Technology | The Guardian

Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, Mac; Romero Games/Paradox Interactive

Productivity score potentially allowed managers to identify individual employees who weren’t contributing enoughMicrosoft has apologised for enabling a feature, “productivity score”, which critics said was tantamount to workplace surveillance.The company says it will now make changes to the service, which lets IT administrators “help their people get the most” from its products, in order to limit the amount of information about individual employees that is shared with managers. Continue reading...

Our article asking why so many players invert their controls provoked a fierce debate that has now caught the attention of researchers into visual perception

Over the course of the pandemic, I’ve been assailed by targeted ads for ‘life-changing’ products – so I put a selection of them to the testIf, like me, you’ve been involuntarily participating in this wild ride people are calling “the pandemic”, you may have experienced the same embarrassing urge as I have. Which is to fill the wide, empty void in your life with things: gadgets, gizmos, subscriptions, speakers, a little brush for your facial hair. Buying stuff online is, simply put, something to do.Thanks to mass online data harvesting, this new pandemic habit has already been widely monetized. It’s most noticeable on Instagram, where with every few scrolls we are hit with ads for products promising to change our lives, taking advantage of the fact that wherever you may be on the sliding scale of privilege, “life” is undeniably shit right now. Continue reading...

The pandemic has spurred on robotics companies building machines to perform tasks in hospitals and other industries

Marc Benioff’s company gains leverage against Microsoft’s threat with the largest acquisition in its 21-year historyBusiness software pioneer Salesforce.com is buying work-chatting service Slack for $27.7bn in a deal aimed at giving the two companies a better shot at competing against longtime industry powerhouse Microsoft.The acquisition announced Tuesday is by far the largest in the 21-year history of Salesforce. The San Francisco company was one of the first to begin selling software as a subscription service that could be used on any internet-connected device instead of the more cumbersome process of installing the programs on individual computers. Continue reading...

Winning combo of great sound, noise cancelling, dual connection, long battery, small case and fitJabra is back with its fourth-generation Bluetooth true wireless earbuds, the Elite 85t, with improved fit, better sound and active noise cancelling to rival Apple’s AirPods Pro.The Elite 85t cost £219.99 and top the range that includes its predecessors the £170 Elite 75t and £140 Elite 65t. Continue reading...

Social network agrees deal with mainstream outlets in face of government crackdown on its dominance of advertising

Demand for the cryptocurrency surges during NovemberThe price of bitcoin has hit an all-time-high of almost $20,000 three years after the cryptocurrency last spiked to that level.One bitcoin was worth $19,850.11 (£14,880) on Monday afternoon, according to CoinDesk, a bitcoin price index. By Monday evening its value fell back to about $19,223. Continue reading...

With a background including Elder Scrolls, Fallout and forthcoming epic Starfield, how does the acclaimed developer see games in the next five years?When you’ve got a discography like Todd Howard’s, full of critically acclaimed games in the Elder Scrolls and Fallout series, it must be hard to pick a favourite. But there is one game he remembers more fondly than anyone else does: the first he ever worked on.“Terminator: Future Shock,” he says. “When [Bethesda] came to Fallout, people were saying, oh, you’re doing a post-apocalyptic open world! In 3D! But we already did that in Terminator. It’s an underrated game that not a lot of people played. I think Quake came out right afterwards, that might have had something to do with it, and understandably so … Future Shock was made with eight or 10 people and it did a lot of things that no game had done. I remember it got critiqued at the time, which annoyed me to be honest. But now the things it did are commonplace.” Continue reading...

Some 300 homes in Fife to be fitted with free boilers, heaters and cooking appliancesHundreds of homes in Scotland will soon become the first in the world to use 100% green hydrogen to heat their properties and cook their meals as part of a new trial that could help households across the country replace fossil fuel gas.Some 300 homes in Fife will be fitted with free hydrogen boilers, heaters and cooking appliances to be used for more than four years in the largest test of whether zero carbon hydrogen, made using renewable energy and water, could help meet Britain’s climate goals. Continue reading...

