An open letter signed by the people behind hits for Britney Spears, the Saturdays and Janet Jackson insists: ‘It’s time to say thank you for the music’Swedish songwriters have written an open letter demanding a bigger slice of the revenue generated from digital music streaming services such as Spotify and YouTube.The piece headlined ‘It’s time to say thank you for the music’ and published in Aftonbladet, one of Scandinavia’s biggest newspapers, is signed by 133 songwriters and producers behind hits by acts including Janet JacksonRobyn, the Saturdays and Britney Spears.

Predictions for the future of Google’s online video service, from sports rights and games to co-viewing and voice recognitionYouTube’s first video may have been uploaded on 23 April 2005, but the website’s domain name was registered on 14 February. Hence the 10th birthday milestone this past weekend at a time when Google’s online video service is more popular than ever.From zero to one billion viewers in a decade is some journey, but what lies ahead as YouTube moves towards its teenage years? Here are some predictions.Related: YouTube is 10 years old: the evolution of online videoRelated: YouTube vloggers are popular, but new study questions their influence Continue reading...

The AIR 2015 event in conjunction with the Royal Netherlands Air Force will be the first aerial entertainment show of its kind to rely on drone technologyThe world’s first drone circus is to be held in the Netherlands, where aerial robots equipped with lasers and projectors will spin in dizzying dances across the Amsterdam Arena.

As evidenced by Louis van Gaal’s World Cup goalkeeper switch, analytics can enhance rather than replace the Machiavellian instincts of sport’s master tacticians

(3DS, Nintendo, cert: 12)

(3D, 3DS, Nintendo, cert: 12)

Information acquired by the Guardian sparks fresh concerns about the cosy relationships between the public and private sector Continue reading...

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

Nintendo’s rejigged 3DS console has dramatically improved 3D effects, but there’s no change to the disappointing screen resolution Continue reading...

Security firm says hackers infiltrated more than 100 banks and ‘watched’ employees to gain knowledge of systemsA hacking ring has stolen up to $1bn from banks around the world in what would be one of the biggest banking breaches known, a cybersecurity firm says in a report scheduled to be delivered Monday.The hackers have been active since at least the end of 2013 and infiltrated more than 100 banks in 30 countries, according to Russian security company Kaspersky Lab. Continue reading...

Civil justice council calls for internet-based dispute resolutions system similar to eBay’s to be available within two years Continue reading...

Businessman with a distinguished war record in the Royal Navy, he went on to become chairman of British Shipbuilding Continue reading...

• India beat Pakistan by 76-runs in their 2015 Cricket World Cup opener

If you can’t make your mind up about colour, then Honda’s new Civic is the car for you – it only comes in black Continue reading...

As companies scramble to discover new uses for small unmanned aircraft, critics fear changes to laws will ignore privacy issues Continue reading...

Campaigners want blue plaque in honour of female labourers who helped construct Waterloo Bridge Continue reading...

As London fashion week begins, leading designers are working on smart garments that integrate phones and cameras Continue reading...

Xbox 360 & One, PS3 & 4, PC; Square Enix; £3.99 Continue reading...

‘The revving is ridiculous. Coming off every traffic light, you sound as though you’re challenging the rest of the road to a duel’ Continue reading...

Reports suggest Apple employees are designing and building a car Continue reading...

Apple CEO Tim Cook speaks during the White House summit on cybersecurity and consumer protection in Palo Alto, California, on Friday. Cook's remarks came Cook's remarks came as many in the tech community have expressed concerns about government attempts to weaken encryption Continue reading...

Highest-profile tech executive at cybersecurity summit calls privacy ‘life and death’ issue but hopes to work productively with government Continue reading...

Being able to access digital content in the coming decades could be less of an issue than one of the ‘fathers of the internet’ has implied.Vint Cerf, Google’s vice-president and one of the fathers of the internet, has warned that “bit rot” could lead to a “forgotten century” as our masses of digital files are lost to progress and become unreadable as technology evolves.Cerf said that the applications to read files are being lost because they will no longer run on newer computers, rendering some files unintelligible and the data, memories and important happenings they contain lost to future generations.Related: Can you recommend a device to make copies of old VHS tapes?Related: How can I organise all my digital photos? Continue reading...

Chief executive Tom Mockridge says first infrastructure expansion in 15 years is overdue as company reveals it has passed the 5 million cable customer mark Continue reading...

Ten years is a long time on the internet, especially when 300 hours of video are uploaded to your site every minute. On YouTube’s 10th birthday, we trace the growth and growing pains of online videoAllow me to make a bold statement: YouTube, at 10 years old, is the most interesting place on the internet. It’s not about the platform or the brand, of course, but rather the sheer amount of content it hosts and its diversity.300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Not all of it is worth watching but enough of it is that you won’t live long enough to see it all.After one listen I instantly fell in love with the song so for the entire ride [to LA from Las Vegas] to I kept playing it over and over so I could try to learn all the words. The second I walked into my apartment, I set up my camera ... I uploaded it to Facebook and got a huge response from all of my friends so I decided to upload it on YouTube as well. It went viral in a day. Continue reading...

