Technology | The Guardian

At £280 the Switch is a gamble, but Nintendo has again done its idiosyncratic best to challenge the way we think about games hardwareNintendo remains a puzzling phenomenon for a lot of modern gamers. The company never makes powerful consoles, or cool consoles; it never pushes the processing envelope, and it always seems a little eccentric when it comes to online infrastructure. Unlike Sony and Microsoft, it isn’t trying to make gaming PCs designed to resemble dedicated games machines – it just makes games machines.The Switch is the latest evolution of an idea Nintendo has been playing with since the arrival of the Wii in 2006 – a console for everyone, with an interesting, accessible and flexible interface. The console itself is basically a tablet, and completely portable, but plug it into the stand and the action immediately appears on your TV. It is a weird hybrid, a new mid-point between home and handheld. Continue reading...

The industry hype around the classic ‘dumbphone’ betrays a pointed fact – there is only so much you can improve a smartphone that already does it allMobile World Congress – the showcase of the most cutting-edge technology on the planet – is in full swing in Barcelona this week. Phones, wearables and everything else with a microchip is showing off fantastic new features. But all anyone really seems interested in is a remake of a phone from 17 years ago, the Nokia 3310.There are a few ways to look at the Nokia 3310. It could just be a marketing ploy, or a Hollywood-esque remake because the industry has run out of ideas. Or maybe it’s trying to tap into the feeling that modern life is too connected, harking back to a simpler time. But whatever you think the Nokia 3310 is, it tells us something interesting about the state of the smartphone industry in 2017. Continue reading...

Sexual misconduct, discrimination and retaliation are rampant and often ignored in tech startups that reject HR practices, women and people of color sayHaana was so repulsed by what happened to her, she covered up her mirror so she wouldn’t have to look at herself. The Silicon Valley tech worker said that after drinks with startup colleagues last year, a male executive at her company put his hand up her shirt and groped her while they walked down the street.“I felt disgusted for months after that,” said Haana, who requested that the Guardian not include her full name or identify the small tech startup where she used to do marketing. “It affects me on a level that I wish it didn’t.” Continue reading...

Technology group to open new 210-hectare campus as part of £2.5bn investment and plans to double workforceDyson, the technology company, is to undergo a dramatic expansion in the UK by opening a new 210 hectare (517 acre) campus as part of a £2.5bn investment that will support its development of new battery technologies and robotics.The company, led by the billionaire inventor Sir James Dyson, will increase its UK geographical footprint tenfold by developing the campus on a former Ministry of Defence airfield and intends to at least double its workforce of 3,500 over the next few years. Continue reading...

Giving Fund platform says it allows donations to ‘over a million charities’ – but few actually get funds because they aren’t registered with company, suit saysCharitable donations made through PayPal’s Giving Fund platform may never reach their intended recipients, a federal class-action lawsuit filed Tuesday in Chicago has alleged.PayPal’s charitable platform, which the company says raised more than $7bn in 2016, claims to allow individuals to give directly to “over a million charities”. But only a fraction of those charities actually receive the donations, the lawsuit alleges, because they aren’t registered with PayPal. Donations made to non-registered charities are held by PayPal for six months before being transferred to other not-for-profit organizations, according to the suit. Continue reading...

Exclusive: AJ Vandermeyden paints picture of a hostile work environment that promoted less-qualified men and retaliated against her for raising concernsA female engineer at Tesla has accused Elon Musk’s car company of ignoring her complaints of “pervasive harassment”, paying her a lower salary than men doing the same work, promoting less qualified men over her and retaliating against her for raising concerns.The allegations of AJ Vandermeyden, who still works at the celebrated electric car manufacturer, paint a picture of a hostile work environment dominated by men where inappropriate sexual behavior is tolerated and women face numerous barriers to advance their careers. Continue reading...

Spiritual successor to classic RPG Planescape: Torment raised $5m in crowdfunding three years ago, and the complex adventure is worth the waitTorment: Tides of Numenera exemplifies that most modern of creative success stories: the Kickstarter smash hit. Developed by inXile Entertainment (the team behind Wasteland 2) it was launched on the crowdfunding platform in 2013 and reached its full $900,000 target after only six hours. By the end of the campaign it had raised almost $5m.Why such fervid interest? Torment: Tides of Numenera is the spiritual successor to the renowned 1999 role-playing game Planescape: Torment, which, alongside other classics like Baldur’s Gate, helped redefine the genre. Set in the complex Planescape D&D campaign, its narrative took in a multiverse of coexisting dimensions, it featured a rich cast of well-drawn characters and an emphasis on dialogue rather than battle. Continue reading...

