Technology | The Guardian

Buying a new computer for gaming can be a confusing endeavour. We asked a group of experts what you’ll need for a slick experienceBuying a new games machine is a major investment in these financially tricky times. A capable PC that will cope with the latest releases for at least 18 months will start at £600, but, whatever you pay, your quest will involve a series of challenging decisions and compromises.So, if you’re thinking about splashing out this year, we’ve pulled together tips and recommendations from a group of highly experienced PC builders. James Hannett is a coder at Frozen Synapse developer Mode7; Nick Tannahill is marketing director at Firefly Studios, creator of the Stronghold series; Byron Atkinson-Jones runs Xiotex Studios; and Guardian reader Simon Beck has built dozens of PCs over the last 10 years. Continue reading...

The tax will apply from Thursday and go towards $250m taxi industry compensationUber has urged users in New South Wales to complain to the state’s transport minister about the introduction of a $1 tax on the company which comes into force on Thursday and is likely to be passed on to customers.Related: Tech's terrible year: how the world turned on Silicon Valley in 2017 Continue reading...

The space race pacesetter and general trailblazer has been flogging $500 flamethrowers on his website – but guns that shoot fire may not be as legal as he seems to thinkName: Flamethrowers.Age: Brand new! New cool thing! Cool! New! Continue reading...

After users of fitness tracker Strava accidentally revealed the whereabouts of US military bases, we round up five tools and apps that have the ability to log your locationFitness tracker Strava has come under fire for publishing the heatmaps (paths its users have logged when running or cycling) of military personnel. As well as showing clear outlines of US military bases in countries such as Syria and Iraq, in some instances the locations of people inside bases were also visible, as was the frequency with which certain routes were taken. As the company pointed out, though, none of this breached its privacy policy, since participants had not opted to keep their stats hidden. Here are five more ways in which you may have agreed to be tracked. Continue reading...

First it was ‘Boring’ baseball caps, now Tesla founder is selling flamethrowers – ‘to liven up a party’Elon Musk, the multi-billionaire founder of electric car company Tesla and tunnelling company Boring, has sold $3.5m (£2.5m) worth of “boring” flamethrowers in less than 24 hours.The maverick businessman, who last week secured a pay deal that could see him collect $55bn, had pledged that if The Boring Company sold 50,000 baseball caps at $20 each he would start selling flamethrowers. Continue reading...

Two of world’s largest cash machine makers and US Secret Service warn of attacks that empty ATMs at rate of 40 notes per 20 secondsCybercriminals are hacking cash machines to force them to give out money in what is known as “jackpotting”, according to two of the world’s largest ATM makers and the US Secret Service.Diebold Nixdorf and NCR sent out an alert to their customers over the weekend, but did not identify victims or specify how much money had been stolen. The US Secret Service started warning financial institutions that jackpotting was now a risk in the US last week, having started in Mexico last year, according to a confidental alert seen by Krebs on Security. Continue reading...

Fitness-tracking company suggests secret army base locations were made public by users, while militaries around world weigh up banFitness-tracking company Strava has defended its publication of heatmaps that accidentally reveal sensitive military positions, arguing that the information was already made public by the users who uploaded it.Following the revelations, militaries around the world are contemplating bans on fitness trackers to prevent future breaches. As well as the location of military bases, the identities of individual service members can also be uncovered, if they are using the service with the default privacy settings. Continue reading...

Money was deducted from my PayPal account – and I couldn’t get my cash backIn September my Uber account was hacked and three trips were taken by the fraudsters in Russia, which resulted in my account being charged 16,000 roubles.Although I was demonstrably nowhere near Moscow at the time, £229 was taken from my PayPal account, details of which I had given to Uber to pay for trips. Continue reading...

Workers in Wakefield and Mansfield worst affected as tech advances risk widening north-south divideWorkers in Mansfield, Sunderland and Wakefield are at the highest risk of having their jobs taken by machines, according to a report warning that automation stands to further widen the north-south divide.Outside of the south of England, one in four jobs are at risk of being replaced by advances in technology – much higher than the 18% average for wealthier locations closer to London. Struggling towns and cities in the north and the Midlands are most exposed. A total of 3.6m UK jobs could be replaced by machines. Continue reading...

Digital currencies such as bitcoin have caused a financial frenzy. Alex Hern explains what they are – and whether this is the end of ‘real’ moneyWhat is a cryptocurrency? Is it like bitcoin?

