A Norwegian startup company has created an automaton that helps children with long-term sickness be part of normal life againAs a rule of thumb, the best ideas are the simplest. That’s easy to forget in an age of rapid technological innovation, when the tendency is to be led by capability rather than need.For as Karen Dolva, co-founder of the Norwegian startup No Isolation, says: “There are a lot of engineers who don’t want to make something useful – they want to make something cool.” Continue reading...

US psychologist Jean Twenge, who has claimed that social media is having a malign affect on the young, answers critics who accuse her of crying wolfLast week, the children’s commissioner, Anne Longfield, launched a campaign to help parents regulate internet and smartphone use at home. She suggested that the overconsumption of social media was a problem akin to that of junk-food diets. “None of us, as parents, would want our children to eat junk food all the time – double cheeseburger, chips, every day, every meal,” she said. “For those same reasons, we shouldn’t want our children to do the same with their online time.”Related: Irresistible: Why We Can’t Stop Checking, Scrolling, Clicking and Watching – review Continue reading...

Nintendo gives Mario’s distant cousin another stab at success, and unveils the best 2DS yet, while it’s another round of samurai savagery on the PlayStation 43DS, Nintendo, cert: 3 Continue reading...

Recent research suggests that AI could make a valuable contribution to the judicial processIn 1963, an American attorney named Reed Lawlor published a prescient article in the journal of the American Bar Association. “In a few years,” he wrote, “lawyers will rely more and more on computers to perform many tasks for them. They will not rely on computers simply to do their bookkeeping, filing or other clerical tasks. They will also use them in their research and in the analysis and prediction of judicial decisions. In the latter tasks, they will make use of modern logic and the mathematical theory of probability, at least indirectly.”Related: Rise of the racist robots – how AI is learning all our worst impulses Continue reading...

If you’re looking for answers to life’s big philosophical questions, try playing a video game, says Jordan Erica Webber

Jonathan Evans says although encryption services have hampered terrorism fight he does not support curtailment of its useA former head of MI5 has spoken out against curtailing use of encryption in messaging apps despite warning that Islamist terrorism will remain a threat for up to another 30 years.Jonathan Evans said the terrorist threat to Britain was a “generational problem”, and suggested the Westminster Bridge attack in March may have had an energising effect on extremists.

Firing of James Damore, engineer behind controversial anti-diversity memo, sparks ire from ‘alt-right’ reminiscent of 2014 Gamergate harassment campaign

Benchmark Capital accuses Travis Kalanick of fraud to ‘increase his power over Uber for his own selfish ends’ as former CEO calls the case ‘riddles with lies’Travis Kalanick is being sued by one of Uber’s largest investors, Benchmark Capital, which accuses the former chief executive of engaging in fraud in order to “increase his power over Uber for his own selfish ends”.The Benchmark complaint exposes an ugly battle for power at the top of the nearly $70bn startup, which has been buffeted from crisis to crisis all year and is still searching for a replacement for Kalanick. Continue reading...

Broadband provider found to have put 21,000 subscribers’ data at risk by allowing ‘rogue’ staff at Indian contractor access to itTalkTalk has been fined £100,000 by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) after the telecoms giant was found to have placed personal data from 21,000 customers at risk.An ICO investigation found the company breached data protection laws after staff from an IT firm working with TalkTalk were able to access large amounts of customer data through an online company portal. Continue reading...

Leaked correspondence with Nevada vehicle regulator reveal Elon Musk’s plans for fully autonomous electric freightTesla is working on electric, self-driving trucks that can travel in “platoons” or road trains capable of following a lead vehicle, according to leaked correspondence with regulators.The electric truck, which is due to be unveiled in September by Elon Musk’s electric vehicle company, is close to prototype on-road testing, with both Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) and California officials in talks to permit trials on public roads, according to documents seen by Reuters. Continue reading...

AI-powered program allowed users to edit selfies to fit into ‘Caucasian, Asian, Indian or Black’ categories causing outrage and immediate U-turnPopular AI-powered selfie program FaceApp was forced to pull new filters that allowed users to modify their pictures to look like different races, just hours after it launched it.The app, which initially became famous for its features that let users edit images to look older or younger, or add a smile, launched the new filters around midday on Wednesday. They allowed a user to edit their image to fit one of four categories: Caucasian, Asian, Indian or Black. Continue reading...

From the second world war to the 1960s, women were a critical part of the computing sector. Would tech culture today be less sexist if they hadn’t been sidelined?Sadie the typist and Susie her computer: sophisticated but cheap. That’s how the duo are billed when they appear in 1960s adverts to promote a now defunct UK computer company. Using young, attractive women to advertise computers was a common ploy in Britain at the time, when male managers, uninitiated in the complexities of this new technology, viewed the machines as intimidating and opaque.