From a young age, humans love to press buttons that light up and make a noise. The thrill of positive feedback lies at the heart of addiction to gambling, games, and social media

Setback is the latest sign of turmoil at Uber, which recently found itself in a separate sexual harassment firestorm and faces a major lawsuit from GoogleThe top engineering executive at Uber has resigned, adding to the company’s turmoil a week after the company found itself in an unrelated sexual harassment firestorm.Amit Singhal, whose hire was announced just five weeks ago, failed to disclose that he had left his previous job at Google because of a sexual harassment allegation, according to the tech blog Recode. Continue reading...

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

As the 3310 returns, a brief history of Nokia mobiles, featuring the first brick phone, the birth of T9 texting, the first to feature Snake and 41-megapixel phones

The ‘indestructible’ handset returns, complete with one-month standby time, colour screen and bags of nostalgiaThe rumours are true – the Nokia 3310 is back, and it even has Snake. The updated version of the early noughties icon, famed for its seemingly indestructible qualities, was unveiled at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Sunday.Anticipation of the device, a phone that doesn’t even have 3G, has been high ever since news of its release leaked earlier this year. The relaunched 3310 is produced by new mobile firm HMD Global, which licensed the Nokia brand last year. HMD is filled with key ex-Nokia people, and the phone appears to have lost none of the charm and identity of the 17-year-old original. Continue reading...

Accusations that an ex-Google engineer stole trade secrets and took them to Uber may pose an existential threat in the race to get self-driving cars on the roadWhen Anthony Levandowski loped on to the stage to accept the Hot New Startup award at an industry awards show this month, the trucker hat perched on his head served as a cringeworthy nod to the millions of drivers his self-driving truck company is poised to leave jobless.Three weeks later, it is the pioneering engineer of self-driving car technology whose job could be in jeopardy, and the lawsuit he is named in could pose an existential threat to an increasingly vulnerable Uber. Continue reading...

Automation is on the march on farms across the world, but it is costly, and may not come soon enough to fill the gapOctopus-like robots are plucking strawberries in Spain, in the US machines are vacuuming apples off the trees, and in the UK they are feeding and milking cows. Robots are taking over fields around the world, and last week food and rural affairs secretary Andrea Leadsom suggested they could help replace the thousands of EU workers who currently help put food on British tables.And it is not just Brexit that is forcing the agricultural industry to embrace the next phase of mechanisation. Farmers are already having to rethink their operations in the face of higher minimum pay – mainly a result of the national living wage for over-25s, which came into effect last year. Continue reading...

How much is it? What are those controllers like? How many games are available? Your questions answered

Leigh Alexander finds out how animal tracking tech is changing understanding of our own species too. And how do you go about QR-coding a bumblebee?

Alphabet-owned company Waymo says former employee Anthony Levandowski stole secrets before founding Otto, Uber’s self-driving truck brand

• BT will start broadcasting international regional finals next month

Susan Fowler’s allegations of sex discrimination at taxi app firm has sparked new wave of users deleting accountLess than a month after public outrage against Uber hit such peaks that it was forced to automate its account deletion process, the cab company is again facing a wave of protest and renewed calls for users to delete their accounts.This time, the fuel being added to the #deleteuber campaign is the allegations by software engineer Susan Fowler of continuous sexual harassment and discrimination at the firm. Continue reading...

Emma uses an old 17in laptop for watching TV and DVDs. Would it be better to replace it with a similar laptop, a desktop, or perhaps even buy a TV?We don’t have a traditional TV set at home. Instead, we watch TV programmes and DVDs on a 17in Dell Studio 17 laptop, which we plug into our Denon hi-fi system to get decent sound. My husband also uses the laptop for a desktop publishing project.Unfortunately, our Dell is nearly 10 years old. It’s running Windows Vista, the internet is painfully slow, and the DVD player is starting to become unreliable.The Dell Studio 17 was a great machine in its day, but your version sounds as though it has come to the end of its natural life. In theory, you could prolong it by installing Windows 10, an SSD, some extra memory and a new DVD drive. (The SSD would go in the spare drive bay.) Continue reading...

