Microsoft co-founder who was a billionaire philanthropist and sports team ownerCo-founding Microsoft ultimately made Paul Allen, who has died of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma aged 65, one of the world’s richest men. But while he could buy anything he wanted – yachts, famous paintings, sports clubs – he lived with the threat of recurring cancer. His illness – initially diagnosed as Hodgkin’s lymphoma – was first treated with radiation therapy and a bone marrow transplant in 1982, and caused him to leave Microsoft the following year. He said: “It makes you that much more focused on realising your dreams and hopes, because all of our times on this planet are limited.”Allen will mainly be remembered for his association with Bill Gates, which started at Lakeside, a private school in Seattle. In 1968 the school’s mothers’ association funded the purchase of a Teletype ASR-33 text terminal to a remote General Electric GE-635 mainframe, and a small group of boys became fanatical users. As Allen wrote in his memoir Idea Man (2011): “I had discovered my calling. I was a programmer.” Continue reading...

Middlesex University's resident robot, Pepper, has become the first robot to appear before a parliamentary select committee. After introducing herself, Pepper answered questions from MPs on Caresses, the artificial intelligence project that is developing culturally aware robots to provide support for elderly people

Feature-packed Android phone is first widely available with scanner embedded in screen alongside 3D face unlockingHuawei’s new Mate 20 Pro has a massive screen, three cameras on the back and a fingerprint scanner embedded in the display.The new top-end phone from the Chinese firm aims to secure its place at the top of the market alongside Samsung, having recently beaten Apple to become the second-largest smartphone manufacturer in August. Continue reading...

Update of popular e-reader introduces thinner and lighter design, Bluetooth compatibility and audiobook supportAmazon has launched a new version of its popular Kindle Paperwhite e-reader, which is thinner, lighter and now finally water resistant.The new 2018 Kindle Paperwhite is the second Amazon e-ink device to be given the water resistance treatment following the launch of the Rolls Royce of e-readers, the £230 Oasis, in 2017. Continue reading...

It looks, feels and works great, is cheaper than the previous version and lasts longer on a charge, but it still doesn’t have USB-C or Thunderbolt 3The new Surface Pro 6 is the latest version of Microsoft’s category-defining detachable tablet PC, but do a price cut, faster chips and a new paint job make it worth buying?From the outside it looks like very little has changed, and that’s because the Surface Pro 6 is practically identical to its predecessor. Continue reading...

Repeatedly reproduced and reimagined since the 80s, the tropes of cyberpunk must evolve or dieThe future has looked the same for almost four decades. A skyline of densely packed skyscrapers, corporate logos lighting the night sky, proclaiming ownership over the city below. At street level, a haze of neon shines down from the cluster of signs above and shimmers at your feet in the rain that runs down the filthy streets. Here, the have-nots, excluded from the safe, luxurious enclaves enjoyed by the super-rich, are preyed upon by hustlers dealing in illegal tech and street gangs composed of green-haired, leather-clad technopunks, decked out with cyborg enhancements and high on synthetic drugs.You know this city. You’ve seen it a million times since it was first constructed in the 80s by the pioneers of cyberpunk, most notably William Gibson in Neuromancer and Ridley Scott in Blade Runner. Hollywood recently returned to it with Blade Runner 2049. In the first episode of Netflix’s Altered Carbon, an adaptation of Richard K. Morgan’s 2002 novel, protagonist Takeshi Kovacs gazes upon it from his window; fire flickers from the top of a tall tower, just as it did in opening scene of Blade Runner, prompting a double-take where you wonder whether the window is actually a screen replaying Scott’s movie. Continue reading...

The Microsoft co-founder engaged in years-long missions for sunken ships and nurtured the Seahawks to three Super Bowls

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has died aged 65 from complications with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. He was first treated for the disease in 2009 but it returned this year. A childhood friend of Bill Gates, the pair started Microsoft in 1975. Allen was also an avid sports fan and went on to buy several sports teams. He was ranked among the world's wealthiest individuals, with an estimated net worth of more than $20bn, and dedicated much of his later life to philanthropic work.

