional watchmaker philosophy, suggesting wearables no longer domain of the likes of Apple and SamsungTag Heuer’s first “luxury” Android Wear smartwatch, unveiled in New York on Monday, could be the most important smartwatch launch of 2015.In a year when Apple debuted its first smartwatch, that might sound surprising, but a tech company releasing a smartwatch is expected – for a luxury Swiss watchmaker to do so is a sign that wearable technology is finally growing up. Continue reading...

Facebook’s earliest evangelist says company’s first responsibility is to its shareholders, and engineers’ algorithms have ‘unintended consequences’A generation ago, Sean Parker would have us believe, parents worried that their children were becoming couch potatoes, passive consumers of information dominated by TV. But he said that concern has now shifted in the opposite direction, acknowledging that technology companies have employed “tricks” that encourage users to become “narcissistic, self-involved assholes”.In a characteristically frank discussion at the Techonomy conference in California’s Half Moon Bay, the Napster co-founder said society had gone from worrying about one paradigm to worrying about another. Continue reading...

Deborah Orr (We are fools to think robots make the future better, 7 November) makes a point about the industrial revolution, but gets it backwards. Yes, children worked in poor conditions, as did their parents, but the countryside emptied as the towns filled up because a horrible job in a factory was (and still is in much of the developing world) a better life than as an agricultural labourer.The towns offered wages, improved living conditions, access to better food and the opportunity for continuing education. It is also much easier for labour to organise in an urban setting than scattered across the countryside. If you don’t believe me, you could always ask the hundreds of millions of Chinese who have done exactly as we did as their country industrialised.

Company also behind Match and OkCupid looking to buck trend of recent poor IPOs in wake of Chinese stock market troublesThe New York-based owner of dating brands including Tinder, Match and OkCupid is to press ahead with a flotation valuing the group at $3.1bn (£2.1bn).Match Group will be hoping sufficient investors “swipe right” to get the deal off to a good start. Over the past month, almost every initial public offering (IPO) has priced below its range amid lingering nervousness about new issues initially raised by the Chinese stock market crisis. Continue reading...

Germany’s transport authority says one in four cars will need more than software changes, as Volkswagen decides on compensation for US ownersGermany’s transport ministry has said Volkswagen is likely to need to make more than just software changes to nearly a quarter of its 2.4m diesel cars being recalled in the country as a result of the emissions scandal.The ministry told the Associated Press on Monday that of the vehicles being recalled for fixes in Germany, the Federal Motor Transport Authority “currently expects that approximately 540,000 will also need hardware changes”. It said Volkswagen would inform owners of the details. Continue reading...

The irradiated landscape of the Commonwealth is packed with activities for the fun-seeking catastrophe survivor. Here are the must-dosFinally – it’s the end of the world. Again. After years of waiting, months of hype and some frenzied last-minute merchandising, Bethesda’s post-apocalyptic opus is back, this time staking out a ruined version of Massachusetts known as the Commonwealth. It’s 200 years after a nuclear war and you, as the sole survivor from a shelter named Vault 111, must make your way in a dangerous new land.Much of your time will be spent following the main story (which very little is currently known about) and dispatching hundreds of raiders, super mutants, and other baddies along the way. But while you’re at it, here are 10 other activities to try, both practical and pleasurable. Continue reading...

From Instagram’s latest spin-off and a neat way to relax on your smartphone to Minecraft Story Mode and a puzzle game based on Mozart’s Magic Flute opera Continue reading...

LifePaint promises great things in terms of saving cyclists’ lives, but our reporter is distinctly unimpressed by its glow-in-the dark claimsI’ve never been one for hi-vis. It is not merely vanity, though I admit luminous yellow is just not my colour. It’s that too many cyclists see it as a panacea, a fluorescent force-field that will protect them from the dangers of the road, whereas the truth is you can be done up head-to-toe as a highlighter pen and it’ll not help you at all if you’re always cowering in a driver’s blind spot.I don’t wear “proper” cycling gear to ride two miles to the Guardian’s Manchester office each day. If it’s raining, I’ll don a waterproof jacket (or, more honestly, take the car). But generally I’m in my civvies and so am arguably the prime market for Volvo’s new LifePaint, a “water-based reflective safety spray”, which promises to turn ordinary clothes into beacons when in direct glare of headlights. Continue reading...

Keith Aldridge alerted CEO’s office to call from fraudster 14 months before firm had first of series of data breaches

The TV property guru on her technophobe co-presenter Phil Spencer, her love of Apple and why she likes to ‘microwave’ her hair curlersAre you a gadget fiend or a technophobe?I’m all about usefulness. I never think: “That piece of tech is beautiful, I want it,” but if it’s useful to me, I’ll happily fit it into my life. Continue reading...

