Technology | The Guardian

Every day, people leave their quandaries on the Reddit website – asking others to judge whether they were in the wrong. As religion wanes, are we crowdsourcing our ethics?

It is a gorgeous, engaging, free-to-play, open-world role-playing game … but at what cost?Genshin Impact seems to have come from nowhere. A month ago nobody knew what it was; now ads for it are plastered all over the New York subway and it’s the talk of gaming Twitter. It has raked in more than $100m (£75m) in its first two weeks, placing it among the Chinese games industry’s most successful forays into the global scene. That’s because it’s a pretty good game that looks, sounds and feels expensive, but is available for free – at least at face value.Like Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – which it heavily resembles, at least on a surface level – Genshin Impact is an action-packed role-playing game with a huge world, chock-full of gorgeous vistas to explore by running, climbing and gliding. The appearance might be similar but the feeling is significantly different. Breath of the Wild’s aesthetic is based on the beauty and solitude of nature; Genshin, by contrast, is the theme park version of that. Where BotW was content to merely hint at hidden treasures and leave vast spaces in-between, you can’t go 30 seconds in Genshin without tripping over some glowy object or mysterious chest. A constant stream of new weapons, trinkets, crafting materials, coins and characters to play with makes it dangerously easy to keep playing. Continue reading...

Filing is first step in a battle that could take years, and experts say it will probably move forward even if Biden wins the electionAfter being hit Tuesday with the most significant monopoly-related charges to be filed in the US in decades, Google has a long road ahead in its quest to prove it does not unfairly dominate the online search engine space.Google was accused in the long-expected lawsuit of harming competition in internet search and search advertising through distribution agreements – contracts in which Google pays other companies millions of dollars to prioritize its search engine in their products – and other restrictions that put its search tool front and center whenever consumers browsed the web. Continue reading...

Video-sharing platform announces move just days after crackdown on QAnon conspiracy movementTikTok has banned a swathe of hate speech from its platform, just days after the company announced a crackdown on the conspiracist QAnon movement.Explicitly hateful ideologies, such as neo-nazism and white supremacy, are already banned on TikTok. Now, the moderation will be extended to cover “neighbouring ideologies”, such as white nationalism and white genocide theory. Continue reading...

Republicans and Democrats agree on something: big tech’s power threatens our economies and our flow of information

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is live streaming as she plays the popular game with some internet-famous people on Twitch. Will it win new voters?Hi Patrick, I keep seeing lots of screenshots of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez playing some game involving little Telly Tubby-type creatures. What’s all that about?Hey Josh. So basically AOC (and Ilhan Omar, for a bit) is playing a video game called Among Us with some internet-famous people, and she’s broadcasting the whole thing live on the internet to anyone who wants to tune in! Continue reading...

Not all virtual sports games are faithful copies of their real-life counterparts. Here are a handful where developers play fast and loose with the rulesWhen you think of sports video games you might think of Fifa or Madden, which obsessively mimic their real-life equivalents – or Track & Field, which valiantly if unsuccessfully tries to. But not all developers play by the rules. From impossible athletics to fantasy baseball players with 27 fingers, these are some of the weirdest virtual takes on sport around. Continue reading...

Site was back online Monday morning with a Russian company enlisted to protect it from DDoS attacksThe latest incarnation of the hate-filled online forum 8chan was temporarily kicked off the internet on Sunday, after a company protecting the site from DDoS attacks cut its services.The site, which is now called 8kun but was formerly known as 8chan, was back online on Monday morning, security researcher Brian Krebs reported, with a Russian company freshly enlisted to provide the protection services. Continue reading...

Children International and The Water Project have no way of refunding Darkside groupNo charity wants to turn down donations, particularly in the middle of a funding crunch. But what if donations come from a surprising source – hackers?While it may sound like a modern-day version of Robin Hood – electronically stealing money from companies and corporations, and giving it back digitally via bitcoin to charities – when the money comes from the proceeds of crime, the law is clear: it must be rejected. Continue reading...

Lawsuit accuses tech company of abusing its position to dominate search and search advertisingThe US justice department filed a lawsuit against Google on Tuesday, accusing the tech company of abusing its position to maintain an illegal monopoly over search and search advertising.“Two decades ago, Google became the darling of Silicon Valley as a scrappy startup with an innovative way to search the emerging internet. That Google is long gone,” the suit alleged. Continue reading...

