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Tesla head plans short and long distance tunnels including Hyperloop from New York to Washington, but it’s unclear whether plans have government approvalElon Musk’s Boring Company has recommitted to building a network of high-speed transport tunnels, including a Hyperloop vacuum-tube supersonic transport system between New York and Washington DC, which it claims will whisk people from A to B at 600mph in a vacuum tube.

After a Google employee was fired for penning a controversial ‘anti-diversity’ manifesto, conservatives say it proves Silicon Valley is a liberal echo chamber

Scandal over discrimination at the company deepens as dozens of current and former staff say they have earned less than men despite equal qualifications

Shahak Shapira and other artist-activists stencil insulting barbs to protest what they deem the company’s muteness on offensive tweets

We are not just swimming in a new medium, we are drowning in it, writes Susan MoronyChristina Patterson’s views about screen use (Don’t let life go by in the blink of a screen, 8 August) must echo those of thousands of parents. We are not just swimming in a new medium, we are drowning in it.On a flight last week from Preveza to London, a seven-year-old boy pulled the window blind down straight after takeoff, so that he could see his iPad screen. Had he looked out of the window, he would have seen the most wonderful things: crystal clear views of Paxos and Antipaxos, Corfu, the entire, stunning Slovenian and Croatian coasts, glorious Venice, the Alps, from Italy through Switzerland and France, and finally the English Channel and home. So sad that he, and many others, had their heads buried in their screens for the entire journey, and that his mother didn’t think to suggest looking out of the window occasionally.

With Google reportedly firing author of a controversial anti-diversity memo, we want to hear the experiences of women working in the industry

Full Fact software backed by George Soros and Pierre Omidyar fact-checks statements in parliament and news media in real timeBroadcast, print and online journalists are to begin using an automated fact-checking system that quickly alerts them to false claims made in the press, on TV and in parliament.An early version of the system, dubbed the “bullshit detector” by its creators, will be rolled out for testing from October as part of a global fightback against fake news. Continue reading...

Video from ARLnow.com shows a car that appears to be driverless. The sighting was a hot topic on tech blogs over the weekend because the vehicle seemed to be autonomous. However, when NBC’s Adam Tuss approached the car he saw a person disguised as a car seat driving the vehicle, leading to questions about the purpose of such a stunt. Continue reading...

Group tells company CEO to pay multimillion-dollar ransom or else risk 1.5TB of shows and confidential corporate data being released onlineHackers of US television network HBO have released personal phone numbers of Game of Thrones actors, emails and scripts in the latest dump of data stolen from the company, and are demanding a multimillion-dollar ransom to prevent the release of whole TV shows and further emails.In a five-minute video letter from somebody calling themselves “Mr Smith” to HBO chief executive Richard Plepler, the hackers told the company to pay within three days or they would put online the HBO shows and confidential corporate data they claim to have stolen. Continue reading...

CEO Sundar Pichai says internal document that criticised efforts to promote women and under-represented minorities is ‘contrary to our basic values’Google reportedly fired a software engineer on Monday after a document he wrote criticising the company’s diversity efforts and attributing the tech industry’s gender imbalance to biological differences between men and women went viral.Related: Google staffer's hostility to affirmative action sparks furious backlash Continue reading...

Silicon Valley says it is committed to racial diversity in its workforce. But the numbers tell a different story

Elon Musk congratulates Italian owners club, which claims new distance record while consuming equivalent of only eight litres of petrolFive members of the Italian Tesla owners club claim to have set a new distance record, travelling 670 miles on a single charge in a Tesla Model S.

The place to talk about games and other things that matterIt’s Monday! Continue reading...

New legislation will give people right to force online traders and social media to delete personal data and will comply with EU data protectionPeople will get a new right to force social media companies and online traders to delete their personal data under laws to be brought forward by the government this summer. Matt Hancock, the minister for digital, said it would amount to a “right to be forgotten” by companies, which will no longer be able to get limitless use of people’s data simply through default “tick boxes” online.Plans to give people the right to request a deletion of social media posts from their childhood were floated by Theresa May during the Conservatives’ election campaign and legislation was promised in the Queen’s speech. However, the measures appear to have been toughened since then, as the legislation will give people the right to have all their personal data deleted by companies, not just social media content relating to the time before they turned 18. Continue reading...

