Playstation goes fully immersive, offering up sharks, superheroes – and some queasiness, plus a VR Batman, Loading Human and the Lego A-TeamRelated: PlayStation VR: nine of the best launch gamesLast week saw the arrival of the world’s least bank-breaking virtual reality headset, PlayStation VR (£349). To use it you’ll need a PlayStation 4 (£299) and a PS Eye Camera (£44.99), which – while not exactly cheap – is less exorbitant than buying a PC-based set-up. The technology itself uses a camera at the front of the room to track head movements, presenting its alternative view of the world via a very small screen mounted in front of each eye. Despite PSVR’s slightly fuzzier visuals, the feeling of being somewhere you’re not is extraordinarily convincing, if sometimes disorientating. Continue reading...
Company has sold 45.5m iPhones in current quarter, down 5% from last year as analysts worry that the world has reached ‘peak Apple’Apple has reported its first decline in annual sales and profit in 15 years. The Silicon Valley company, which had bounced back from near bankruptcy in 1997 to become the world’s most valuable company today, told investors on Tuesday night that it had sold $215.6bn (£177bn) worth of iPhones, Watches, Mac computers and other products in the year to 24 September.
Easy-to-hijack ‘smart’ devices just crashed some of the world’s biggest online platforms. Experts say it’s a wake-up call to improve security – and quickly
A combination of how broadcasts handle quiet noises and the way audio is compressed for mobile devices is causing a stink among viewers, programme-makers and – most importantly – Gareth MaloneThe Head of Sound at the BBC must be increasingly tempted to stick a finger in both ears. With one lug already ringing from the rumbling complaints that TV actors (in shows such as Jamaica Inn and Happy Valley) speak too quietly or indistinctly to be heard by older viewers, now comes an earful in the other from those moaning that the soundtracks on TV shows these days are too loud.Top TV choirmaster Gareth Malone has said this week that The X Factor leads the shows that offend his musical sensibilities. It is not just that they pump some notes to 11 on the amp, but that 7 and 8 become noisier, too. Malone blames a process called “audio signal compressionâ€, in which the sonic range is reduced to raise the volume of the quieter sounds in a track closer to the loudest. Continue reading...
Supermarket tests contactless system that could do away with those crumpled till receipts lining your pocketPockets and handbags stuffed with streams of crumpled receipts could become a thing of the past if an experiment by Tesco takes off.Britain’s biggest retailer is testing a contactless system that sends proof of purchase to the customer’s smartphone. Tesco is staging the three-month trial at its store in Harlow, Essex. Continue reading...
EA Dice’s decision to travel back in time has paid dividends with a thrilling and visually impressive military experienceBattlefield 1 is a tectonic shift for the military shooter genre. By jumping back to world war one, developer EA Dice has not only discovered fresh game design ideas through the antiquated weaponry, it has also ensured that its game stands apart from other shooters, which have dominated disc-trays for the past 10 years.There are other unexpected benefits too. Battlefield 1 discovers compelling and poignant stories, effective ways to tell them, and a campaign structure that should inspire any shooter after it. The newly invigorated multiplayer warfare adds the final flourish. Continue reading...
With 8in screen, stereo speakers, 16GB of storage and enough performance to handle games, Fire HD 8 is a good budget tablet that won’t infuriateAmazon’s latest tablet is an 8in media consumption machine that aims to replicate the success of the £50 Fire, but with a larger, better screen. How good can a £90 tablet be?
Game turns out to be not quite as seamless as human football – with the ability to remain upright proving the participants’ main challengeAn American team of robots have defeated their Australian rivals in a game of football to win the RoboCup Challenge after technical problems plagued the Australian side.
American and Australian robots battle it out in the final football match of the RoboCup Challenge in Beijing. The University of Texas at Austin’s Austin Villa eventually defeated the University of New South Wales’ Runswift 7-3. The game turns out to be not quite as seamless as human football – with remaining upright, kicking the ball and tackling all proving somewhat problematic. Continue reading...
