Technology | The Guardian

Companies are promising to sway the electorate using high-tech targeting of voters in ways that aren’t easy to keep track ofAs your mind wearily contemplates being exposed to yet another political campaign, are your dreams haunted by battle buses, billboards and TV debates? Or is it Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Google?On the evidence of last year’s EU referendum, much of the campaigning, and much of the money spent on political advertising, will be online. And it will happen in a way that will be largely hidden from scrutiny by either the public or regulators. Continue reading...

Young people attack computer networks to impress friends and challenge political system, crime research showsTeenage hackers are motivated by idealism and impressing their mates rather than money, according to a study by the National Crime Agency.The law enforcement organisation interviewed teenagers and children as young as 12 who had been arrested or cautioned for computer-based crimes. Continue reading...

In examining how gallant, restrained masculinity could function as an action-adventure ideal, the LucasArts game was way ahead of its timeThe fact that developer Double Fine Productions has chosen to remaster the classic 1995 point-and-click adventure Full Throttle isn’t in itself remarkable. The LucasArts titles of the mid-1990s are widely loved and celebrated, and we have already seen updates of stablemates Grim Fandango and Day of the Tentacle.What is remarkable is that the strength of the narrative design, silly gags and beautiful vistas hasn’t diminished at all. Holding a PS4 controller in front of the new version, it’s obvious that the 20-year-old game is 10 times more ambitious than most commercially-made video games today. Not in the action of the game, in which your biker man Ben merely solves increasingly obscure puzzles involving the collection and application of objects to scenery (most memorably illustrated in the classic command “Slam face on bar”). No. What makes its legacy is something much more interesting than how many puzzles the game has, or how difficult they are to solve. Continue reading...

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

Korean firm’s infinity display pushes smartphone design forward, and its new device is packed with the latest technology encased in a metal and glass shellFollowing the Note 7 debacle, Samsung really needs a home run to keep its lead in the smartphone market. Is the almost all-screen Galaxy S8 it?

I notice your review of the Huawei P10 smartphone (theguardian.com, 20 April) makes no reference to the manufacturer’s policy concerning sourcing the materials used in production. I’m sure your product reviewers are all very aware that minerals such as gold, which are used in mobile phone production, can come from mines that use slaves. Furthermore, the mercury and cyanide used in gold extraction have a devastating environmental and human impact.Despite the fact that it is not, as yet, the norm in technology reviews in the press, I strongly encourage you to take the lead and highlight in your reviews whether or not producers ensure that no slave labour is used in any part of their supply chain. Reference to the environmental cost of production and post-use product recycling policy would also be welcome. Continue reading...

Company could announce feature to prevent intrusive online adverts within weeks, according to reportsA future version of Google Chrome may include a built-in adblocker, designed to prevent the most intrusive online adverts from being displayed on users’ computers and smartphones by default.According to the Wall Street Journal, Google could announce the feature within weeks, but the specifics are not yet set in stone, and the company may yet scrap the entire plan. Continue reading...

John ran a tune-up utility and now his Windows 10 laptop won’t start. What can he do?I recently ran a free trial of a PC tune-up utility, including a disk clean-up routine, on my Windows 10 laptop. When it restarted, it reported a missing component. Said machine then bricked: boot begins, then the screen blanks.Are there any steps that I can take to recover access to the machine? Failing that, can I recover my files from the hard drive, installed in a USB cradle? JohnMicrosoft has spent a lot of time (and money) trying to make Windows self-repairing, partly because it generally gets the blame when other programs – or users – try to “improve” it. Given that tens of thousands of expert programmers have worked on the code over the past 30 years, the number of safe, simple, significant and forwards-/backwards-compatible improvements may be quite small. Continue reading...

From DDoS attacks to bots to fake news, there are many ways to influence an election. But is the UK really at risk?“Brexit vote site may have been hacked” warned the headlines last week after a Commons select committee published its report into lessons learned from the EU referendum.

