Technology | The Guardian

For the spiritual among the 30 million people descending on the Indian city of Nashik for this August’s tri-annual Hindu festival, the event is a catharsis. For urban planners it is an opportunity to analyse city problems on a huge scaleThis August an expected 30 million religious devotees, ascetics and tourists will congregate in the Indian city of Nashik for the Kumbh Mela – a 20-day Hindu festival which is one of the largest public gatherings in the world.The mass pilgrimage of faith takes place every three years on a rotational basis in four alternating cities, and will be returning to Nashik after a gap of 12 years. For the spiritual, the event is a catharsis, where one can purge oneself of sin by taking a dip in the holy water of the sacred rivers. But for technologists, social innovators and urban planners, the staggering increase in human density is a golden opportunity to identify, analyse and study pop-up city problems at scale. Continue reading...

EA Dice’s 2008 dystopian parkour adventure Mirror’s Edge was visually stunning but flawed. Now a long-awaited reboot seeks to fulfil its potentialFirst-person shooters are rarely ever about the person. We may view the ceaseless slaughter through the eyes of the lead protagonist but we rarely get a sense of them as a physical presence in the game world. They are a visual consciousness attached to a gun and a health gauge.Mirror’s Edge was different. Built by Swedish studio EA Dice between the second and third generations of its multimillion-selling Battlefield titles, it made the body and experiences of lead character Faith Connors central to the action. Set in a stylised futuristic dystopia, the game mixed parkour exploration with the narrative of a paranoid chase movie, turning the city into a tense gymnastic playground, its soaring white towers a mere backdrop to the physicality of the avatar. While running, we could see Faith’s arms and legs on screen, the camera jogged as she sprinted and leapt. It was a strange and thrilling simulation of embodiment. It was flawed but beautiful. Continue reading...

The 85-year-old director is using crowdfunding to assemble a budget for a threequel, offering roles as extras and an exec producer creditDespite the underwhelming response to his 2011 sequel The Wicker Tree, 85-year-old director Robin Hardy is using crowdfunding site Indiegogo to fund a third Wicker Man film.Related: How we made The Wicker Man Continue reading...

YouGov survey will concern newspapers, social networks and music streaming sites that are seeing consumers turn to ad-blocking softwareLess than half of UK adults know that most free content online from services such as newspapers, social networks and music streaming sites is funded by advertising.The figures – from a survey by YouGov commissioned by the Internet Advertising Bureau – will make worrying reading for ad-reliant web companies that are seeing consumers turn to ad-blocking software. Continue reading...

Quirky DJ’s show is almost identical to his former BBC Radio 1 slot, suggesting Beats 1 is intended to be an experimental rather than a mainstream station“All right man, we’ve gotta kick this whole thing off at some point.”Uttered just after 5pm UK time on the world’s first global, 24/7 radio station, Zane Lowe’s characteristically conversational opening bon mot might have found itself committed to history books, had listeners who tuned in early not heard 45 minutes of Brian Eno’s Music For Airports punctuated by Lowe and his producer wrestling with the studio equipment. Instead, the first words the Guardian hears on Beats 1 are: “Check! Check! Check!” Continue reading...

Tourists in EU countries will pay same mobile fees as at home from June 2017, but parallel deal means web services could pay for faster connections than rivalsHolidaymakers travelling within the EU will pay the same price to use their mobile phone as they would at home from June 2017, after a deal was reached by European authorities.

Apple is launching the Zane Lowe-fronted radio station with its Spotify-like streaming service. Here’s what we know and what’s yet to be revealedThe days of big surprises from Apple are mostly in the past. As the scale of the company has grown, it has become unable to prevent leaks somewhere along its chain.That’s doubly true when dealing with the notoriously gossipy music industry, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that nearly everything about Apple Music, the company’s new Spotify competitor, was known long in advance of the service’s announcement. Continue reading...

Online retailer’s Prime Now service expands from being focused on grocery delivery to include substantial portion of its catalogue

Markets do not have much patience for a commitment to techniques that don’t deliver. Unfortunately, spy agencies aren’t subject to this discipline“Regression to the mean” is one of the subtlest concepts in statistical literacy – and yet it’s terribly simple. In plain English, “regression to the mean” is the idea that normally, things are pretty normal. That is, if you observe something abnormal – a high fever, a high share price, a long, unseasonable stretch of sunny or rainy days – then chances are that all will soon fall back within normal range. If you’re sick, you’ll probably get better (this is why so many quack cold remedies “work” – they take your mind off the passage of time while you wait for regression to the mean to assert itself).

