Technology | The Guardian

Our readers share paens to MS Paint, which is not long for this world

At-a-glance security information should be beside energy efficiency ratings to protect households according to Durham chief constable Mike BartonTelevisions, fridges and other internet-connected home appliances should carry cyber security ratings alongside energy efficiency ratings, a police chief has suggested.Durham chief constable Mike Barton said customers should be given the at-a-glance information for internet-ready equipment in the same way fridges, freezers, TVs and other appliances have to display their energy efficiency ratings before sale. Continue reading...

Pit your wits against a wily street hustler (played by Dan Skinner) in the heart of the City of London. But be on your guard: they say you always win your first game, always lose your second. You’ll need all your powers of observation and concentration to come out on top ...

Mike Barton says companies must do more to stop content appearing online, and questions difficulty of removing imagesInternet companies should reinvest some of their “eye-watering” profits into efforts to stamp out child abuse images online, a chief constable has said.Mike Barton challenged firms to do more to stop the content appearing in the first place, as police arrest hundreds of suspected paedophiles every month. Continue reading...

Long-standing basic graphics editing program, used throughout childhoods since the 1980s, has been marked for deathMicrosoft’s next Windows 10 update, called the Autumn (or Fall in the US) Creators Update, will bring a variety of new features. But one long-standing stalwart of the Windows experience has been put on the chopping block: Microsoft Paint.

In 2002 a game depicting Mickey Mouse and pals threatened by an evil force was a surprise hit. Can the latest Toy Story-themed instalment provide the magic fans crave?When Disney held its annual D23 fan convention in Anaheim, California, last week, news was dominated by the announcement of new Star Wars-themed areas for its giant theme parks, promising fully immersive adventure experiences. But when it came to video games, neither of Disney’s big geek-friendly franchises – Star Wars or Marvel – dominated the show. Instead, the spotlight was very much on franchise far less recognised by the wider masses: Kingdom Hearts, an action-RPG series that crosses Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy with elements of the Final Fantasy series.When new material for the much-delayed Kingdom Hearts III was revealed during the gaming-focused Level Up panel, the cheering was louder than anything that greeted major mainstream properties such as EA’s Star Wars Battlefront II or Insomniac’s upcoming Spider-Man title. While Kingdom Hearts is celebrating its 15th anniversary this year, it’s been a 12-year wait for a brand-new, main instalment in the series. Continue reading...

As the Facebook CEO travels across the US to ‘learn about people’s hopes and challenges’, the cafeteria workers at his company struggle to make ends meet

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

Apple’s new 175-acre California campus was envisioned by Steve Jobs as a centre for creativity and collaboration. Apple claims it will be the ‘greenest building on the planet’. It consists of 5 million square feet of asphalt and concrete with grassy fields and over 9,000 native and drought-resistant trees, and is powered by 100% renewable energy Continue reading...

The much-mocked wearable computer, refashioned as an aid for factory workers, is the latest success born of a commercial flopRemember Google Glass? It was the name coined for spectacles developed by Google’s (now Alphabet’s) X division (the company’s intellectual sandpit in which engineers develop way-out ideas). Looking at first sight like a cheap pair of non-prescription reading glasses, Glass functioned as a kind of miniature head-up display (a transparent screen that allows users to read data without having to change their viewpoint). Over part of the right-hand lens was a small rectangular block of glass which functioned as a miniature computer monitor. Inside the right-hand support (the part that goes over your ear) Google had packed memory, a processor, a camera, speaker and microphone, Bluetooth and wifi antennas, an accelerometer, gyroscope, compass and a battery. So when you put on your spectacles you were, in fact, donning a tiny wearable computer.Glass was first announced in 2012 and made available (for $1,500) to select early adopters (dubbed “Glass explorers”) in 2013. It went on sale to the general public in May 2014. In technical terms, it was an amazing piece of miniaturisation. Driven by voice commands, it had quite impressive functionality. You could tell it to take a photograph, for example, or record a video of what you were looking at. Similarly, you could call up a Google search about something you were looking at and have the results displayed in surprisingly readable form on the tiny screen – which appeared to be suspended some distance ahead of you in space. In that sense, Glass looked like the realisation of a dream that early tech visionaries like Douglas Engelbart had – of technology that could usefully augment human capabilities with computing power. Continue reading...

The BFG director debuted the footage from his new film at a Comic Con event, showcasing elaborate VR and special effectsThe first footage from Steven Spielberg’s forthcoming thriller Ready Player One has been released onto the internet.Spielberg revealed the trailer for the film as part of an event at Comic Con in San Diego, marking his first film since his Roald Dahl adaptation The BFG. Continue reading...