Teams use the tablet under a $400m deal – but the publicity hasn’t all been positive as Bill Belichick and others vent their frustrationsMicrosoft might pay the NFL $400m to use its tablets, but that doesn’t stop players, coaches and announcers from complaining about the devices.Last week, the New England Patriots’ head coach, Bill Belichick, went on a five-and-a-half minute rant about the Surface Pro, saying he was going back to using pen and paper. Continue reading...
Camera can now blur backgrounds to focus attention on people or objects in the foreground, replicating an effect typically limited to larger SLR camerasThe iPhone 7 Plus’s camera can now blur backgrounds to focus attention on people or other objects in the foreground, replicating an effect typically limited to larger cameras known as SLRs.The “portrait mode†feature was announced in September but was not available until the company released its iOS 10.1 software update Monday. Continue reading...
An enormous DDoS attack was a network of hacked Internet of Things devices, many of which were made by XiongmaiChinese electronics firm Xiongmai is initiating a product recall after the enormous hacking attack that took down much of the internet on the eastcoast of the US and also affected Europe on Friday.The root of the attack, which took the form of a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS), was a network of hacked “Internet of Things†devices, such as webcams and digital recorders, many of which were made by Xiongmai. Continue reading...
Post-EU referendum slide in value of pound to blame for Microsoft’s UK price rises, expected to be up to 13% for software and 22% for cloud-based servicesMicrosoft will increase the prices it charges British businesses by up to 22% to account for the slump in the value of the pound following the EU referendum result, the software company has announced.The new prices, which will come into effect in January 2017, see the amounts expected for locally hosted software increase by 13%, while “most†cloud-hosted services will increase by the full 22%, the company said in a statement. While once programs like Microsoft’s Office suite were installed locally on PCs, in recent years the cloud-based subscription version, Office 365, has become increasingly popular. Continue reading...
Move comes after repeated criticism of Facebook from news organisations, charities and others over important posts being taken down without noticeFacebook is finally going to consider whether or not posts are important to the public interest before removing them from the site for violating community guidelines, the social network has announced.Two vice presidents from the company, Joel Kaplan and Justin Osofsky, co-signed the announcement, which acknowledged that “observing global standards for our community is complexâ€. Continue reading...
Software program can weigh up legal evidence and moral questions of right and wrong to predict the outcome of trialsArtificial intelligence software that can find patterns in highly complex decisions is being used to predict our taste in films, TV shows and music with ever-increasing accuracy. And now, after a breakthrough study by a group of British scientists, it could be used to predict the outcome of trials.Software that is able to weigh up legal evidence and moral questions of right and wrong has been devised by computer scientists at University College London, and used to accurately predict the result in hundreds of real life cases. Continue reading...
We can conjure objects into our real world as if by magic with AR, and with Pikachu and friends earning up to $10m per day, R&D departments are searching for the next phaseWhile Dorothy, blue-skirted and pigtailed, clutching a wicker basket and a bewildered dog under her arm, surveys the weird flowers and pygmy huts around her, she’s sure of just one thing: she’s not in Kansas any more. L Frank Baum’s character was, it turns out, born slightly too early. In 1901, a year after the publication of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Baum wrote The Master Key, a novel credited with the invention of augmented reality via a pair of imagined spectacles that could map information on to whatever or whomever its wearer looked at. Had Dorothy owned a pair, she might have learned that she’d been whisked to Oz, or that her new friend the Tin Man was in need of a heart, even, perhaps, that a wicked witch is burned not by fire, but by water.It was almost a century until Baum’s invention gained a label. In a 1992 research paper, the Boeing engineers Thomas Caudell and David Mizell described a pair of “see-thru virtual reality gogglesâ€, a device that would enhance the vision of factory workers with the complicated task of piecing together a jumbo jet’s nests of internal wiring with dynamically changing labels and information. Caudell termed this principle of annotating the seen world “augmented realityâ€, thereby formalising for Silicon Valley’s mavens and investors a fresh and unplundered field of technological opportunity, one that would eventually lead to the invention of Google Glass, a pair of information-spewing spectacles built, unbelievably, to Baum’s century-old definition. Continue reading...
