As robots grow more lifelike, and religious faith in our uniqueness wanes, it is a challenge to understand what it means to be mortalPerhaps the best way to think of what makes a human being human is to look at something that seems almost human and subtract the difference. Whatever is left over is what is unique to us. That seems to be the thinking behind the Finnish photographer Maija Tammi’s One of Them Is a Human #1, a portrait of Erica, the Japanese android who was declared the most realistic female human robot of 2016. The photograph caused a stir last week because it was shortlisted for the National Portrait Gallery’s prestigious Taylor Wessing prize, despite the rule that “all photographs must have been taken by the entrant from life and with a living sitter”.Related: Why the rise of the robots could allow humans to flourish again | Giles Fraser: Loose canon Continue reading...

US-based credit ratings firm says records of UK citizens were among those unlawfully accessed during cyber-attack in JulyEquifax, the US credit ratings firm victim to an unlawful breach of security, has been told to inform British residents “at the earliest opportunity” if their personal information has been put at risk, the Information Commissioner said on Friday.Equifax says it holds details on over 44 million Britons, and said that records of UK and Canadians citizens were among the unlawfully accessed confidential data for 143 million Americans. Continue reading...

Online services are challenging our model of primary care – the NHS must find a way to incorporate new approaches into the mainstreamThe irresistible entrepreneurial spirit of Silicon Valley is slamming into the immovable object of UK healthcare regulation, with the Care Quality Commission (CQC) exposing significant concerns with at least 10 online clinical services.

The lives of tech entrepreneurs aren’t always as glamorous as they’re made out to be, as I learned living among them on a dangerous San Francisco streetFor the past 12 months of my life, I paid the bargain price of $1,250 per month to sleep diagonally in a bunk bed in a 10ft x 10ft room that I shared with a 32-year old man. Because I am 6ft 4in, sleeping diagonally in my undersized accommodation was the only way I could make it through the night without getting cramps.Welcome to my life in the hacker house. Continue reading...

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

Lauri Love is charged with masterminding a 2013 attack by Anonymous on US government websites. Will Britain allow him to spend the rest of his days in an American prison?In October 2013, Lauri Love was drinking coffee in his dressing gown in his bedroom at his parents’ house in the village of Stradishall, Suffolk, when his mother called upstairs to say there was a deliveryman at the front door. Love, whose first name is pronounced “Lowry”, like the English painter, clomped downstairs. In the front doorway was a man dressed in a UPS uniform. “Are you Lauri Love?” the man asked. “Yes,” Love said. In a single motion, the man grabbed Love’s arm while presenting, not a package, but a pair of rattling handcuffs.For the next five hours, while dusk turned to evening outside, Love, then 28, and his parents sat in the front room as a dozen or so men from the National Crime Agency, which investigates organised crime and other serious offences, checked the computers in the house. In Love’s bedroom, they found two laptops, and a PC tower humming on his desk. Among the bewildering Rolodex of open tabs in Love’s internet browsers, the officers found accounts logged into several hacker forums and arcane internet chatrooms. Downstairs, Love, who knew that anything said in these limbo moments of investigation could be later used against him, kept the conversation to small talk about the weather and football. Continue reading...

Amazon is looking to build its second home, promising it will be a full equal to current Seattle base, but has a list of key demands from potential candidatesAmazon has launched a $5bn (£3.8bn) search for a site for a new headquarters, asking cities across the US and Canada to make their pitches.The new HQ will be the world’s largest e-commerce company’s second in North America, and “will be a full equal” to its current headquarters in Seattle, Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos said. Continue reading...

Social media company’s advertising data doesn’t tally with census data for millennial and other demographics to the tune of millions of peopleFacebook claims that it can reach more millennials and people in other demographics than actually exist in the UK, US, Australia, Ireland and France, according to census data.In the UK, Facebook says it can reach 7.8 million users aged between 18 and 24. The Office of National Statistics, however, says there were only 5.8 million people in that age group in the whole in the country in 2016. Continue reading...