Laws that criminalize insulting Islam have led to a death sentence for posts, as activists worry Facebook’s commitment to Pakistanis’ ‘voice’ is mostly lip serviceTaimoor Raza, a 30-year-old Shia Muslim from a “poor but literate” family, was sentenced to death in June by an anti-terrorist court in Pakistan. His crime? Allegedly insulting the prophet Muhammad on Facebook.It occurred during an online debate with a man who turned out to be an undercover counter-terrorism agent. His death sentence, the first to result from a social media posting, is an extreme example of the Pakistani government’s escalating battle to enforce its blasphemy laws, which criminalize insulting Islam. Continue reading...

From Atari’s CX joystick to the Oculus Touch, here are our favourites Continue reading...

Fancy a Lichtenstein? How about a Warhol? San Francisco’s MoMA will now send you anything from its collection – all you have to do is ask the artbotIf you fancy receiving an artwork from a world-class gallery, all you now have to do is ask. Liberating itself from the confines of physical space, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has launched a service that has already gone viral. You simply take out your phone and text it a request, keying in “Send me” followed by a descriptive word or an emoji. Send me mountains. Send me sadness. Send me something orange. It will text back an image selected from one of the 34,678 artworks in its vaults.SFMOMA was aiming for 100,000 texts over the summer. On Monday last week, it clocked up 385,000. By the end of the week, it had passed 2m. Browse through some of the exchanges and you quickly see the potential. It’s beautifully simple – and consistently surprising. “Send me a Warhol” won’t get you a Warhol: the artbot doesn’t search by artist, nor by title. Asking for Kardashians won’t get you anything, either. But if a match can’t be found, texters don’t emerge empty-handed. Suggestions will be given instead. Maybe try “Send me the ocean” or “Send me San Francisco”. Continue reading...

Technology means we could soon be able to ‘translate’ barks. We really need better ways to understand their needs

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

The vibrating back plate adds a physical dimension to music, games and VR in your home or office, but without the neighbour-ruining racketHearing music is one thing, but to really become enveloped by it, you need to feel the music too. Until recently that meant standing in front of an enormous speaker that pounded your body and ears with sound, the kind that makes your chest reverberate and your ears bleed. But what if you wanted that super-club experience at home? Meet the Subpac, a sub-like device you strap to your back to give you that body-rumbling feeling without deafening yourself or annoying your neighbours.

Under plan being considered by government, flat owners would be forced to pay extra strata fees, and limits placed on number of days a property can be let outResidents who let out their spare rooms to rowdy guests through sites such as Airbnb could be forced to pay compensation to their neighbours under a plan being considered by the New South Wales government.

Several city, state and federal spokespeople concur that Tesla CEO has not received permission to build high-speed tunnel from NYC to Washington DCElon Musk does not have government approval to build a Hyperloop tunnel from New York City to Washington DC.The Tesla executive took to Twitter this morning to tantalize his legion of fans and the tech press with the “news” that he had “just received verbal govt approval for The Boring Company to build an underground NY-Phil-Balt-DC Hyperloop. NY-DC in 29 mins … City center to city center in each case, with up to a dozen or more entry/exit elevators in each city.” Continue reading...

Two of the biggest Tor-based destinations for guns, drugs and other illicit goods shut down as US decries dark web as ‘no place to hide’AlphaBay and Hansa – two of the largest “dark web” marketplaces for illegal and illicit items such as drugs and guns – have been shut down, the US Justice Department said on Thursday.Police in the US and Europe, including the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the Dutch National Police, partnered to shutter the sites accused of allowing thousands of vendors to sell illegal drugs, of which Europol said there were 250,000 listings on AlphaBay alone, with 200,000 members and 40,000 vendors. Continue reading...

London transport app company given six-month licence to launch bus route between Aldgate East and Highbury and Islington stations on weekend nightsLondon-based transport app Citymapper has announced its next product: “a social hyper-local multi-passenger pooled vehicle”. Using “geo-matching technology” to route vehicles in a way which optimises boarding while minimising waiting times, the firm hopes to enable efficient ETAs for passengers with varied demographics.Helpfully, the firm has also provided a translation out of its Silicon Valley-speak: it’s launching a bus. Bus route CM2 will run between Aldgate East and Highbury and Islington stations, every 12 minutes, on Friday and Saturday nights from 9pm to 5.30am. Continue reading...

