Technology | The Guardian

Information Commissioner’s Office investigates amid claims Cameron tried to protect taxi app from tougher regulationThe information watchdog is investigating whether Downing Street covered up correspondence relating to Uber, amid accusations that David Cameron tried to protect the taxi app from tougher regulation proposed by the London mayor’s office.The Information Commissioner’s Office said it was making inquiries about why Downing Street said it had no record of correspondence from a former No 10 adviser, Daniel Korski, with City Hall relating to Uber dated October 2015. Continue reading...

Program – dubbed ‘Hell’ – was reportedly run between 2014 and early 2016 in order to deprive cab competitor of driversA secret Uber program internally dubbed “Hell” allegedly spied on arch-rival Lyft to determine which drivers were working double shifts for both companies, letting the cab-hire app steer more work towards them in an attempt to deprive its competitor of workers.The report of the “Hell” program continues a string of uncomfortable claims for the company, still dealing with the fall-out of a string of sexual harassment allegations at the beginning of the year, and now operating with a brand new head of public policy and communications following the departure of its previous PR chief, Rachel Whetstone, on Tuesday. Continue reading...

The heartland best known for supplying nearly 25% of America’s food is experiencing a rise in homelessness that can be traced in part to the tech boom

From unskippable cut scenes to escort missions, here are the video game features we’d like to see banished to digital purgatoryVideo games are incredible. Just think: 40 years ago, we were batting a square white ball between two digital planks, and now we have whole gigantic universes to explore. But of course, we’re human beings and so still cannot be completely satisfied.While riding across the beautiful landscapes of Witcher 3, or guiding Nathan Drake through another improbable architectural marvel built by poorly educated 18th century pirates with little access to construction resources, sometimes there are things that don’t quite work. Sometimes, there are things that drive us crazy with frustration. Continue reading...

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

A new website, ‘Why everyone hates Uber’, argues that the company uses controversial tactics to bulldoze its way to domination – one city at a timeThe tides are turning for the poster child of the gig economy. Uber’s “disruptive” approach has up until now attracted investors like flies, leading to its valuation snowballing to $69bn. However, a string of allegations about sexual harassment, intellectual property theft and driver manipulation have called into question the aggressiveness of its expansion practices.

Guilty pleas by Chris Hutcheson and his sons Adam and Chris at Old Bailey, with sentencing set for JuneGordon Ramsay’s father-in-law and two of his brothers-in-law have admitted hacking computers at the celebrity chef’s restaurant and business empire during a time of bitter dispute in the family.Chris Hutcheson and two of his sons – Adam and Chris Jr – pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey on Tuesday to charges of conspiring to cause a computer to access programmes and data without authority. Continue reading...

Researchers were able to guess four-digit code with 70% accuracy at first attempt and 100% at fifth from how device heldHackers could steal mobile phone users’ pin numbers from the way their devices tilt as they type on them, researchers have claimed.Computer scientists at Newcastle University managed to guess a four-digit pin with 70% accuracy at the first attempt by using the gyroscopes built into all modern smartphones. With five attempts, the team was able to correctly guess the pin 100% of the time. Continue reading...

Martha Lane Fox’s views on bringing responsibility to technology are commendable (Technology is a marvel. Now let’s make it moral, 10 April). But I wonder whether politics and capitalism will obstruct socialist and moral decisions, as they have since Asimov first warned of the dangers and set out his three laws of robotics over half a century ago. We have the increasing use of drones in warfare; computers in trading stocks and shares; a trend towards a cashless society where a bank computer would store your e-funds, and commercial giants taking over the web. You might say we now have George Orwell’s 1984, where a large section of the population is spying on the rest.We certainly need the responsibilities that go with technological freedom. But Lane Fox gives no coherent view as to how to implement these aims, especially as this may have to be retrospective too. I would like nothing better than to see the UK excel in technological prowess, particularly with regard to the benefits to society at large. But this may involve increasing regulations – of the sort that the Brexiters want to put on the bonfire. While Lane Fox extols the virtues of opportunity, we actually need an action plan rather than a list of “could-do’s”. Unfortunately, planning has not been a strong point in the Brexit debate.

