Waymo sued Uber in February, claiming that the ride-sharing company had orchestrated the ‘calculated theft’ of its technologyThe federal judge overseeing a trade secret dispute between Uber and the Google spin-off Waymo has recommended that federal prosecutors begin a criminal investigation into the alleged theft of Waymo’s self-driving car technology.Judge William Alsup’s referral of the case to the US attorney came amid a flurry of orders in the contentious lawsuit between two Silicon Valley giants. Alsup also denied Uber’s attempt to force the case into arbitration and partially granted Waymo’s request for a preliminary injunction against Uber. Continue reading...
Page for Women on Web, which connects doctors with women in places that restrict abortion access, deleted over ‘promotion or encouragement of drug use’Facebook has censored the page of an organization that helps women obtain abortion pills, citing its policy against the “promotion or encouragement of drug useâ€.Related: Civil rights groups: Facebook should protect, not censor, human rights issues Continue reading...
Executive order signed Thursday aims to improve the network security of US government agencies that have fallen victim to high-profile data breachesDonald Trump has signed an executive order to modernize and improve the nation’s computer networks and protect critical infrastructure from cyber-attacks.The order, signed Thursday, outlines plans to improve the network security of US government agencies, which have fallen victim to high-profile data breaches in recent years. Among the new requirements is that agency heads must be accountable for implementing risk management measures and updating their systems. Continue reading...
US ride-hailing app argued it is digital service, but ECJ advocate general says it should be regulated as transport companyUber could be forced to adhere to local licensing laws in European cities, after a top legal adviser to Europe’s highest court said the US ride-hailing app should be regulated as a transport company.The European court of justice’s advocate general Maciej Szpunar said Uber provides a transport service, rather than a digital service as it has argued. Continue reading...
Andrew uses Google Drive and Dropbox to sync and store his data. Does he still need to make backups?I use Google Drive and Dropbox to store all my data, and I assume that because my data is synced that it is safe. Is this the case or should I be backing it up as well? AndrewIt’s very handy to have files synchronised with online services such as Google Drive, Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, Apple iCloud, Flickr or whatever. You should be able to retrieve most or all of your photos if your smartphone or laptop breaks or is lost or stolen. However, you can never assume that your data is safe, whether you’re asking about cloud services, network servers, PCs, smartphones, USB hard drives, thumb drives, SD cards, or CD-Rom, DVD or Blu-ray discs. I might make an exception for stone tablets, but they are not practicable for storing photos and videos.
Snap Inc’s shares lose nearly a quarter of their value on news of $2.2bn loss and slowing growth in first quarter report, its first since its IPO in MarchSnapchat’s parent company Snap Inc lost nearly a quarter of its value on Wednesday when its newly listed shares went into a nosedive after the company reported a $2.2bn loss and slowing growth.Snap’s shares closed the day at $22.98 and fell close to 25% in after hours trading.
Sleek, intelligent and attractive, new Google voice-controlled device can play music, control other connected objects and give you a personalised briefing on your dayThe Google Home smart speaker has finally made it to the UK, bringing the company’s always-listening voice assistant into direct competition with the incumbent Amazon Echo and its own assistant, Alexa. But is Google’s best worth buying?Artificially intelligent voice assistants are the new battleground between the big US tech companies and while Google is no stranger with voice search and Google Now being available on Android smartphones for years, it was beaten into US and then UK households by Amazon and its hit Echo speaker. Continue reading...
US cyber officials gave France ‘heads up’ that Russia was hacking their systems and was working with the UK and Germany to help shield upcoming electionsThe US National Security Agency tipped off French officials that Russia was hacking the country’s computer systems during the presidential campaign and is working with the UK and Germany to help shield their upcoming elections from Moscow’s interference.The NSA director, Adm Mike Rogers, told a Senate committee on Tuesday that the agency tipped off its French counterparts before the hack of Emmanuel Macron’s campaign became public 36 hours before he won the second round of the presidential campaign. Continue reading...
