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...

Microsoft’s biggest launch in the last few years must go right, or the company might end up with users stuck on Windows 7 foreverWindows 10 might be Microsoft’s final version of its 29-year-old operating system, but there are quite a few things it must get right for it to be the next XP – and not the next Vista.

Microsoft’s new and final version of Windows has been released. Have you upgraded yet? Tell us how you faredMicrosoft has released Windows 10, the latest, and final, version of its operating system. It’s available as a free upgrade for Windows 7 and 8 users (there was no Windows 9!) Have you upgraded yet? How long did it take? Did you have any problems? Do you like the new Windows? Or is it nothing compared with Windows 3.1? Let us know in the comments below.• Read our four-star review of Windows 10 Continue reading...

Australian actor posts thank you video praising ‘amazing response’ after his initial message is retweeted almost 10,000 times

Users of the social network can now nominate a ‘legacy contact’ to manage their digital presence after they die – but how on earth do you decide who to pick?As a man in my mid-30s in the year 2015, I spend the bulk of my life diligently and repeatedly carrying out one simple task – ignoring the prospect of my inevitable death. It’s quite easy, partly because I don’t appear to be imminently approaching my demise, but mainly because I’ve successfully barricaded myself inside an impenetrable fort of shiny distractions.If I notice a story about a freak accident that resulted in a tragic loss of life, I bury my head in Netflix for a bit. When I realise that I’m incrementally growing closer to the average age of people mentioned in obituaries, I stab a bunch of strangers on Assassin’s Creed until the tightness in my chest goes away. And if I’m struck by a sudden awareness that the human body is a fragile, error-strewn thing, and that I could easily be taken out by a plane or a car or a virus or an exploding oven or the accidental consumption of raw camel’s milk without so much as a second’s notice? Well, I hammer out a load of unfunny fart jokes on Twitter. There, there. Everything’s OK. Everything’s OK. Continue reading...

iRights campaign says young people should be able to easily edit or delete comments or pictures they have posted on sites such as Facebook and TwitterGovernment ministers have backed a campaign calling for under-18s to have the right to delete embarrassing and damaging material they have posted on social media that could later harm their job or education prospects.The iRights coalition has set out five rights that young people should expect online, including the ability to easily edit or delete comments or pictures they have posted on sites such as Facebook and Twitter, and to know who is holding or profiting from their information. Continue reading...

It’s free! It’s out tomorrow! It has Minecraft!… for a bit. For some people. Continue reading...

Surveillance laws being debated around the world should avoid the recent fate of the French – and the scorn of Franz KafkaThe problem of our laws, wrote Kafka, is that they can involve arbitrary, secretive acts on the part of elites. The law, on this view, has “brought only slight, more or less accidental benefits, and done a great deal of serious harm, since it has given the people a false sense of security towards coming events, and left them helplessly exposed”.“We live”, Kafka concluded, “on the razor’s edge”. Continue reading...

The organization notified the FBI and Department of Justice of a possible data breach that could threaten the ‘privacy and safety of our staff members’Planned Parenthood representatives say that hackers appear to be working to gain access to the abortion providers’ employee information systems.The organization notified the FBI and Department of Justice of a possible data breach, a spokesperson said on Monday, one that representatives from the organization said “if true” could threaten the “privacy and safety of our staff members”. Continue reading...

Far-right Gates of Vienna website is also promoting upcoming London exhibition of Muhammad cartoons which it is feared is intended to incite Islamist violenceA group of MPs have called for an investigation into a far-right website described as a training manual for anti-Muslim paramilitaries – amid fears that an upcoming exhibition of cartoons of the prophet Muhammad in London is designed to incite Islamist violence.The Gates of Vienna website has been heavily promoting the exhibition, which is understood to feature the same drawings shown in Texas in May when two gunmen attempted to storm the event and were killed by police. Continue reading...

Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act would give tech firms broad latitude to collect personal data – even as Congress uses old tech to avoid prying eyes

Argos has become the first major British retailer to offer an on-the-spot trade-in service for old devices – so how much could one writer get for the old phones and tablets knocking around her house?How many old mobile phones and tablets are languishing in your home? A quick inventory of my drawers, where gadgets go to die, reveals a stash bigger than Las Vegas’s neon boneyard.There are five phones, a couple of them smart and stored inexplicably in their original boxes (a state of affairs that makes me look like a serious collector, but is really an example of senseless hoarding). There’s also an Asus tablet that looks, under closer inspection, to be an extremely small Etch A Sketch. It’s a shameful walk down technology lane, although it’s surprising how nostalgic you can get when confronted by your partner’s old Sony Ericsson K850. It also prompts some existential questioning, namely: why the hell am I still using a cracked, two-year-old Samsung Galaxy S3 when I could be posturing ironically with a Nokia 2730? Continue reading...

Requesting password recovery email allowed attacker to gain access to gaming accounts without needing password or access to email accountPC gaming platform Steam has fixed a bug that allowed anyone to steal a user account by being armed with nothing more than the account’s username.The bug affected Steam’s password recovery process for four days, from 21–25 July, and was excruciatingly simple: an attacker could try to log-in to someone else’s Steam account, and ask for a password recovery email to be sent out. Continue reading...

Users left unamused as social media company replaces content subject to takedown notices with ‘tweet withheld’ messages, allowing 10 days to appealTwitter has begun to honour takedown requests from users complaining their jokes have been lifted wholesale and shared by others, passing them off as their own.Certain tweets have begun to be replaced with copyright notices and a message saying “tweet withheld”. The blocked tweets offer users the chance to “learn more” via a link to Twitter’s policy on DMCA takedown notices. Continue reading...

