Technology | The Guardian

South Korean firm adds dual cameras and infinity screen to stylus-equipped big smartphone flagship to make amends for fire-prone predecessorThe new Samsung Galaxy Note 8, the most important big smartphone in the company’s history, is launching in New York today, hoping to right the wrongs of last year’s “exploding” Note 7 and tempt people away from rivals with a new dual-camera system and massive “infinity display”.The Note 8 looks to rekindle Samsung’s dominance of the so-called “phablet” category, which the company invented with 2011’s original Galaxy Note, featuring the same winning formula that made its predecessors a success until the Note 7 debacle: big screen, big specs, long battery life and an advanced stylus to “get things done”. Continue reading...

Women working for companies like Uber and DoorDash say they have been groped, threatened and harassed by customers. Their stories highlight how technology connects strangers – and opens the door for abuseWhen a male customer grabbed Melissa’s breast, she didn’t bother reporting it to DoorDash, the on-demand food delivery service that hired her as a driver.She didn’t think the company would care. When a different customer had sexually harassed her a month earlier – texting her a pornographic video through the app – DoorDash did little to help, she said. The company canceled the order, but allowed the man to continue sending her multiple messages. Continue reading...

Anonymity network Tor has become a safe-space for white supremacists and paedophiles. Yet in nations where access to the net is curtailed, it’s a lifelineThe neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer finally crossed a line following the killing of a civil rights activist at a white supremacist rally it helped organise in Charlottesville, Virginia: a blogpost attacking victim Heather Heyer lead to it being chased from the web, first by technology companies who steadily refused to provide service, then by hackers who tried to crash the site.Eventually, it sought refuge in the so-called dark web, launching a special type of site called a Tor hidden service, impervious to conventional internet censorship. In doing so it shone a spotlight, yet again, on a controversial technology that provides protection for dissidents in oppressive regimes at the same time as harbouring Nazis, illicit marketplaces and child abuse rings. Continue reading...

Thirteen years of negotiations came to an abrupt end in June, it has emerged, because of a row over the right to self-defence in the face of attacksThirteen years of negotiations at the United Nations aimed at restricting cyberwarfare collapsed in June, it has emerged, due to an acrimonious dispute that pitted Russia, China and Cuba against western countries.The split among legal and military experts at the UN, along old cold war lines, has reinforced distrust at a time of mounting diplomatic tension over cyber-attacks, such as the 2016 hacking of the US Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) computers. That break-in was allegedly coordinated by Russian intelligence and intended to assist Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

Yvette Cooper and Fawcett Society boss Sam Smethers write to firm for explanation of methodology and timescales for removing online abuseTwitter is failing to take down graphic images of suspected rape and abuse that violate its own community standards, the chair of parliament’s home affairs select committee has said.The Labour MP Yvette Cooper, who founded the Reclaim the Internet campaign on online abuse, has written to Twitter asking it to explain its methodology and timescales for removing graphic pictures and sexually explicit messages.

Attackers dump HBO social media account passwords on the internet following hacks and leaks of unaired TV shows and confidential data

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

A hilarious sport simulation parodies football culture, while enigmatic puzzles and city building turn players into strangers in a strange landMac, PC, Size Five Games; cert: NA Continue reading...

With its ‘Coventry face’ it’s every inch a Jag, straining at the leash to take on the BMW 3-Series, Mercedes C-Class and Audi A4Price: from £26,995

They invade privacy, but apps such as ReplyASAP could also save livesA British father, digital product manager Nick Herbert, has invented an app, ReplyASAP, because his 13-year-old son wasn’t responding to his calls or texts.The app takes over a smartphone screen, locking the phone from further use and sounds an alarm that only stops when the recipient replies by text. Parents can tell when the child has seen a message or if the phone is turned off. The app is available to download and costs from 99p to send messages to one person. It sounds like an invasion of privacy and the latest attempt by overbearing, distrustful parents to track and control their teenage progeny. But this is fair enough – it serves the little sods right for not replying. Continue reading...

Kremlin supporters suspected to be behind fraudulent articles designed to look like they came from Le Soir and the GuardianFake articles made to look like they have been published by legitimate news websites have emerged as a new avenue for propaganda on the internet, with experts concerned about the increasing sophistication of the latest attempts to spread disinformation.Kremlin supporters are suspected to be behind a collection of fraudulent articles published this year that were mocked up to appear as if they were from al-Jazeera, the Atlantic, Belgian newspaper Le Soir, and the Guardian. Continue reading...