The internet of things has created a global network of devices vulnerable to cyber criminals – and no one wants to fix itM y eye was caught by a Kickstarter campaign for a gizmo called a SWON, described as “a connected conservation device for your showerâ€. You unscrew the shower head, screw on the SWON and then screw the head back on to it. From then on, water goes through the SWON before it reaches you. The Kickstarter campaign needs $50,000 to be pledged before the product can be made. Last time I checked, it had 75 backers and had raised pledges of $4,798.Before consigning it to the “leading-edge uselessness†bin, I clicked on the link. This triggered a video spiel in which four twentysomething hipsters straight out of central casting (male, baseball caps, black T-shirts – you know the rigmarole) explain why the gizmo is such a good idea. Apparently, every minute a hipster spends in the shower uses 2.5 gallons of water. “This is why,†says the lead geek, “I created SWON, an IoT device that installs in under one minute.†It will save its users “hundreds of dollars†in utility costs, and between 4,000 and 10,000 gallons of water a year, which in drought-stricken Silicon Valley is obviously quite a big deal. Continue reading...
The war in Iraq is being broadcast 24/7. But don’t think for a moment that the authorities have surrendered their control over the mediaSome 34 years ago, almost by accident, Britain’s ministry of defence solved the pesky problem that had laid the Pentagon low in Vietnam. What do you do about journalists running wild in your warzone? You put them on a long, slow boat to the other side of the world. You – ahem! – take control.And so, from Grenada to Panama to Iraq War One, journalists were locked in little boxes as far from the action as possible before (Iraq Two) being cautiously “embedded†with units they depended on to keep them safe. No freelance trips here. No unwanted questions asked. Control was still the theme of each and every fighting day. Continue reading...
Experts say blue chip companies have decided it’s cheaper to deal with extortionists than risk damaging attacksSeveral of London’s largest banks are looking to stockpile bitcoins in order to pay off cyber criminals who threaten to bring down their critical IT systems.The virtual currency, which is highly prized by criminal networks because it cannot be traced, is being acquired by blue chip companies in order to pay ransoms, according to a leading IT expert. Continue reading...
Internet-connected gadgets vulnerable because they don’t have enough memory for safety software, use generic code and access web by default“Smart†internet-connected devices such as webcams, kettles and baby monitors are “too dumb†to resist the kind of cyber-attack that brought down some of the world’s most popular websites on Friday, experts have warned.Richard Sims, a product development consultant at the Technology Partnership, said such devices – commonly referred to as the “internet of things†– often connect to the internet by default and use stock code from open-source software, which makes them easier to hack. Continue reading...
On Friday the US and EU were subjected to a far-reaching cyber attack, which widely blocked internet access; some of the world’s most popular websites were shutdown, including Paypal, Twitter and Spotify. The hack was a botnet attack. Usually, botnet attacks use computers, but Friday’s attack was different because it used household items with internet connections to launch a huge denial of service (DDoS) assault. It is believed the attack came from China
Bright red seatbelts look like ceremonial sashes: my kid has become an ambassadorHaving a Citroën Cactus is a bit like painting your house pink; it sounds extraordinary and daring; it looks it for a while, but since you’re mostly inside it rather than outside, it’s your neighbours who have to live with it. I’m talking mainly about the side panels: bubbly sheets whose purpose was never plain to begin with. The Rip Curl keeps the panels and adds a number of driving modes (snow, sand, slipperiness), to ensure you’re ready for more than just bumping into things: you can now bump into things that are also driving on sand. It’s not obvious what the point is, for those of us not planning to reinvade Africa. It does have a mud setting, though, so is not totally inappropriate for the British weather.That is its metier: rugged jaunts across tricky terrain. Round town, it doesn’t get much chance to show off, though it does have a pleasing interior. The driver’s seat is armchair-roomy, like going to a posh cinema. Bright red seatbelts give everyone the look of wearing a ceremonial sash, which can be discombobulating, especially when you catch your kids in the rear-view and try to remember when you made them the Icelandic ambassador. Heavily stylised stitching and natty door pulls make you feel as though you’re sitting inside 1930s luggage. The younger passengers were unimpressed with the pop-out back windows and moaned constantly about not being able to stick their heads out. (It was like being able to hear the internal monologue of a dog.) The satnav was so sluggish that on roundabouts you just had to get used to being told to take the exit you’d just passed. Continue reading...
