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PlayStation 4, PC; No Code/Devolver Digital

PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch; Sumo Digital/Sega

UK workers must move to nine-hour week if carbon levels do not change, says thinktankPeople across Europe will need to work drastically fewer hours to avoid disastrous climate heating unless there is a radical decarbonising of the economy, according to a study.The research, from thinktank Autonomy, shows workers in the UK would need to move to nine-hour weeks to keep the country on track to avoid more than 2C of heating at current carbon intensity levels. Similar reductions were found to be necessary in Sweden and Germany. Continue reading...

Female-voiced tech often gives submissive responses to queries, Unesco report findsAssigning female genders to digital assistants such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa is helping entrench harmful gender biases, according to a UN agency.Research released by Unesco claims that the often submissive and flirty responses offered by the systems to many queries – including outright abusive ones – reinforce ideas of women as subservient. Continue reading...

Ed Bridges, from Cardiff, says ‘intrusive’ technology is used on thousands of peopleAn office worker who believes his image was captured by facial recognition cameras when he popped out for a sandwich in his lunch break has launched a groundbreaking legal battle against the use of the technology.Supported by the campaign group Liberty, Ed Bridges, from Cardiff, raised money through crowdfunding to pursue the action, claiming the suspected use of the technology on him by South Wales police was an unlawful violation of privacy. Continue reading...

Huawei announces cut-price premium phones with quad cameras and top-end chipsHuawei’s Honor is trying to dominate the increasingly crowded cut-price premium phone market with the launch of two new top-spec phones, the Honor 20 and Honor 20 Pro, flying in the face of the US blockade.With Apple, Samsung and now Huawei ceding the space of the sub-£600 top-end phone as starting prices have risen beyond £900, Honor’s latest offering continues the winning trend of flagship hardware at more reasonable prices. Continue reading...

Announcement comes after Guardian revealed Google gave $150,000 in free ads to opaque anti-abortion groupGoogle has changed its advertising policy after facing scrutiny for providing tens of thousands of dollars in free advertising to an anti-abortion group that runs misleading ads designed to deter women from terminating their pregnancies.Google announced this week that starting in June, advertisers running ads “using keywords related to getting an abortion” will first have to distinguish themselves as an organization that “either provides abortions or does not provide abortions”, according to the new policy update. Continue reading...

PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch; Fallen Tree Games/Curve Digital

Ren Zhengfei says firm is fully prepared to face US bans and that 5G plans will be unaffectedThe founder of Huawei has said the US “underestimates” the Chinese telecom makers’s strength and that conflict with the US is inevitable in the quest to “stand on top of the world”.Ren Zhengfei said his company was fully prepared to face US bans on key components following new trade restrictions caused by Donald Trump’s declaration of a national economic emergency last week Continue reading...

Top executive says dispute is about trade, not security, as US temporarily eases some restrictions to avoid hurting US companiesThe US ban on sharing technology with Huawei is a “cynically timed” blow in the escalating trade war between the US and China, the Chinese firm’s top executive in the UK has said.Huawei denounced Donald Trump’s ban on the sharing of US tech with “foreign adversaries”, after a string of US tech companies followed Google in restricting the company’s access to their products on Monday. Continue reading...

Google has cut off Huawei from its Android services because of Trump’s blacklist, but what does that mean for your phone?Donald Trump’s blacklisting of Huawei in the escalating trade war between the US and China is now starting to cause significant issues for the world’s second-largest smartphone manufacturer.Alongside US chip manufacturers, Google has been forced to comply with the US government’s ban on the supply of technologies to Huawei. Continue reading...

Reported move could hit Huawei Technologies’ ability to run phone operating systemGoogle has suspended Huawei’s access to updates of its Android operating system and chipmakers have reportedly cut off supplies to the Chinese telecoms company, after the US government added it to a trade blacklist last week.Google said it was complying with an executive order issued by Donald Trump and was reviewing the “implications”, later adding that Google Play – through which Google allows users to download apps – and the security features of its antivirus software Google Play Protect would continue on existing Huawei devices. New versions of its smartphones outside China would lose access to popular applications and services including Google Play, Maps and the Gmail app. Continue reading...