Games company launches lawsuit accusing Nestlé of ‘plain and blatant’ breach of its copyright in UK advertNestlé has been accused of copying Atari’s classic 1970s video game Breakout for a KitKat marketing campaign.In a complaint filed on Thursday in a federal court in San Francisco, Atari said Nestlé knowingly exploited the Breakout name, look and feel through social media and a video, hoping to leverage “the special place it holds among nostalgic baby boomers, Generation X, and even today’s millennial and post-millennial gamers”. Continue reading...

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

Flagship Android smartphone has dual cameras, spatial audio and aluminium body, but will be relying on brand nostalgia to stand out against rivalsNokia has launched the most important new handset in its attempts to revitalise the once world-beating brand for the modern smartphone era dominated by Samsung, Apple and China’s Huawei.The Nokia 8 marks the culmination of efforts to bring the Finnish telecoms brand back to the mainstream handset market, which kicked off six months ago with the nostalgia-inducing remake of the classic Nokia 3310 feature phone. Continue reading...

Donald Trump is fixated on a vision of masculine, blue-collar employment. But the retail sector has long had a far greater impact on American employment – and checkout-line technology is putting it at riskThe day before a fully automated grocery store opened its doors in 1939, the inventor Clarence Saunders took out a full page advertisement in the Memphis Press-Scimitar warning “old duds” with “cobwebby brains” to keep away. The Keedoozle, with its glass cases of merchandise and high-tech system of circuitry and conveyer belts, was cutting edge for the era and only those “of spirit, of understanding” should dare enter.Inside the gleaming Tennessee store, shoppers inserted a key into a slot below their chosen items, producing a ticker tape list that, when fed into a machine, sent the goods traveling down a conveyer belt and into the hands of the customer. “People could just get what they want – boom, it comes out – and move on,” recalled Jim Riot, 75, who visited the store as a child. “It felt like it was The Jetsons.” Continue reading...

Recipient of 64m Microsoft shares is a mystery, but is expected to be tech tycoon’s foundationBill Gates, the world’s richest man, has donated $4.6bn (£3.6bn) in the Microsoft founder’s biggest gift to charity since he set up the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.Gates donated 64m Microsoft shares according to a US Securities & Exchange Commission filing. The recipient of the gift was not specified but it is expected that the money will be directed to the foundation he and his wife set up in 2000 with $5bn funding to improve global healthcare and reduce extreme poverty. The foundation did not respond to requests for comment. Continue reading...

Computer programmers | Jacob Rees-Mogg | Hurt by Brexit | Confederate generals | Lawrentian dialect | Breastfeeding equipmentThe decline in female computer programmers is even more dramatic than Peter Kaye (Letters, 11 August) suggests. He says that in 1967 half of the programmers were female. That is nothing. In 1843 100% of programmers were female. Her name was Ada, Countess of Lovelace, and she had the prescient genius to explain how a computer might be programmed before one had even been built.

This outtake was part of a TED talk demonstrating the advances made by formerly Google-owned Boston Dynamics. Though robots have come a long way, the clip suggests they won’t be taking our jobs just yet Continue reading...

The internet has long been a gathering place for white supremacists. But in the wake of the Virginia attack, some are reconsidering their willingness to host hate

British cybersecurity researcher who stopped WannaCry attack is denying that he created and sold malware designed to steal people’s online banking detailsThe British cybersecurity researcher Marcus Hutchins has pleaded “not guilty” to charges of creating and selling malware designed to steal people’s online banking details.Hutchins, 23, achieved fame as the “accidental hero” who helped to halt the spread of the WannaCry ransomware attack that crippled the UK’s National Health Service and many other companies around the world. Continue reading...

An AI world sounds like hell – making humans redundant only serves the interests of an already rich, powerful and creepy tech industryGrim news – Silicon Valley is coming to the UK. Google is planning to build a gigantic £600m “landscraper” in King’s Cross, central London. It plans to “bring our London Googlers together” with a 25-metre swimming pool, massage rooms, a basketball court, nap pods and a 200-metre “trim trail”, which loops around a rooftop meadow, to encourage “the Google culture of walking meetings”, as the Guardian’s architecture and design critic, Oliver Wainwright, put it.This is where I begin to feel queasy. Google has its own “culture”, which its 7,000 London employees will presumably have to embrace cheerily while they work, jog, snooze, eat, play and eventually live on this monster “campus”. Stuff the homeless locals. Also, what about the “Googlers” personal lives? Continue reading...

