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PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X; Activision

Many robots are designed with a face – yet don't use their 'eyes' to see, or speak through their 'mouth'. Given that some of the more realistic humanoid robots are widely considered to be unnerving, and that humans have a propensity to anthropomorphise such designs, should robots have faces at all - or do these faces provide other important functions? And what should they actually look like anyway? Continue reading...

As I pick up maskless rider after maskless rider, I begin to wonder: am I going crazy? The pandemic is real, right?It is Sunday afternoon, and Jimmy is dancing a slow drunkard’s shuffle in the general direction of my car. His hand-eye coordination is severely compromised. He’s also not wearing a face mask.Related: Want to skip Thanksgiving dinner with family? This expert negotiator can help Continue reading...

Online retail grew massively in lockdown, and Amazon reaped huge profits. But where is the company’s relentless innovation and automation heading – and is it time to clip its wings?For the last year, Anna (not her real name) has been working as an Amazon “associate”, in the kind of vast warehouse the company calls a fulfilment centre. For £10.50 an hour, she works four days a week, though, during busy periods, this sometimes goes up to five. Her shift begins at 7.15am and ends at 5.45pm. “When I get home,” she says, “it’s about 6.30. And I just go in, take a shower and go to bed. I’m always exhausted.”Anna is a picker in one of the company’s most technologically advanced workplaces, in the south of England. This means she works in a metal enclosure in front of a screen that flashes up images of the products she has to put in the “totes” destined for the part of the warehouse where customer orders are made ready for posting out. Everything from DVDs to gardening equipment is brought to her by robot “drives”: squat, droid-like devices that endlessly lift “pods” – tall fabric towers full of pockets that contain everything from DVDs to toys – and then speed them to the pickers. Continue reading...

Concern among some users that Fleet feature, similar to stories on Snapchat and Instagram, creates opportunities for online harassmentTwitter has launched a new feature worldwide called ‘fleets’: tweets that disappear after 24 hours, similar to the stories feature on Snapchat and Instagram.Twitter has previously announced its plan for these ephemeral tweets, dubbed “fleets”, and tested the feature in Brazil, Italy, India, and South Korea. Continue reading...

Video game company alleges Apple misuses its market power and forces apps to pay ‘monopoly prices’The company behind the popular online video game Fortnite is suing Apple in Australia for allegedly misusing its market power by taking a slice of all revenue earned by apps on iPhones, iPads and Macs.Fortnite is a big money maker for Epic, with millions of daily users logging billions of hours on the game each month. It is forecast to bring in US$5bn in revenue in 2020. Continue reading...

Chief executives of Facebook and Twitter quizzed by judiciary committee on allegations of anti-conservative bias and handling of election

In his non-fiction graphic novel, the writer and comic-book artist takes us on a revealing exploration of the timeline of games – and why we play themVideo game histories tend to follow an achingly familiar structure. They start with Pong and the Atari years; they do the console wars between Nintendo and Sega; they cover the success of the PlayStation and the dawn of 3D visuals. All the technological waypoints are slavishly ticked off, but rarely does anyone stop and ask: why do we even play video games? What do they mean?These questions were very much on the mind of writer and artist Edward Ross when he began work on Gamish, a non-fiction graphic novel about the history of games. Five years ago, Ross wrote the acclaimed Filmish, an enthralling illustrated romp through cinema from George Méliès to The Matrix, whose accessible comic-strip presentation was a Trojan Horse for a wealth of in-depth film theory. With Gamish he uses a similar approach, constructing a loving, pastel-coloured visual narrative around titles such as Metroid, Doom and Papers Please, exploring not just the timeline of games but also the culture that makes and consumes them. Continue reading...

Peiter Zatko’s appointment follows mass attack on social media platform in JulyTwitter has appointed one of the world’s most respected hackers as its new head of security in the wake of a humiliating mass attack in July.The company has placed Peiter Zatko in charge of protecting its platform from threats of all varieties, poaching him from the payments startup Stripe. Zatko is better known as Mudge, his handle for more than 20 years of operation on both sides of the information security arena. Continue reading...