A clever robot, a lukewam bloodbath, an eight-sworded android and some vivid imaginations in Paris★★★ Continue reading...

Dublin played host to one of the world’s largest startup gatheringsMore than 42,000 people flocked to Ireland to one of the biggest tech conferences in the world, Dublin’s web summit. Once described as “the best technology conference on the planet”, the gathering is a seething mass of startups pitching ideas, investors looking for the next Google or Facebook, tech thinkers talking about the latest trends, and the odd celebrity giving their visions for the future. Here is what we learned at this year’s meeting of techie minds.Tinder says it’s about long-term love, not short-lived thrills Continue reading...

Instagram superstar, comic, rapper ... and plagiarist, too? Meet Josh Ostrovsky, aka the Fat JewThe internet sensation and now memoirist Josh Ostrovsky, aka the Fat Jew, is 15 minutes late to meet me, which is annoying because he’s actually chatting with a friend right outside this coffee shop window. He’s wearing a hoodie, novelty sunglasses and a gold necklace that reads “Life” in Hebrew. He’s a big man with a shaggy afro which, when he spends time on it, can be manipulated into a kind of unicorn’s horn. Today it’s not a horn. People recognise him. Passersby look impressed. We’re in an area of Brooklyn called Dumbo, and I’m sitting inside the cafe with two of his publicists, who insist on being present throughout the interview. It is all weirdly corporate, given that Ostrovsky’s an Instagram comedian; but last March, Time magazine named him one of the “30 most influential people on the internet”.He started out as an entertainment reporter and a member of the rap group Team Facelift, but since 2013 Ostrovsky has become increasingly famous for his vastly successful memes and viral videos. On Instagram, as @thefatjewish, he has 6.4 million followers. Fans include Miley Cyrus, Katy Perry, Kanye West and millions of teenagers. Consequently, as Time explained, “brands have started to pay him for exposure to that audience”; these brands include Stella Artois, Burger King, Apple and Budweiser. Some of his videos are perceptive and funny: for example, when he staged a spinning class for homeless people on Citi Bikes that weren’t in use (“Indoor cycling is not available to everybody. I want the homeless people of New York to have really gorgeous bodies.”). When the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer incurred the internet’s wrath for shooting a much-loved lion while big-game hunting in Zimbabwe, Ostrovsky posted on Instagram a photograph of the cowardly lion from The Wiz with the caption: “Going to start dressing like a Lion. That way cops know that if they kill me. White people will avenge me.” Continue reading...

‘If you have driving aims other than feeling like a giant and going extremely fast, think again’The Vauxhall Adam Grand Slam was a variation on the Adam, designed to be more appealing to men; then, manliness being such a difficult quality to pin down, they changed the name to the S. Everybody knows that men love initials, especially consonants.You cannot fault it on performance. Its 1.4-litre, turbo-charged, four-cylinder petrol engine could get a tractor to a decent speed over time; a car this size is at 62mph from cold in the time it takes you to wonder how long it will be before you have a panic attack and jump out, shouting, “I don’t need an MRI! I’m fine with a brain tumour – I’ll get it treated homoeopathically!” (This, if you really want to put a number on it, is 8.5 seconds.) Continue reading...

The tech giants are racing to provide internet access from unmanned aircraft flying higher than passenger jets, having quietly registered new drone designsGoogle and Facebook have significantly expanded their rival plans to develop unmanned aircraft that can provide broadband internet access from high above the Earth, the Guardian has learned.Both Facebook and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, have quietly registered new drone designs with the US Federal Aviation Administration. Continue reading...

In this extended edition of the podcast, we talk to some of the biggest movers and shakers at the annual web summit in DublinThis week Tech Weekly packs up its bag of cables and microphones and hits the road for the annual Web Summit in Dublin. We move through the throngs of braying startups and roving investors to cut straight to some of the most interesting speakers at the event.This year it seems four initials are gaining traction: AI and VR. We talked to VR pioneer Jackie Ford Morie about her work to make astronauts less lonely; futurist Nell Watson about virtual consciousness for AI; cyber-psychologist Mary Aiken on how online life is affecting children; and to Silicon Valley roboticist Andra Keay and the Guardian's Julia Powles on the tech monopolies taking over our lives. Continue reading...

Like every parent, David Bowie told his son to put down the console and play outside. But that young gamer has grown into the director of the first World of Warcraft movie. Duncan Jones on tackling a $100m fantasy epicWhen he was a child growing up in the 1980s, Duncan Jones would often stay up through the night, drawing maps on graph paper of places he’d only ever visited inside a computer screen. His father, David Bowie viewed his son’s arcane video game obsession with suspicion. “Like any parent he would say, ‘Why won’t you just get out of the house and play outside?’” Jones recalls.Zowie, as he was known at the time, spent much of his early life on tour with his father. A peripatetic child, even one cushioned by the comforts of a rock star lifestyle, has to find home somewhere. For Jones, it was the video game worlds into which he disappeared each day. “Games have always presented an opportunity to escape,” he says. “But they are also an opportunity to go somewhere that you come to know well.” Continue reading...

