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PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC; Ubisoft

From refugees to Aids, live action role-play games are exploring critical issues. But is the idea of social change via larp a fantasy?The detention centre sits on the border. Once a low-security prison, it is in a depressing state of disrepair. The private company running the government facility plans improvements, but the flood of desperate “residents” has pushed these firmly on to the back burner.Residents are not prisoners, but a perceived scarcity of social resources means public opinion towards them is volatile; in response, the government has set an extremely small immigration quota. Residents undergo rigorous assessment in order to have their immigration applications even considered. Continue reading...

At a time of great emotional pain, Charlotte Soares was confronted by pop-up adverts on Facebook for funeral organisersThe news reminds me why I stopped using Facebook (Report, 22 March). Back in 2015-16 my mother was dying and I only used my BT email when writing to family and friends about her, never mentioning her on Facebook, the only social media I used. Suddenly I started getting pop-up adverts on Facebook for funeral organisers, will writers and monumental masons. At a time of great emotional pain, I was confronted by this every time I went on to Facebook like a slap in the face. I complained to BT that it seemed my emails were being compromised, when I thought what I wrote in them was private. They said it should be and they would investigate but I heard no more.I tried to contact Facebook to complain about inappropriate advertising which, to me, was of an emotionally abusive nature, but could find no working contact details. It left me no alternative but to come off Facebook because I could no longer trust the site. My main worry was the link between what I wrote in emails and what appeared on Facebook. I tested it by sending an email saying I was thinking of going to Italy. Hey presto, up came an advert on Facebook for Alitalia. It felt like an invasion of my privacy even if it’s only computers talking to each other with no humans aware. To use my mother’s final illness as a means to persuade me to buy things is inappropriate and caused me immense distress. Continue reading...

Some might be baffled by the cheapo Lego art style and janky controls – but, for kids, playing a game that doesn’t always work properly is all part of the funIf your kids aren’t playing Fortnite – the colourful, cartoonish shooter that has recently become a massive after-school (and work lunch-break) craze – they are probably playing Roblox. Like Minecraft, which colonised the minds of basically all school-aged children around 2012-15, Roblox lets players get creative and build things. But it goes further than Minecraft in that you can create entire games in Roblox, from racers to haunted-house adventures to competitive battle arenas. According to the developer, it has 56 million players. Continue reading...

As the use of autonomous machines increases in society, so too has the chance of robot-related fatalitiesWas killed last Sunday by an Uber autonomous car that hit the 49-year-old at approximately 40mph as she was crossing the road in Tempe, Arizona. Police confirmed there was an operator in the Volvo SUV at the time of the collision, and stated that it didn’t appear the car had slowed down. Continue reading...

The bestselling SUV from Volvo is the safest car on the road… but don’t ask it to park itselfVolvo XC60

Mark Zuckerberg kept his silence – then did little to assuage the anger in a week that laid bare the worst of Silicon ValleyEvery story has a beginning. For me, the story of Cambridge Analytica and Facebook that has unfolded so spectacularly this past week began in a cafe in Holloway, north London, at the beginning of 2017.I was having a coffee with my colleague Carole Cadwalladr. She had recently written a series of articles that set out how certain Google search terms had been “hijacked by the alt-right”. In the course of that investigation she explained how she had come across another pattern of activity apparently linking the Trump and Leave.EU campaigns, one that appeared to involve the billionaire Robert Mercer, Steve Bannon – then of Breitbart – and a secretive British company called Cambridge Analytica. She laid out the elements of what she knew, and what she didn’t, testing her conviction that “there’s definitely something there”. Continue reading...

Revelations about the depths of Facebook’s failure to protect our data have finally pulled back the curtain, observers say

Site unmasks 84 accounts used by 13 people linked to Russia’s ‘troll farm’, the Internet Research Agency, and says law enforcement has been notifiedThe blogging platform Tumblr has unmasked 84 accounts that it says were used by a shadowy Russian internet group to spread disinformation during the 2016 US election campaign.Tumblr said it uncovered the scheme in late 2017, helping an investigation that led to the indictment in February of 13 individuals linked to the Russia-based Internet Research Agency (IRA). Continue reading...