Videos will coach users to how to manage data as the company admits ‘not everyone wants to share everything with everyone’Facebook has published its privacy principles for the first time and will roll out educational videos to help users control who has access to their information.As the company prepares for the impact of new European Union data protection laws, it announced on Monday that users will be shown how to manage the data that Facebook uses to show them ads, how to delete old posts, and what happens to the data when they delete their account. Continue reading...

Data about exercise routes shared online by soldiers can be used to pinpoint overseas facilities

Coincheck will reimburse 260,000 customers who lost holdings of NEM currencyA Japan-based cryptocurrency exchange will refund to customers about $400m (£282m) stolen by hackers two days ago in one of the biggest thefts of digital funds.

From voting to healthcare, music to energy production, blockchain may just change the way we run our livesA blockchain allows the authentication of transactions without them needing to be administered or guaranteed by a central authority. Ballot boxes and current online voting platforms are vulnerable to manipulation; now a startup called Follow My Vote is developing a blockchain-based system to ensure security, transparency and mathematically accurate election results. Continue reading...

The big new seven-seat SUV from Peugeot looks the part, but underneath the flair it’s still every bit a practical people carrierPeugeot 5008

Internet users have fed firms their personal data – which in turn is feeding the rapid growth of AI. Has the industry consumed all it needs from the web?

Move to prosecute 1,000 people who shared explicit footage three years ago sparks online debateThe two teenagers at the centre of the Facebook sex video case dividing Denmark are deeply unhappy at a police decision to revisit the offence, their lawyer has said.A video shot without permission of the teenagers engaging in sexual acts at a party three years ago, when both were 15, was shared by Danish teenagers on social media in 2015 and early 2016 before gradually falling out of circulation. Continue reading...

With more than half of young adults admitting to excessive use of smartphones, we look at the apps designed to break the habitAs a tech writer who has written regularly about apps, I’m well aware of the addictive nature of smartphones. It was during a 2am panic attack after waking up, reaching for my smartphone and reading a tweetstorm about the latest Donald Trump controversy that I realised I may have a problem. That, and the fact that even my 10-year-old son had started telling me to put my phone down when he caught me not paying attention.I’m not alone. When Deloitte surveyed 4,150 British adults in 2017 about their mobile habits, 38% said they thought they were using their smartphone too much. Among 16- to 24-year-olds, that rose to more than half. Habits such as checking apps in the hour before we go to sleep (79% of us do this, according to the study) or within 15 minutes of waking up (55%) may be taking their toll on our mental health. Continue reading...

Some say the firm is already overvalued at $60bn. But its founder’s vision is now truly ambitiousRacy valuations for loss-making businesses are nothing new to hard-nosed Wall Street types. The dotcom boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s made a fortune for the brave souls who backed a plethora of small start-ups that are now giants of the stock market, such as Apple, Amazon and Facebook. Plenty also lost their shirts with punts on the “next big thing”.Elon Musk knows more than most about this tricky game of risk and reward. The entrepreneur founded and sold software company Zip2 for $305m to Compaq; he also established online payment giant PayPal, which was sold to eBay for $1.5bn. Continue reading...

Jordan Erica Webber looks at how our data is being used to push political ideologiesSubscribe and review on iTunes, Audioboom, Mixcloud, Acast or on your favourite podcasting app and join the discussion on Facebook and TwitterIs the internet broken? Has the utopian 1990s net been replaced by digital feudalism, where a few powerful entities wield control over all of us digital serfs? In this series, Jordan Erica Webber looks at internet-enabled dystopia, and how even the technology designed to do good can end up causing harm. Continue reading...

New settings will allow users to hide reminder ads on a case-by-case basis, giving more control over muted adverts across devicesGoogle is rolling out a new tool that will stop so-called reminder ads from following you around the internet, typically used to try to get users to come back after virtual window shopping.The new settings will allow users to “mute” these reminder ads , but only on a case-by-case basis, not as a setting to stop them in their entirety. Continue reading...

PlayStation 4’s prequel to horror adventure Until Dawn is a bleak tale of psychological stress that quickly becomes a haunted house fairground ridePlayStation 4, Supermassive Games/Sony (PS VR headset required)It is a familiar horror movie setup: someone wakes to find themselves trapped in an asylum, with no memory of their past and a creepy doctor looming over them. But no matter how many times you’ve seen this on the big screen, it is very different when you’re the one strapped in the chair. Continue reading...

