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 “disruptionâ€.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...
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 “generalâ€, you’ll see a setting for “maximum page sizeâ€: 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 communityâ€, 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-communitiesâ€, 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
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...
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 “Greenlightâ€, 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...
Rebellion’s long-distance shooter brings the action to second world war Italy, but refuses to depart from well-known conventionsThe act of shooting a gun – occasionally dull, frequently unsatisfying, universally overused – has become gaming’s primary interaction. Rather than using firearms as an emotional release or a tense show of force, games often feature the firing of a weapon as a formulaic means of earning progress; to fight your way from A to B to earn a new cutscene, a better weapon or a climactic boss.Few games nowadays succeed in making the actual act of shooting the main reason to play. But Sniper Elite 4 does a superb job of that. By putting you behind a scope, tracking your target from 300m away, the game creates a sniping experience that’s so good the rest of Sniper Elite 4 – a serviceable, visually impressive open-world shooter akin to Far Cry – feels generic in comparison.
Thanks to advances in technology, many jobs that weren’t considered ripe for automation suddenly areIn the battle for the 21st century workplace, computers are winning. And the odds of us puny humans making a comeback are not very good.
‘Alexander’ tells how Shaltai-Boltai, or Humpty Dumpty, terrorised Russian officials for three years, combining hacking, leaking and extortionWearing a Christmas jumper emblazoned with reindeer, Alexander sits in a bar in Riga. He has a remarkable story to tell. After several years hiding in the shadows, he is, or at least claims to be, the last member still at large of Russia’s most notorious band of hackers and leakers.Shaltai-Boltai, or Humpty Dumpty, terrorised Russian officials for nearly three years, combining hacking, leaking and extortion, while retaining an impenetrable cloak of anonymity. The group would post online samples of emails from officials they had hacked, and put the rest of the cache up for sale: the incriminating information could then either be bought back by the original sender, or snapped up by enemies. Continue reading...
It is a fuzzy, lo-fi world of multi-coloured bricks and boxy animals. So why do millions of people want to live inside Minecraft? We travel to Sweden to find outYou wouldn’t know, turning into this nondescript street in Stockholm and padding up the stone steps to Minecraft HQ, that anything special was being made up here. The truth only becomes clear when you step through the door and discover the endless shelves filled with awards (including a Bafta) and the vast boxes of Minecraft merchandise piled in every corner. This is where they make what many regard as a digital version of Lego: a game that’s been downloaded more than 100m times on PCs, consoles and smartphones since its launch in 2009. If you have children aged between six and 16, the chances are they’re hooked on this strange, blocky pursuit. And the chances are you’ve asked yourself: why?To truly understand the appeal of Minecraft, you need to understand the studio behind it. Five years ago, when makers Mojang moved to this first-floor office in the trendy area of Södermalm, they wanted it to have the feel of a gentlemen’s club. In came Chesterfield sofas, a snooker table and lots of dark oak furniture. They even designed a Mojang coat of arms, which hangs near an enormous banqueting table. The aim was to make a nice place to hang out, meet people and have fun – an environment that felt personal. In short, they wanted the office to be like Minecraft. Continue reading...
Released in 2013, Rockstar’s epic gangland adventure is currently No 2 in the UK games chart. Is gaming having its dad rock moment?In a recent conference call to discuss its latest quarterly financial results, the games publisher Take Two provided some astonishing statistics about Grand Theft Auto V. According to the company’s CEO, Strauss Zelnick, the open-world gangster adventure, originally released in 2013, has now sold more than 75m copies.Not only that, but NPD Group sales data shows it was the sixth best-selling game across all formats in 2016. Three years after its release. If you look at the current UK games chart, GTA V is at number two, beaten only by Resident Evil 7, released last month. Why is this happening?
Canadian Avery Alder created her tabletop game Monsterhearts to channel her own experiences of LGBT adolescence. Characters are teenagers but with supernatural powers, where a roll of the dice is as random as a hormonal surgePete had been having a rough day. First he was late for school, then he’d been cruelly mocked by his classmate Britney and her posh-girl clique. Now he was developing a horrible suspicion that he might have eaten his neighbour’s cat.Fortunately for the local feline population, Pete was a fictional character. A bemused and terrified teenage werewolf, he was part of a pen-and-paper roleplaying game called Monsterhearts, whose players assume the roles of supernatural creatures traversing the social minefield of school. Continue reading...
