Technology | The Guardian

It’s easy to feel swamped, but how do you decide what to keep and what takes priority? And should you be checking out of hours?This is not impossible, according to Graham Allcott, the author of How to Be a Productivity Ninja, who runs workshops on keeping your inbox empty. “Get really comfortable with the delete button,” he says, “and set your recycling bin not to empty regularly, so that if you accidentally delete things, you can retrieve them easily.” The goal should be managing your attention, not your emails, he says, “therefore a key part of an ‘inbox zero’ system is to do whatever it takes to get your attention on to the most important and fulfilling stuff. If that means a few smaller things go awry once in a while, so be it. Your job isn’t to do email well, it’s to use email to do your work well.” Continue reading...

Everything in your smart home, from the lightbulbs to the thermostat, could be recording you or collecting data about you. What can you do to curb this intrusion?During an interview with the BBC last year, Google’s senior vice-president for devices and services, Rick Osterloh, pondered whether a homeowner should disclose the presence of smart home devices to guests. “I would, and do, when someone enters into my home,” he said.When your central heating thermostat asks for your phone number, your TV knows what you like to watch and hackers can install spyware in your home through a lightbulb security flaw, perhaps it’s time we all started taking smart home privacy issues more seriously. Just this week the National Cyber Security Centre issued a warning to owners of smart cameras and baby monitors to review their security settings. Continue reading...

Tech company will temporarily ban ads for medical face masks on the social network and Facebook marketplaceFacebook is temporarily banning advertisements for medical face masks as part of an effort to prevent use of its social media platform to exploit people’s concerns about the coronavirus outbreak.Related: Coronavirus: US deaths rise to 19 as New York declares state of emergency Continue reading...

Platforms would lose legal cover if they fail to follow ‘best practice’ to prevent child abuseUS senators have proposed a new law which would make key legal protections that online platforms rely on contingent on those platforms adopting specific practices related to privacy and the prevention of child sexual exploitation.The act has widely been seen as an opening salvo in a renewed war on end-to-end encryption, with the US justice department (DoJ) regularly criticising technology companies for creating products, such as iMessage and WhatsApp, which cannot be intercepted by law enforcement. Continue reading...

Site monitors you and flashes up warning messages if you start reaching for your face

Exclusive: Cases for conditions such as insomnia almost double in England in seven years

Chernobyl creator Craig Mazin will work on the adaptation with the game’s creative director Neil DruckmannHBO is working on a television adaptation of the bestselling video game The Last of Us.It will be written by Craig Mazin, the creator of highly acclaimed TV series Chernobyl, together with Neil Druckmann, the creative director on the game and its forthcoming sequel, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Continue reading...

Group of eight rebels call for Huawei to be removed from UK networks by end of 2022A group of eight Conservative rebel MPs, including four former cabinet ministers, have put down an amendment calling on the government to eliminate all Huawei technology from the UK’s mobile phone networks by the end of 2022.Led by Sir Iain Duncan Smith, Owen Paterson, David Davis and Damian Green, the rebels hope to stage a show of strength – although it is not clear whether they can attract the 44 votes needed to threaten Boris Johnson’s majority. Continue reading...

With the demo thrilling gamers all over the world, we speak to co-director Naoki Hamaguchi about the vision behind this long-awaited reimaginingWhen Final Fantasy VII hit the PlayStation in 1997, the role-playing adventure genre was changed for ever. Abandoning the stereotypical castles, creatures and grizzled beardy wizards of high fantasy, the game took place in a quasi-futuristic world the likes of which had never been seen in this style of game before. The revolutionary 3D modelled characters, the sci-fi stylings and detailed, often cinematic visuals, led critics and fans to declare it one of the greatest video games of all time.This April, the Final Fantasy VII Remake promises to redefine the genre again, and developer Square Enix has been keen to point out that this is no shot-for-shot remake. Much will be familiar – the opening cinematic, with Cloud Strife, the game’s iconic, big-haired, big-sworded mercenary hero, arriving at the train station – has been lovingly updated, and the game’s first chapter, of which a demo has been made available this week, takes players on a beautifully re-created version of the original’s Mako reactor bombing mission. Continue reading...

Announcements made following coronavirus guidance from Washington state officials instructing workplaces to allow employees to work remotelyAs the coronavirus outbreak continues to spread across Washington state, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook have advised their Seattle-area employees to work from home for the next few weeks.Related: Coronavirus: Google leads tech charge to work from home Continue reading...