Australian rockers, who held back their catalogue from iTunes until 2012, joins Spotify, Apple Music and other digital platformsThey’ve been around for decades, have sold hundreds of millions of albums, but until now had not been available on streaming services.No, not The Beatles. AC/DC. Continue reading...

Nintendo’s brash, punky shooter would have defined my teen years – if only it hadn’t arrived too lateFor a whole host of reasons, the start of secondary school marked a pause in my love of video games.I’d spent my childhood playing grungy classics like Crazy Taxi and Tony Hawk’s Underground. But on the cusp of puberty and thrust into a group of new personalities - most of which were much bigger and louder than mine - I did what most kids do at that difficult age and adjusted my interests according to my friend group. Continue reading...

The place to talk about games and other things that matterIt’s Tuesday and Persona 4 Dancing all Night is coming out in Europe this autumn, complete with a special Disco Fever edition that comes with a whole bunch of remixed tracks. Continue reading...

AOL to make Bing its main search engine and take over selling ads on Microsoft sites, while Uber rather than in-house division will supply mapsMicrosoft is to hand over its display advertising business to AOL and sell some map-generating technology to Uber as it slims down money-losing online operations.

Historic ‘treasure trove’ of materials linked to TV pioneer is at risk of being exported from Britain unless a buyer can be foundAn export bar has been placed on an archive from John Logie Baird’s first transmission of trans-Atlantic television pictures in the hope that it will prevent the materials – which include the first use of the acronym TV – leaving the UK.A UK buyer will need to match the £78,750 asking price for the archive, described as a “treasure trove” of materials, for it to remain in Britain. Continue reading...

The bestselling author took to Twitter to field questions from fans and quickly found out how hashtags and the best of intentions don’t necessarily mixFifty Shades of Grey author EL James got more than she bargained for during a Twitter Q&A that quickly descended into chaos as people used the #AskELJames hashtag to bombard the writer – who is now worth a reported $37m – with questions and comments that (perhaps predictably) made fun of her much parodied series.The session, which took place in Twitter’s UK headquarters, began with James fielding questions about the plot of Fifty Shades of Grey, such as what she would have liked to change anything in the Ana and Christian relationship with answers such as: “Yes. I would have liked to split them up for longer at the end of FsoG.” Continue reading...

Spokeswoman for Paris prosecutor says they have been taken into custody for questioning, against backdrop of violent recent taxi strikeTwo Uber managers have been taken into custody for questioning over “illicit activity” linked to the ride-hailing company’s low-cost service, the Paris prosecutor’s spokeswoman has said.The Uber managers, who have not been named, were detained on Monday. The US company has sparred with the government over its low-cost service. Despite a violence-marred taxi strike, Uber says it would keep operating the service until a ruling by the country’s top court. Continue reading...

China-based advanced persistent threat spotted using the Flash flaw, which has now entered malware kit MagnitudeUsers are being urged to update to the latest version of Flash after a security flaw fixed less than a week ago was discovered being exploited in the wild.The bug, which affects how Flash Player plays video files, lets an attacker use a carefully made video file to seize control of a user’s computer. It was made public last week by security research firm Fireeye, who discovered the flaw and reported it to Adobe. The publisher has now made a patch available, which can be downloaded using the auto-updater included with Flash. Continue reading...

Offering a vast collection of videos to play along to, Activision’s rhythm action reboot looks to be a worthy encore to a once-popular genreIf you’ve been a gamer for at least 10 years, the chances are, your under-stairs cupboard is a shantytown of plastic guitars, dusty half-size drum kits and unsolvable tangles of wire.Once upon a time, Guitar Hero and its many copycats ruled gaming, playing to arena-sized crowds of excited fans – but then they exited the business with unusual haste. The genre, in which players strap on plastic guitars and strum along in time with an eclectic soundtrack, was so dominant it even lured in The Beatles, that notoriously vigilant guarder of legacy. But it came at a cost. Viacom spent $20m (£12.7m) on advertising alone for The Beatles: Rock Band, a figure that illustrates both the belief in the genre at the time, and the depth of its subsequent fall. By 2010, wearied players had hung up their instruments en mass, and the flood of music games slowed to a drip. Continue reading...

Computer-generated copy is already used in sports and business reporting – will machines soon master great storytelling?Nobody wants to confront the idea of their own obsolescence. Still, sitting across a desk from Kris Hammond, in his office overlooking the lake shore in Chicago, it is hard not to at least have a sense of the inevitable. Hammond is the co-founder and chief scientist of a company called Narrative Science, which, among other things, has worked out a way of teaching machines how to write journalism. At the moment, the computers’ output is limited to basic sports reports and business news. But Hammond is convinced this is only the beginning. It probably won’t be that long, he half-suggests, before they can bash out 2,500 word stories on innovations in machine learning for the Observer New Review. Worse, he is irrepressibly cheerful about the prospect.“Look!” he says, “we are humanising the machine and giving it the ability not only to look at data but, based on general ideas of what is important and a close understanding of who the audience is, we are giving it the tools to know how to tell us stories.” Continue reading...