Data protection bill would cripple researchers uncovering abuses of personal data while doing nothing to stop the spread of poorly anonymised dataA new law proposed to protect the privacy of British internet users could end up criminalising the only people working to uncover abuses of personal data, a leading privacy researcher has warned.The new data protection bill will contain a clause making it a criminal offence to “intentionally or recklessly re-identify individuals from anonymised or pseudonymised data”. The maximum penalty under the new law would be an unlimited fine. Continue reading...

Damore became an ‘alt-right’ hero after Google fired him over his views on women. Did Google-owned YouTube play a role in reinforcing those ideas?

Quick, calm and clever, the Mercedes E-Class offers the perfect front-row seat to follow the Tour de France

If your working day is being ruined by distractions or admin errors, try these apps to improve your focus, time management and output Continue reading...

Losses are steep and user growth is anaemic leaving investors fearful the latest ‘new Facebook’ has run out of steamIs Snapchat – the social media app famous for its disappearing messages – in danger of doing a vanishing act of its own? It’s a question some are asking after investors turned on the company again this week following a second set of poor results which have turned a once-hot tech company into a stock market casualty.The losses alone were steep. Snapchat’s parent, Snap Inc, lost $443m over the last three months, compared with $116m in the same period a year ago. Young tech companies are expected to burn through cash at a prodigious rate as they chase customers, but the main worry for shareholders was anaemic user growth, missed revenue targets and the threat from Facebook and Google – both of which have copied some of Snapchat’s key features. Imitation may well be the most sincere form of flattery, but in this case it could also be the most deadly. Continue reading...

The IOC is against it, but competitive video gaming draws huge young audiences and deserves the same platform as other Olympic eventsThe image of an Olympian is associated with physical prowess, a sculpted body chipped into perfection by years of careful maintenance and preparation. We expect these people to perform great feats of physicality better than the rest of us. That is why so many are scornful of the notion that competitive video gaming, or eSports as it’s come to be known, should stand alongside other Olympic sports. But this requires rethinking.Related: eSports could be medal event at 2024 Olympics, Paris bid team says Continue reading...

The wage gap is more than simply one very memorable statistic – it’s a measure of inequality that shrinks and expands according to age, industry and raceA Google employee’s tirade against diversity efforts included a claim that the gender wage gap is a myth, in spite of mountains of data proving otherwise.But the wage gap is more than simply one very memorable statistic – that a woman in the US earns $0.80 for each $1 a man earns. It is a measure of inequality that shrinks and expands based on variables including age, geography, industry, occupation and race.

The 23-year-old has fallen from grace as he battles accusations of involvement in a malware scam, but the cyber community has protested his innocenceWhen Marcus Hutchins appears in court in Milwaukee on Monday, it will be almost three months to the day since the young British cybersecurity researcher halted the spread of a malicious software that crippled Britain’s National Health Service as well as companies such as FedEx and Telefonica.In the days that followed, Hutchins was hailed as an “accidental hero” for his discovery of the “kill switch” that stopped the WannaCry ransomware and worked with GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) to mitigate the threat. Continue reading...

Apparently ‘surprised’ by release of documents, TV network attempts to push back ransom deadline with promise of paymentHBO reportedly offered $250,000 (£193,000) to the group that hacked its servers under the guise of a “bug bounty”, according to a screenshot of the conversation released by the attackers and seen by the Guardian.A senior vice president of the company made the offer on 27 July, phrasing the payment as a reward for discovering weaknesses in HBO’s network rather than acceding to ransom demands. Continue reading...

World’s largest retailer sees US market as ripe for the taking, following consumer dislike for fees and sports teams desire to boost merchandise salesAmazon’s next big thing is reportedly to be ticket sales, as the retail giant looks to take on the dominance of Ticketmaster, partnering with venue owners in the US.According to four sources talking to Reuters, Amazon see the lucrative US ticketing market as ripe for attack. Consumers dislike ticket fees, and venue owners, sports leagues and teams want more distributors for their tickets as they seek to boost sales. Continue reading...

