Technology | The Guardian

Games can offer a window on to other jobs as well as other worlds. Three players explain how their favourite games guided working life choicesBack in 2016, the current Manchester United boss Ole Gunnar Solskjaer revealed that his interest in the managerial aspect of the beautiful game came from a video game. Having led an illustrious career as a United striker, famously the super-sub who scored the winning goal in the 1999 Champion’s League final, it was Solksjaer’s experience with team sim Football Manager that encouraged him to continue a football career after he hung up his boots.He’s not the only gamer who ever discovered a real-world passion through playing. Games can often offer a window on to other careers as well as other worlds, and sometimes inspire people to explore options they’d never considered before. Here, three video-game fans explain how their favourite games guided their real-life careers. Continue reading...

A masterful edition of Storyville exposed the awful plight of the moderators tasked with purging tech platforms of violent and sexually abusive imagesOne woman wanted to quit her job as a moderator for an unnamed tech company during training, after hearing descriptions of the content and images she was likely to see. Once she had started, she came across pictures of a six‑year-old girl having terrible things done to her and asked to leave. Her manager told her this was what she had signed up for and sent her back to work. Her story was preceded by footage from testimony before a committee on child abuse images and exploitation by Nicole Wong, then a legal adviser at Google. “We’re doing the best we can,” she said.We don’t know the name of the woman haunted by images that still make her voice shake when she speaks of them. She is one of tens of thousands of moderators employed by companies in the Philippines, themselves hired by big tech firms, to purge social media platforms of the worst that humanity offers when you give it the chance. Like the rest of her colleagues, she could only speak without risk anonymously. Continue reading...

ACLU hails ‘sweeping changes’ after company criticized over ad targeting based on race, gender and ageFacebook is taking steps to block discriminatory ads for housing, employment and credit by preventing advertisers from targeting users based on race, gender, age and zip code.The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other rights groups, which sued Facebook for violating civil rights laws with its ad practices, announced the “historic settlement” on Tuesday, saying “sweeping changes” would restrict illegal and discriminatory ad targeting. Continue reading...

Stadia, which will allow users to play games on any device, will launch later in 2019Google announced its entry into the video game market with Google Stadia, a service that will allow players to stream video games to any screen – phone, tablet, TV or computer.Google announced Stadia at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday. The cloud-powered service will allow users to log in from any screen using the Chrome browser, a Chromecast device or a Google Pixel phone or tablet and play the same games across all of them, with all the computational heavy-lifting done by Google’s servers instead of a games console. It means that players won’t have to purchase a box that sits under the TV in order to play, theoretically liberating video games from hardware altogether. Continue reading...

Xbox One, PS4, PC; Ubisoft Massive/Ubisoft

LiveLeak removed the horrific footage but still caught up in ‘extraordinary’ effort to censor the webA site that explicitly stated it would not host the horrific Christchurch terror video has been blocked by Australian telcos in an “extraordinary” effort to censor dozens of websites.Telstra, Vodafone and Optus have all confirmed they are actively blocking Australian customers on their networks from accessing websites that hosted the Christchurch terror video. Continue reading...

San Francisco firm reveals figures for first time as it competes with Uber to be first with IPOLyft has officially kicked off the roadshow for its initial public offering, saying on Monday it plans to put more than 30m shares up for sale with an anticipated price of between $62 and $68 each.That would raise more than $2bn for the San Francisco ride-hailing company, pegging its market value at $20bn to $25bn, even though it has not been able to turn a profit yet. Continue reading...

Counterfeits worth $590bn a year made up 3.3% of global trade in 2016, report findsThe rise of online platforms for buying and selling goods has fuelled a rapid increase in fake merchandise sold around the world, the value of which has reached $590bn (£384.4bn) a year, according to a report.The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the European Union’s intellectual property office (EUIPO) found illicit goods, from designer handbags to luxury watches, accounted for as much as 3.3% of total international trade in 2016, up from 2.5% ($461bn) in 2013. Continue reading...

