Technology | The Guardian

From immersive shooters to psychedelic Tetris and gothic fairytales, here are the virtual reality games you should be picking upThe familiar game of high-speed block organisation, but enveloped in psychedelic visuals and sound. VR isn’t strictly necessary, but it wraps the game’s astonishing visuals – glittering forests, neon cityscapes, constellations of lights that move like whales – all around you, helping you sink into the trance-like state of concentration that gives the game its title. The cumulative effect is quite emotionally overwhelming. As a fringe benefit, if you turn out to be one of the players who reports crying at Tetris Effect, the headset will help hide your tears from anyone else in the room. Continue reading...

It had everything: swordfights with lizards, magical tennis, shrieking mummies, a whole world to explore – plus a rousing score you could play along to. This joyful/scary chapter in Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda has inspired designers ever sinceThe Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time’s opening sequence is, for me, the most evocative of all video games. First you hear the galloping of a horse, joined by soft minor-key piano and melancholy, soaring ocarina notes as a young man in a green tunic rides under the setting moon. The camera pans over a blocky, low-resolution, yet spartanly beautiful landscape as the sun rises. It prepares you for a game that could be as melancholy as it was exciting, as emotionally affecting as it was technologically innovative. Released in Europe on this day in 1998, Ocarina of Time was one of the first true 3D adventures, a capsule world on a game cartridge, and it remains one of the very best. Continue reading...

In its latest seasonal update, the 200m-selling blockbuster allows players to create their own islands and share them with friends – the response is likely to be hugeEvery three months something gigantic happens in the lives of 200m video game players: Fortnite Battle Royale starts a new season. The seventh of these launched on Thursday, bringing a variety of additions to the online multiplayer shooting game, but the most important of these is surely the Creative mode, a whole new element that allows players to build their own Fortnite landscapes and share them with the world.For the uninitiated, Fortnite Battle Royale (as opposed to Fortnite Save the World, a linked but different version of the game) puts 100 players on an island together where they must search for guns and equipment and then fight until only one player remains. They begin on a large island filled with houses, shops, factories and sports arenas, but a huge storm rolls in progressively through the game, forcing combatants into an ever smaller area. The visuals are bright, brash and cartoony, and the locations are silly, from fast-food joints with enormous burger-headed statues, to toilet factories and spooky castles. It’s like playing Call of Duty in a world created by the Scooby Doo art team. Continue reading...

Service to be closed four months earlier than expected in light of lapse that exposed names, email addresses and other informationGoogle is still having trouble protecting the personal information on its Google+ service, prodding the company to accelerate its plans to shut down a little-used social network created to compete against Facebook.A privacy flaw that inadvertently exposed the names, email addresses, ages and other personal information of 52.5 million Google+ users last month convinced Google to close the service in April instead of August, as previously announced. Google revealed the new closure date and its latest privacy lapse in a Monday blogpost. Continue reading...

Forklift driver employed through labour hire company Adecco says he was dismissed from his job at Amazon due to union activityTwo unions have formed an alliance to organise workers at Amazon Australia after the first worker at its Sydney fulfilment centre to join a union was sacked.Raj, a forklift driver employed through labour hire company Adecco, has launched a general protections case in the Fair Work Commission claiming he was dismissed from his job due to union activity. Continue reading...

Country steps up pressure as Canada cancels a trade mission and Meng Wanzhou’s bail hearing adjourned until TuesdayChina has stepped up pressure on Canada ahead of the resumed bail hearing for a senior Huawei executive who was arrested in Vancouver on a US warrant.Related: China summons US ambassador over Huawei CFO's arrest Continue reading...

US trade representative says new tariffs will be imposed if trade negotiations are not achieved by the 90-day deadlineUS-China trade negotiations must achieve success by 1 March or new tariffs will be imposed, the US trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, said on Sunday, clarifying the “hard deadline” after a week of seeming confusion among Donald Trump and his advisers.Related: China summons US ambassador over Huawei CFO's arrest Continue reading...

Terry Branstad urged to cancel arrest warrant for Meng Wanzhou and end her ‘egregious’ detentionChina has summoned the US ambassador in Beijing to protest about the detention of a senior Huawei executive in Canada after US law enforcement officials issued a warrant for her arrest last week.The official Xinhua news agency said the vice-foreign minister, Le Yucheng, had “lodged solemn representations and strong protests” with the ambassador, Terry Branstad, against the detention of Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of the Chinese technology firm. Continue reading...