Online advertising is an effective way to get messages across, but the strategy must be smartFigures released this week by the Electoral Commission are the simplest way to demonstrate the growing influence of Facebook on British politics. Political parties nationally spent about £1.3m on Facebook during the 2015 general election campaign; two years later the figure soared to £3.2m.

Players snap up clothing items as iPhone version of free video game tops iTunes chart in 13 countriesA year ago, no one had heard of Fortnite, the online shooter game in which 100 players fight it out to be the last person standing. Now it is the biggest video game in the world, with an obsessive fanbase among schoolchildren and teenagers.Previously only available on consoles and PC, last week an iPhone version was given a limited release – and within hours it topped the iTunes chart in 13 countries. According to the market research firm Sensor Tower it made $1.5m (£1m) in revenue for Epic Games, its developer, in its first three days. Continue reading...

Jordan Erica Webber has her reservations when it comes to virtual reality in gaming. This week she battles with motion sickness and visits a VR arcade in London to see if her mind can be changed. Is there a future for these types of arcades?Subscribe and review: Acast, Apple, Spotify, Soundcloud, Audioboom, Mixcloud. Join the discussion on Facebook, Twitter or email us at podcasts@theguardian.comVirtual reality has some interesting applications in news and even in healthcare. But as a gaming platform it has its issues even if you do not suffer from simulation sickness. It is isolating, shutting the player off from the outside world. And it is expensive. Continue reading...

PS4, Xbox One; Criterion / Stellar Entertainment / Electronic ArtsThe much-loved racing game returns with a revamp that makes you feel as if you’re in the best Fast and Furious movie ever madeWhen Burnout Paradise arrived in 2008, some players resented its diversion from the previous Burnout games, which focused on tight circuits and vehicular destruction. Others, however, found its open-world structure exciting and beautiful. Paradise City is a vast playground, its intricate streets, highways, tunnels and overpasses open and explorable from the start. Players are dropped into a junkyard, where they choose a car. Then they drive – and they don’t really stop.

Concerns raised about future testing as footage suggests fatal collision in Arizona was failing of system’s most basic functions

Readers respond to recent revelations about Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, and suggest ways our personal data might be better safeguardedPatrick Cosgrove (Letters, 21 March) argues that the answer to the Facebook data scandal is simple – stop using Facebook. Alas, this completely misses the point. A few of us have never been a member of Facebook, but they still hold data about us, gathered from our friends and family who do have Facebook accounts. Worse, given that Facebook also buys data about people from third-party brokers, the profile they have on us is probably far more detailed and complete than we might like to think. The Facebook AI systems may know where we live, where we used to live, our work history, quite a bit about our movements, the people we know, where and how often we meet, how rich or poor we are, our interests, political outlook and so on. This is not trivial. The more they know, the more they can deduce and infer – and the more that information can be abused when it falls into the wrong hands.It was said some years ago that the credit card companies had such good profiles of us that they could predict when a marriage was going to break up before the couple did. This may well have been apocryphal, but behavioural prediction has come a long way in the last few years. I have no doubt at all that this is now a prediction that can be made with a high degree of accuracy. Continue reading...

Langlands and Bell are celebrating their 40th year together – by taking an uncompromising look at Silicon Valley’s utopian promisesBy a remarkable coincidence, on Wednesday, right as Mark Zuckerberg finally addressed the unfolding Facebook data-breach scandal, British artists Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell opened their new exhibition about the unchecked power Facebook and the other big tech companies wield.Internet Giants: Masters of the Universe, at Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery until 10 June, marks the 40th year of collaboration between Langlands and Bell. It is an arresting ensemble of installations and animations, prints and architectural models. Continue reading...

We asked you whether you’re thinking of deleting your Facebook account and to share your thoughts on data privacy

Following days of silence, CEO announces Facebook will change how it shares data with third-party apps and admits ‘we made mistakes’

New footage of the crash that killed Elaine Herzberg raises fresh questions about why the self-driving car did not stopVideo of the first self-driving car crash that killed a pedestrian showed how the autonomous Uber failed to slow down as it fatally hit a 49-year-old woman walking her bike across the street.The newly released footage of the collision that killed Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Arizona, on Sunday night has raised fresh questions about why the self-driving car did not stop when a human entered its path and has sparked scrutiny of regulations in the state, which has encouraged testing of the autonomous technology. Continue reading...