‘It’s amazing, and makes 3D – a feature that used to be faintly migraine-inducing – into one you can’t believe you lived without’Although not as prolific as Nokia, Nintendo’s history of launching handheld games machines is a busy one. This year’s additions to the family are the unimaginatively named New 3DS (£149.99) and New 3DS XL (£179.99). Looking outwardly similar to their forebears, the differences are fairly subtle, and include an extra analogue stick and two new shoulder buttons. Easily the biggest addition, though, is its enhanced 3D functionality, which uses a camera to track the position of your eyes, automatically adapting the image to look as good as possible without silly-looking 3D glasses. It’s amazing, and makes 3D – a feature that used to be faintly migraine-inducing – into one you can’t believe you lived without. Its final upgrade is a faster processor, which for the moment just means games load more quickly, although in the future there will be games that only run on the new machines. Continue reading...

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

But in the final quarter of the year, publisher King made more money from other games as it reduces its reliance on sweet-swapping hitQuarterly spending on mobile game Candy Crush Saga fell steadily over the course of 2014, but its players still spent $1.33bn (£865.2m) on in-app purchases for the sweet-swapping hit.Analysis by the Guardian of publisher King’s latest financial results, as well as previous filings, reveals that Candy Crush Saga’s “gross bookings” – the term used to cover spending by players – totalled $1.04bn in the second half of 2013.Related: Why Candy Crush Saga likes to play on your sweet tooth Continue reading...

Apple’s business practices are seldom challenged in the tech world, but would consumers accept the same terms from any other kind of business?Dear Members of the Speckless Community,We’re not big believers in responding to our critics here at Absterge. We like to think that our products speak for themselves, and we know that you agree – that’s why you’ve helped turn us into the most successful kitchen appliance company in the history of the world. Continue reading...

The veteran game designer is at the centre of a raging controversy over his new game Godus. He says he is finished with the pressWhen things go wrong for modern game developers they go spectacularly wrong. This is an era of endless rolling news and mass social media judgement. There is no respite. Peter Molyneux knows this now – if he didn’t before. The veteran designer, famed for inventing the “god game” genre with his 1989 title, Populous, has spent the last three days under intense press scrutiny. His latest project, Godus, is in disarray, his reputation in tatters. Everyone wants a piece.“The only answer is for me to retreat,” he says, speaking via Skype from his office in Guildford. “I love my games and I love sharing them with people. It’s this amazing incredible thing I get to do with my life, creating ideas and sharing them with people. The problem is, it just hasn’t worked.” Continue reading...

Music fans have compiled 2.5m playlists for getting it on, with a healthy mix of cool, romance - and Celine DionIntro, the first song on the debut album of indie rockers The XX, is already fairly ubiquitous, appearing on adverts, trailers and low-budget montages in police procedurals.But according to Spotify, it also dominates another arena: the bedroom. Continue reading...

Great for telling general activity, but this fitness tracker doesn’t provide any meaningful, useful data from measuring heart rate

Tech giant facing renewed questions about user data as WikiLeaks lawyer says ‘The question I have is: what caused this six-month delay?’Google is facing renewed questions about its handling of subscribers’ private information following the revelation that it waited six months after the lifting of a gagging order to alert WikiLeaks that emails and other data belonging to its employees had been passed to the FBI.It was disclosed last month that Google had cooperated with federal agents after the search giant was served with secret warrants demanding that it hand over all emails and IP addresses relating to three WikiLeaks staffers. The warrants named the British citizen Sarah Harrison; senior WikiLeaks editor Joseph Farrell and the spokesperson for the organisation, Kristinn Hrafnsson. Continue reading...

Additional login step brings extra layer of protection against hackers for Apple’s messaging and video chat, but more can be can be done say expertsApple is finally enabling two-step authentication to help protect users of its iMessages and FaceTime on iPhone, iPad and Mac computers.

Sign abusing Benedetta Arese Lucini hung on electrical wire as local taxi drivers protest over potential relaxing of competition laws

Police investigate after bot created by web developer Jeffry van der Goot tweets ‘I seriously want to kill people’When Twitter user @jeffrybooks tweeted saying “I seriously want to kill people” at a fashion and cosmetics convention happening at Amsterdam, the Dutch police took the threat seriously.Jeffry van der Goot, a 28-year-old web developer who created the account, received a visit from the police in short order. The only problem was that Van der Goot – who is non-binary and goes by “they” – hadn’t written the tweet. Instead, Van der Goot had handed the Twitter account over to “jeff_ebooks”, a bot they created which could automatically send tweets and hold conversations as an eerie simulacrum of themselves. It was jeff_ebooks who had sent the threat, and it was its creator who was being held liable.Obviously they're automated and what they say is just based on the algorithm and the corpus, but like. Police involvment is... scaryOf course since I don't have any legal knowledge I don't know who is/should be held responsible (if anyone) but like. kinda scared right nowSo yeah, hope it never happens again. Continue reading...

• 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...