Technology | The Guardian

In what FCC chairman Tom Wheeler calls ‘a huge victory,’ the rules will go into effect Friday despite a handful of lawsuits challenging themNet neutrality rules will go into effect on Friday, after a federal court rejected a bid by cable and telecommunication companies to stay the rules while a lawsuit challenging them is pending.“This is a huge victory for internet consumers and innovators!” Tom Wheeler, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said in a statement. “Starting Friday, there will be a referee on the field to keep the internet fast, fair and open.” Continue reading...

With 37m YouTube subscribers, Swedish gamer teams up with Penguin Random House for 250-page collection of ‘advice and inspirational quotes’With more than 37m subscribers, Felix ‘PewDiePie’ Kjellberg is one of the biggest stars on YouTube. Now he’s hoping to take bookshelves by storm too.The Swedish gamer has signed a publishing deal with Penguin Random House to release This Book Loves You in October. The 250-page book promises “indispensable advice and inspirational quotes”. Continue reading...

Facebook subsidiary reveals Microsoft partnership and new hand-tracking controllers for its Oculus Rift headset’s 2016 debut• As it happened: Oculus’ Step into the Rift event

Facebook’s VR subsidiary reveals new games and hand-tracking Oculus Touch controllers ahead of E3 games show, as well as EVE Valkyrie demo• News story: Oculus virtual reality controller plans include Xbox One gamepad

Ofcom toughens up industry code of practice, which will benefit subscribers who are not getting the minimum speed promised when they signed upConsumers whose broadband speed doesn’t match what they signed up to will soon be able to ditch their provider at any point during a contract, under rules announced by the communications watchdog.Sharon White, the new chief executive of Ofcom, said she wanted to toughen the industry code of practice to allow subscribers to switch provider if they were not getting the minimum speed they were promised when they signed up. Continue reading...

Magazine aims to ‘demystify’ software by explaining languages such as Java, C++ and Python in an accessible way

Popular extension maker says Apple’s built-in system for iOS 9 and its web browser could spell ‘end of Adblocking on Safari’The developer of Adblock Plus has cried foul over new features in Apple’s next update for its mobile operating system that could come equipped with ad-blocking built-in.

Judith’s desktop computer runs slowly, and almost all its memory is being used even when she is not running any applications. What might be going wrong?

Smartphones were once the major disruptive force in the games industry, but now Steam Machines and immersive entertainment technologies are set to stir things up againFor the past 30 years, the console wars have always played out in pretty much the same way. A new set of machines arrives with more powerful processors and graphics hardware than their predecessors. The console manufacturers compete directly against each other to get the best exclusive games and the best versions of multi-platform releases. The platforms mature, and rumours begin about more powerful hardware on the horizon. The cycle begins again.But this year’s E3 exhibition in Los Angeles sits slap bang in the middle of interesting intersection the dedicated games console business. From one direction comes a host of new rivals, from another, the dawn of an entirely new interactive entertainment technology. Of course, the traditional console business has been threatened before. Some analysts once thought that smartphones and tablets would strangle the market for dedicated games machines, others speculated that the resurgent PC, augmented by the digital games distribution platform Steam, would render them obsolete. Continue reading...

Users can share extensive lists of trolls for one-click blocking to help stop organised harassment on social media platform

The place to talk about games and other things that matterHi everyone! Today’s Chatterbox game of the day is Spectra, a twitchcore racer developed by indie start-up Gateway Interactive and published on PC and Xbox One by Mastertronic. There’s a cool trailer, which you have to watch as the chiptune soundtrack is amaze. Continue reading...

Internet security company Kaspersky says software was used to infiltrate venues for international negotiations on Tehran’s nuclear programmeA powerful computer virus linked to Israel is thought to have been used to spy on the recent Iran nuclear talks after being found in the networks of three hotels that hosted the negotiations.

Workers emailed Tim Cook, the company’s chief executive, to complain of embarrassing treatment under anti-theft proceduresAt least two Apple Inc retail store workers complained directly to the chief executive, Tim Cook, that its policy of checking retail employees’ bags as a security precaution was embarrassing and demeaning, a court filing made public on Wednesday has revealed.