Entrepreneur to overtake Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg as electric carmaker selected for S&P 500Elon Musk, the maverick chief executive of electric car company Tesla, is poised to overtake Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg to become the world’s third-richest person after Tesla’s shares jumped 13% following its selection to join the S&P 500 index of leading US companies.The latest surge in the Tesla share price, which had already risen by almost 500% so far this year, is estimated to have increased Musk’s fortune by about $15bn (£11.4bn) to about $117.5bn. Continue reading...

Exclusive: vice-president Victor Zhang says north-south divide in England would be exacerbated by missing out on 5GThe UK should revisit its decision to ban the Chinese telecoms equipment maker Huawei from its 5G network in the post-Trump era and recognise that it will worsen England’s north-south divide, the vice-president of Huawei has told the Guardian.Victor Zhang’s intervention comes as Boris Johnson prepares on Monday to meet the Northern Research Group, the lobby group of Conservative MPs determined to turn the prime minister’s levelling up agenda into a reality. Zhang urged the UK to stay true to its roots as the birthplace of the first Industrial Revolution, saying the government could not afford to fall behind in the 5G revolution. Continue reading...

At a time when even leaving our homes is tricky, new audio guides with a difference can take listeners over the Atlantic or to splash about in the MedThe bear’s throaty growl starts to my right, then circles predatorily around to my left as I turn. But I stay calm, because the beast is not really there – it’s an illusion. I’m on a street corner in Leeds on a bright, chilly autumn morning and there are no bears for thousands of miles – or at least there haven’t been for well over a century.Between 1840 and 1858, before Burley Park was all tarmac and terraced housing, the street where I’m standing was part of the short-lived Headingley Zoological and Botanical Gardens. I’m on a guided “sound walk” around the graffitied remnants of its walls, and I’ve just reached Bearpit Gardens. Continue reading...

Tech firm told Northern Ireland resident who wanted to watch rugby that he didn’t live in UKIt was an unlikely statement from one of the world’s biggest companies, but for a brief period on Saturday afternoon it appeared that Amazon had pledged its backing to a united Ireland.The tech company has now apologised after telling a resident of Northern Ireland that he could not watch its rugby union coverage because he didn’t live in the UK. Continue reading...

CEO told staffers Bannon had not violated enough policies to justify ban when he called for beheading of Anthony FauciMark Zuckerberg told Facebook staffers on Thursday that former Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon had not violated enough of the company’s policies to justify his suspension from the platform when he called for the beheading of two US officials and the posting of their heads outside the White House as a “warning”. Continue reading...

Restrictions tied to national security concerns were scheduled to take effect on ThursdayThe US government has announced it will delay enforcement of a ban on TikTok, granting the Chinese-owned social media app a temporary reprieve in its battle against the Trump administration.The popular app was facing restrictions over national security concerns that would have effectively barred it from app stores in the US. The rules were expected to take effect on Thursday. But the US commerce department said it was holding off “pending further legal developments”. Continue reading...

The company says it requires an extra $600m in funding for 300,000 premises that were not factored into original plansNBN Co has blamed the Covid-19 pandemic in part for a $6.7bn blowout in funding, as executives raked in almost $3m in bonuses last financial year for “significantly” overachieving targets.At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, when office workers and school children were sent home to work and study, NBN Co moved to cushion the boom in demand for capacity on the NBN network by offering an additional 40% broadband capacity to retailers for free. Continue reading...

Deadline pushed back amid ongoing wave of US election misinformationFacebook has announced it will extend its ban on political ads in the US for at least another month, as it continues its effort to keep tabs on the wave of misinformation washing over its platform in the wake of the US election.The ad ban, which started a week before the vote and was initially projected to last just one week after, frees Facebook from having to make difficult calls about whether individual adverts are potentially harmful to the democratic process. Continue reading...

Small, spherical speaker packs a sonic punch for its size but is only for those all-in on Apple’s ecosystemApple’s HomePod mini is finally here – the iPhone maker’s attempt to break the Amazon Echo-Google Home duopoly and put itself back into the voice assistant race.The HomePod mini costs £99 and sits below the full-sized HomePod costing £279. Continue reading...