A chatty unravelling of surprising stories behind our built environment by the engineer and campaigner for women in engineeringYou might think that cement is cement, whether it’s used to hold together the bricks in your house or mixed into the concrete of the great columns that support the Shard. So it could come as a surprise to learn that the Chinese added sticky rice to the mortar of the Great Wall, to give it extra flexibility and avoid cracking; or that the Romans added animal blood to their recipe, believing it made it more resistant to frost; or that the dome of the Taj Mahal is held together with a kitchen-cabinet mixture that included shells, gum, sugar, fruit juice and egg white.Observations from Agrawal's childhood in Mumbai are mixed with her teenage years wowed by skyscrapers in New York Continue reading...

Images of Emma Watson, Daisy Ridley, Scarlett Johansson and others used to create fake adult films using advanced machine learningAdvanced machine learning technology is being used to create fake pornography featuring real actors and pop stars, pasting their faces over existing performers in explicit movies.The resulting clips, made without consent from the women whose faces are used, are often indistinguishable from a real film, with only subtly uncanny differences suggesting something is amiss. Continue reading...

Focus shifts to smaller platforms that can ‘quickly become home to criminals and terrorists’Theresa May has signalled her desire to crack down on encrypted messaging apps, arguing that the services provide a safe haven for terrorists and extremists and hinting that the government may take more concrete action if developers do not act themselves.Sound familiar? The prime minister has had her favourite dead horse shipped out to Davos, ready for another flogging. Continue reading...

Fund allocated to Google’s Creators for Change programme with aim to push positive messages in face of popular hate videosYouTube is to spend more than $5m funding creators on the video-sharing website who “counter hate and promote tolerance”, as Google faces continued political pressure to do more to tackle extremism.The money will be allocated to the company’s Creators for Change programme, a collective of more than 100 YouTubers that was created “to encourage empathy and understanding around the world”. Continue reading...

First such deal by a major sporting team will see club promoting CashBet at the EmiratesArsenal has signed a sponsorship deal with the US cryptocurrency CashBet, which will see the Premier League club promote the firm’s initial coin offering (ICO) at the 60,000-seat Emirates stadium.The deal, the value of which was undisclosed, is the first time a major global sporting team has officially partnered with a cryptocurrency firm. It comes as an increasing number of regulators and business leaders express concern about the dangers of consumers risking their savings in unregulated virtual currencies.

US chipmaker paid billions of dollars to monopolise iPhones and iPads and shut out rivals such as Intel, investigators sayUS chipmaker Qualcomm has been fined €997m (£872m) by EU antitrust regulators for paying Apple to use only its chips in the iPhone, locking out rivals such as Intel.The European commission launched an investigation in July 2015, covering the period from 2011 to 2016, looking at Qualcomm’s dominance within the market for modems and chips required to connect handsets to 4G mobile phone networks. It issued a charge sheet five months later. Continue reading...

Salesforce chief Marc Benioff is latest tech insider to raise alarm over social media’s effect on society with comments at DavosFacebook should be regulated like a cigarette company, because of the addictive and harmful properties of social media, according to Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff.Social networks would be regulated “exactly the same way that you regulated the cigarette industry”, Benioff told CNBC at the World Economic Forum in Davos. “Here’s a product – cigarettes – they’re addictive, they’re not good for you, maybe there’s all kinds of different forces trying to get you to do certain things. There’s a lot of parallels. Continue reading...

Oscar Nilsson ‘knocked to ground’ in San Francisco as company tested self-driving carsGeneral Motors is facing one of the first lawsuits to involve an autonomous vehicle, after a collision between its Cruise self-driving car and a motorbike in California.

Journalists pestering women in the industry won’t help – there are good reasons why few have spoken out so farA couple of weeks after the Weinstein revelations, the emails started coming. Some weren’t even personalised. “Hello, prominent woman in the video games industry. I am a reporter trying to unmask sexual predators. Is this something you would be willing to talk about? If not, do you know anyone else who will?” Women working in video game development and media, especially those who are outspoken about gender equality in the games industry’s notoriously unbalanced workforce – which, according to the most recent Independent Game Developers Association survey, is 79% male – have been getting these missives for months.Related: The Aziz Ansari furore isn’t the end of #MeToo. It’s just the beginning | Sarah Solemani Continue reading...

Autopilot controls are not yet fully capable of functioning without human intervention – but they’re good enough to lull us into a false sense of securityWhen California police officers approached a Tesla stopped in the centre of a five-lane highway outside San Francisco last week, they found a man asleep at the wheel. The driver, who was arrested on suspicion of drunk driving, told them his car was in “autopilot”, Tesla’s semi-autonomous driver assist system.In a separate incident this week, firefighters in Culver City reported that a Tesla rear-ended their parked fire truck as it attended an accident on the freeway. Again, the driver said the vehicle was in autopilot. Continue reading...