Allen, diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, hailed as ‘a great technology pioneer’ and innovator of the personal computer

London remains European headquarters of cryptocurrency exchange, but a move to Ireland is plan BCryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is opening new offices in Dublin as part of the company’s contingency planning for a hard Brexit.The company, one of the largest members of the blockchain ecosystem, says that London will remain its European headquarters, but that Dublin’s EU membership, as well as its English-speaking workforce and diverse technology talent pool, made it the “clear choice” for a second European outpost. Continue reading...

Social network hopes launch of transparency tools will restore trust after series of scandalsFacebook will no longer allow British political groups to publish “dark ads” on its network, in an attempt to restore public trust after the Cambridge Analytica scandal and questions over its influence on the Brexit referendum.Related: Facebook 'dark ads' can swing political opinions, research shows Continue reading...

The US embassy in Australia spammed recipients with a picture of a cat this week – but that’s nothing compared with other recent message failsThe US embassy in Canberra, Australia, sent out an email invitation this week to untold numbers of recipients, in Latin, with a picture of a cat holding biscuits in a turquoise Cookie Monster onesie. It was, of course, an error, though not one I can see any reasonable person being truly irked by. It also wasn’t the first of its kind. In 2014, the retailer Fab followed up its own subscriber-destined email of nothing but a cat with another, featuring two cats, explaining that it had been “purrrly a mistake”, and attaching an apologetic 10% discount code.Messaging systems the world over seem to be having a bad year of it, spanning the full spectrum of societal anxiety, from A-level results to intercontinental ballistic missiles. Continue reading...

Appeal for £25m investment to rescue British team’s plan to break land speed recordPlans to build a British jet-powered car to speed at more than 1,000mph through the desert have hit quicksand, after the company behind the Bloodhound project entered administration.The dream of an ultra-fast car to break the land speed record led to the creation of Bloodhound Programme Ltd in 2007, with the idea of also engaging schools and students in engineering. Continue reading...

The 6,600km undersea cable will open in 2020 and is one of seven Google is building over the next two yearsTelecoms firm Orange has teamed up with Google to work on a private undersea cable connecting the Atlantic coasts of France and the United States.Measuring 6,600km in length, the undersea cable will be named Dunant after Henry Dunant, the first Nobel peace prize winner and founder of the Red Cross. When it comes online in 2020, it will provide Orange alone with a capacity of “more than 30 terabits per second, per [fibre] pair” – enough, the company says, “to transfer a 1GB movie file in 30 microseconds”. Neither Orange nor Google released information about the total capacity of the cable, nor how they would allocate it between them. Continue reading...

Cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin result in the concentration of wealth, not greater equalityWith the value of bitcoin having fallen by about 70% since its peak late last year, the mother of all bubbles has now gone bust. More generally, cryptocurrencies have entered a not-so-cryptic apocalypse. The value of leading coins such as Ether, EOS, Litecoin and XRP have all fallen by over 80%, thousands of other digital currencies have plummeted by 90%-99%, and the rest have been exposed as outright frauds. No one should be surprised by this: four out of five initial coin offerings (ICOs) were scams to begin with.Faced with the public spectacle of a market bloodbath, boosters have fled to the last refuge of the crypto scoundrel: a defence of “blockchain,” the distributed-ledger software underpinning all cryptocurrencies. Blockchain has been heralded as a potential panacea for everything from poverty and famine to cancer. In fact, it is the most overhyped – and least useful – technology in human history. Continue reading...