They’re too young to vote or drive. But meet the children writing computer programs to track our health and wellbeing, choose a new school… and even how to cheat at online gamesI started getting interested in coding when I was about 11. I joined a local community lab where biologists and computer scientists come together and conduct experiments. I wanted to join the lab because my brother was really into biology and at the time I wanted to be exactly like him. I was too young to participate in the experiments, so my mentor pushed me more towards coding. Continue reading...

For years, it never made a profit – despite having bigger warehouses and better tech than its rivals. Post Covid-19, can Ocado go global?Ocado’s warehouse in Erith, 15 miles east of London on the Thames estuary, is staffed by 1,050 “personal shoppers”. Outnumbering them are 1,800 robots the size of small washing machines.You see them by climbing to the top level of the vast warehouse – at 564,000 sq ft, it is more than three times the size of St Peter’s in Rome – where a sign tells you that photography is strictly prohibited. The online supermarket is paranoid that rivals will glimpse the technology it believes to be revolutionary. Continue reading...

A Kent couple love their new car – but their experience suggests there are problems with the charging networkA couple from Kent have described how it took them more than nine hours to drive 130 miles home from Bournemouth as they struggled to find a working charger capable of producing enough power to their electric car.Linda Barnes and her husband had to visit six charging stations as one after another they were either out of order, already had a queue or were the slow, older versions that would never be able to provide a fast enough charge in the time. Continue reading...

The pandemic has left millions of Americans unemployed – including many in the hospitality industry, which has seen a rise in the adoption of new techThey can check you in and deliver orange juice to your hotel room, answer your questions about a missing package, whip up sushi and pack up thousands of subscription boxes. And, perhaps most importantly, they are completely immune to Covid-19. While people have had a hard time in the coronavirus pandemic, robots are having a moment.The Covid-19 pandemic has left millions of Americans unemployed – disproportionately those in the service industries where women and people of color make up the largest share of the labor force. In October, 11 million people were unemployed in the US, compared with about 6 million people who were without a job during the same time last year. Continue reading...

Actor Taraji P Henson exploes the history of the poppy, R&B-influenced New Jack Swing. Plus: rapper Eve turns interviewer, and a US politics podcast high on camaraderie and insightJacked: Rise of the New Jack Sound

Economist takes on retail giant before planned day of international protestsThe economist Yanis Varoufakis has called for a one-day boycott of Amazon on Black Friday as trade unionists, environmental activists, privacy campaigners and tax justice advocates plan coordinated actions against the company’s sites and supply chain.Amazon’s success during the coronavirus pandemic – at one point the company was reported to be making sales of $11,000 (£8,200) a second – has vastly inflated its share price, increasing the personal wealth of its chief executive, Jeff Bezos, already the world’s richest man, by $70bn. Bloomberg estimates his current wealth to be $187bn. Continue reading...

Tool allows managers to use Microsoft 365 to track their employees’ activityMicrosoft has been criticised for enabling “workplace surveillance” after privacy campaigners warned that the company’s “productivity score” feature allows managers to use Microsoft 365 to track their employees’ activity at an individual level.The tools, first released in 2019, are designed to “provide you visibility into how your organisation works”, according to a Microsoft blogpost, and aggregate information about everything from email use to network connectivity into a headline percentage for office productivity. Continue reading...

Nintendo Switch; Omega Force/Koei-Tecmo/Nintendo

With its iPhones, watches and forthcoming smart glasses, Apple’s gadgets are increasingly becoming extensions of our minds and bodies. It’s the big tech dream – but could it turn into a nightmare?

Some of the discounts UK retailers such as Tesco, Argos, Asda and Aldi are offering

Further rise in Tesla share price pushes entrepreneur past Microsoft co-founderElon Musk, the maverick chief executive of Tesla, has overtaken Bill Gates to become the world’s second-richest person with a $128bn (£97bn) fortune after the electric car company he helped found 17 years ago soared in value to more than $500bn.Musk, 49, has seen his personal fortune increase by $100bn so far this year as investors worldwide rush to buy shares in Tesla, which is seen as key in helping wean the world off its reliance on fossil fuels. Continue reading...

UK information commissioner calls for international approach to emerging threat

Messaging app to pay users for most viral ‘snaps’ as it seeks to head off exodus to TikTokThe promise of viral fame has always been a lure for online content creators, but Snapchat hopes it has found a more immediate way of encouraging people to post pictures and videos: a share of a daily $1m (£747,000) prize.The messaging app is to begin paying its users for their most viral snaps, as the platform moves to head off a feared exodus to TikTok with a new feed of user-generated content. Continue reading...