Far from moaning about the glitches, players are experimenting with everything from community fly-ins to planes operated live by Twitch groupsThe building stood 212 storeys high, piercing the skyline like some kind of alien monument. The pilots who discovered it while flying over a quiet Melbourne suburb quickly reported their findings on forums and social media, drawing other fascinated spectators. Soon, they were visiting in their thousands.The building is not real – it exists only within Flight Simulator 2020, the latest in Microsoft’s 35-year-old series. And what players quickly realised was that it was the product of a slight mathematical error. Flight Simulator bases its reproduction of the entire surface of the planet on data from a range of sources including the OpenStreetMap, an open source mapping application maintained by volunteers. One such volunteer, Australian student Nathan Wright accidentally entered a particular building height as 212 storeys rather than 12. No one corrected it, so the Flight Simulator program used the data as it stood. Hence: super skyscraper. Continue reading...

New fibre-optic cables to Pacific islands have been cautiously welcomed amid warnings over harassment and violence linked to online platformsFrom the narrow bay of Sydney’s Tamarama Beach, a cable twice as thick as garden hose, carrying optic fibre thinner than human hair, stretches along the ocean floor linking Australia to Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands.The Coral Sea cable will provide, for the first time, fast internet to Australia’s near Pacific island neighbours. A similar link, called Manatua One Polynesia – connecting Samoa, Niue, the Cook Islands and French Polynesia – was declared “ready for service” in July. Continue reading...

The policy change is intended to ‘reduce opportunities for confusion or abuse’ and did not give a timeline for advertising to returnFacebook has announced significant changes to its advertising and misinformation policies, saying it will stop running political ads in the United States after polls close on 3 November for an undetermined period of time.The changes, announced on Wednesday, come in an effort to “protect the integrity” of the upcoming election “by fighting foreign interference, misinformation and voter suppression”, the company said in a blogpost. Continue reading...

No one needs 45 buttons on the TV remote, but phones, computers and ovens have all become overly complicated. And it’s excluding the people who would get the most out of the latest advancesAbout 10 years ago, I moved into a fancy flat. I was looking forward to my dad coming to stay for the first time. He arrived at lunchtime, before I went off to present The One Show. He is really into music, so I enjoyed showing him the audio system, which could play more or less every radio station in the world and just about every piece of music ever made. I could even summon up a specialist jazz station in Los Angeles. Then there was the lighting, which could be selected to come on in different places at selected levels. Finally, there was the television and associated apparatus which, for convenience, could be operated by a single remote control sporting a little touchscreen. With a cheery wave, I bade him farewell, encouraging him to relax and enjoy himself.It was eight o’clock and night had fallen by the time I returned. The place was quiet and in darkness. I was terrified, frankly, that he had expired. Then I heard a tiny, tinny sound emanating from the big, open-plan living room. “Dad?” I switched on the light, selecting the brightest of the five available options, and there he was, sitting alone in the middle of the too-big sofa that could comfortably have seated 20 of him. On the coffee table in front of him was the small, battery-operated wireless he carried with him everywhere. On the television, an error message flitted around the screen. In his hand was a glass of wine. He looked resigned, but not unhappy. “I tried,” he said, “but got nowhere with anything, so just gave up.” Continue reading...

It was the self-aware classic that took decades to complete – and laid the groundwork for an era of adventure gamesAnyone who went to school during the Thatcher years will remember adventure games as something experienced on the class computer, typically a BBC Micro. Educational titles such as Granny’s Garden and Flowers of Crystal were as compulsive as they were frustrating. These were the prototype point-and-click games, incorporating graphics into riddles and thinly disguised geography lessons. After my 50th wrong marker buoy on Cambridge Software House’s Mary Rose had me contemplating hurling the floppy disks away from me like a pair of swimming floats, I’d learn that there was a new type of adventure game on the horizon: LucasArts’ The Secret of Monkey Island, which turns 30 this month.Ron Gilbert, co-designer on Monkey Island and various other adventure games of the era, disliked the fantasy themes that titles like Loom (1990) were relying on, and wrote as much in a 1989 article Why Adventure Games Suck. So Monkey Island took players to the 17th-century Caribbean instead, the place and time of Treasure Island. Players took control of Guybrush Threepwood as he tried to prove himself a seadog, rubbing shoulders with some of the most bloodthirsty – and self-aware – buccaneers ever conjured in code: Smirk, a cigar-chewing fencing instructor, and Meathooks, a brawler with metal claws for hands. Then there was island governor Elaine Marley, a formidable swordfighter and unlikely damsel who had been kidnapped by back-from-the-dead ghost pirate LeChuck. Continue reading...

