Force testing app that lets officers run snapshot through ‘watchlist’ to identify suspectsSouth Wales police are to have a facial recognition app installed on their phones to identify suspects without having to take them to a police station.The force intends to test the app over the next three months with 50 officers using the technology to confirm the names of people of interest who are stopped on routine patrols. Continue reading...

A California woman has insisted that painting huge emojis on her house was not an attempt to get back at her neighbours – but it’s not the first time the Unicode characters have caused controversyA neighbourly dispute in the laid-back Californian comminuty of Manhattan Beach has deteriorated into pulling faces. Giant, grotesque faces, on the side of a hot-pink house. As first reported by Mark McDermott for Easy Reader News, homeowner Kathryn Kidd says her intent in covering the walls of her two-level duplex with two gurning yellow emojis was to bring her neighbours joy, and definitely not to get back at them for reporting her for illegally renting it out on Airbnb. Kidd said: “Instead of everybody being so gloomy, always so depressed, always in other people’s business, I just wanted to send a message to be happy.”THE EMOJI HOUSE @ztheart @thegoneman #TheEmojiHouse Continue reading...

EU project creates robotic hands that can sense and fix damage without human interventionFrom picking fruit to carrying out minor surgery, soft robotic hands made from jelly-like plastic are thought by scientists to be the future solution to many human needs.But being gentle and soft enough to avoid damaging fruit or flesh has made the robots prone to damage and left them largely impractical for use in the real world – until now. Continue reading...

Firm to launch various new top smartphones with even bigger displays in New YorkSamsung will launch various models of its latest Galaxy Note 10 flagship smartphone in New York on Wednesday, hoping to woo its biggest fans with new stylus and camera features.The original Galaxy Note introduced the concept of the big-screen smartphone in 2011, cementing Samsung as a key player in the market. Recent Note models, however, have struggled to differentiate themselves from Samsung’s other flagship smartphone line, the Galaxy S. Continue reading...

There is no compelling evidence that games cause real-life bloodshed, but the industry must address its attitude to guns and conflict, or risk being drowned out by fearmongersIt was not a surprise to see Donald Trump and a cabal of other Republican politicians seeking to implicate video games in the US’s latest mass shootings. The idea that young men can be driven to kill by Doom, Call of Duty or Fortnite is a seductive one: it’s simple, it ties in with fears that older voters harbour about digital culture and screen time, and it conveniently draws attention away from more complex societal concerns such as poverty, neglect, easy access to deadly firearms and a violently confrontational political culture. There’s just one problem: despite years of research and hundreds of studies, there is no compelling evidence that video game violence causes real-life bloodshed. It’s a dead end.Every time these claims are made, the industry seems unwilling to analyse or engage with the reasons why games are so often implicated in violent acts. The standard response is blanket outrage and denial – games don’t cause real-world violence, they’re “apolitical” fun, so we don’t have to think about the issue, we don’t have to consider how the shooters portray or utilise military violence. They’re just entertainment. Continue reading...

Brilliant Sonos sound paired with attractive Ikea lamp makes for a surprisingly great wifi speakerWhat if your simple Ikea lamp was actually a Sonos wifi speaker that could play music from any number of music sources and link up with others around your house? That’s exactly what the Ikea Symfonisk table lamp is.The new musical lamp, priced at £150, is one of a pair of new products in an interesting partnership between the Swedish furniture manufacturer Ikea and multi-room audio specialists Sonos. Continue reading...

Though it offers $15 an hour, workers report injury claims denied, sweltering in warehouses and rising productivity demandsAmazon won praise when it raised its minimum wage to $15 an hour in October 2018. Since then, the company has responded to criticism over its working conditions by claiming it is an industry leader in compensation, but a Guardian investigation has revealed many workers take issue with this messaging, as serious workplace issues remain that they say are still not being addressed.They include claims workers are being punished for injuries; the elimination of bonuses and stock options, which has lessened the impact of the wage rise; poor working conditions; higher productivity demands and the hiring of temporary workers who do not have the same benefits as Amazon staff. Continue reading...

