Technology | The Guardian

UK tax authority spent £11m to use online giant’s web-hosting services in 2018, says reportHM Revenue & Customs spent £11m to use Amazon’s web-hosting service last year, more than six times the £1.7m it received in corporation tax from Amazon’s main UK business, according to a new report.The UK tax authority was the second-biggest spender on Amazon services among central government departments, falling just behind the Home Office which spent nearly £16m last year, according to a report published by the GMB trade union. Continue reading...

Ubisoft has announced a new Watch Dogs game set in London in a packed conference, while Square Enix showed off Avengers and Final Fantasy VII – with 2020 release dates for both.3.19am BSTAnd that’s it for us! E3 proper begins tomorrow, but it feels a lot of the biggest announcements have already been made. Final Fantasy VII Remake, Watch Dogs: Brexit Edition and Marvel’s Avengers. A big day for gaming.3.17am BSTSurprise! It’s a live game, a la Destiny or The Division. Avengers delivers “a narrative over multiple years, with exciting new content released on a regular basis.”“You’ll assemble into teams of up to four players online, where you can master exciting abilities and muster a roster of exciting heroes. Every new hero, every new region will be delivered at no cost” And there won’t be random lootboxes or pay to win either. Continue reading...

News Media Alliance says revenue was almost as much as that of entire online news industry, although some question methodologyGoogle made $4.7bn in advertising from news content last year, almost as much as the revenue of the entire online news industry, according to a study released on Monday.According to the News Media Alliance, between 16% and 40% of Google search results are news content. Google’s revenue from its distribution of news content is only $400m less than the $5.1bn brought in by the United States news industry as a whole from digital advertising last year. Continue reading...

John Suffolk says Chinese requirement to cooperate with spy agencies does not applyHuawei is not obliged to compromise its products in order to comply with China’s intelligence law, a senior executive at the company has told MPs at a UK parliamentary hearing.John Suffolk, the telecoms firm’s global cybersecurity and privacy officer, said its understanding was that China’s 2017 requirement on companies to cooperate with its intelligence agencies when requested did not apply in its case. Continue reading...

Cybersecurity report warns Chinese tech firm’s breadth exposes customers to riskHuawei’s threat to national security is inextricably linked to the company’s sheer scale, according to an analysis of the Chinese tech company from threat intelligence firm Recorded Future.Rather than focusing attention on any one area of the company’s business, analyst Priscilla Moriuchi argues corporations, consumers and organisations should instead be wary of the pure variety of products and services offered by the company, which “generates a nearly unimaginable amount of data for one company to possess”. Continue reading...

Two intriguing new games and fresh trailers for Doom Eternal and Wolfenstein: Youngblood make up for a lacklustre eveningThose hoping for a glimpse of Elder Scrolls VI or the highly anticipated sci-fi adventure Starfield were left disappointed at Bethesda’s E3 conference in Los Angeles on Sunday. But the publisher did make a couple of intriguing announcements, with new games from Dishonored creator Arkane Lyon and from the studio of Resident Evil legend Shinji Mikami.There were also new trailers for shooters Doom Eternal (out on 22 November) and Wolfenstein Youngblood, both of which look to be carrying on the explosively gory and adrenaline-fuelled legacies of their forebears. A massive update for beleaguered multiplayer role-playing game Fallout 76 was also announced, adding a battle royale mode called Nuclear Winter and human characters for players to meet. Continue reading...

Jordan Erica Webber chats to Addie Wagenknecht, who is using the YouTube algorithm to her advantage by teaching cybersecurity tips while reviewing beauty products Continue reading...

Government research suggests British tech ‘unicorns’ are only surpassed by US and ChinaBritain is creating more technology companies worth at least $1bn (£786m) than any other company in Europe, according to government research.It found that UK-based entrepreneurs have built 72 such businesses in the past 20 years, including 13 in the past year, with only the US and China surpassing that number. Germany has 29 and India has 26. Continue reading...

The next-generation Xbox video game console will debut late next year, as announced at Microsoft’s E3 2019 press conference.At a press conference at E3 2019 in LA on Sunday, Microsoft announced the first details of a next-generation Xbox, the follow-up to its Xbox One console. Still known by its codename Project Scarlett, the new machine will be released in late 2020, with Halo Infinite as its leading launch title.Promising to “set a new bar for console power, speed and performance”, the new machine will feature custom hardware designed by chip manufacturer AMD, which supplied the technology for both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, and is also behind the architecture of Sony’s as-yet-unnamed next PlayStation. Continue reading...

