Industry analysts fear action against anti-competitive behaviour will punish consumers more than GoogleThe European commission has fined Google £3.8bn for anti-competitive behaviour regarding its Android mobile operating system. It’s looking to force the company to cede some control, but is it too little too late?The record fine is not to be dismissed, but for Google it is the EU’s suggested remedy – the prising loose of its tight grip around Android – that may have the largest impact. Continue reading...
Firm to launch appeal because ‘Android has created more choice for everyone, not less’Google has been hit with a landmark €4.34bn (£3.8bn) fine by the European Union over “serious illegal behaviour†to secure the dominance of its search engine on mobile phones.The European commission imposed the record penalty after finding that the US tech firm required smartphone manufacturers to pre-install Google’s search and browser apps on devices using its Android operating system, which is used on 80% of all phones. Manufacturers that refused Google would not be allowed to use its Google Play online store and streaming service. Continue reading...
When the open-world pirate adventure launched in March, every voyage seemed to end in a fight to the death. So the developers ripped up their plans – and summoned an old legless monster-hunter and a fleet of skeleton shipsSoon after the online pirate adventure Sea of Thieves was released in March, it had become a war zone. The game sees small groups of players board ships and setsail on the open ocean in search of treasure, but every time you spotted another boat, the result would be a fight to the death, cannons blazing and swords swirling. Games developer Rare had hoped that some encounters would be peaceful and cooperative, but the innate competitiveness of the online multiplayer arena seemed to have won out.Then the studio released the game’s first major update, The Hungering Deep, and for a few days everything changed. Player ships made their way to Shark Bait Cove to receive a time-limited challenge from a hoary old monster-hunter who had lost both legs to a gigantic sea creature, and now wanted players to work together to find and destroy it. So they did. Ships anchored, crews alighted, and – united by an interesting common goal – they didn’t brawl: they communicated, messed around, played their musical instruments and formulated plans. Then they went off together to track down and slaughter the terrifying Megalodon. It was the scenario Rare had dreamed of. Continue reading...
Tesla billionaire says his remarks about Briton Vernon Unsworth were unjustifiedThe tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has apologised to a Briton who helped to rescue a group of boys and their football coach from a cave in Thailand last week, after calling him a “pedo†on Twitter.Vernon Unsworth had said he was considering legal action and was “astonished and very angry†about the slur. Continue reading...
After announcing three huge games at E3 expo – Fallout 76, The Elder Scrolls VI and Starfield – Bethesda stalwarts Todd Howard and Pete Hines explain the importance of staying relevantIn the early 2000s, game publisher Bethesda was best known for its Elder Scrolls series of technologically ambitious fantasy games. In the last 15 years, however, it has expanded greatly, snapping up several legendary video game franchises as well as starting an original series of its own. The company now produces the Fallout post-apocalyptic role-playing games; the iconic, hellish shooter Doom; tongue-in-cheek Nazi-killing romp Wolfenstein; supernatural steampunk assassin sim Dishonoured; and Rage, a Mad Max-style romp around a devastated world.At its E3 press conference last month, after showing new Doom, Rage, Fallout and Wolfenstein titles, Bethesda teased the next entry in its Elder Scrolls series as well as a new sci-fi role-playing game called Starfield. For both, 100 hours is a conservative playtime estimate. Continue reading...
Tesla CEO called immature after attacking Vernon Unsworth, who rescued trapped childrenTesla investors have demanded an apology from CEO Elon Musk after he lashed out at a British cave diver who rescued children in Thailand.Musk’s posts on Twitter sparked backlash from shareholders and Silicon Valley analysts, who called his behavior immature and an impediment to the car company’s success. Continue reading...
Today’s the day to celebrate the little pictures that changed the way we talk onlineToday is the fifth World Emoji Day – a day to celebrate the tiny images on our phones that have transformed the way people chat online. Here are some things you need to know about those funny little pictures : Continue reading...
The co-founder of the most downloaded iOS app of 2017 welcomes competition from big techIt might not be marked in your diary, but 17 July is World Emoji Day. Why? Because, if you’re on an Apple or Google platform, that’s the date the calendar emoji shows.To mark the occasion, Apple replaced all of its executive headshots with cartoony “memojiâ€, a new feature coming in iOS 12 for iPhone X users, which lets them create custom avatars and ping them over to friends and family. Continue reading...