Natural History Museum, London

‘The boy beat the Koreans with a few lines of computer code that no one else in the world could have thought of’Under the cover of darkness, a secret unit of the SAS, called the secret unit of the SAS and known only to two men in the entire United Kingdom, one of whom was Frederick Forsyth, raided a house in Luton, Bedfordshire, England. What they found there amazed even them.Three months earlier experts at Fort Meade, home to America’s top secret National Security Agency in Maryland, America, had noticed that their top secret computer defences had been breached. The discovery sent shockwaves through the American high command, who had believed their networks were unhackable. After the finest computer minds in America were put on the problem, the breach was located to an IP address in Luton, Bedfordshire, England. It was April 2019. Continue reading...

Automation will bring growth, but history tells us labour’s share of national income will declineThe World Bank has a reassuring message for those fearful of being made obsolete by automation. The robot age is nothing to be worried about. Just like all previous waves of technological advance, the fourth industrial revolution will create rather than destroy jobs, so fears of mass unemployment are largely unfounded.Nor should we be concerned that the arrival of the new machine age is going to widen the gap between rich and poor, because the idea that the world is becoming a less equal place is more perception than reality. Continue reading...

In our image-propelled social media era, some photographers fear for the future of the art, while others are galvanised by it. As technology increasingly shapes how we see and share the world, how is photography changing in response?In 2012, I wrote an essay about the shifting nature of photography in an era of unprecedented image overload. Back then, Facebook users alone were uploading 300m photographs a day, while the number of images posted on Flickr and Instagram had exceeded the 11bn mark. I quoted the American artist and writer Chris Wiley, whose 2011 article, “Depth of focus”, in Frieze magazine, had expressed the anxiety of many practitioners about “a world thoroughly mediatised by and glutted with the photographic image and its digital doppelganger”.Wiley’s conclusion was pessimistic: “As a result, the possibility of making a photograph that can stake a claim to originality or affect has been radically called into question. Ironically, the moment of greatest photographic plentitude has pushed photography to the point of exhaustion.” Continue reading...

Damian Collins says Scotland Yard must explain failure to look into potential crimes committed by three pro-Brexit groupsA senior Conservative MP has demanded that Scotland Yard urgently explain why it has not opened a criminal investigation into three pro-Brexit campaigns that the Electoral Commission found had broken the law.Damian Collins, chair of the Commons committee investigating the illegal use of data during the EU referendum, told the Observer he was concerned that the Metropolitan police had as yet failed to launch a formal investigation into potential crimes committed by pro-Leave groups before the 2016 referendum. Continue reading...

We can no longer count on our governments to protect us from a tide of disinformation. Our security rests in the hands of open source intelligence, as pioneered by BellingcatWhen the story of 2018 is told, historians may be hard pressed to say which was weirdest: that a deadly nerve agent was deployed in a quiet cathedral town on the edge of Salisbury Plain, at the heart of our military establishment. Or that the Russian suspects were identified not by British intelligence but a group described last week as “armchair investigators”.Because we now know not just the identities of the two men who travelled to Salisbury with a military-grade chemical weapon but also the arm of the Russian army that deployed them – thanks to Bellingcat, a citizen investigation site founded by Eliot Higgins, a former blogger who started it from a laptop on his sofa in breaks from caring for his daughter. Continue reading...

Benefits of automation must be passed on to staff, says thinktankA four-day working week could become commonplace in Britain as automation and artificial intelligence increase workplace efficiency, a new study has concluded.If the benefits of rolling out such new technologies were passed on to staff, then they would be able to generate their current weekly economic output in just four days. The research, by the cross-party Social Market Foundation (SMF) thinktank, found that even relatively modest gains from using robots and AI had the potential to give British workers Scandinavian levels of leisure time. Continue reading...

Company didn’t disclose leak for months to avoid a public relations headache and potential regulatory enforcementThis March, as Facebook was coming under global scrutiny over the harvesting of personal data for Cambridge Analytica, Google discovered a skeleton in its own closet: a bug in the API for Google+ had been allowing third-party app developers to access the data not just of users who had granted permission, but of their friends.If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s almost exactly the scenario that got Mark Zuckerberg dragged in front of the US Congress. The parallel was not lost on Google, and the company chose not to disclose the data leak, the Wall Street Journal revealed Monday, in order to avoid the public relations headache and potential regulatory enforcement. Continue reading...