Minicab and black-cab drivers join GMB union in urging Transport for London to take actionA group of minicab drivers, many employed by Uber, have joined black-cab drivers and unions in calling for improved workers’ rights to be a condition of Uber being able to renew its London licence later this month.United Private Hire Drivers, which says it has 1,200 members and organised a go-slow protest blocking roads in the capital in November last year, is calling on Transport for London to insist Uber and other minicab drivers are guaranteed basic employment rights, including the minimum wage and holiday pay, under the terms of its new five-year licence. Continue reading...
Tale of Brexiter who claimed his son bet £500 on far-right candidate to win French election amused many – but it was not trueYou may have seen screenshots of tweets from a disappointed Brexiter who was trying to convince Ladbrokes his 13-year-old son put a £500 bet on Marine Le Pen winning the French election.With the exception of Mussolini sitting on a whoopee cushion that one time, this may be the funniest thing ever involving a fascist. pic.twitter.com/tOKa3XDWZj Continue reading...
New voice-controlled speaker with a 7in screen hopes to keep Amazon ahead of Google and Microsoft in fight for home assistant supremacyAmazon is launching Echo Show, a new Alexa-powered smart speaker that includes a 7in touchscreen and video-calling features, as it enters the next stage in an ongoing battle with Google to become the most popular in-home voice assistant.Echo Show, which will cost $230 in the US and will ship on 28 June (no UK release date is set), will operate like Amazon’s existing Echo and Echo Dot wifi-connected smart speakers, putting the company’s artificially intelligent voice assistant Alexa into the home. But unlike Amazon’s previous voice-only smart speakers, it will also have a touchscreen to show extra information, play videos from YouTube and elsewhere, show results for questions and other visual information that’s currently displayed when Alexa is asked a question on the firm’s Fire TV smart devices. Continue reading...
Guardian News and Media says email addresses and usernames were exposed following human error at a third-party technology providerUsers of the dating website Guardian Soulmates have received explicit emails following a data breach.The email addresses and Soulmates usernames were exposed by a third-party service provider, according to Guardian News and Media (GNM), which has run the online dating service since 2004. Continue reading...
Late-night host told viewers to flood Federal Communications Commission website with comments, but agency says issues were from DDoS attacksThe Federal Communications Commission (FCC) claimed on Monday that its online comments system was attacked hours after comedian John Oliver called on viewers of his HBO series Last Week Tonight to file comments to urge the agency to protect open internet rules.
Bethesda’s reimagining of the popular shooting game combines the best of Bioshock, Dead Space and Dishonored but does little extra with themNearly everything good about Prey is pulled from a game released in the decade before it. Well, four other games to be exact. As Morgan Yu, you are thrust into the aftermath of a failed research project with only a wrench for protection, just like Jack in BioShock. The desolate, ruined space station setting brings back memories of Dead Space, and the experimental gameplay takes cues from Dishonored, which was also developed by Franco-US studio Arkane. Then there’s the fact that it re-imagines the original Prey, a well-received sci-fi shooter from 2006, which mixed extraterrestrial and Native American themes to compelling effect.The new Prey takes the highlights of these games, but merely allows them to coexist in a single habitat, never doing anything new with the foundational building blocks it has borrowed. The game takes place in the year 2032, in an alternate reality where President John F Kennedy was never assassinated but instead worked with the Soviet Union to launch the Talos 1 space station. Waking up in the space station as either the male or female version of Morgan Yu, the player embarks on a journey to rediscover the past of a protagonist we are given no information about at first. This is a decidedly mundane storyline, in what should have been a race against time to stop the alien threat aboard Talos 1 from making it’s way back to Earth. Continue reading...