Computer scientist who became one of the world’s first freelance programmers in the 1950sThe computer scientist Mary Lee Berners-Lee, who has died aged 93, was on the programming team for the computer that in 1951 became the first in the world to be sold commercially: the Ferranti Mark I. She led a successful campaign at Ferranti for equal pay for male and female programmers, almost two decades before the Equal Pay Act came into force. As a young mother in the mid-1950s she set up on her own as a home-based software consultant, making her one of the world’s first freelance programmers.Modest about her own pioneering achievements, she is on record (in an interview with computer historian Janet Abbate) as saying that her biggest contribution was to be “the grandmother of the web”. In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee (now Sir Tim), the eldest of her four children, proposed a system to access and exchange documents across the internet, and soon afterwards built the first web server, website and browser. Continue reading...

Musk will become planet’s richest man if he turns Tesla into a $650bn business in a decadeElon Musk, the founder and chief executive of electric car company Tesla, would smash all pay records and become the richest man in the world if an extraordinarily ambitious new incentive scheme pays out.The 46-year-old entrepreneur, who is already a multi-billionaire, has agreed to work unpaid for the next 10 years – after which he would collect an unprecedented $55.8bn (£40bn) bonus if builds the 14-year-old business into a $650bn company within a decade. Continue reading...

COO Sheryl Sandberg also reiterates company’s promise to add 10,000 safety and security personnel, tackle fake news and end abuseFacebook will roll out a new set of tools aimed at making it easier for users to make informed choices about their privacy in response to sweeping new European privacy laws, according to the company’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg.“We’re rolling out a new privacy centre globally that will put the core privacy settings for Facebook in one place and make it much easier for people to manage their data,” Sandberg said at a Facebook event in Brussels on Tuesday. Continue reading...

Axel Weber says cryptocurrency ‘not an investment we would advise’ while South Korea bans anonymous tradingBitcoin has fallen 12% over 24 hours while the chairman of UBS warned against investing in it and South Korea continued to crack down on cryptocurrencies by banning anonymous trading.

Of the 978m global victims of cybercrime last year, 17m were Britons targeted by phishing, ransomware, online fraud and hackingHackers stole a total of £130bn from consumers in 2017, including £4.6bn from British internet users, according to a new report from cybersecurity firm Norton.More than 17 million Brits were hit by cybercrime in the past year, meaning the nation, which accounts for less than 1% of the global population, makes up almost 2% of the 978 million global victims of cybercrime and almost 4% of the global losses. Continue reading...

Exclusive: Ciaran Martin says Britain fortunate so far to avoid major, crippling attackThe head of the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre has warned that a major cyber-attack on the UK is a matter of “when, not if”, raising the prospect of devastating disruption to British elections and critical infrastructure.In remarks underlining newly released figures showing the number of cyber-attacks on the UK in the last 15 months, Ciaran Martin said the UK had been fortunate to avoid a so-called category one (C1) attack, broadly defined as an attack that might cripple infrastructure such as energy supplies and the financial services sector. Continue reading...

Amid policy changes at social network, media mogul criticizes it for failing to ‘adequately reward’ publishers that add value and integrity

Newly opened Seattle store offers a speedy experience while fueling fears for retail jobsAll around me in this Seattle corner shop, people are grabbing items off the shelves, shoving them into bags or pockets, and bolting for the door. It would feel like well-mannered looting if not for the hi-tech gates where shoppers have to swipe in with their smartphones.This is the first day that Amazon’s new checkout-less convenience store, Amazon Go, is open to the public, and shopping is even easier than online. There is no tedious clicking or scrolling, no banner ads to negotiate nor passwords to remember. Simply present the Amazon Go app at the gates and start shopping. Continue reading...

The internet is now used as a low-level weapon of war. How should Britain best defend itself?In the desperate scramble to rearm before the second world war there was always an undercurrent of pessimism. “The bomber will always get through,” Stanley Baldwin warned. In his dark fantasies, destruction and poison gas rained from the skies and obliterated civilisation. That isn’t quite what happened, though the bombers did their best. Today’s equivalent is the feeling that the hacker will always get through, and that attacks on computer networks will become the most devastating form of future warfare.There are certainly grounds for fear. Technological civilisation is now built on software, much of it desperately insecure. Even when the software itself is secure – and you’d assume that the CIA at least would use properly secured software – the human parts of a bureaucracy can fail, as is shown by the extraordinary case of a teenage hacker, Kane Gamble, operating from his bedroom in Leicestershire, who managed to impersonate the director of the CIA and the deputy director of the FBI and gain access to part of their emails, which included a great deal of classified material. Continue reading...