Admittedly, the game is only available in Japan, but the new console’s limited internal memory could prove annoyingIt could probably only happen to Nintendo. While other console manufacturers have dutifully stuffed their consoles with ever more expansive hard drives, the Kyoto-based veteran has always been somewhat penurious with storage. Its next release, the delightfully eccentric Switch, contains only 32GB of internal memory, around 4GB of which is reserved for the operating system. Sure, this probably keeps the manufacturing costs down, but it presents a problem. This week, the official Japanese Switch page revealed a host of forthcoming titles, together with their file sizes. One, a double pack featuring Dragon Quest Heroes I and II, comes in at ... 32GB. Which means if you buy the digital version from the Nintendo eShop, it won’t fit on your console.There are some mitigating factors here. Dragon Quest Heroes I & II collects two full-size PlayStation releases into one package, so it’s an unnaturally large proposition. The file sizes for other games were mostly around 1GB to 5GB, with Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild coming in at 13.4GB. Also, unlike the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, the Switch doesn’t demand that physical games are installed on to the hard drive before you can play, so if you buy a boxed copy of Dragon Quest Heroes I & II, you won’t have any issues. But if you do plan on making a lot of eShop purchases on your new machine, you’re going to have to buy a MicroSD card for extra storage space. A 128gb card comes in at around £35. Continue reading...

Ubisoft’s multiplayer-focused fighting game is a single-minded simulation of melee battle, with an emphasis on epic physical confrontationsThere was an interview on Radio 4 with an ex-boxer recently, in which she spoke about the peculiar nature of the sport. One thing she said really stood out “Boxing teaches you to use violence as a resource.” That phrase describes the experience of playing For Honor pretty well. This is a game about learning to use deadly force in order to navigate through a world where nothing else matters but conflict. For Honor has the purity, depth and bloody grace of a martial art.The set-up is certainly as simple as a sport. The player selects from three warring factions – the knights, the samurai and the vikings, and then fights everyone else, either in the single-player mode or online. The former is effectively a training exercise, teaching you the basics of combat, as well as the special-move sets specific to all of the available classes of warrior, unlockable during play. There is a kind of story, about factions battling to control land and food, but really, you’re just stomping through a series of beautifully realised historical environments bludgeoning people, while looking for collectibles (this is a Ubisoft game after all). It’s basic stuff, but it does feature a range of breathtaking set-piece encounters from castle sieges to village raids, all drawn in gritty, pulverising detail. Continue reading...

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

The list recognises businesses for their services to creativity and innovation and includes startups in the film, tech and gaming industriesAn agency that creates beer from clouds and a production company focusing on disabled talent are among the 10 businesses to have been named in Creative England’s Future Leaders list, picked from the CE50, which is published today.The companies were chosen by a panel of creative industry judges including Emily Forbes, founder and CEO of Seenit, a crowdsourcing video platform (whose company was named in the list last year), actor, writer and director Simon Bird, who played Will Mackenzie in the Inbetweeners, MediaCom UK CEO Josh Krichefski, AO.com group brand director Andrew KirkCaldy and Noirin Carmody, founder and COO at Revolution Software, for their services to creativity and innovation. Continue reading...

From questionable labor practices to rejections of transportation laws, critics say Uber built its service through a ‘pattern of arrogance’Uber’s sexual harassment case is the latest controversy in a long history of the ride-sharing company flouting regulations and, according to the company’s critics, ignoring ethical and legal standards in the name of “disruption”.Related: Uber launches 'urgent investigation' into sexual harassment claims Continue reading...

Jolyon Maugham QC says he is preparing to submit case to high court claiming taxi app company should be paying VAT on faresA leading tax lawyer is planning to challenge Uber in the courts over what he alleges could be a £20m-a-year black hole in its tax payments in the UK.Jolyon Maugham QC said he was preparing to submit a case to the high court that would argue the US taxi app company should be paying VAT on fares, which he estimated would total almost £20m for 2015. Continue reading...

Fitness trackers are pointless, especially when you’re only walking to the kitchen for another bacon sandwich

Users of the app, sick of prying parents and having to look perfect, are creating private secondary profiles where they can just be themselves. It’s a real #nofilterName: Finstagrams.Age: Young. Continue reading...

Penny Mordaunt appoints ‘sector champions’ to improve experiences of people with disabilities in industries including fashion and gamingA government minister is calling on industries, including gaming, fashion and television, to urgently increase their representation of people with disabilities.Penny Mordaunt said she had been surprised to hear young people raise the lack of disabled characters in computer games as their top concern during research by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). Continue reading...

Faster, more powerful streaming device comes with Alexa and voice control, turning almost any TV smart – despite only being little larger than a flash driveAmazon is bringing its Alexa voice assistant to British televisions with a £40 Fire TV stick that turns almost any TV into a smart streaming box.The new Fire TV stick comes with a voice-enabled remote, giving users access to voice controls and search for movies, music and TV shows. But it will also perform Alexa’s other skills, allowing users to check their commute, get a weather forecast and to answer questions and control smart home devices by speaking into the remote and showing new so called video cards with information on screen. Continue reading...

