Technology | The Guardian

Prominent bloggers claim their accounts are being routinely blocked after orchestrated complaints from Russia’s cyber army. RFE/RL report

LastPass hack reopens debate around whether using password managers is the best way to minimise the risk of being compromised online

Autoplaying videos, gifs and Vines look pretty, sure, but battery life, mobile data allowances and smartphone performance are all far more important to usersTwitter has just introduced auto-playing video, Vines and gifs on mobile. “Oh great!” you may say: “Just what we needed! … more things to, er, chew through our data and battery life?”To be fair to Twitter, you can opt out and revert to click-to-play (see below), but Twitter could have just made autoplay opt in. Instead it is forcing users to hunt out a setting and check a box just to keep things the way they were.

Sean Parker invested several million dollars in the startup last year, and he and CEO Matt Mahan believe they can inject life into Americans’ sense of civic dutyLast fall, Sean Parker, the technology billionaire behind Napster, Facebook and Spotify, invested several million dollars into a risky stealth startup, Brigade, which has the ambitious aim of increasing mass civic participation.He takes comfort in the fact that Brigade’s wide-eyed goal “is a little bit more achievable than it may seem at first blush, because turnout is so low, the average American is so disengaged, that even a few marginal changes – a few percentage points one way or the other – has a huge impact”. Continue reading...

Founder of privacy-focused search engine says company can build on audience – and takes a swipe at GoogleDuckDuckGo has recorded a 600% rise in traffic enjoyed in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations two years ago.The site, which does not track user data, now handles some 3bn searches a year - although that is only about the same volume that Google processes in 24 hours. Continue reading...

Audio boss John MacFarlane thinks iTunes successor will be a ‘first shot heard around the world’ to raise demand for streaming musicConnected-audio firm Sonos hopes it will be able to strike a deal with Apple to stream its upcoming Apple Music service into the living room, according to chief executive John MacFarlane.His company’s wireless speakers and hi-fis can already play music from streaming services including Spotify, Deezer, SoundCloud, Google Play, Rdio, Tidal and Mixcloud, with Apple now high on its wish list for future partners. Continue reading...

The actor has lent his halting Austrian tones to navigation app Waze for a selection of customised robotic driving instructionsArnold Schwarzenegger’s new role will see him play a virtual driving instructor – issuing voice commands via in-car navigation system Waze.Related: Arnold Schwarzenegger on Terminator Genisys: ‘I’ll be taking a beating or two’ Continue reading...

‘Pictures are being used for talking,’ says social app’s boss, as he tries to help people understand why children are taking ‘a zillion photos’What is Snapchat? A question asked by a growing number of parents over the past couple of years, as they noticed their children flocking to the social app. Now its chief executive Evan Spiegel has provided an answer.In a surprisingly-grainy video uploaded to Snapchat’s YouTube channel, Spiegel attempts to answer the question “what is Snapchat” with the aid of some old-school pen’n’paper diagrams. Continue reading...

The X Factor supremo links up with Founders Forum to offer prize of £10,000 and the chance to pitch to business leaders including Google boss Eric SchmidtSimon Cowell is turning his attention to a new talent search – trying to find young technology entrepreneurs.The X Factor supremo, who unveiled Rita Ora and Nick Grimshaw as the new judges on his show on Tuesday, has joined forces with the Founders Forum which includes businessmen such as TalkTalk boss Charles Dunstone in the hunt for tech talent. Continue reading...

Publishers collaborate to add classic Super Mario figures that will work with games by both of them

Veteran developer Yu Suzuki’s Dreamcast revival is now a certainty for PC and PlayStation 4, after racing past its goal following E3 announcement“If we do not reach our funding goal, Shenmue 3 will not go forward,” wrote veteran games developer Yu Suzuki, as he launched a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to make a new game in his pioneering open-world series.Less than 24 hours later, the game is most certainly going forward, as Suzuki sailed past what now looks like a conservative fundraising goal of $2m. At the time of writing, Shenmue 3 has generated nearly $2.2m of pledges on Kickstarter. Continue reading...

