Technology | The Guardian

Social media giant’s chief technical officer Mike Schroepfer questioned by MPs about the firm’s impact on politics. Follow rolling coverage here3.14pm BSTAnd that’s it. The session is over, a little under five hours after it started.3.08pm BSTStevens moves on to Myanmar, where Facebook has been implicated in violence against the Rohingya minority.“I went to the refugee camps last November. The UN has accused Facebook of playing a role in the violence, saying social media has been exploited to spread hate speech. Just last month the UN said your platform had morphed into a ‘beast’ that spreads hatred against Rohingya muslims.” Continue reading...

Amazon, Google and eBay will be obliged to ensure sellers know how to influence online rankingAmazon, Google and other tech firms will be forced to be more transparent in their dealings with third-party businesses who sell goods on their sites, under a draft EU regulation.

Firefox is about to stop supporting Windows Vista and websites are not working. Is there a cheap or preferably free solution?I read your article about Windows 10 updates and that most PCs with Vista should be tossed in the trash bin. I really don’t want to do that. I bought my computer with a disability settlement, and I simply don’t have the money for upgrades. It is an HP Model m8530f with an AMD Phenom 9550 quad-core processor and 5GB of memory. I use it for writing, blogging, internet access, simple games, nothing intense. But I do need to do something because there is only one web browser I can use effectively, and some websites have begun to shun us unfortunate Vista folks. Please tell me how to do this. I am not stupid or illiterate, just a little on the broke side, and a bit (OK, a lot) of a procrastinator. Jeanne

Sony’s new God of War is one of the best-reviewed games of the decade. Creative director Cory Barlog talks about how it was inspired by his own relationship with his sonSony Santa Monica’s new God of War, released earlier this month, is outstanding for several reasons. It’s one of the best-looking video games of the modern era, a Norse epic that weaves an overarching mythological tale together with a smaller-scale, personal story about grief and family. Its most unexpected achievement, though, is humanising its protagonist, Kratos – previously a lump of tattooed muscle whose entire emotional range was “angry”.Related: God of War review – violent, vital and more brilliant than ever Continue reading...

Company sees almost $12bn in revenue, up nearly 50% from last year and beating analyst estimates as Zuckerberg hails ‘strong start’Facebook’s data privacy problems have had little impact on its profitability as the company posted record revenues for the first quarter of 2018.The company made $11.97bn in revenue in the first three months of the year, up 49% from the previous year, beating Wall Street estimates of $11.41bn. Continue reading...

Enhanced controls will allow parents to handpick videos among a host of new features, but campaigners say YouTube must do moreGoogle is updating its YouTube Kids app to improve the control over the videos and channels that can be watched by children.YouTube Kids is a separate app for smartphones and tablets that provides access to a subset of the videos available on the main site. There have been 70bn video views since the app, which is used by 11m families, launched in 2015. In the app’s biggest change yet, Google is giving parents much greater control over what their children can find and watch. Continue reading...

Number of people who see Facebook as their main social media profile falls from 80% to 70% in a yearBritish adults are becoming less reliant on Facebook for communicating with friends, according to research conducted by the UK media regulator, which suggests people are starting to turn to other social media apps.The number of British social media users who consider Facebook to be their main social media or messaging profile fell from 80% to 70% in 12 months, according to the regulator’s annual media use survey. Continue reading...

Suspect appears to have links to misogynistic online community for the ‘involuntarily celibate’Hours before the Toronto van attack, a post on the Facebook profile of the chief suspect declared that “the incel rebellion has already begun, we will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys”.The message has brought new-found attention to the so-called incel movement, one of the stranger offshoots of the “alt right”, and led to calls for the attack to be recognised as an act of far-right terrorism. Continue reading...

After my data was harvested by Cambridge Analytica, I went on a harrowing deep dive into my accountTwo weeks ago I logged into good old Facebook dot com to discover I was one of the 311,127 Australians – and one of about 87 million people worldwide – who had their personal data harvested by Cambridge Analytica sometime around 2013-15.

Google announces change for next Android update, falling in line with Apple, Samsung, WhatsApp and TwitterGoogle has become the latest firm to change its gun emoji to resemble a water pistol, falling in line with most other platforms, including Apple, Samsung, WhatsApp and Twitter.Amid a particularly fervent period in the US anti-gun movement, led by the Floridian students of Stoneman Douglas high school caught up in a mass shooting earlier this year, users of Google-owned products and services will soon see the gun emoji rendered as a bright orange water pistol. That includes smartphones updated to the upcoming Android 9.0 “P” due for release in May. Continue reading...