Why bother flying when you can escape to the Himalayas, or into space, from the comfort of your couchWhen I was a child, each year without exception our family would drive to Cornwall in a wheezing Ford Sierra for the summer holidays. We’d stay with my great-uncle, a retired army major (gruff bachelor, suspected womaniser, borderline alcoholic), who was perhaps the last person I’d ever meet who earnestly deployed the phrase: “Children should be seen and not heard.”In order to preserve quiet in the house, we went out a lot. Routine became ritual. We’d visit the same beach, whatever the weather. We’d eat the same sandy ham sandwiches and shoo the same crabs from under the same rocks. Familiarity might have bred contempt, were it not for the Game Boy my brother and I brought along for the ride. The machine’s luminous green screen was a tiny portal to other worlds, a holiday from the holiday, when the holiday started to drag. The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening is, in my mind, a part of Hyrule that’s for ever Cornish. Continue reading...

An intrepid but accident-prone podcast presenter chases his cold-caller all the way to Delhi, and tower-block dwellers wax lyricalReply All podcast: Gimlet Media

US prosecutors claim Marcus Hutchins, hailed as ‘accidental hero’ for stopping major ransomware attack, admitted to creating Kronos malware targeting banks

Low-quality version of latest episode leaks in separate security breach from hack that has been self-described as ‘the greatest leak’ of the digital eraThe cable network HBO capped off several weeks of controversy and misfortune with further bad news on Friday when it emerged that the next episode of its star series, Game of Thrones, due to air on Sunday, had leaked on the internet that morning.Related: At last! Game of Thrones gives us all the moments we've most been waiting for Continue reading...

Nottingham Trent University team says replacing concrete with plastic container to fill with water could slash carbon emissionsResearchers have developed a device to make washing machines lighter that could significantly reduce carbon emissions and the back pain of people having to install them.Washing machines typically contain one or more large concrete blocks, which can weigh more than 25kg (4st), in order to prevent them from moving during spin cycles.

Apple’s HomePod firmware is full of clues about its next smartphone. Here’s an exhaustive list, from all-screen design to a new SmartCamA week of analysing a leak from Apple has revealed many details about what the company’s next iPhone will be like: from facial recognition to a smart camera system and a screen that fills the front.

Company admits ‘we could have done more’ after one of its cars burst into flames when it knew that Honda had issued a recall for electrical faultUber said it had taken action to repair faulty cars in Singapore after it was reported the ride-hailing company rented them out to drivers despite being aware of a recall, and after one caught fire.The Wall Street Journal said Uber managers in Singapore bought more than 1,000 Honda Vezel SUVs and rented them to drivers even though they knew the model had been recalled in April 2016 over concerns that an electrical part that could overheat and catch fire. The WSJ cited internal Uber documents and interviews with people familiar with Uber’s operations. Continue reading...

Marcus Hutchins arrested over his alleged role in creating Kronos malware targeting bank accounts

Today’s compact cameras can often shoot both video and still images, but not at the same time. Christian is looking to save high-quality pictures from his home movies Continue reading...

Hackers behind attacks such as WannaCry might not have become hugely rich, but that doesn’t mean they are going to give up any time soonThe destructive potential of ransomware, the malicious software that is used to extort money from victims, is huge: in the first half of 2017, two major outbreaks, WannaCry and NotPetya, led to service outages from organisations around the world.A third of the UK’s National Health Service was hit by WannaCry, and the outbreak was estimated by risk modelling firm Cyence to have cost up to $4bn in lost revenues and mitigation expenses. Then, a month later, NotPetya (so-called because it is not Petya, another type of ransomware with which it was initially mistaken), brought down a significant chunk of the Ukrainian government, pharmaceutical company Merck, shipping firm Maersk, and the advertising agency WPP, as well as the radiation monitoring system at Chernobyl. Continue reading...

The place to talk about games and other things that matterIt’s Thursday. Continue reading...