‘How much have you given’ Marc Benioff asked Jack Dorsey as the two sparred over proposed tax to assist those on the streetsThe CEOs of two of the world’s most prominent tech companies got into an online spat on Friday over who was doing the most to address homelessness.The Salesforce CEO, Marc Benioff, and Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, were tweeting at each other about a proposed tax on high-earning San Francisco businesses. It would redirect millions of dollars to help thousands of people who live on the streets, including outside the headquarters of both companies. Continue reading...

Hackers were able to access name, birthdate and other data in nearly half of the 30 million accounts that were affectedFacebook has revealed 30m accounts were affected in a data breach last month. The company said hackers were able to access personal information for nearly half of those accounts.That information included name, relationship status, religion, birthdate, workplaces, search activity, and recent location check-ins. The company had initially said 50m accounts were affected. Continue reading...

Decades after women were pushed out of programming, Amazon’s AI recruiting technology carried on the industry’s legacy of biasA recent report revealed Amazon’s AI recruiting technology developed a bias against women because it was trained predominantly on men’s résumés. Although Amazon shut the project down, this kind of mechanized sexism is common and growing – and the problem isn’t limited to AI mishaps.Facebook allows the targeting of job ads by gender, resulting in discrimination in online job advertisements for traditionally male-dominated jobs from construction to policing. The practice has long been illegal in traditional print media – but Facebook’s targeting tools encourage it. Not only can this affect whether women and non-binary people can see ads; it also affects male job-seekers who are older and therefore viewed as less desirable by many employers. Facebook has come under fire for illegal advertising practices in the past: notably, it scrapped thousands of microtargeting categories after a 2016 ProPublica report showed how it allowed racial discrimination in housing ads. Continue reading...

Billionaire tweets ‘visual approximation’ of bottle as company applies to use the name for tequila branded after the electric carsElon Musk is hitting the bottle – well, probably. Tesla has trademarked “Teslaquila”, a tequila branded after his electric car company.The product started as an April Fool’s joke when Musk claimed Tesla was going bankrupt and that he had been found “passed out against a Tesla Model 3, surrounded by ‘Teslaquilla’ bottles, the tracks of dried tears still visible on his cheeks”. Continue reading...

We saw the UK and France face off to defend their undefeated records in the Overwatch World Cup, competitive gaming’s answer to the global football tournamentIt’s a Friday morning in late September and 2,000 fans are packed into the underground arena of La Grande Arche de la Défense, ready for the Paris stage of the Overwatch World Cup. It’s a fairly mixed-gender crowd, predominantly young adults, mostly French, many wearing game-themed clothing. Overwatch is one of the world’s most popular competitive video games: matches are fast-paced, chaotic battles between two teams of six players. Using colourful characters with outlandish powers, they take turns to attack and defend objectives. Fights can be over in seconds or turn into minutes-long scraps. The sense of unpredictability makes for very exciting viewing.The Overwatch league works like football’s Premier League, with teams signing players across nationalities, but the Overwatch World Cup evokes a sense of home pride among viewers. Each of the Paris leg’s 15 matches had their share of intense moments as national teams fought for the two remaining places at the finals, which will take place later this month in Anaheim, California. The previous group stages in Incheon, South Korea; Burbank, USA; and Bangkok, Thailand. Continue reading...

Is the brave new digital world affecting our politics? Could it render democracy obsolete? Jamie Bartlett joins Jordan Erica Webber to discussThere are plenty of ways to consider the power the Silicon Valley giants have: their financial power, the compulsive hold they have on consumers, the sheer volume of users and the data that comes along with them. One area in which this power has come under particular scrutiny recently is in the influence big tech has on elections worldwide.To discuss the growth in tribalism and explain the age of “Tinder politics”, Jordan Erica Webber speaks to author and tech blogger Jamie Bartlett, whose book The People Vs Tech explores the “bitter conflict” between technology and democracy. They address how the internet has turbo-charged human behaviour to expect instant gratification in areas where it does not belong and how, as a result, citizens, as much as governments, need to change the way they interact with data. Continue reading...