Jordan Erica Webber chats to the authors of a new book which looks into why human emotions have changed so drastically in the last couple of centuriesSusan Matt is a professor of history at Weber State University in Utah. She recently collaborated with Luke Fernandez, an assistant professor in the school of computing there, to write a book called Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid: Changing Feelings About Technology, from the Telegraph to Twitter.Jordan Erica Webber chats to them about how our emotions have changed alongside technological advances, from the invention of the telegraph and the ability to write letters to the emergence of the camera and the creation of social media. Continue reading...

As the blocky exploration game and creativity tool reaches its first decade, our games writer – and the father of someone on the autism spectrum – reflects on the impact it has hadHidden away somewhere in my attic is an old Xbox 360 that I’ll never throw away. On its hard drive is a Minecraft save file that contains the first house my oldest son ever built in the game. He was seven and, coming from a boy on the autism spectrum with a limited vocabulary and no patience to draw and paint, his creation was a revelation. Sure, it is a monstrous carbuncle, a mess of wooden planks, cobblestone and dirt. But it is also the greatest building I ever saw.Now Minecraft is 10. The building-and-exploring game, originally developed by one coder, Markus Persson, in his spare time, has now sold 176m copies across 21 platforms. A free-to-play version launched in China via a partnership with NetEase has been downloaded 200m times alone. Every month, 90 million people around the world play Minecraft. There are Minecraft clothes, Lego sets and spin-off games. In spring 2022, there will be a live-action Minecraft movie. Continue reading...

The attack on the messaging app showed us spying is a thriving businessWhen Edward Snowden broke cover in the summer of 2013 and a team of Guardian journalists met up with him in his Hong Kong hotel, he insisted not only that they switch off their mobile phones but also that they put the devices into a fridge. This precaution suggested that Snowden had some special insight into the hacking powers of the NSA, specifically that the agency had developed techniques for covertly taking over a mobile phone and using it as a tracking and recording device. To anyone familiar with the capabilities of agencies such as the NSA or GCHQ, this seemed plausible. And in fact, some years later, such capabilities were explicitly deemed necessary and permissible (as “equipment interference”) in the Investigatory Powers Act 2016.When Snowden was talking to the reporters in Hong Kong, WhatsApp was a four-year-old startup with an honest business model (people paid for the app), about 200m active users and a valuation of $1.5bn. In February 2014, Facebook bought the company for $19bn and everything changed. WhatsApp grew exponentially to its present ubiquity: it has more than 1.5 billion users and has spread like a rash over the entire planet. Continue reading...

A uniquely effective suspension means this easy-going family car will cope with all of life’s little bumpsCitroën C5 Aircross

Eating is a social pleasure – touchscreens just serve to make it more solitaryLast month, in New York, I saw the future, and I didn’t like it. Let me first set the scene. Booked on an eye-scorchingly early flight, I arrived at Newark airport before dawn, feeling fiercely alone, as I often do when I travel for work: a bagatelle ball, pinging around, unseen by those I love and who love me back. The airport was quiet and I passed through security quickly. On the other side, I sent a couple of emails and bought a newspaper, and then it hit me: I was ravenous; hungry like a wolf. I wanted some breakfast. I needed some breakfast. And so I set off to find some breakfast.Hunger in these situations isn’t straightforward. My stomach was empty, it’s true. But I also had time to kill and spare dollars in my pocket. The potential for boredom flickered away in the glare of the artificial light. I didn’t want to make conversation with anyone, but I did want to receive that particular form of ersatz kindness a waiter may offer to a person travelling on their own. “Coming right up,” they tell you in America, as if you were their best ever customer, and an order of coffee the most original and daring request ever made. In the right mood – or perhaps I mean the wrong mood – this line has the potential to reduce me to tears. Continue reading...