Claims Biden immigration policies risked more Covid-19 as company also blocks ads delegitimizing election resultsFacebook has removed a number of ads from the Trump campaign for making misleading and inaccurate claims about Covid-19 and immigration.On Wednesday the social media platform took down the Trump-sponsored advertisements which claimed, without evidence, that accepting refugees would increase Americans’ risk of Covid-19. The ad, which featured a video of Joe Biden talking about the border and asylum seekers, claimed, also without evidence, that the Democratic candidate’s policies would increase the number of refugees from Syria, Somalia and Yemen by “700%”. More than 38 versions of the ad were run on Facebook and were seen by hundreds of thousands of people before the company removed them. Continue reading...

Tesla CEO acknowledged the design and manufacturing process of the new cells, which he says will be half as expensive, is not completeElon Musk described a new generation of electric vehicle batteries that will be more powerful, longer lasting, and half as expensive as the company’s current cells at Tesla’s “Battery Day” on Tuesday.Tesla’s new larger cylindrical cells will provide five times more energy, six times more power and 16% greater driving range, Musk said, adding that full production is about three years away. Continue reading...

Upload to social video site was part of ‘coordinated attack’ a week after live Facebook broadcast, MPs hearA graphic suicide video that went viral on TikTok in early September was “the result of a coordinated raid from the dark web”, the company has told MPs.Giving evidence to the Commons committee for digital, culture, media and sport (DCMS), Theo Bertram, TikTok’s European director of public policy, said the video, which was originally broadcast live on Facebook, was used in a “coordinated attack” on the social video app a week after it was originally recorded. Continue reading...

Donald Trump believes video-sharing service is security threat but deal is changing by the hourDonald Trump has accused the video-sharing social networking service, which is wildly popular in the US, of being a threat to national security. He claims its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, would give the Chinese government access to user data upon request. TikTok denies the accusation. Continue reading...

Studio Oleomingus create surreal games that unpick India’s thorny past – and take aim at its chaotic presentIn Gujarat, a tiny independent studio is drawing on India’s rich literary history to create surreal games that flow like visual poems, evoking decades of colonial literature and folk theatre to draw attention to the politics of today. Through fantastical environments where buildings and oversized monuments are made of rubber sandals and toothpaste tubes, Studio Oleomingus – made up of writer/artist Dhruv Jani and programmer Sushant Chakraborty, with help from another programmer, Vivek Savsaiya – crafts interactive stories that cast a playful light on India’s complicated past and present.“We find video games to be excellent spaces for political discourse,” Jani tells me over Skype. “The government is hardly bothered about something as ‘trivial’ as video games, and they also give you a lot of room to think and ponder complex ideas.” Continue reading...

Cutting-edge foldable confines previous missteps to the past for a truly special device that will one day become mainstreamFollowing a bit of a false start with the original Fold last year, Samsung has hit a home run in its second attempt to make cutting-edge folding phone-tablets a reality – as the Galaxy Z Fold 2 is something really quite special.The new device costs £1,799, which makes it a super luxury purchase. Make no mistake, this is absolutely not a smartphone for the masses, but it is a very important device. Continue reading...

From its early days as a whimsical, arthouse space through more recent waves of influencers and pool inflatables, the world’s favourite photo-sharing app has rewired society for good and bad

Spelunky is a masterpiece of a game – and notoriously difficult. Here’s how to lower yourself gently into its cavernous depthsSpelunky 2 is out this month on PS4 and PC, and it’s a superb sequel to Derek Yu’s influential roguelike masterpiece. It’s also very challenging, and while part of the fun is learning the game and mastering it, there are some things I wish I’d known before plugging dozens of hours into it. Here are a few to help you along.1. How to kill bats easily every time Continue reading...