For his new book, America 51, the Slipknot frontman has been examining the sicknesses at the heart of US culture – and from Donald Trump to modern dating, here’s his exclusive guide to navigating themHe is so ineffectual. Everyone was worried about the crazy things he’d do, but there’s nothing that he’s done that can’t be changed in another administration, like the Paris agreement. There’s no need to panic. Too many – I don’t want to say liberal lambasts – are hitting the panic button too quickly, instead of bringing up issues and talking about them. For me it’s really a case of: what’s going on with the senators, what’s going on on a local level? Continue reading...

Cybersecurity firm Symantec says ‘Dragonfly’ group has been investigating and penetrating energy facilities in US, Turkey and SwitzerlandA hacking campaign is targeting the energy sector in Europe and the US to potentially sabotage national power grids, a cybersecurity firm has warned.The group, dubbed “Dragonfly” by researchers at Symantec, has been in operation since at least 2011 but went dark in 2014 after it was first exposed, secretly placing backdoors in the industrial control systems of power plants across the US and Europe. Continue reading...

From a cookie that’s definitely not a cookie to a yellow flag when everyone else sees red, sending emojis is fraught enough without manufacturers changing thingsIt’s a tricky life, being an emoji designer. Unicode, the consortium that controls the key standard used to digitally encode writing, picks which emojis need to be included, but until recently offered little guidance beyond a name and a black and white illustration.Then there’s the problem that every individual operating system needs to design its own emoji because the little glyphs are copyrighted, so it won’t do to simply use the same ones as your competitor. Continue reading...

While so many books, TV shows and films has used schools as a setting, very few video games take place in and around the classroomThis week sees thousands of children throughout the country wake up and realise with stark horror that the summer holidays are over and school beckons.Most adults can remember the sudden system shock of these mornings; the alarm going off unreasonably early, the shivering cold of the bathroom, the family gathered in stony silence around the table, munching forlornly on soggy toast. Games such as Resident Evil or Silent Hill have conjured few horrors that compare with entering a new classroom and meeting an unfamiliar teacher who may or may not prove to be an authoritarian sociopath. Continue reading...

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Aloneness and not knowing are fundamental to being human – let’s leave the virtual world and return to the real one, says Peter HindleyHoward Jacobson expresses surprise at his dependence on his smartphone (Weekend, 2 September). I recently lost mine, and it made me confront the two sources of anxiety my phone assuaged for me. First, the fear of being alone: my phone gave me the illusion that I could always be in contact with someone or something. Second, fear of uncertainty: my phone could always provide me with an answer for any question I wanted to ask. Aloneness and not knowing are fundamental to being human and drive much of our communication and creativity. Surely it is time for the Guardian to encourage us to give up our phones and celebrate the delights of being disconnected from the virtual world but truly connected to the real world.

With no home button on the new iPhone, something’s got to give, and that something might just be your power buttonIf you are a fan of Siri, then good news: Apple’s voice assistant looks like it will be getting a promotion in the near future, thanks to the combination of iOS 11 and the “D22” iPhone (the leaked model thought to be the forthcoming “iPhone Pro, 8 or X”). If you’re not a fan of Siri, well, look away now – some of this isn’t pretty.For the first time, Siri will sync across devices, letting details it has picked up from your phone affect how it answers on your iPad or computer. The service is also seeing a slight refocus: Siri isn’t just a voice assistant anymore, since “Siri” will also be responsible for suggesting topics in Apple News based on your web browsing, or for suggesting a calendar event if you make a booking online. Continue reading...

Cities attract wild ideas, from Qinhuangdao’s straddling bus to London’s bike lanes in the sky. As Musk’s Boring Company starts tunnelling, could his plans for underground roads and Hyperloop trains prove the doubters wrong?In early August, the city council of Hawthorne, California, held a special meeting. It had set aside this time to discuss a major construction project proposed by a high profile company based there in the sprawling Los Angeles basin.The company was Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, the rocket-building offshoot of the electric car company Tesla, run by the billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk. SpaceX had recently spun off another entity, this one aimed at disrupting the tunnel boring business, cheekily named the Boring Company – and it needed the City of Hawthorne’s cooperation. Continue reading...