When I leave my mobile on a bed in Sydney, my life quickly unravels. It turns into a movie. A very bad movie. Not starring Leigh SalesIn Sydney, housesitting for a friend. She comes back early on Friday morning – about 7am. She’s going to a symposium thing – Leigh Sales is speaking and she doesn’t want to be late. She’ll help me with my bags and we will go to the train station together. I will then go to the airport and fly to Melbourne. Don’t want to make my friend late for Leigh Sales, so pack really quickly.At the station I realise have left my phone on the bed – along with some makeup and a book. Do not care about other things – but I care about the phone! Cannot contact friend who is journeying to symposium. Go to the airport feeling weird – and panicked. Continue reading...

In a world where we get flooded via Facebook, text messaging and more, a look at whether you can de-escalate a friendship without losing a friendQ: A friend I know moderately but not terribly well sends me messages via every available medium – text message, messaging app, email and Facebook – far more often than I want to respond. How do I get her to back off without being rude?A: I think what you’re asking is how to de-escalate the friendship without losing the friend, and the answer is it may not be possible. It’s a problem I think about relatively frequently, because it’s tricky, and it feels disloyal, and love and friendship are two of the most important things in life and we reject them at our peril. Continue reading...

Some perfectly authentic looking web addresses are not what they seem and not all browsers are taking the problem seriouslyHere’s a challenge for you: you click on a link in your email, and find yourself at the website https://аррӏе.com. Your browser shows the green padlock icon, confirming it’s a secure connection; and it says “Secure” next to it, for added reassurance. And yet, you’ve been phished. Do you know how?The answer is in that URL. It may look like it reads “apple”, but that’s actually a bunch of Cyrillic characters: A, Er, Er, Palochka, Ie. The security certificate is real enough, but all it confirms is that you have a secure connection to аррӏе.com – which tells you nothing about whether you’re connected to a legitimate site or not. Continue reading...

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg briefly addresses on stage the killing of a man in Cleveland that was uploaded to the social network, saying ‘we will keep doing all we can to prevent tragedies like this.’ Steve Stephens posted a video of the killing of Robert Godwin Sr on Monday. The next day, Stephens killed himself while being pursued by police. Continue reading...

Uber v self-driving cars, Facebook v video games. Some of the tech industry’s biggest rivalries are not what you would expectWhen you’re a globe-spanning technology firm, you need to keep a paranoid eye on the competition. But sometimes it can be hard to work out what the competition is: disruption can come from the most unlikely corners.But even given that, Netflix has an odd definition of what it has to compete with. Not Amazon Video, not YouTube, not even old-fashioned broadcasters. No, according to the company’s chief executive, Reed Hastings, Netflix’s biggest competitor is the pesky human need to close your eyes and sleep for a third of the day. Continue reading...

Internet retailer says Malcolm Turnbull’s government’s plan would create an ‘inherent disincentive’ to complyThe internet giant Amazon has attacked the Turnbull government’s plan to impose the GST on all online purchases, saying it is so poorly designed it will create an “inherent disincentive” to comply.It says the government should be asking Australia Post to collect GST on goods imported to Australia, rather than forcing websites such as Amazon and eBay to do so. Continue reading...

YouTube sensations Rose and Rosie have turned a vlogging hobby into a hit brand. They talk about coming out on camera, posting their wedding online – and why there’s no such thing as oversharing‘I think when I have a baby, I’m going to livestream the birth.’ Rosie Spaughton is sitting in the Guardian canteen with her wife Rose Ellen Dix, talking about the future of their YouTube channels – and the prospect of parenthood. Known to their one million subscribers simply as Rose and Rosie, they slouch comfortably among a growing pantheon of online celebrities, pulling in vast audiences via the omnipresent video-sharing platform. Their videos have been viewed over 142m times.What do they do to attract such a huge following? Well, they sit in their living room in Hertford and chat. They talk about their lives, play video games, make up terrible songs on Rose’s acoustic guitar. They are warm, hilarious and unguardedly honest, especially about sex and relationships. In one recent video, they discuss their most hurtful rejections. “Oh, there was that time you tried to have a threesome and they told you to get out,” says Rosie with undisguised glee. “That could only happen to you.” Continue reading...