Jack Dorsey rhapsodised about 10-day meditation retreat and encouraged his 4 million followers to visitThe CEO of Twitter has faced fierce criticism for promoting Myanmar as a tourist destination in a series of tweets despite hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing human rights abuses that the UN says amounts to genocide.Jack Dorsey told his 4 million followers he had travelled to northern Myanmar last month for a 10-day silent meditation retreat, before encouraging them to visit. Continue reading...

As our online existences become less distinct from ‘real life’, experts raise concern about the growing power of big techMany of the boundary lines in our lives are highly literal, and, for the most part, this is how we’ve been trained to think of boundaries: as demarcations shored up by laws, physical, legal, or otherwise, that indicate exactly where one thing ends and another begins. Here is the border of your property; here is the border of your body; here is the border of a city, a state, a nation – and to cross any of these boundaries without permission is to transgress. But one of the most significant boundary lines in our lives is not this way, and one piece of ubiquitous technology is making this line increasingly permeable and uncertain, at a cost that we may only be starting to comprehend.Here’s a thought experiment: where do you end? Not your body, but you, the nebulous identity you think of as your “self”. Does it end at the limits of your physical form? Or does it include your voice, which can now be heard as far as outer space; your personal and behavioral data, which is spread out across the impossibly broad plane known as digital space; and your active online personas, which probably encompass dozens of different social media networks, text message conversations, and email exchanges? Continue reading...

From electric bikes and fold-up drones to combat robots and digital skipping ropes… the year’s most desirable technologyInstead of relying on heat, this innovative device employs the Coanda jet-flow effect (which helps keep planes airborne) to wrap and style hair. It requires relearning how to coax your locks, but you can say goodbye to heat damage and singed foreheads. Continue reading...

Neat, nimble and light… the reborn Alpine A110 has everything you need to tackle Devon’s toughest roadsAlpine A110

Chinese backlash intensifies as Meng Wanzhou faces extradition to US over fraud allegationsChina has warned Canada there would be severe consequences if it did not immediately release Huawei’s chief financial officer, calling the case “extremely nasty”.Meng Wanzhou was arrested in Canada on 1 December and faces extradition to the United States, which alleges that she covered up her company’s links to a firm that tried to sell equipment to Iran despite sanctions. Continue reading...

Labour’s deputy leader demands action after the Guardian’s investigation

The Chinese telecom giant is under renewed global scrutiny after the arrest of its founder’s daughter. Here’s whyIts chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, who is also the daughter of the company’s founder, was arrested in Canada on 1 December and faces extradition to the US over allegations of helping evade sanctions against Iran. The Obama-era sanctions banned the sales of certain telephone-system equipment. Continue reading...

The arrest of its chief financial officer has shone a light on its global role in telecoms – and links to the Chinese stateMany executives consider themselves figures of great significance, but few are capable of sending a chill through global markets simply by getting arrested. Meng Wanzhou, also known as Sabrina Meng or Cathy Meng, is one.The chief financial officer of the Chinese telecoms giant Huawei – and the daughter of its billionaire founder, Ren Zhengfei – was detained in Vancouver last week. She could face extradition to the US on charges thought to be related to allegations that Huawei breached sanctions levied by Washington against Iran. Continue reading...

Meng Wanzhou lied about links between telecoms giant and shell company, Vancouver court hears as bail arguments continueA senior Chinese telecoms executive committed fraud when she lied about links between Huawei and a shell company used to sell telecommunications equipment to Iran in breach of US sanctions, Canadian prosecutors have told a Vancouver court.Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s chief financial officer, appeared in court on Friday as she sought bail in a case that has sparked a major international dispute between China and the US. After more than five hours of debate, the court has not yet decided if Meng will be granted bail as she fights an extradition order to the US. The closely-watched hearing will resume on Monday morning. Continue reading...

Australia has made itself a global guinea pig in testing a regime to crack encrypted communicationIn the hit US TV series The Wire police are initially baffled when the criminal suspects they are investigating begin to communicate through photographic messages of clock faces.After several seasons of plots driven by the legalities and logistics of setting up telephone intercepts on suspected drug dealers, the police can’t keep up when overheard conversations are replaced by an inscrutable form of pictorial code. Continue reading...