Techies are pushing the trend of intermittent fasting for weight loss – made popular by diets like the 5:2 plan – to the extreme. Are they crazy?The last time any food passed Phil Libin’s lips was a day ago, when he ate yakitori at a restaurant in San Francisco’s Mission district. He’ll next eat in three days time on Thursday evening, when he has a reservation at one of the fanciest sushi restaurants in town. In the intervening four days it’s just water, coffee and black tea.Over the last eight months the former CEO of Evernote and current CEO of AI studio All Turtles has shunned food for stretches of between two and eight days, interspersed with similar periods of eating. He’s lost almost 90lbs and describes getting into fasting as “transformative”. Continue reading...

From Google to Uber, Silicon Valley’s tech giants have a woman problem. Meet Lawless & Lawless, the sisters fighting backOn the wall of Lawless & Lawless’s San Francisco office is a framed, full-page newspaper advert with a black background and just two words in white text: “Thanks Ellen”. The ad, taken out in March 2015 in a Silicon Valley freesheet, referred to Ellen Pao, who had recently fought a $16m sexual discrimination suit against her former employer, venture capitalists Kleiner Perkins. Pao claimed she was passed over for promotion and excluded from meetings after she accused a senior partner of sexual harassment.Although Pao lost the suit, coverage of the case shone a bright light on Silicon Valley’s gender problem. More legal suits followed, this time against Facebook and Tesla. The common denominator? The lawyers representing the women: Therese and Barbara Lawless. The formidable sisters, who have been practising employment law together since the late 1980s, have become the go-to attorneys in the battle against what they describe as America’s “wild west” of gender discrimination and sexual harassment. Continue reading...

The company, which offered pre-sold packets of diced fruits and vegetables that users plugged into its $400 machines, launched only 16 months agoJuicero, a Silicon Valley juicer startup that raised $120m from investors and was widely ridiculed after the $400 machines were revealed to be the equivalent of two hands squeezing a juice box, is shutting down.The death of Juicero, announced on Friday, is the latest case of a San Francisco tech startup collapsing after raising substantial funds under the guise of innovation and disruption, but failing to build a profitable business. Continue reading...

The president to make a decision on Daca, as Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and Tim Cook among tech leaders urging him not to end the programDonald Trump’s spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said on Friday that the president would announce his decision on whether to kill off special legal provisions offered to “Dreamers”, people brought to the US illegally as children, on Tuesday.Related: 'The fear is great': 'Dreamers' on edge as Trump threatens to end Daca program Continue reading...

Prof Martyn Thomas had first-hand experience of fighting the millennium bug, and dismisses the idea that it never posed a serious threat to the world’s computer systemsPlease don’t perpetuate the falsehood that the millennium bug was a myth (Hard to stomach, G2, 30 August). The widespread use of two-digit years in computer systems was a serious threat. I led the Y2K teams for Deloitte Consulting internationally in the 1990s and those of us who spent years successfully finding and fixing many of the huge number of problems resent the implication that our work was unnecessary or fraudulent. Despite all the worldwide work (coordinated by a special UN team), many failures did occur, including 15 shut-downs of nuclear reactors around the world. Details and authoritative references from Gresham College can be found online at tinyurl.com/zcd8tqd.

On 12 September Tim Cook’s company will hold its first event at the new Steve Jobs Theater in Cupertino, California. Here’s what they will (probably) talk aboutApple will hold a press event on 12 September to unveil its much anticipated new iPhones, which are expected to introduce a whole new design and set the tone for the next few years.Unlike previous years, much is known about at least one of the new iPhones thanks to a large software leak from Apple that revealed several of its key details. But new smartphones are not the only new thing Apple is expected to announce, with the event taking place in the just-built Apple Park and its Steve Jobs Theatre. Continue reading...

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FDA overseeing crucial firmware update in US to patch security holes and prevent hijacking of pacemakers implanted in half a million peopleAlmost half a million pacemakers have been recalled by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) due to fears that their lax cybersecurity could be hacked to run the batteries down or even alter the patient’s heartbeat.The recall won’t see the pacemakers removed, which would be an invasive and dangerous medical procedure for the 465,000 people who have them implanted: instead, the manufacturer has issued a firmware update which will be applied by medical staff to patch the security holes. Continue reading...