Attempts to donate to Council of Conservative Citizens, labeled hate group by activists, are rejected after organization allegedly gets nod from shooting suspectRelated: Leader of group cited in 'Dylann Roof manifesto' donated to top RepublicansThe online payment company PayPal appeared on Saturday to have disabled the account of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CofCC), a rightwing organization that was cited in a manifesto linked to the South Carolina shooting suspect Dylann Roof and has given to prominent Republican politicians. Continue reading...

It’s time for the company to stop telling people interested in games to ‘write a book’ if they want to make artFor the past five years, one company has dominated the handheld games market. Sure, its major competitor fights a good fight, but there’s no doubting who’s boss.I’m not talking about Sony and Nintendo, by the way. No: the real fight is between Apple and Google. Continue reading...

Nationwide initiative for a ‘technology Sabbath’ encourages families to reconnect with each other by disconnecting their computers, iPads and phones for 24 hoursWhen the Bird family give up technology on Sunday for the country’s first annual “National Unplugging Day”, 15-year-old James will be most worried about how his sister Charlotte, 13, will cope.“My sister will struggle more than anyone,” he said. “She relies on her phone so much. She’s always checking it – when we’re on the trampoline together, when we’re talking. She can’t go five minutes without it.” Continue reading...

The taxi-hire company faces resistance worldwide, signalling trouble for other ‘sharing economy’ companies, such as AirBnB

The Orlando and California locations are asking tourists to leave their selfie accessories at home due to ‘safety concerns’, a Disney World spokeswoman saidDisney officials have announced that are banning selfie sticks at some of its parks worldwide, beginning on Tuesday with US locations in Florida and California.The popular tool used by tourists will no longer be welcome at Disney’s four Orlando theme parks and the Disneyland resort in California on Tuesday. The ban begins on 1 July at Disney parks in Paris and Hong Kong. Continue reading...

Ubisoft boss Yves Guillemot refuses to rule out long-awaited sequel and suggests that game designer Michel Ancel is involvedA sequel to Beyond Good and Evil could be in development by Ubisoft, its chief executive has hinted.To many gamers, the 2003 action adventure is the great lost franchise – the series that Ubisoft should have spent the past decade creating new instalments for, but failed to do so. Continue reading...

The place to draw Blood Bowl and nothing else matters“Come ye human, dwarf and orc

How Blizzard’s world-conquering card game became a star of the eSports scene, and why maintaining its accessibility remains the key driving forceHearthstone: how a game developer turned 30m people into card geeks, part oneEvery Hearthstone match starts in the same way. Continue reading...

Radio 1 presenter rounds up the Minions, the history of hip-hop, Cristiano Ronaldo in a WWE clash with Draco Malfoy, and the cat in the flapPilot Romain Jantot thought he had carried out all the correct pre-flight checks before taking a passenger for a flying experience. But he hadn’t reckoned on a stowaway cat which suddenly appeared over the wing after he had taken off. After the flight, Jantot said: “I told my passenger not to reach for the cat. I told her not to move at all actually. I trusted the cat to not move if we didn’t try to reach for her.” You can catch another plucky pussy who scared off an Alaskan brown bear here.If you are missing the football season, you will love our clip of 15-year-old Lionel Messi when he played for Barcelona’s Under-16 squad in the 2002/03 season. The footage was released to mark the player’s 28th birthday. Continue reading...

Gamers are right to be excited about the return of these two legendary games, but we need to temper that with some realism and perspectiveThe nostalgics have won. That was the defining message of this year’s E3 expo in Los Angeles.Fans have been demanding Shenmue 3 for over a decade, while a Final Fantasy VII remake has been the stuff of spiky haired dreams since Square Enix started obsessively mining the series for spin-offs, reboots and sequels to sequels many years ago. Continue reading...

Court says social media company may have to open its servers for inspection after complaint from 21-year-old woman filmed in sex videoA Dutch court on Thursday ordered Facebook to hand over the identity of someone who posted a revenge porn video on the social network, or face having its servers opened up to an outside investigator.

Company plans to send 648 micro-satellites into space by 2019, racing Facebook, Google and Elon Musk’s SpaceX to be first to create global broadband networkThe broadband space race has received a $500m boost after Airbus, Coca-Cola and Virgin Group joined other funders in backing a venture to bring the internet to the most remote corners of the planet.OneWeb, based in the channel island of Jersey but with offices in California and Washington DC, plans to send 648 micro-satellites into space by 2019. These will do away with the expense of installing mobile phone masts or laying miles of cables, instead beaming a broadband signal direct to small, solar-powered user terminals on the ground. Continue reading...