The Chinese telecoms firm’s promised investment follows the arrest of CFO in CanadaThe Chinese telecoms giant Huawei is to spend $2bn (£1.5bn) in an effort to alleviate British security services’ concerns about vulnerabilities in its products, capping a torrid week for the firm.In July, a British government centre established to verify the integrity of Huawei’s technology warned that it had security concerns about the company’s technology and could only provide “limited assurance” that risks to national security had been mitigated. Continue reading...

Turner prize | Bad sex | Cornish literature | Housing crisis | Dr Wendy Atkin | Corbyn’s cunning Brexit planI was interested to read that the chair of the Turner prize judges has declared winner Charlotte Prodger’s work the “most profound use of a device as prosaic as the iPhone camera that we’ve seen in art to date” (Video clips shot using an iPhone win Turner prize, 5 December). I am finding my iPhone very useful for holding down the wrapping paper on the Christmas presents, when I need both hands to wrangle the sticky tape into submission. Does this use count as profound or prosaic?

Entrepreneur says Silicon Valley has inequality problem as it puts too much trust in young, white menThere is a surefire way to make Vivienne Ming flinch. It is a reaction she has to the bullish claims that big tech firms like to make. As federal investigations hit Facebook and global protests plague Google, the mantra remains. Artificial intelligence will make all our lives better. Poverty, mental health, climate change, inequality? All can be solved with AI.As a Silicon Valley technologist, entrepreneur and theoretical neuroscientist, Ming might easily have fallen under the same spell as her tech firm counterparts. She is a firm believer that AI will become an ever more powerful tool, after all. And what could be more west coast than a Human Potential Maximiser? Continue reading...

Company criticised over data misuse and ordered to issue an apology on its website and appFacebook has been fined €10m (£8.9m) by Italian authorities for misleading users over its data practices.The two fines issued by Italy’s competition watchdog are some of the largest levied against the social media company for data misuse, dwarfing the £500,000 fine levied by the British Information Commissioner’s Office in September – the maximum that body was able to issue. Continue reading...

Jordan Erica Webber explores the sometimes controversial world of holograms, from lessons taught by absent academics, to celebrities returning to the stage, even after their deathIn November 2018 Imperial College Business School announced that its students will be the first in the world to have live lectures delivered to them via hologram.Just a month before that, it was announced that Amy Winehouse would be going on tour in 2019. The singer, who died seven years ago, will appear on stage as a hologram. Continue reading...

Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s global chief financial officer, will appear at a bail hearing on Friday morning, following her arrest last Saturday

State-run papers label Washington a ‘despicable rogue’ as Japan moves to ban telecoms company from government contracts

National security adviser said US had long been concerned about role of Chinese tech companies in theft of technological knowhowThe US national security adviser, John Bolton, has said he knew in advance that a top Chinese telecoms executive would be arrested in Canada to face extradition to the US, in what is escalating into a major diplomatic incident.Beijing is calling for the release of Meng Wanzhou, the global chief financial officer of the vast Huawei corporation, and demanded Ottawa and Washington provide reasons for her arrest in Vancouver on Saturday. Continue reading...

US ride-hailing firm files plans with regulator as it races rival Uber for fundingUS company Lyft has filed plans with the regulator in Washington for a flotation as it races for funding against Uber, the rival ride-hailing company.In a statement on Thursday, Lyft announced it had submitted a draft registration statement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), in a move which sets it up to be one of the first large tech flotations of 2019. Continue reading...

Employees discussed how to minimise amount of consent they would need to ask forFacebook employees discussed how to minimise the amount of consent needed to collect user data, according to the latest tranche of emails released by the UK parliament relating to the company’s mass collection of call and text logs.Since 2015, the social network has collected communications metadata from users who install its app on Android phones. In March this year that logging became public when users discovered details of their communications as they downloaded their personal data using new tools created to comply with the EU’s general data protection regulation (GDPR). Continue reading...

Accident in New Jersey puts new focus on retailer’s warehouse working conditionsTwenty-four employees at an Amazon warehouse in New Jersey were taken to hospital after a robot accidentally punctured a can of bear repellant.The 255g can containing concentrated capsaicin, a compound in chilli peppers, was punctured by an automated machine after it fell off a shelf, according to local media. Continue reading...