WARNING: SOME VIEWERS MAY FIND THE FOOTAGE DISTRESSING Video of the first self-driving car crash that killed a pedestrian in the US shows ​how the autonomous Uber failed to slow down before it hit a 49-year-old woman walking her bike across the street. It has raised fresh questions about why the vehicle did not stop when a human entered its path. 'It’s just awful,' Tina Marie Herzberg White, a stepdaughter of the victim, told the Guardian on Wednesday. 'There should be a criminal case.' Continue reading...

Sandy Parakilas, who has claimed covert harvesting was routine at the social network, told the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee Facebook did not do enough to prevent, identify - or act upon - data breaches

The director’s latest film, shot entirely on a phone, is a dizzying deep dive into the psyche of a stalking victim kept in a mental care facility against her will. Contains spoilersThe history of Steven Soderbergh is the history of making do. The steadfast indie director likes doing his movies his way, and when money poses an obstacle to his purity of vision, he’s always quick with an industry workaround. He wanted to make a 250-minute account of Che Guevara’s life to be spread across two films and shot entirely in the Spanish language, and since Hollywood wasn’t interested, he hawked his wares with French and Spanish distributors instead. The big studios refused to release Soderbergh’s Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra unless he first recut it, so he bypassed US theaters entirely and found a welcome home at HBO. He managed to free himself from overseer shackles entirely by selling all the streaming and TV rights to Logan Lucky ahead of its release last year, using that capital to finance the film, and then divvying up the box office proceeds among his collaborators instead of suited investors.Related: Don’t call it a comeback: the celebrities who love to ‘retire’ Continue reading...

One of the world’s most popular video games is now on phones, as well as everywhere else you look. We assess how it performs on a small screenBarely six months after its launch, Fortnite: Battle Royale has become one of the most played, watched and talked about video games in the world. Now, showing an admirably ruthless efficiency, developer Epic Games is launching a smartphone version. There really is no escape.It is currently available by invitation via the dedicated website and is only for iPhones. The game employs pretty much the same user interface as the console versions, which means some of the text and icons on the menu screens are extremely small on a standard iPhone display. However, once you’re playing, the bright, colourful graphical style works well in this reduced format, allowing you to easily pick out scenic details, even from a distance. Continue reading...

The rebooted Lara Croft video game crossover is aiming to reignite moviegoers’ passion for action archaeology. So do you dig Alicia Vikander’s interpretation, or are you still in the Angelina Jolie camp?

Brian Acton adds his voice to Cambridge Analytica backlash, as US agency said to be investigating social network’s mishandling of dataFacebook’s troubles entered a fourth day with a rising chorus of people – including the co-founder of WhatsApp – joining the #DeleteFacebook movement as the Federal Trade Commission was reported to be investigating the company’s handling of personal data. Continue reading...

Loved ones are in shock over the death of Elaine Herzberg in Arizona, but questions remain as to whether Uber will be held accountable

Perhaps you think you can’t possibly replace the social network – but it can be done. Here’s what you need for a Zuck-free existenceFor many people, deleting their Facebook accounts sounds a lot like living a carbon-neutral life, recycling all your waste or going hardcore vegan: a nice idea, and probably the morally right thing to do, but way too much of a hassle to actually go through with.Facebook, after all, is how millions of people keep in touch with loved ones, plan weekends and evenings, and engage with like-minded communities. And that’s without touching on the company’s other services, Instagram and WhatsApp, which between them form a trifecta of seeming indispensability. Continue reading...

Jaguar Land Rover to demonstrate autonomous cars’ emergency braking on streetsBritain is pushing ahead with tests of self-driving cars on public roads despite mounting public concern over safety after a pedestrian was killed by one in the US.The country’s biggest carmaker, Jaguar Land Rover, has been experimenting with autonomous cars on roads in the Midlands and is set to demonstrate more of the cars’ features, including an emergency braking warning system, on urban streets this week. Continue reading...

The Cambridge Analytica revelations may be the final nudge we need to turn away from the social network. And it’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to big tech harvesting private informationSorry to break it to you, but you are probably a “dumb fuck”. This is according to statements by a young Mark Zuckerberg anyway. Back in 2004, when a 19-year-old Zuckerberg had just started building Facebook, he sent his Harvard friends a series of instant messages in which he marvelled at the fact that 4,000 people had volunteered their personal information to his nascent social network. “People just submitted it ... I don’t know why ... They ‘trust me’ ... dumb fucks.”Related: Are you leaving Facebook? Share your concerns on privacy with us Continue reading...