Eavesdropping agency collected bulk personal data without authorisation ‘due to technical error’ finds intelligence services watchdogGCHQ, the government’s electronic eavesdropping agency, has been found to be spying too much on its own staff, an official watchdog has said.Sir Mark Waller, the intelligence services commissioner, reveals in his annual report that GCHQ reported one error to him last year when it was found that an internal monitoring system, which keeps an eye on staff communications, was capturing an unauthorised amount of information. Continue reading...

Intelligence and law enforcement data-sharing envoy in treaty talks with internet companies, the US and other governments over co-operation in terrorism casesExisting international laws will never be enough to persuade US internet companies to hand over their customers’ personal data to the British security services in urgent counter-terrorism or “threat-to-life cases”, according to a secret report by the prime minister’s special data envoy.

Technology company says it will open 14th data centre at Widows Creek site in Jackson County that will be powered with 100% renewable energyGoogle will convert an old coal-fired power plant in rural Alabama into a data centre powered by renewable power, expanding the company’s move into the energy world.

Critics say Icann’s proposal to make sites used for ‘commercial services’ ineligible for proxy registrations puts users at risk of harassment and ID theft

The novelist is contributing her own cartoons, detailing her experiences as a young woman, to Kickstarter-funded The Secret Loves of Geek GirlsMargaret Atwood is taking a short break from writing acclaimed and award-winning literary novels to contribute a series of cartoons to a crowd-funded, all-female anthology aimed at the “geek girl” looking for “stories on dating and love”.Racing towards its goal of C$37,000 (£19,000) on Kickstarter – launched earlier this week, it is already at over C$27,000 – The Secret Loves of Geek Girls is the brainchild of Hope Nicholson, a Canadian comic-book publisher and editor, who called it “a celebration of the stories we tell each other but never make public – until now”. Atwood is the most high-profile of a host of women, both creators and fans, contributing a mix of prose stories and comics to the anthology. Continue reading...

Will Lewis says sharing deals with companies such as Facebook, Apple and Google pose threat to newspapers over control of contentWill Lewis, the chief executive of Wall Street Journal owner Dow Jones, has warned rival newspapers not to “run like headless chickens” to strike content deals with tech firms such as Facebook and Google.Lewis, a former editor-in-chief of the Daily Telegraph, warned that deals such as Facebook’s Instant Articles partnerships pose a threat to loss of control of content. Continue reading...

El Capitan, the world’s most iconic cliff face, has been mapped by Google, giving anyone online the chance to join some of the world’s greatest climbers on the Yosemite rock faceEl Capitan, the iconic granite monolith in Yosemite national park, is used to having the world’s eyes on it: in January millions followed the progress of climbers Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson as they completed the first-ever free climb of its Dawn Wall, a gruelling 19-day marathon.But now anyone with access to the internet will be able to visit the cliff-face, thanks to the latest Google Street View project, which has mapped 3,000 vertical feet of the famous rock formation. Continue reading...

Will I lose Office 2010 if I upgrade? Does it come in a DVD format, as well? Will I have to use an Outlook account? Find out here

Inspired by Google’s dreamscape images, students have set up a neural network that takes users’ suggestions and feeds back on itself to create a kaleidoscopic stream• Yes, androids do dream of electric sheepRemember those amazing images from last week that looked like a computer having an acid trip? What if you could watch them live?A group of PhD students from Belgium have created a Twitch livestream which lets viewers look in to the mind of a neural network as it “dreams”. Continue reading...

The history of ‘forgetting’ is really about making things hard to find, and what the company’s new policy does is give people a limited right to obscurity

New Statesman columnist tweets displeasure after being kicked off social media site, saying she used alias to avoid being trolledFacebook has been accused of putting users at risk “of rape and death threats” by a journalist who was banned from the social networking site for using a pseudonym.Laurie Penny, a contributing editor at the weekly political magazine the New Statesman, who also writes for the Guardian, said she had been kicked off Facebook for using a fake name to avoid being trolled. Continue reading...

From the unintended reply all to the email bitching about your boss that you accidentally send to your boss, here’s how we can now be savedThe wheel, the telegram and now, Google’s “Undo Send” email feature. There’s nothing like an invention that truly changes the fabric of life. Even better are those that save us: hydraulic braking, say, or rehab.This is the news that the tech giant is rolling out a feature allowing users to pull back emails – up to 30 seconds after hitting send. The feature has been around for a while, but hidden in Google’s labs section. Continue reading...

Employee understood to be member of company’s UK team