Elon Musk’s luxury car manufacturer, which has never made a profit, now worth $51.4bn after share prices soared unexpectedly starting last weekForget Motor City. Silicon Valley now owns the most valuable car company in the US. Tesla, the loss-making electric luxury vehicle maker, became the most valuable car company in the US. When US markets closed on Monday the manufacturer was worth $51.54bn to second banana General Motors’ $50.22bn after an upgrade by analysts at Piper Jaffray.“We have driven a Tesla for seven months in preparation for this report, and after conducting investor meetings with the company last week, we’re finally ready to take a stand,” the firm’s analysts, led by Alexander Potter, wrote in a note to investors published Monday morning. Piper Jaffray now rates Tesla stock at an equivalent to “buy”. Continue reading...

16-year-old Carter Wilkerson’s tweet is catching up on Ellen DeGeneres’s Oscars selfie but still has a way to go to get the 18m retweets needed for free foodAll Carter Wilkerson wanted was some free chicken nuggets – now he has one of the most retweeted tweets of all time.HELP ME PLEASE. A MAN NEEDS HIS NUGGS pic.twitter.com/4SrfHmEMo3 Continue reading...

If you want to be a better all-rounder, practising any of these acclaimed and multifaceted titles will give you a new edgeMost video-game fans tend to get into habits when we play. We favour certain genres, and then we play them in a certain way. Some people will buy any military shooter that comes out, then spend 20 hours running madly into gunfire, armed with a default assault rifle. Others will spend hours sneaking around an open-world adventure, planning every attack from the safety of distant bush. Most games are built so that they seamlessly accommodate those habitual behaviours.But a few either actively seek to wrench you out of your comfort zone, or are so varied and interesting that they make you want to try new things. Fewer still are so beautifully designed they provide you with truly transferable skills, allowing you to take the things you’ve learned to a variety of subsequent games. Continue reading...

Voice assistant transforms budget smart TV stick into smarthome powerhouse, but keeps simple controls, wide UK catchup TV and third-party app supportAmazon’s second generation Fire TV stick – which lets you stream video and apps on your TV – continues the same winning formula but adds new voice search, Alexa assistant and a snappier, more polished experience making it one of the best instant smart TV devices available.It looks like a USB flash drive, just with an HDMI connector on one end and a microUSB socket in the side. Set up is incredibly easy. Plug it directly into the back of your TV or receiver, or use the included HDMI extension cable if it doesn’t quite fit next to other devices, connect the included microUSB cable to the power adapter and plug it into the stick. Continue reading...

Years in the making, this charming platformer infused with the magic of childhood is finally being released in May. Will it be a hit with patient fans?It takes no less than 45 minutes of playing Tequila Works’ upcoming game for their creative director to tell a story from his childhood. It is no aimless reminiscence — Rime, as Raúl Rubio says, “is about childhood memories. So we put a little bit of ourselves in the game.”The Serrano-based studio’s upcoming release is a “single-player puzzle adventure game” and has already drawn comparisons to classics like LucasArts adventure games, The Legend of Zelda and projects from Team Ico. With its dreamy art style, puzzle platforming and sense of a small-protagonist-in-a-big-world, Rime has all the trappings of a game from my early childhood; it prompts memories of sitting squarely in front of a CRT TV.

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

Amazon Business will sell office supplies to small and large UK companies and is latest example of its expansion beyond retailAmazon is targeting the multibillion-pound UK business-to-business market by launching a new service that sells office supplies, industrial tools and laboratory kits to companies.The service, called Amazon Business, is the latest example of the US company’s dramatic expansion beyond its traditional consumer retail business. Amazon already offers cloud computing services to businesses through Amazon Web Services. Continue reading...