From a young age, the Amazon founder had dreamed up unlikely-sounding schemes. And then one took offIn 1994, Jeff Bezos held 60 meetings with family members, friends and potential investors in an attempt to persuade them to invest $50,000 (£35,000) in his revolutionary idea to create an online bookshop. He failed to convince 38 of them, and 24 years later some of them still cannot bring themselves to talk about what life might have been like if they had taken a punt on Bezos and this “Amazon thing” that the then 30-year-old hedge fund manager wouldn’t shut up about.“I’m in touch with a few of them now,” Bezos revealed in an on-stage interview at a charity dinner in Washington DC last year. “It’s kind of a study in human nature ... Some of them take it in their stride, and they recognise that they actually have ridiculously happy lives. [But] others of them just cannot talk about it – it’s too painful.”

Company posts first-quarter profit of $61m on revenues of $665m, comfortably ahead of analysts’ expectationsIt’s taken 12 years, but Twitter is now a money-maker. The social media company reported its second profitable quarter on Wednesday, driven by a 10% rise in users and faster growth overseas.Related: Tech firms could face new EU regulations over fake news Continue reading...

Webstresser.org, which had 136,000 users, could be rented for £10 to launch DDoS attacksA website linked to more than 4m cyber-attacks worldwide, including against some of Britain’s biggest banks, has been shut down following a UK- and Netherlands-led operation.Webstresser.org had 136,000 registered users and could be rented for about £10 to launch distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, in which high volumes of internet traffic are launched at target computers to disable them. Continue reading...

Researchers sign open letter saying privacy restrictions ‘likely to compound the real problem’• Sign up to receive the top stories in Australia every day at noonA group of the world’s leading internet academics say Facebook’s decision to tighten access to user data in reaction to the Cambridge Analytica scandal will actually hamper genuine research and oversight of the platform.An open letter, signed by 27 researchers and published on Wednesday, said while the privacy changes might generate positive publicity for Facebook and its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, they were “likely to compound the real problem, further diminishing transparency and opportunities for independent oversight”. Continue reading...

Facebook-owned messaging service will demand users confirm they are old enough to use app after raising age limit from 13WhatsApp is raising the minimum user age from 13 to 16, potentially locking out large numbers of teenagers as the messaging app looks to comply with the EU’s new data protection rules.The Facebook-owned messaging service that has more than 1.5 billion users will ask people in the 28 EU states to confirm they are 16 or older as part of a prompt to accept a new terms of service and an updated privacy policy in the next few weeks. Continue reading...

The Chinese smartphone maker has hit a home run with this top-end smartphone that’s on a par with the bestWith the P20 Pro, Huawei has not only proved that it can compete with the likes of Apple and Samsung, but it can beat them in many ways. Three cameras really are better than one (or two).

Nintendo’s ‘conductor’ takes us behind the game giant’s inner workings, how it finds talent and the philosophy that sparks its eccentric ideasNintendo is coming out of a rough patch in its 128-year history. After spending most of the 00s riding high on the success and profits of its DS and Wii consoles, the current decade has seen the Japanese company struggle to adapt to the changes that its rivals and smartphones have wrought upon the video game world. The death of company president Satoru Iwata in 2016, who presided over a creatively and financially brilliant period in Nintendo’s history, left many wondering how the company would find its way again.In March 2017, Nintendo’s fortunes turned around again with the launch of the Switch, a smart portable games console that can also be docked next to a TV and played at home. It has proven extremely popular, and its flagship games Mario Odyssey, Splatoon 2 and Zelda: Breath of the Wild hoovered up awards last year, including three Baftas at this month’s ceremony. One of the minds behind this joyful little machine is Shinya Takahashi, Nintendo’s GM of development, who started at the company as an artist in 1989 and is now in charge of Switch. He has been called Nintendo’s conductor. Continue reading...

Jason Calacanis, an early investor in Uber, spearheads a contest to find a service ‘that is actually good for society’Can Facebook be replaced? The prominent Silicon Valley investor Jason Calacanis, who was an early investor in several high-profile tech companies including Uber certainly hopes so. He has launched a competition to find a “social network that is actually good for society”.The Openbook Challenge will offer seven “purpose-driven teams” $100,000 in investment to build a billion-user social network that could replace the technology titan while protecting consumer privacy. Continue reading...

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With its profound knowledge of its customers, Amazon can move into almost any sector – striking fear into the hearts of rivals. And the $740bn company is ‘just getting started’The computer on which this article was written is sitting on a laptop stand that tells you everything you need to know about how Amazon does business. At $19.99 (£14.99) a pop, the laptop stand combines everything customers love about Amazon: utility, price and convenience. It’s also a total and complete knockoff – of a laptop stand that the San Francisco-based company Rain Design began selling nearly a decade before Amazon decided to make its own.Amazon’s innovation with its own version was to replace Rain Design’s raindrop logo with its own smiley arrow logo – and cut the price in half. Continue reading...