At its E3 2019 press conference, Microsoft showed a raft of new games and announced a release date for its next-generation console, Project Scarlett. Here’s all the news.11.06pm BSTAlright, that’s me signing off for now. Here’s a quick schedule for the rest of the E3 press conferences and what to expect from them:10.50pm BSTNow that it’s over, here’s the most important news from the night:

Some hackers use malicious code, but most just hide in plain sight. It can be devastatingly effective

As the 87th edition of Le Mans prepares to get under way next weekend, all eyes will be on the last of the factory Ford GTsFord GT

From mobile phone chargers to HDMI for TVs, here’s how to save on leads for your gadgetsCables are a necessary evil in our modern world. Whether it’s the power cord for your phone, the cables jammed in the back of your TV or the wires connecting you to the internet, they’re everywhere.And when you need a new one the options are almost limitless, with some costing as much as hundreds of pounds. But do you need to spend all that for a cable? Absolutely not. So here’s a quick guide to cables to help you avoid the overpriced. Continue reading...

Site’s waffling over harassment during Pride month was ‘not surprising’, YouTuber saysYouTube’s haphazard response to an anti-gay harassment controversy this week underscores the company’s continuing failure to protect creators from hate speech, queer users say.The platform’s initial refusal to discipline Steven Crowder for years of sustained anti-gay and racist harassment of Carlos Maza, a video journalist for the US news site Vox, drew widespread criticism. Continue reading...

Longtime employee who helped organize global protest alleges Google’s response was designed to ‘have a chilling effect’ on growing workplace activismA prominent internal organizer against Google’s handling of sexual harassment cases has resigned from the company, alleging she was the target of a campaign of retaliation designed to intimidate and dissuade other employees from speaking out about workplace issues.Claire Stapleton, a longtime marketing manager at Google and its subsidiary YouTube, said she decided to leave the company after 12 years when it became clear that her trajectory at the company was “effectively over”. Continue reading...

Human rights group calls on England and Wales to ban police use of AFR in public spacesAutomated facial recognition poses one of the greatest threats to individual freedom and should be banned from use in public spaces, according to the director of the campaign group Liberty.Martha Spurrier, a human rights lawyer, said the technology had such fundamental problems that, despite police enthusiasm for the equipment, its use on the streets should not be permitted. Continue reading...

Idan Ofer allegedly hired Black Cube in 2014 but firm denies meeting and is suing TV showAn Israeli investigative TV show has claimed that one of the country’s richest men hired the Israeli intelligence firm Black Cube to dig up dirt on a cabinet minister. Black Cube denied the allegations.

Transport Workers Union says the decision will be devastating for workers in the gig economyThe ridehailing company Uber does not directly employ its drivers, the Fair Work Ombudsman has said, because drivers have control over “whether, when, and for how long they perform work”.The decision comes after an investigation into whether Uber’s “driver-partners” are lawfully classified as independent contractors or are effectively employees, as argued by unions and a lobby group, Ride Share Drivers United. Continue reading...

GCHQ technical director says he hasn’t seen anything that reassures him company is taking necessary security stepsChina’s Huawei Technologies needs to raise its “shoddy” security standards which fall below rivals, a senior British cyber security official said on Thursday, as the company came under increasing pressure internationally.The US has led allegations that Huawei’s equipment can be used by Beijing for espionage operations, with Washington urging allies to bar the company from 5G networks. Continue reading...

Long-awaited ‘Netflix for games’ will be available in 14 countries including UK and US but not AustraliaGoogle will launch its long-awaited “Netflix for games” service, Stadia, in November, the company has announced. It will be available in 14 countries including the UK, US and Ireland, but not Australia or New Zealand.Related: Apple Arcade v Google Stadia: which is the future for video games? Continue reading...

Teachers trying to educate about fascism hit by service’s new policy on hate speechYouTube has blocked some British history teachers from its service for uploading archive material related to Adolf Hitler, saying they are breaching new guidelines banning the promotion of hate speech.The video-sharing website announced on Wednesday that it would remove material glorifying the Nazis from its platform in an attempt to stop people being radicalised. In the process however, it also deleted videos uploaded to help educate future generations about the risks of fascism. Continue reading...