Instead of being driven by a twisted sense of vengeance, protagonist Ichiban, a washed-up gangster in his 40s, seeks answers. He’s a welcome antidoteIt sounds like the set-up for a violent revenge movie. Low-ranking yakuza Ichiban Kasuga takes the blame for an inter-clan assassination and does 18 years in prison to protect the organisation’s patriarch. But, on his release, the gang disowns him and the boss, who he considers a father figure, shoots him and leaves him for dead. Kasuga wakes up days later, destitute and alone in another city. Surely, the stage is set for bloody retribution?Well … not quite. Kasuga is not that kind of protagonist. Continue reading...

Many still regards video games as a waste of time or downright sinister. But the real story is very differentAfter an Oxford study this week showed that people who play more video games report greater wellbeing, the headlines reflected a sense of stunned incredulity. “Playing video games BENEFITS mental health,” exclaimed MailOnline, while Business Insider went with “Video games might actually be good for you.” My dad sent me a clipping from the Times, as he has done every time he’s seen video games mentioned in the paper for the past 15 years, that began with the words “parents beware”. Who’d have thunk it?But why the surprise? For anyone who actually plays video games, this is hardly news. Video games are fun and interesting, and doing fun, interesting things makes you happy. Would we need a study to show that watching a few episodes of a beloved TV show makes you feel good, or that sitting down with a good book is relaxing? This year especially, video games have been an essential form of escapism and therapy for millions, and this study proves that I was hardly the only one devotedly playing Animal Crossing to decompress after an intense day of lockdown parenting. And that’s not to mention the 11-year-olds whose only meaningful social contact with other kids for months was playing Roblox together. Continue reading...

My brother Eddie Yeadon, who has died aged 82, was an engineer and physicist with a particular interest in optics and astronomy.In the late 1960s he worked in the US for the optics company Perkin Elmer on the visors for the helmets used in the Apollo 11 moon landings. He also designed a reflector left on the moon to “bounce” a laser beam. He often joked that this was the part of the mission which did not work (although it was used subsequently). Continue reading...

Tech giant criticised for failing to act after being told two years ago about extremist activity on its platformA white supremacist network with more than 80,000 followers and links to the UK far right, including a student charged with terrorist offences, is being hosted by Facebook and Instagram, putting the world’s largest social media company under fresh pressure to tackle extremism.The network, which includes more than 40 neo-Nazi sites, offers merchandise including NaziSS symbols and stickers praising Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager under investigation for shooting dead two Black Lives Matter protesters in Wisconsin in August. Continue reading...

Online retailer is investigating spate of pre-delivery thefts of newly released £450 consoleAmazon has said it is investigating reports that new PlayStation 5 consoles have been stolen in transit, as customers have complained of missing deliveries, and bags of grain or tins of cat food delivered instead of the electronics.Supply shortages have left the new games console even more desirable than its £450 price tag would suggest. But some shoppers waiting at home for the console to be delivered received an unwelcome surprise on Thursday and Friday, opening their parcels to find something other than the item they ordered. Continue reading...

Facebook, Twitter and Google part of working group targeting false claims about vaccines

Criticism made as Apple pushes ahead with transparency feature disliked by advertisers

Gamers express anger as demand crashes websites and new console sells outGames retailers have been overwhelmed by demand for the latest Sony PlayStation console, which launched in the UK on Thursday.The rush for the Playstation 5 – which in non-pandemic times would have sparked midnight queues and camping outside high street stores – caused the entire John Lewis website to crash for nearly two hours. The department store apologised to shoppers and blamed “extremely high levels of demand” for the technical issues. Continue reading...

New unit aims to disrupt online activities of hostile states, terror groups and paedophilesBritain has unveiled its new National Cyber Force, a unit of offensive hackers that can target hostile states such as China and Russia, terror groups and even paedophiles by disrupting their online communications.The NCF, controlled by the spy agency GCHQ and the Ministry of Defence (MoD), has been secretly up and running since April with several hundred hackers based in Cheltenham and other military sites around the country. Continue reading...

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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...