Big tech’s power has reached a tipping point. Governments must set some ground rulesIn his trademark disingenuous response to the latest wave of massacres, Donald Trump has identified the internet as both the cause and, more insidiously, the solution to the spread of rightwing domestic terrorism.Ignoring his own hate-filled social media feeds and fervent embrace of gun denial-ism, the US president has set his sites on the “dark recesses” of the internet, where hatred foments through “gruesome and grisly” video games that celebrate violence. Continue reading...

Jim Watkins defended website amid growing outcry over reports the alleged El Paso gunman used the site to publish his manifestoThe owner of the extremist message board 8chan broke his silence on Tuesday in a defensive video statement that attempted to deflect blame for the role the platform plays in disseminating hate speech and inciting violence by lashing out at service providers, journalists and Instagram.Jim Watkins, a US military veteran who lives in the Philippines, defended the website amid growing outcry over reports that the alleged El Paso gunman, as well as several other mass shooting suspects, used the site to publish white nationalist manifestos ahead of violent attacks. Continue reading...

Alex Hern on how Google’s use of personal data has potentially helped create a new age of mass surveillance. Plus Lois Beckett on the response to two mass shootings in the USGoogle’s story is one of extraordinary growth. From its days as an insurgent startup, it now dominates internet search in most of the world and has branched out into video sharing, operating systems, productivity tools and now self-driving cars and artificial intelligence.Much of its success comes down to its ability to raise huge revenues from selling targeted advertising. In order to do this effectively, it relies on vast amounts of personal data. Continue reading...

Message board enabling hate speech, where El Paso suspect allegedly posted manifesto, struggles to find new hostThe far-right message board 8chan has been flickering on and offline, after being knocked offline Sunday by the internet infrastructure company Cloudflare.Cloudflare stopped servicing 8chan on Sunday, after a shooting suspect allegedly posted a white nationalist rant on the site before killing more than 20 people in El Paso. Continue reading...

Users exposed to unsafe products bolstered by misleading reviews, says studyFacebook has been accused of failing to stop the sale of fake reviews through its website, more than a month after it was told to crack down on the issue by a UK regulator.An investigation by Which? found that despite concerns raised by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), Facebook continued to be flooded with fake review groups that try to deceive customers. Continue reading...

Amazon is not following Apple and Google in suspending practice altogetherAmazon has given Alexa users the option to disable human review of their voice recordings, and committed to greater clarity about its use of the strategy in future, but says it will not follow Google and Apple in halting the practice altogether in Europe.Echo owners, and other users of the company’s virtual voice assistant, can turn off human review in the Alexa privacy page by disabling a setting labelled “help improve Amazon services and develop new features”. Continue reading...

This week, Jordan Erica Webber talks to Kate Eichhorn about her new book The End of Forgetting: Growing up with Social Media, which explores the dangers facing young people who may find it difficult to distance themselves from their pasts, long into the future Continue reading...

The technology is helping to combat crimes police no longer deal with, but its use raises concerns about civil libertiesPaul Wilks runs a Budgens supermarket in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire. Like most retail owners, he’d had problems with shoplifting – largely carried out by a relatively small number of repeat offenders. Then a year or so ago, exasperated, he installed something called Facewatch. It’s a facial-recognition system that watches people coming into the store; it has a database of “subjects of interest” (SOIs), and if it recognises one, it sends a discreet alert to the store manager. “If someone triggers the alert,” says Paul, “they’re approached by a member of management, and asked to leave, and most of the time they duly do.”Facial recognition, in one form or another, is in the news most weeks at the moment. Recently, a novelty phone app, FaceApp, which takes your photo and ages it to show what you’ll look like in a few decades, caused a public freakout when people realised it was a Russian company and decided it was using their faces for surveillance. (It appears to have been doing nothing especially objectionable.) More seriously, the city authority in San Francisco have banned the use of facial-recognition technologies by the police and other government agencies; and the House of Commons science and technology committee has called for British police to stop using it as well, until regulation is in place, though the then home secretary (now chancellor) Sajid Javid, said he was in favour of trials continuing. Continue reading...