Faulty server migration blamed for mass deletion of songs, photos and videoMyspace, the once mighty social network, has lost every single piece of content uploaded to its site before 2016, including millions of songs, photos and videos with no other home on the internet.The company is blaming a faulty server migration for the mass deletion, which appears to have happened more than a year ago, when the first reports appeared of users unable to access older content. The company has confirmed to online archivists that music has been lost permanently, dashing hopes that a backup could be used to permanently protect the collection for future generations. Continue reading...

Margot James says footage of Christchurch attack highlights issues around regulationThe digital minister, Margot James, has raised concerns about the regulation of online live streaming in the aftermath of the New Zealand shootings, in which an alleged terrorist broadcast footage of an attack on two mosques live on Facebook.James, whose department is preparing to unveil the government’s proposals on tackling online harms, said she was unhappy that footage of the attack, which could never be allowed on traditional television channels, was easily available on social media. Continue reading...

About 1,800 newspapers have closed in the US in the last 15 years, partly as a result of internet-based companies like FacebookFacebook’s effort to establish a service that provides users with local news and information is being hindered by the lack of outlets where the company’s technicians can find original reporting.Some 1,800 newspapers have closed in the US over the last 15 years, according to the University of North Carolina. Newsroom employment has declined by 45% as the industry struggles with a broken business model partly caused by the success of companies on the internet – including Facebook. Continue reading...

To celebrate 60 years of Barbie, Jordan Erica Webber looks back at some of the key moments in the history of the world-famous doll, and examines how Barbie became a representative of the tech worldThis month, Barbie turns 60. Beloved by generations of children, over the past decade her manufacturer, Mattel, also saw the need to introduce Barbie to the digital world.Barbie wasn’t just the star of her own video games and movies. In the noughties, Mattel was encouraged to design more diverse Barbie dolls, both in the way they looked and the careers they chose. So, in 2016, we welcomed Game Developer Barbie, a doll that could – like so many before her – inspire a younger generation and show them game development was a viable career for women. Continue reading...

A year after devastating revelations of data misuse, Mark Zuckerberg still hasn’t fulfilled his promises to reform

The Oscar-winning director presents a sympathetic portrait of the Silicon Valley CEO who fooled the world into believing she had built a better blood testWe can’t get enough of Elizabeth Holmes. The founder and CEO of Theranos once captivated the imaginations of venture capitalists and magazine profile writers with her too-good-to-be-true tale of a revolutionary blood testing technology. Three years, numerous federal investigations, and eleven felony counts later, our appetite has shifted to devouring the tale of how Holmes fooled the world. The Silicon Valley morality tale – a true crime saga with a dash of Fyre Fest-schadenfreude and the added bonus of an icy blonde with a mysteriously deep voice – has thus far inspired a best-selling book, a popular podcast, and two documentaries, with a feature film and real-life criminal trial still to come.One of the documentaries, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, debuts Monday on HBO. The film, by Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney, presents a surprisingly sympathetic portrait of Holmes as a modern-day Thomas Edison-gone-wrong. The Wizard of Menlo Park, Gibney reminds us, was a master of “faking it until you make it” who raised money off a promise long before he figured out how to make the incandescent light bulb work. Of course, Edison eventually came through, while Holmes is facing up to 20 years in prison, and her company was forced to void tens of thousands of blood tests for patients in Arizona. Continue reading...

A date will soon be set for the launch of a UK-wide age block on visiting adult websites – but campaigners fear a threat to privacyThe government will this week confirm the launch date for a UK-wide age block on online pornography, as privacy campaigners continue to raise concerns about how adult websites and age-verification companies will use the data they collect.The plan for implementing the long-delayed age block, which has been beset by technical difficulties, is expected to be announced alongside the government’s other proposals for tackling online harm, although it could be several months before the system is up and running. Continue reading...