Yanis’s Samsung Galaxy S10 shoots high-quality videos but they take up too much spaceHow can I compress videos so I don’t lose a lot of the quality? My phone, a Samsung Galaxy S10, makes really high quality videos but I would be satisfied if they looked like normal videos. YanisVideos take up a lot of space, and a lot of research goes into making them smaller. Other things being equal, a key factor is the size of the image, just as it is with still photographs. You can also reduce the file size by arbitrarily reducing the data rate or, for preference, by using a more efficient video compression system. The current favourite is MPEG-4/H.264/AVC (Advanced Video Coding), which is usually called MP4 for short. Technically, MP4 is the file container while H.264 is the codec that codes and decodes the video. Continue reading...

Small, comfortable true-wireless earbuds, good sound, last ages, with a pocketable case and iPhone appSamsung’s second-generation Galaxy Buds+ correct a few mistakes and are now fully iPhone compatible, making them some of the very best standard true-wireless earbuds for just about anyone.There is no shortage of good true-wireless earbuds in 2020, but Samsung’s £159 Galaxy Buds+ look to take the crown as the best set without noise cancelling. Continue reading...

PC, Size Five Games

Fleets trialled in Brazil to remove some of the anxieties that ‘hold people back from talking’, company says

Serpentine Gallery, London

Anti-Huawei MPs want timetable for removing Chinese supplier from networkA ministerial promise that high-risk 5G network suppliers such as Huawei would eventually be phased out of future UK phone networks has failed to quell a brewing Conservative revolt over the issue.Rebel backbenchers said the clarification made by Matt Warman, a junior minister, at a Westminster Hall debate was not enough because he would not commit to a timetable to eliminate the Chinese supplier, which they claim is a national security risk. Continue reading...

The successor to Sony’s original PlayStation is still the bestselling games machine of all time – and it has a legacy of true innovationIt has to be said, the launch titles were not great. When the PlayStation 2 arrived in Japan on 4 March 2000, the first games early purchasers got to take home with them included a mahjong sim and a digital train set. The big-name titles, Street Fighter EX3 and Ridge Racer 5, were formulaic entries in tired legacy franchises. Meanwhile, Sega’s Dreamcast machine, released a year earlier, was hosting innovative hits such as Shenmue, Crazy Taxi and Power Stone. Had Sony stumbled after its hugely successful and highly disruptive original PlayStation?No, it had not. It just took developers time to understand the architecture of this forward-looking console – especially its hyperbolically named Emotion Engine, the 128-bit central processing unit at the core of the box, designed to generate large, explorable 3D environments and fill them with life. Continue reading...

A report suggests the tech giant is not fully enforcing its own standards banning content that exploits or endangers childrenFacebook failed to catch hundreds of cases of child exploitation on its platform over the past six years, a study published on Wednesday found.The site was used as a medium to sexually exploit children in at least 366 cases between January 2013 and December 2019, a report from the not-for-profit investigative group Tech Transparency Project (TPP) analyzing Department of Justice news releases found. Continue reading...

Company removes thousands of listings raising cost of masks and sanitiser by up to 2,000%

Bob Seely raises concerns over claims subcontractors for firm used forced labourA Conservative MP has asked BT to investigate whether using Huawei is compliant with its anti-slavery policy after an Australian thinktank alleged that some of the Chinese firm’s subcontractors used forced labour from the country’s Muslim minority.Bob Seely, who is one of a group of Tories unhappy with government plans to allow Huawei to supply 5G network technology, set out his concerns in a letter to Philip Jansen, BT’s chief executive officer, seen by the Guardian. Continue reading...

Comfortable, durable, wireless headphones with long battery life and signature soundMarshall’s second iteration of its top Monitor wireless headphones add active noise cancellation and up to 45 hours of battery life while keeping their classic looks.Marshall brand headphones combine powerful, distinctive sound with a classic look reminiscent of the company’s guitar amps. The £280 Monitor II ANC are no exception. Continue reading...

Company to pay up to $500m to in proposed settlement, which requires judge’s approvalApple has agreed to pay up to $500m to settle litigation accusing it of quietly slowing down older iPhones as it launched new models, to induce owners to buy replacement phones or batteries.The preliminary proposed class-action settlement was disclosed on Friday night and requires approval by the US district judge Edward Davila in San Jose, California. Continue reading...

Data based on texts of 50,000 children suggests ‘peri peri’ and ‘coleslaw’ not as innocent as parents may thinkIf a child texts about enjoying “peri peri” or “coleslaw”, parents may be unnerved to discover they might not be talking about a family meal out.An internet safety service that has monitored the online interactions of more than 50,000 children has discovered that girls as young as 10 are using code words drawn from the Nando’s restaurant menu to obscure explicit sexual conversations. Continue reading...