Illegally streamed live football matches and pirated films and music will be hidden under new plan to crackdown on piratingInternet users will find it harder to search for pirated films and music and illegally streamed live football matches under a new plan to crackdown on piracy websites.Search engine companies Google and Bing have signed up to a voluntary code of practice aimed at preventing users from visiting disreputable content providers. Continue reading...

Armed with a solid playlist, we test the quality of a selection of speakers with claims to superior sound fidelityEvery reputable audio brand now offers portable Bluetooth speakers, alongside swaths of Amazon-fodder with names such as iClutch and The Broozr. The latter are very cheap and are certainly a good option for people who simply want a slightly louder phone. The seven speakers tested below represent a range of those with pretensions to superior fidelity.Some of these have flashy extra features such as USB power output or aptX compression. The former is useful, but in most cases seemed like an afterthought, while the latter is almost worthless unless your device is equally well equipped and you only listen to swanky lossless audio. We’ve judged them, then, primarily on the quality of the sound they produce, plying them repeatedly with the same six tracks, in the hope of separating the room-fillers from the landfillers. Continue reading...

Transfer money, search more accurately, or engage with your appliances: tips and tricks to enhance and customise the world’s most popular webmail serviceWant to see more of your inbox at a glance? Click the cog-wheel at the upper right of the Gmail web interface, then select “compact” to reduce the spacing between items (you can also choose “comfortable” for a more relaxed view). You can also view more conversations per page: click the cog, then select “settings” to open Gmail’s configuration page. Under “general”, you’ll see a setting for “maximum page size”: increase to 100 and you won’t need to keep flipping through pages to browse recent messages. If you don’t like the way email exchanges are bundled into threads, you can also disable conversation view, to make Gmail list each email individually. Click “save changes” at the bottom to apply your preferences. Continue reading...

The Facebook founder could yet lead other tech titans into the arena of public life. But they would need a whole new set of skillsAbraham Lincoln took under 300 words to deliver the Gettysburg address. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg deployed just under 6,000 to explain his mission as a defender of globalisation, and mark an official shift in his career plan from tech titan to political aspirant.Related: Mark Zuckerberg's letter annotated: what he said and what he didn't Continue reading...

GMB says changes to law have ‘opened up a hornet’s nest’, allowing Uber drivers to work outside areas where they are licensedUber has been accused of exploiting a legal loophole that allows its drivers to operate in UK towns and cities where they don’t have a licence, leaving local authorities powerless to regulate them.Mick Rix, the GMB union’s national officer for the hackney and private-hire taxi trade, said the company behind the cab-hailing app was “acting with impunity” across the UK, where it was increasingly “spreading its tentacles” into smaller towns and cities. Continue reading...

The Facebook CEO’s 5,700 word post advocated a strong civil society and ended quoting Lincoln. Is he pitching for office, or already an unofficial Potus?It is not normal for a technology chief executive to announce a new product roadmap in the form of a 5,700 word blogpost that begins with a unified theory of history and ends by quoting Abraham Lincoln. But that’s exactly what Mark Zuckerberg has done in his letter to the “Facebook community”, published on Thursday.The unusual aspects of the letter don’t stop at its length. Zuckerberg rapidly alternates between lofty statements of social principle and minor product updates. One minute, he is discussing the necessity for a strong civil society existing between the government and the people, implicitly rebutting Margaret Thatcher; the next, he is discussing the need for the administrators of Facebook groups to be able to support “sub-communities”, so that, for example, a Facebook group for a university can contain within it a sub-group for a particular accommodation block. Continue reading...

Alex Hern analyses the Facebook founder’s 5,700-word mission statement on the goals of Facebook and highlights what he really meant and what he left out

Machines that helped transform the way we work and play, from big beige boxes to laptop-tablet hybrids Continue reading...

The 5,700-word mission statement reads like a state of the union address, tackling everything from fake news to growing anti-globalization sentimentMark Zuckerberg has written a long-winded riposte to criticisms of Facebook and growing anti-globalization sentiment.The 5,700-word manifesto, posted to his Facebook page, outlines the challenges faced by the world and the measures that Facebook can take to address them. From climate change and pandemics to terrorism and inequality, Zuckerberg has a plan – albeit a vague one – for building what he considers a better future. Continue reading...