Xbox Series X|S (version tested), Xbox One, PC; Tomas Sala/Wired Productions

Neto’s outspokenness landed him on Time’s most influential people list, but also made him the target of a vicious fake news campaignFelipe Neto is an irreverent YouTuber with 40 million followers on his channel where he plays computer games, pokes fun at celebrities and riffs on social media trends.With another 25 million followers on Instagram and Twitter, he is one of the biggest names on Brazil’s boisterous internet. Continue reading...

PC, PS4, PS5; Young Horses

Video baselessly questioning the collection of valid ballots is retweeted more than 70,000 timesTwitter took more than an hour to flag a highly misleading video shared by Donald Trump, which baselessly pushed claims of ballot fraud and was retweeted more than 70,000 times before the platform took action.The president, who lost the US election to Joe Biden last week, shared a video of election workers in Los Angeles collecting valid, mail-in ballots that were posted on or before election day from a ballot drop box. The video, which has been shared thousands of times in recent days, falsely suggested something unusual was under way and has been repeatedly debunked. The Los Angeles county registrar confirmed that the ballots were collected on 4 November from a box that was locked at 8pm on election day and were later processed and counted. Continue reading...

Platform says it’s received ‘no clarity’ from government about status of proposal to place app under control of US companiesThe popular video-sharing app TikTok says its future has been in limbo since Donald Trump tried to shut it down earlier this fall and is asking a federal court to intervene. Continue reading...

Research and development workers told they can only work from home in ‘exceptional cases’

As the Xbox Series X and Series S are released, Microsoft gaming chief Phil Spencer says the next games generation is all about how many players you have, not how many consoles you shiftThe launch of the Xbox Series X this week marked the start of a new video game console generation – historically a super-exciting time for players, as better technology unlocks new dimensions for games. But despite the usual competitive crowing about teraflops, frame rates and resolutions, there’s a different dimension to the console wars this time around. The looming Netflix-ification of video games threatens to upend the whole idea of video game consoles. Amazon and Google are both working on game streaming services that let people play cutting-edge games without paying for a box that sits under the TV. And Microsoft has spent the past five years spending billions on game developers to shore up its star service: Xbox Game Pass, a monthly subscription that lets you play hundreds of games for a monthly fee.It’s been clear for a while that Microsoft sees the future of gaming in subscriptions, streaming and services. Phil Spencer, the head of Xbox since 2014, is known to players as the guy who shows up on stage at press conferences in video-game T-shirts. Under his leadership, Microsoft has massively broadened its stable of game developers, started selling Xbox games on PC, and engineered its own streaming service to let people play on any screen, known in prototype as Project xCloud. Subs and streaming have already transformed other creative industries, with varying effects on artists – Spotify has been a disaster for musicians, where Netflix has arguably been good news for TV producers. With Microsoft already clearly committed to this direction of travel, what will its effect be on the games industry? Continue reading...

PS5, PS4, PC; Giant Squid/Annapurna Interactive

First M1-based Macs promise big leap in performance and battery life after ditching Intel chipsApple has announced the first in its series of ARM-powered Mac computers with the new MacBook Air, MacBook Pro and Mac mini, as it begins the transition from traditional Intel processors to those that run in the iPhone.The new machines mark the first stage of Apple’s huge effort to change the underlying technologies of its Mac computers, replicating the switch it made from PowerPC to Intel processors in 2006, but this time to chips of its own design as used to great effect in the firm’s iPhones and iPads. Continue reading...

New MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and Mac Mini revealed as the company parts ways with Intel6.51pm GMTAnd finally, and unsurprisingly, the UK pricing for the new Macs is a straight symbol-swap for the US pricing. So that means the new MacBook Air starts at £999; the new 13-inch MacBook Pro starts at £1299; and the new Mac mini starts at £699.6.47pm GMTHaha, “one more thing” at the very end – John Hodgman shows up, for a reprise of his role in the “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC” adverts. “I’m fast too! Look at me!” Continue reading...