Tim Cook has called autonomous systems ‘the mother of all AI projects’. So here are the things we’d most like done for us by robotsApple is working on a self-driving car, but according to chief executive Tim Cook, “autonomy is sort of the mother of all AI projects” and that “a vehicle is only one” use for autonomous systems, which got us thinking: what other things would we want automated?Cook made the comments during an earnings call last night, and said that Apple was “very focused on autonomous systems from a core technology point of view” and that the company does “have large project going, and [it is] making a big investment in this”. Continue reading...

With umpires not referees, no throw-ins and an arbitrary approach to offside, Dan Marshall’s game makes getting football wrong just rightDan Marshall insists there is no such thing as a football referee. “Umpires officiate over sport,” he argues. There’s a lot about football that annoys Marshall – he really doesn’t get it. And yet this experienced game designer has just spent a year-and-a-half of his life creating a football simulation. Why?Behold the Kickmen is in part a joke written in code, as well as a playful jibe at the predilection of football fans for taking the details of their adored sport too seriously. It deliberately – even obstinately – contradicts many of football’s rules, and yet plays loving homage to a long lost era of home computer sports sims. Despite Marshall’s joyful indifference to its subject matter, Kickmen is rather superb. Continue reading...

Company pledges further development to tackle rise of extremist and illicit content and hate speech, but says advanced machine learning is the answerGoogle has pledged to continue developing advanced programs using machine learning to combat the rise of extremist content, after it found that it was both faster and more accurate than humans in scrubbing illicit content from YouTube.

It’s assumed that people who grow up in the digital age have a natural affinity to tech. But new research puts a glitch in the code

The makers of indie cult favourite Gone Home have created a linear sci-fi title set in 2088 that feels satisfyingly lived in and free from stereotypesIt seems unavoidable to compare Tacoma to Gone Home, the previous game by developer Fullbright Productons. Along with Dear Esther, it is often credited with popularising a certain type of linear narrative-focused game, often pejoratively labelled ‘walking simulators’. As soon as Tacoma was announced, people starting calling it Gone Home in Space. Again, you play as a woman exploring an abandoned environment, and again you’re piecing together what happened to the people who used to be there.But here the focus has shifted from the recent past to the not-so-distant future. Where Gone Home is set in a spooky house in 90s Oregon and intentionally plays on horror tropes, Tacoma takes the traditional science-fiction setting of a space station – the titular Tacoma. The futuristic placement allows for changes both narrative and mechanical. Whereas the charm of Gone Home, for many, was the familiarity of the 90s setting, the plot of Tacoma in 2088 revolves around an imaginable near future of space travel and advanced AI. Continue reading...

A journalist and a data scientist secured data from three million users easily by creating a fake marketing company, and were able to de-anonymise many usersA judge’s porn preferences and the medication used by a German MP were among the personal data uncovered by two German researchers who acquired the “anonymous” browsing habits of more than three million German citizens.“What would you think,” asked Svea Eckert, “if somebody showed up at your door saying: ‘Hey, I have your complete browsing history – every day, every hour, every minute, every click you did on the web for the last month’? How would you think we got it: some shady hacker? No. It was much easier: you can just buy it.” Continue reading...

Amber Rudd will tell forum including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube that they share responsibility for tackling terrorismAmber Rudd will urge social media companies to do more to remove online terrorist content during a series of meetings with tech giants including Twitter and Facebook, after a sharp increase in the number of plots foiled in the UK. The home secretary will warn that extremists have exploited web platforms as way of spreading their “hateful messages” when she attends the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism in Silicon Valley.Theresa May had previously warned that the fight against Islamic State was shifting from the “battlefield to the internet” when she attended the G7 meeting in Sicily in the wake of the Manchester terror attack. World leaders called on internet service providers to “substantially increase” their efforts to crackdown on extremist content. Continue reading...

The US cable network has confirmed a ‘disturbing’ cyber-incident that reportedly led to the leak of future episodes and scripts onlineHBO is the focus of a “cyber-incident” reportedly involving hackers leaking forthcoming episodes and scripts of Game of Thrones.Related: At last! Game of Thrones gives us all the moments we've most been waiting for Continue reading...