A shadowy global operation involving big data, billionaire friends of Trump and the disparate forces of the Leave campaign influenced the result of the EU referendum. As Britain heads to the polls again, is our electoral process still fit for purpose?“The connectivity that is the heart of globalisation can be exploited by states with hostile intent to further their aims.[…] The risks at stake are profound and represent a fundamental threat to our sovereignty.â€
Is the desire to wreak global havoc online, as British teenager Adam Mudd did, really so alien?When he was 16 years old, Adam Mudd, a computer science student from Kings Langley, Hertfordshire, created a piece of software that could be used to take down even the largest, most fortified websites in the world. Mudd dubbed his tool Titanium Stresser, a name that captured both its strength and its capacity to cause niggling mischief. The software was a so-called distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) tool, a kind of digital weapon used to direct vast amounts of fake traffic to a particular website in order to cause its servers to fail and go offline – a bit like flicking every light switch in a skyscraper on at the same exact moment in order to trigger a power cut.Between December 2013 and March 2015, Mudd, who lived with his parents at the time, carried out 594 such attacks on more than 180 targets, crashing, for example, the network at his school, West Herts College. Mudd, who pleaded guilty to the charges at the Old Bailey last month, soon began selling his software online. It proved popular and profitable; more than 112,000 people bought packages from Mudd, who made £386,000 from his enterprise. Titanium Stresser soon became a notorious scourge of online institutions around the world, particularly video game companies. The fantasy game RuneScape, for example, suffered more than 25,000 attacks. Its owner company reportedly spent £6m trying to defend itself against the onslaught. Continue reading...
When Apple missed expectations last week, it was another hint the smartphone boom may be running out of steam. But the company has $250bn to spend …As the biggest company in the world, Apple operates to different rules from other businesses. That was apparent against last week when Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, partly blamed weaker-than-expected iPhone sales on leaks about future products.Cook said that there had been a “pause in purchases†due to “earlier and much more frequent reports about future iPhonesâ€. Continue reading...
It accelerates with a Jeevesian obedience – it’s not sure you ought to be going at that speed, but of course it will deliver it for youIt’s a hybrid and an SUV, and that makes it a big noise, worthy in some quarters (not these) of its own acronym – the Huv. I don’t see the point in principle of Kia’s Niro; anybody with any sense would hybrid innovate in this order: reduce kerb weight, then petrol dependence; boost efficiency any other way; make it look like the future. At Kia – and most other car companies – the new has been dutifully ushered in, but the old has not yet made way.Whatever this car is, old-guard values are: people will like it if it’s higher off the ground. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: respectability hitches itself to a high-riding style, and suddenly you get into an SUV-ish car and you feel more respectable. It’s not a pricey vehicle, and feels more expensive than it is. Kia generally sets itself high drive standards, so you can have a cabin whose materials feel a bit cheap, but that won’t tell in a flaky or jittery drive. The Niro’s interior is unusually chic, with a lovely wide display, and intuitive controls. It has those hybrid graphics whose visual language nobody understands – arrows going into flows and bar charts going up and down. It makes you feel good, though; green and modern. The regenerative braking is satisfying on this score, giving you all kinds of subtle thumbs-ups on the screen, with no backchat in the drive. Continue reading...
En Marche! movement says posting of huge email leak online ‘clearly amounts to democratic destabilisation as was seen in the US’The French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron has been targeted by a “massive and coordinated†hacking attack, according to his campaign team, hours before voters go to the polls.Macron, who opinion polls suggest should win Sunday’s vote by 60% to his rival Marine Le Pen’s 40%, was unable to respond to the alleged attack due to a ban on electioneering in the run-up to the opening of polling stations. Continue reading...
Buyers at London superyacht conference shown the ease with which hackers can take control of vessels – and even procure private photosWithin a few hours of mooring up and opening his laptop, Campbell Murray had taken complete control of a nearby multimillion-dollar superyacht.
Learning nothing for Boaty McBoatface, Tesla chief sought help naming a tunnelling machine and the public replied in kindElon Musk needs a name for his new digging machine – so he asked the internet. And we all know how much the internet likes naming things.The Tesla CEO has a new venture called the Boring Company, which, rather than being a company about uninteresting things, is a tunnelling company aiming to help Los Angeles traffic by digging tunnels underneath the city. Continue reading...
