Technology | The Guardian

Social network is reportedly investing in video streaming with an eye to launching a music service to take on Spotify, Apple, Google and TidalRewind just a few short years. The music industry was sick, if not dying. Napster had started the decline, free music for all, albeit illegally. With shrinking revenues and costly licensing deals only Apple was really making any money by selling its breakthrough iPod music player.

Just as new formats and technologies have driven new types of pornography in the past, virtual reality is starting to offer powerful, immersive new formats for adult entertainment. Stuart Heritage braves an onslaught of stimulating demos to find out if VR is as good as the real thing

Do more with your digital fitness coaches — find out how to move your data between apps, sync music to your exercise, set up smarter alerts and more. Continue reading...

Twitter has helped make the world a better place – but it has the potential to do so much moreIt is often said that technologists are the new rock stars, though what they lack in glamour they make up for in a profound influence on how we live and interact with the world.Two weeks ago I was in the Spanish city of Granada at what claims to be the world’s first conference dedicated to Twitter, where the now departed CEO Dick Costolo appeared on stage to a standing ovation before he had even started speaking. Costolo later said the reception is always the same, even when he visited journalism students in China – a country that blocks Twitter. It is a shame tech firms don’t look outwards more often; it is a mark of the tunnel vision of American tech companies that they still call staff “international” if they deal with any countries other than the US. Continue reading...

The viral content site announces a major editorial overhaul that has been inspired by Netflix, according to co-founder Peter KoechleyUpworthy is rolling back its clickbait headlines and ramping up its story creation in a shakeup that will pit it against viral media storytellers, such as BuzzFeed and Vice.

Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella is writing off the company’s Nokia devices purchase and pulling back from being a smartphone manufacturerMicrosoft’s mobile business just keeps calling wrong numbers. On Wednesday chief executive Satya Nadella announced he had “restructured” the company’s smartphone business laying off 7,800 staff and writing off $7.6bn.Ex-Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer’s dreams of making it big in mobile with his 2014 purchase of Nokia Devices have essentially gone up in smoke. Continue reading...

Cuts will add to more than 12,000 jobs eliminated in past year as CEO Satya Nadella says the company is reassessing its money-losing smartphone businessMicrosoft announced on Wednesday that it is cutting 7,800 jobs and taking a loss of $7.6bn on its money-losing mobile phone business.The cuts add to the roughly 12,500 jobs eliminated in the past year from the Nokia phone business that Microsoft bought for $7.3bn in 2012. Some 2,300 of the jobs will be made in Finland, where Nokia is headquartered.

What is really going on in the much-hyped preview shown during this year’s expo? We carry out a forensic analysisThe Sony press conference at this year’s E3 expo in Los Angeles was one huge gift to veteran gamers. There was the long-awaited confirmation that The Last Guardian is still in development; there was news of the Shenmue 3 kickstarter; and, to the raucous delight of the audience, there was the announcement of Final Fantasy VII Remake, a modernised version of the classic PlayStation role-playing game. The internet blew up.Many writers have attempted to explain the lasting appeal of this hugely successful 1997 release, but few have managed it conclusively. Set in a dark industrialised world, where eco warriors face a mega-corp looking to suck all the resources from the planet, the game is crammed with flawed, interesting characters, quirky charm (including cross-dressing in order to sneak into a pimp’s mansion) and truly epic narrative scale. 18 years, three spin-off games, a handful of novella’s and an animated sequel later, and the adventure is still considered a masterpiece of its genre. Continue reading...

Company designer Caitlin Winner puts women front and centre in new icons for friends and groupsAs software updates go, the one coming soon to Facebook appears relatively minor. It’s a slight visual update to the icons used to represent friends and groups on the platform, and probably won’t even be noticed by the vast majority of users. But symbolically, the change says a lot.Why? Because it puts women first – literally. Continue reading...

Tech company promises patch within a day for major new flaw uncovered by leak of 400GB of documents from hacking firm

While more than 200,000 Redditors want Ellen Pao to resign, readers are jumping ship to budding competitor sites as top brass pushes to go mainstreamReddit, the giant online discussion forum for everyone from political junkies to billiards enthusiasts, is in revolt. Continue reading...