Archanoid highlights loss of heritage in Russian capital in last 25 years, using database featuring over 400 demolished buildingsThe pace of change in Moscow over the past quarter of a century has seen hundreds of the city’s buildings knocked down, taking their history with them.The buildings are demolished for various reasons, sometimes because they have been badly preserved and other times to make way for offices and other developments. Continue reading...

The games developer and publisher is showing three VR prototypes at E3, and its subsidiary Red Storm studio is working on a shared virtual environmentUbisoft has thrown its hat into the virtual reality ring. The publisher behind multimillion-selling game franchises Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry and Ghost Recon is working on ambitious VR projects, it has revealed.At a pre-briefing before the E3 games conference in Los Angeles, David Votypka, the creative director of Ubisoft-owned developer Red Storm, announced that there are several prototypes being developed in various studios around the company. Votypka who studied virtual reality technology at university before working on formative VR projects in the 1990s told attendees: “VR is back, and it’s back for real. We’ve been exploring, figuring out what works and what doesn’t. We have now have three prototypes at E3 from studios within Ubisoft”. Continue reading...

Report by the Committee for Economic Development of Australia predicts almost 40% of existing jobs will disappear because of technological advancementsComputers could replace five million Australian jobs in the coming two decades, from accountants to real estate agents and even some of the roles now performed by doctors.A report by the Committee for Economic Development of Australia (Ceda) predicted almost 40% of existing jobs will disappear because of technological advancements. Continue reading...

Alex Scarrow’s son was a gamer not a reader, so that’s why he decided to use every trick he learned as a games designer to write addictive books that keep readers coming back for “just one more go”My son, Jacob, is 17 now. He’s at college and he works part time in Waterstones bookshop and, when his increasingly hectic social life permits, he reads novels.

As the time to justify its licence fee approaches, the corporation is in danger of overlooking the world’s biggest entertainment mediumThe fact is, it was like a scene from W1A: a few weeks ago, I was standing in a breakout space in Broadcasting House, talking about technology. I’m not being funny, right, but I love the BBC. Even when I can practically hear David Tennant’s dry voiceover (“Naomi is about to tell the executives about how zombies can improve fitness”) all I think about the BBC is: yeah, brilliant. They produce so much exceptional content for so little money, they raise the cultural bar in radio and television, even in online provision, given the user-friendly brilliance of the iPlayer. So that’s all good then.Except it isn’t quite all good. The BBC’s coming up for charter renewal next year. Always a dodgy moment, especially with a Conservative government and a minister for culture who’s iffy about the licence fee. The BBC has to make a case for itself once a decade, and the time has come for that to include the largest entertainment medium in the world: games. Continue reading...

The pro-gaming scene is dominated by two titles: League of Legends and Dota 2. Can Blizzard really challenge them with a complete newcomer?There are video game developers, and then there’s Blizzard Entertainment. Since its founding in February 1991 (under the name Silicon & Synapse) the California-based giant has delivered hit after hit, and far more than good sales figures – Starcraft, boosted by its expansion Brood War, is the foundational title for eSports, while World of Warcraft is the quintessential massively multiplayer online game (MMOG). Last week saw the release of arena-battler Heroes of the Storm (HotS), an entry in a popular genre that – unusually for Blizzard – is also a little bit of unfinished business.HotS is a multiplayer online battle arena (Moba), currently the biggest genre of competitive gaming in the eSports scene. The idea is simple: two teams of players, each controlling an on-screen warrior (or “hero”), face each other in a small arena and must fight using melee weapons and spells, until the opponent’s base building is destroyed. Continue reading...