Jeff Bezos’s firm is good at selling things to shoppers, but that is the tip of its commercial icebergIn the early days of Amazon, Jeff Bezos instituted a rule: every internal team should be small enough that it can be fed with two pizzas. The goal wasn’t to cut down on the catering bill. It was, like almost everything Amazon does, focused on two aims: efficiency and scalability. The former is obvious. A smaller team spends less time managing timetables and keeping people up to date, and more time doing what needs to be done. But it’s the latter that really matters for Amazon.The thing about having lots of small teams is that they all need to be able to work together, and to be able to access the common resources of the company, in order to achieve their larger goals. Continue reading...

With the retailer poised to report blockbuster results, we look at the story behind its success“I see them as kind of a great white shark. You don’t really want to mess with them.” The words are those of a former manager at Amazon – and she is describing her former employer.It is an apt analogy. Amazon is huge – worth $740bn (£530bn) at Monday night’s share price – but it moves fast and is a lethal predator. Continue reading...

Exclusive: panel told researcher Aleksandr Kogan that Facebook’s approach fell ‘far below ethical expectations’A Cambridge University ethics panel rejected research by the academic at the centre of the Facebook data harvesting scandal over the social network’s “deceptive” approach to its users privacy, newly released documents reveal.A 2015 proposal by Aleksandr Kogan, a member of the university’s psychology department, involved the personal data from 250,000 Facebook users and their 54 million friends that he had already gleaned via a personality quiz app in a commercial project funded by SCL, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica. Continue reading...

Latest in Amazon Key programme sees newer Volvos and General Motors vehicles become lockboxes for Prime membersAmazon has begun offering deliveries direct to car boots for members of its Prime subscription service.

Popularity of services such as Spotify outstrips traditional formats for first time

EC concerned £300m deal with music-recognition app could give Apple data on users and rival streaming services to aid poachingThe EU has launched a formal investigation into Apple’s proposed acquisition of UK music-recognition app Shazam.The European commission announced its in-depth investigation into the deal over concerns that it would harm consumer choice and give Apple an unfair advantage through access to user data, which could aid in poaching customers from rivals. Continue reading...

General Data Protection Regulation holds that anyone in Europe can ask any company for the data it has on themHave you ever wondered what your boss or co-workers say about you behind your back? If you’re located in Europe, it will soon be extremely easy to find out.Under the General Data Protection Regulation that comes into play on 25th of May, any individual located in Europe can ask any company for the data it collects about them – and that includes their employer. Continue reading...

One of video games’ most beloved creators on surviving a tumultuous career, running an indie publishing arm and earning a Bafta fellowshipWe went through a period in the games industry where I felt I was being shamed for doing story. It was like, all games should be Deus Ex, all games should be design-driven and systemic. Interactivity is what’s unique about games, a powerful tool that can’t be ignored, but I don’t like limited ideas about what games “should” be. It annoys me because there are so many different people playing games who like them for completely different reasons. Gamers aren’t just one thing.

Media committee chair says Martin Lewis’s case shows yet another failure to protect usersFacebook is facing calls to deploy facial recognition technology to block scam adverts featuring celebrities, after consumer campaigner Martin Lewis launched legal proceedings against the social network over fake promotions claiming his endorsement.Damian Collins, the chair of the parliamentary committee investigating online disinformation, told the Guardian he would ask the social network to consider new ways to block fake promotions when the company’s chief technology office appears to answer questions in parliament on Thursday. Continue reading...

Company tells Australian regulator that news makes up just 5% of content shared, and downplays its collection and use of people’s data

Video-sharing site responds to criticism over objectionable content by publishing report into scale of its moderation processYouTube says it removed 8.3m videos for breaching its community guidelines between October and December last year as it tries to address criticism of violent and offensive content on its site.

Platform removed a video exposing Jones’ harmful lies about the Sandy Hook massacre, but has yet to censor Jones himself – raising questions about its approach to fake newsYouTube’s algorithm has long promoted videos attacking gun violence victims, allowing the rightwing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to build a massive audience. But when a not-for-profit recently exposed Jones’ most offensive viral content in a compilation on YouTube, the site was much less supportive – instead deleting the footage from the platform, accusing it of “harassment and bullying”.Media Matters, a leftwing watchdog, last week posted a series of clips of Jones spreading falsehoods about the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school massacre, a newsworthy video of evidence after the victims’ families filed a defamation lawsuit against the Infowars host. But YouTube, for reasons it has yet to explain, removed the video three days after it was published, a move that once again benefitted Jones, who is now arguing that the defamation suit has defamed him. Continue reading...