A researcher has analysed millions of public transactions to prove just how much the app reveals about our life and habitsAnyone can track a Venmo user’s purchase history and glean a detailed profile – including their drug deals, eating habits and arguments – because the payment app lacks default privacy protections.This was the finding of a Berlin-based researcher, Hang Do Thi Duc, who analysed the more than 200 million public Venmo transactions made in 2017. Her aim was to highlight the privacy risk from using a seemingly innocuous peer-to-peer app. Continue reading...
Bethesda’s Todd Howard explains why post-apocalypse simulator Fallout is becoming an online multiplayer game, and why he is just as scared of it as the playersWhile billionaires buy up property in New Zealand and pay technologists huge sums of money for advice on how to keep their staff in check after “the event†– that is, whatever it is that wipes out enough of the planet to justify living in bunkers – the rest of us are left to deal with the looming threat of catastrophe by playing video games. Bethesda Game Studios’ Fallout series offers a very American take on the post-apocalypse: humans, ghouls and mutants protect their respective corners of the wasteland with big guns and power armour, in a retro future with sci-fi technology and a 1950s aesthetic. The games present a ravaged, irradiated all-American picket-fence fantasy with classic cars, suburban homes and US landmarks devastated by nuclear bombs.Fallouts 3 and 4 are explorative role-playing games that cast the player as a survivor emerging from a vault after more than 100 years into a world they don’t recognise – though, after a few hours, they have significantly more weapons and resources than the average pitiable remnant of humanity. The games offer the player 100 or more hours exploring the wasteland and meeting its dogged inhabitants. But developer Bethesda surprised fans this year by announcing Fallout 76, an online multiplayer game set in the same universe. As one of the first survivors to emerge from the vaults, you’ll be up against other players as well as the usual mutants, monsters and hazardous environments. Continue reading...
The energy used in our digital consumption is set to have a bigger impact on global warming than the entire aviation industryIt was just another moment in this long, increasingly strange summer. I was on a train home from Paddington station, and the carriage’s air-conditioning was just about fighting off the heat outside. Most people seemed to be staring at their phones – in many cases, they were trying to stream a World Cup match, as the 4G signal came and went, and Great Western Railway’s onboard wifi proved to be maddeningly erratic. The trebly chatter of headphone leakage was constant. And thousands of miles and a few time zones away in Loudoun County, Virginia, one of the world’s largest concentrations of computing power was playing its part in keeping everything I saw ticking over, as data from around the world passed back and forth from its vast buildings.Most of us communicate with this small and wealthy corner of the US every day. Thanks to a combination of factors – its proximity to Washington DC, competitive electricity prices, and its low susceptibility to natural disasters – the county is the home of data centres used by about 3,000 tech companies: huge agglomerations of circuitry, cables and cooling systems that sit in corners of the world most of us rarely see, but that are now at the core of how we live. About 70% of the world’s online traffic is reckoned to pass through Loudoun County. Continue reading...
AI and robotics forecast to generate 7.2m jobs, more than will be lost due to automationArtificial intelligence is set to create more than 7m new UK jobs in healthcare, science and education by 2037, more than making up for the jobs lost in manufacturing and other sectors through automation, according to a report.A report from PricewaterhouseCoopers argued that AI would create slightly more jobs (7.2m) than it displaced (7m) by boosting economic growth. The firm estimated about 20% of jobs would be automated over the next 20 years and no sector would be unaffected. Continue reading...
C4 Dispatches documentary finds moderators left Britain First’s pages alone as ‘they generate a lot of revenue’Leading far-right activists have received special protection from Facebook, preventing their pages from being deleted even after a pattern of behaviour that would typically result in moderator action being taken.The process, called “shielded reviewâ€, was uncovered by Channel 4 Dispatches, after the documentary series sent an undercover reporter to work as a content moderator in a Dublin-based Facebook contractor, Cpl. Continue reading...
Accommodation service told it needs to be clearer on total cost including fees and chargesAirbnb has been found in breach of EU law and given until the end of the summer to ditch a range of practices, including that of belatedly applying additional fees to the prices it promotes online.The accommodation service has been accused by the European commission and national regulators of failing its customers and making the mistake of many global digital firms of “forgetting its responsibilitiesâ€. Continue reading...
Teardown exposes new silicone skirt around keys that could stop debris from blocking themDespite Apple stating that new 2018 MacBook Pro keyboards were not designed to alleviate key failures due to dust, a teardown has revealed a new barrier under the keys that could stop them getting clogged up.