With smartphones and tablets becoming the devices of choice for accessing content, traditional news organisations are going to find it harder to surviveTraditional news outlets face an increasingly uphill struggle to make money as readers move to mobile devices, giving Facebook, Google and Apple increasing control, according to a new international survey.The use of mobile devices to access news on a weekly basis surged in the last year from 37% of respondents to almost half (46%), according to a 12-country report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ). Continue reading...

Staff at Britain’s central bank will now have to type out the name of every single person they send an email to, after a blunder led to confidential plans being forwarded to the GuardianAutocomplete, we can all agree, is the work of the devil. Its potential for disaster is huge. It’s so dangerous, in fact, that the Bank of England has been forced to permanently disable it in its emails.The reason? You’re looking at it. Details of the top-secret Project Bookend – the bank’s contingency plan in the event of Britain leaving the EU, unknown even to most of its employees – were emailed to the Guardian by accident last month, all because someone at the bank became temporarily fat-fingered and didn’t notice the system was accidentally sending it to a newspaper. And now, to ensure that a catastrophe of this scale never happens again, everyone at the Bank of England has to laboriously hammer out every single character of every single email address they ever write. Continue reading...

In an industry first, moviegoers will be able to use digital currency to buy tickets to the Sundance hitHoping to add some more cool points to the stack already assembled, the distributor of teen comedy Dope is allowing moviegoers the chance to pay for their tickets with the digital currency Bitcoin.Related: Sundance 2015: Dope review – easily meme-worthy teen comedy Continue reading...

UK firm creates emoji-based passcodes that are more secure than traditional four-digit numerical pins … but don’t get too yetCould emojis be the future of online security? One company is claiming so, suggesting replacing four-digit passcodes with a four-digit emoji string would be almost 500 times more secure. So should we ditch or pins for smiley faces?The British start-up at the heart of the claims, Intelligent Environments, trumpets numerous other benefits as well. It cites “memory expert” Tony Buzan, who says that an emoji passcode “plays to humans’ extraordinary ability to remember pictures, which is anchored in our evolutionary history”. Continue reading...

European data privacy reform takes one step forward to a single digital union as talks head to trilogue stageAll 28 member states of the Council of the European Union have to agreed to new European data protection laws that could see tough new regulations unified across the whole of the EU.The changes would allow for a pan-European framework for privacy and the handling of European citizens’ data, instead of the current scenario where data privacy is regulated by watchdogs in the country of operation within Europe such as Ireland. Continue reading...

Belgian privacy commission launches lawsuit after warning over alleged privacy law breaches over tracking of users and non-users for adsThe Belgian privacy commission is taking Facebook to court for its alleged “trampling” over Belgian and European privacy law.

Sponsored clip is a partnership between the popular British YouTuber and film studio Universal PicturesJurassic World has made a big splash at the box office, grossing a record $511m during its opening weekend. But it’s also proving popular on YouTube.Related: Minecraft YouTube videos were watched 3.9bn times in March Continue reading...

Bethesda has revealed that its post-apocalyptic adventure will be out in 2015 with a range of new features, while the next Dishonored is coming in 2016Fallout 4 will be released on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on 10 November 2015, publisher Bethesda has announced.The company devoted a large chunk of its first E3 press conference to the post-apocalyptic role-playing adventure, with game director Todd Howard providing some key details. Continue reading...

PS Vita, PS3, PQube, cert: 16Steins;Gate is a visual novel, a uniquely Japanese style of game that is more of a digital book accompanied by images. There’s likely a contingent of outspoken players furious at the thought that this is a considered a “game” of any kind. Yet while reading through walls of text is going to be a deal breaker for some, those with the patience will find this to be an incredibly absorbing experience. Played (or should that be read?) from the perspective of Rintaro Okabe, a would-be mad scientist who prefers his alternative persona of Hououin Kyouma, an intricate story centred on time travel unfolds.Okabe can recognise changes in the timeline and, coupled with a microwave that sends messages back in time (seriously), he and his friends attempt to improve the future. Most “gameplay” comes in the form of phone calls, a mechanism to explore causality within Steins;Gate’s temporally complex narrative. Decline to answer a call and the ramifications can range from the personal to the dimension-shattering. It’s simple, but adds at least a touch of interaction. The slow pace, Japanese-only voice acting and occasional typos will deter some, but stick with it and Steins;Gate’s approach to sci-fi storytelling and its beautiful artwork make for a delightful curiosity. Continue reading...