RideWith uses technology developed by the Israeli start-up bought by Google to connect drivers with people travelling in same directionCarpooling could be set for a new trip around the block following a decision by Google to test a new app in Israel.RideWith uses technology developed by Waze, an Israeli start-up bought by Google in 2013 for about $1bn. Continue reading...

Corporation to set up not-for-profit venture to sell starter device, a modern-day successor to the BBC Micro, after its rollout to pupils in October.The BBC is to give away up to one million of its new Micro:bit computers to 11- and 12-year-old children across the UK.The computer was unveiled at an event in London on Tuesday, along with plans for its rollout this October, after the Micro:bit project was launched earlier this year as part of the corporation’s Make It Digital initiative. Continue reading...

Offensive cybersecurity firm warns clients to lie low while it assesses damageHacking Team, the cybersecurity firm which saw 400GB of private data published on Sunday night in a humiliating hack, has been forced to advise customers to stop using its software while it assesses the damage caused by the leak.A spokesman for the company recommended that clients, who are largely law enforcement and national security agencies who use Hacking Team to provide surveillance capabilities, suspend their operations while the company determines what has been exposed. Continue reading...

A late-1980s SNES-CD console ditched by Sony and Nintendo was discovered last month. Here are six other elusive games machines for look out for …For gamers, it was like discovering the Ark of the Covenant – but made of plastic and less likely to contain the power of God. In early July, one Dan Diebold posted a YouTube video showing an apparently functional prototype of the SNES CD, an aborted update of the famed Super Nintendo Entertainment System built in partnership between Nintendo and Sony.Developed in the late 1980s, the machine was intended to run games on both cartridges and CD-rom discs, but then Nintendo and Sony fell out and things went wrong. Sony proudly showed off its console – now called the Play Station – at the 1991 Consumer Electronics Show, but Nintendo switched its allegiance to Philips a day later. Enraged, Sony decided to release a new PlayStation console on its own, and many of the SNES-CD prototype units were destroyed. Which is why this new footage has caused much excitement in the gaming community. Continue reading...

Report claims that more than 22 multi-channel networks reaching 1bn monthly views, as top star PewDiePie’s earnings are revealedThe 100 largest multi-channel networks (MCNs) on YouTube may have a collective valuation of nearly $10bn, and account for 42% of the online video service’s monthly views.That’s according to a report from research firm Ampere Analysis, which has been crunching data on the last three years’ worth of acquisitions of MCNs to figure out the value of the rapidly-growing market. Continue reading...

Vessel, Medium, CloudPlayer by DoubleTwist, BitTorrent Shoot, Geometry Wars 3, Vainglory, Lego Minifigures Online 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...

Yves Guillemot admits company raised expectations too high with its 2012 ambitious graphical demo of cyberpunk thriller

(PS4, Xbox One, Warner Bros, cert: 18)Rocksteady’s masterful Arkham trilogy comes to a close with a game so far from the cramped, knotty, Bafta-winning original Asylum as to be nigh on unrecognisable. Where Asylum took place entirely in the titular madhouse, in City, the Caped Crusader took to the skies and streets of Gotham to deal justice to his collection of nemeses. Now, in Knight, the basic idea is the same – the open-world setting has grown, the already impressive visuals have been polished further – as the Dark Knight takes on the Scarecrow and the mysterious Arkham Knight, a malevolent doppelgänger.The addition of the Batmobile is the biggest change in gameplay – with the ability to speed through the streets of the city a welcome departure – although some of the tank-style combat has strayed too far from the claustrophobic, stealth challenges that really made the series great. However, the twisty plot is a comic-book delight – a fitting end to a triumvirate of games that have always valued storytelling and voice-acting – and it propels players through to a fine conclusion to this version of DC’s most popular superhero. Continue reading...

Minecon 2015 panel sees game’s creator talking about the next steps for its computer, console and mobile editionsWe know all about Minecraft’s past and present: 70m sales across computers, consoles and mobile devices, and a burgeoning community of players, YouTubers, educators and independent developers doing interesting things with developer Mojang’s game.We know a little about its future too: a narrative-driven adventure spin-off called Minecraft: Story Mode - a separate game, not a new mode within the main game - and a Minecraft movie sometime in 2016 or 2017. But what’s next for the main game itself? Continue reading...