Photographer Gab Scanu, 20, has amassed a huge following on Instagram with his aerial shots of Australian landscapes and coastlines. He spoke to us about his work
Amazon’s smart voice assistant takes to the road with new accessory for anything from music and audiobooks to shopping and smarthome controlAmazon’s Alexa voice assistant is making its way into cars in the UK, bringing voice controlled music and even the ability to remotely control smart home devices onto the road.
Reform thinktank says sector could be ‘the next Uber’ and staff should embrace the gig economy amid rise in automationAlmost 250,000 public sector workers could lose their jobs to robots over the next 15 years, according to a new report which claims machines would be more efficient and save billions of pounds.Reform, a right-of-centre thinktank, says websites and artificial intelligence “chat bots†could replace up to 90% of Whitehall’s administrators, as well as tens of thousands in the NHS and GPs’ surgeries, by 2030 – saving as much as £4bn a year. Continue reading...
Simple rock-styling, good controls, excellent battery life and great sound, make these relatively compact on-ear wireless headphones worth a listenMarshall knocked it out of the park with its last set of Bluetooth headphones, the Major II Bluetooth, which means the new Mid Bluetooth have big shoes to fill.
The defence secretary, Michael Fallon, appears ignorant of well-established UK and US military programmes designed to modify public perceptions in conflict zones (Nato must counter Russia’s ‘weaponising’ of lies – Fallon, 3 February). A prototype system was first reported in detail by Nick Fielding and Ian Cobain in the Guardian nearly six years ago – just as Nato began air attacks on Libya (Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media, 18 March 2011).I quote: “… it will allow the US military to create a false consensus in online conversations, crowd out unwelcome opinions and smother commentaries or reports that do not correspond with its own objectives … each fake online persona must have a convincing background, history and supporting details … up to 50 US-based controllers should be able to operate false identities from their workstations without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversariesâ€. Each operator would be able to masquerade as “10 separate identitiesâ€. Continue reading...
Archivist Jason Scott has made it his mission to record digital culture for future generations. But why are we so keen to relive the days of Geocities websites and 56k modems?Jason Scott is a “guerilla internet archivistâ€. Someone’s got to be. If you’ve got some content embedded in a site that’s about to disappear, then he and his team of coders and data engineers go in there and “Ocean’s Eleven†the joint. In the name of digital archaeology, they migrate as much data as they can to a safe harbour even as the main site goes down. “We swoop in and, to the best of our ability, take a snapshot,†he says.Scott is interested in conserving the stuff we have forgotten has value. Increasingly, our culture plays itself out on the internet, yet even now we have a tendency to view what we do on there as trivial. Or we make the mistake of assuming that digital means for ever. “The problem is, the internet’s systems have been designed as though everything goes on indefinitely,†he says. “There are no agreed-upon shutdown procedures. When users die, what do you do? Because their accounts live on, and suddenly Facebook is telling you your dead friend also likes Snickers bars. Often, you don’t even know who’s running a site. It’s as if you didn’t know who was in charge of your water supply; then one day, it just stopped ...†Continue reading...
Banking is easier than ever thanks to contactless and mobile transactions. But making it simple to spend money isn’t all goodA recent report from the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute has revealed what many people with mental health problems already knew – mental illess can have a significant, and often terrifying, impact on your finances.Anxious? Good luck tackling the bank statements piling up, unopened. Having a manic episode? Time to spend thousands of pounds on things you’ll never use! Depressed? … What was my pin again? Continue reading...
Fitness trackers are not just for humans anymore – a growing range of electronic collars and cameras can help you monitor your pet’s location, activity and even emotional stateWe are becoming a species obsessed with data. Not content with monitoring our own sleeping, eating and exercising habits, many of us could soon be tracking the lives of our pets, too. Where did your cat go last night? How many calories did your dog eat today? What is your snake thinking? Knowing the answers to such questions – well, the first two, anyway – is becoming ever easier, and the advantages of doing so are increasing.Related: Puppies' response to speech could shed light on baby-talk, suggests study Continue reading...