What is the ‘speak-no-evil-monkey’ really saying? Are those hands praying or high-fiving? Emoji ambiguities explainedSo there’s going to be a film based on emoji. Of course there is, there’s a film based on everything these days. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. But the emoji film is going to have a tricky time getting the meanings of emoji right. It’s often the case that the symbols’ official Unicode Consortium titles do not relate to how we use them every day.The truth is, emoji can mean a vast array of things. Here are some examples of the kinds of ways the following emoji could be used; not necessarily how their creators intended. We’ve mixed in emoji as they appear on both Apple and Android products. Continue reading...

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

Instead of mobilising a national defence against cyberattacks, we want a toaster that communicates with the washing machine over the internetComputer experts have long warned about a catastrophic cyber-attack in the US, a sort of Web 3.0 version of 9/11 that would wreak enormous damage throughout the country. Like most Americans, I shrugged. With all of the enormous resources the country enjoys, those warnings seemed like the rantings of a digital Chicken Little.Oddly enough, the revelations of the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden gave me some false comfort. If the powerful NSA was so good at hacking its own citizens, then surely the agency could prevent criminals, terrorists and foreign enemies from doing the same? Continue reading...

Experts say the US has hit a low point in its storied space history, but that hasn’t stopped thousands of children from spending their summers learning about the cosmos – and hoping, perhaps, to be among the first on the red planetRecent evidence, at least, would seem to suggest that space camp – that all-American rite of passage for generations of young math wizards, science geeks and wannabe astronauts – ought to have disappeared into a black hole by now.

Godzilla | Trials Fusion: Awesome Level Max | Door KickersThere are few things as satisfying as blowing stuff up in video games, which is why playing as Godzilla, Japan’s favourite city-razing monster, is instantly appealing. Lumbering about, laying waste to office blocks and swatting helicopters should be about as much fun as it’s possible to have. Unfortunately, Godzilla the game is a work of staggering incompetence that turns even the straightforward process of controlling your huge monster into a joy-sapping toil. Staggering at a glacial pace between stultifying encounters with large buildings and power plants, you’re constantly assailed by tanks, helicopters and bombers, none of which do enough damage to make them a real concern. More of a threat are fellow giant monsters, with fan favourites such as Mothra and Mechagodzilla putting in appearances. But these battles are also hampered by poor controls and texture-free graphics. Its poor translation, phoned-in voice acting and low-budget looks may be true to the franchise, but don’t make for an involving game. Releases this appalling were once commonplace, but these days it’s rare to find anything quite so brazen. Continue reading...

‘If you had a single mattress to take to the dump, you’d be made up’Nobody chooses to be a person who makes up slogans for cars: you have to try not to get too hung up on them. But Honda’s “the power of dreams” infuriated me as I drove the CR-V. It swam around my head. “Nobody would ever dream this!” I shouted as the stertorous automatic gear change dragged me clumsily along. “Not unless they’d eaten blue cheese and gone to sleep thinking about Talgarth Road.” The new nine-speed automatic transmission has made it smoother than the five-speed, but I still found it lurchy and lumbering.These cars are incredibly popular, dominating the compact SUV market, the bestselling in the world last year. Since the appeal of the SUV is largely to show off how much space you can take up using only your wallet and your bullheadedness, I don’t really understand the market for the compact version: people are weird, was my take-home. The City-Brake Active System is the big safety feature: a windscreen-mounted laser radar that detects a likely collision at speeds of less than 18mph and brakes if you don’t. So, if you’re in traffic of more than one lane, which you often are in town, it emits a constant high-pitched noise. It’s needlessly stressful. From what I know of driving, you always would brake, unless you were asleep: they might as well have designed a seat-mounted sleeping-driver detector with a sprinkler system. Continue reading...

Ed Sheeran, Mark Ronson and Rihanna helping to drive the boom in audio streams on services such as Spotify, Deezer and Google PlayThe revolution in the way we listen to music has passed another landmark, as more than 500m songs were streamed online in the UK in a single week, with Mark Ronson, Ed Sheeran and Rihanna among the most popular artists.The 505m audio streams in the chart week ending 16 July is the first time the number of weekly streams on services such as Spotify, Deezer and Google Play has topped the half a billion mark – which is nearly double the number of songs streamed a year ago. Continue reading...

Company joins calls for BT and Openreach to be split to share fibre-optic cables between providers as Ofcom reviews broadband market

Tech developers face huge complexity building applications for connected environments – leading to the reinforcement of power hierarchiesThe grand vision of the internet of things is currently an exercise in imagination. It is about what happens when more and more of the real, physical world comes online, as devices and sensors proliferate, connecting everything.The promise is that the internet of things won’t just connect our homes, hospitals, schools and streets – it will enable whole new ranges of interactions, services and efficiencies. It’s not just about the things, in other words – it’s about the people and environments that animate them. Continue reading...

UN says powers given to intelligence agencies, which include phone-tapping and computer-hacking, are ‘excessively broad’ and intrusiveFrance’s highest authority on constitutional matters has approved a controversial bill that gives the state sweeping new powers to spy on citizens.The constitutional council made only minor tweaks to the legislation, which human rights and privacy campaigners, as well as the United Nations, have described as paving the way for “very intrusive” surveillance and state-approved eavesdropping and computer-hacking. Continue reading...

As classic Star Wars game Knights of the Old Republic II is patched for the first time a decade, what other games should be fixed for the modern era?Released in 2005, Obsidian’s Knights of the Old Republic II is still hailed by many fans as one of the greatest Star Wars games ever made – so perhaps it’s appropriate that, like the greatest Jedi Masters, it has been given life after death.The PC version of the game, originally released in a notoriously buggy, unfinished state, has just received its first official update in over 10 years. And it’s huge. Continue reading...