Six years after the adventure began, Shadowbringers sets up a heady climax, as well as the chance to uncover true friendsThe climax of Dead Pixels, E4’s recent sitcom from the creators of Peep Show and based on a group of friends obsessed with an online fantasy video game, was surprisingly affecting. After years of questing together, the friends, for whom the game had become the crucible in which their bonds had been made and reinforced, successfully plant the “Orb of Uncreation” into the slug queen’s egg sac and thereby triumphantly conclude the game’s story. The reward for the thousands of hours’ effort? A treasure chest containing a pair of red gloves.“No, this was totally, totally worth it,” murmurs one of the players into the head mic she uses to chat to her teammates (one of whom plays from the adjacent bedroom). “I’m so happy with my life choices.” Continue reading...

People born in the late 1970s are the last to have grown up without the internet. Social scientists call them the Last of the Innocents. Leah McLaren ponders a time when our attention was allowed to wanderIn moments of digital anxiety I find myself thinking of my father’s desk. Dad was a travelling furniture salesman in the 1980s, a job that served him well in the years before globalisation hobbled the Canadian manufacturing sector. He was out on the road a lot, but when he worked from home he sat in his office, a small windowless study dominated by a large teak desk. There wasn’t much on it – synthetic upholstery swatches, a mug of pens, a lamp, a phone, an ashtray. And yet every day Dad spent hours there, making notes, smoking Craven “A”s, drinking coffee and yakking affably to small-town retailers about shipments of sectional sofas and dinette sets. This is what I find so amazing. That my father – like most other professionals of his generation and generations before him – was able to earn a salary and support our family with little more than a phone and a stack of papers. Just thinking of his desk, the emptiness of it, induces in me a strange disorientation and loneliness. How did he sit there all day, I wonder, without the internet to keep him company?In this age of uncertainty, predictions have lost value, but here’s an irrefutable one: quite soon, no person on earth will remember what the world was like before the internet. There will be records, of course (stored in the intangibly limitless archive of the cloud), but the actual lived experience of what it was like to think and feel and be human before the emergence of big data will be gone. When that happens, what will be lost? Continue reading...

Uber plans to expand into food delivery and driverless cars but its IPO was a flop and its latest earnings figures could prove vitalUber has big plans. The ride-hailing service wants to ferry the world around in self-driving cars and on electric scooters, deliver our takeouts and groceries by drone, and ship freight via robot trucks. But first Uber needs to answer a big question: will it ever make any money?This week, Wall Street will have the chance to ask that question. Continue reading...

In our digital world, a misdirected text or simple keyboard error can trigger huge unintended consequencesOne day in May this year, Luigi Rimonti left his home in Gateshead to catch a ferry from North Shields, the first stage in a 1,000-mile drive across Europe to Italy. A dapper, energetic 81-year-old, Rimonti had grown up in a suburb of Rome before coming to the north-east of England as a young man. Often, over the years, he had driven back to Rome, insisting to his two adult sons, Gino and Valter, that he preferred to make this long journey by car. They worried about their father on these drives, and this spring, for the first time, they persuaded Rimonti to equip his car with a satellite-navigation device.Off the ferry in Amsterdam, Rimonti began to have difficulties with the satnav. He stopped in a petrol station: could someone there help him re-input his destination? A stranger obliged. Tap-tap-tap, enter. Rimonti thanked the stranger and drove on – south, he presumed, towards Rome. Continue reading...

Materials used in manufacturing and companies’ efforts to collect and charge scooters create significant greenhouse gas emissions

Tech firm to review virtual assistant ‘grading’ programme after Guardian revelations

From tablets to robot toys, here’s some tech ideas to keep the little ones occupied in the long breakWith the summer holidays in full swing you might need a bit of a hand keeping the kids entertained. From tablets and cameras to robot toys and updated old-school favourites, here is a collection of kid-aimed tech to keep the little ones occupied. Continue reading...

Technology is spying on us and machines are developing human voices. But it’s not all a weird cyberpunk dystopiaTechnology changes so fast that our lives are radically different from even a decade ago, yet slowly enough that sometimes we don’t even notice the changes.We live in the future, in other words, and sometimes it takes a moment to realise what an odd, and perhaps unsettling, future it is. So I’m going to try laying it out for you in plain English. Continue reading...

