Technology | The Guardian

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...

Social expectations about digital etiquette have never been more in flux. The solution? Avoid worrying about it altogetherYou know you’ve reached a crisis point in your email backlog when you’re obliged – as I was recently – to confront the following conundrum of electronic etiquette: is it ruder to reply to an email after three months than not to reply at all? On one hand, obviously, not replying is obnoxious. On the other, at least it lets the sender imagine that you missed their message entirely, or even that it never arrived; a reply implies, insultingly, that I had three months’ worth of more important things to do first (and/or that I’m hopelessly overwhelmed by emails – which is true, and particularly embarrassing, given that I’ve championed various systems for taming the monster in this very column).In the end, I opted to reply. But even then I didn’t get closure on the matter, because of course the recipient didn’t say she was offended and, this being email, I had no facial expressions or vocal inflections by which to judge. The internet: helping us understand each other less well since 1969. Continue reading...

Foreign minister suggests recent actions against Chinese firms are ‘deliberate political suppression’China’s foreign minister has said Beijing will “take all necessary measures” to defend the rights and interests of Chinese companies such as Huawei, which is locked in an escalating legal dispute with the US.Beijing’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, said in response to a question about the company suing the US: “It is not difficult to see that the recent actions against specific Chinese enterprises and individuals are not just judicial cases, but deliberate political suppression. Continue reading...

The SpaceX founder and Tesla chief executive smoked marijuana on a comedian’s podcast last September, a US official saidSpaceX chief executive and Tesla boss Elon Musk’s security clearance is being reviewed by the Pentagon after the billionaire smoked marijuana on a California comedian’s podcast last September, a US official said on Thursday.An incident report was started by the Pentagon some time after the marijuana event, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The review was first reported by Bloomberg. Continue reading...

Move comes as social media faces growing scrutiny over its role in promoting anti-vaccine propagandaFacebook will no longer allow advertisements that include misinformation about vaccines as part of an effort to reduce the spread of “vaccine hoaxes” on the platform, the company announced on Thursday.Facebook will also diminish the reach of groups and pages that spread anti-vaccine misinformation by reducing their ranking in search results and on the News Feed, removing them from autofill suggestions in the search bar, and removing them from recommendation features such as “Groups You Should Join”. Continue reading...

More than 100 false accounts posed as far-right and leftwing activists to sow division, says companyFacebook has removed a network of more than 100 accounts and pages for “coordinated inauthentic behaviour” on its social networks – the first time it has done so for UK-based operations seeking to influence British citizens.The operation was spread over Facebook and Instagram and used a network of fake accounts to pose as both far-right activists and their opponents. It ran pages and groups whose names frequently changed in order to drum up more followers and operated fake accounts to engage in hate speech and spread divisive comments on both sides of UK political debate, Facebook says. Continue reading...

The Facebook founder talks about his firm’s new focus, but what does it all mean?My focus for the last couple of years has been understanding and addressing the biggest challenges facing Facebook. This means taking positions on important issues concerning the future of the internet. In this note, I’ll outline our vision and principles around building a privacy-focused messaging and social networking platform.There are two types of Mark Zuckerberg post, the short feature-packed ones and the long thinky ones. This is the latter, focused on “vision and principles”. Continue reading...

Eira wants to join because she is missing out on things, but doesn’t want to build a profileIs it possible to be a passive user of Facebook? I want to read announcements relating to friends and colleagues, and maybe post comments, without building a profile with photos, a timeline and so on. I have managed perfectly well without joining, but occasionally miss useful information that is not available elsewhere. EiraWhat’s known as “lurking” – being a member without actively participating – is very common. To quote Jakob Nielsen, “In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.” This is known as the 1% rule, and it’s obviously a gross generalisation. Continue reading...

Foreign secretary to call for global action but say there is no proof of interference in UKJeremy Hunt is to promise the government will step up international efforts to prevent overseas cyber-attacks on elections, while insisting the UK has never succumbed to such outside interference.A number of groups have called for an investigation into allegations that Russia was behind interference before the 2016 EU referendum, and for a wider examination of the role of foreign companies in the campaign. Continue reading...

The Facebook CEO says integrating messaging apps will help protect users’ privacy, but experts disagreeFor 15 years, Facebook has pushed, prodded, cajoled, lured and tricked billions of people into sharing the most intimate details of their lives online, all purportedly in service of making the world “more open and connected”.On Wednesday, the company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg put forward a new idea: doing the opposite. Continue reading...

Mark Geyer goes on attack after false claim about daughter on NRL Memes pageFacebook has defended its “reporting tools” after the former NRL player Mark Geyer took aim at the NRL Memes page, which falsely suggested his daughter had been caught up in the league’s latest sex tapes scandal.Geyer has threatened legal action against the page after it suggested that his daughter, Montanna, was one of two women featured in the Tyrone May sex tapes. Continue reading...

PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4; Capcom

Two anticipated PlayStation games make different post-apocalyptic pitches: hordes of virus-infected undead walking, or romance in a pitiless, violent world. Pick your pandemic …

The prison where sensors and wristbands are saving lives, cutting hospital visits and reducing costsJim Lees woke up late one night needing to use the toilet. As he sat up in bed, he felt dizzy, then blacked out and fell to the floor.He remembers: “Everything went blank. I fell and was unconscious. I don’t know how long I was out.” When Lees [not his real name], 80, did regain consciousness, he couldn’t get back up. “My foot wouldn’t grip the floor. There was blood and urine everywhere. I just don’t know what happened to me.” Continue reading...

Firm’s move comes as Amazon removes one of far-right activist’s books from saleYouTube has defended its decision to keep Tommy Robinson on its platform, arguing that the far-right activist’s content on its site is fundamentally different from the posts that led Facebook and Instagram to delete his account last week.Additionally, Amazon has removed one of Robinson’s books, Mohammed’s Koran: Why Muslims Kill For Islam, from sale. His autobiography remains on the site. The company confirmed its decision to the Guardian, saying that “we reserve the right not to sell certain inappropriate content”. Continue reading...

Machines can now allegedly identify anger, fear, disgust and sadness. ‘Emotion detection’ has grown from a research project to a $20bn industry

Electric cars featured heavily at the 89th annual motoring showcase event in Switzerland, as manufacturers rolled out new electric and hybrid models to address tougher emissions requirements in Europe. SUVs and SUV-like crossovers also had a good showing, in addition to new prestige and performance models and concepts from car makers Continue reading...

The latest internet meme involves a significant waste of cheese – and may not be entirely welcomed by the world’s baby communityName: The cheese challenge.Age: Five days. Continue reading...

Machines can already write music and beat us at games like chess and Go. But the rise of artificial intelligence should inspire hope as well as fear, says Marcus du SautoyAs Marcus du Sautoy greets me at the entrance to New College, Oxford, his appearance is a quiet riot of colour. His clothes rather suggest someone who ran into White Stuff or Fat Face and frantically grabbed anything he could find – in this case, a salmon zip-up top, multihued check trousers and shoes that are a headache-inducing shade of turquoise. When we settle down to talk in a nearby meeting room, he repeatedly glances at a notepad – whose pages, just to add to all the garishness, are a bold shade of yellow.They are full of what look like scrawled equations, mixed with odd-looking shapes: the raw material, he explains, of a project involving very complicated geometry. “There’s an infinite symmetrical structure that I’m looking at,” he says, “and I think the top bit of it will tell me everything that’s going on inside it. It’s almost like an infinite lake, and I should be able to know everything that’s happening in it by looking at the first centimetre.” Continue reading...

Ranking of 230 countries placed UK 136th, with India as cheapest countryThe UK is one of the priciest countries in Europe for mobile phone data, with Britons typically paying almost six times more than their counterparts in Finland, according to a new study.Some may also be surprised to see that the top 10 cheapest countries in the world include the likes of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and Sudan. Continue reading...

Amnesty says social media firm must do more to support users who report harassmentHuman rights campaigners have called for action after a survey revealed that more than half of the reports that women lodge about harassment on Facebook are met with no action from the social media company.The Survation poll, commissioned by the feminist campaign group Level Up, found that 29% of the 1,000 women who took part had been harassed on Facebook. Continue reading...

Retailer also introduces serial numbers and automatic detection to curb frauds salesAmazon will hand over unprecedented powers to brands to remove suspected counterfeits from its site, as part of a concerted push to eliminate fakes and frauds from the shopping experience.Under the company’s new Project Zero programme, companies will now be able to remove counterfeit listings themselves, without having to wait for Amazon to take action. Continue reading...

Contact details supplied by users to enable two-factor authentication led to reduced privacyFacebook has been accused of abusing a security feature in order to weaken user privacy, after the social network was found using phone numbers initially handed over for account safety for other purposes.The company now faces criticism that it will be harder to convince users to take other necessary security measures if users view this as an abuse of trust. Continue reading...

PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC; Team Ninja/Koei Tecmo

Microsoft’s Cortana, Google Home and other AI devices tend to be voiced by women, playing into the stereotype that serving is a woman’s job. But do robots need to be gendered at all?Microsoft has Cortana, Amazon has Alexa, and Google has … well, Google Assistant. That last name doesn’t give it away, but get it talking and the common link between all three AI assistants is revealed: they are all supposed to be women.Providing assistance has long been considered a woman’s role, whether virtual or physical, fictional or real. The robots that men voice, meanwhile, tend to be in positions of power – often dangerously so. Think Hal 9000, or the Terminator: when a robot needs to be scary, it sounds like a man. Continue reading...