Elizabeth’s new laptop has Windows 10 but she prefers Windows 7. What are her options?I now have a Lenovo laptop which has Windows 10 installed, but to be honest with you, I preferred Windows 7, which was on my last two computers. What would you suggest? ElizabethAs most Windows 7 users know – and if they don’t yet, Microsoft will nag them about it soon – Windows 7’s support stops in January 2020. After that, there will be no more security updates, except for companies that pay an annual fee that doubles every year. This is a powerful incentive to migrate from Windows 7 to Windows 10. Continue reading...

Top-end smartphone balances a big screen with smaller body, good performance and triple cameraThe Galaxy S10 is Samsung’s middle-of-the-road top-end phone, featuring a large screen in a pretty compact body for those who don’t like the current breed of massive flagship superphones.The regular, non-plus versions of Samsung’s Galaxy S line have always been the sweet spot between size, price and performance. They offer big, beautiful screens in bodies that are practically tiny by today’s giant-phone standards. Continue reading...

Huawei welcomes agreement in area ‘of strategic importance’ after meeting between Xi Jinping and Vladimir PutinHuawei, the Chinese technology company considered a security threat by the US, has signed a deal with Russian telecoms company MTS to develop a 5G network in the country over the next year.The agreement was signed on the sidelines of a meeting between Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian president Vladimir Putin in Moscow. Continue reading...

Officials fear data breach may be used to recruit students or university alumni as informantsIntelligence officials believe China may have been behind a massive data breach which compromised the personal details of thousands of Australian National University students and staff.The Sydney Morning Herald reports that senior intelligence officials have pointed the finger at China as one of only a few countries capable of pulling off the hack, which compromised up to 19 years’ worth of personal data from students and staff. Continue reading...

Companies such as JetBlue began utilizing the technology after Trump issued an executive order pushing for its use in US airportsA new tool launched by privacy activists offers to help travelers avoid increasingly invasive facial recognition technologies in airports.Activist groups Fight for the Future, Demand Progress and Credo on Wednesday unveiled a new website called AirlinePrivacy.com, which shows users what airlines use facial recognition to verify the identity of passengers before boarding. The site also helps customers to directly book flights with airlines that don’t use facial recognition technologies. Continue reading...

Video-sharing site demonetises Steven Crowder after initially finding him innocent of cyberbullyingYouTube has removed advertising from material by a user who subjected a journalist to repeated homophobic abuse in videos, after the platform faced criticism over its failure to act.Carlos Maza, a video journalist for the US news site Vox, went public last week with a complaint that the rightwing YouTube personality Steven Crowder was engaged in a long-term homophobic harassment campaign. In a compilation video Maza created of some of his mentions on Crowder’s show, the host attacks Maza as a “gay Mexican”, a “lispy queer” and a “token Vox gay atheist sprite”. Continue reading...

Content promoting fascism, supremacism or Holocaust denial will no longer be hosted

Capcom’s veteran game director reveals how one of the year’s best games was made – and why successful game design need not be a crunch momentIn 2002, veteran Capcom game director Hideaki Itsuno – then working on a pitch for an original action-RPG that later turned into Dragon’s Dogma – was called upon to get an ailing Devil May Cry 2 out of the door. It sold decently, in the end, but was widely regarded as a critical flop. “When it finished up, they all realised they could have done better,” explains Devil May Cry producer Matt Walker (and Itsuno’s translator for this interview). “So he and others at Capcom said, we’re going to take all of our collective knowledge on how to make a good fighting game, a good action game, and put everything we can into making Devil May Cry 3.“And if this isn’t received well, if this doesn’t sell well, that’s it. We’ll just have to quit Capcom, and do something else.” Continue reading...