Social media start-up is following a familiar path, but attitude to tax and reluctance to be ‘creepy’ set it apart from its peersSnap, the company formerly known as Snapchat, has finally confirmed it is planning to go public, with an IPO expected sometime in March. If all goes to plan, the company should net somewhere in the realm of $25bn (£20bn) from the public offering, shooting it past Twitter in market cap terms and cementing its position as one of the largest social media companies in the world.But while it sounds like the typical final evolution of a Silicon Valley titan, Snap has deliberately charted a very different route from its most obvious competitors for much of its history. Continue reading...
by Ewen MacAskill Defence correspondent on (#2B88J)
UK defence secretary accuses Moscow of ‘weaponising misinformation’ to disable democratic machineryNato must begin to compete on the cyber-battlefield to counter Russian hacking, which is “weaponising misinformation†to create a post-truth age, the defence secretary, Sir Michael Fallon, has said.In his hardest-hitting comments yet about Russia, Fallon said that in the past two years it had targeted the US, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Bulgaria and Montenegro, which becomes a full Nato member this year. He blamed Russia for helping create the fake information age. Continue reading...
The ephemeral app is set to go public, could be worth $25bn, and is seen as the only serious challenger to Facebook’s audience. But can the ascent continue?What is the value of Snapchat? The notoriously secretive parent company of the ephemeral messaging app is about to find out. Snap Inc has this week released paperwork designed to drum up interest in its initial public offering, scheduled for March, which some analysts say could value the company at between $20bn and $25bn – making it one of the biggest technology offerings in recent years.Snapchat was created in September 2011 as a selfie app that let users share pictures that deleted themselves once they had been viewed. It quickly developed a reputation as a sexting app, although this wasn’t representative of how the app was actually being used. Continue reading...
Government does not appear to have a coordinated strategy and agencies tasked with safeguarding are not consolidated, says MPs’ reportConfidence in the government’s ability to protect Britain from high-level cyber-attacks is being undermined by a skills shortage, parliament’s spending watchdog has said.Ministers have taken too long to consolidate the “alphabet soup†of agencies tasked with safeguarding the UK from cyber-attacks and there appears to be no coordination across the public sector, the public accounts committee (PAC) said. Continue reading...
Online retailer announces 55% rise in year-on-year profit but even a 22% bump in revenue can’t match Wall Street’s expectationsAmazon had a bumper holiday, as the online retailer announced a 55% rise in fourth-quarter profit on Thursday for the three months ending 31 December, but its share price fell in after hours trading after the retail and services giant narrowly missed Wall Street’s sales expectations.For years, Amazon eschewed profits for growth, to the criticism of many investors. Profits for the final quarter of 2016 rose to $749m from $482m a year earlier, the seventh straight profitable quarter for Amazon. Continue reading...
John helps run a small museum, and they need a screen to show what’s on display upstairs. What are the options?I help run a small museum in a historic building, and it’s hard for anyone with mobility issues to access an upper floor. To comply with accreditation requirements, we want some way to show what we have on display upstairs, using photos of exhibits and a short video.On a recent visiting to a National Trust property, I saw a tablet in use for this purpose. If we do this, which device would suit our needs? Our budget is £200 to £250. If we could use the device for other tasks, such as word processing, that would be helpful. Is a Windows PC out of the question on this budget? How much more would we need to spend? JohnYou can use almost any type of computer for this purpose, from a small tablet to a large all-in-one PC. You can also use almost any operating system, including Android, Apple’s iOS, Windows and Linux. The best choice will depend on your programming abilities and factors such as the amount of physical space available, and whether the device is supervised at all times. Continue reading...
In the backstreets of Bondi I meet with other mindless midnight scrollers who, like me, want to stop taking their phones to the toiletThe first step to acknowledging addiction is to, well, acknowledge the addiction – and get help. So I am here in the backstreets of Bondi, ringing on the buzzer of a double-storey terrace. It’s the first time I’ve attended a support group and I’m nervous.I’m at the home of Matt Ringrose – and tonight in Sydney he is holding a meeting for mobile device addicts. Of which I am one. Continue reading...
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