Technology | The Guardian

The researcher who first highlighted the company’s cars now says they’re no longer thereHas Uber exorcised its phantom cars from the street?A week after the company denied claims that the cars displayed on its app were a misleading “visual effect”, the researcher who brought the initial accusation now says the phantoms have vanished. Continue reading...

Numerous, Yahoo Livetext, 5K Runner, Bestie by Camera 360, Fab Nights at Freddy’s 4, Angry Birds 2 and moreWelcome to this week’s roundup of the latest, greatest Android apps and games, covering smartphones and tablets.All these apps have been released for the first time – ie not updates – since the last roundup. All prices are correct at the time of writing, with “IAP” indicating use of in-app purchases. Continue reading...

In bid to popularise former leader’s image, group calls on Instagram users to take photographs of themselves with his statues. Global Voices reportsCapitalising on Russia’s love-hate relationship with the selfie, a communist youth organisation has launched a competition encouraging young people to share photographs of themselves with statues of the former leader.Using the hashtag #LeninLives, the group says the project is a “cheap and effective way to popularise the image of the leader of the world’s proletariat among the youth”. Continue reading...

Samsung joins company in promising monthly security updates in order to prevent Android platform from falling behind fight against malware

The service will complement the company’s free offering and users will be asked to cough up $9.99 a month for the premium servicePornhub, a vast network of online adult content which attracts a 6 million visitors a day, has launched Pornhub Premium, a paid subscription platform it calls “Netflix for porn” in a move that will be closely watched by all of the online media world from music to news.

‘Just the first of many viral, audio-only drama shows,’ says streaming firm boss, who is hoping for growth despite Apple and Spotify competitionThe success of the podcast Serial is part of a wider “radio renaissance” that goes well beyond traditional broadcasters, according to streaming service Mixcloud.The company has just announced the winners of its second Online Radio Awards, which aim to spotlight the best internet shows, with NPR Radio’s whodunnit documentary winning the best online talk radio show category. Continue reading...

Leak confirms taxi-app firm’s losses growing faster than revenues as it invests in future growthTaxi-app Uber is losing millions of dollars every year, despite the company’s rapid growth and international notoriety, according to documents obtained by US news site Gawker.The financial reports, which span Uber’s history from the beginning of 2012 to the second half of 2014, show the company’s revenue rising from just $1.4m a quarter to almost $57m in just over two years. But in the same period, the company’s overall profits, taking into account all of its expenses, fall from a loss of $3.5m to a loss of $108.8m in the second quarter of 2014. Continue reading...

Will real-world ideals of urban planning work on a computer simulator? Environmental writer Karl Mathiesen tests the eco-limits in ‘Hopenhagen’

EL James and Rachel Abbott take the ebook top spots as self-published success spreads on Amazon’s e-readerRelated: Rachel Abbott: 'Self-publishing means the success of my books is entirely down to me'Five years ago, Rachel Abbott was retired. Today, she has been named the most popular self-published Kindle author in the UK by Amazon, thanks to the dark psychological thrillers she started writing to pass the time, and decided she “might as well” self-publish. Continue reading...

Smart sensors are being used to improve agriculture from farming lettuce to producing beef – and even protecting beesThe cleverest thing in your smart fridge may not be an automated re-ordering button, web-connected camera that tweets when your milk is off, or some other silly convenience system, but the food itself.Agriculture has been quick to trial internet of things (IoT) technologies: already, sensor-controlled rooms are growing altered lettuce, cows are connected to improve milk, and the all-important bee is getting a boost from automated heaters. Continue reading...

Prizes range from trip to New York Fashion Week with $4,000 in spending money to virtual logos and Destiny codesFor as long as there have been competitions, there have been people trying to break competitions. After all, who wouldn’t pass up the chance to win something for free? Competition clubs, for example, take the idea on an industrial scale, allowing people to pay a fee for a third party to enter a whole load of competitions on their behalf.But no one has broken the concept quite so majestically as US coder Hunter Scott, who managed to win almost 1,000 competitions over the last nine months with the help of a single twitter bot. Continue reading...

Media that kids and adults enjoy together is the smart way to prepare children for online dangerThere’s two ways a conversation about the internet and parenting can go: the first way, which is also the stupid way, is to focus on how to stop kids from accessing the Bad Internet and doing Dumb Things there.

Recruiting advert spawns trending global gender and diversity campaign #iLookLikeAnEngineer, leading thousands to post pictures in supportThousands of female engineers have taken to Twitter to dispel the myth that all engineers are men.