Polly wants to dump her laptop for a more ergonomic computer due to neck and shoulder painI’m an academic with neck and shoulder problems and fear turning into a hunchback through too much peering at the screen. I’m now moving house and setting up a home office. I want to dispense with my laptop – the source of my problems – and buy a desktop and an ergonomic keyboard.I’m confused about whether to get an all-in-one or a PC with a separate monitor. I am only really going to use it for internet and typing articles. I realise that this means I can look to the cheaper end of the market, but is there much slowdown in speed at that end? Should I be spending the money to get a good processor? PollyLaptops can be considered harmful if used for prolonged serious work rather than casual use. If you have neck and shoulder problems, you should seek medical help. I’ve been saved twice by an excellent physiotherapist, at my own expense. I’ve also spent time and money mitigating problems, but there is no panacea. Buying an ergonomic keyboard is only one part of a solution that could also include the mouse, desk, chair, lighting, work habits and, perhaps, glasses. Continue reading...

Decision to temporarily pull bikes comes nearly two months after ride sharing company launched its fleet in the cityLyft has put the brakes on its electric bike program in San Francisco, after the batteries on multiple vehicles caught fire.On Wednesday, a Twitter user posted an image of a bike in San Francisco’s Lower Haight neighborhood that appeared to have caught fire. Another bike in San Francisco appears to have caught fire on Saturday as well, the San Francisco Examiner reported. Continue reading...

PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One; Question

Usage changes from describing outdoors to depicting digital life in just one generationTweet, web, stream and cloud may once have evoked the wild outdoors, but they are now predominantly used to describe technology, according to new linguistic research.A study of datasets of informal conversations from different decades has found that the implied meaning of some common nature words in Britain has almost completely changed in a single generation. Continue reading...

Telco says diverse agencies accessing data through legal loophole need to follow the same process as law enforcement bodiesTelstra has warned that public trust in the security of their data will be eroded if government agencies continue to be allowed access to it without appropriate authorisation.More than 60 agencies, including local councils, state coroners, Centrelink, the National Disability Insurance Agency and the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority, have been accessing data using a loophole in the Telecommunications Act that allows them to bypass restrictions in the 2015 data retention legislation, under which access was restricted to only 20 agencies, primarily police and other law enforcement bodies. Continue reading...

Payment card to be launched in August, Tim Cook says, as third-quarter earnings beat predictionsApple has announced it will launch its own credit card in August, as iPhone sales continue to fall and the company seeks to diversify its business model.The announcement by the CEO, Tim Cook, came on an earnings call on Tuesday after the company’s third-quarter earnings beat predictions, sending shares up 3% in after-hours trading. The tech company reported a quarterly revenue of $53.8bn, higher than its previous estimate of $53.39bn. Continue reading...

The question is not whether esports is the future of sports entertainment, but whether there’s any possible scenario where it’s notNearly all established sports are going through some degree of hand-wringing over attracting younger fans as their older core ages out. The death of monoculture and explosion of entertainment options, many accessible without leaving one’s bedroom, have seen attendance drops across the board. MLB and NFL teams have fallen over themselves installing on-site daily fantasy lounges to lure second-screeners. Even the hidebound International Olympic Committee has made transparent plays for youth, most recently with the addition of skateboarding, surfing and three-on-three basketball to next year’s Summer Olympics in Tokyo.Related: Ten ways to make your child a Fortnite millionaire Continue reading...

Apps are changing the industry, but experts warn against dispensing with human therapists entirelyThe road to therapy is often inscrutable, windy and unsatisfying, with availability, cost and fit frequently preventing people from getting the care they need.A new wave of Bay Area startups is turning to tech to change that, using algorithms and automation to take the guesswork out of finding the right therapist. At a time when mental health care is rapidly moving from clinics and hospitals on to our phones, they’re building software to enhance the human relationship at the heart of successful therapy. But the speed at which this shift has occurred is sparking as much concern as excitement about technology’s potential. Continue reading...

FBI has arrested individual who obtained names, addresses, phone numbers and birth dates of people in US and CanadaA hacker gained access to personal information from more than 100 million Capitol One credit applications, the bank said on Monday as federal authorities arrested a suspect.The data breach has affected around 100 million people in the US and 6 million in Canada. Continue reading...