Search company to integrate its app-based feed of news, events, sports and interest-based topics into Google.com page in the near futureGoogle’s famously simple homepage with its logo and single search box on a white background is set to undergo a radical change for the first time since its launch in 1996, with the addition of Google’s interest and news-based feed.The feed of personalised information, which has been a mainstay of Google’s mobile apps for Android and iOS since 2012 along with a home-screen page on Google’s Nexus and Pixel smartphones and tablets, will become part of the main web experience in the near future, the Guardian understands. Continue reading...

Shamit used Skype on her smart TV set until Samsung and Microsoft stopped supporting it. She’d like a substitute that’s just as easy to useSkype has discontinued support for smart TVs. This was an extremely useful feature as I could talk to my parents in the UK while having my family in the shot, and importantly, without needing to pass a laptop or mobile phone around so that toddlers could speak to their grandparents. Is there an alternative that will allow us to video call using our TV? ShamitPutting Skype into smart TV sets was a boon to families, especially for elderly, disabled or non-technical users who found a TV remote much easier to handle than a PC, tablet or smartphone. Continue reading...

Managing tasks used to burden one partner more than the other, but apps such as Trello and Wunderlist are helping share the admin of daily lifeIt’s the middle of the workday when a mobile notification pops up on my phone: “Luke created ‘Rocking chairs’ in ‘Inbox’,” it reads. It’s from the Trello app, which means it’s not urgent and it doesn’t really disturb my work – I know if my partner wanted my immediate attention he’d text. For us, a Trello note is a placeholder for something to talk about later.

The dangers of machine intelligence will grow as it spreads. We need to prepare nowWhen software gets smarter, the first effect is to empower the already powerful. The fantastic powers available now to Google and Facebook, which are now in practice the publishers of most of what appears on the public internet, is one example. More sinister is the power of nation states to spy on us, to manipulate their own citizens, and to disrupt the workings of their enemies. But these advantages cannot last. Soon they have to be reinforced by law, and ultimately force, as the techniques behind them spread and hardware grows cheaper and more plentiful.The speed of technological progress, and the ease with which ideas can now spread, mean that few techniques can long remain the preserve of large firms or entities. Every advance in power and convenience available to the ordinary consumer will soon be available to criminals too. Illegal commerce, whether in drugs, forged documents, stolen credit cards or emails, is nearly as slick and well organised as the legal sort. So are the criminal world’s labour exchanges: hiring someone to hack a website, or to boost your Twitter account with fake followers, is easily done. So is renting a botnet of suborned devices to knock an enemy’s website off the net. Last year large chunks of the consumer internet in the US were knocked out for hours, apparently by an assault launched from subverted home security cameras. Continue reading...

Red Dead Redemption contains one of the greatest sequences in the history of interactive entertainment. How can we expect the sequel repeat the trick?I’m starting to worry about Red Dead Redemption 2. Not because I’ll have two young kids by the time it’s released, which means I’ll still be stuck on the bit where they teach you how to herd cows until about 2019, although that is obviously an issue.No, I’m worried about Red Dead Redemption 2 because it’s bound to be a disappointment. Sure, the worlds are likely to be bigger. Sure, the faces are likely to be more expressive, sure there is probably going to be an amazing online mode where we all get to live together in a wild west town, like a video game version of WestWorld (which is itself a comment on video game worlds, but let’s not go there right now). However, ask yourself this: how on earth can you improve on a game that contains one of the greatest moments in the history of interactive entertainment? Continue reading...

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

Photo, video and voice messages have all been censored although text messages using the Facebook-owned app are getting throughChina has partially blocked the popular messaging service WhatsApp, as authorities tighten their grip on the internet ahead of a major leadership reshuffle in Beijing.Photo, video and voice messages sent by the Guardian from Beijing were all blocked on Wednesday, but text messages were not affected. Dozens of users in China complained of a total ban on sending any type of messages on WhatsApp. Continue reading...

Meals such as $19.99 salmon nicoise salad available to customers based in select cities where company operates its Amazon Fresh delivery serviceAmazon has released its first “meal kits”, just days after revealing its intentions in the area by filing a trademark for the phrase: “We do the prep. You be the chef.”Priced between $15.99 (for meals like “falafel patties with tomato & sumac salad”) and $19.99 (for ones including “salmon nicoise salad with herb crust & olive aioli”) for two portions, the meals are available to customers based in select cities where the company operates its Amazon Fresh grocery delivery service. Continue reading...