James Damore, the engineer fired this week for his criticism of diversity, spoke with two YouTube personalities who have espoused anti-feminist viewsJames Damore went from an unknown software engineer at Google to widespread internet notoriety when the technology company fired him for writing a memo criticizing diversity initiatives.But as mainstream journalists across the globe reached out to him for interviews this week, Damore largely ignored the queries and instead selected two rightwing YouTube personalities to make his first, expansive comments on the international firestorm he has ignited. Continue reading...

Pundits identify with James Damore, who wrote a 10-page manifesto suggesting gender inequality in Silicon Valley was naturalGoogle’s decision to fire an engineer who sent out a screed on diversity to his colleagues is the stuff of conservative culture war dreams.For a start, a lot of conservative pundits can identify with James Damore, the now unemployed author of the 10-page manifesto. Damore seems overbearing, writes at punishing length about why inequality is natural, and addresses himself to a modern world that finds his thoughts irrelevant and even offensive. That’s pretty much the profile of the average writer at National Review. Continue reading...

Tesla head plans short and long distance tunnels including Hyperloop from New York to Washington, but it’s unclear whether plans have government approvalElon Musk’s Boring Company has recommitted to building a network of high-speed transport tunnels, including a Hyperloop vacuum-tube supersonic transport system between New York and Washington DC, which it claims will whisk people from A to B at 600mph in a vacuum tube.

After a Google employee was fired for penning a controversial ‘anti-diversity’ manifesto, conservatives say it proves Silicon Valley is a liberal echo chamber

Scandal over discrimination at the company deepens as dozens of current and former staff say they have earned less than men despite equal qualifications

Shahak Shapira and other artist-activists stencil insulting barbs to protest what they deem the company’s muteness on offensive tweets

We are not just swimming in a new medium, we are drowning in it, writes Susan MoronyChristina Patterson’s views about screen use (Don’t let life go by in the blink of a screen, 8 August) must echo those of thousands of parents. We are not just swimming in a new medium, we are drowning in it.On a flight last week from Preveza to London, a seven-year-old boy pulled the window blind down straight after takeoff, so that he could see his iPad screen. Had he looked out of the window, he would have seen the most wonderful things: crystal clear views of Paxos and Antipaxos, Corfu, the entire, stunning Slovenian and Croatian coasts, glorious Venice, the Alps, from Italy through Switzerland and France, and finally the English Channel and home. So sad that he, and many others, had their heads buried in their screens for the entire journey, and that his mother didn’t think to suggest looking out of the window occasionally.

With Google reportedly firing author of a controversial anti-diversity memo, we want to hear the experiences of women working in the industry

Full Fact software backed by George Soros and Pierre Omidyar fact-checks statements in parliament and news media in real timeBroadcast, print and online journalists are to begin using an automated fact-checking system that quickly alerts them to false claims made in the press, on TV and in parliament.An early version of the system, dubbed the “bullshit detector” by its creators, will be rolled out for testing from October as part of a global fightback against fake news. Continue reading...

Video from ARLnow.com shows a car that appears to be driverless. The sighting was a hot topic on tech blogs over the weekend because the vehicle seemed to be autonomous. However, when NBC’s Adam Tuss approached the car he saw a person disguised as a car seat driving the vehicle, leading to questions about the purpose of such a stunt. Continue reading...

Group tells company CEO to pay multimillion-dollar ransom or else risk 1.5TB of shows and confidential corporate data being released onlineHackers of US television network HBO have released personal phone numbers of Game of Thrones actors, emails and scripts in the latest dump of data stolen from the company, and are demanding a multimillion-dollar ransom to prevent the release of whole TV shows and further emails.In a five-minute video letter from somebody calling themselves “Mr Smith” to HBO chief executive Richard Plepler, the hackers told the company to pay within three days or they would put online the HBO shows and confidential corporate data they claim to have stolen. Continue reading...

CEO Sundar Pichai says internal document that criticised efforts to promote women and under-represented minorities is ‘contrary to our basic values’Google reportedly fired a software engineer on Monday after a document he wrote criticising the company’s diversity efforts and attributing the tech industry’s gender imbalance to biological differences between men and women went viral.Related: Google staffer's hostility to affirmative action sparks furious backlash Continue reading...

Silicon Valley says it is committed to racial diversity in its workforce. But the numbers tell a different story

Elon Musk congratulates Italian owners club, which claims new distance record while consuming equivalent of only eight litres of petrolFive members of the Italian Tesla owners club claim to have set a new distance record, travelling 670 miles on a single charge in a Tesla Model S.