The Only God Forgives director has made his first foray into TV with a supernatural noir series, and it’s just as horrible and upsetting as you’d expectWhen I spoke to Nicolas Winding Refn at the Lumiere film festival in Lyon a while back, he told me that though cinema would find a way to return in the digital multiplatform age: “Television is dead. And television will not be reborn.” He can only of course have meant that mischievously, because Refn has just completed a huge new TV show, a quasi-supernatural LA horror-thriller noir entitled Too Old to Die Young, two episodes of which premiered on the bigger-than-big screen of the Grand Theatre Lumiere at Cannes. The programme is produced by Amazon, with whom Cannes’s relations are considerably better than with Netflix. It incidentally contains a clip of Curtis Harrington’s cult thriller Night Tide, starring Dennis Hopper, from 1961: a film which Refn has championed on his new streaming platform.The show is every bit as hypnotically horrible and upsetting as you would expect, with terse lines, tense pauses, dead-eyed glares, all conducted at the andante pace of a zombie continuing to move after being shot – and delivering a doomy, sepulchral, and very plausible evocation of pure evil. Despite its occasional forays into the fierce sunshine of California and New Mexico, this is a creature of the night, lit by neon, an underworld of madness and fear. The two episodes shown here allow only for a partial understanding of what is supposed to be going on, but it’s clearly influenced by Lynch and Tarantino, and like Refn’s bygone horror Only God Forgives, there is a sense memory of the corridor of blood that Travis Bickle will walk down in Taxi Driver. And the hero himself is a little like Ryan Gosling’s implacable wheelman in Refn’s Drive, from 2011. Continue reading...

‘Appalled’ Democrat urges action after Guardian revealed Google has given $150,000 in free ads to opaque anti-abortion groupGoogle is facing pressure in Washington to immediately remove online advertisements for “fake medical clinics” that are designed to “mislead” women who are seeking an abortion.Related: Google has given $150,000 in free ads to deceptive anti-abortion group Continue reading...

Grumpy Cathas died aged seven. She became an internet sensation in 2012 when images of her downturned mouth and unimpressed expression emerged on Reddit. She soon became the universal digital shorthand for displeasure, with thousands of memes and gifs of her being circulated online to communicate apathy or cynicism. Grumpy Cat’s online stardom quickly translated into a real-world empire with a Christmas film, a Madame Tussauds wax figure, and a range of merchandise including soft toys, clothing and a fragrance.

Microsoft has launched an augmented reality version of the bestselling game, which follows Pokémon Go on to the streetsSince its beta launch in 2009, the blocky, world-building adventure game Minecraft has been released on more than 20 different platforms, from PC to consoles to mobile phones, selling 176m copies. Now it’s heading somewhere new: the real world.News of a Minecraft AR (augmented reality) app leaked a few weeks ago, but now Microsoft has officially announced Minecraft Earth. It is being developed at the company’s Redmond campus, using an array of its mobile, GPS and tracking technologies. Continue reading...

Internet’s No 1 cat, with a face that launched a thousand gifs, expires in ArizonaThe greatest frown in town: Grumpy Cat – a life in picturesGrumpy Cat – the most famous cat on the internet, whose downturned mouth and unimpressed expression was the universal digital shorthand for displeasure – has died.The seven-year-old cat, real name Tardar Sauce or Tard, became one of the internet’s first “petfluencers” after gaining fame online for her perpetually gloomy gaze, launching an empire worth millions. She died in the arms of her owner, Tabatha Bundesen, in Phoenix, Arizona, on Tuesday morning after complications from a urinary tract infection. Continue reading...

Recruiters reportedly say social network has suffered major decline in interest from top US schoolsThe fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal continues to hurt Facebook as candidates turn down job offers from what was once considered one of the best employers in the tech sector.Job offer acceptance rates at Facebook have significantly decreased, it has been reported, after the revelations last March that the data of up to 87m users of the social network had been used improperly by Cambridge Analytica to target ads for Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election. Continue reading...

Great camera, top software, OK battery and performance, in a plastic body that’s a bit too wideWith a price-tag of £469, the Pixel 3a XL tries to offer the best of Google, but costing £400 less than its top-end siblingThe bigger brother of Google’s other lower-cost phone, the Pixel 3a, the new Pixel 3a XL offers the same winning combination of great camera and software. It offers practically everything that makes Google’s top £869 Pixel 3 XL good, shrunk in both cost and weight. Continue reading...