Oculus CEO dismisses leaked images as “old placeholders”, but do they hint at the first consumer release of the Rift headset?Virtual reality headset company Oculus has responded to the accidental leaking of what looked like images of the final version of its Rift headset on its website on Tuesday, with Palmer Luckey, chief executive of the Facebook-owned firm, explaining the images were actually “placeholder concepts”.Luckey spoke out to the Reddit community on the same day as the images were leaked, confirming that they were official Oculus images but adding that some design details wouldn’t “carry through”. Continue reading...

The world's biggest gaming expo takes place next week in Los Angeles – what can we expect to see?Every year, over 40,000 developers, publishers, distributors and journalists descend on the vast LA Convention Centre to check out the latest releases from the world's biggest gaming companies.Ahead of next week's gaming headlines, Guardian games editor Keith Stuart talks to industry experts about what to expect: superstar indie game developer Mike Bithell; game writer Will Porter, co-creator of Project Zomboid and co-writer of Alien Isolation; Philippa Warr from PC gaming site Rock Paper Shotgun and Debbie Timmins, editor-in-chief of gaming site Average Gamer. Continue reading...

Microsoft and Sony both set to tweak their consoles as gamers tire of running out of storage spaceBarring big announcements about virtual or augmented reality headsets at this year’s vast E3 games conference in Los Angeles, hardware is unlikely to be the big story.The Xbox One and PlayStation 4 are now more than a year old and the focus has shifted to games. Meanwhile, Nintendo says it is far too early to talk about its NX console, revealed in March and rumoured to be based on Google’s Android technology. Continue reading...

A photograph of the director with an animatronic dinosaur, posted online as a joke, prompted choice comments from Oates. The internet is bamboozledJoyce Carol Oates: prolific author, National Book award winner, Pulitzer nominee. And … dinosaur conservationist?Oates has a Twitter feed which has come in for a fair amount of criticism in the past. “Here is the problem with your Twitter feed, Joyce Carol Oates: It is, as we like to say on the internet, the worst,” wrote our own Michelle Dean for Gawker last year, citing her “‘Cat food’ in China actually is” comment. The novelist had previously been criticised for linking rape culture to Islam on her Twitter feed, and for saying she’d be “very surprised” if women were harassed in affluent areas. Continue reading...

Encryption everywhere takes a step forward after twin support from US president and world’s biggest tech companyBoth Apple and the White House have announced new policies aimed at boosting the use of encrypted connections on the internet, suggesting that the days of insecure internet connections could be numbered.On Monday, Apple revealed the latest version of its mobile operating system, iOS 9, at the company’s Worldwide Developer Conference. Continue reading...

Mobile company to enter crowded marketplace with an offering that includes parental controls and a feature to prioritise certain devices on the networkVodafone has entered the UK’s fiercely competitive home broadband market, with a service that lets parents turn off Wi-Fi for enforced screen breaks and which supercharges the signal to certain household devices.The mobile operator already has broadband and pay-TV customers in continental Europe, and has been building its own British broadband network, which will reach telephone exchanges that pass 22m homes later this summer. Continue reading...

And 20m of them are paying for the streaming service as its conversion rate creeps upwards at a time of intense debate about ‘freemium’ musicMusic streaming service Spotify has upped its public numbers, announcing that it now has 75 million active users, with 20 million of them paying for its premium subscription tier.That’s a rise from the previous figures – 60 million active users and 15 million subscribers – announced by the company in January. The announcement’s timing is no coincidence, coming days after Apple unveiled its rival Apple Music service. Continue reading...

Open letter to US President lobbies against policy that could see US government given access to user data through softening encryptionThe technology industry has sent President Obama a new open letter urging him to stop attempting to weaken encryption, compromise security and destroy consumer trust.

