Twitter is discontinuing the most creative video platform on the internet. Here we pay tribute to the weirdest, wackiest and most wonderful VinesTwitter announced on Thursday that it will soon kill off one of the weirdest and funniest parts of the internet.Vine, the six-second looping video app launched in 2012, will be “discontinued”, its owner Twitter announced in a post on Medium. Continue reading...

MoMA in New York has just added the first emoji to their collection – Shigetaka Kurita explains how he designed them, and how it all started with the heartI was part of a team that spent about two years designing the first emoji for the launch of i-mode [NTT DoCoMo’s mobile internet system] in 1999. It limited users to up to 250 characters in an email, so we thought emoji would be a quick and easy way for them to communicate. Plus using only words in such a short message could lead to misunderstandings … It’s difficult to express yourself properly in so few characters.In the mid-1990s, before mobile phones, we used to have pagers in Japan called Pocket Bells. They were cheap and really popular among young people, partly because they had a heart symbol. Then a new version of the Pocket Bell came out that was intended more for business use, and the heart symbol was dropped. It caused an outcry, to the extent that young users left DoCoMo and signed up with another Pocket Bell company that had retained the symbol. That’s when I knew that symbols absolutely had to be part of any texting service. That was my main inspiration. Continue reading...

Social network to discontinue Vine mobile app ‘in the coming months’ as it reduces head count and costsTwitter is killing off its social media video-sharing app and platform Vine as it trims its headcount and costs. The social network said the Vine mobile app would be discontinued “in the coming months”.Twitter said in a blog post: “Nothing is happening to the apps, website or your Vines today. We value you, your Vines and are going to do this the right way. You’ll be able to access and download your Vines. We’ll be keeping the website online because we think it’s important to still be able to watch all the incredible Vines that have been made.” Continue reading...

Group’s spin-off of its archive of what was once the web’s third most-visited site features 4.5m animated imagesIf you’re nostalgic for a certain time on the internet – a time before your Facebooks and your Twitters, when the only live video was grainy webcam links that updated one frame a minute and your favourite social network was that one forum you’d been on since 1995 – you could do worse than spend a few minutes today on the Internet Archive’s latest project, GifCities. Continue reading...

Borderlands: The Handsome Collection, featuring Borderlands 2 and Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, is free for Xbox One nowMicrosoft is giving away two of the best games of the last console generation for free, possibly by mistake.Borderlands: The Handsome Collection, which contains Borderlands 2 and Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, is free for the Xbox One right now, and users can add the games to their library on Microsoft’s website. Continue reading...

The company’s quarterly results report dropped at 4am local time in California with news of 9% cuts in workforce but better-than-expected revenue of $616m

Host Leigh Alexander chats with popular YouTube star Hannah Hart about the challenges and implications of internet celebrity and putting your life online for all to seeIn 2011, Hannah Hart took the internet by storm when she recorded a video of herself drinking wine and cooking a cheese-less grilled cheese sandwich and uploaded it to the web. Today, her YouTube channel has over 2.5 million subscribers, she’s starred in films and TV programmes, and has recently released her second book. Continue reading...

Stephen has finally got fast broadband installed, but the Wi-Fi signal doesn’t reach his home office. What’s the solution?I’ve just switched from slow ADSL broadband, where the router was outside my office, to fast Virgin broadband, where the router is on the other side of the house. Unfortunately, my computer is struggling to pick-up the Wi-Fi signal. In the past, I’ve tried Wi-Fi extenders from Netgear and Belkin but not had much luck with them. I found that if I placed them where they got a strong enough signal, they didn’t actually extend the signal much further. Will Google’s Wi-Fi mesh routers be the solution, and if so, do you know of any routers like that that can be bought in the UK? StephenWi-Fi is never as fast, and never as reliable, as a wired internet connection. In the old days, before DECT and mobile phones, many people had wires running to landline phones, and it’s still not that hard to do with bulkier Cat5E (E for “enhanced”) or Cat6 cable. Cat6A can deliver 10 gigabits per second over 100 metres of Ethernet cable, which would solve the speed problem for the foreseeable future. Continue reading...