Details discovered by developers in firmware for Apple’s HomePod speaker show in-development iPhone with IR face unlocking and bezel-less designThe next version of Apple’s iPhone will have infrared-based facial recognition unlocking – eliminating need for a passcode or fingerprint – and will have an almost all-screen design on the front, say developers digging into the pre-release of firmware distributed by Apple.

Nintendo’s cartoon avatars offer a gateway to role-play, Supergiant Games score a winner and PlayStation’s PlayLink refreshes the quiz experience3DS, Nintendo, cert: 7

With a real threat of antitrust and privacy regulation on the horizon, Google is on track to become this year’s top corporate lobbying spender in the USFigures released last week show that Google spent a record amount of almost $6m lobbying in Washington DC in the past three months, putting the Silicon Valley behemoth on track to be the top corporate lobbying spender in the US. Last year it ranked No 2, behind Comcast.Given the increased antitrust scrutiny that is coming from the Democrats’ new “Better Deal” policy platform, Donald Trump’s random tweets attacking Google’s fellow tech giant Amazon for its connection to the Washington Post, and his adviser Steve Bannon’s recent comments that Google and Facebook should be regulated as utilities, it is likely Google will only increase its lobbying expenditure in the next few months. Continue reading...

Scientists are racing to make replacement human organs with 3D printers. But while the technology’s possibilities are exciting, already there are fears we could be ‘playing God’Erik Gatenholm first saw a 3D bioprinter in early 2015. His father, Paul, a professor in chemistry and biopolymer technology at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, had bought one for his department. It cost somewhere in the region of $200,000. “My father was like, ‘This thing can print human organs,’” Gatenholm recalls, still awestruck. “I said, ‘Bullshit!’ Then it printed a little piece of cartilage. It wasn’t cartilage, but it was like, this could be cartilage. That was the moment when it was like, ‘This is frickin’ cool!’”Gatenholm, who had long owned a regular 3D printer, decided then that he wanted to do something in 3D bioprinting. His language might be a bit Bill & Ted – he grew up between Sweden and the US, where his father is a visiting professor – but his intent and ambitions are very serious. Gatenholm had started his first biotech company aged 18 and he realised that if this machine had the potential to print organs, like his father said, then it had the potential to radically change the world of medicine. Continue reading...

The Amazon boss became the world’s richest man on Thursday, but he’s still looking for ways to do good with his money. He could start by improving the lives of his workersOn Thursday, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos finally became the world’s richest man. But he still hasn’t decided how to spend his money. Long known for being less charitable than other prominent members of the top .001%, Bezos recently hinted that he is finally looking for opportunities to put more of his money toward social good.Bezos has long had a reputation for being unusually stingy, even for a multibillionaire. He is the only one of the world’s top five billionaires not to have signed Warren Buffett’s giving pledge, and his philanthropic efforts so far have paled next to those of other prominent corporate titans like Bill Gates and even Mark Zuckerberg. Instead, he has used his money to purchase the largest luxury home in Washington DC (converting the 27,000 sq ft Textile Museum into a single-family residence). Unlike his brother, Mark Bezos, a volunteer firefighter who runs an anti-poverty organization called Robin Hood, Jeff has confined himself to a few highly idiosyncratic forms of charity, such as handing out free bananas on the streets of Seattle. Continue reading...

Uber’s new chief brand officer joins with a stellar résumé, but it could prove difficult to fix the ride-sharing firm’s image without changing the culture firstBozoma Saint John stole the show at Apple’s annual developer conference in 2016, injecting some cool into a sea of dad-dancing during her presentation on the company’s music-streaming service.Last month she joined Uber as the company’s first chief brand officer, with a remit to “change the perception of the brand”. The company is in desperate need of an image overhaul after months of allegations of toxic work culture, sexual harassment and a series of high-profile executive departures, including that of the bad-boy chief executive Travis Kalanick. Continue reading...

From sunlight lamps to white noise devices, we roadtest popular gadgets to see if they can improve our sleepResearch has shown that sleep deprivation can impact our productivity at work, and even curtail our earning power. With so many of us failing to have a good night’s sleep, can technology help? In recent years, all sorts of gadgets and apps promising to enhance our sleep have exploded on to the market. But do they really work? From sunlight lamps to white noise machines, our writers put some of the most popular sleep gadgets to the test. Continue reading...