PC; Creative Assembly/Sega

Report calling for 5G ban in UK comes as Netherlands said to be investigating Huawei espionageHuawei should be completely banned from supplying 5G mobile networks in the UK because its operations are “subject to influence by the Chinese state”, according to a report by a Conservative MP and two academics.They argue that a decision announced by Theresa May last month, after a fraught meeting of the National Security Council (NSC), to allow Huawei to supply “non-core” equipment should be overturned because using the company’s technology presents “risks”. Continue reading...

Marex has run out of space for music and graphic design work; thankfully, adding an SSD is easyI use a Dell 15-5577 laptop with 8GB of memory for music production and graphic design. The problem is that its 256GB SSD is not enough to store all my projects. An external drive is not an option because I want everything in the same “drawer” and it’s a pain to carry it everywhere with me. I need help with how to swap out my existing SSD with a larger capacity one, say 512GB. While I’m at it, should I also upgrade memory? MarexThe Dell Inspiron 15-5577 was sold as an affordable 15.6in gaming laptop with an Intel Core i5 or i7 Kaby Lake (7th generation) processor and an Nvidia GTX 1050 graphics chip. It costs from £799 to £1,299 depending on the processor, graphics, storage and type of screen installed. It also has an Ethernet port, three USB 3.0 ports and a full-size SD card slot. Continue reading...

Coders, cocktails and a bank heist in reverse – the brothers who sued Mark Zuckerberg and hit bitcoin boom timeIf you have seen The Social Network, you will remember the Winklevoss twins: tall, preppy Harvard students (both played by Armie Hammer) who also happened to be Olympic oarsmen and who ended up suing Mark Zuckerberg for allegedly stealing their idea to make Facebook. (Zuckerberg eventually settled for $65m.) In that film they were portrayed as faintly ridiculous comic relief, personifying the establishment against which the geeks triumphed. No doubt, then, they were eager to be interviewed for this book, in which they are the heroes.Ben Mezrich wrote the non-fiction account on which The Social Network was based, The Accidental Billionaires, and since it seems that the word “billionaires” works well in a book title, he is back to tell the story of how the Winklevi – as they are commonly known, though for some reason he insists here on spelling it Winklevii – made an early big bet on bitcoin, the digital cryptocurrency, and won big. Continue reading...

16 May 1959: Jodrell Bank Experimental Station bounces messages off moon to US in what is seen as a great step forward in world communicationsA great step forward in world communications – including television and radio-telephony – may result from the success of experiments at Jodrell Bank.Radio signals transmitted from Jodrell Bank have been bounced off the moon and picked up by receivers at the United States Air Force research centre at Cambridge in Massachusetts. This was announced yesterday in a statement from Jodrell Bank and by the Pye Organisation, of Cambridge in England, which manufactured some of the equipment used at Jodrell Bank. The first message transmitted was in morse code and read: Continue reading...

Jacinda Ardern and Emmanuel Macron host Christchurch Call summit in ParisWorld leaders and heads of global technology companies have pledged at a Paris summit to tackle terrorist and extremist violence online in what they described as an “unprecedented agreement”.Wednesday’s event, two months to the day since the Christchurch massacre in New Zealand, drew up a “plan of action” to be adopted by countries and companies to prevent extreme material from going viral on the internet. Continue reading...

Barbican, London

Supreme court says GCHQ’s hacking powers should be subject to judicial reviewGovernment security decisions will in future be open to challenge in the courts after judges ruled that a secretive intelligence tribunal could not be exempt from legal action.By a 4-3 majority, supreme court justices declared that the extent of GCHQ’s powers to hack into internet services should be subject to judicial review. Continue reading...

Four payments sent after SamSam ransomware targeted entities across the US were traced by ProPublica to Proven DataFrom 2015 to 2018, a strain of ransomware known as SamSam paralyzed computer networks across North America and the UK. It caused more than $30m in damages to at least 200 entities, including the cities of Atlanta and Newark, the port of San Diego and Hollywood Presbyterian medical center in Los Angeles. It knocked out Atlanta’s water service requests and online billing systems, prompted the Colorado Department of Transportation to call in the national guard, and delayed medical appointments and treatments for patients nationwide whose electronic records couldn’t be retrieved. In return for restoring access to the files, the cyberattackers collected at least $6m in ransom.“You just have 7 days to send us the BitCoin,” read the ransom demand to Newark. “After 7 days we will remove your private keys and it’s impossible to recover your files.” Continue reading...