Dazn’s initial focus will be on boxing when it expands to 200 countries, including UK, in MayA streaming service that is aiming to become a “Netflix of sport” is to expand to 200 countries, including the UK, and is targeting Premier League rights for the British market.The London-based Dazn, which is owned by the billionaire Sir Leonard Blavatnik, currently operates in nine international markets but the high cost of sports rights driven by Sky and BT has delayed a UK launch. Continue reading...

The first major release from Riot Games since its multiplayer battle arena game is free to play and arrives in the summerLeague of Legends developer Riot Games has announced its next game, Valorant. Teased for several weeks as Project A, it is a team-based shooter for the PC set on a near-future Earth where a catacylsmic event has reshaped the geopolitics of the planet.Players choose from a selection of eight differently skilled secret agents before engaging in tactical objective-based matches. The game will be free to download, with players able to buy cosmetic items such as gun skins. Continue reading...

Algorithms push viewers to extremes, senior MP says at launch of report on far right

For workers at Facebook, Google, Amazon and other Silicon Valley giants, one candidate soars above the restFrom software engineers at Facebook and Google to drivers for Uber and warehouse workers for Amazon, the employees that power California’s technology industry donate to Bernie Sanders above all other presidential candidates, a Guardian analysis found.The Vermont senator received the most money, from the highest number of individual donors among employees of Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, Uber, Tesla and SpaceX, Oracle and Microsoft. Continue reading...

NSW police warn people should report alleged predatory behaviour, not attempt to take law into their own handsSocial networking platform TikTok has removed an Australian account purporting to lure alleged paedophiles to meetings and then capture their confrontation on film, as the NSW police warn people not to take the law into their own hands.In what appears to be a new form of the trend of online accounts hunting child sex abusers, the account, which before being taken down had thousands of views and likes, claimed to have confronted alleged paedophiles the account said came to “meet an underage kid”, seemingly lured from a dating app. The men appearing in the six short videos were often attempting to flee, or were fighting back against the person filming them. Continue reading...

Establish rules about when phones and tablets are OK, and make sure everybody – including you – sticks to themScreens have no direct toxic effect on children. So it is perfectly fine, for example, to reward them with screens once they have done their homework. It is more a question of what it is displacing. Ask yourself: is everybody’s screen time under control? Also ask if it is interfering with other social interactions; perhaps activities you may want to do as a family? If it is, then think about reducing it.Have a plan and stick to it, so that everybody understands when they’re allowed screen time and when they should stop. Think about your own media use, as it is important that everyone, including the adults in the home, adhere to these agreed boundaries. For instance, if you’ve decided as a family that you won’t have any screens at the dinner table, you all have to abide by that. Continue reading...

Drivers hoping to cut emissions may be let down by cold weather or low battery chargeDrivers hoping their new plug-in hybrid car will help cut down their carbon footprint may have an unlikely enemy: cold weather.Zero-emissions driving can be impossible for some of the UK’s bestselling plug-in hybrid models when the air is chilly or if passengers do as little as switching on the heating – even if the battery is fully charged. Continue reading...

Former Uber engineer Susan Fowler has written a memoir about her fight with the company over sexism – and she hopes it will help other women in the tech industryBefore Susan Fowler was a whistleblower she was a violinist, and before she was a violinist she fed fruit flies to spiders that were milked for their venom at a small Arizona business known as Spider Pharm. In February 2017, Fowler was thrown into the public eye after she published a damning blogpost exposing the toxic sexism she experienced working as a software engineer at Uber. And in her new memoir, Whistleblower, she explains how she came to shake up one of the world’s most valuable startups. But, despite the title of her book, Fowler defies one-word labels. She is a musician, a writer, a physicist, a philosopher: a person who demands to be seen, she has written, as more than “that woman who was sexually harassed”.Six million people read Fowler’s blogpost in which she chronicled her time at what was then the No 1 disrupter in Silicon Valley. In the post – titled “Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber” – Fowler recounted how she was pestered by her new boss on her first official day at the company. “He was in an open relationship, he said, and his girlfriend was having an easy time finding new partners but he wasn’t,” Fowler recalled. “It was clear that he was trying to get me to have sex with him.” Fowler immediately reported the conversation to HR. Continue reading...