After the success of Pandemic Legacy, designer Rob Daviau is back with a seafaring adventure. But is everyone ready for board games you throw away at the end?Rob Daviau thought Cluedo was flawed. It was around the end of 2008, while Daviau was working as a designer at Hasbro, and he was brainstorming ideas which could breathe new life into the murder mystery classic. “At one point I made the comment: ‘I don’t know why they keep inviting these people over for dinner, they’re all mass murderers. Why would you keep inviting them back game after game?’â€Daviau was joking, but his boss thought there was something in his critique. What if there was a way for games to change every time they were played? They discussed ways in which decisions made in one gaming session might carry over into the next. An attempt at Cluedo: The Usual Suspects was swiftly abandoned but Daviau soon found another classic with potential: Risk – the somewhat interminable game of word conquest.
by Sam Thielman in New York and Elle Hunt on (#1YXZM)
Hundreds of thousands of devices such as webcams and DVRs were infected with malicious code to create a so-called ‘botnet’ to target leading sitesThe huge attack on global internet access, which blocked some of the world’s most popular websites, is believed to have been unleashed by hackers using common devices like webcams and digital recorders.Among the sites targeted on Friday were Twitter, Paypal and Spotify. All were customers of Dyn, an infrastructure company in New Hampshire in the US that acts as a switchboard for internet traffic. Continue reading...
by Nicky Woolf and the Associated Press on (#1YXGE)
LinkedIn has suggested the 29-year-old’s arrest is tied to a 2012 breach that resulted in more than 100m of its users’ passwords being compromisedA Russian man has been charged with hacking and stealing information from computers at LinkedIn and other San Francisco Bay Area companies.The US attorney’s office in San Francisco announced Friday that a grand jury indicted 29-year-old Yevgeniy Aleksandrovich Nikulin, of Moscow, Russia, a day earlier on charges including computer intrusion and aggravated identity theft. Continue reading...
Deciding to make judgments about the newsworthiness of content is a major shift for the social media platform whose CEO insists it is ‘not a media company’
Google in June deleted a clause in its privacy settings that said it would not combine cookie information with personal information without consentSince Google changed the way it tracks its users across the internet in June 2016, users’ personally identifiable information from Gmail, YouTube and other accounts has been merged with their browsing records from across the web.An analysis of the changes conducted by Propublica details how the company had previously pledged to keep these two data sets separate to protect individuals’ privacy, but updated its privacy settings in June to delete a clause that said “we will not combine DoubleClick cookie information with personally identifiable information unless we have your opt-in consentâ€. Continue reading...
Australian man says the iPhone ‘melted’ and destroyed his car while he was on the beach, as lithium-ion batteries under scrutiny amid major Samsung recallApple is investigating a report from an Australian man who claimed his iPhone 7 caught fire and destroyed his car, the company said on Friday.Surfer Mat Jones told Channel 7 News that he had gone into water off a New South Wales beach and left his new iPhone 7, bought last week, wrapped in a pair of trousers in his car on the beach. Continue reading...
by Sam Thielman in New York and Chris Johnston in Lon on (#1YW4X)
Denial of service attack from unknown culprits on domain name system company Dyn caused access to be severely restricted for users on FridayUS officials are investigating multiple attacks that caused widespread online disruption on both sides of the Atlantic on Friday.
by Presented by Leigh Alexander and produced by Matt on (#1YV60)
We uncover the rituals and superstitious habits that we perform on our technology and gadgetsHave you ever raised your phone in the air to get better reception? Or perhaps blown into your video game cartridge to make it work properly?We explore the psychology behind the rituals that we perform on our technology with guests psychologist and writer Stuart Vyse and ethnographer Nicolas Nova. Continue reading...