After losing her faith, a former evangelical Christian felt adrift in the world. She then found solace in a radical technological philosophy – but its promises of immortality and spiritual transcendence soon seemed unsettlingly familiarI first read Ray Kurzweil’s book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, in 2006, a few years after I dropped out of Bible school and stopped believing in God. I was living alone in Chicago’s southern industrial sector and working nights as a cocktail waitress. I was not well. Beyond the people I worked with, I spoke to almost no one. I clocked out at three each morning, went to after-hours bars, and came home on the first train of the morning, my head pressed against the window so as to avoid the spectre of my reflection appearing and disappearing in the blackened glass.At Bible school, I had studied a branch of theology that divided all of history into successive stages by which God revealed his truth. We were told we were living in the “Dispensation of Grace”, the penultimate era, which precedes that glorious culmination, the “Millennial Kingdom”, when the clouds part and Christ returns and life is altered beyond comprehension. But I no longer believed in this future. More than the death of God, I was mourning the dissolution of this narrative, which envisioned all of history as an arc bending towards a moment of final redemption. It was a loss that had fractured even my experience of time. My hours had become non-hours. Days seemed to unravel and circle back on themselves. Continue reading...

Veteran actor says Walt Disney would have been horrified by the content of today’s video games and filmsDick Van Dyke, who is currently filming Mary Poppins Returns, which is scheduled for release next year, has warned of his fears over the effects of “scary” video games and films on young children.The 91-year-old actor, who will make a cameo appearance in the upcoming film, describes these activities as a far cry from the free-spirited, kite-flying, carousel-riding world of the two children, Jane and Michael, in the original Mary Poppins. Continue reading...

Despite her formidable reputation, Rachel Whetstone – who departed Uber this week – wasn’t able to shift the company’s fundamental problemsWhen Rachel Whetstone left Google two years ago to replace David Plouffe, a former Barack Obama official, as policy and communications vice-president at Uber, it seemed like a promising Silicon Valley role.The taxi-hailing app had a reputation for aggressive and even underhand tactics, and a CEO, in Travis Kalanick, with a reputation as a gaffe-prone “tech bro”, but it was one of the fastest growing startups in the world, achieving a $50bn valuation (now almost $70bn) within just six years. Continue reading...

Gwilym isn’t convinced his anti-virus software is worth the money, and wants to know what protection I’d recommendI am using Avast to protect my computer: you recommended it quite some time ago. I am not entirely convinced it’s worth what I am paying, and it is constantly suggesting, in a variety of less than subtle ways, that I should upgrade. What protection would you now recommend? I am prepared to pay for something that works. GwilymIt’s complicated. I’ve spent more than 20 years recommending various anti-virus programs as an essential part of any Windows setup. However, Windows has changed, and the threat landscape has changed. I am no longer sure that a third-party AV program is essential, and some of them may be detrimental. Continue reading...

Pioneering feminist founded country’s first female suffragist society and called for equal rights for womenHenrietta Augusta Dugdale, a founder of the first female suffragist society in Australia, has been honoured by Google with a doodle on the search engine’s homepage.On 13 April 1869, Dugdale became the first Australian woman to publicly call for women’s equality with a letter published in Melbourne’s Argus newspaper. In the letter she described a bill to help women secure rights to property as a “poor and partial remedy for a great and crying evil” and a “piece of the grossest injustice”. Continue reading...

They’ve been called the ‘only sane solution’ for urban deliveries and are already being tested, but are pedestrians prepared to jostle for space?Sharing a sidewalk with one of DoorDash’s delivery robots is a bit like getting stuck behind someone playing Pokémon Go on his smartphone. The robot moves a little bit slower than you want to; every few meters it pauses, jerking to the left or right, perhaps turning around, then turning again before continuing on its way.These are the sidewalks of the future, technology evangelists promise. Autonomous delivery robots, once the exclusive purview of 1980s sci-fi movies, are coming to a city near you, with promises of reduced labor costs, increased efficiency and the reduction of cars. Continue reading...