From royal role-playing to battle simulators, these games will satisfy Westeros refugees as the TV saga nears its endPC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One Continue reading...

I, too, wanted to see male-me, but it’s ironic that an app that encourages you to play with gender has such a binary view of itYou may remember Snapchat. The app used to be hugely popular and then suddenly became irrelevant. Thanks to its viral new gender-swapping filter, however, Snapchat is back. People are downloading the app in droves to see what they would look like as the opposite gender; even the (male) England Cricket team has got in on the action. (Honestly, if they all looked like that in real life, I would be the biggest cricket fan in the world.)Anyway, I’ve always thought I would have made a very handsome man, so when I heard about the Snapchat filter I was quick to try it out. Well, “quick’” may not be the most accurate descriptor. Apparently, I am now “can’t-use-technology-years-old”; it took me an embarrassing amount of Googling and expletives to figure out how to download the gender-swapping function. After all that trouble I can’t tell you how upset I was to find out that male-me looks like a sex offender. An extremely disappointing result. Continue reading...

Ruling will make it more difficult for workers to organize, secure minimum wages and other protections, labor advocates sayUber drivers are not subject to traditional labor protections because they are independent contractors, the National Labor Relations Board said in an opinion published on Thursday.The board’s opinion, which appears to be the first federal comment on the issue of Uber drivers’ employee status, will make it more difficult for workers to organize in unions and secure minimum wages and other protections, labor advocates say. Continue reading...

Cyberweapons are dangerous in themselves. Their proliferation makes them much more harmfulNSO Group, an Israeli firm that has risen to a billion-dollar valuation on the strength of the aggressive hacking tools it sells to authoritarian governments across the Arab world, is being sued by lawyers and activists who claim to be victims of its software. One of the lawyers involved in the suit was targeted some weeks ago by mysterious WhatsApp calls to his phone in the middle of the night. When he contacted technical experts, they discovered Pegasus 3, an aggressive virus that can apparently install itself on a phone without the victim taking any action at all. Once installed, it takes control of the device, recording conversations and video. It can destroy the evidence of its own arrival and existence, and control any files on the device. In effect, it turns a smartphone into the perfect spying device, which the victim will carry everywhere with them.Similar programs are widely available to abusers of all sorts, which is one reason why many domestic violence shelters ban the use of smartphones. But the ones that can easily be bought require some action from the victim, usually a misplaced click, or else a few moments’ access to their phone. The NSO malware targeting WhatsApp is different in that it could install itself without the victim doing anything at all. To discover and exploit the programming mistakes that opened this vulnerability would take years and cost millions of dollars. That is why it’s assumed that only states, or state-backed actors, have the resources to produce them. Continue reading...

She livestreams her dates, once became a real-life Alexa and built a light that dims in boring company. As AI: More Than Human opens at the Barbican, meet an artist for the tech ageIn a gallery in downtown Manhattan, people are huddling around four laptops, taking turns to control the apartments of 14 complete strangers. They watch via live video feeds, and respond whenever the residents ask “Someone” to help them. They switch the lights on and off, boil the kettle, put some music on – whatever they can do to oblige.The project, called Someone, is the latest in a series exploring our ever more complicated relationship with technology. It’s by the American artist Lauren McCarthy and is a sort of outsourcing of Lauren, an earlier work in which she acted as a real-life Alexa, remotely watching over a home 24 hours a day, responding to its occupants’ questions and needs like a flesh and blood version of Amazon’s voice-operated virtual assistant. Continue reading...

Chinese telecoms company’s chairman says concerns about surveillance are overblownHuawei’s chairman has said the Chinese company would be prepared to sign a “no-spy agreement” with the British government to reassure politicians it has no intention of allowing its technology to be used for surveillance.Speaking on a visit to London, Liang Hua said the company did not want to spy on western consumers and that concerns about Chinese laws requiring the company to cooperate with the regime’s intelligence agencies were overblown. Continue reading...