Machine learning and machine intelligence is already incorporated in apps such as Google Photos, Google Now and Apple Maps, and it can make your life easierWhen Joe Weizenbaum found his secretary using a computer program he had created, he was so upset he devoted the rest of his life to warning people not to use its technology. The program was “Eliza”, which gives a passable imitation of a nondirectional psychiatrist; you type sentences such as: “I wonder what I should write,” and it replies :“What answer would please you the most?” (You can try a version at psych.fullerton.edu/mbirnbaum/psych101/Eliza.htm).Weizenbaum’s distress came because he had written Eliza as an experiment, to see whether he could simulate “artificial intelligence” in a question-and-answer system by parsing sentences and throwing relevant bits back at the questioner. But his secretary saw it as real, and asked him not to intrude on “sessions”; Weizenbaum saw this as an omen that we would be too easily fooled into trusting machines. Continue reading...

Id Software’s legendary shooter returns with a level editor encouraging players to design and share their own maps and modesBethesda kicked off its inaugural E3 press conference with a bang – and a hell of a lot of blood – revealing in-game footage from Id Software’s Doom 4.Set on Mars and throughout the depths of Hell, the game looks to be a return to the classic Doom gameplay: super fast, hyper-violent action against nightmarish demons. Continue reading...

What really happens at the US Defence Agency’s annual robotics showdown, and what are Uber, Amazon and Elon Musk doing in the crowd?

The latest gadgets for those who love surfing, diving and otherwise messing about in the water£289.99 Continue reading...

Put your foot down in Peugeot’s 308 SW GT and you’ll be mightily impressed by how quickly it goes – and stopsPeugeot 308 SW GT Blue HDi 180

Lindsay Lohan’s Mean Girls is being transformed into a video game (again!) so we’ve taken a look at six other unlikely conversions Continue reading...

Global taxi firm’s computerised system approves fake insurance papers amid fears such exploitation by drivers may risk passenger safety

Taxi drivers say breaches in Uber's approval process could put customers' safety at risk. The Guardian's Robert Booth demonstrates how a cab driver was able to pick up a paying customer despite having provided faked insurance paperwork to Uber via its computerised system. Following our investigation, Uber says it is reviewing its systems in the UK

Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond tow the (caravan) line, Shia LaBeouf gets motivational and The Muppets do hip-hop in their own special wayTop Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond reunite on the trailer for a BBC2 special, the first time they have been onscreen together since Clarkson was dropped by the BBC. The trio, wearing dinner jackets, race cars off road before testing budget caravans in a show which has been put together from pre-recorded clips from the last two episodes of series 22. May and Hammond recently filmed links for the new one-off episode and, although they have stated they don’t want to continue the motoring show without Clarkson, are reportedly still in talks with the corporation.Meanwhile, there are sporting antics of a different nature when Champions League winner, Barcelona’s Neymar, takes on professional rally driver Ken Block for a Footkhana challenge. And if the pair needed any further drive, they should tune into Transformers star Shia LaBeouf as he delivers an intense motivational speech. Continue reading...

Communications minister tells online question and answer session users’ digital identity will become ‘the most important thing you have’Malcolm Turnbull has outlined his vision to transform government services online and make using them “as cool and as interesting” as using popular social-media platforms such as Facebook.The communications minister told people tuning into a 45-minute online question and answer session on Thursday, hosted by website OurSay, that he planned to overhaul the services as part of the work of the soon-to-be launched Digital Transformation Office. Continue reading...

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.