Rachel Whetstone, once adviser to former Tory leader Michael Howard and friend of David Cameron, moved from Google less than two years agoUber’s head of public policy and communications, Rachel Whetstone, has quit the troubled cab-hire app less that two years after it poached her from Google.Her departure comes after a string of scandals for Uber, ignited by a tell-all blogpost from a former employee alleging numerous sexual harassment incidents. Continue reading...

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

Featuring telephones, mirrors, twine and, yes, even screens, the Now Play This festival explores the far edges of game design - here’s the best bitsNow Play This is a festival of experimental games. Spread throughout several rooms of the New Wing of Somerset House, and running as part of the London games festival, it reflects what happens when we stop worrying about the artistic or commercial validity of the medium. Curated by game designers Holly Gramazio and George Buckenham, it’s about collecting experiences that offer something interesting, meaningful or special.This year’s event featured games in a variety of formats: tabletop, physical, digital, augmented reality, virtual reality and new sports. There were experimental interfaces and there were fascinating intersections between space and content. One game, Joy is Here, covered all the walls in a giant word search. Continue reading...

The cryptocurrency may have no physical form but the returns from trading it can be very real – and for some they’re worth giving up your job forOn a sunny afternoon in west Beijing, on the auspicious eighth floor of a nondescript concrete high-rise, Huai Yang sits with the curtains drawn in his apartment, making his own luck.For the past six months, 27-year-old Yang has worked mainly from home, mainly from his sofa, tracking and trading bitcoin, and watching the money roll in. The flat itself is modestly sized; Yang moved in in his pre-bitcoin days when he worked variously for a crowdfunder start-up, a branding consultancy and dabbled in hedge-fund management, all of which he describes as “creative financial work”. Now, though, his main focus is bitcoin, which is “much younger, more fun, and much more money”. Yang claims to make up to 1m yuan (£116,000) a month, under the radar of the taxman, purely from trading the online cryptocurrency. Continue reading...

Rail staff confirm legend that rising sun shines through Box tunnel in Bath on birthday of Isambard Kingdom BrunelEngineers have tested one of the UK’s most intriguing railway legends: that the rising sun shines through the Box tunnel near Bath on the birthday of the 19th-century genius who created the line.For many years, railway enthusiasts and mathematicians have argued over whether Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the creator of the Great Western mainline, did design the two-mile tunnel with his own birthday in mind. Continue reading...

After its game-playing AI beat the best human, Google subsidiary plans to test evolution of technology with Go festivalA year on from its victory over Go star Lee Sedol, Google DeepMind is preparing a “festival” of exhibition matches for its board game-playing AI, AlphaGo, to see how far it has evolved in the last 12 months.Headlining the event will be a one-on-one match against the current number one player of the ancient Asian game, 19-year-old Chinese professional Ke Jie. Continue reading...

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

Unknown hackers triggered about 15 alarm cycles before city officials took down emergency notification system used during inclement weather eventsHackers took control over the 156 sirens in Dallas this weekend, triggering false alarms on the system used to alert residents to take shelter from inclement weather, until officials deactivated the system early Saturday morning.The person or people responsible were able to hack into a part of the system that was communicating with all 156 of the city’s sirens, said Rocky Vaz, who heads the city’s office of emergency management, at a news conference. Continue reading...

Personal details from hundreds of thousands of accounts may have been illegally accessed, admits payday lenderMore than a quarter of a million customers of payday loan firm Wonga are being warned that their personal data may have been stolen in a data breach at the firm.The online lender said it was “urgently investigating illegal and unauthorised access” to the personal data of some of its customers in the UK and Poland. It is understood that the breach could affect up to 270,000 current and former customers, including 245,000 in the UK. The company would not disclose where it had taken place. Continue reading...