Rockstar North made huge profits while claiming £42m in tax relief, says thinktankRockstar North, the Edinburgh-based developer of Grand Theft Auto, has paid no corporation tax over the past 10 years, despite making billions in revenue for its parent company Take-Two Interactive, while claiming more than £42m in tax relief.A report from the investigative thinktank TaxWatch UK estimates Rockstar Games’ operating profit at $5bn (£4bn) between 2013 and 2019, during which time the company released Grand Theft Auto V (GTA V) and Red Dead Redemption 2. Rockstar North is part of Rockstar Games. Continue reading...

Tools to crack down on ‘dark money’ political ads are ineffective, researchers say“Major bugs” in Facebook’s political transparency tools are preventing researchers and journalists from holding advertisers to account, according to a report from Mozilla.It comes as the Conservative party is spending thousands of pounds a day experimenting with new adverts on the social network, prominently emphasising the leadership of Boris Johnson. Continue reading...

The esports industry must attract female pro players to avoid replicating the sexism that blights other sportsThis weekend the best Fortnite players in the world gathered at Flushing Meadows in New York to compete in the game’s first ever World Cup Finals for $30m (£24m) in prize money. Tens of thousands of spectators packed the famed Arthur Ashe stadium to watch the action live, and many millions more viewed on Twitch and YouTube. Fortnite is, after all, one of the biggest entertainment brands on the planet, played by hundreds of millions. Amid all the hype and fanfare around the finals, however, one depressing fact remained unavoidable: not a single one of the 100 finalists was female.Despite the growing popularity of professional gaming throughout the world – the audience figures for competitive gaming have reached 450m this year – female competitors remain scarce. There certainly are high-profile examples of female pros – trans woman Sasha “Scarlett” Hostyn is one of the most successful Starcraft II players in the world; Katherine “Mystik” Gunn is the industry’s highest-paid female pro gamer and won the SyFy channel’s reality TV show WCG Ultimate Gamer; and Fortnite has stars such as One_Shot_Gurl and Loeya. But you could watch a year of big tournaments, whether it’s Call of Duty, League of Legends or Hearthstone, and count the number of female competitors on the fingers of one hand. Continue reading...

Sixteen-year-old Kyle ‘Bugha’ Giersdorf beat 99 other players at the Fortnite World Cup tournament in New YorkLast night, a US teenager who goes by the name Bugha – real name Kyle Giersdorf – became the Fortnite World Cup Champion. The 16-year-old beat 99 other players in the brightly coloured Battle Royale game, running, building and fighting his way to a $3m (£2.4m) victory.The competition began months ago, with waves of qualifiers being selected in weekly online play-ins. A total of 40 million people attempted to qualify for the World Cup, the first esports event of its kind for the mega-hit Fortnite, one of the world’s most popular video games. The 100 who made their way to New York this weekend represented 30 different countries. Continue reading...

Jordan Erica Webber chats to Fabian Wosar, a renowned anti-ransomware expert, who has worked on thousands of cases during his career. The victims that Fabian helps love him. The ransomware hackers he thwarts – not so much. He talks about the sacrifices he has made for the job he loves Continue reading...

As a surveillance technique it’s ubiquitous, but is still a political, legal and ethical conundrumFacial recognition technology has spread prodigiously. It’s there on Facebook, tagging photos from the class reunion, your cousin’s wedding and the office summer party. Google, Microsoft, Apple and others have built it into apps to compile albums of people who hang out together. Continue reading...

Jaden Ashman, 15, known as Wolfiez, came second in the video game’s duos competition

When even Microsoft starts calling for government regulation, you know the technology is a problemOn 18 July, the House of Commons select committee on science and technology published an assessment of the work of the biometrics commissioner and the forensic science regulator. My guess is that most citizens have never heard of these two public servants, which is a pity because what they do is important for the maintenance of justice and the protection of liberty and human rights.The current biometrics commissioner is Prof Paul Wiles. His role is to keep under review the retention and use by the police of biometric material. This used to be just about DNA samples and custody images, but digital technology promises to increase his workload significantly. “It is now seven years,” observes the Commons committee, “since the 2012 high court ruled that the indefinite retention of innocent people’s custody images was unlawful and yet the practice is continuing. A system was meant to have been put in place where any custody images were kept for six years and then reviewed. Custody images of unconvicted individuals at that point should be weeded and deleted.” Continue reading...