PS4, Xbox One, PS5, Series X/S, PC; Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio/Sega

PS4 and PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series, PC; Ubisoft

PC, PS4, Switch: Edelweiss

Artificial intelligence is being used to create new songs seemingly performed by Frank Sinatra and other dead stars. ‘Deepfakes’ are cute tricks – but they could change pop for ever‘It’s Christmas time! It’s hot tub time!” sings Frank Sinatra. At least, it sounds like him. With an easy swing, cheery bonhomie, and understated brass and string flourishes, this could just about pass as some long lost Sinatra demo. Even the voice – that rich tone once described as “all legato and regrets” – is eerily familiar, even if it does lurch between keys and, at times, sounds as if it was recorded at the bottom of a swimming pool.The song in question not a genuine track, but a convincing fake created by “research and deployment company” OpenAI, whose Jukebox project uses artificial intelligence to generate music, complete with lyrics, in a variety of genres and artist styles. Along with Sinatra, they’ve done what are known as “deepfakes” of Katy Perry, Elvis, Simon and Garfunkel, 2Pac, Céline Dion and more. Having trained the model using 1.2m songs scraped from the web, complete with the corresponding lyrics and metadata, it can output raw audio several minutes long based on whatever you feed it. Input, say, Queen or Dolly Parton or Mozart, and you’ll get an approximation out the other end. Continue reading...

A comfortable fit, with solid battery life but big case and no onboard volume controlsBose has finally launched its noise-cancelling Bluetooth QuietComfort Earbuds, a pair that hope to replicate the success of the firm’s legendary overhead QC35 headphones that dominate flights and rail commutes alike.The new earbuds cost £249.95 and sit above the £179.95 Sport Earbuds, which do not have noise cancelling. They look more like small Bluetooth headsets rather than earbuds, similar to Sony’s design for its top noise-cancelling earbuds. Despite being large and relatively heavy at 8.5g each (most earbuds weigh under 6g), they have a light and comfortable fit, thanks to their soft and well-shaped silicone tips. Continue reading...

Our £40,000 Passat GTE completely died just outside its three-year warrantyOur VW Passat GTE – a plug-in electric hybrid – completely died a few months ago. Because it is just outside its three-year warranty, VW wants to charge me more than £2,500 to fix it.The car refused to turn on and, instead, displayed a “hybrid system error”. My breakdown firm took it to my local dealership . They thought they’d fixed it and charged me several hundred pounds. Continue reading...

Tesla and China have stolen a huge march – but the UK’s automotive sector still has the capability to close the gapCarmakers talk a good game. Even the biggest petrolhead automotive executives are now practised at conjuring images of a zero-emissions future, but that future always seems to be just a bit further off. And even while they increase production of electric cars, many insist that there is a stubbornly long line of consumers who will still want the internal combustion engines that also happen to boost their makers’ profits.There are obvious exceptions, led by Tesla, the US electric car pioneer, as well as a bevy of Chinese imitators. In the UK, Bentley last week became the first to break ranks. On Thursday it announced that its Crewe factory would stop making internal-combustion-engined cars completely by 2030, making it the first large British carmaker to do so. Continue reading...

Biden plans to push through aid stimulus amid the pandemic, undo Trump’s corporate tax cuts, and crack down on big techWhen Joe Biden enters the White House on 20 January, he will face arguably the biggest set of challenges a president has had to tackle since the end of the second world war. The coronavirus is raging through the US, millions of Americans are still losing their jobs each month, and the climate crisis – ignored by the Trump administration – is deepening.Biden has set out his economic and policy plans, but without control of the Senate he may struggle to realise them. Official GDP figures for the third quarter showed the size of the economy was still almost 4% below its previous peak, despite a 7.4% recovery from the spring lockdown. Continue reading...