The company funded ‘It’s Lit: A guide to what teens think is cool’, which found that it was more cool than Vice, Nike and FacebookToday’s teenagers think Google and Google brands are cool, research funded by Google has found.Google published “It’s Lit: A guide to what teens think is cool”, a “magazine” compiling the results of its research into Generation Z, characterised as those aged from 13 to 17. Continue reading...

Report predicts rise in robotics will usher in ‘industrial revolution 4.0’ altering working practices and legal frameworksInnovation in artificial intelligence and robotics could force governments to legislate for quotas of human workers, upend traditional working practices and pose novel dilemmas for insuring driverless cars, according to a report by the International Bar Association.The survey, which suggests that a third of graduate level jobs around the world may eventually be replaced by machines or software, warns that legal frameworks regulating employment and safety are becoming rapidly outdated. Continue reading...

New details emerge in Google lawsuit that alleges former employee Anthony Levandowski plotted to steal trade secrets and take them to Uber

My friend Rosemary’s car breakdown turned into a nightmare because she had forgotten her glasses and couldn’t read her card number. Do they expect us to stay inside and go quietly mad?Rosemary was driving home last night, when, bad luck, her car broke down. Catastrophe. Because she does not belong to a breakdown service. Luckily, she found a car insurance bill in the glove compartment and rang them on her prehistoric/newly chic mobile. They instructed her to ring someone else, who demanded £80 before they would move an inch to save her. “I need the long number on the front of your card,” said the breakdown lady, but Rosemary couldn’t read her card in the gloom without her glasses.Luckily, an elderly chap with his little dog stopped to assist her. “Just a moment,” said Rosemary, “a gentleman has offered to help me. He’ll read it.” Continue reading...

The site has ditched its default avatar after it became synonymous with trolls, replacing it with a shadowy head and shoulders. Surely we can do better than that ...Regular Twitter users are likely to have experienced the anticipatory glow of a notification, signalling the start of an illuminating conversation in which conflicting points of view are debated calmly and politely, or maybe the birth of a new friendship, or a clever bon mot that makes you chuckle quietly to yourself for the rest of the day. Or perhaps an apoplectic egg is screaming at you. “CLEARLY you don’t AGREE with DEMOCRACY!!1!” it says, then says it again, in a slightly different way, for the next 12 hours.But the Twitter egg has finally cracked. Over the past few years, the default profile picture – which was introduced in 2010 as a way to illustrate that a new user was about to “hatch” – has become visual shorthand for trolls, bots and fury. It has now been replaced by a shadowy head and shoulders, which is supposed to feel more temporary. At least you’ll be able to imagine that it’s a human being behind terrifying conspiracy theories about fluoride, rather than your breakfast. Continue reading...

CBO Philipp Schindler downplays issue with extremist material, as spokesman says flagged videos received small fraction of brands’ total YouTube impressionsGoogle’s chief business officer, Philipp Schindler, has claimed that the company’s problem with adverts running on extremist material on YouTube affects “very, very, very small numbers”, but that the company has implemented a wide range of features to try and solve it anyway.“It has always been a small problem”, Schindler told Recode’s Peter Kafka, “and over the last few weeks, someone has decided to put a bit more of a spotlight on the problem.” Continue reading...

The luxury car maker is quick to divulge data to suggest its technology was not responsible for crashes but refuses to let drivers themselves see the data logsLuxury car maker Tesla is throwing some drivers’ privacy under the wheels following accidents in order to defend its hi-tech self-driving car technology.And while the company has handed data to media following crashes, it won’t provide its customers’ data logs to the drivers themselves, according to interviews conducted by the Guardian. Continue reading...

Older apps are going to stop working once Apple turns off support for 32-bit applications, but a menu item in iOS tells users how affected they areApple has released a new tool to help highlight apps that will be rendered obsolete by the next major update to its iOS operating system. The tool shipped to iPhone and iPad users with the latest update, to iOS 10.3.Any app that hasn’t been updated since 2015 is likely to be rendered obsolete when iOS 11 ships in about six months’ time, a consequence of a decision by Apple to remove support for apps which don’t run natively in 64-bit mode. Continue reading...