Vernon Unsworth ‘astonished and very angry’ after Tesla owner makes baseless remarkA British cave diver who was instrumental in the rescue of 12 children trapped in a northern Thailand cave says he is considering legal action after the inventor Elon Musk called him a “pedo†on Twitter.
From books and films to TV shows and video games, the last-man-standing trope is massively popular. Is it a reflection of our dog-eat-dog free-market ideology?You are dropped on to a remote island with only your wits. You are going to have to scavenge weapons, ammunition, first-aid kits and the like, while 99 other people do the same. And then, at some point, the shooting will start, because this is a contest of elimination. As the old Highlander movies had it, there can be only one. The last person left alive wins the game. Welcome to the battle royale.Such is the basic idea behind the staggeringly popular “Battle Royale†version of the world-beating video game Fortnite, which has 40m players logging in every month, and grossed $223m in March of this year alone. Its success has inspired a slew of other battle-royale games, including a mode in the forthcoming instalment of the juggernaut Call of Duty franchise. A fight to the death among many contestants, until one victor emerges, is also the setup of the Hunger Games trilogy of books and films (from 2008), in which 24 young people from the poverty-stricken Districts are selected every year as “tributesâ€, to participate in an obsessively televised fight to the death, for the enjoyment of the decadent inhabitants of the Capitol. Continue reading...
In 1993, writer/director Steven de Souza battled a military coup, an ever-growing cast list and a self-destructing Jean-Claude Van Damme – and came out with a profitable pictureIt was the early 1990s and every teenager in the world knew about Street Fighter II. Originally released in the arcades and then on the SNES and Mega Drive consoles, the game featured a cast of weird, semi-magical combatants with names like Ryu, Chun-Li and Guile battling it out for victory in the World Fighting Championship. It was colourful, competitive and ridiculous. It sold 15 million copies.
Britain has required resources to be global hub for blockchain technology, analysts sayThe UK is well-placed to become a leader in blockchain technologies and the crypto economy, according to a new report.Britain has all the required resources, as well as industrial and governmental will, to become a global hub for the technology by 2022, according to analysis by the Big Innovation Centre, DAG Global and Deep Knowledge Analytics. Continue reading...
Ada Lovelace | Morris Minors | Halal school meals | ‘Gordon Bennett’ | Guardian masthead | Angry seabirdsBehind Theresa May and her cabinet in your photo (Cabinet crisis, 10 July) is a big painting of Countess Ada Lovelace, mathematical genius and probable inventor of the computer. Good to see Lovelace hung in the Cabinet Office and a sign that she is at last being given the recognition that she and other hitherto forgotten women of science deserve.
People thought they could make unkind comments with recourse before discovering users could see who was asking whatInstagram’s constant kamikaze launch of new features, in which they desperately try to hold on to their sizeable but fickle user-base by throwing new story modes and face filters at them, installed an interesting new question and answer function this week.The feature is similar to sites like Ask.fm and the now-defunct Formspring, where users could ask anonymous questions of each other, with the answers made public. Some people used these sites to secretly tell someone they had a crush on them, or ask something they’d be too frightened to say in public, but they also became hotbeds of high school bullying and were blamed for a spate of suicides. Continue reading...
We dismiss claims about mobiles being bad for our health – but is that because studies showing a link to cancer have been cast into doubt by the industry?On 28 March this year, the scientific peer review of a landmark United States government study concluded that there is “clear evidence†that radiation from mobile phones causes cancer, specifically, a heart tissue cancer in rats that is too rare to be explained as random occurrence.Eleven independent scientists spent three days at Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, discussing the study, which was done by the National Toxicology Program of the US Department of Health and Human Services and ranks among the largest conducted of the health effects of mobile phone radiation. NTP scientists had exposed thousands of rats and mice (whose biological similarities to humans make them useful indicators of human health risks) to doses of radiation equivalent to an average mobile user’s lifetime exposure. Continue reading...
Boom in unregulated short-term rentals is fuelled in part by unscrupulous businesses posing as private ownersGrowing numbers of professional holiday letting firms are hiding from regulation by using Airbnb and other sites, putting holidaymakers at risk, MPs will warn this week.While hotels and b&bs are subject to fire safety regulations and other checks, homeowners do not have to prove their properties are safe before letting them out via holiday rental sites such as Airbnb. Continue reading...