Navine G Khan-Dossos’s work explores the shared geometric and algorithmic language of Islamic art and the internetNavine Khan-Dossos is an artist whose work is often informed by technology and infrastructure. In her latest work, A Year Without Movement, she explores the symbology of London’s huge Crossrail project, painting directly on to the walls of the 18th Century House of St Barnabus, which rests directly above Crossrail tunnels.

This corporate clickbait exercise pretends to be a film for kids, but is actually trying to cross-sell apps to a tween audienceChildren should not be allowed to watch The Emoji Movie. Their impressionable brains simply aren’t set up to sift through the thick haze of corporate subterfuge clouding every scene of this sponsored-content post masquerading as a feature film. Adults know enough to snort derisively when, say, an anthropomorphic high-five drops a reference to popular smartphone game Just Dance Now (available for purchase in the App Store, kids!), but young children especially are more innocent and more vulnerable.The Emoji Movie is a force of insidious evil, a film that feels as if it was dashed off by an uninspired advertising executive. The best commercials have a way of making you forget you’re being pitched at, but director Tony Leondis leaves all the notes received from his brand partners in full view. The core conceit apes Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, where a spirited misfit hops between self-contained worlds styled in a single recognisable way. Instead of holidays, however, our hero here jumps from app to app, and the ulterior motive of pumping up download numbers drains every last drop of joy from Leondis’s efforts to enchant. Continue reading...

Recent updates to iOS and Android contain fixes for Broadpwn, found in chips used in iPhones, Samsung Galaxies and Google Nexus devicesA recently patched bug found in the chips used to provide wifi in iPhones, Samsung Galaxies and Google Nexus devices could be used to build malware which jumps unstoppably from device to device, according to Nitay Artenstein, the researcher who discovered the flaw.Affected users should update their phones’ operating systems immediately, to iOS 10.3.3 (released 20 July) or the July security update for Android, which contain fixes for the flaw. Continue reading...

How often are we guilty of ignoring the people we love to check if randoms we haven’t seen in years have posted new pictures of their children online?

Free Basics, built for developing markets, focuses on ‘western corporate content’ and violates net neutrality principles, researchers sayFree Basics, Facebook’s free, limited internet service for developing markets, is neither serving local needs nor achieving its objective of bringing people online for the first time.That’s according to research by citizen media and activist group Global Voices, published this week, which examined the Free Basics service in six different markets – Colombia, Ghana, Kenya, Mexico, Pakistan and Philippines – to see whether it was serving the intended audience. Continue reading...

Recently, hit-maker Max Martin referred to Lorde’s track Green Light as ‘incorrect song-writing’. His theory applies to game design – especially SonicIn April, the pop musician Lorde gave an interview to the New York Times where she talked about a meeting with famed song writer Max Martin. The genius who helped create Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” and Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space”, referred to Lorde’s song Green Light as “incorrect songwriting”. He saw its early key change, weird melodics and the lack of drums until the chorus kicks in, as improper. “It wasn’t an insult, just a statement of fact,” said Lorde. “It’s a strange piece of music.”Weirdly, as soon as I read the fascinating little snippet of song craft theory, I thought of Sonic the Hedgehog. The legendary platformer, in which a spiky creature sprints furiously through a series of multi-levelled environments is incorrect game design. It shouldn’t work. It’s wrong.

Valeria and other readers think people are using their Gmail account without permission. To lock them out, there are several security steps to take

Russian operator of long-standing bitcoin exchange BTC-e indicted for laundering money including high-profile hack of funds from Mt Gox exchangeThe Russian “internationally sought ‘mastermind’ of a crime organisation” accused of laundering more than $4bn in bitcoin, including funds obtained from the hack of failed bitcoin exchange Mt Gox, has been arrested in Greece.A US jury indicted Alexander Vinnik on Wednesday after his arrest in a small beachside village in northern Greece on Tuesday, following an investigation led by the US justice department along with several other federal agencies and task forces. Continue reading...