Hotly anticipated titles demoed at EGX’s indie event range from doomed space-station mystery Tacoma to fish-care sim MegaquariumThis year’s Rezzed festival, which returned to Tobacco Dock at the end of last week, felt unconquerable in the best way. Unlike other game expos with their huge show floors dominated by a few key titles, Rezzed featured dozens of rooms and more than 200 smaller games, from Kickstarter millionaire Yooka-Laylee to the idiosyncratic co-operative physical-digital hybrid Vaccination.With so many games on show it would have been impossible to play them all, but from those I did, here are 12 of my favourites for you to look out for (and a bonus that you can play right now).

Ghost in the Shell is part of a cult subgenre whose lineage stretches back to the 1920s – and whose visions have never seemed so prescientCode streams across a computer screen; hackers bark at each other in techno-jargon and hammer at keyboards; the real world seamlessly shifts into the virtual, and back again. This is the sort of scene that is instantly recognisable as a cyberpunk film, the subgenre of sci-fi that meshes together technology and counterculture – of which Ghost in the Shell, the live-action remake of the Japanese anime classic, is the latest high-profile example.It is little surprise that cyberpunk has proved irresistible for many film-makers over the decades since the term was coined, by the author Bruce Bethke, in the early 1980s. With its visions of postapocalyptic futures, advanced technologies and virtual realms, they get to pack their films with visual effects to sweeten the (red) pill, while wrestling with weighty existential themes. Continue reading...

The social network says it is introducing a new default profile photo – a gender neutral silhouette – in a bid to ‘prompt more self-expression’Twitter is abandoning its default “egg” avatar in a bid to shake its association with trolls.For the past seven years, new Twitter accounts have been assigned a profile picture of an egg – a playful reference to the site’s bird logo. Continue reading...

Ciaron O’Reilly one of 10 people named by whistleblower as having had emails illegally monitored by Scotland YardAn Australian anti-war activist was among the victims of alleged illegal email hacking by UK police, according to whistleblower claims being investigated by the British police watchdog.Ciaron O’Reilly, a Ploughshares and Catholic Worker organiser, is one of 10 people named in a letter to the Green party peer Jenny Jones by an anonymous whistleblower who alleged the emails of those individuals were among those illegally monitored by a secretive Scotland Yard unit working with Indian police and hackers. Continue reading...

Complaints to police include claims of burglary ‘scoping’, mid-air near-misses and the smuggling of contraband into prisons

One commentator recently described the iPad as ‘done’, but he didn’t mean that it was finishedMy eye was caught by a headline in the Register, an invaluable online source of tech news and opinion. “Clearance sale shows Apple’s iPad is over. It’s done,” it read. This was a quotation from a piece by Volker Weber on the latest product announcements from Apple. “iPad is the biggest news,” he wrote, “and it says: the iPad is done. Apple is just refining the components, but there isn’t much they can do these days to make yet another super-duper Earth-shattering innovation here.”Since I was reading this on my iPad Pro, which is probably the most useful electronic device I have ever owned, it came as a bit of a shock. But in fact Volker was really just articulating a truth about digital hardware, which is that the evolution of all such products (and a good deal else besides) follows a sigmoid curve. Continue reading...

Citroën’s new supermini may look a bit peculiar, but its fun gadgets and French charm will soon win you overPrice: £10,795

I am something of a lapsed devotee of mountain biking. The Boardman’s job was to tempt me backHalfway down the rutted, slippery track on the deserted North Downs, pellets of mud bouncing off the tyres and into my face, I remembered why mountain biking in a British winter can be such fun: it’s the grown-up equivalent of leaping into puddles. Getting grubby is half the point.I am something of a lapsed devotee. My own ageing mountain bike has lain idle in a garage for several years as I took to the more straightforward pleasures of road cycling. The Boardman’s job was to tempt me back. Continue reading...