With clusters of balloons through the stratosphere, Project Loon aims to bring internet to the two-thirds of the world’s population who still don’t have access

America is producing more than ever before, but it is doing so with fewer and fewer workers. Once trucks become automated, where will these jobs go?In April 2016, Uber announced the acquisition of Otto, a San Francisco-based startup that has developed a kit that can turn any big rig into a self-driving truck.

David is fed up with spam, phishing and viruses, and thinks email is no longer fit for purpose. What could he use to replace it?Like countless others, I use email daily, but it’s a love/hate relationship because of the dangers of viruses, trojans, phishing, spam etc. I think it is unreasonable to expect the average person to be able to tell a valid email from one that is dangerous.The latest problem is the incorrect identification of emails as spam. I check my spam folder two or three times a week for emails that my ISP (BT Yahoo) has decided are spam. These could be emails between friends with whom I have been exchanging emails for years. It has caused some real problems, and I am now adopting the bizarre solution of texting the person to alert them I have sent an email.I don’t think anything is going to replace email in the near future, and probably not in the far future. It’s virtually impossible to use internet technologies without an email address, because they are used as identifiers by most websites, cloud services, and even operating systems such as Google Android and Microsoft Windows. Many companies, schools and colleges also give all their members a unique email address. Continue reading...

Halo returns to the world of RTS with a challenging yet instinctively playable take on the once-mighty genre, and one that is full of new ideasFew genres have fallen from grace quite as fast as the real-time strategy (RTS). It’s now nearly a decade since Starcraft, Command & Conquer and Age of Empires regularly duked it out at the top of the charts. Today, two of those mighty names are no more and even 2009’s Halo Wars, which tried to re-think the whole experience from the ground up, proved to be developer Ensemble Studios’ final game. So all credit to Microsoft for having another go at taking its most treasured IP in this most difficult of directions.Luckily, Halo Wars 2 arrives with plenty of shock and awe in its arsenal – not just a rollicking 13-level campaign but a flurry of multiplayer modes and a whole new game type called Blitz. Development duties have switched to strategy specialist Creative Assembly (the Total War series) and Halo specialist 343 Industries, but otherwise this is instantly familiar stuff to fans of the original. Continue reading...

Despite Prince’s refusal to deal with the much-maligned streaming platform while he was alive, his music is now available on the site. But there are still a few superstars who won’t play

A homage to the retro handset is rumoured to be launching later this month. And it’s not the only basic mobile in Nokia’s arsenalIt was a cockroach of a phone. You could drop it from a plane. You could run over it. You could crush it in a hydraulic press, if that was the sort of thing you were into.Now, the phone that became a meme about surviving the apocalypse is coming back from the dead, one last time. Continue reading...

If implemented, patent filed by company will solve problem of drone landing and keep valuables from breaking upon impactThe bizarre patents of Amazon’s drone programme keep on coming. Hot on the heels of the company’s proposal for a floating airship warehouse, it has now filed a patent for parachute-aided delivery of packages.In the future, if the patent is implemented, Amazon’s delivery drones may not even need to land on your enormous lawn to deliver your parcels. Instead, the drone will simply release parcels from on high, deploying parachutes to slow their descent and ensure the valuables inside remain intact. Continue reading...

Sophisticated artificial intelligence will make ‘house cats’ of humans, claims the entrepreneur, but his grand vision for mind-controlled tech may be a long way offHumans must become cyborgs if they are to stay relevant in a future dominated by artificial intelligence. That was the warning from Tesla founder Elon Musk, speaking at an event in Dubai this weekend.Musk argued that as artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated, it will lead to mass unemployment. “There will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot can’t do better,” he said at the World Government Summit. Continue reading...

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

National Cyber Security Centre to be formally opened as chancellor warns of sophisticated and severe attacksHacking attacks on the government and businesses are increasing in their frequency, severity and sophistication, Philip Hammond, the chancellor, has said.Related: UK hit by 188 high-level cyber-attacks in three months Continue reading...

System was intended to prevent stream of low quality software flooding the store but failed to halt explosion in content last yearMarket-dominating PC game store Steam is ending the X Factor-style voting system is has used for the past five years to decide which independent developers can sell on the storefront. Valve, the company behind Steam, will replace the programme with a simpler system which guarantees access to any developer who can pay an application fee.Previously, developers below a certain size could use the programme, called “Greenlight”, to put their games up for a public vote. Those with enough votes would be allowed space on the web store, while those that failed to excite potential customers were kept behind the velvet rope. Continue reading...