If the US can prove the Chinese firm broke sanctions, Huawei could grind to a haltThe arrest in Canada of the chief financial officer of the Chinese mobile network and handset tech firm Huawei marks a new stage in a technological cold war between western spy agencies and Beijing. This development could be catastrophic for Huawei: according to reports, the US suspects it broke sanctions by selling telecoms equipment to Iran. If that is proven, the response could exclude Huawei from many of the world’s most valuable markets.Related: Stock markets slump as Huawei arrest fuels trade war fears – business live Continue reading...

Richard likes Swype’s predictive text on his tablet and wants a similar app for a Windows 10 PCIs there an intelligent keyboard app for Windows 10? I use Swype on my tablet, and apart from being faster than keyboard typing, I love the power of its intelligent predictive text. My PC doesn’t have a touch screen, but I feel I would still benefit from the predictive text, as I’m not a touch typer. I looked at Grammarly, and a couple of others, but they’re not really what I’m after. RichardPredictive text programs have been around for a long time, and many are still available. The first one I used was Brown Bag Software’s MindReader, which arrived on a 5.25in floppy disk in the early 1980s. I don’t know if Brown Bag came up with the idea, but its approach is typical. Continue reading...

Far-right activist wanted funds for comeback, saying: ‘I’ve had a miserable year or two’The far-right activist Milo Yiannopoulos has suffered a setback in his attempts to relaunch his career after being banned by the crowdfunding site Patreon.Yiannopoulos, recently revealed to be more than A$2m (£1.1m) in debt, according to Australian court documents, had been hoping to recruit people to regularly contribute funds to a planned comeback. Continue reading...

Quirky and egalitarian, Toca Boca’s games are a world away from the usual half-hearted or exploitative kids’ apps. We meet the Scandinavian company taking child’s play seriously

Meng Wanzhou, who faces extradition to US, said to have been investigated over alleged sanctions breaches

Refined design, water resistance and good screen makes latest e-reader about as good as a single-use device getsThe new Amazon Kindle Paperwhite is thinner, lighter and now water resistant, setting a new standard for what an e-reader should be.There’s only so far you can push a single-use device. Technically the Kindle Paperwhite is more than just an e-reader, as it now has Bluetooth for playing back audiobooks too. But it’s still a book reader, plain and simple. Continue reading...

World’s largest telecommunications equipment firm has been blacklisted by several countries and its CFO arrestedHuawei (pronounced “Wah-Way”) is a telecommunications and electronics company based in Shenzhen in the south of China. Continue reading...

Emails show Zuckerberg targeted Twitter’s Vine and gave some companies special data access, among other revelationsThe UK parliament has published a cache of confidential Facebook documents it obtained from a plaintiff in a California lawsuit. The records, which have been under seal in US courts, provided a rare window into internal discussions at the social network about privacy, user data, the company’s handling of competitors and more.Facebook’s director of developer platforms and programs, Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, told the Guardian in an earlier statement that the documents from the lawsuit “are only part of the story and are presented in a way that is very misleading without additional context”. Continue reading...

Social network staff apparently conversed about removing data restrictions for big ad spendersFacebook staff in 2012 discussed selling access to user data to major advertisers, before ultimately deciding to restrict such access two years later, according to a tranche of internal emails released by the UK parliament.The internal emails were obtained by the House of Commons digital, culture, media and sport (DCMS) committee last month after they had been disclosed, under seal, by Facebook as part of a lawsuit against it by the American software developer, Six4Three. Continue reading...

A Norfolk church is soliciting feedback on its choice of songs via a smartphone app. But, even with songs of praise, there’s no accounting for tasteWelcome to Ecclesiastical Factor, in which churchgoers in Aylsham, Norfolk, have been asked to use an app to give real-time feedback on their Sunday hymns. Rev Canon Andrew Beane hopes it will make services more interactive, but perhaps he hasn’t considered the potential for democracy to go wrong (hello, Brexit, Matt Terry*, Boaty McBoatface). Also, most hymns are not bangers. All it will take is for one voice to rise up against Morning Has Broken and he could have a revolt on his hands. Our music critic’s entirely subjective ranking of the UK’s Top 5 hymns (as determined by a 2013 BBC poll), gives a taste of what Rev Beane can expect.*The 2016 X Factor winner Continue reading...

Creative mode, to launch on 6 December, will let gamers construct and play in their own environments without fear of attack

A boy who reviews toys with his mum and dad has somehow become the world’s highest-earning YouTube star. What’s his secret?