London startup tailors smaller, cheaper battery for UK households to use more of their own generated solar energyWhen Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, took to the stage in California in April to launch a solar battery for the home, the audience hollered and whooped at every detail. On the other side of the Atlantic, a more modest, quieter challenger plans to take on the US electric car giant.Based within a railway arch, with the sound of trains running overhead from nearby London Bridge station and surrounded by other ecologically minded startups, the offices of Powervault are a far cry from Tesla’s showpiece Californian stage. The similarity lies in the product – the Powervault battery, which stores energy from domestic solar panels. Continue reading...

The electric Tesla S is a pure spark of inspiration. But how did it get so far ahead of the competition?Price £50,000

The multi-platform construction and battles game has become a worldwide phenomenon – so much so that it can draw thousands to live eventsAs a corporate conference venue, London’s ExCeL Centre is regularly overwhelmed by besuited executives dealing in arcane business jargon. This weekend, however, an altogether different sub-culture was in charge, as Creepers, Zombies, Skeletons and thousands of children congregated to celebrate a common digital passion: Minecraft.Minecraft involves exploring a world made out of digital blocks, which can be broken up and made into new materials and structures, from pickaxes and swords to buildings and carts. Its “creative mode” puts the emphasis on building, while its “survival mode” sees players having to battle monsters which come out at night. Continue reading...

The annual Minecraft conference comes to London’s Excel centre for Saturday and Sunday. Photographer Katherine Anne Rose met some of the players Continue reading...

Ellen Pao would not comment on firing of director of talent but said company was working on providing moderators with a better infrastructure and networkRelated: Reddit revolts: subforums shut down in protest over AMA co-ordinator sackingThe chief executive of the social media site Reddit, Ellen Pao, has apologized for “letting down” users after the company fired a well-liked employee. Continue reading...

‘It’s insufferable. It beeps with no obvious explanation and the manual is impenetrable’The new Subaru Outback is unaccountably large – 4.8 metres long, 1.8 metres wide, 1.6 metres high – but low-slung; it looks much more estate than SUV. This, paradoxically, makes it seem even larger. One makes allowances in an SUV and expects to feel ridiculous. In a supersized estate, I was never prepared for how much I would always be sticking out, everywhere.Given its outlandish size, the Outback was strangely characterless. I drove to Bristol and parked in a hurry on some floor or other of a multistorey. When I returned, I couldn’t remember anything about it, not even its colour, which occupied some indeterminate, Welsh-weather-ish space between brown and grey. Luckily, I had parked in a way that nobody else would, which is how I was able to find it without having to wait until all the other cars had gone home. Continue reading...

Minecon aims to create a world where reality and Minecraft co-exist, says game’s developer MojangWith more than 70m copies sold since its launch in 2009, Minecraft is one of the biggest success stories of the modern games industry. It is remarkable for the community it has spawned – from developers who modify the game for fun, to the players who have become stars on YouTube with videos of their exploits.Related: Minecraft: a crash guide to Mojang's world-beating game Continue reading...

Home Secretary receives gong for going ahead with ‘snooper’s charter’, while MPs Tom Watson and David Davis are ‘heroes’ for challenging surveillanceThe Home Secretary, Theresa May, has been named the UK internet industry’s villain of the year for pursuing “snooper’s charter” legislation without fully consulting the sector.The gong, part of the annual ISPA awards, was given for “forging ahead with communications data legislation that would significantly increase capabilities without adequate consultation with industry and civil society”. Continue reading...

PS4, Xbox One, PC; Warner; £39-£45Arkham Knight describes itself as the “conclusion to the Arkham trilogy”, conveniently ignoring the less well received Arkham Origins, which was admittedly by another developer. In this outing, Batman gets new body armour and a redesigned Batmobile, which is a Swiss Army knife-style problem-solver that pulls down walls and doors and even chips in with rubber bullets during fights. It’s also got a mini-gun and cannon for dispatching the legions of unmanned drone tanks that infest Gotham City, letting you blow stuff up without breaking Batman’s no-killing rule.It looks gorgeous, the perpetual night complemented by beautifully realised gothic architecture, but the 1980s Chuck Norris movie-grade script and mostly cheesy voice acting do little to bring the atmosphere to life. Still, pretending to be Batman has never been so exciting, and this is a well-constructed finisher for what remains the best superhero franchise ever. Continue reading...