News of heavy losses at Snapchat’s parent company, Snap Inc, saw shares plummeting by more than 16%Dancing hot dogs were not enough to save Snapchat from another Wall Street pounding on Thursday. Losses at Snapchat’s parent company have nearly quadrupled in the last three months, the company announced, sending the social media company’s shares to a new low in after hours trading.Snap Inc lost $443m in the second quarter. The company paid out $242m in stock based payments and associated taxes over the quarter. The mobile app’s revenues rose 153% to $182m, but were below Wall Street forecasts. The company also failed to match expectations for growth, adding 7.3 million new users over the quarter, below the 8 million expected by analysts. Snapchat had 173 million daily active users over the quarter. Continue reading...

Online retailer’s UK warehouse and logistics operation more than halved its corporation tax bill from £15.8m to £7.4mAmazon paid just €16.5m (£15m) in tax on European revenues of €21.6bn (£19.5bn) reported through Luxembourg in 2016.The figures, published in Amazon’s latest annual accounts for its European online retail business, are likely to reignite the debate about US tech companies using complex crossborder arrangements to minimise the tax they pay across the continent. Continue reading...

Female programmers made up half the industry’s workforce in the beginning, says Peter Kay; while Dr Jill Miller says increasing diversity is about levelling the playing field. Plus Robert Lawrence and Susan Hutchinson on data and the state

HomePod software suggests device’s facial-recognition system will work when phone is flat and be able to mute notifications when it detects user is lookingMore details have been revealed about the highly anticipated iPhone 8 by software leaks from Apple, including the device’s ability to mute notifications when it detects you are looking at it.While the name and precise release date of the next big change to the Apple’s iPhone, dubbed the D22 iPhone, is unknown the leaked software for Apple’s upcoming HomePod smart speaker has already revealed what the phone will look like, that it will have face recognition and other details. Continue reading...

Marigold has a broken iPod and would like to hear about alternative MP3 players, mainly for listening to podcasts and Audible audio booksI was appalled to read that Apple is abandoning iPods. I have a seventh-generation iPod that has just packed it in, but I hesitate to spend money on repairs if it is about to go obsolete. Meanwhile, I am happily using my 2008 model, which lacks a radio but is fine otherwise. The grandson declares that this is the moment to get a “proper” phone that will do everything, but I am refusing to submit to blackmail and have no wish to consult the internet at every opportunity.I am addicted to podcasts and books from Audible, and don’t often play music. Would an MP3 player from another maker still tie up with iTunes and Audible? Could I get one with a radio, preferably DAB? MarigoldApple is abandoning its traditional iPods because most people with smartphones now use them for everything. However, many current smartphones – including Apple’s – don’t have FM, and none has a DAB radio.

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

We’ve often been told that screen time for children should be limited. But what if the real danger is our own addiction to our phones?

An article in the Atlantic has found some alarming results linking depression and technology. My research with Australian teens paints a different picture

The new feature, Watch, lets users discover videos from outside their feed more easily, and will also dabble in original contentFacebook has revamped its video offering, creating a new, TV-like rival to YouTube and dabbling in original content in a bid to get people to spend even more time on the social network.The Facebook feature, dubbed Watch, will let users discover videos from outside of their feed more easily, create watchlists, and have an easier way to follow shows created by artists, brands and publishers.

Computer engineer James Damore, axed for suggesting women were less suited to certain tech roles, may challenge dismissalThe computer engineer fired by Google for suggesting women are less suited to certain roles in tech and leadership is considering taking legal action against the company.Related: Segregated Valley: the ugly truth about Google and diversity in tech Continue reading...

Virginia residents and tech blogs alike fooled by university ‘research project’ featuring a driver pretending to be part of autonomous vehicleTech blogs went crazy over the weekend after a new self-driving car was seen rolling around Arlington, Virginia.Unlike vehicles from Google Waymo, Uber and others, the car didn’t have any obvious signs of a Lidar array, the chunky imaging technology most autonomous vehicles use to gauge the state of the road ahead. Instead, it had just a small bar mounted on the dashboard, which blinked red when it was at a stop light and green once the cost was clear. Continue reading...

Government proposes penalties as ‘last resort’ for those failing to adequately assess risks and prevent damageBritish organisations could face fines of up to £17m, or 4% of global turnover, if they fail to take measures to prevent cyber-attacks that could result in major disruption to services such as transport, health or electricity networks.But the proposals, which are being considered as part of a government consultation launched on Tuesday, say that financial penalties will be used as a “last resort” and not applied if organisations facing an attack can prove they assessed the risks adequately. Continue reading...