President Brad Smith warns authorities might track, investigate or arrest people based on flawed evidenceMicrosoft has called for facial recognition technology to be regulated by government, with for laws governing its acceptable uses.In a blog post on the company’s website on Friday, Microsoft president Brad Smith called for a congressional bipartisan “expert commission†to look into regulating the technology in the US. Continue reading...
The US deputy attorney general’s timing coincided with the president meeting the QueenIt was an extraordinary split-screen moment. On one side, president Donald Trump meeting the Queen at Windsor Castle and strolling past a ceremonial guard of red-uniformed beefeaters. On the other, the US deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, was simultaneously indicting 12 Russian spies for hacking and leaking the emails of senior Democrats during the 2016 presidential election campaign.These latest indictments by the special prosecutor, Robert Mueller, were carefully crafted. Its timing seems distinctly mischievous. And it heaps pressure on Trump ahead of his meeting on Monday in Helsinki with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, the man to whom the GRU intelligence agency and its generals ultimately answer. Continue reading...
The inventor, entrepreneur and much-ridiculed rich person thinks his wealth is used as a stick to beat him. People with less than $20bn disagree …Name: The billionaire’s curse.Age: Of the moment. Continue reading...
Some of most popular users appear to lose millions of followers after crackdownEgos have been bruised on Twitter after the social network initiated a change to how it tracks followers that saw some of the most popular users lose millions from their count.Following the change on Friday, which removes from the count accounts that have been suspended or locked by Twitter for abuse, some of the most popular users had hundreds of thousands, or millions, fewer followers than they had a day before. Continue reading...
Don’t outsource the job of managing your time and attention to Apple or GoogleHot on the heels of “smart emailâ€, grumbled about in this column recently, comes “digital wellnessâ€, the umbrella term for trying to fix our addiction to technology – and its grim effects on our health, productivity and politics – by means of that technology itself. One hugely popular app, Forest, displays a tree on your phone when you put it down, which then gradually begins to grow, only to die if you pick it back up. Android phones have Wind Down, which causes the screen to fade slowly to black and white as bedtime approaches; then, last month, Apple announced features designed to help you monitor, and limit, the time you spend staring open-mouthed into its range of glass rectangles. Using fire to fight fire in this fashion is an appealing thought. And given the endless data these firms collect about how we use their products, nobody could be better placed to help us use them more healthily, if they chose to.And yet, increasingly, digital wellness triggers in me a response reminiscent of those screaming authoritarians you encounter in bad American reality TV shows, about wayward teenagers sent to the Colorado wilderness to learn self-discipline through self-love. If you hate how much you use your phone, just stop using your phone so much! Relying on Big Tech to help you do so is a problem, for one thing, because of the obvious conflict of interest. (However concerned for your wellbeing they might seem, Apple and Google need you to need their products.) But it’s also infantilising, as the author Cal Newport explained on his blog. “I’m a grown man,†he wrote. “If I’m checking my phone every five minutes, or playing video games instead of paying attention to my kids, I don’t need an animation of a dying tree to nudge me toward better habits. I need someone I respect to knock the stupid thing out of my hand and say, ‘Get your act together.’ †Continue reading...
by Presented by Jordan Erica Webber and produced by D on (#3TTH6)
David E Sanger, national security correspondent for the New York Times, speaks about his new book: The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage and Fear in the Cyber AgeSubscribe and review: Acast, Apple, Spotify, SoundCloud, AudioBoom, Mixcloud. Join the discussion on Facebook, Twitter or email us at chipspodcast@theguardian.com.Throughout history, the weapon of choice for warring nations has evolved. Soon after the invention of the aeroplane at the start of the 20th century, countries involved in the various conflicts that battered the globe started to use them to drop bombs from the sky. Continue reading...
Updated machines have hands-free Siri, the latest processors, True Tone displays and a quieter keyboardApple has updated its MacBook Pro laptops with new processors, keyboards and display technology, and hands-free Siri.The update is slightly more than an expected specifications improvement for Apple’s popular “Pro†laptops. Both the 13-inch and 15in MacBook Pros with Touch Bar will now come equipped with the latest eighth-generation Intel Core i5, i7 and i9 processors, bringing them into line with competition from Windows PC manufacturers such as Huawei, Dell and others. Continue reading...