Girls’ participation in esports outpacing that of boys, study of 5,000 children findsVideo games are increasingly popular with teenage girls, research shows, ranking in their top 10 hobbies just behind drawing and singing.Competitive gaming – esports – is also gaining ground among girls, with growth in participation outpacing that of boys in the 13-15 age group. Continue reading...

Ballet dancers also flagged up as explicit content under blogging website’s new rulesBallet dancers, superheroes and a picture of Christ have all fallen foul of Tumblr’s new pornography ban, after the images were flagged up as explicit content by the blogging site’s artificial intelligence (AI) tools.The company, which is owned by the US media conglomerate Verizon, said on Monday it would ban pornography from its site – and defined the term as covering any depiction of “real-life human genitals”, or “female-presenting nipples”. Continue reading...

Understanding voice personas: what their objectives are and how do they help to shape the experience?

Accusations of encoded anti-conservative prejudice are gaining traction, but experts say the claims are just a red herringIn August, Paula Bolyard, a supervising editor at the conservative news outlet PJ Media, published a story reporting that 96% of Google search results for Donald Trump prioritized “left-leaning and anti-Trump media outlets”.Bolyard’s results were generated according to her own admittedly unscientific methodology. She searched for “Trump” in Google’s News tab, and then used a highly questionable media chart that separated outlets into “left” and “right” to tabulate the results. She reported that 96 of 100 results returned were from so-called “left-leaning” news outlets, with 21 of those from CNN alone. Despite this dubious methodology, Bolyard’s statistic spread, and her story was picked up by a Fox Business Network show. Continue reading...

Those ‘geniuses’ in the bright, sleek Apple store are underpaid, overhyped and characters in a well-managed fiction storySteve Jobs wanted customers to understand the Apple store “with one sweep of the eye,” as if gods standing on Mount Olympus. Indeed, the outlets seem to speak for themselves. Bright, uncluttered, and clad in glass, they couldn’t contrast more sharply with the big-box labyrinths they were designed to replace.Neither could their profit margins. Since launching in 2001, the instantly recognizable stores have raked in more money – in total and per square foot – than any other retailer on the planet, transforming Apple into the world’s richest company in the process. Yet the very transparency of the Apple store conceals how those profits are made. Continue reading...

Site was platform for some in LGBT community to share their struggles and triumphsNyx Serafino says she spent most of her life feeling like she was society’s “dirty secret”. A gender-fluid sex worker struggling with her identity and childhood abuse, she said: “There is absolutely nothing about me that fits in a box.”When Serafino, 28, of Las Vegas, discovered Tumblr in 2010, it wasn’t the cure-all she sought. Continue reading...

A beautiful, crisp display, good performance and modern ports rejuvenate a classicApple has finally given the MacBook Air the update fans have been craving for the last three years: new processors and a vastly improved Retina display. But is this the new Mac laptop for most people or has it lost some of the desirability and shine while stagnating since 2015?When closed, the new MacBook Air looks pretty much the same as the old one. The aluminium frame is still wedge-shaped. It still has the cut-out in the deck to lift the screen and still has the Apple logo emblazoned on the lid, even if it is now metallic and shiny rather than being light-up opaque plastic. Continue reading...

Microblogging site says move reflects responsibilities to different age groupsTumblr will ban all pornography from its service this month, in a move that will alter how the social network is used and shows an increased desire by major media companies to restrict which content appears on their websites.Unlike most major websites, the microblogging outlet has always had a tolerant attitude to legal adult material since it was founded in 2007, gaining a reputation as a safe haven for adult-themed artists, sex workers and pornographers. As a result adult material has flooded the service, where it sits alongside other fandoms for everything from Harry Potter to anime. Continue reading...

New research suggests we’re getting increasingly annoyed with people taking photos and filming at gigs, but removing these rights would be utterly draconianIt reads like a particularly clumsy Black Mirror episode: a crowd at a gig all glued to the action on their phone screens rather than looking at the stage. But this is a common sight at live music events today, and one that the British public is getting more irritated by.New research by the ticketing website Eventbrite polled more than 1,000 UK gig-goers for their opinions on using mobile phones during concerts. Of respondents, 70% said they were annoyed by people constantly taking video or photos of the show, and 69% said they would support “more than minimal action to minimise the disruption”. Eventbrite’s suggestions varied in popularity: “no-phone zones” and audience spot checks received less than 20% support each, but the idea of “gentle nudges to make phones more discreet” received 41% support. Continue reading...