Sandy Parakilas says numerous companies deployed these techniques – likely affecting hundreds of millions of users – and that Facebook looked the other way

The beloved feline star of the popular meme has died age eight. But does this really mean the end?Tonight he’s jamming with Kurt and Jimi. Keyboard Cat, the internet meme that bookended a thousand pratfalls, is dead.

Tempe police said car was in autonomous mode at the time of the crash and that the vehicle hit a woman who later died at a hospitalAn autonomous Uber car killed a woman in the street in Arizona, police said, in what appears to be the first reported fatal crash involving a self-driving vehicle and a pedestrian in the US.Tempe police said the self-driving car was in autonomous mode at the time of the crash and that the vehicle hit a woman, who was walking outside of the crosswalk and later died at a hospital. There was a vehicle operator inside the car at the time of the crash. Continue reading...

If you found the Cambridge Analytica data breach revelations deeply unsettling, read our guide to the maze of your privacy settingsIf the revelations that Cambridge Analytica acquired the records of 50 million Facebook users has you wondering how to protect your own personal information, you may already have discovered the maze of privacy settings the social networking site offers.First, the good news: the feature that allowed the most egregious data harvesting used by the company that gave Cambridge Analytica its data is no longer on the site. Continue reading...

Company looks for feedback on change that will make Windows Mail links open in Edge even if users have Chrome or Firefox set as default

A look at some of the most interesting discussion today, including around Cambridge Analytica and Facebook revelations

From the savagery in Salisbury to ‘dark social ads’, Russia’s hybrid warfare is here and needs a swift response. US law may have the answerThe Observer’s remarkable exposé of Cambridge Analytica must now bring down the curtain on the permissive environment for online electoral sabotage. It’s time for new laws, starting with a new UK version of the Honest Ads Act proposed in Congress, so voters finally learn who is targeting them with what “news” – and who’s writing the cheques. And that’s the amendment I’ll propose to the data protection bill this week.It’s not just the revelations about Cambridge Analytica that require us to act. The savagery in Salisbury brings with it a new truth. “Hybrid war”, fought for five years without mercy in the Ukraine, Crimea and the Baltics, has now arrived on our shores. Continue reading...

We can’t all go and live in the woods, of course. But if we resist debt, resist gadgets, and reconnect with nature, the world might just changeHaving once been an early adopter of tech, I was an unlikely early rejector. But it has now been over a year since I have phoned my family or friends, logged on to antisocial media, sent a text message, checked email, browsed online, took a photograph or listened to electronic music. Living and working on a smallholding without electricity, fossil fuels or running water, the last year has taught me much about the natural world, society, the state of our shared culture, and what it means to be human in a time when the boundaries between man and machine are blurring.My reasons for unplugging, during that time, haven’t so much changed as shifted in importance. My primary motives were – and still are – ecological. The logic was simple enough. Even if used minimally, a single smartphone (or toaster, internet server, solar panel, sex robot) relies on the entire industrial megamachine for its production, marketing and consumption. Continue reading...

Digital campaigns have evolved from banner ads 20 years ago to Cambridge Analytica harvesting our Facebook data. Has the rise of micro-targeting become a threat to democracy?

Fitness trackers are the boring cusp of the quantified self movement – but surely the true self can’t be found through wearable techThe latest product from Fitbit is called Ace. It is designed for children aged eight to 13 years old, and will help parents monitor their offspring’s health. (“Ace”, to my ears, sounds like the online username of a predatory catfish, but let’s leave that to one side.) I’m not sure how it will work – presumably there’s a gamification element for the kids, socially sharing movement and sleep levels, and rewarding healthy choices. Or maybe it simply electrocutes them if they go into a fried chicken shop.As any right-thinking person knows, technology peaked with the invention of the pyramid teabag. But only a fool wouldn’t admit to the sophistication of activity trackers like Fitbit. Embedded with accelerometers and altimeters, they disapprovingly calculate the number of stairs climbed, calories consumed and breaths taken, producing in-app graphs that prove you are a human sausage who will die at the desk of a job you hate. The scrutiny doesn’t end there. Fitbit has announced that it is looking into sensors that can track sleep apnea. Apple wants its earbuds to measure how much we sweat. Wearable blood glucose meters are being piloted, and in a few months, we will see personal hydration monitors on sale. This year, the sound of summer will be a wristband nagging you to put down the WKD and slam a Robinsons fruit shoot instead. Better than Ed Sheeran, I suppose. Continue reading...