Report on near-misses also reveals pilots were shocked to see another drone hovering as high as 3,000 metresA drone flew within 20 metres of a plane on the approach to Heathrow, while another shocked pilots by appearing at 3,000 metres (10,000ft), a monthly update on near-misses has revealed.Commercial jet pilots reported two “category A” incidents, the most serious class of near-miss, involving unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), known as drones. Continue reading...

Ahead of its April 28 release, Alex Hern gets an advance look at Samsung’s hottest new smartphoneIn pictures, the new Samsung Galaxy S8 doesn’t look that different from the Galaxy S7 Edge that preceded it. The chin and forehead of the device have been radically foreshortened, yes, but the really eye-catching aspect of the device remains its wraparound screen, which curves over the left and right edges to provide a completely bezel-free effect.

The app that helps the homeless find government housing and asylum seekers avoid legal delays with their claims

The sprawling Silicon Valley campus has cafes, bike repair services, even dry cleaning. But across the road a homeless community epitomizes the wealth gapIn a patch of scrubland across the road from the Facebook headquarters in Silicon Valley, a woman named Celma Aguilar recently walked along some overgrown train tracks. She stopped where a path forked into some vegetation, just a few hundred yards from the tourists taking photos by an enormous image of a “Like” icon at the campus entrance.“Welcome to the mansion,” Aguilar said, gesturing to a rudimentary shelter of tarps hidden in the undergrowth. Continue reading...

‘Palmer will be dearly missed,’ company says in statement announcing departure of controversial VR pioneerVirtual reality pioneer Palmer Luckey has left Facebook, six months after it was revealed that he had secretly funded a pro-Trump campaign group dedicated to turning the tide of the US election through “meme magic” and “shitposting”.Luckey, who founded virtual reality company Oculus in 2012 when he was 19, has been a Facebook employee since Mark Zuckerberg’s social network bought his firm in 2014 for $2bn. In a statement, Facebook said “Palmer will be dearly missed. Palmer’s legacy extends far beyond Oculus. His inventive spirit helped kickstart the modern VR revolution and helped build an industry. We’re thankful for everything he did for Oculus and VR, and we wish him all the best.” Continue reading...

Meetings between UK government and Facebook et al are more ritual than battle as they avoid subjects both parties disagree on, such as tax and user privacyAs the government and technology companies butt heads yet again over extremist material on social media, both sides may be giving a silent prayer of thanks that the battleground is one on which they are both quite comfortable.Related: Top tech firms avoid encryption issue in government talks Continue reading...

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

Isabella Lane started Smarter Applications with husband Christian two and a half years ago. Their first product was a wifi kettle, which they built for £100Subscribe and review on iTunes, Soundcloud & Mixcloud and join the discussion on Facebook and Twitter.From its humble beginnings with just a £100 wifi kettle prototype, Smarter Applications has come a long way. The kettles are now stocked in the likes of Harrods and John Lewis and the company has also launched a wifi coffee machine and fridge cam in Europe, with plans to export to the US in 2017. Continue reading...

Executives commit to removing extremist material but do not address Amber Rudd’s concerns after Westminster attack

Exhibition explores the history of the selfie and our changing relationship with this most everyday of art formsIt is a show that includes painstakingly executed self-portraits by Rembrandt, Van Gogh, and Frida Kahlo; and rather more spontaneous selfie-portraits by Kim Kardashian, Tom Cruise and a macaque monkey from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.The images are being displayed together in London’s Saatchi gallery and while curators are not assigning them any aesthetic equivalence, they do argue that there is a direct line from one to the other. Continue reading...