From skyscrapers to houses and furniture, plywood is ideal for all kinds of designIn March, when Austrian architects announced they were going to build an 84-metre skyscraper out of wood, there were mutterings about whether this was the right material for the job. The reservations were not about its strength, but that the material doesn’t embody modernity, and so these wooden skyscrapers might seem anachronistic. Wood suffered this bias throughout the 20th century as new materials such as metal alloys and carbon fibre composites offered not just better properties but something even more alluring: newness itself. The story of how wood regained its edge encompasses the development of aircraft, modernist furniture and digital fabrication.Wood is a porous material comprised of cellulose fibres that give it strength and stiffness, and lignin polymer that effectively glues these fibres together. The density and arrangement of the fibres gives wood its grain, which is determined not just by the biology of trees but also by their growth environment. Thus the grain varies from species to species and from tree to tree. The upshot is that, like us, each piece of wood has an individual character, which is one of the reasons we love it so much. Wood is strong across the grain but has a tendency to crack along it. This is useful if you are splitting logs for a fire, but if you are building a house, a chair, a violin or pretty much anything out of wood it presents a design problem. The thinner the piece, the more cracking is an issue, which is why solid wooden furniture can be quite bulky and heavy. Counter-intuitively, the answer to this problem is to make very thin wafers of wood called veneer. Continue reading...

The ongoing investigation to find out who was behind the leaked nude photos of stars including Jennifer Lawrence has focused in on two houses in ChicagoThe search for the hackers behind last year’s leaked celebrity photos has led the FBI to Chicago, where a raid saw two residences searched, according to The Hollywood Reporter.Related: Jennifer Lawrence denounces nude photos hack as 'sex crime' Continue reading...

PR staffer’s request for journalists to censor reporting do not reflect position of Huawei, the Chinese electronics company saysHuawei has rejected accusations of “paranoia and secrecy” after a PR staffer told a group of journalists on a government-organised tour in Shanghai that they could not mention the Chinese electronics company in their reporting from the day.The group, which included the Australian Financial Review’s Angus Grigg, had been invited to Huawei’s Shanghai development campus as part of a tour of Chinese science and technology firms arranged by the government for foreign and local journalists. Continue reading...

Technology giant promises to blur faces and car licence plates if they are captured, as it continues work on Street View-style serviceApple is taking a leaf out of Google’s book by putting a fleet of vehicles on the streets of the UK and Ireland to photograph streets for its Maps application.The news follows speculation in February that Apple was working on a rival to Google’s Street View service, after a car leased to Apple and covered in cameras and scanning equipment was spotted on the streets of San Francisco. Continue reading...

Free services usually mean we pay in data and privacy. Is there a better business model for connected homes?As more connected products come to market, from smart thermostats on our walls to connected wearables on our wrists, how will we pay for it?Will we sign contracts as we do with mobile phones, getting hardware for “free” and paying for services? Or will we get discounts or free devices by handing over our personal data, as we do with Google and Facebook? Continue reading...

The place to talk about games and other things that matterIt’s Wednesday everybody. Today’s screenshot comes from adventure game Broken Sword 5, which was successfully Kickstarted in 2012 for smartphone release and is coming to Xbox One and PlayStation 4 this summer. Continue reading...

Our father, John Horlock, who has died aged 87, was a highly respected man of great intellect, whose main academic interests were in aerodynamics, fluid dynamics and energy. He loved all kinds of music, cricket, football (Spurs) and the radio. He was a kind and generous man who, along with our mother, Sheila, was always there to discreetly support us (and indeed many other people along the way).Born in Edmonton, north London, John grew up in Winchmore Hill with his much-loved parents, Harold and Olive, and older sister, Beryl. He attended Latymer school, where he first met Sheila Stutely, a talented singer who later became a music teacher and a JP. They married in 1953. Continue reading...

Michael Haneke’s next film will no longer be his previously announced project about disparate online characters brought togetherWhen Flashmob was announced, it seemed like an eccentric idea for Michael Haneke to take on. A drama about a group of online characters brought together by a flashmob wasn’t what you’d expect from the director of The White Ribbon and Amour.Related: Not coming soon: the films still stuck in purgatory Continue reading...

Open letter sent to Obama from groups representing Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft as report suggests fear of surveillance costs economy $35bn a yearUS tech industry groups have urged Barack Obama not to pursue policies which might weaken encryption as a new report suggests that fear of government surveillance costs the economy by more than $35bn in revenue each year.Related: If the FBI has a 'backdoor' to Facebook or Apple encryption we are less safe | Trevor Timm Continue reading...

Does your bank support Apple Pay? Where can you use it? Your questions, answeredApple Pay is coming to Britain in July in its first expansion outside of North America, Apple confirmed at its annual worldwide developer conference.Sometime in July, users of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, as well as Apple Watch owners, will be able to start making payments in shops around the country using their mobile phones. Continue reading...