Billionaire Paul Singer’s Elliott Management has taken a ‘sizable stake’ and intends to ‘push for changes’, reports Bloomberg NewsA major Republican donor has purchased a stake in Twitter and is reportedly seeking to oust its chief executive, Jack Dorsey.Bloomberg News first reported that Elliott Management has taken a “sizable stake” and “and plans to push for changes at the social media company, including replacing Dorsey”. Continue reading...

Sally Flood managed to claw two-thirds back, but says lenders should do more to protect customersA Manchester woman lost £95,000 she inherited from her father in a sophisticated bank transfer scam. After a year-long battle she has managed to retrieve two-thirds of the cash.Sally Flood enlisted the help of a law firm specialising in cybercrime and data breaches, and while she is pleased to have recovered a good chunk of what she had lost after “the year from hell”, she is furious about being left £35,000 out of pocket. Continue reading...

My father, David Aspinall, who has died aged 86, was one of a small group of researchers who founded the field of computer science in the UK. As an engineering research student he was involved in building the Manchester University Atlas computer which, when it was switched on in 1962, was the fastest in the world.In 1970, David moved to University College Swansea to become professor of electrical engineering and create a new course, a BSc in computer technology, based on the model designed by his boss Tom Kilburn whose computer science department at Manchester University was the first of its kind in the UK. These people were the pioneers of the new academic and educational field of “computer science”. Continue reading...

Computer scientist who made the cut, copy and paste commands simple to useAnyone who uses the cut, copy and paste commands on their computer or mobile device has Larry Tesler to thank for making them so simple and easy to use.Tesler, who has died aged 74, began his work on cut, copy and paste in 1973, when he was hired by Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (Parc) in California. Among other things he worked with a fellow computer scientist, Tim Mott, on the development of Gypsy, a “modeless” word processor. At the time most software had modes: for example, you might press I to enter the insert mode, or R for the replace mode. But Tesler’s research showed that non-expert users found modes confusing – and so he began to fight against them. He had “Nomodes” as his car numberplate and, later, a website at nomodes.com. Continue reading...

M&S Bank Arena, Liverpool

This is a genuinely fraught topic: is it generational, habitual, or explained by neuroscience? I asked the expertsImagine you are playing a video game where you’re looking out over an explorable world. You have a controller in your hand and you want your character to look or move upwards: in what direction do you push the joystick?If the answer is “up”, you’re in the majority – most players push up on a stick, or slide a mouse upwards, to instigate upward motion in a game. Most, but not all. A significant minority of players start every new game they play by going into the options and selecting “Invert Y axis”, which means when they push up on the stick, their onscreen avatar looks or moves downwards. To both sets of players, their own choice is logical and natural, and discussions about the subject can get quite fraught – as I found when I tweeted about it a few weeks ago. But why the perceptual difference? Is there anything definite that neuroscientists or psychologists can tell us about this schism? Continue reading...

Parliamentary committee hears state and government agencies sought data 8,432 times in 2018-19Federal government officials have been accused of a “cavalier disregard” for the dozens of state and federal government agencies accessing data retained under the mandatory data retention regime thousands of times a year despite legislation explicitly excluding them from access.Under the mandatory data retention legislation passed in 2015, the number of agencies allowed to access the data was narrowed down to just 21. But the telecommunications industry organisation Communications Alliance has revealed that at least 87 other state and federal organisations – including city councils, the RSPCA and the South Australian fisheries department – have accessed the data under section 280 of the Telecommunications Act. Continue reading...

Microsoft and Epic Games also announce they will not be attending this year’s Game Developers Conference in San FranciscoFacebook is canceling F8, its annual conference for developers, because of the new coronavirus.The conference was scheduled to take place in early May in the San Francisco Bay area. Last year’s event was attended by more than 5,000 people from around the world. Continue reading...

IT servers have been disabled for past three weeks, affecting website and phone linesA council in the north-east of England has admitted that it has suffered a cyber-attack that has disabled its IT servers for the past three weeks, leaving it with a steep bill and concerns among residents that their local government infrastructure is “in danger of collapse”.One Redcar and Cleveland councillor told the Guardian they had been advised it would take several months and cost between £11m and £18m to repair the damage -far more than the £7.4m funding grant the council is set to receive in 2020/2021 from central government. The council’s total annual budget is £279m. Continue reading...

Post-Brexit, Sean wants to keep his data protected by the EU’s GDPR rather than laxer US privacy lawsGiven Google’s recent announcement about moving UK users’ data to US jurisdiction, what’s the best way to migrate to EU-based services? Can you download+upload or crossload your Gmail to another service? And are we in for the same treatment by Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram et al? SeanLast week Google notified users that “because the UK is leaving the EU, we’ve updated our terms so that a United States-based company, Google LLC, is now your service provider instead of Google Ireland Limited. We’ve also changed our privacy policy to make Google LLC the data controller responsible for your information and for complying with applicable privacy laws.” Continue reading...