Reddit’s r/WatchPeopleDie sees 425,000 subscribers share clips of horrific and tragic deaths. Since when did so many of us like watching death?Warning: sensitive contentIs it disingenuous that the name of the Reddit community r/WatchPeopleDie uses the word die?Put it this way: the people in the videos and GIFs shared on Watch People Die do not merely die. Neither do they pass away (too polite), nor go to a better place (too peaceful). They are beheaded, incinerated, exploded, crushed, electrocuted, drowned, mangled, stoned and disemboweled. And their deaths, horrific and tragic as they are, can be watched by anyone with internet access, over and over again. Continue reading...

Martin is interested in using a DWeb alternative to Google Docs, but worries about the energy use associated with blockchainI recently read a piece about decentralisation. As I am looking for an alternative to Google, Microsoft and the other big names, Graphite stood out. However, it uses blockchain, and one thing that I do not find encouraging is the amount of energy it consumes.So my question is: from an energy point of view, is there much difference between cloud and blockchain?The main aim of the decentralised web (DWeb) is to remove the power of centralised “gatekeepers” such as Facebook and Google, who hoover up the world’s data and monetise it by selling advertising. It reminds me of the original concept of the web, where every computer would be both a client and a server, sharing information on a more or less equal basis. Continue reading...

The US military is creating a more automated form of warfare – one that will greatly increase its capacity to wage war everywhere forever.Last month marked the 17th anniversary of 9/11. With it came a new milestone: we’ve been in Afghanistan for so long that someone born after the attacks is now old enough to go fight there. They can also serve in the six other places where we’re officially at war, not to mention the 133 countries where special operations forces have conducted missions in just the first half of 2018.The wars of 9/11 continue, with no end in sight. Now, the Pentagon is investing heavily in technologies that will intensify them. By embracing the latest tools that the tech industry has to offer, the US military is creating a more automated form of warfare – one that will greatly increase its capacity to wage war everywhere forever. Continue reading...

There are plenty of theories to explain falling alcohol use among millennials. But maybe we’re missing the pointYou don’t need to spend much time adrift in the 21st-century mediascape to conclude that there is something seriously wrong with young people today. Millennials are more narcissistic, anxious, annoying, entitled, communist and fond of avocados than any generation ever; millennials are killing everything from mayonnaise to diamonds to the car industry; millennials are making everyone else feel bad; millennials – get this! – don’t even drink any more.The figures just released by the Health Survey for England lend weight to what is becoming a familiar trope. In 2015, one in three 16- to 24-year-olds were completely teetotal, compared with one in five in 2005. Lifetime abstainers rose from 9% to 17%; meanwhile rates of harmful drinking have declined. In 2015, 28% admitted to drinking above the recommended limits; 10 years previously, it was 43%. The 10,000 participants reported that complete abstention was becoming “mainstream”. Continue reading...

Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PC; Ubisoft

Great screen, robust design, brilliant keyboard and Thunderbolt 3 make the third-generation ThinkPad X1 Tablet a potent combinationLenovo’s third-generation ThinkPad X1 Tablet aims to be a no-compromise Windows 10 detachable that gives users what Microsoft’s Surface won’t: USB-C and Thunderbolt 3.The form factor is familiar. The actual computer is squeezed into an 8.9mm thick tablet with a kickstand out the back and a magnetically attached keyboard that sits up on an angle for better typing. Continue reading...

Specialists had been building computer programs since 2014 to review résumés in an effort to automate the search processAmazon’s machine-learning specialists uncovered a big problem: their new recruiting engine did not like women.The team had been building computer programs since 2014 to review job applicants’ résumés, with the aim of mechanizing the search for top talent, five people familiar with the effort told Reuters. Continue reading...