The tech giant will patch a serious bug in the next security update to its desktop operating systemApple is to fix a bug in its Mac OS X operating system as soon as possible amid concerns over the security of its desktop and laptop computers.The tech company will patch a serious “privilege escalation” bug in the next security update to its desktop operating system, Mac OS X 10.10.5, the Guardian has learned. The initial beta of the next update to the Mac operating system did not include a fix for the bug, known as DYLD, leading to concerns it would not be fixed until the Autumn when the next major OS release, El Capitan, is planned. Continue reading...

The place to talk about games and other things that matterIt’s my birthday today! So to celebrate, here is a screenshot from ScaleBound. Continue reading...

Nine clash after drone drops package of heroin, marijuana and tobacco, leading officers to use pepper spray and strip-search 205 prisoners

Pop star finds it ironic that ‘multi-billion-dollar company’ Apple reacted to criticism with humility, while ‘the start-up with no cash flow reacted to criticism like a corporate machine’The prospect of Taylor Swift and music streaming service Spotify ever ever getting back together looks remote, after Swift negatively compared the company’s response to her withdrawal of her music in 2014 to that of her recent criticism of Apple.“Apple treated me like I was a voice of a creative community that they actually cared about,” Swift told Vanity Fair about the latter dispute, which saw Apple change its plans not to pay rightsholders for streams on its Apple Music service’s free trial shortly after she criticised them in a blog post. Continue reading...

‘Thunderstrike 2’, a worm which moves from Macbook to Macbook using hardware, joins privilege escalation bug seen in the wild for the first time

A group of people will attempt to write a book in a little over an hour at Nine Worlds Geekfest this weekend. Don’t expect it to be in next year’s Booker longlistEvery year, writers across the world struggle through the month of November to hit a seemingly impossible target: write a whole novel in 30 days. But National Novel Writing Month – or NaNoWriMo, as it’s known – will shortly look like child’s play, because on Saturday 8 August, science-fiction author Chris Farnell will lead “NaNoSessionMo”: an attempt to write an entire novel in 75 minutes.The session (which, Farnell concedes, should perhaps be called NaNoWriSession) will take place at the Nine Worlds geekfest in Heathrow, a multidisciplinary convention for fans across the spectrum of geek culture, and was inspired by a previous panel Farnell led at 2014’s show. Continue reading...

Homeland Security admits Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act raises concerns while corporations and data brokers lobby for bill as it returns to SenateThe Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Monday said a controversial new surveillance bill could sweep away “important privacy protections”, a move that bodes ill for the measure’s return to the floor of the Senate this week.The latest in a series of failed attempts to reform cybersecurity, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (Cisa) grants broad latitude to tech companies, data brokers and anyone with a web-based data collection to mine user information and then share it with “appropriate Federal entities”, which themselves then have permission to share it throughout the government. Continue reading...

Audi, BMW and Daimler team up to acquire technology that could prove invaluable in race to develop driverless carsThree German carmakers have put their rivalries aside by teaming up to acquire a €2.8bn (£2bn) mapping business from Nokia, as they attempt to avoid being outsmarted by technology groups in the race to cash in on the driverless car revolution.Amid speculation that the likes of Uber, Amazon and Apple were preparing bids, Nokia, the Finnish communications group, agreed a deal to sell its Here unit to the consortium of Audi, BMW and Daimler, the Mercedes owner. Continue reading...

As Seattle-based company rapidly expands TV and movies division, the man in driver’s seat makes it clear that Netflix is not the only game in townWhen it comes to the rapidly expanding TV and movies division of Seattle-based retailer Amazon, you might expect the company that religiously studies customer order histories, when and how people buy, what they’re buying and a slew of other metrics, to bring that same zeal for data to its slate of original content.

Tech startups are usually seen as a young person’s game, so founding a website in my late 50s has been something of an adventure…Pulling into Old Street underground station in London I can with great accuracy predict who will head for the doors of the train. Not that clean-shaven man in the three-piece business suit; nor that Armani-ed woman who’s probably heading for a City skyscraper. No, Old Street (ironically, given the name) is a magnet for tech-oriented twentysomethings. So how does it feel to be a “grey entrepreneur” blinking in the light of Silicon Roundabout?I’m a former magazine editor (Psychologies, Good Housekeeping, In Style) in my late 50s. When, a few years ago, I wanted to find a therapist to deal with some of life’s harsher blows, I realised that most directories couldn’t give me what I needed. Picking out a face from the hundreds listed was a stab in the dark. Couldn’t you take the sort of algorithm that worked for dating sites, and find the right therapist much more accurately? Continue reading...