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

New legislation will give people right to force online traders and social media to delete personal data and will comply with EU data protectionPeople will get a new right to force social media companies and online traders to delete their personal data under laws to be brought forward by the government this summer. Matt Hancock, the minister for digital, said it would amount to a “right to be forgotten” by companies, which will no longer be able to get limitless use of people’s data simply through default “tick boxes” online.Plans to give people the right to request a deletion of social media posts from their childhood were floated by Theresa May during the Conservatives’ election campaign and legislation was promised in the Queen’s speech. However, the measures appear to have been toughened since then, as the legislation will give people the right to have all their personal data deleted by companies, not just social media content relating to the time before they turned 18. Continue reading...

Why bother flying when you can escape to the Himalayas, or into space, from the comfort of your couchWhen I was a child, each year without exception our family would drive to Cornwall in a wheezing Ford Sierra for the summer holidays. We’d stay with my great-uncle, a retired army major (gruff bachelor, suspected womaniser, borderline alcoholic), who was perhaps the last person I’d ever meet who earnestly deployed the phrase: “Children should be seen and not heard.”In order to preserve quiet in the house, we went out a lot. Routine became ritual. We’d visit the same beach, whatever the weather. We’d eat the same sandy ham sandwiches and shoo the same crabs from under the same rocks. Familiarity might have bred contempt, were it not for the Game Boy my brother and I brought along for the ride. The machine’s luminous green screen was a tiny portal to other worlds, a holiday from the holiday, when the holiday started to drag. The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening is, in my mind, a part of Hyrule that’s for ever Cornish. Continue reading...

An intrepid but accident-prone podcast presenter chases his cold-caller all the way to Delhi, and tower-block dwellers wax lyricalReply All podcast: Gimlet Media

US prosecutors claim Marcus Hutchins, hailed as ‘accidental hero’ for stopping major ransomware attack, admitted to creating Kronos malware targeting banks

Low-quality version of latest episode leaks in separate security breach from hack that has been self-described as ‘the greatest leak’ of the digital eraThe cable network HBO capped off several weeks of controversy and misfortune with further bad news on Friday when it emerged that the next episode of its star series, Game of Thrones, due to air on Sunday, had leaked on the internet that morning.Related: At last! Game of Thrones gives us all the moments we've most been waiting for Continue reading...

Nottingham Trent University team says replacing concrete with plastic container to fill with water could slash carbon emissionsResearchers have developed a device to make washing machines lighter that could significantly reduce carbon emissions and the back pain of people having to install them.Washing machines typically contain one or more large concrete blocks, which can weigh more than 25kg (4st), in order to prevent them from moving during spin cycles.

Apple’s HomePod firmware is full of clues about its next smartphone. Here’s an exhaustive list, from all-screen design to a new SmartCamA week of analysing a leak from Apple has revealed many details about what the company’s next iPhone will be like: from facial recognition to a smart camera system and a screen that fills the front.

Company admits ‘we could have done more’ after one of its cars burst into flames when it knew that Honda had issued a recall for electrical faultUber said it had taken action to repair faulty cars in Singapore after it was reported the ride-hailing company rented them out to drivers despite being aware of a recall, and after one caught fire.The Wall Street Journal said Uber managers in Singapore bought more than 1,000 Honda Vezel SUVs and rented them to drivers even though they knew the model had been recalled in April 2016 over concerns that an electrical part that could overheat and catch fire. The WSJ cited internal Uber documents and interviews with people familiar with Uber’s operations. Continue reading...

Marcus Hutchins arrested over his alleged role in creating Kronos malware targeting bank accounts

Today’s compact cameras can often shoot both video and still images, but not at the same time. Christian is looking to save high-quality pictures from his home movies Continue reading...

Hackers behind attacks such as WannaCry might not have become hugely rich, but that doesn’t mean they are going to give up any time soonThe destructive potential of ransomware, the malicious software that is used to extort money from victims, is huge: in the first half of 2017, two major outbreaks, WannaCry and NotPetya, led to service outages from organisations around the world.A third of the UK’s National Health Service was hit by WannaCry, and the outbreak was estimated by risk modelling firm Cyence to have cost up to $4bn in lost revenues and mitigation expenses. Then, a month later, NotPetya (so-called because it is not Petya, another type of ransomware with which it was initially mistaken), brought down a significant chunk of the Ukrainian government, pharmaceutical company Merck, shipping firm Maersk, and the advertising agency WPP, as well as the radiation monitoring system at Chernobyl. Continue reading...