It may look a little odd, but the Berlingo is bursting with lifeCitroen Berlingo

Allegations come as US prosecutors investigate claims of cover-upFacebook is facing explosive new questions about when senior executives knew of Cambridge Analytica’s abuse of users’ data, one year on from when the scandal first broke, as federal prosecutors investigate claims that the social media giant has covered up the extent of its relationship with the firm.The Observer has also learned of claims that a meeting was hosted at the office of Facebook board member and confidant of its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreessen with Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, in the summer of 2016 just as the data firm started working for the Trump campaign. Continue reading...

More work needed to see if wearables can help screen for heart problems, but researchers call study encouraging

Todd McLellan wants his photographs of disassembled gadgets to help people understand how stuff worksBy his own admission, photographer Todd McLellan was “kind of a weird kid”. As an eight-year-old, the Canadian had a workbench in his bedroom, where he would use a hammer, a soldering iron and an oscilloscope to tinker around with household objects. He particularly enjoyed taking apart his brother’s toy cars to try to see what was inside. “I thought the little seats were so cool,” he says now. “But it was so disappointing there were no pedals or steering wheel. I was like: ‘What – is that it?’”McLellan rarely experiences the same disappointment now. For the past decade, the 42-year-old has earned a name for himself by taking apart everyday objects, neatly aligning their components, and photographing the results. “Some of them, I think there’s going to be nothing to it, and I schedule two, three hours of my day to take them apart,” he says. “And then I get started, and it’s like: ‘Oh, no. So many pieces.’” Continue reading...

Blocking out annoying sounds on flights or the commute with these options priced from £80Daily life is stressful enough without being subjected to the noise of others. Thankfully noise cancelling headphones can help by actively blocking oppressive distractions, whether it’s for flights, the commute, or just in the office, with effective options costing from £80.Here’s a quick guide to separate the wheat from the chaff. Continue reading...

Democratic presidential candidate’s membership of group that invented the term ‘hacktivism’ may explain much about his approach to politicsBeto O’Rourke, the Democratic presidential candidate, belonged as a teenager to the oldest group of computer hackers in US history, he has revealed in an interview.Members of the influential, so-called Cult of the Dead Cow, jokingly named after an abandoned Texas slaughterhouse, have protected his secret for decades, reluctant to compromise his political viability. Continue reading...

From Neopets to Habbo Hotel, we’d like to hear your experiences and memories to mark the 30th anniversary of the webThirty years ago this month, Tim Berners-Lee filed his proposal for the project that would become the world wide web. To mark the date, we’re asking readers to share their favourite and formative memories of online communities from the 90s and early 00s. That could be a tale of relationships forged through forums that no longer exist, pivotal dramas on long-lost discussion threads, or long-distance friends introduced through niche online interests.Related: The Guardian view on the world wide web: we wove a tangle | Editorial Continue reading...

Chief product officer, who helped create news feed feature, was viewed as a possible successor to CEO ZuckerbergFacebook’s chief product officer and one of the primary architects of its signature news feed, Chris Cox, said on Thursday he was leaving the company, just days after Mark Zuckerberg revealed a plan to shift the world’s biggest social network to an encryption-focused messaging company.Cox, one of Zuckerberg’s earliest employees and closest lieutenants, said in a blogpost he made the announcement “with great sadness” and was leaving after 13 years with the company. Continue reading...

Company is banking on the new model to revive excitement about the brand as traditional carmakers expand their electric vehicle offeringsTesla unveiled a new electric crossover SUV, the Model Y, during an event at the company’s design studio in Hawthorne on Thursday evening.Chief Executive Elon Musk said the compact SUV would first debut in a long-range version with a range of 300 miles priced at about $47,000. Continue reading...