Consumers buying chlorine dioxide solution on Amazon platform say they have been drinking fluid despite FDA warningsIndustrial bleach is being sold on Amazon through its product pages which consumers are buying under the mistaken belief that it is a “miracle cure” for Covid-19, despite health warnings from the US Food and Drug Administration that drinking the fluid can kill.Related: 'Archbishop' of Florida church selling bleach 'miracle cure' arrested with son Continue reading...

Pros from then and now recall a game that sparked a cultural phenomenon and inspired some of the best skaters in historySkateboarding has always ebbed and flowed in popularity, according to pro skateboarders Rodney Mullen and Chad Muska. “We’ve watched this rollercoaster ride and, each decade, there’s usually a huge peak and then a dip,” says Muska. “But we’ve not felt the dip for quite a long time now.” Since a crash in the early 90s, skateboarding has been enjoying a slow ride to the top. The dudes of the original skateboarding boom, now in their 40s, are now vastly outnumbered in skate parks by teenagers.In the late 90s and early 00s, rap and hip-hop became integrated with skate culture; skate videos ditched the grungy VHS aesthetic and fish-eye lenses for faster cuts and smoother shots. Fast-forward to 2020 and the kids that grew up with this culture are now paying homage. Jonah Hill’s directorial debut, Mid90s, is a coming-of-age film about 90s skateboarding, while Virgil Abloh, the creative director of Louis Vuitton, is now signing pro skateboarders to design shoes for his fashion house. Continue reading...

President warns any agreement to continue operating in US must be ‘100% as far as national security is concerned’

Tonight Sony announced a price and November release date for the new video games console, along with new games9.54pm BSTHere’s everything that just happened (you can scroll down to see all the trailers and footage):-The PlayStation 5 is out November 12th in the US, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea9.46pm BSTOne last quick reveal before we go: it’s a teaser for a new God of War, basically a logo and that’s it. Ragnarok is coming, we are informed - 2021. Not much, but something to look forward to. Continue reading...

What’s the best way to have fun while social distancing this winter? As hordes of retirees and parents are finding, with a bit of kit and know-how, there are countless ways to escape

Hacker Alex Hope says he used a photo of a plane boarding pass Abbott posted on Instagram to obtain the informationAn Australian hacker obtained Tony Abbott’s passport details and personal phone number using a photo of a plane boarding pass the former prime minister posted on social media.On Wednesday, hacker Alex Hope revealed that he had managed to use a photo Abbott posted on Instagram in March to reveal a security flaw in the online check-in portal of the country’s national airline carrier, Qantas. Continue reading...

Mid-tier iPad Air gets big upgrade in design and performance while firm also improves its cheapest, eighth-generation iPad

Follow latest updates from ‘Time Flies’ event led by Apple chief executive Tim Cook7.13pm BSTAnd for any Brits hanging on for prices in pounds:7.09pm BSTThat’s it from Apple.If you want a round-up of the announcements: Continue reading...

Short-form video platform launched following India’s ban on Chinese-owned appGoogle is taking advantage of India’s ban on TikTok by launching its own short-form video platform, YouTube Shorts, in the country, the company has announced.The new feature will mimic many of TikTok’s most popular features, allowing users to make and post 15-second videos with built-in creative tools encouraging them to add licensed music and more. Continue reading...

Firms join Apple and Microsoft in committing to put no excess carbon into the atmosphereFacebook and Google are becoming carbon neutral businesses, joining competitors Apple and Microsoft in committing to put no excess carbon into the atmosphere, both companies have independently announced.But the details of the two companies’ ambitions differs greatly. At Google, which first committed to going carbon neutral in 2007, the announcement sees the company declaring success in retroactively offsetting all carbon it has ever emitted, since its foundation in 1998. It has also committed to being powered exclusively by renewable energy by 2030. Continue reading...

Tech company confirmed reports after Trump set deadline for US firms to stop dealing with app owner ByteDanceOracle, the tech company, confirmed on Monday that it will partner with video-sharing app TikTok as the company works to head off a ban by the Trump administration.The hugely popular app has been caught in a geopolitical standoff, with the Trump administration accusing it of spying on Americans and Chinese officials attacking US protectionism. Continue reading...