UberPop is suspended for the next three months after violent protests and arrests in FranceUber has closed its ride-sharing service, UberPop, in Paris, after the arrest of two executives on Monday, and a series of increasingly disruptive protests against the company in France.The company said it had made the decision as a result of “intimidation, violent protests and organised aggression against UberPop drivers and users … due to a minority of out-of-control individuals”. Continue reading...

Association of Online Publishers Digital Publishing Awards give consumer publisher of the year award to newspaperThe Guardian picked up three prizes at this year’s Association of Online Publishers (AOP) Digital Publishing Awards, including consumer digital publisher of the year and best mobile app.At a ceremony hosted by actor Rufus Hound in London’s Roundhouse, the judges said the Guardian app was a “clear winner” as they gave it the award for best use of mobile. Continue reading...

The place to dance about singing about games and other things that matterIt’s Friday, everyone. Everything is going to be OKAY. Continue reading...

Watchdog says most nuisance communications related to accident claims, green energy, payday loans and lifestyle surveysMore than 180,000 complaints were made about commercial nuisance calls and texts last year, according to new figures.The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) noted a 12% rise in complaints about spam communications in 2014/15, compared with the previous year. The watchdog’s annual report said it had issued five fines relating to marketing calls and texts totalling £386,000, along with eight enforcement notices. Another 31 firms were “monitored”. Continue reading...

The Lego gaming series continues with another blockbuster licence and another child-friendly puzzle adventureEvery year the global strategy consultancy Brand Finance releases a list of the world’s most powerful brands. In 2014, Ferrari topped the chart, but this February, the Italian super car manufacturer was usurped by a toy. It was, of course, Lego.This classic product, conceived over 60 years ago, has proved infinitely extendible in the modern era. The Lego Movie, a film based on the toy, was itself turned into a series of Lego playsets, while Minecraft, a game often referred to as digital Lego, is now available in plastic form. It’s a perfectly circular business. Continue reading...

Tech companies are looking to provide your healthcare, from an app to help with insomnia to a taxi service for kidney patients

Ofcom finds younger people are turning to BBC iPlayer, YouTube and Netflix, and using Facebook, Google and Twitter for news

Social network already has 4bn views a day of its native clips, but helping their creators to make money is its next ambitionVideos uploaded directly to Facebook are watched more than 4bn times a day according to the social network. Now it wants their uploaders to be able to make money from those videos.The social network is testing a new “suggested videos” feature in its news feed, which will see videos from partner publishers and creators recommended to Facebook users, with advertisements running in between them. Continue reading...

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

George struggles with fonts on small laptops and so wants a portable with a big screen. But he can make Windows texts easier to read on a machine of any size …I work for a university and do quite a lot of travelling. I need reading glasses for small fonts, and consequently struggle with small laptop screens. I would like a large-screen laptop and wonder if you could recommend one. My priorities are a large good-quality screen and portability. GeorgeYou are correct in thinking that if you display the same image on a bigger screen, everything will look bigger, though it won’t be quite as sharp. (There will be fewer pixels per inch.) Unfortunately, the bigger the screen, the less portable the laptop. Continue reading...

Carl M Force, part of federal taskforce that penetrated illicit online marketplace, ended up siphoning off more than $700,000 in digital currency for himselfA former undercover agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration has pleaded guilty on charges of stealing more than $700,000 in digital currency – most of it from an online drug bazaar known as Silk Road that he infiltrated as part of a federal investigation.Carl M Force, dressed in the orange garb of the San Francisco jail and shackled at the ankles, pleaded guilty to extortion, money laundering and obstruction of justice in federal court. Continue reading...

The first full-length trailer for the biopic of the Apple co-founder written by Aaron Sorkin has been released, with Fassbender, Kate Winslet and Seth Rogen all popping up in the Danny Boyle-directed movie“Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome...” booms the announcer at the end of the trailer: then up pops the words, as if typed into a computer, “steve jobs”.It’s a suitable sign-off line for a film that looks to be about performance as much as anything else: scriptwriter Aaron Sorkin has said it will revolve around three separate product launches at different points in Jobs’ career. Continue reading...

Online subscription service says the numbers of ebooks read by fans of these genres make costs unsustainableLove conquers all … and it’s certainly causing problems for the online book subscription service Scribd, which has announced it is slashing its romance and erotica offer because readers are gorging themselves.

Hurray, there’s still time to talk about games and other things that matterI’m having one of those days... Continue reading...

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.