As the super-fast network is rolled out across the country, we look at how much it will cost, when you can get it and what it means for the NBN – and your healthAustralia’s mobile networks are currently embarking on major upgrades to get the country ready for 5G. While patches of 5G networks are already available in some Australian cities, it won’t be until at least 2020 that 5G has any real impact, and several more years until the networks are completed. So until then, what is all the fuss about? Continue reading...

Laden with irrelevant detail, the boastful ‘OOO’ email is the latest vehicle for one-upmanship. Why not keep it simple?So, you’re off on your hols, then? Remembered to leave an out-of-office message on your email? Ah, yes. “John Stephens will be out of the office from 1st August for two weeks. If you need an urgent response to a query, please contact … ”I’m sure you’ll agree that there’s nothing wrong with that – straightforward and informative. But – how can I put this, John? – isn’t it just a little bit prosaic? Don’t you itch to generate a frisson of envy among your colleagues while you’re not hewing at the coalface? Boost your image? What might be called induced OOO envy? If so, you’re going to have to do a damn sight better than the above. Because telling the truth on an OOO is so passé these days. No, what’s required is something altogether more ambitious, more global. Continue reading...

Workers hear drug deals, medical details and people having sex, says whistleblowerApple contractors regularly hear confidential medical information, drug deals, and recordings of couples having sex, as part of their job providing quality control, or “grading”, the company’s Siri voice assistant, the Guardian has learned.Although Apple does not explicitly disclose it in its consumer-facing privacy documentation, a small proportion of Siri recordings are passed on to contractors working for the company around the world. They are tasked with grading the responses on a variety of factors, including whether the activation of the voice assistant was deliberate or accidental, whether the query was something Siri could be expected to help with and whether Siri’s response was appropriate. Continue reading...

Tweaks to user experience help company to better-than-expected profitability of $76mTwitter’s revenue rose by almost a fifth year on year, the company reported on Friday, leading to “better-than-expected profitability” of $76m (£61m) in the second quarter of 2019, although this was down from $80m in the same period last year.The results were boosted by strength in US advertising revenue, which was up by 24% overall, in part due to growth in “monetisable daily active users”, which reached 139 million people, up 14% year on year. Continue reading...

Microsoft, Google and several others are vying to be the ‘Netflix of video games’, but what advantages are on offer for players?Streaming video games is an idea with such obvious advantages that like virtual reality, motion controls and 3D screens, it had already hit the market several times before it was technologically possible: witness the untimely demise of OnLive in 2015. The big question facing Microsoft and Google, both of which showed off their entries into the “cloud gaming” market at the E3 video game conference in Los Angeles last month, is whether they’ve taken the plunge at the right time, or whether they, too, will be chalked up in history as premature entrants.After playing with Microsoft’s Project xCloud and Google’s Stadia, we can draw some conclusions but others will have to wait. Both services are aiming at different targets, and based on the idealised situations in which they were presented, they each achieve their goals. But not everything is in their hands. No plan survives contact with the enemy, and no streaming service has yet survived contact with the realities of home broadband. Continue reading...

Weeks after paying £43m for city state’s dearest penthouse, inventor has reportedly bought £26.5m bungalowWhen billionaire inventor James Dyson bought Singapore’s most expensive flat for £43m earlier this month, the only thing the luxury triplex was missing was its own waterfall.But Dyson, who has been criticised for uprooting his company to Singapore after strongly backing Brexit, has rectified that with the purchase of a second property, complete with cascading water feature. Continue reading...

Players as young as 12 will compete in the event, marking Fortnite: Battle Royale’s entry into the lucrative professional games tournament circuitAfter 10 weeks of open qualifiers attracting more than 40 million competitors, the Fortnite World Cup finals will be held this weekend in New York. Up for grabs for the 100 qualifiers – many of whom are between 12 and 16 years old – is a total prize pot of $30m, the largest ever for an esports event.With more than 250 million players, Fortnite: Battle Royale has become one of the most popular video games in the world since its launch in 2017. The World Cup represents the title’s entry into the lucrative world of professional games tournament circuits, where revenues are set to pass $1bn this year, due to exploding sponsorship, advertising and broadcast rights. Continue reading...