A recent report suggests that many trackers and apps can be miles off the mark – particularly over long distances such as the marathonA report from Which? has claimed that some fitness trackers and apps are so inaccurate that they could measure as many as eight miles too short, or too far, over the London Marathon course. So how can you measure how far you have really run? Continue reading...

Mike Wendling’s history of the political group provides plenty of information, but doesn’t get to the root of its hatredThe best thing about Mike Wendling’s new book is the cover. It is extremely clever – a digitised, mashed-up, almost-but-not-quite swastika, which is both artistically striking and a reflection of the book’s central argument: that the “alt-right” represents a novel form of extreme rightwing thinking that is at once familiar and confusing.Most people first heard of the “alt-right” around mid-2016, as the internet-savvy rabble that got behind Trump hammered out frog memes, worshipped Milo Yiannopoulos and loitered around the Breitbart website. No one was entirely sure whether this was a new combination of internet libertarians and youthful nationalists or simply old-fashioned racism repackaged. According to Alt-Right: From 4chan to the White House, it’s a bit of both and very hard to pin down: “an incredibly loose set of ideologies held together by what they oppose: feminism, Islam, the Black Lives Matter movement, political correctness, a fuzzy idea they call ‘globalism’ and establishment politics of both left and right”. Unsurprisingly, then, writes Wendling, “it’s a movement with several factions which shrink or swell according to the political breeze and the task at hand”. Continue reading...

MoneySavingExpert founder says firm failed to stop false adverts luring victims into scamsMartin Lewis, the consumer advice and money-saving expert, is suing Facebook for defamation after it published dozens of fake adverts featuring his face and name.He is seeking exemplary damages in the high court, arguing that Facebook failed to prevent or swiftly remove false advertising that has both tarnished his reputation and lured unwitting victims into costly scams. Continue reading...

Tech company claims news readership has been increasing as Seven argues Google exploiting its lack of competitionGoogle sent more than 2bn visits to Australian news websites last year and is optimistic about the ability of quality journalism to survive the digital disruption, the company has told the competition regulator.

Leaving your scepticism at the door, this digital wellness startup can feel like a personal therapistFor all the things that the millennial generation struggle with (buying a house, cultivating a career, monogamy), self-care seems to be one area where they flourish. So much so that it is said to be a multibillion-dollar industry, and whatever your particular strand of self-care needs, Shine may be the app you have been waiting for. Along with recently landing $5m (£3.5m) of investment, the startup has picked up more than two million users in two years, with people tuning in for affirmations, meditations and salutations.Its primary focus is a chatbot that dishes out life advice in text messages and then offers guided audio therapies and blog content, depending on your needs. The app has been used in 189 countries, despite the fact that it is only formatted in English. As a millennial snowflake, I tried it for a week to see how I would fare: would it help me “thrive”, as it claimed? Continue reading...

Cheap, cheerful and Chinese: the new MG ZS is a very different carMG ZS

Carole Cadwalladr just wanted to insure her car. Six months later, she found a mass of personal details held by a firm she had never contacted that is run by Leave.EU’s biggest donor, Arron Banks. How did it get there?If a 29-year-old Peugeot 309 is the answer, it’s fair to wonder: what on earth is the question? In fact, I had no idea about either the question or the answer when I submitted a “subject access request” to Eldon Insurance Services in December last year. Or that my car – a vehicle that dates from the last millennium – could hold any sort of clue to anything. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, however, in pursuing the Cambridge Analytica scandal, it’s that however weird things look, they can always get weirder.Because I was simply seeking information, as I have for the last 16-plus months, about what the Leave campaigns did during the referendum – specifically, what they did with data. And the subject access request – a legal mechanism I’d learned about from Paul-Olivier Dehaye, a Swiss mathematician and data expert – was a shot in the dark. Continue reading...

Kane Gamble, 18, targeted CIA and FBI chiefs from Leicestershire housing estateA teenager who rocked the US intelligence community when he tricked his way into top officials’ accounts in a campaign of “cyberterrorism” has been locked up for two years.