Richard Snape says drivers should be able to exchange a depleted battery for a fully charged one at a service station. Plus Adrian Townsend questions the wisdom of recommending a new Oxford-to-Cambridge motorwayI think the National Infrastructure Commission is on the wrong track (Letters, 1 June). The disadvantage of current electrically powered vehicles is the integral battery system, leading to vehicle down time, decreasing effectiveness, replacement costs and recharging practicalities. Far better to use a battery replacement system whereby a standard size and configuration is adopted and vehicles are designed to allow exchange. You buy the vehicle, not the battery. Standardising would bring benefits of scale to battery manufacturers, leading to reduced cost and better competition, and passes on the long-term ownership issues from the individual to organisations better equipped to manage them. Fossil fuel suppliers should view themselves as energy suppliers and use their capabilities and resources to rapidly redevelop service stations to support such systems.The customer would call into a service station when required and select the grade of battery they want. The depleted battery would be automatically exchanged for a fully charged one and the customer would pay for the difference in charged states plus a rental charge to cover the outlay, maintenance and replacement costs for the supplier. The first step is to standardise the battery configuration. Come on, guys, get on with it!

From Star Wars and Marvel-themed juggernauts to village life sims and monster hunts, these are the games we’re most interested in at next week’s E3 in Los Angeles Continue reading...

Despite years of tough policing, Oakland couldn’t get a handle on gun crime. Was the solution a community-based approach?

Gun homicides nationwide have barely declined, but in one region of America they are down 30%. In a year-long series, the Guardian investigates the initiatives that are saving lives in an area scarred by rising inequality and gentrification

Congress to investigate whether giant tech firms are guilty of ‘anti-competitive conduct’ as markets see tech stocks plummetCongress is launching a bipartisan investigation into digital markets and the tech industry, looking into giants such as Facebook, Google and Amazon for “competition problems” and “anti-competitive conduct”.“The open internet has delivered enormous benefits to Americans, including a surge of economic opportunity, massive investment, and new pathways for education online,” House judiciary chairman Jerrold Nadler said in a statement. “But there is growing evidence that a handful of gatekeepers have come to capture control over key arteries of online commerce, content, and communications.” Continue reading...

Follow the launch of Apple’s latest products as they are announced

The iTunes app is dead, your iPhone will be faster and the $5,999 Mac Pro becomes firm’s most expensive computerApple has announced that the iPhone is going to get faster with iOS 13, the iTunes app is dead on the Mac with the new macOS 10.15 Catalina, and the iPad is getting its own operating system.On stage at the firm’s annual developer conference in San Jose McEnery Convention Center, California, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook unveiled the next versions of iOS, iPad OS, watchOS, macOS and the long-awaited Mac Pro, which becomes Apple’s most expensive computer yet. Continue reading...

Demonstrators cover bodies with stickers to ensure nipples on display are ‘male’, in line with Facebook policySome were hairy. Some were pointy. Some were dark brown, some a pale pink. But the hundreds of nipples on display in front of Facebook’s New York City headquarters on Sunday were technically “male”, despite some being on female protesters.More than 100 people lay nude on the sidewalk to call for a change to the company’s censorship policies. The action, called #wethenipple, was organized by the artist Spencer Tunick and the National Coalition Against Censorship. Continue reading...

Next PM could overturn decision to let Chinese firm supply non-core 5G kitMike Pompeo, the US secretary of state, has ramped up the pressure over the use of Huawei technology in 5G networks hours before Donald Trump was expected to demand that the UK rethinks its plan to do business with the Chinese company.The US president is due to meet Theresa May in Downing Street on Tuesday. There is growing speculation that her successor as prime minister could overturn her decision on Huawei. Continue reading...

Governments and police must take crime on the internet seriously. It is where we all live nowAbout half of all property crime in the developed world now takes place online. When so much of our lives, and almost all of our money, have been digitised, this is not surprising – but it has some surprising consequences. For one thing, the decline in reported property crimes trumpeted by successive British governments between 2005 and 2015 turns out to have been an illusion. Because banks were not required to report fraud to the police after 2005, they often didn’t. It would have made both banks and police look bad to have all that crime known and nothing done about it. The cost of the resulting ignorance was paid by the rest of government, and by the public, too, deprived of accurate and reliable knowledge. Since then, the total number of property crimes reported has risen from about 6m to 11m a year as the figures have taken computerised crime into account.The indirect costs to society are very much higher than the hundreds of millions that individuals lose. One example is the proliferation of plagiarism software online, which developed an entire industry in poor, English-speaking countries like Kenya, serving idle or ignorant students in England and North America. The effort required by schools and universities to guard against such fraud has been considerable, and its cost entirely disproportionate to the gains made by the perpetrators. Continue reading...