PlayStation 4, PC; Mossmouth

The joyful jumping plumber has been on every Nintendo console and inspired a generation of players. Shigeru Miyamoto, Kenta Motokura, Takashi Tezuka and Yoshiaki Koizumi reflect on his legacyAlmost everyone who has ever picked up a video game controller will have played at least one Mario game. Whether you had a Nintendo Entertainment System in the 1980s, the N64 in the 90s or a Wii in the 00s, the joyful little jumping plumber has graced every generation of Nintendo’s consoles – and touched every generation of players. Over 373m Super Mario games have been sold to date, which means hundreds of millions of siblings uniting to find Star Road in Super Mario World, commuters escaping with Super Mario 3D Land on the train, and parents soaring from planet to planet in Super Mario Galaxy with their kids.These are in essence straightforward games about the pleasure of running and jumping, of moving a character around in colourful, abstract space. What makes them better than a thousand other platformers, as this genre is known, is the finesse and responsiveness in Mario’s movement. The soaring jump, the slight inertia that carries him forward after a leap, and the sudden acceleration of his run all translate to pleasure when you play. There is such skill and satisfaction in mastering his movement, in stringing together backflips and wall-kicks and long-jumps to scale the geometry of the levels and find their secrets, and this is what has enthralled children (and adults) for 35 years. Mario’s designers know to hide things in the nooks and crannies of these levels, to always answer the question “what happens when I do this?” with “something fun”. Continue reading...

Dontnod’s latest game is a thoughtful, atmospheric narrative adventure – and with its trans lead character, a defining moment for the industryAs the first major studio game release to feature a trans lead character, Tell Me Why represents a pretty major milestone. The first two chapters of the narrative adventure game from Dontnod, the French developer behind the Life is Strange franchise, were released recently for Windows and Xbox One; the third and final chapter dropped last week.You play as twins Alyson and Tyler Ronan, a cis woman and trans man (voiced by Erica Lindbeck and August Aiden Black, himself a trans guy). The siblings reunite after a decade apart to organise the sale of their family home in small-town Alaska. As they sift through the remains of their childhood, they also confront unanswered questions about the events that split up their family. Continue reading...

Sarah Hanson-Young says Coalition needs to fix the draft code to save public interest journalism and if it did Greens could back itThe Greens have signalled they could support a code to force Google and Facebook to pay for the value they receive from the distribution of Australian journalism if it is extended to cover the ABC, and if the Coalition comes up with a rescue package for the news wire service AAP.Its communications spokeswoman, senator Sarah Hanson-Young, told Guardian Australia the Greens were reserving their position until they saw the Morrison government’s legislation but said: “If the government wants to save journalism in Australia, then they need to deliver more than a sugar hit to Murdoch. Continue reading...

Social media chief denies Facebook’s algorithms are designed to push viewpoints ‘that are going to kind of enrage people’Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has said he “hopes” his social network will not effectively destroy society as we know it.Related: Biden to visit Michigan as fallout from Cohen's book on Trump continues – live Continue reading...

Readers respond to news that robots are to be deployed in some UK care homes to reduce loneliness

Next-generation console will go on sale in November alongside the lower-priced Xbox Series SMicrosoft has confirmed that its Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X consoles will launch on 10 November. The former will be priced at £249 (and $299), the latter at £449 ($499). Pre-orders for both will be available from 22 September.The company was forced to announce its lower priced Xbox Series S machine on Tuesday after information was leaked on social media. The console will have less powerful specifications than the Xbox Series X but will offer next generation features such as fast load times, high frame rates and real-time ray-tracing. Continue reading...

New guidelines aimed at ensuring AI research is of same quality as that in other fields

PC, PS4 (version tested), Xbox One, Nintendo Switch; Lucky Mountain/Sumo Games/Curve Digital

They seemed like the future … and here we are. We remember the key PC machines that inspired a generation of gamers and programmersManufactured by Swansea-based Dragon Data (an offshoot of traditional toy company, Mettoy), this 32k machine featured an advanced Motorola MC6809E central processor, decent keyboard and excellent analogue joypads. However, its eccentric graphics hardware gave every game a garish green tinge, and its most iconic gaming character was a bespectacled schoolboy named Cuthbert. Admittedly, I put the Dragon on the list instead of another great Swansea-made machine, the Sam Coupe, because I designed two hit games for the system: Impossiball and Utopia. Despite this, Dragon Data went bust in 1984. Continue reading...