As politicians lose the protection of Westminster’s IT security, hackers have increased opportunity to access sensitive data, say security researchers
Based on an old mechanical coin-op game, this is a quaint, challenging puzzler that works especially well on the Nintendo SwitchNintendo Switch owners should immediately add TumbleSeed to their collection. This mid-priced roguelike is available for PC, Mac and PS4, but both its aesthetic and its core mechanic fit particularly well on the Switch, especially in portable mode.Your goal is to move a seed up a procedurally generated mountain, but the mountain is full of holes and you can only move the seed with a stiff green vine that stretches horizontally across the whole screen, using the left and right analogue sticks to tilt each side up and down. The notion of using a horizontal bar to move a round object up a holey course might sound original, but it’s directly inspired by a 1983 mechanical arcade game called Ice Cold Beer (and, in fact, Shrek n’ Roll used a similar mechanic in 2007). Developer Benedict Fritz made a derivative digital prototype, designer Greg Wohlwend saw it on Vine, and the two teamed up to turn that simple project into a game. Continue reading...
Digital campaign experts have created program to allow voters to expose how political messages arrive in Facebook feedsA tool exposing how voters are targeted with tailored propaganda on Facebook has been launched in response to what is likely to be the most extensive social media campaign in general election history.Experts in digital campaigning, including an adviser to Labour in 2015, have designed a program to allow voters to shine a light into what they describe as “a dark, unregulated corner of our political campaignsâ€. Continue reading...
Revenue is up but sales of the popular product dipped, suggesting customers may be waiting for 10th-anniversary editionApple reported a surprise fall in iPhone sales for the second quarter on Tuesday, suggesting that customers had delayed purchases in anticipation of the 1oth-anniversary edition launch of the company’s core product.The company shipped 50.8m iPhones in the quarter ended 1 April, down from 51.2m shipped in the second quarter of 2016. Analysts on average had estimated iPhone sales of 52.27m, according to the financial data and analytics firm FactSet. This means that the iPhone’s return to growth following the launch of the iPhone 7 only lasted through the so-called holiday quarter at the end of 2016. Continue reading...
Tech company is disputing analysis that female engineers have code rejected 35% more than male engineers and said such leaks make it harder to hire womenFacebook is disputing a former employee’s analysis that female engineers have their code rejected 35% more than male engineers, telling employees internally that leaking such information damages its “recruiting brand†and makes it harder for the company to hire women.The original analysis, first reported by the Wall Street Journal and independently confirmed by the Guardian, was conducted by a longtime Facebook software engineer last year. The engineer studied the company’s code review process, looking at the number of times code was rejected, commented upon, or updated; how long it took for code to be accepted; and demographic data about the coder, such as gender and length of employment. Continue reading...
New premium laptop is thinner, lighter, faster and has longer battery life than any Apple laptop, while Windows 10 S takes on Google’s ChromebookMicrosoft has launched Windows 10 S, a new locked-down version of its operating system aimed at the education market, and the new premium Surface Laptop in an attempt to challenge both Google’s popular sub-£300 Chromebooks and Apple’s premium MacBook Pro.The new Surface Laptop shares features with its Surface Pro and Surface Book siblings, including a 13.5in touchscreen and coloured, fabric-covered deck. The 14.5mm thick and 2.76lbs (1.25kg) laptop will also have a standard USB-A port, mini DisplayPort, a headphones socket and Microsoft’s proprietary power connector which allows it to dock with existing Surface accessories.But it does not come with the newer USB-C, which has become common for both smartphones and computers. Continue reading...
News that Facebook shared teens’ details with advertisers throws focus on firm’s ability to mine the data of its 2 billion users – and raises serious ethical questions
The Circle envisions an omnipotent social media platform whose quest for tech utopia turns sour. Sound familiar?Mark Zuckerberg ate two brats in Madison, Wisconsin this weekend, “basically inhal[ing]†the first before remembering that the entire reason he was in Madison eating brats in the first place was to memorialize the event with photographs. So he ordered another, and posed for the pic.That the Facebook founder and CEO’s latest trip through the heartland occurred on the weekend that the techno-dystopian thriller The Circle was released provided a helpful comparison between the menace of an endlessly rapacious social network as imagined in 2013, and the much more alarming reality of an endlessly rapacious social network in 2017. Continue reading...