Mayor of London says ‘lives could depend on’ removal of videos that instruct viewers how to kill rival gang members, which YouTube says breached no rulesLondon mayor Sadiq Khan has criticised Google’s YouTube after it failed to take down four violent gang videos describing killing methods and threatening rivals, which were flagged by police.The videos reportedly show gang members waving a large Rambo-style knife as they attempt to goad rivals. The videos have been watched more than 356,000 times and have not been removed despite YouTube’s terms saying it takes “threats, harassment, intimidation (and) inciting others to commit violent acts” seriously. Continue reading...

Are the idealists ‘good guys’ who are challenging the old order or are they really tax-minimising corporations that threaten our future?Antonio García Martínez has seen the future and it is terrifying. Which is why he is going to set up home (“this is the drone room right here”) on a small island north of Seattle and live out the ravages of post-America, self-sufficiently, with a composting toilet and an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. He is nervy and fast-talking, like a survivor who has seen unimaginably horrific things. And he has – he was once a product manager at Facebook. There is going to be a “violent revolt”, he says. The tech overlords, he mentions in passing, are all building their own survivalist camps. The rest of us, the “normals”, are sleepwalking towards the apocalypse, posting Instagram pictures from our most recent Airbnb stay from the back of a self-driving Uber. The first of two episodes of Secrets of Silicon Valley (BBC2, Sunday) was a sobering look at how tech is going to change society quickly and dramatically.The Industrial Revolution was nothing compared to what is coming, says one tech genius, Jeremy Howard, whose artificial intelligence (AI) software will probably replace doctors any day. He arrives on screen on a one-wheeled skateboard – why have four wheels if you can have one? It seems a neat symbol of how redundant most of us will become. Continue reading...

Earth’s metals and minerals, essential to our technology, are running out. We need to explore long-forgotten passages in flooded minesIndium, rhodium, platinum, tellurium and gold: these are some of the rarest elements in the world. From smartphones (which contain a whopping 60 to 64 elements) to hybrid cars, wind turbines and medical equipment, much of the technology we depend upon contains a rich list of elemental ingredients.Meanwhile, demand for traditional metals such as copper and aluminium is rocketing, driven by the rapid growth of emerging economies in Asia and South America. Continue reading...

The band from the game League of Legends has stormed the charts and bagged cameos from the likes of Tommy Lee – despite existing only in the imaginations of their creatorsHow has a band that doesn’t physically exist, with zero promotion from the music industry, breach the Billboard Top 40 and reach No 1 in the iTunes metal chart?Conceived by California-based gaming gurus Riot Games in 2014, Pentakill exist purely in the imaginations of their creators – and the 100 million global fans of League of Legends, the multiplayer online battle arena game that spawned the band’s members, Karthus the Deathsinger, Yorick, Sona, Olaf and lead guitarist Mordekaiser the Master of Metal. Continue reading...

Smartphones take centre-stage is this hideously dumbed-down offeringThis is what happens when a film studio decides not to bother with making films good enough to prise the audience from their smartphones and just embraces the fact that mobile devices are part of the movie-viewing experience for a swath of the younger audience. And it’s horrible. A bleak, witless, creative wasteland of a movie that plays out like Pixar’s Inside Out dumbed down for morons. I don’t think I’m overstating things here when I say that The Emoji Movie feels like a harbinger for the end of human civilisation as we know it. A strident palette of candy-coloured empty calories and poop jokes and a cynical message about accepting yourself had me searching for an emoji showing a dispirited film critic hanging from a noose fashioned from a phone-charger cable. Continue reading...

Tech firms have developed AI that can learn how to write music. So will machines soon be composing symphonies, hit singles and bespoke soundtracks?From Elgar to Adele, and the Beatles or Pink Floyd to Kanye West, London’s Abbey Road Studios has hosted a storied list of musical stars since opening in 1931. But the man playing a melody on the piano in the complex’s Gatehouse studio when the Observer visits isn’t one of them.The man sitting at the keyboard where John Lennon may have finessed A Day in the Life is Siavash Mahdavi, CEO of AI Music, a British tech startup exploring the intersection of artificial intelligence and music. Continue reading...

Volvo has given its all-conquering saloon the beefcake treatment. But brawn is never a match for brainsPrice: £41,955