From Sega v Nintendo in the early 90s to PlayStation v Xbox in 2020, the world of computer games is still a battlefield

PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5; Insomniac Games/Sony

Investment manager Baillie Gifford says rise is no fluke as manufacturer stands to benefit from move away from fossil fuelsOne of the biggest investors in Tesla has defended the explosive growth in the US electric carmaker’s share price, arguing that it is “far from an aberration”.Baillie Gifford, the Edinburgh-based investment manager that runs the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust (SMIT), has been the second-biggest winner from Tesla’s rocketing share price, beaten only by Tesla’s outspoken chief executive, Elon Musk. Continue reading...

The University Challenge and Newsnight cross-examiner makes a foray into a chattier interview style in his new podcast. Plus: a grim new chapter in season two of Dr DeathThe Lock In with Jeremy Paxman

As parts of the UK enter another month – at least – of being stuck indoors, our critics pick out top music, games, books, TV, dance and art fixes to lift your spirits

I can see how a live-action TV series based on the hit video game series might just work. Forget the tortured mythology – just stick to running around and fightingFew video games have endured like Assassin’s Creed. Twelve different versions have been released since the game was introduced in 2007, each of them more or less clinging to the same highly enjoyable formula. Like history? Like climbing things? Like stabbing people in the skull? Like being intermittently scowled at by Danny Wallace? Like spending the final hour of any pursuit genuinely confused about why an alien has come out of nowhere to instruct you to murder everyone with a sort of glowing death apple? Then Assassin’s Creed is for you.So the news that Netflix has just commissioned a live-action Assassin’s Creed series should be cause for celebration. After all, one of its biggest hits of last year was The Witcher – a series that was based on a game that was based on a book – which shows that there’s plenty of demand for this sort of thing. If done well, the Assassin’s Creed series could be relentlessly entertaining. It could be – and this is not a phrase I use lightly – Game of Thrones with parkour. Isn’t that everything you ever wanted? Continue reading...

Apple’s more expensive model has zoom camera and lidar but uses heavier stainless steelApple’s more luxurious version of the iPhone 12 takes the best of the iPhone 4’s looks, adds some polished stainless steel and a third camera on the back – and an extra £200 to the price.The new iPhone 12 Pro costs from £999 and sits between the slightly smaller £699 12 Mini, the same-size £799 12 and the larger, more expensive £1,099 12 Pro Max, which will have a more powerful camera when launched on 13 November. Continue reading...

Musicians condemn payola-style deal to give some songs an algorithmic boostSpotify has been accused of trying to create digital “payola”, after announcing a feature that would give artists an algorithmic boost on the company’s playlists – if they agree to take a cut in the royalties they get paid for the relevant songs.The feature, which Spotify is describing as an “experiment”, will affect playlists including the company’s Artist Radio, which plays songs similar to a particular band, and Autoplay, which continues to play similar music after a playlist has run out of tracks. Continue reading...

A supreme court decision, Trump falsely claimed, would allow ‘rampant and unchecked cheating’ on election dayTwitter on Monday evening flagged a tweet from Donald Trump, which baselessly claimed a recent supreme court decision would lead to voter fraud, as misinformation. Continue reading...

Criminal gangs target NHS while hostile states hit vaccine research, says cybersecurity centreBritain’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has dealt with 194 coronavirus-related incidents involving hostile states and criminal gangs, which led to the overall number of serious hacker attacks reaching an all time record of 723 over the past year.The intelligence unit said that while Russia and other states – such as China – had targeted British vaccine research, it was criminal gangs who frequently targeted other parts of the NHS, often to attempt online fraud. Continue reading...

Error meant users spent much longer next to infectious person before self-isolating

Twitter tagged the video, which included fake Florida signs as Joe Biden addressed Minnesota, as ‘manipulated media’

Smaller, lighter, slightly cheaper version of the flagship triathlon watch ticks almost every boxGarmin’s latest multisport smartwatch is the Forerunner 745, which takes almost everything from the firm’s top model and squeezes it into a smaller, lighter and cheaper device that’ll track pretty much anything.The new model costs £450, putting it between the £250 Forerunner 245 and the top £520 Forerunner 945. With the same sized screen as the other two models, it is only 1.5mm wider, 1.1mm thicker and 8.5g heavier than the cheaper version, making it a compact sports watch. Continue reading...