Mazda’s lovable MX-5 is the world’s bestselling sports car. And for one injured soldier it has been a lifeline…Price £18,495

While Facebook and Snapchat soar, the most immediate social media channel in the world has many experts worriedHow many tech companies are saddled with the problem of enjoying global fame but struggling with lacklustre performance? Not Facebook, which revealed in its results that it has nearly 1.5 billion users logging in each month around the world. Twitter, however, is an example where participation is lagging behind reputation.The company built around text-message-length “tweets” announced in its own quarterly results last week that it has 304 million monthly active users (MAUs), who logged in at least once a month in the past quarter. That figure was up only 0.7% from the previous quarter, while the figure for MAUs in the US stayed stubbornly at 65 million. Continue reading...

Posturing over Google and the ‘right to be forgotten’ detracts from larger issues about respect for individuals v overreaching economic rights in digital spaceImagine, 25 years ago, someone telling you: we really need to redress this massive social ignorance that, when you meet someone for the first time, you don’t know everything about them. What we ought to do is assemble a giant database. On everyone.Brilliant idea. But there are a couple of provisos, they add. This database will be sourced from whatever scraps of information are lying around about you – whether carefully crafted, or pulled from the streets. The product of your life’s work; or just some odd thing you once said or did, long ago, somewhere that the database decides to rank highly and eternally. Continue reading...

‘It didn’t set my world on fire. It probably thinks setting things on fire is irresponsible’I can seriously see the point of the Skoda Fabia. I can’t stand the convention that, as soon as you have a family, you have to start driving some lumbering bison of a car, destined to stick out in car parks and squeeze down urban roads. I would much rather drive something that looked like a hot hatch and just happened to have a bunch of people and animals in the back.OK, the Fabia does not look like a hot hatch. It doesn’t look hot. It looks like your existing girlfriend. No, just kidding! That kind of sexist objectification has no place in car reviewing. It looks dependable and friendly, but not particularly invigorating. I’m not sure that it would wow the younger audience, but then I always think the young car buyer who has money is a figment of the industry’s imagination. Continue reading...

Beast, a puli, is the newest internet celebrity thanks to his moppy hair and unusual heritageWhen Priscilla Chan and her husband, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, announced they are expecting a baby girl, the internet showered them with praise. At last count, nearly 800,000 people had liked the Facebook announcement in which they shared the big news.But this being the internet, the happy couple were almost immediately upstaged by their dog. Continue reading...

Facebook CEO and his wife Priscilla Chan, who married in 2012, have had three miscarriages, Zuckerberg writes on Facebook page announcing the pregnancyFacebook Inc chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, are expecting a baby girl, he said on his Facebook page on Friday.The couple, who married in 2012, have been trying to have a child and had three miscarriages, he wrote. Zuckerberg, 31, did not say when their daughter is due but said the pregnancy was far enough along that the risk of miscarriage was low. Continue reading...

Banking group says Distributed Denial of Service attack prompted flood of complaints from customersThe RBS banking group has revealed it suffered a cyber attack on its online services that left customers struggling to log on for nearly an hour – just as monthly pay cheques were arriving in accounts.

Personal finance journalist Lewis sold 9m shares at £2.80, reducing his stake in the website from 3.1% to 1.5%Martin Lewis, the personal finance journalist, has made £25.2m after selling a large portion of his shares in the price comparison website Moneysupermarket.com.Related: Moneysupermarket.com founder pulls out of £95m share sale Continue reading...

More than half of viewing is done on mobile devices, says ZenithOptimedia, which also predicts a fall in television viewing next yearPeople around the world will be spending an average of almost an hour a day watching online video by the end of next year, and more than half of that will be spent on a mobile device, according to a report from ZenithOptimedia.Mobile devices will become the dominant source of online video within the next 12 months, and television will peak this year, before starting to fall for the first time, predicts the firm, part of advertising group Publicis. Continue reading...

US car part maker Delphi Automotive pays £1.1bn for HellermannTyton as it seeks to capitalise on growing trend for vehicles that connect to the webA US-listed car parts maker is paying £1.1bn to buy HellermannTyton, a British manufacturer of cable equipment, as it seeks to capitalise on the growing trend in intelligent vehicles.Delphi Automotive said it expects HellermannTyton, which makes products for fastening, fixing, and protecting cables, to help it take advantage of increasing demand for vehicles that connect to the web and smart devices such as phones and tablets. Continue reading...