It took three years for Google to match Apple’s security permissions for personal data within apps, Hiroshi Lockheimer tells the GuardianNew privacy features available in Google’s forthcoming Android M software update will give users of Android mobile phones and tablets more control over how their personal data is used.

Our expert offers shortcuts and tips to getting the most out of Spotify, Tidal, Deezer and the rest – and saving you money at the same timeRun to the beat Continue reading...

The Syrian Electronic Army claimed responsibility, posting: ‘Your commanders admit they are training the people they have sent you to die fighting’The US Army said on Monday it temporarily took down its website after a group calling itself the Syrian Electronic Army hacked into the site and posted messages.

‘World’s first’ 4G action cam is like a GoPro that can live stream to the internet without needing a smartphone or computerMobile network EE is taking on GoPro and Periscope with a new action camera capable of streaming up to 10 minutes of live video over 4G without a smartphone or computer.

Twitter exchange suggests Harry Potter author will also draw on Native American traditions for the ‘magizoology’ script she is working onJK Rowling has confirmed on Twitter that the existence of a long-mooted American school of witchcraft and wizardry could be revealed in new Harry Potter spin-off movie Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.During an ad-hoc question and answer session with fans on the social network, the British author was asked to name the institution which US students of magic might attend in the Potter universe. While she refused to do so, Rowling did reveal a series of titbits regarding the hitherto-unidentified school. Continue reading...

The biggest show in video games is back next week, promising a packed schedule of revelations Continue reading...

Down from 33% in 2002, the number of women in the digital sector is expected to rise back to 30% by 2022Just 27% of those employed in Britain’s digital industries are women, according to a new report from the UK Commission for Employment and Skills (UKCES), a public body which aims to advise the government and others on those issues. The proportion is down from an already low figure of 33% in 2002, and well below the UK average of 47% for female employees.The research highlights the continuing failure of the sector to train and retain female employees, particularly given the fact that Britain is expected to need 1.2 million new digital workers by 2022. More than 800,000 of those new workers will be needed to replace workers leaving the sector, while the rest will be needed to support expected growth. Continue reading...

Jimmy Iovine and Eddy Cue train their sights on Spotify, YouTube and other rivals: ‘Most of these other companies see themselves as utilities’Apple isn’t just gunning for Spotify with its new Apple Music streaming service. It’s gunning for radio broadcasters.Its combination of live radio station Beats 1 and a range of non-live stations programmed by DJs aims to seduce listeners away from traditional radio, and then sell some of them a $9.99-a-month streaming subscription. Continue reading...

Billed as the first Australian event of its kind, it’s a shame the games didn’t reflect the energetic culture showcased by Game On’s speakers and sessionsThe games I enjoy most are the ones that allow you to make of them what you will, rather than be dictated to by a linear progression. The Witcher 3 has just come out and I already know I’ll be shunning the main story and bountiful shagging in favour of days spent in the wilderness picking flowers and bathing under waterfalls. Once hooked, I won’t be getting any work done in the real world, nor in the Witcher’s virtual Northern Kingdoms, effectively creating Inception for sloths by procrastinating twice.For the same reason, Vivid Sydney’s Game On interactive event was an engrossing experience with a similar “sandbox” appeal: there was just enough variety and freedom in the expansive Australian Technology Park to allow most people to go along and carve out their own experience among all the consoles, pinball machines and people pottering around in an Iron Man costume. Continue reading...

Connected appliances, heating and more are making homes smarter. But what can you do if you live in a centuries-old dwelling? Continue reading...

The place to talk about games and other things that matterHello Tuesday. Continue reading...

New ‘low power’ mode makes iPhones last longer as Apple focuses on speed, reliability and a smarter Siri with new updateThe next update to Apple’s iOS iPhone and iPad operating system was unveiled on Monday and introduced a new intelligent search assistant, greater speed and security.Related: El Capitan: Apple unveils next version of OS X software Continue reading...

Site’s arbitration committee looks certain to strip Richard Symonds of right to unearth users’ IP addressesWikipedia’s “high court” looks likely to reprimand one of its senior administrators over the way he investigated claims that the former Conservative party co-chairman Grant Shapps used an account to edit his own page and those of rival Tories.