Apple is expected to overhaul its MacBook line of personal computers. Expect a new MacBook pro if the leaks are correct – but no more MacBook AirAt a press event on the morning of 27 October, San Francisco time, Apple is expected to overhaul its MacBook line of personal computers.Leading the event is expected to be an update to its MacBook Pro range of laptops, which has not seen any changes whatsoever for more than 500 days. The biggest alteration to the computers has been leaked by Apple itself, when a software update for macOS Sierra included a number of images showing the new computers in action. Continue reading...

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

Supersized smartphone doesn’t really bring anything new to the table, but it ticks most boxes, with great screen, camera and latest Android 7.1 NougatThe 5.5in Google Pixel XL is the company’s first own-brand phablet, the bigger brother of the 5in Pixel. It’s Google inside and out, but is it better than Samsung or Apple’s efforts?

Lee Jae-Yong joins the board of the electronics giant after Galaxy Note 7 smartphone fiasco brings a huge drop in third-quarter profitsSamsung’s Lee Jae-Yong took a major step towards control of the family-run conglomerate on Thursday, joining the board as the company reported a 30% profit dive following the recall of its flagship Galaxy Note 7 handset.The nomination was approved by an extraordinary meeting of Samsung shareholders, which also focused on the recall fiasco surrounding the handset that has hammered the reputation of the world’s largest smartphone maker. Continue reading...

Skylanders, the first release from Activision Blizzard Studios, is a CGI animation based on a £2.5bn game and toy franchiseInside a converted flower warehouse off a scruffy street in Paris’s 18th arrondissement, the world’s largest computer games company is preparing its latest assault on the world’s screens.On Friday, Skylanders Academy, a CGI animation based on a $3bn (£2.5bn) combined video game/toy franchise aimed at pre-teens, will hit Netflix. Continue reading...

Transport hubs in Los Angeles, Denver and Washington are soon to trial Total Recall-style high-speed body scannersA startup bankrolled by Bill Gates is about to conduct the first public trials of high-speed body scanners powered by artificial intelligence (AI), the Guardian can reveal.According to documents filed with the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Boston-based Evolv Technology is planning to test its system at Union Station in Washington DC, in Los Angeles’s Union Station metro and at Denver international airport. Continue reading...

The 176 tiny designs – a gift from a Japanese phone company – will go on show at New York’s Museum of Modern ArtBack in the day, before cars could drive themselves and phones could airbrush selfies, a Japanese phone company released the first emojis.The year was 1999 and the tiny 12-by-12 pixel designs included smiley faces, hearts of the intact and broken variety, a peace sign and zodiac symbols. Continue reading...

Apple showed off what it calls ‘AirPods’ last month during a launch event for the iPhone 7, but now the company isn’t saying when they’ll be released

Dyn, the victim of last week’s denial of service attack, said it was orchestrated using a weapon called the Mirai botnet as the ‘primary source of malicious attack’

The $3,000 computer is marketed to professionals as Microsoft shifts focus to ‘technology that enables profound creation’Microsoft is getting artsy. The tech giant unveiled tools for artists and designers on Tuesday in Manhattan, including a smartphone app that allows users to scan 3D images of everyday objects and move them around in virtual or “mixed” reality.Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, said he anticipated a greater market for creative tools as the market for video display devices matures. “Much of technology has been slanted toward consumption,” Nadella said. “I believe that the next 25 years will be defined by technology that enables profound creation.” Continue reading...

As the gaming world advances, women are facing the same physical threats online as offline. Players and developers want to do something about itStriding through the snow-covered fortress, shooting zombies with her bow and arrow, Jordan Belamire felt like a god – right up until the moment someone named BigBro442 decided to “virtually rub [her] chest” and make her feel like just another “powerless woman”.“Even when I turned away from him, he chased me around, making grabbing and pinching motions near my chest,” she wrote in a Medium post of her experience playing QuiVR, a virtual reality game. “Emboldened, he even shoved his hand toward my virtual crotch and began rubbing.” Continue reading...