Trio of presenters sign deal with on-demand TV service for as-yet unnamed motoring show to be made by Clarkson’s long-time collaborator Andy WilmanWould you join Amazon Prime to watch Clarkson, Hammond and May? - poll

Researchers say the app shows cars present in the user’s vicinity even when there are noneUber has denied claims its application misleads users by displaying “phantom cars” which don’t actually exist.The claim was made by Alex Rosenblat and Luke Stark, a pair of researchers from the Data & Society thinktank. In an article for Vice’s Motherboard, Rosenblat wrote that the phantom cars are just one way that Uber’s passenger app can be “deceptive”. Continue reading...

Protesters attack Uber drivers and their vehicles with clubs and stones outside Mexico City airport on Tuesday. Uber says between 10 to 12 cars were damaged in the attack, but there were no reports of serious injuries. Earlier this month, Mexico City became the first in South America to create official regulations for smartphone-based taxi services such as Uber Continue reading...

No need to check the weather forecast for our stroll through decades of sunny seasonal offerings, through Vice City and Xtreme Beach VolleyballWe have such a fraught relationship with summer in Britain. Most of the time, the sun skulks behind cloud cover, only briefly surfacing to give us false hope on the first day of Wimbledon. Its fleeting visits are met with near orgiastic excitement as even we grown adults flock to ice cream vans or hastily erect rusting barbecues so that we can give all our neighbours botulism. No sunny day can be taken for granted, so the result is stress and resentment. You don’t want to put a bikini on and frolic in the surf, but you have to or the summer police will come and bang you up.This is why, unless you can spend three months of the year in Portugal, video games are the best place to revel in sunshine. None of these classics will ever be rained off or require the purchase of a Pack-a-Mac. And if you get bored of the endless cobalt skies, you can just switch off and go outside in the rain. Nobody loses. Continue reading...

The place to talk about games and other things that matterIt’s Thursday folks! Today’s screenshot is from forthcoming PS3/Vita fighting game, Dengeki Bunko: Fighting Climax. Launch copies of the game will come with a bonus CD featuring tracks by Teruhiko Nakagawa (Shinobi) and Naofumi Hataya (NiGHTS into Dreams)! Continue reading...

How this very English view of the apocalypse communicates to the player through music, sound and songSilence is rare in Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture – which is strange because everybody is dead.This elegiac adventure game, set in a rural area of Shropshire, imagines the end of humanity coming, not as a nuclear bang, but as a soft, almost seductive whimper. The player finds themselves in an abandoned village shortly after a devastating event of some kind, and by exploring the buildings, pathways and woodlands, must try to piece together what has happened. Continue reading...

Company reports fifth straight quarterly profit drop as the Galaxy S6 series fails to reverse its declining fortune in smartphone industrySamsung Electronics has reported a fifth straight quarterly profit drop as the Galaxy S6 series of smartphones failed to reverse its declining fortune in the industry.Samsung’s April-June net income was 5.8tn won (US$5bn/£3.2bn), down 8% from 6.3tn won a year earlier. Continue reading...

Protests are clear signal that regulations designed to create a legal framework for app-based ride services have not put an end to city’s simmering disputeA raucous crowd attacked Uber drivers and their vehicles with clubs and stones outside the Mexico City airport, according to the company, as licensed taxi drivers demonstrated to demand a “total halt” to app-based rideshare services in the capital.Video of the demonstration showed people throwing eggs and flour inside the windows of vehicles, kicking doors and trying to rip off side mirrors. One man destroyed a sedan’s rear window with a large rock. Continue reading...

My father, Bill Dabbs, who has died aged 84, played a key role in the development of the car industry in the UK, including the introduction of its first robot.Bill was born in Southall, London, into a poor family during the Depression, the only boy among eight children. His father, William, suffering from the effects of mustard gas during the first world war, was often unemployed; his mother, Matilda – known as Kathleen – had been in domestic service. In 1940, to keep Bill safe from the London blitz, his parents booked him passage to Canada on the SS City of Benares. Shortly before he was due to leave, they changed their minds; a few days into its voyage, the ship was torpedoed by a German U-boat and 77 evacuee children lost their lives. Continue reading...

Lawsuit launched on behalf of GMB union for professional drivers over pay, holiday allowance and health and safety of its driversUber, the taxi-app firm, is facing legal action over whether it affords its drivers basic rights and treats them as employees rather than “partners” or “contractors”.The suit is being brought by employment law firm, Leigh Day, on behalf of the union for professional drivers, GMB. Continue reading...