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds banned in Gujarat to combat spread of ‘violent traits’Police in the western Indian state of Gujarat detained 10 teenagers for breaking a newly announced ban on playing the online video game PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) – the forerunner of global smash Fortnite.The ban was announced last week by local authorities to combat what they called the spread of “violent traits” in kids playing the game. Continue reading...

Instagram and WhatsApp were also hit. It wasn’t the apocalypse, but for some people, it felt like itWhen your grandchildren ask you how you made it through the Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp outage of March 2019, what will you tell them? Did you Google “Facebook down” to ascertain whether Facebook was, indeed, down? Did you call the emergency services?Amid the breakdown of digital society, the Australian breakfast television program Sunrise publicised apparently official advice not to contact police over the mass outage. Continue reading...

Epic mythological fighting game picks up 10 nominations, chased by Red Dead Redemption 2, Return of the Obra Dinn and Florence with six nominations each. See the full list belowSony Santa Monica’s God of War has received 10 nominations for this year’s Bafta game awards, leading a diverse pack of nominees.Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption 2 also picked up six nominations, as did Florence – a game about a relationship played from the perspective of a young woman – and Return of the Obra Dinn, a lo-fi monochrome mystery set on an abandoned ship. Continue reading...

PC; Tendershoot/No More Robots

David wants a new Mac Mini but doesn’t want to pay Apple’s eye-watering price for a 2TB SSDMy general question is: can a computer that has some of its storage on an external drive with a fast connection (such as Thunderbolt) perform as well as a computer with the same amount of storage inside the computer?To be specific, I have a 2014 Mac Mini, which is very slow. I am considering upgrading to the latest 2018 version, but I need at least 1TB of storage. Apple can supply the unit with up to 2TB of solid state drive (SSD) storage, but charges an eye-watering £720 per terabyte. If I bought an external Thunderbolt SSD for about £220 per terabyte, would I be likely to see any difference? DavidThe general question is easy: external drives are slower than comparable internal drives, because the interconnection itself adds an overhead. While you could have a faster external drive, it would be better to spend the money upgrading the internal drive, where possible. Continue reading...

Investigation by federal prosecutors adds to laundry list of inquiries since the Cambridge Analytica revelations one year agoFacebook is under criminal investigation by federal prosecutors examining its data-sharing deals with other major technology companies, according to the New York Times.A New York grand jury has subpoenaed records from “at least two prominent makers of smartphones and other devices”, the Times reported, citing two unnamed sources. Continue reading...

Family of apps, including Instagram and Messenger, encountering problems but company spokesman says it is not a cyber-attackFacebook has been suffering from outages across the world since around 12pm ET (4pm GMT) Wednesday.All four of the company’s main applications – Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger – were encountering problems, according to Downdetector.com. The outages appeared to be concentrated in the Americas and Europe. Continue reading...

‘Machine vision’ is struggling to recognise darker-skinned pedestrians, and cost pressures could make things worse

My friend Roger Ainsworth, who has died aged 67 of cancer, was a distinguished engineer who worked first at Rolls-Royce and then for the Atomic Energy Research Establishment (AERE), before in 2002 becoming master of St Catherine’s College, Oxford.Roger was born in Morecambe, Lancashire, to Harold Ainsworth, a civil servant, and his wife, Mary (nee Reynolds). After Lancaster Royal grammar school he completed an apprenticeship with Rolls-Royce and then went to Jesus College, Oxford, where he won a first-class degree in engineering in 1973 and then a doctorate in 1976. Continue reading...

How will today’s noble tech titans honour their achievements in a single statue? We run through the obvious optionsEvery city has a landmark that celebrates what its people love. France has the Eiffel Tower, which is both astonishingly beautiful and admittedly a bit penisy. New York has the Empire State Building, which is the same but bigger. Rome has the Colosseum, to celebrate an oiled-up Russell Crowe.Now Silicon Valley power-brokers want to honour the thing they truly love, by building their own massive monument to themselves. The San Jose Light Tower Corporation has raised $1m to create a statue that honours Silicon Valley itself. They hope to raise up to $150m for a “great idea”, according to the New York Times. Continue reading...