Son of media tycoon Rupert Murdoch is the lead candidate to replace the embattled Tesla founderJames Murdoch is the favourite to take over the chairmanship of volatile electric-carmaker Tesla from its embattled founder, Elon Musk, according to reports.The son of newspaper, satellite TV and movie studio tycoon Rupert Murdoch is now the lead candidate for the Tesla chair, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday, citing two people briefed on the discussions. Continue reading...

Rockstar Games’ upcoming wild west adventure is a step forward for virtual world realism – and a reminder that cowboys, too, had to face up to modernityLeft to my own devices with Red Dead Redemption 2 for a few hours, I was expecting to see sweeping open plains interrupted by mesas, dusty frontier towns with swing-door saloons and wary inhabitants, and a gang of crusty outlaws sharing stories around a campfire then riding through the woods on their way to a shootout. This astounding virtual wild west models itself on the classic Hollywood image of that time, the same fantasy as depicted in Westworld. What I wasn’t expecting in my brief preview was a city, Saint Denis, modelled on turn-of-the-century New Orleans.Riding into town as an outlaw frontiersman, I suddenly felt like a tragic anachronism. A tram rolled past, and I tied up my horse to board the next one Continue reading...

Most of us have an unmanageable amount of data on our devices. But a few easy tweaks could bring it all back under controlYou have Marie Kondoed your wardrobe, recycled your old newspapers and taken unwanted books to the charity shop. It may feel as if you have succeeded in decluttering your life, but then you turn on your phone or open up your laptop and find a whole load more to tidy up.Sometimes, it gets out of control. Just this week, the snappily named European Problematic Use of the Internet Research Network warned of the dangers of “cyberhoarding”, an inability to delete information gathered online. Researchers weren’t sure whether this was a new condition or an extension of a more common offline affliction. Continue reading...

Peter Dutton says the tech giants have a responsibility to help combat organised crimeThe Morrison government has criticised Silicon Valley’s biggest tech companies for opposing its planned encryption laws, saying the internet giants have a responsibility to help combat organised crime.Peter Dutton, the home affairs minister, says Australia’s law enforcement agencies have been prevented from infiltrating paedophile networks and other organised crime groups because the messages they send over encrypted electronic messaging services, such as Wickr and Whatsapp, cannot be intercepted by authorities. Continue reading...

A host of online accounts are dedicated to posting an identical image every day – from pictures of Bake Off stars to Steve Buscemi. But why?If scrolling through your Instagram feed first thing has become an unavoidable morning ritual, then a posting trend that has recently garnered attention might just make sense to you. Teenagers – and they are by all accounts predominantly teenagers – have for the past couple of years taken to running daily “same picture” accounts, which do exactly as the title suggests. They post one pic and one pic only, the same one, every single day. That picture can be anything from a stock photo of a gherkin to a cut-out of Danny DeVito’s face. There are same accounts featuring Steve Harvey, a shirtless Gibby (from the sitcom iCarly), a Supreme brick, a person falling, a red Croc, a pink Croc, Pink Guy, the Fortnite pump, a dog called Kevinand a lone chicken nugget. And while certain left-field takes on the format see that one pic slightly altered with each new post – see @samepicofgodfieri’s daily Warholesque reworking of a smiling Guy Fieri shot – most are straight up repeats: visual mantras for the oversaturated.Elena, who declines to give her last name but is based in Germany, started @samepictureofstevebuscemi in March 2016 for no reason other than, as she puts it, to “promote the man’s beauty”. Why does this mode of tribute appeal more than any other? “I’m a pretty lazy person,” she says. “It would be more interesting to look at different pictures of him every day, but looking at the same pic every day is quite funny.” And that equivocation between mesmeric boredom and elusive amusement seems key to the whole phenomenon. Continue reading...