Teen rebellion is even better fifth time around, while a crowd-funded platformer revives the 90s and Kenya’s wildlife gets up close and personalPS4, PS3, Sony, cert: 12

Your smartphone needn’t keep you sedentary: these apps will soon have you cycling, exploring forests or gazing at night skiesWhy don’t you just switch off your smartphone and go out and do something less boring instead? Although with all due respect to the famous intro for children’s TV show Why Don’t You?, perhaps better advice for 2017 would be to keep your smartphone on – but seek out some apps that will get you out into the world.Whether you’re spotting wildlife, blue plaques or Gruffalos; discovering new walking and biking trails; taking up geocaching or staring at the night skies, there are apps to help you get out into the fresh air for some activities. Continue reading...

Wellie wearers rejoice! The much-loved classic Volvo estate is back and it’s bigger and cleverer than everPrice: £34,955

At the media industry’s annual bash in Cannes, virtual reality is the next mass medium that will take TV to a new levelVirtual reality (VR) technology secured its place in popular culture through films such as The Lawnmower Man and The Matrix, as well as books such as Ready Player One, which Steven Spielberg is adapting for a movie. They presented visions of technology whereby strapping on a VR headset (or, as in The Matrix, being imprisoned in pods and hooked up to a computer network by human-farming machines) enabled people to explore virtual, computer-generated worlds.In 2017, these cultural touchstones are freshly in mind for the television industry, as it tries to understand whether real-life headsets can be used to deliver new forms of drama, documentary and storytelling. Continue reading...

Apps such as Spreeder and Spritz are bringing speed reading back into fashion. But what gets lost in this race for the last page?This article contains 1,993 words. If you were to read it to the end, without being distracted by your email or your dog or your children or the contents of the fridge or the bills you have to pay, it would take you, on average, a little over six minutes. But what if you were able to imbibe all of its (undoubted) nuance and richness in half of that time? Or a quarter? What if you could glance at the text and know everything it said just by running your eyes down the page?The idea of speed reading was invented by an American schoolteacher named Evelyn Wood, whose search for a way to improve the lives of troubled teenagers in Salt Lake County, Utah, by teaching them to read effortlessly, led her to the belief that she herself could read at the rate of 2,700 words a minute, 10 times faster than the average educated reader. And further, that the techniques that allowed her to do so could be taught and sold. Continue reading...

Cameras are all very well, but it’s nice to have the option of using your actual eyesI t calls itself a family car, the Mazda 3 2.0, and “family” in car speak is a dialectical code for what it’s not: it’s not a hot hatch or a roadster, it’s not an SUV or a saloon, it’s a car, it goes, and it fits people in. OK?The kind of family it would suit is one in which the front two could be any size – plenty of leg and head room – and the back three had short little legs and a high tolerance for engine noise and tyre roar. (It is actually a pre-adolescent standard, to have short legs and like car noises.) I liked all the revving and the way the speed picked up, and the slightly white-knuckle steering: very keen into a corner but not 100% predictable. Continue reading...

One friend’s version of meal planning for the weekend is to stock up on free food from the office cafeteria on FridaysMy husband and I moved here for the jobs. This place had way more than we could imagine. We packed our bags and uprooted our lives without ever having been to the west coast. Being selected to work for a major tech company was like winning the lottery; it wasn’t a question of whether you’d accept the prize, but how soon.Most of the friends we’ve made are colleagues from other states who are here for the same reason. The companies we work for have taken over the role of our parents, sponsoring what feels like an extension of our college years: free meals, laundry and shuttle buses. We are making six-figure salaries, but we’re also slow to outgrow the frugal student lifestyle. One friend’s version of meal-planning for the weekend is to stock up on free food from the office cafeteria on Fridays. Apparently, this is common practice. Continue reading...

Court in Rome upholds taxi unions’ complaint and gives company 10 days to end use of apps in country – but ruling is subject to appealAn Italian court on Friday banned the Uber app, saying it contributed to traditional taxis facing unfair competition, local media reported.In a ruling that is subject to appeal, a court in Rome upheld a complaint filed by taxi unions and gave Uber ten days to end the use of its various phone applications on Italian territory, along with the promotion and advertising of them. Continue reading...