Music service files complaint with European commission over subscription ‘tax’Spotify has filed a complaint with European regulators arguing that Apple limits choice and competition in its app store, giving its own music streaming service an unfair advantage over rivals.Apple’s app store is an important distribution platform for Spotify. But Apple takes a 30% commission on all sales made through the app store – including music streaming subscriptions – which Spotify and many other third-party app developers have long complained is an unfair “tax”. Continue reading...

As the video game giant turns 130, veteran developers Shinya Takahashi and Hisashi Nogami reflect on Nintendo’s creative process and legacyIn the century and a bit since its founding in 1889, Nintendo has made playing cards, designed toys, hired out taxis and briefly run love hotels, but it is the last 40 years or so that have made it a cultural icon. Having dabbled in the video games business throughout the 1970s, in the 1980s Nintendo released the Game & Watch and the Nintendo Entertainment System, and since then it has introduced hundreds of millions of people to the joy of video games – from 90s kids squinting at monochrome Game Boys to grandmothers bowling on the Wii.Nintendo’s hallmarks are innovation and an unwavering focus on fun. Where other big players in the games industry have chased the latest technology and positioned their consoles as entertainment hubs, Nintendo has mostly come out with affordable, family-friendly machines that combine technical innovations such as the Wii’s motion control or the DS’s touchscreen with fun, accessible games in the vein of Mario, Zelda, Pokémon and Wii Sports. Nintendo hasn’t always been at the top of the sales charts, but no other video game creator has proven so enduringly popular across generations. A lot has changed since 1985, but kids still know who Mario is. Continue reading...

Users in Australia, the US, Europe and Asia report problems with various applications for several hoursGoogle has been hit by outages in a host of countries around the world, with users reporting issues with Gmail, Google Drive, Hangouts and Google Maps for several hours.Various websites that track Gmail problems and outages, showed a spike in users reporting problems with the email service from about 1pm AEDT (2am GMT). Continue reading...

Road crashes claim over 40,000 lives in the US annually, and the poor are more likely to die than those well-offSilicon Valley is pouring billions into robot cars. Soon – although the time scale keeps shifting – tech manufacturers say driverless cars will replace their traditional counterparts, car parks will become parks again and road fatalities will plummet. People have argued over ethical concerns surrounding the technology, the ensuing job losses and the public’s antipathy to this robot revolution. But the biggest obstacle may well be money.We have been taking a deep look at the economics of driverless technology. Our conclusion? So-called robocars are unlikely to produce the societal changes tech companies are promising not because they don’t work but because they will cost too much. Continue reading...

Former search executive Amit Singhal was reportedly forced to resign after an employee claimed he groped her at an off-campus eventGoogle paid the former search executive Amit Singhal $35m in an exit package when he was reportedly forced to resign after a sexual assault investigation, according to court documents released on Monday.Details of the exit package were revealed as part of a shareholder lawsuit against the company, one that followed a published report of payouts Google made to executives accused of sexual misconduct. Continue reading...

With 500 million users across 150 countries, the short-form video app is becoming a social media sensationIf you spend any amount of time on social media, the chances are you have probably seen a TikTok video - knowingly or not. In a short space of time, the mobile app used for creating and sharing short videos has become an almost unavoidable part of internet culture. Considering it had amassed more than 500 million users across 150 countries as of November last year, it is easy to see why.But what exactly is TikTok? Simply put: it is a free, short-form video app popular with teens (or Generation Z, as they are known). It was created in 2016 by ByteDance, a tech company now valued at $75bn (£57.3bn) and based in Beijing, where the app is known as Douyin. In 2017, ByteDance merged with Musical.ly, an enormously popular app built around lipsyncing. Its popularity has since skyrocketed, and it is touted as the first Chinese social media app to make it big in English-speaking countries. Continue reading...