Public asked not to use app during drivers’ strike, which follows last week’s McStrike in push to unionise gig economyUber customers have been urged not to cross a “digital picket line” as British drivers with the app-based service staged their first coordinated national strike.Organisers of the 24-hour strike, which started at lunchtime on Tuesday – the latest part of a push to unionise the so-called gig economy – said many drivers logged off the app and stayed at home, while hundreds staged rallies outside the Uber offices in London, Birmingham and Nottingham. Continue reading...

Android-maker bets on dual-camera selfies and AI features such as Super Res Zoom and Top Shot to battle Samsung and AppleGoogle’s new Pixel 3 smartphones attempt to push the computational photography envelope, challenging Apple’s new iPhone XS and Samsung’s Galaxy S9.As with last year’s Pixel 2, Google is further flexing its artificial-intelligence muscle, with more and more local AI-driven features across every facet of the device, from the camera and smart Gmail replies to battery life and device control. Continue reading...

After a Florida woman attempted to offer up a photo of her son as an emblem of the #HimToo movement, something unusual happened: the meme had a happy endingWhen you are the subject of a typical Twitter meme, the best policy is to just ignore it and wait for it to end. That seemed to be the case on Monday night, as thousands of Twitter users piled joke after joke on top of a post by a Florida woman who had attempted to offer up a photo of her unwitting son as an emblem of the burgeoning #HimToo movement. These things usually end in bitter fighting and brutal name-calling.But then something weird happened: the meme had a delightful ending. Continue reading...

In Schodack, a local group filed a lawsuit to stop a proposed fulfillment center, even as town officials support the projectCities across the US are currently fighting tooth and claw to be the home of Amazon’s second headquarters. But not everywhere is so happy when Amazon comes to town.Schodack, New York, a town of about 13,000 people just south of the state capital of Albany, is currently facing the possible construction of a 1m-sq-ft Amazon fulfillment center. Continue reading...

Company reveals details about voice-controlled device, which was delayed after data breachFacebook wants to be invited into your living room. The company has revealed details about its Amazon Echo competitor, a voice-controlled, webcam-equipped smart screen named Portal.Arriving in the US in November, Facebook Portal is a $199 (£152) 10-inch screen, with two speakers and a high-quality webcam attached, which the company hopes users will put in their living rooms and kitchens and use to launch video chats with friends and loved ones. Continue reading...

Margaret Hodge MP says it is ‘outrageous’ how little tax the company pays in BritainFacebook paid £15.8m in tax in the UK last year despite collecting a record £1.3bn in British sales.The social media giant’s accounts show that while Facebook increased its UK income by more than 50% in 2017, its pre-tax profits increased by only 6% to £62.7m. The Silicon Valley-based company’s UK taxable profits were reduced by a £444m charge for unexplained “administrative expenses”. Continue reading...

Tech company faced claims it gathered personal data from more than 4m iPhone usersThe high court has blocked a mass lawsuit against Google that aimed to collect as much as £3bn in compensation for the company’s historical practice of collecting data on iPhone users whose privacy settings should have prevented surveillance.Mr Justice Warby, sitting in London, announced his decision on Monday. Continue reading...

Whether it’s fighting terrifying beasts, wreaking anarchy in a parallel universe or singing karaoke, these titles challenge both your intellect and reflexesA majestic adventure across Norse mythology in the company of buttoned-up old god Kratos and his young son Atreus. Alongside jaw-dropping encounters and fights with the creatures, places and gods of the Norse canon, it unexpectedly has a lot to say about family dynamics and grief. The current high bar for action games.

Rise of populism | Identity politics | Clapping | Dating | Paying the ferrymanJohn Green (Letters, 4 October) asks us to imagine if Hitler and Goebbels had had television and social media at their disposal. Someone already has. Timur Vermes’s brilliant satirical novel Look Who’s Back is predicated on the idea that Hitler wakes up in 2011 and is taken in hand by PR and marketing people to become a huge success. The message doesn’t matter as long as they can ride the wave of the success. For many Hungarians, and others, it must be eerily prescient.