GCHQ and Ministry of Defence to roll out national task force of hackers after months of delayA specialist cyber force of hackers who can target hostile states and terror groups is due to be launched later in the spring, after many months of delays and turf wars between the Ministry of Defence and GCHQ.The National Cyber Force – containing an estimated 500 specialists – has been in the works for two years but sources said that after months of wrangling over the details, the specialist unit was close to being formally announced. Continue reading...

Child safeguarding at risk as police say lack of technology and time limits prevent device checksPolice are giving back to suspected paedophiles phones and computers that possibly hold child abuse images because they do not have the time or technology to search the devices, a report says.Prosecutions are being dropped because the technology that helps officers quickly scan devices to determine the likelihood of indecent images being present is not consistently available across forces, a policing watchdog finds. Continue reading...

Director Rian Johnson lifts lid on brand’s controlling use of product placement, which saw it ensure villains used PCsFilm director Rian Johnson has lifted the lid on a secret in the world of product placement – Apple will not allow its kit to be used by a villainous character on screen.“Apple, they let you use iPhones in movies, but – and this is very pivotal – if you’re ever watching a mystery movie, bad guys cannot have iPhones on camera,” Johnson, whose credits include Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Looper and Knives Out, revealed in a video recorded for Vanity Fair. Continue reading...

From doctored videos to fake quotes, the presidential candidate is muddying the water online – and it’s workingIf a dumpster is already on fire, is there any harm in throwing some more trash into it?Mike Bloomberg’s campaign has spent the last month unapologetically performing the digital equivalent of dumping buckets of fresh garbage into the trash fire that is internet discourse in 2020, apparently with little or no concern for the toxic side effects. Continue reading...

Filled with intrigue and drama, the Tekken games are like violent soap operas in which women are the complex starsA young woman stands at the grave of her recently departed father, her blond hair in a ponytail. After a quiet moment, she places flowers on the ground, then hears the crunch of gravel behind her. She whips around, pulls out her gun and finds a brunette woman of roughly her own age. The brunette smiles faintly and reassures the blonde that she’s not here to fight. She, too, is here to pay her respects. They walk past one another, visibly tense in blocky 1996 animation, and decide to let the feud rest. For today.This is one of the more conservative story endings for Nina Williams, a much-beloved combatant in the Tekken series of fighting games. In conversations around classic female video games characters, she often gets overlooked. Street Fighter’s Chun-Li is the first lady of the fighting genre (the Princess Leia buns, the thighs that launched a thousand “crushed to death” fetishes) and, although Peach wins the popular vote, no one has ever come close to stealing Lara Croft’s crown when it comes to overall iconic omnipresence. But growing up, Nina Williams was by far my favourite character, which naturally made Tekken my favourite two-player title. It wasn’t just that she was Irish – although I remember gasping the moment I read that in the Tekken 2 booklet, it being the first time I had anything in common with a woman from a video game – it was that I felt as if I knew things about her. Continue reading...

New hide-away design, great remote, top performance and impressive HD to 4K upscaling make for a killer smart TV boxThe Nvidia Shield TV is a refined version of the best Android TV box for years, packed with impressive new AI-based upscaling technology and a novel space-saving design.The new Nvidia Shield TV comes in two versions: a £149.99 media streamer and a “Pro” alternative for £199 that is aimed more at gaming. Continue reading...

Study of people across six countries finds German users would charge most for sharing personal dataGerman Facebook users would want the social media platform to pay them about $8 per month for sharing their contact information, while US users would only seek $3.50, according to a study of how people in various countries value their private information.The study by US-based thinktank the Technology Policy Institute (TPI) is the first that attempts to quantify the value of online privacy and data. It assessed how much privacy is worth in six countries by looking at the habits of people in the United States, Germany, Mexico, Brazil, Columbia and Argentina. Continue reading...

Two major shareholder groups backed proposal that would force tech company to make new human rights commitmentsApple could be forced to disclose details of censorship requests from China and other nations after two major shareholder groups backed a proposal that would force the tech firm to make new human rights commitments.The motion, set to be voted on by the company’s investors on Wednesday, was prompted by numerous allegations of Apple kowtowing to Beijing and blocking apps from being used by Chinese customers. Continue reading...