Technology | The Guardian

• 23-year-old British driver will race in top prototype class at Le Mans 24 Hours

Pinterest, Tumblr, Dropbox, Yahoo and Bitly also on board for new platform to share information on security threatsFacebook has teamed up with a group of other internet firms to launch ThreatExchange, a way to share information on cyber-attacks and other online security threats.Facebook’s partners in the project include Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr and its parent company Yahoo, Dropbox and Bitly.Related: It's been a great year! Thanks to these Facebook scams... Continue reading...

Rumours of an Apple car may be premature but what would that future look like?We have a new contender for most improbable Apple rumour. Long-time Apple commentator, Bryan Chaffin, of the Mac Observer, says he is “certain” the company is working on a car.Chaffin’s sources say that, even as Elon Musk’s electronic car firm Tesla Motors is stealing away record numbers of employees from Apple, the house the Steves built is hiring Tesla employees right back – and specifically, “the kind of people from Tesla with expertise that is most suited to cars”.5. There will be a social network to let you share your favourite drives Continue reading...

Computer games build imagination, confidence and an appreciation of complex moral issues. Banning them will achieve the opposite of what Grylls wants Continue reading...

Hour-long track of cat purring triggers YouTube’s Content ID system, but it’s definitely not a feline cover version of Focus trackCats and copyright infringement: two of the internet’s most popular pursuits ... together at last! Except in this case, the copyright infringement has turned out to be a red herring.The cause was an hour-long, audio-only YouTube video of a cat purring, uploaded in March 2014 by a user named Digihaven. With less than 3,000 views, it was very much in the long (furry) tail of Google’s online video service.Related: What’s new, pussycat? The growing economy of internet cat videos Continue reading...

We live in the digital era, yet the desire for tangible, physical objects persists, with companies reporting good sales when they combine the two worlds

Gaming visuals are entering a new era of realistic physical rendering. We speak to graphics hardware specialist Nvidia about what this meansImagine looking into the eyes of a video game character and knowing that they have lied to you, or that they’re scared, or that they love you.Right now, even with the astonishing power of current multi-core processors and graphics chipsets, the people we encounter in visually beautiful games like Far Cry 4, Assassin’s Creed: Unity and Tomb Raider lack something in their faces, some spark of humanity. The phenomenon has a well-known name, the Uncanny Valley, coined by robotics professor Masahiro Mori. His hypothesis, first put forward in 1970, was that as human reproductions get closer to authenticity, the tiny inaccuracies become increasingly disturbing. Video game characters look so real, but not real enough, and we recoil from them. Continue reading...

Former UK editor-in-chief Alex Miller takes worldwide role, as Ellis Jones is promoted from managing editor of Vice magazine

North Korea meets Flappy Bird in new mobile game, which is available for iOS after initially falling foul of App Store regulationsApple has approved the release of mobile game Little Dictator on its App Store, weeks after initially rejecting the app due to its content spoofing North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.The game, developed by Built Games, is a Flappy Bird-inspired action title, with a cartoon Kim riding a missile through “the dangerous world outside the Fatherland”.“In the infinitely unlikely event that the missile explodes before it reaches the evil west, more missiles will be supplied to try again and again… and again and again! Not to worry, Kim Jong-un possesses the hearts of his father and grandfather giving him ultimate endurance and strength to withstand any small mishaps along the way… very few of course!”Related: Should Apple be censoring games differently to music and books? Continue reading...

Ethan Czahor resigned as chief technology officer of Bush’s Right to Rise Pac after sexist and racially charged tweets from years earlier came to light Continue reading...

Aleks Krotoski and the tech team mark a decade of Google Maps by asking where mapping technologies came from and are going in the digital age Continue reading...

Study finds fitness bands incorrectly estimate number of steps by up to 22.7% while phones only get it wrong by, at most, 6.7%Fitness bands can significantly misreport the number of steps taken by a user, whereas smartphones are considerably more accurate, according to new research.The study, led by Dr Mitesh Patel of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, tested the accuracy of steps recorded by smartphones and wearable devices. Fourteen volunteers walked on a treadmill at a pace of three miles an hour for 500 steps and again for 1,500 steps, repeating each distance twice.Related: Could 2015 be the year wearable tech becomes sexy? Continue reading...

Apple Watch comments may be seen as distasteful in some quarters, but the dangers of sedentary lifestyles are more than a marketing line Continue reading...

Prime minister pledges £50m to four train operators for wireless connectivity, funded by fines on Network Rail for tardiness Continue reading...