Super-thin and light laptop with new Intel processor tech has 10-hour battery and fanless designThe Samsung Galaxy Book S is no ordinary laptop as it contains one of Intel’s brand new “hybrid” processors designed to give PCs smartphone-like battery life while running regular Windows 10.The Book S follows the Book Flex in Samsung’s return to the UK PC market, but is confusingly available in two versions both costing £999: the Galaxy Book S Intel (as reviewed here) and the Galaxy Book S Qualcomm, which is slightly older and has a completely different type of chip. Continue reading...

The internet retail giant makes move after residents in more than a dozens states reported receiving packets they did not orderAmazon said it has banned foreign sales of seeds in the United States after thousands of Americans received unsolicited packages of seeds in their mailboxes, mostly postmarked from China.The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) in July identified more than a dozen plant species ranging from morning glories to mustard in the bags of unsolicited seeds. Continue reading...

Insiders at the interior department say a drone shortage has made it more difficult to contain the fires raging across the USAs wildfires grow in size and frequency, more resources are needed to keep them in check. But experts say a Trump administration directive halting the purchase of new drones jeopardizes the rise of cutting-edge technology, curtailing the ability to manage wildfires and potentially putting more lives in danger.In October 2019, the US Department of the Interior grounded its fleet of more than 800 drones and put a freeze on buying new ones due to concerns of Chinese spying. Many of the devices were used in wildfire fighting and prevention, including starting prescribed burns, a key tool in controlling wildfire. The interior department carries out more than 10,000 drone flights a year on average, according to federal documents. Continue reading...

A mesmerising, unaccountable kind of algorithm – machine learning – is blinding governments to the technology’s often disastrous flawsWill Thursday 13 August 2020 be remembered as a pivotal moment in democracy’s relationship with digital technology? Because of the coronavirus outbreak, A-level and GCSE examinations had to be cancelled, leaving education authorities with a choice: give the kids the grades that had been predicted by their teachers, or use an algorithm. They went with the latter.The outcome was that more than one-third of results in England (35.6%) were downgraded by one grade from the mark issued by teachers. This meant that a lot of pupils didn’t get the grades they needed to get to their university of choice. More ominously, the proportion of private-school students receiving A and A* was more than twice as high as the proportion of students at comprehensive schools, underscoring the gross inequality in the British education system. Continue reading...

The tech giant’s monopoly over App Store content will bring a change to data privacy on its devices that has advertisers worriedIf in August 2018 you had invested £5,000 in Apple stock, you’d have doubled your money in two years. Nifty, eh? But if you’d bought a single share at the company’s IPO price of $22 in 1980, it would be worth nearly $28,000 (£21,000) today. This is the kind of hindsight that is bad for one’s blood pressure: it merely confirms Warren Buffett’s famous observation, quoting his mentor Ben Graham, that in the short run the stock market may be a betting machine, but in the long run it’s a weighing machine.Either way, Apple’s market capitalisation now weighs in at $2.2tn. What was once a plucky little outfit battling against the mighty Microsoft has somehow morphed into a corporate behemoth. And the interesting thing is that, until recently, nobody outside of stock exchanges seemed to have noticed the implications of this metamorphosis. When the House judiciary antitrust subcommittee summoned four tech bosses to a critical hearing in Congress, for example, Apple’s Tim Cook got off lightest. Subcommittee members reserved most of their ire for Amazon, Facebook and Google. Continue reading...

Joey Gibson, founder of group with 45,000 followers accuses Facebook of double standardFacebook has taken down the pages of US right-wing group Patriot Prayer and its founder Joey Gibson, a company spokesman said, as part of efforts to remove “violent social militias” from the platform.Patriot Prayer has hosted dozens of pro-gun, pro-Trump rallies and attendees have repeatedly clashed with leftwing groups around Portland, Oregon, where one supporter of the group was killed this week. Continue reading...