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

Tim Cook has called autonomous systems ‘the mother of all AI projects’. So here are the things we’d most like done for us by robotsApple is working on a self-driving car, but according to chief executive Tim Cook, “autonomy is sort of the mother of all AI projects” and that “a vehicle is only one” use for autonomous systems, which got us thinking: what other things would we want automated?Cook made the comments during an earnings call last night, and said that Apple was “very focused on autonomous systems from a core technology point of view” and that the company does “have large project going, and [it is] making a big investment in this”. Continue reading...

With umpires not referees, no throw-ins and an arbitrary approach to offside, Dan Marshall’s game makes getting football wrong just rightDan Marshall insists there is no such thing as a football referee. “Umpires officiate over sport,” he argues. There’s a lot about football that annoys Marshall – he really doesn’t get it. And yet this experienced game designer has just spent a year-and-a-half of his life creating a football simulation. Why?Behold the Kickmen is in part a joke written in code, as well as a playful jibe at the predilection of football fans for taking the details of their adored sport too seriously. It deliberately – even obstinately – contradicts many of football’s rules, and yet plays loving homage to a long lost era of home computer sports sims. Despite Marshall’s joyful indifference to its subject matter, Kickmen is rather superb. Continue reading...

Company pledges further development to tackle rise of extremist and illicit content and hate speech, but says advanced machine learning is the answerGoogle has pledged to continue developing advanced programs using machine learning to combat the rise of extremist content, after it found that it was both faster and more accurate than humans in scrubbing illicit content from YouTube.

It’s assumed that people who grow up in the digital age have a natural affinity to tech. But new research puts a glitch in the code

The makers of indie cult favourite Gone Home have created a linear sci-fi title set in 2088 that feels satisfyingly lived in and free from stereotypesIt seems unavoidable to compare Tacoma to Gone Home, the previous game by developer Fullbright Productons. Along with Dear Esther, it is often credited with popularising a certain type of linear narrative-focused game, often pejoratively labelled ‘walking simulators’. As soon as Tacoma was announced, people starting calling it Gone Home in Space. Again, you play as a woman exploring an abandoned environment, and again you’re piecing together what happened to the people who used to be there.But here the focus has shifted from the recent past to the not-so-distant future. Where Gone Home is set in a spooky house in 90s Oregon and intentionally plays on horror tropes, Tacoma takes the traditional science-fiction setting of a space station – the titular Tacoma. The futuristic placement allows for changes both narrative and mechanical. Whereas the charm of Gone Home, for many, was the familiarity of the 90s setting, the plot of Tacoma in 2088 revolves around an imaginable near future of space travel and advanced AI. Continue reading...

A journalist and a data scientist secured data from three million users easily by creating a fake marketing company, and were able to de-anonymise many usersA judge’s porn preferences and the medication used by a German MP were among the personal data uncovered by two German researchers who acquired the “anonymous” browsing habits of more than three million German citizens.“What would you think,” asked Svea Eckert, “if somebody showed up at your door saying: ‘Hey, I have your complete browsing history – every day, every hour, every minute, every click you did on the web for the last month’? How would you think we got it: some shady hacker? No. It was much easier: you can just buy it.” Continue reading...

Amber Rudd will tell forum including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube that they share responsibility for tackling terrorismAmber Rudd will urge social media companies to do more to remove online terrorist content during a series of meetings with tech giants including Twitter and Facebook, after a sharp increase in the number of plots foiled in the UK. The home secretary will warn that extremists have exploited web platforms as way of spreading their “hateful messages” when she attends the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism in Silicon Valley.Theresa May had previously warned that the fight against Islamic State was shifting from the “battlefield to the internet” when she attended the G7 meeting in Sicily in the wake of the Manchester terror attack. World leaders called on internet service providers to “substantially increase” their efforts to crackdown on extremist content. Continue reading...

The US cable network has confirmed a ‘disturbing’ cyber-incident that reportedly led to the leak of future episodes and scripts onlineHBO is the focus of a “cyber-incident” reportedly involving hackers leaking forthcoming episodes and scripts of Game of Thrones.Related: At last! Game of Thrones gives us all the moments we've most been waiting for Continue reading...

Details discovered by developers in firmware for Apple’s HomePod speaker show in-development iPhone with IR face unlocking and bezel-less designThe next version of Apple’s iPhone will have infrared-based facial recognition unlocking – eliminating need for a passcode or fingerprint – and will have an almost all-screen design on the front, say developers digging into the pre-release of firmware distributed by Apple.

Nintendo’s cartoon avatars offer a gateway to role-play, Supergiant Games score a winner and PlayStation’s PlayLink refreshes the quiz experience3DS, Nintendo, cert: 7