Free service available in Moscow will delete all mentions of homosexuality or ‘evil under the guise of goodness’The Russian Orthodox Church has said it will offer free “Orthodox internet” Wi-Fi cleansed of immoral content near churches and in public places around Moscow.Orthodox priest Roman Bogdasarov, who heads the Russian Inter-religious Council, told Izvestia newspaper that the internet contains many threats to users, including recruitment materials for Christian sects and Islamic State, pornography and “distorted versions of history”. Continue reading...

By clamping down on her children’s use of smartphones and tablets, the Steve Jobs actor doesn’t know what she’s getting intoKate Winslet, in an interview to promote Steve Jobs, her new movie about the legendary Apple designer, said she is clamping down on her children’s use of smartphones and tablets and will not allow them to use social media because of its harmful qualities.Related: Kate Winslet says children being harmed by social media Continue reading...

This GPS-driven story about loss turns your smartphone screen into a portal, presenting a virtually abstracted version of cities

Every Friday, we review things that desperately need appraising but seldom receive the critical treatment they deserve. We also review things that really don’t need appraising at all. We’ll review your suggestions, too – suggest in the comments or @guideguardian Continue reading...

When two worlds meet to make a successful combinationTwo of the mainstays of geek culture, comics and games have shared an awkward relationship – for many years, games were re-imagined to mediocre effect in print. There were exceptions, but today it’s much easier to find well-considered game-comics. Here are some of the best. Continue reading...

Star Wars is back, with The Force Awakens opening in cinemas in December, but for gamers the franchise has never gone away, from the early arcade delights of destroying the Death Star to recreating the movies in Lego1983 Star Wars

Site is offering small businesses new location-aware adverts, to let them distinguish between users in different placesAlready alarmed by how well Facebook’s adverts seem to know you? They are about to get even more specific.The social media company is rolling out two new ad products aimed squarely at small businesses who have typically been reluctant to fork out for prime placement on the site. Continue reading...

After the King purchase, could Activision be thinking of entering its hugely successful collectible card game into the ‘skill-based gaming’ sector?On Monday, Activision announced a deal to acquire the smartphone and online gaming specialist King for $5.9bn, instigating one of the largest takeover bids in recent gaming history. The move was greeted with surprise by analysts who pointed to King’s heavy reliance on a single title, Candy Crush Saga, which appears to be stagnating, as well as the company’s declining revenues – a point underlined on Thursday when King announced its third-quarter earnings, down to $180m, compared with $216m a year ago.

Jason Clare seizes on data released by former head of NBN Co Mike Quigley to defend company from claims of poor accounting and financial systemsThe prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, has no one to blame but himself for the cost blowout of the national broadband network (NBN), Labor’s communications spokesman, Jason Clare, has said.Related: Turnbull defends purchase of $14m worth of copper to deliver NBN Continue reading...

Low resolution screen, weak processor, poor cameras and serious lag make the Fire HD 10 a disappointment with few redeeming qualitiesThe Fire HD 10 is Amazon’s latest full-sized tablet, but it cuts far too many corners and isn’t cheap.

Company to employ 200 people in a new facility that will include development of roboticsToyota is investing $1bn in a research company it is setting up in Silicon Valley to develop artificial intelligence and robotics, underlining the Japanese automaker’s determination to lead in futuristic cars that drive themselves and apply the technology to other areas of daily life.Related: Life with robots: 'What people enjoy most is avoiding social interaction' Continue reading...

Online retailer launches Prime Same Day – free to Prime subscribers but £9.99 for others – a day before Argos unveils free delivery offerAmazon and Argos delivery drivers will be racing each other to customers’ front doors from Friday, as the retailers go head-to-head with a same-day delivery service.Amazon has launched Prime Same Day, allowing customers of its Prime service to order goods before noon and receive them between 6pm and 10pm. Continue reading...

‘It’s like Lego!’ – the perky Radio 1 presenter offers young listeners a quick guide to coding a big-money winner“If you could invent any app in the world, what would it be?” A quick vox pop of would-be young digital pioneers discovers that their life-changing ideas involve takeaway deliveries and tech to blag their coursework. Teenagers today, eh?In Radio 1’s How to Make a Million-Pound App, perky host Dev dangles the digital carrot of becoming as rich as Facebook entrepreneur Mark Zuckerberg or Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel before the age of 30. It’s a big promise, but his boundless enthusiasm should surely be enough to inspire teenagers to get off WhatsApp and create their own technology. Continue reading...