Ambitious – and expensive – high-speed internet program will stop plans to expand to new cities as business reportedly under pressure to cut costsGoogle’s parent company is halting operations and laying off staff in a number of cities where it once hoped to bring high-speed internet access by installing new fiber-optic networks.The company also announced that Craig Barratt, a veteran tech executive who led the ambitious – and expensive – Google Fiber program, is stepping down as CEO of Access, the division of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, that operates the five-year-old program. Continue reading...

Russia’s Vladislav Surkov fell out of favour with Putin but new role in Ukraine talks has made him target for unknown hackersVladislav Surkov was the mysterious Kremlin puppet master who wrote rock lyrics and loved Tupac Shakur yet was simultaneously the chief architect of Vladimir Putin’s system of “managed democracy”.Now, after some time on the sidelines, Surkov is well and truly back in the thick of Kremlin intrigue after a cache of emails purporting to show his office coordinating affairs in separatist east Ukraine was leaked online.

From facial-recognition to dog power, smart technology has come knocking on your door. No, don’t get up …The doorbell, like the landline, is increasingly on its way out. Being in a specific place at a certain time is just not how digital nomads roll. In the past few years, US companies such as SkyBell and DoorBird have offered solutions to the problem of having to be home occasionally by developing doorbells that connect to your smartphone, so you can converse with the deliveryman, passing pal or burglar, whether in or out. The UK’s newly launched Ding, though, is one of the first to do it with a design finish that doesn’t scream “home security paranoiac with own laser trip wires”. Continue reading...

In Playtest, a developer creates an augmented reality horror adventure that uses the player’s own memories to scare them. This is closer to reality than you may thinkThe latest Black Mirror series from Charlie Brooker presents, despite its transition to Netflix, another unsettling collection of future shock nightmares drawn from consumer technology and social media trends. The second episode, Playtest, has an American tourist lured to a British game development studio to test a new augmented-reality horror game that engages directly with each player’s brain via a biorobotic implant. The AI program mines the character’s darkest fears and manifests them into the real-world as photorealistic graphics. Inevitably, terror and mental breakdown follow.The idea of a video game that can analyse a player’s personality and change accordingly may seem like the stuff of outlandish sci-fi to some Black Mirror viewers. Continue reading...

Apple ships update including image of new MacBook Pro expected to be released 27 October, showing new touch bar that replaces function and escape keys, and power buttonApple has spoiled its own surprise launch by shipping an update to macOS Sierra that includes an image of the new MacBook Pro the company is expected to release on 27 October.The picture, which will apparently show up as part of the instructions for using Apple Pay on the new devices, shows a new touch bar along the top of the computer, which replaces the function and escape keys and power button on existing MacBook Pros. It was first reported by tech news site MacRumors. Continue reading...

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...

The place to talk about games and other things that matterIt’s Wednesday. 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 compression”, in which the sonic range is reduced to raise the volume of the quieter sounds in a track closer to the loudest. Continue reading...

These are far from disastrous times for Pokémon Go, which still boasts 30m players. But can a Halloween tie-in win back the tens of millions who have put down the game?It was the blockbuster hit of the summer, but as temperatures drop and the nights begin to draw in, wandering around with your phone on display may not be the best way to spend your evenings.But Niantic, the makers of Pokémon Go, is trying to tempt you out with the game’s first “event”, a Halloween special which runs from 26 October until 1 November. 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...

Paypal co-founder and Facebook board member apologises for ‘crudely argued statements’ made in 1995 book

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...

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

The iPod turned 15-years-old on Sunday and to celebrate we asked readers to share their memories. Here’s what some of them said

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...

League of Legends has conquered the Moba scene. Now developer Riot Games has invaded the tabletop gaming arena

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 complex”. Continue reading...

The place to talk about games!It’s Monday. Continue reading...

The iPod turned 15 years old on Sunday and to celebrate we’d like to hear your memories of the innovative MP3 player

Mario tropes are the butt of goofy, self-aware humour, while magic and politics meet in medieval ItalyWii U, Nintendo; cert: 3

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 goggles”, 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 reality”, 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 shower”. 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...