A third of people in relationships are being ignored because their partners are staring at smartphones. Are you a snubber or a snubbee?

The augmented reality game from the makers of Pokémon Go will take budding wizards on a magical quest through their own neighbourhoodOver a year since it was announced in November 2017, Warner Bros has lifted the lid on Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, a hotly anticipated new augmented reality game for smartphones due out later this year.Developed by Pokémon Go creator Niantic in collaboration with Warner’s Portkey Games label, Wizards Unite overlays the wizarding world on the real world, asking players to walk around their neighbourhoods with their phones to uncover traces of magic. It draws both from the Harry Potter films and books, and the Fantastic Beasts additions. Continue reading...

Car prices to rise by ‘about 3%’ after decision to move to online-only sales reversedTesla has reversed a decision to close all its stores and move to an online-only sales model, the company has announced, pending the results of a further review on the usefulness of physical locations.The initial decision was made as part of a plan to reduce costs at the company, in order to fund an across-the-board immediate price reduction of 6% on Tesla’s cars. Now, however, Tesla will be increasing the price of cars by “about 3%”, erasing half the savings. Continue reading...

A fantastic display bolted to great cameras, a strong battery, an ultrasonic fingerprint scanner and even a headphone socketThe Galaxy S10+ may be Samsung’s most important phone in years, but at £899 does the huge screen, triple camera and fancy ultrasonic fingerprint scanner make for a worthy upgrade?One thing is obvious: the Galaxy S10+ is not the future of smartphones. That would be the Galaxy Fold and Huawei Mate X, devices with folding screens that cost £2,000-plus. Instead the the Galaxy S10+ is one of the finest examples of today’s smartphones. Iterative but excellent. And you won’t need a mortgage to buy it. Continue reading...

Free from viral abuse, Instagram has become our MPs’ preferred platform to show off their human sideTom Watson is spiralising courgettes with a gadget bought in a supermarket sale. Caroline Flint looks thrilled with the mini trampoline she got for Christmas, though arguably not as thrilled as Tory leadership contender Liz Truss is to be posing with Larry the Downing Street cat on her knee. And Gavin Williamson, the defence secretary, wants you to know he’s been doing some DIY.Welcome to the soothingly soporific world of politicians on Instagram. You won’t find many profound insights on Brexit, admittedly. But in a week where two Conservative councillors were caught “liking” Facebook memes about beheading Sadiq Khan while Labour’s Angela Rayner received death threats for tweeting something polite about Tony Blair, there’s something undeniably restful about looking at pictures of Emily Thornberry stroking a penguin. If political Twitter feels increasingly like hard work, Instagram is one of the few places MPs still allow themselves to be playful. Continue reading...

Kate Wyver’s reflections on a complex game about grief and journalism earned her joint second place in this year’s Observer/Anthony Burgess prize

A tiny electric vehicle at this year’s Geneva motor show made a big impressionCitroën Ami One

New Digital Authority would replace ‘clearly failing’ system of self-regulation of internetThe House of Lords has called for the creation of a digital super-regulator to oversee the different bodies charged with safeguarding the internet and replace the “clearly failing” system of self-regulation by big technology companies.A new Digital Authority is the chief recommendation of the Lords’ communications committee report, which warns that the patchwork quilt of more than a dozen regulators that oversee the digital realm creates gaps and overlaps. Continue reading...

Following campaign by Tinder and tech activist group Emojination, 71 new variations have been approvedIn 1664, Maryland passed the first British colonial law banning marriage between whites and slaves. An 1883 US supreme court ruling that state prohibitions on interracial marriage don’t violate the 14th amendment held for more than 80 years.While such impediments to marriage were dismantled over time, there are still hurdles, however small, to overcome. Here, in 2019, interracial couples have a small victory to celebrate: the approval of 71 new variations of emoji for couples of color. Continue reading...