UK arm – which earns about 10% of app’s global ad revenues – is forecast to bring in £181mSnapchat is so popular in Britain that its advertising revenue will overtake Twitter’s UK revenue in 2019, and revenue from consumer magazine and cinema advertising within two years.The seven-year old phone app is hugely popular with younger users, many of whom have flocked from older social media platforms such as Facebook, and advertisers are beginning to spend increasingly large amounts of their digital ad budgets on targeting its users.

Technological addiction was a problem even in the early days of computer programming, according to Dave Smith, while Peter McKenna says search engine algorithms alone are not to blame for gender biasI found Moya Sarner’s article on digital addiction and her story of Lady Geek’s reverse ferret from digital guru to prophet of doom absorbing, timely, and somehow familiar (Is it time to fight the digital dictators?, 15 March). She also quotes Professor Mark Griffiths, director of the International Gaming Research Unit at Nottingham Trent University as having invented the term “technological addiction” in 1995. In 1971 I started a degree in maths, electronics and physics at Chelsea College, University of London which involved a certain amount of programming on the college’s Elliott 803 mainframe.I remember clearly our lecturer warning us very sternly about the dangers of getting over-involved in programming, quoting the case of an earlier student who had spent so many nights in the computer room, addicted to getting his programs just-so, that he neglected all his other studies and eventually failed to make progress in anything. Remember that this was back in the days when our programs were written in Fortran on decks of hand-punched 80-column cards. Continue reading...

According to the Internal Revenue Service, anything purchased using a digital currency is liable to be taxed as a capital gainThe rollercoaster ride for some cryptocurrency investors could be about to take another tax-time lurch, according to experts, as the taxman looks for his share of transactions made using bitcoin and its like.Wild fluctuations in the value of digital currencies – bitcoin surged from less than one dollar in 2010 to $997 at the start of the 2017 to nearly $20,000 before settling back to around $8,500 on Friday – have exposed investors to tax bills the value of their coins may no longer meet. Continue reading...

Once the International Space Station is decommissioned in 2028, what will the next generation of orbital bases look like?

Only a handful of these stunning track cars are going to be built, but that won’t stop millions of us lusting after themAston Martin Valkyrie AMR Pro hypercar

The founder of the screen repair initiative is a judge for the Observer’s New RadicalsCracked It, a social enterprise staffed by young ex-offenders, and whose founder is a judge of the Observer New Radicals initiative, has been named social enterprise of the year.The project, a smartphone-repair service which employs young ex-offenders and tries to turn young people away from gangs, was recognised at the Centre for Social Justice Awards last week. Cracked It was tipped as a rising star of 2017 by the Observer last year. Continue reading...

The algorithm used in the Facebook data breach trawled though personal data for information on sexual orientation, race, gender – and even intelligence and childhood traumaThe algorithm at the heart of the Facebook data breach sounds almost too dystopian to be real. It trawls through the most apparently trivial, throwaway postings –the “likes” users dole out as they browse the site – to gather sensitive personal information about sexual orientation, race, gender, even intelligence and childhood trauma.A few dozen “likes” can give a strong prediction of which party a user will vote for, reveal their gender and whether their partner is likely to be a man or woman, provide powerful clues about whether their parents stayed together throughout their childhood and predict their vulnerability to substance abuse. And it can do all this without an need for delving into personal messages, posts, status updates, photos or all the other information Facebook holds. Continue reading...

When these young entrepreneurs bought a remote ski resort in Utah, they dreamed of an exclusive, socially conscious community. Is this the future, or Mt Olympus for Generation Me?Jeff Rosenthal is standing near the top of his snow-covered mountain wearing a fluffy jacket, fingerless gloves and ripped jeans. “It’s surreal, man!” he says, shivering as he surveys the landscape of newly laid roads and half-built homes. “That’s Ken Howery’s house, the co-founder of PayPal. Awesome house!”