The e-commerce behemoth that put chain bookstores out of business has seemingly ripped a page from their playbook with the opening of its first physical shop, in Seattle. But are the locals buying it?It took Amazon.com to get Kirsten Davenport back into a bookshop.“It has been a long time. Years. I couldn’t even tell you where a bookstore is,” the healthcare manager said. “That’s so awful.” Continue reading...

Amazon’s parental leave policy is the latest in tech company trend of ostensibly generous perks meant to retain hard workers rather than give them a real breakLet’s give Amazon the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps the announcement of its revamped and significantly more generous family leave policy didn’t have anything to do with the really bad PR that the company has been combatting since the publication of a New York Times exposé, including comments by some former Amazon insiders, about just how difficult it is to work for the retail behemoth.Writing that the company “is conducting a little-known experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers, redrawing the boundaries of what is acceptable”, Times reporters collected somewhat hair-raising tales of what it means to be an elite worker at the giant online retailer. In the process, they raised the question of whether a gender gap might partly explain the problem, and recounted at least one instance where a woman was told by her boss that having children “would most likely prevent her from success at a higher level”. Continue reading...

Dyson argues tests don’t reflect real-world energy use but green campaigners say they have still made vacuum cleaners more efficient and help cut energy billsThe British technology firm Dyson is asking the European court to throw out a large chunk of the EU’s energy efficiency legislation following accusations that rival firms are misleading customers over the way their products operate.Dyson, headed by the British engineer James Dyson, is seeking to quash the EU’s regulation for vacuum cleaners at the European court of justice. Continue reading...

App boss says while hook-ups happen, 80% of users are looking for long-term relationshipsTinder users are looking for long-term love, not just casual sex, according to the dating app’s chief executive, Sean Rad.“We just conducted a survey of over 300,000 of our users. What we found was over 80% of people on Tinder are there to find a long-term relationship,” said Rad, at the Web Summit conference in Dublin. Continue reading...

Nothing digital is secure, so the massive proposed extension of state powers in the ‘snooper’s charter’ could backfireThe surveillance bill has had a rough passage so far. Today the spooks were under pressure from left and right. Libertarians, nerds and the big computer firms were up in arms. The sceptred isle was up against the Spectred isle. So MI6 sent for Bond.The past week has seen the most bizarre spinning. The BBC and the Times suddenly “managed to secure” exclusive stories about the wonderful world of secret intelligence, shamelessly pegged to the premiere of the film. The Times offered a gushing prospectus of work inside GCHQ. The BBC’s Frank Gardner sat, obsequious, in a darkened room and asked faceless voices what it was like being “the real James Bond”. It was like a spoof promotion video for the Stasi. Continue reading...

A Nokia 3310 and couple in sauna among 30 tongue in cheek digital symbols to be launched by Finnish governmentFinland has rolled out images of a couple in a sauna, an old Nokia phone and a heavy metal music fan as part of a set of national emojis, or symbols, to be used in digital communication. Continue reading...

Project Zero security vulnerabilities team reveals top-end curved Korean handset had 11 holes, of which three have yet to be fixedGoogle has revealed that Samsung’s flagship Galaxy S6 Edge Android smartphone suffered 11 “high impact” security issues that were introduced by the company’s customisation of Android.

Theresa May’s revived snooper’s charter will give police and spies access to a year’s worth of your web browsing historyCritics call it a revived snooper’s charter, because the government wants police and spies to be given access to the web browsing history of everyone in Britain.However, Theresa May says her measures would require internet companies to store data about customers that amount to “simply the modern equivalent of an itemised phone bill”. Continue reading...

Home secretary Theresa May likens accessing internet browsing history to allowing the authorities to see an itemised phone bill, as part of the new bill on internet surveillance in the House of Commons on Wednesday. The bill, known as the snooper’s charter, gives new powers for police and security services tracking UK citizens’ internet use without the need for a judicial check

Teenager, who quit platform after revealing how much she was being paid to promote products, has started her own websiteA teenager who dramatically altered her popular Instagram profile to reveal how she was paid for seemingly perfect images has deleted her account, encouraging followers to visit and donate to her new website instead.Essena O’Neill, 18, who had 612,000 followers, had rewritten the captions on many of the images, explaining she was being paid to promote clothes and drinks, and had taken some of the selfies more than 100 times to get the right stomach-sucked-in shot. O’Neill said the pictures “served no real purpose other than self-promotion”. Continue reading...

The new surveillance powers unveiled by home secretary Theresa May in wake of the Edward Snowden revelationsRelated: Theresa May gives police powers to view UK citizens' web browser history – live• Requires web and phone companies to store records of websites visited by every citizen for 12 months for access by police, security services and other public bodies.