Social network hiring 10,000 more staff to combat spread of fake news, and harassment use of Facebook as a weapon in ‘cyberwar’Facebook has admitted to being “too slow to recognise” Russian election interference, but says that social networks simply reflect human intent, “good and bad”.In a blogpost, Facebook product manager Samidh Chakrabarti says that “at its best, [social media] allows us to express ourselves and take action. At its worst, it allows people to spread misinformation and corrode democracy. Continue reading...

Don’t be duped by a bot or phished like Hillary Clinton’s campaign – follow these four simple steps to outflank Putin’s digital foot soldiers

I get more and better sleep, feel less anxiety and even get out of bed quicker – and it’s all because social media sucksI never quite fell in love with smartwatches, but I do credit my brief time with one for sparking the most positive change to my life for years: relegating my smartphone to the hallway.With only one plug socket by my bed, and no space for an adaptor, I had to choose one device to win the hallowed bedside charging position. Thanks to my desire to eke out one final hour of standing time to goose my activity tracking, the watch won. Continue reading...

In this hugely popular Battle Royale-style game, all nuance is gone – it’s nothing but rage and deathThe island of Erangel is kind of beautiful. It has rolling hills and lush valleys, and there are little villages dotted along the coastlines. Just one thing, though. Everyone here wants to kill you.This is PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), the hit online multiplayer game that sold more than 24m copies last year. Originally developed as a modification of the military shooting sim, Arma 2, it’s now a standalone release on PC and Xbox One and fans are obsessed with it. Inspired by the Hunger Games books and movies, as well as Kinji Fukasaku’s cult film Battle Royale, it sees 100 players being dropped on to the island, before searching for useful items such as backpacks, body armour and guns and then trying to kill each other. The last player standing wins. Continue reading...

This crowdfunded and croudsourced machine could offer something special if its niggles are ironed outOn paper the Eve V reads like it should be the king of Windows tablets – a Surface Pro but with more ports, longer battery life and more features.

News organisations say they have seen a steady drop off in Facebook referred traffic“Homepage. Even the word sounds old. We bring the news to your social feed.” A week ago this is what you would have found on the not-the-homepage of the millennial-focused video site Now This News. Icons for Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook guided viewers out on to the social web where the real action was. Click there now and it is a different story: social media icons have been relegated to the very bottom of the page, while stories like “Unicorn Noodles Are Now A Thing” and “Cape Town is Going to Run Out of Water” are plastered over Now This videos.The homepage is back, and not just for those chronically old people over 40, but for every news organisation that wants to survive falling off the great Facebook cliff of 2018. Because last week Facebook announced it was changing its recipe for the news feed – the stream of posts anyone sees when they open up their account – and that the net effect would be to promote more things posted by family and friends, and fewer things produced by publishers. Continue reading...

2006’s Hokusai-inspired video game is transformed in an exemplary HD rereleaseIf the American novelist Chuck Palahniuk skewered the almost-lie that money buys happiness with his quippy adage that the things we own end up owning us, the newly rereleased Ōkami (and pretty much every other video game in which you play God) spoils the idea that the life of a deity is in any way enviable. Sure, as the benevolent goddess Amaterasu, freshly incarnated as a white wolf, you have the power to change the world in extravagant ways, both galactic and molecular.With a flourish of that mystical calligraphic brush clenched between your fangs you can, for example, paint entire suns into the world, daub leaves back on to the branches of barren trees, or splotch a missing star on to a lapsed constellation. More often, however, you are a god of small things, engaged in the mundane busywork of answering the prayers of the villagers who live within your domain. With a swipe of the bristles you must light their fires, fix their bridges, repair their tools, replace their lost objects and, when cleaving passing demons in two, save their lives. To crib Palahniuk’s format: the god we follow ends up following us. Continue reading...

In the first of a new series on ideas and advances in science, nature and tech, we look at the innovations coming to this year’s Winter OlympicsSouth Korea boasts the speediest broadband in the world (an average of 28.6Mbps compared to the UK’s 16.9) and connectivity will be further boosted at Pyeongchang by the introduction of a 5G mobile network at games venues, courtesy of Intel. 5G delivers download speeds of 100Mbps (Stoke-on-Trent was recently crowned the town with the fastest 4G connection in the UK at 26.6Mbps). The tech giant is planning to show off the capabilities of its enormous mobile bandwidth by offering such delights as transcendent live streaming and unsurpassed live VR experiences to visitors. Continue reading...