An image of a Syrian refugee using virtual reality to help researchers design a shelter has been chosen as the winner of the 2019 national science photography competition organised by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. The competition attracted 169 entries from EPSRC-funded researchers Continue reading...

A couple of years ago, Hussein Kesvani started receiving anti-Islam messages from a Twitter account called True Brit. A few months later, he travelled to meet the man behind the account. Jordan Erica Webber chats to him about what that was like, as well as his new book Follow Me, Akhi, which looks at how the newest generation of British Muslims are growing up in the digital age. Continue reading...

Baltimore this month joined Atlanta, San Diego and Newark in the list of US cities hit by ransomware attacks as the cyber intrusions are expected to continue“We won’t talk more, all we know is MONEY! Hurry up!”This was the ransom note that confronted Baltimore officials on 7 May when hackers crippled government computers with a virus, taking the systems hostage. The ongoing cyber-attack has halted real estate transactions and shut down websites for processing water bills and other services. Continue reading...

Google confirmed that YouTube, Google Cloud and G Suite services were affected by sporadic outagesUsers of YouTube, Snapchat and some Google services are seeing errors or slow performance due to high levels of network congestion in the eastern United States.YouTube, Google Cloud and G Suite services are affected, but Google said it believed it had identified the cause of the congestion and expected normal service to resume shortly. Continue reading...

Tim Cook will announce separate apps for music, TV and podcasts, according to reportsIt was once heralded as a possible saviour of the music industry in the digital age, famously annoyed fans by forcing a U2 album on them, and its 20,699-word terms and conditions have even inspired a graphic novel, but now Apple is to replace its iTunes download service.According to a report by Bloomberg, the tech company will announce that three separate apps for music, TV and podcasts will supersede iTunes, as Apple seeks to reposition itself as an entertainment service rather than a hardware company powered by products such as the iPhone. Continue reading...

London Stadium

A tale of two 12th-century French children confronting an ever more malevolent and verminous world casts a beguiling spellA Plague Tale: Innocence opens on a scene of idyllic playfulness: a teenage girl, Amicia, walking her dog through an autumnal forest in 12th-century France, bumping apples from tall trees using pebbles hurled from a homemade slingshot. If this is the “innocence” of the game’s title, it plays but a fleeting cameo role in the drama. Before the day is out, Amicia’s dog is dead – ripped apart by a thrashing mass of rabid vermin – along with her former life of privilege as a French noble, ripped apart by soldiers of the inquisition, thugs acting on behalf of an equally corrupt church.Amicia and her younger brother Hugo, a boy who suffers from a blood disease and has spent his days in jaundiced confinement, escape the family estate and begin to pick their way through a countryside turned hostile. This is, then, a story of innocence versus experience, of children versus the ruined world of adults, with all its plagues, both physical and ideological. Continue reading...

Will robots be the answer to labour shortages on farms? Our pick of the best planting, weeding and harvesting machinesLast week a startup based at Plymouth University unveiled the world’s first raspberry-picking robot. The machine can pick about 25,000 berries a day, which is 10,000 more than a human during an eight-hour shift. Raspberries are particularly challenging for machines to harvest because the robots have to identify ripe fruit and handle the soft berries without damaging them. The firm intends to lease the robots to farmers at a rate that would undercut the cost of employing human fruit pickers. Continue reading...

Don’t expect the Chinese government to roll over in the fight against the tech giantUntil recently, the only thing the average citizen could have told you about Huawei, the Chinese tech giant, was that s/he hadn’t the faintest idea of how to pronounce it (it’s “hwa-wei” btw, according to Wikipedia). And then, suddenly, this unpronounceable company seemed to be all over the news. Now it’s at the centre of a burgeoning geopolitical row. How did that happen?I blame the Australians, who have a government only marginally less dysfunctional than our own. According to a Reuters report, in early 2018 they asked their top spooks a question: “With all the offensive cyber tools at their disposal, what harm could they inflict if they had access to equipment installed in the 5G network, the next generation mobile communications technology, of a target nation?” The spooks came back with a sombre assessment: the offensive potential of 5G was so great, they reported, that if Australia were on the receiving end of such attacks, the country’s critical infrastructure could be seriously sabotaged. Continue reading...