NSO Group technology reportedly used against lawyer involved in civil case against the Israeli surveillance firmThe UK lawyer whose phone was targeted by spyware that exploits a WhatsApp vulnerability said it appeared to be a desperate attempt by someone to covertly find out the details of his human rights work.The lawyer, who asked not to be named, is involved in a civil case brought against the Israeli surveillance company NSO Group whose sophisticated Pegasus malware has reportedly been used against Mexican journalists, and a prominent Saudi dissident living in Canada. Continue reading...

Time to make sure WhatsApp is updated on your iPhone, Android or Windows deviceUsers are being urged to update their WhatsApp smartphone apps immediately because of a security bug that allows hackers to take over your phone by simply calling it, whether or not you answer. Continue reading...

When the Guardian journalist died recently, it triggered a torrent of grief on social media. People felt they knew him, even if they hadn’t met. Ian Martin understands whyWe lost someone special when the journalist and writer Simon Ricketts died just over four months ago. He was a 24-carat mensch. A living antidote to cruelty and heartlessness. An astonishing comet of kindness blazing across social media’s dark night skies, indiscriminately brightening the lives of everyone. His wasn’t the first high-profile death at our end of Twitter, but it was the hardest.“Our end” – you know the end I mean. The older end. The flexitarian, smartarse, squabbling, umbrage-taking, performatively progressive end. The rainbow end. The herbivore lunch with an Armagnac at the end. Continue reading...

The spyware, developed by Israeli cyber intelligence company, used infected phone calls to take over the functions of operating systemsWhatsApp is encouraging users to update to the latest version of the app after discovering a vulnerability that allowed spyware to be injected into a user’s phone through the app’s phone call function.The spyware was developed by the Israeli cyber intelligence company NSO Group, according to the Financial Times, which first reported the vulnerability. Continue reading...

Madonna said giving her children mobile phones ‘ended their relationship’. We asked parents to share their own experiencesHas giving my child a phone changed my relationship with them? It’s meant fewer dinners together, and less inclination to share in conversation; greater irritability and less ability to self-regulate or find meaningful non-phone related activities to participate in. Many activities are done with the phone as meditating entity and spatial registry. The phone enhances the need for immediate mediation or gratification. Daniel, US Continue reading...

Great camera and software make a bargain, let down only by middling performance and batteryGoogle’s latest phone, the Pixel 3a, offers the firm’s fantastic camera and software for less than £400, cutting a few corners on the way.The pitch for the Pixel 3a is simple: everything that made the £739 top-end Pixel 3 good, but at a lower price. Continue reading...

CEO defiant in email but downward spiral continues after stock market debutThe chief executive of Uber has urged employees to ignore “pessimistic voices” after shares in the company slumped again on their second day of trading since Friday’s disappointing stock market debut.With Wall Street in a fragile state after the re-emergence of trade tension between the US and China, Uber’s stock market value fell below $63bn (£49bn), just over half the $120bn that its investment bankers advised it could be worth last year. Continue reading...

Trump-imposed tariff of 25% on $200bn of goods could add about $160 to the cost of a $999 Chinese-made iPhone XSThe escalating trade dispute between the US and China could prove damaging to Apple and its customers by pushing up the cost of iPhones and driving down the share price.According to a report by Morgan Stanley, the new Trump-imposed tariff of 25% on $200bn of Chinese-made goods could add about $160 (£124) to the cost of a Chinese-made iPhone XS, which starts at $999. Continue reading...

Exclusive: Obria Group’s ads suggest it provides abortion services, when in fact it tries to persuade women not to terminate pregnanciesGoogle has given tens of thousands of dollars in free advertising to an anti-abortion group that runs ads suggesting it provides abortion services at its medical clinics, but actually seeks to deter “abortion-minded women” from terminating their pregnancies.Related: Abortion: judge strikes down Kentucky restriction but governor to appeal Continue reading...

Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and Google will make submissions as inquiry looks at online abuseFacebook, Apple, Microsoft and Google are to give secret evidence to the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse (IICSA) as it examines the growing problem of online exploitation.Representatives of the four global tech companies will make part of their submissions in closed sessions of the inquiry, which is being held in Southwark, south London. Continue reading...