Leaked documents said to describe how the social network shares psychological insights on young people with advertisersFacebook showed advertisers how it has the capacity to identify when teenagers feel “insecureâ€, “worthless†and “need a confidence boostâ€, according to a leaked documents based on research quietly conducted by the social network.The internal report produced by Facebook executives, and obtained by the Australian, states that the company can monitor posts and photos in real time to determine when young people feel “stressedâ€, “defeatedâ€, “overwhelmedâ€, “anxiousâ€, “nervousâ€, “stupidâ€, “sillyâ€, “useless†and a “failureâ€.
Driver Becky Graham says two men she picked up in San Diego sexually assaulted her, but filing reports with both Uber and the police have led nowhereThe Uber passenger said he wanted to give a tip. The driver, Becky Graham, had picked up two men at a bar in November of 2015 and was dropping them at a hotel in San Diego when she said one came up by her side – and grabbed her head with his hands.“He said, ‘My tip is the tip of my tongue,’†Graham, 42, recounted in a recent interview, describing how the intoxicated man shoved his tongue in her ear and began licking the side of her face. Behind her, she said, the other man grabbed her and tried pulling her into the back seat. Continue reading...
Clever minds should devote themselves to real problemsThe Science & Tech feature (“What if virtual reality is outside the headset?†New Review) was fascinating, if somewhat more science fiction than one might have preferred. It has to be bizarre in the extreme that, if the hypothesis is true, we, the computer simulants/avatars, have started to believe that we are just that and there is some sort of intelligent creator culture designing us in the “real world†.It would be far more meaningful if the big brains such as Ranyard, Bostrom and Musk et al, who are thinking up this stuff, devoted their undoubted cleverness to finding solutions for many of the ills of the human condition. Continue reading...
Moore family of Newton Falls, Democrats who voted for Trump, hosted the Facebook CEO who is visiting all 50 states amid speculation of a run for officeAn Ohio family said they learned just 20 minutes before dinner on Friday evening that a planned mystery guest would be the Facebook founder and billionaire Mark Zuckerberg.
After 100 days of Trump, you may need some memesWhen Trump won the presidency, someone on 4chan wrote: “We actually elected a meme as president.â€As terrifying as the idea of a meme having access to the nuclear codes is, the age of Trump has ushered in a new age of memes. Jokes on the internet often crop up in the most trying of times – and with a non-stop news cycle based around whatever the president tweets next, maybe memes are the only way to make sense of the turbulent times we live in. Continue reading...
In December the UK government was given reports by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele on possible collusion between Trump camp and the KremlinThe UK government was given details last December of allegedly extensive contacts between the Trump campaign and Moscow, according to court papers.
British inventor Richard Browning tests his personal flightsuit before a demonstration at the TED conference in Vancouver. The jet-powered suit, named Daedalus, allows Browning to fly for around 10 minutes
Our monthly guide to new board games features a mysterious archipelago kingdom off the coast of Japan, a magical gardening game and a chance to play pizzaWelcome to our monthly roundup of the best new board games. This time around we’re building shrines and palaces in ancient Japan, stuffing ourselves with delicious pizza and growing magical flowers in a surprisingly cut-throat gardening contest.
Gravity founder Richard Browning demonstrates his ‘Daedalus’ flight suit at TED conference in VancouverRichard Browning, the British inventor dubbed “Wiltshire’s Iron Manâ€, successfully demonstrated his personal flight suit on the shores of Vancouver harbour, with mini jet engines on his hands.Inspired by the Marvel comic superhero Iron Man, Browning flew in a circle and hovered a short distance from the ground using thrusters attached to his arms and back, captivating attendees at the Vancouver TED conference. Continue reading...
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