Nintendo’s new hardware is attempting to reinvent gaming – again. But can the company’s focus on portability help it connect with a new generation of gamers?Nintendo’s next console looks like it may just be the Nintendo console we’ve all been waiting for – at least since the Wii U was consigned to being the dustiest thing on our shelves. Eccentric, interesting, boasting widespread industry support and with a focus on portability that plays to Nintendo’s considerable strengths (Game Boy, DS, 3DS ...), the Switch is the veteran company’s attempt to reinvent gaming. Again.Some of the biggest reveals from the Nintendo Direct broadcast included: the re-introduction of cartridge games, similar to those used in the 3DS; the fact that Bethesda’s Skyrim remaster will be coming to the system, which is huge; and the removable side controls that can be slotted into a larger controller or used on their own as tiny little handheld gadgets that look like they may well cramp up podgier fingers in a few short minutes. They’re called Joy-Cons, a controversial naming decision which reminds some of the old Namco Jogcon pads and others of a euphemism for injuring yourself during sex. Continue reading...
The ‘Dirty Cow’ bug was originally introduced nine years ago, and has been sitting unnoticed for much of that timeThe operating system that lies at the core of most servers on the internet and most smartphones has a critical vulnerability which has existed, unnoticed, for nine years.Called “Dirty Cow†(because it exploits a mechanism called copy-on-write), the bug allows an attacker to gain privilege escalation on the Linux kernel. Continue reading...
Testing shows 32GB iPhone 7 is slower and Intel-based iPhone 7 Plus has worse signal than 128 or 256GB versionsNot all iPhone 7s are born equally, according to new tests, which appear to show the cheapest, 32GB versions are significantly slower than the more expensive 128 or 256GB versions and that some have much poorer 4G reception.
The head of Apple, Tim Cook, says all payments could soon be via smartphone apps. But there’s a sinister side to this vision, that would lead to us losing our freedomThe tooth fairy is dying. Soon, there will be no more scrabbling under pillows in the middle of the night; no more wondering what to do with a tiny molar, swapped for the traditional pound. (Chucking it in the bin seems heartless, keeping it faintly grisly.) But although my nine-year-old is reaching the limits of belief in fairies, it’s not just the magic that’s fading. It’s the habit of carrying cash.By 2025, three quarters of payments in Britain are expected to be made without notes or coins. We’re not quite Sweden – where even street beggars are starting to take plastic, via card-readers handed out by charities – but we’re moving in the same direction, towards a world of tapping contactless card to reader and paying by app, and who knows what else besides. Continue reading...
Interior minister says pro-Moscow disinformation network has sprung up on Czech soil and ‘we want to get into every smartphone’ to defeat itThe Czech government has accused Russia of conducting a propaganda war on its soil and is setting up a unit to counter what it says are networks of pro-Moscow puppet groups.“We want to get into every smartphone†to counter Russian disinformation, said Milan Chovanec, the Czech interior minister. Continue reading...
University of Leeds researchers analyzed the body language, facial expressions and voice of sitcom character to create a digital avatar and, eventually, a chatbotSince the final episode of hit sitcom Friends first aired in 2004, many fans have clung to the hope of a reunion. Earlier this year, the show’s co-creator Marta Kauffman quashed that idea emphatically:“There will never be a Friends reunion movie,†she told E! News. Could she be any clearer? Continue reading...
For all its lip service about embracing difference, Silicon Valley is still mostly white and male. Calling support for Donald Trump diversity won’t change thatEarlier this week, while we were still reeling from cavalier boasts about sexual assault and from watching woman after woman come forward to recount alleged sexual mistreatment at the hands of Donald Trump, Silicon Valley bigwig Peter Thiel donated $1.25m to the candidate.Far from being blacklisted for supporting Trump, Thiel remains a “part-time partner†at influential tech startup incubator Y Combinator, and he still sits on the boards of Facebook, Palantir, Asana and Zenefits.