Jordan Erica Webber talks to Douglas Rushkoff about his new book, Team Human, a call to arms for people to start working togetherJordan is joined by Douglas Rushkoff, the author and professor of media theory at Queens College, City University of New York. With his new book, Team Human, he hopes to explain how tools meant to improve human connection, such as the internet, have ended up being used against us, and why people have to relearn how to work together to fight back. Continue reading...

From a ‘battle royale’ showdown to a shoot ’em up revival, three mixed new titles demonstrate the value to games of genresGenres, as the graphic novelist Alan Moore once wrote, are pretty much only useful for directing the WH Smith’s clerk in which section to place the books. The best work is woven from threads of comedy, tragedy, romance, horror and all the rest. It defies, in other words, tedious categorisation. In video games, however, the strictures of genre cannot be so easily dismissed. Game design is tactile, quasi-architectural in nature. Games are more easily grouped, then, and drift in and out of fashion more readily than film and literature, as a trio of this month’s releases demonstrate.The Ukrainian fingerprints of Metro Exodus’s development team are pressed clearly into each of its snowy, menacing landscapes. This game, based on the bleak, post-apocalyptic novels of the Russian writer Dmitry Glukhovsky, comes from a team clearly familiar with the texture of post-nuclear disaster: the blackened berries withering on the bushes, the homeless dogs, nature’s relentless reclamation of all human edifice. The effects of this fictional nuclear holocaust have surely been exaggerated for video game effect – the swamp sharks and mutant horses, to name but two – but there’s a melancholy near to the surface of this brittle shooter that has the quality of lived experience. Continue reading...

Built for the rough, the hugely intimidating new G-Wagon is actually a bit of a smoothieMercedes-Benz G-Class

Social network targeted legislators around the world, promising or threatening to withhold investmentFacebook has targeted politicians around the world – including the former UK chancellor, George Osborne – promising investments and incentives while seeking to pressure them into lobbying on Facebook’s behalf against data privacy legislation, an explosive new leak of internal Facebook documents has revealed.The documents, which have been seen by the Observer and Computer Weekly, reveal a secretive global lobbying operation targeting hundreds of legislators and regulators in an attempt to procure influence across the world, including in the UK, US, Canada, India, Vietnam, Argentina, Brazil, Malaysia and all 28 states of the EU. The documents include details of how Facebook: Continue reading...

Retail giant plans to open its first store in Los Angeles as early as the end of the year, according to a Wall Street Journal reportAmazon plans to open dozens of grocery stores across the United States as it looks to expand in the food business, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.Related: Return order: New York leaders plead with Bezos to reconsider Amazon deal Continue reading...

Charities say parental guidance about scary-doll challenges may have worsened issue

Children’s charities say warnings about online suicide challenge have done more harm than goodBritain’s media, schools and police forces were told on Thursday to stop promoting an online hoax about the so-called Momo challenge, amid fears that unjustified warnings about the supposed phenomenon risked doing more harm than good.The Momo challenge centres on false claims that a mysterious character is using WhatsApp messages to encourage children to kill themselves. After it moved from the fringes of the internet to the mass media, interventions from authority figures were blamed for creating a full-blown moral panic – and genuine fear among children. Continue reading...

Features such as loot boxes need tighter regulation, says deputy Labour leaderGambling-style features in computer games, which encourage players to pay for items such as loot boxes that may be worth very little, warrant stricter oversight by the Gambling Commission to prevent them becoming a “gateway” to betting addiction, Labour’s deputy leader, Tom Watson, said.Speaking as he proposed much tighter controls on online gambling, including caps on the amount that consumers can gamble, Watson said not enough was being done to deal with gambling through games. Continue reading...

Organisation to give support to and encourage greater representation of people of colour in UK game developmentA group of games industry insiders has launched a new initiative to tackle the problem of poor diversity in the UK video game development sector.POC in Play is described by the group as a racial equity and inclusion movement with an aim to improve representation and to provide events and initiatives for people of colour either working in the industry or thinking of joining. Continue reading...

App to set up ‘age-appropiate’ rules for under-13s to comply with US data protection lawsTikTok, the popular video-sharing app formerly known as Musical.ly, has agreed to a record $5.7m (£4.2m) fine with the US Federal Trade Commission after being accused of illegally collecting personal information from children under 13.The app, which is owned by the Chinese giant Bytedance, a private startup with a $75bn valuation, admitted to improper data collection in a statement following the settlement and said that it would begin keeping younger users in “age-appropriate TikTok environments”, where those under 13 would be pushed into a more passive role, able to watch videos, but not post or comment on the platform. Continue reading...