Developers at the gaming giant reveal the thinking behind their new range of hi-tech interactive cardboard construction kits, and the laughs they had while inventing themThe launch of a new Nintendo product always generates excitement, because you never quite know what you are going to get. In 2004, Nintendo abandoned the wildly successful Game Boy portable consoles in favour of an ugly silver clamshell with two screens, the DS. Two years later, when other games companies were focused on improving their consoles’ graphical power, Nintendo popularised motion control with the comparatively underpowered Wii. Both announcements attracted scepticism and even mockery from players and market analysts alike, and both sold more than 100m each.The company’s experimental approach is not always successful, however. Though Nintendo’s most recent console, the Switch, has been a huge success so far, its predecessor, the Wii U, was one of the worst-selling games machines of all time. Nintendo Labo, out today in the US and on 27 April in the UK, is one of Nintendo’s weirdest ever ideas: a set of cardboard construction kits that, combined with the game software packaged with it, can be used to create interactive toys. Continue reading...

In April 2018, Google lost a landmark case against a businessman who used his ‘right to be forgotten’ to have links to a previous conviction taken down from the search engine. Jordan Erica Webber discusses the importance of this case and looks ahead at the coming era of General Data Protection RegulationSubscribe and review: Acast, Apple, Spotify, Soundcloud, Audioboom, Mixcloud. Join the discussion on Facebook, Twitter or email us at podcasts@theguardian.comWe’ve all done things we regret. Perhaps you’re one of those people who lies awake at night fretting about something hurtful you said 10 years ago. Or maybe you committed a crime in your youth, served your time, reformed and are dedicated to a new life as a law-abiding citizen. Continue reading...

After Cambridge Analytica revelations, 83% of Americans call for companies like Facebook to face harsher penalties for breachesAmericans want major technology companies to be regulated, with legal responsibility for the content they carry on their platforms and harsher punishment for breaches of data privacy, according to a nationally representative survey of 2,500 adults.In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the way that technology companies handle our personal data and moderate the content – including fake news, hate speech and terrorist propaganda – on their platforms has been thrown under the microscope. Continue reading...

Liberal Democrat leader claims recent scandals have shown web companies have gone from ‘heroes to villains very quickly’Vince Cable has compared Google, Amazon and Facebook to the US oil monopolies that exploited their market power more than a century ago – and called for them to be broken up.In a speech in London, the Liberal Democrat leader said a series of recent scandals, including revelations about Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, meant the “tech titans” had “progressed from heroes to villains very quickly”. Continue reading...

Under the trending Twitter hashtag #GameStruck4, video game fans have spent the day listing the four titles that defined their love of gaming. Some are predictable, others not so muchIt’s a question video game fans often discuss: which games have defined your life? Now that question has become a trending Twitter hashtag, and some familiar classics are emerging as the most widely inspiring experiences.It all started yesterday when streaming service Filmstruck took to Twitter asking people to list their four life-changing movies under a hashtag, #FilmStruck4. In response, Twitch streamer Marcus “EpicNameBro” Sanders tweeted: “I don’t watch movies, so I can’t do the whole ‘What 4 films define you’ thing. But I can do games.” He listed four titles – Final Fantasy Tactics, Demon’s Souls, Cave Story and World of Warcraft – and added the hashtag #GameStruck4. Continue reading...

Five-year deal, thought worth $40m, gives Prime subscribers in UK access to grand slam eventAmazon has struck a deal said to be worth $40m (£30m) for the exclusive UK TV rights to the US Open tennis tournament, as the US firm looks to add to its 100 million Prime subscribers.Amazon, which is in talks with the Premier League to potentially stream matches from 2019 to 2022, has struck a five-year deal starting with this summer’s tournament at Flushing Meadows in New York.

Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple have accrued so much power, it has damaged American democracyFor those Democrats who dream of being president, it’s no longer safe to play it safe. We live in a dangerous, unstable time in a democracy that is far from healthy. Many of the forces corroding it precede Donald Trump, despite progressives who would tell you otherwise – this entire century, so far, has been a misery for many Americans.

Company moves responsibility for users from Ireland to the US where privacy laws are less strictFacebook has moved more than 1.5 billion users out of reach of European privacy law, despite a promise from Mark Zuckerberg to apply the “spirit” of the legislation globally.In a tweak to its terms and conditions, Facebook is shifting the responsibility for all users outside the US, Canada and the EU from its international HQ in Ireland to its main offices in California. It means that those users will now be on a site governed by US law rather than Irish law. Continue reading...

California base faces claims of unreported injuries as it struggles to roll out Model 3Tesla is facing an investigation by Californian safety regulators into reports of serious injuries at its factory in Fremont, California, where it is struggling to scale up production of its Model 3 mass-market electric car.The California Occupational Safety and Health Administration said on Wednesday it had begun an inspection on Tuesday, a day after the news website Reveal alleged that Tesla failed to disclose legally mandated reports on serious worker injuries, making its safety record appear better than it was. Continue reading...