Lego The Incredibles is the latest video game to help introduce the brand to a new generation of children – one 3D block at a timeFor some parents, the idea of kids sitting down in front of a Lego-branded video game might be baffling: isn’t the point of Lego that it’s not on a screen? But the mega-success of Minecraft – based on building things out of blocks with different colours and properties – proves that Lego and video games have been influencing each other for at least a decade. There are now Minecraft-branded Lego sets: a real-life toy influencing a game that becomes a real-life toy again.Many official Lego games have come out of a cross-pollination. Since the mid-90s there have been more than 50 of them, the most recent being this week’s Lego The Incredibles, based on the Pixar film. Video games aren’t replacing traditional ways of playing with the toy, but they’re providing new twists on Lego’s ethos: the ability for children to be creative in their play. Continue reading...
Company lays off Pittsburgh drivers as it prepares to return to roads with a smaller fleetUber laid off 100 of its self-driving car backup drivers in Pittsburgh on Wednesday as it scales back its testing in the wake of its fatal crash in March.The ride-hailing firm made 55 new mission specialist positions available to replace them, according to a report by Quartz, with the intention of returning to on-the-road testing but with a reduced fleet of cars. Continue reading...
From picking up the phone every seven minutes to realising that Safari is my main time sink, Apple’s Screen Time tools revealed more than I expectedHow many times do you pick up and interact with your phone in a week? More than 500 times? How about the sheer number of notifications you get? It might number in the thousands.
Firm removes category, which affected 65,000 people, from ad tools, following safety fearsFacebook’s advertising tools algorithmically labelled 65,000 Russians as interested in treason, potentially putting them at risk from the repressive state, until the company removed the category, following inquiries from journalists.The labelling raises new concerns over data-driven profiling and targeting of users on the website, which has already faced criticism for the same tool algorithmically inferring information about users’ race, sexuality and political views despite data protection legislation requiring explicit consent to hold such information. Continue reading...
Locked accounts will be removed from follower numbers, as company targets spread of abuse and misinformationTwitter users will see a drop in their follower counts this week as the company clamps down on “problematic†accounts including those that have been hijacked to spread abuse, misinformation and propaganda.Starting on Wednesday, Twitter will remove all locked accounts from people’s follower numbers. Most people will see a change of “four followers or fewer†but accounts with larger followings will experience a “more significant dropâ€, the company said. Continue reading...
Information Commissioner’s Office inquiry into AggregateIQ is one of many started by ICO in response to data misuse claimsThe Information Commissioner’s Office is investigating the relationship between the Canadian data firm AggregateIQ, Vote Leave and a number of other leave campaigns, the body has said in a report published on Wednesday.Related: Labour bought data on 1m mothers and their children Continue reading...
Liane Hornsey resigned in an email to staff after just 18 months in the roleUber’s head of HR has resigned after only 18 months following an investigation into how she handled allegations of racial discrimination at the taxi firm.Liane Hornsey, the firm’s chief people officer, resigned in an email to staff on Tuesday, after an investigation into accusations from anonymous whistleblowers that she had systematically dismissed internal complaints of racial discrimination. Continue reading...
Firm fined £500,000 for lack of transparency and failing to protect users’ informationFacebook is to be fined £500,000, the maximum amount possible, for its part in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the information commissioner has announced.The fine is for two breaches of the Data Protection Act. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) concluded that Facebook failed to safeguard its users’ information and that it failed to be transparent about how that data was harvested by others. Continue reading...
Elon Musk says first facility outside the US will build 500,000 cars a yearTesla is to open a new electric car production plant in Shanghai, its first outside the US, chief executive Elon Musk said from the city on Tuesday.The new auto plant is slated to produce 500,000 cars a year, taking Tesla’s total global manufacturing capacity to 1m vehicles a year. Most automotive factories are tooled to produce 200,000 to 300,000 vehicles a year. Continue reading...
Exclusive: Self-flying vehicle firms got $2m last year, as US military envisions taxis as more Blade Runner than Back to the FutureTwo start-ups leading the race to build the first self-flying taxis are using money from the US military.Last year, Kitty Hawk and Joby Aviation received a total of nearly $2m from the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx), a Pentagon organization founded to help America’s military make faster use of emerging technologies. Neither company, nor the DIUx, disclosed the funding at the time. Continue reading...
New 10in Windows 10 tablet is half the cost of Surface Pro, aimed at Apple’s iPad and Google’s Chromebooks but running OfficeMicrosoft has unveiled its direct challenge to Apple’s iPad, the cheaper, smaller and lighter Surface Go 2-in-1 Windows 10 tablet.