Allegations of possible employment violations emerge at court hearing as part of lawsuit to compel company, a federal contractor, to provide compensation dataGoogle has discriminated against its female employees, according to the US Department of Labor (DoL), which said it had evidence of “systemic compensation disparities”.As part of an ongoing DoL investigation, the government has collected information that suggests the internet search giant is violating federal employment laws with its salaries for women, agency officials said.

Attempt to reveal identity behind an account criticizing Trump’s immigration policy sparked an outcry from free speech advocates and a lawsuit from Twitter

Ride-hailing company defends itself in federal court filing amid allegations it lifted LiDAR technology from Waymo, a company spun out of GoogleUber has begun to mount its defense against allegations that the ride-hailing company is using technology stolen from Waymo, the self-driving car company spun out of Google.Uber claimed in a federal court filing Friday that it began developing its own self-driving technology in 2015, before it acquired Otto, a self-driving trucking startup founded by several former Google employees. Continue reading...

App enables creative camera tomfoolery that Snapchat does so well, but without attached social networkCloning Snapchat is the new brunch, which is the new black. Facebook did it, Instagram did it, even WhatsApp did it. But even so, it’s surprising today to see that Apple’s done it too.Clips, the new iOS app from the iPhone manufacturer, takes a different tack to cloning Snapchat than most. Apple has finally learned that social networks are not its biggest strength (remember Ping?) so its new app doesn’t have one. Continue reading...

In its ongoing bid to combat fake news, Google follows Facebook in announcing new technology to help curb spread of misinformationGoogle is to start displaying fact-checking labels in its search results to highlight news and information that has been vetted and show whether it is considered to be true or false, as part of its efforts to help combat the spread of misinformation and fake news.The fact-checking feature, which was first introduced to Google News in the UK and US in October, will now be displayed as an information box in general search results as well as news search results globally. Continue reading...

If you’ve ever wondered what an android thinks about humans and the future, now’s your chance to ask one a question

Playdead’s Inside picked up four awards as indie developers outshone major studios but blockbuster took the biggest prizeAt last year’s Bafta Game Awards, the developer of Her Story, Sam Barlow, famously so struggled with his three awards that he carried them around in a champagne bucket. This year, indie developer Playdead went one better by winning four for their dystopian puzzle platformer Inside: artistic achievement, game design, narrative, and original property.After their previous game, Limbo, won none from four in 2011, the team at Playdead were delighted to take home so many this year: “We kind of expected to continue the clean slate, so we’re very happy.”

After criminals hijacked our phone to route calls abroad, our insurer and system operator both refused to pay outI work for a small charity in Benwell, Newcastle, where we have been the victim of phone system hacking that has resulted in a bill of almost £5,000 over a four-day period. We have been informed by our phone system supplier, Chaser Communications, that the hackers gained remote access to our phone system via our answering machine, and were somehow able to route calls to Syria at a premium rate.We have reported it to our local police and Action Fraud, but this has been no help. Our insurer has said we are not covered for a cyber attack, while Chaser says it will have to pass on the charges to us. Continue reading...

Following ‘error 53’ case, Choice says businesses cannot turn customers away just because they’ve had a third-party repairsCourt action against Apple for allegedly misleading iPhone and iPad owners serves as a “timely reminder” to companies that consumer rights are inviolable, Australian consumer advocates have said.

Twitter says government wants to reveal identity behind an account that claims to provide anonymity for civil servants who disagree with Trump policyThe US government sought to unmask the identity of an anonymous Twitter account criticizing its policies, according to a lawsuit filed by the social media platform Thursday.Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), a division of homeland security, issued a summons to Twitter on 14 March seeking records including the phone number, mailing addresses, and IP addresses associated with @ALT_USCIS, an account that purports to convey the views of dissenters within the government. Continue reading...

Generous words of Mr Justice Holman – ‘don’t be embarrassed’ – may be indicative of softening attitude to tech among judiciaryThe sudden trilling of a mobile phone amid the solemn atmosphere of a court hearing often leads to stern glances from the bench and cringing embarrassment from the offender. But Mr Justice Holman, one of the longest-serving high court judges in England and Wales, responded to an electronic interruption from one lawyer’s device in the family court on Thursday with compassionate forbearance.