Brian likes to have everything on his own Windows PC and doesn’t want to share anything with others. Can he avoid using the cloud?How long will I be able to continue avoiding the cloud? I mean things like Microsoft accounts (my computers all use Windows 10), Facebook, Google and so on. I like everything to be stored on my computer and I don’t need to “share” stuff with others, but I have a feeling that Microsoft and others want everyone to sign up. BJGIt’s almost impossible to avoid the cloud now, because of the movement of commercial and government services to the web, the multiplication of computing devices and the rapid growth in smartphones. These different trends reinforce one another. Continue reading...

Samsung’s European Mobile Division vice president Jean-daniel Ayme discusses the new features of the Samsung Galaxy S8 smartphone on Wednesday. This the company’s first major smartphone release since the recall of its fire-prone Note 7. This model boasts a larger display with no home button and also a voice assistant to rival Siri and Google. The Note 7 recall cost Samsung at least $5.3 bn (£4.27bn)

Latest in long-running high-school franchise boasts characters as deeply written and well observed as a multi-season TV seriesLike Scooby-Doo, the Famous Five and Harry Potter, the Persona series of Japanese role-playing games fits into a long tradition of teen fiction in which young people band together to expose the schemes and exploitations of corrupt adults. The abuses that Persona 5’s teenagers must confront are, however, unusually and uncompromisingly grave.The game opens with a typical example: one evening your character, a 17-year-old high-school student, confronts an inebriated, groping politician who is trying to force a woman into a taxi. The consequences of intervening with such a powerful local figure prove life changing. You are summarily expelled from school and banished to Tokyo, to live with a crotchety café owner. There you are enrolled in an academy whose halls are filled with whispering students who, having read the headlines, judge you as a toxic delinquent. Continue reading...

President to approve law killing rules meant to prevent internet service providers from selling consumers’ web browsing and app storage histories to advertisersPresident Donald Trump was expected to sign legislation on Wednesday allowing internet service providers to sell the browsing habits of their customers.The move, which critics charge will “fundamentally undermine” consumer privacy, overturns an Obama-era rule issued last October that was designed to give consumers greater control over how internet service providers (ISPs) could share their information. Continue reading...

Brand hopes to win back consumer trust after Note 7 debacle with new phone that’s almost completely bezel-free and includes its new virtual assistantSamsung has unveiled the Galaxy S8 and S8+, the company’s first flagship phones since the Note 7 debacle in 2016 threatened to sink its brand in the eyes of the public.The new phones’ most eye-catching feature is an almost completely bezel-free display, running the full width of the device, even curving around the edge (akin to the screen on Samsung’s Galaxy S7 Edge), and shrinking the chin and forehead of the front screen to tiny slivers. Samsung’s calls this the “infinity display”, and even the home button has been removed, replaced with a pressure-sensitive section at the bottom of the screen. Continue reading...

Move continues trend of exclusivity for premium members, after Switch sells out from major retailers as it records successful startIf you want a Nintendo Switch, you might have to start thinking about the prospect of Amazon Prime membership: the online retailer has started selling its admittedly limited stock of the new Nintendo console exclusively to members of its Prime subscription service.It’s the continuation of a growing trend from Amazon, which was first spotted making certain games and films members-only in early 2016. Then, Amazon’s explanation for the exclusivity, which affected games like Grand Theft Auto V and films including Birdman, was that “one of the many benefits of Amazon Prime is access to exclusive selection on a number of great products”. Those products were available from third-party sellers on Amazon. Continue reading...

Official opening of Amazon Go store delayed after camera and sensor technology found wanting in beta testingAmazon’s cashier-less grocery shop, dubbed Amazon Go by the company, is going through some teething problems, according to the Wall Street Journal.Specifically, the new shop can’t handle tracking more than about 20 people at the same time, and freaks out “if an item has been moved from its specific spot on the shelf” the paper writes, citing un-named sources. Continue reading...

The ride-hailing rival has seized on Uber’s scandals to position itself as the ethical choice, but can it back up the claims?“We’re woke. Our community is woke, and the US population is woke.”