Julian Assange’s data-leaking site defaced via DNS attack, showing humiliating messages for organisation that prides itself on being tech savvyWikiLeaks suffered an embarrassing cyber-attack when Saudi Arabian-based hacking group OurMine took over its web address.The attack saw visitors to WikiLeaks.org redirected to a page created by OurMine which claimed that the attack was a response to a challenge from the organisation to hack them. Continue reading...

Thousands in San Jose are sleeping on the street, and the city has proposed temporary ‘tiny homes’ to help. But residents say: not in my backyard

Dara Khosrowshahi, the former Expedia CEO, holds an all-staff meeting as the ousted Uber founder describes the last six months as the hardest of his lifeThe incoming Uber CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, former CEO of Expedia, addressed the ride-hailing company in an all-hands meeting Wednesday at the company’s San Francisco headquarters.Khosrowshahi, who starts next Tuesday, replaces the ousted leader and co-founder Travis Kalanick, who resigned following a string of controversies including allegations of sexual harassment, discrimination and intellectual property theft.

The FCC has received nearly 22m comments on “Restoring Internet Freedom” with just hours left before the window for public feedback closes on WednesdayA sweeping plan to roll back Obama-era rules intended to ensure an open internet has drawn a record number of comments before a critical vote by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).With hours left before the window for public feedback closes on Wednesday, the agency has received nearly nearly 22m comments on “Restoring Internet Freedom”, which could dismantle net neutrality rules put in place in 2015. Though many of the comments appear to be from spambots, the effort to ease regulations on internet service providers (ISPs) has drawn widespread criticism from Democrats, consumer advocates and internet companies. Continue reading...

Company will give users option to be tracked only while actively using the app, as it tries to clean up its act on privacy after unveiling of new CEOUber will stop its controversial practice of tracking users for up to five minutes after a trip has ended, as it attempts to turn around its mired public image.A change to the Uber app due to roll out this week will allow users to share location data only when actively using the app, stopping further tracking once a trip is complete, according to Uber’s chief security officer Joe Sullivan. Continue reading...

Free speech was the left’s rally cry. But the fate of the Daily Stormer, a hate site ‘kicked off the internet’, signals the increasing irrelevance of the first amendment

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

The world’s largest video event showcased long-awaited 1930s cartoon-style platformer Cuphead, beast-bludgeoning fantasy Monster Hunter and moreGamescom, the world’s largest video game event, has just taken place in Cologne, bringing 400,000 visitors – including Angela Merkel – to the vast Koelnmesse for a week of hype and hands-on action.Here are the 11 games we most enjoyed amid the chaos. Continue reading...

Amazon, which acquired Whole Foods in June, will begin a wave of price cuts on Monday following Walmart’s new focus on developing its online retail effortsAmazon has set the stage for a price war with retail giant Walmart as it signaled a wave of price cuts at Whole Foods, the grocery chain it acquired for $13.7bn in June. The move signals the start of a much wider battle – to see who will be the king of online retail in America.Related: Amazon to buy Whole Foods Market in $13.7bn deal Continue reading...

Customers say recently acquired televisions stopped working after the company sent out an upgrade a week agoThousands of owners of high-end Samsung TVs have complained after a software update left their recently acquired £1,400 sets with blank, unusable screens.The Guardian has been contacted by a number of owners complaining that the TVs they bought – in some cases just two weeks ago – have been rendered useless by an upgrade sent out by Samsung a week ago. Continue reading...

From Ulm to New York 1901, board games have embraced stories about urban development – but can they teach us anything useful about planning?In 1666 a terrible fire raged through London, destroying most of the medieval city and consuming more than 13,000 houses, churches and monuments. It is estimated that at least 70,000 of the city’s 80,000 residents had their homes reduced to cinders. In the ashes of this tragedy, London needed to be rebuilt, creating myriad problems and opportunities.

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

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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...