UK’s National Cybersecurity Centre warned of connections ‘from multiple UK IP addresses to state-sponsored threats’, according to reportsThe UK energy sector is likely to have been targeted and probably compromised by nation-state hackers, according to a memo from Britain’s National Cybersecurity Centre.The NCSC, a subsidiary of GCHQ, warned that it had spotted connections “from multiple UK IP addresses to infrastructure associated with advanced state-sponsored hostile threat actors, who are known to target the energy and manufacturing sectors,” according to Motherboard, which obtained a copy of the document. Continue reading...

Information commissioner acts after consumers are bombarded with messages promoting firm’s Satsuma LoansA West Yorkshire credit company has been fined £80,000 by a government watchdog after bombarding consumers with nearly 1m nuisance texts in six months.Bradford-based Provident Personal Credit Ltd employed third-party companies to send 999,057 unsolicited text messages to promote personal loans for its brand Satsuma Loans. Continue reading...

Parent company Ruby Life Inc agrees to pay settlement following class-action lawsuits from plaintiffs who allege company misrepresented level of securityThe parent company of hacked extramarital dating site Ashley Madison has agreed to pay an $11.2m (£8.57m) settlement to US-based users of the site, ending a two-year court battle.Ruby Life Inc agreed to pay the settlement following a number of class-action lawsuits “alleging inadequate data security practices and misrepresentations regarding Ashley Madison”. It will pay for, among other things, “payments to settlement class members who submit valid claims for alleged losses resulting from the data breach and alleged misrepresentations as described further in the proposed settlement agreement”. Continue reading...

New pictograms include a bearded person, a breastfeeding woman, a sandwich, a zombie and a T-rex and will be available with iOS 11 this autumnToday is World Emoji Day, and to celebrate, Apple has revealed the final versions of some of the new emoji it will be introducing to iOS in the next version of iOS 11, which is due out this autumn.Among the new pictograms the company has showed off are “bearded person” and “breastfeeding”, and food items such as “sandwich” and “coconut”. Continue reading...

Tesla and SpaceX CEO says AI represents a ‘fundamental risk to human civilisation’ and that waiting for something bad to happen is not an optionTesla and Space X chief executive Elon Musk has pushed again for the proactive regulation of artificial intelligence because “by the time we are reactive in AI regulation, it’s too late”.

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

Pupils at Stroud high school were outraged by strict new rules prohibiting the use of digital devices, but the results were remarkableFourteen-year-old friends Hannah Cox and Libby Shirnia admitted they were a little taken aback when their school announced stringent new rules on mobile phones, smart watches and Fitbit activity monitors.“Everyone’s reaction was: ‘This is so annoying.’” said Libby. “But then we chatted about it and thought it might be a good thing. It’s the worst thing when you’re having a conversation and someone is doing that [Libby mimes tapping and sliding on a smart screen]. Continue reading...

Algorithms can dictate whether you get a mortgage or how much you pay for insurance. But sometimes they’re wrong – and sometimes they are designed to deceiveLots of algorithms go bad unintentionally. Some of them, however, are made to be criminal. Algorithms are formal rules, usually written in computer code, that make predictions on future events based on historical patterns. To train an algorithm you need to provide historical data as well as a definition of success.We’ve seen finance get taken over by algorithms in the past few decades. Trading algorithms use historical data to predict movements in the market. Success for that algorithm is a predictable market move, and the algorithm is vigilant for patterns that have historically happened just before that move. Financial risk models also use historical market changes to predict cataclysmic events in a more global sense, so not for an individual stock but rather for an entire market. The risk model for mortgage-backed securities was famously bad – intentionally so – and the trust in those models can be blamed for much of the scale and subsequent damage wrought by the 2008 financial crisis. Continue reading...

Those who fell for the gag clause inserted into wifi terms and conditions committed to more than a month of community serviceDo you read the terms and conditions? Probably not. No one does. And so, inevitably, 22,000 people have now found themselves legally bound to 1000 hours of community service, including, but not limited to, cleaning toilets at festivals, scraping chewing gum off the streets and “manually relieving sewer blockages”.The (hopefully) joke clause was inserted in the terms and conditions of Manchester-based wifi company Purple for a period of two weeks, “to illustrate the lack of consumer awareness of what they are signing up to when they access free wifi”. The company operates wifi hotspots for a number of brands, including Legoland, Outback Steakhouse and Pizza Express. Continue reading...

Kumbu is a service to preserve your digital memories – but how do you decide which of our mountain of data to keep?

Malcolm Turnbull says the ‘law of Australia’ will prevail over the ‘laws of mathematics’ in new legislation on encryption. But he is on shaky groundThe Australian government is proposing legislation, similar to that introduced in the UK, that will compel technology companies to provide access to users’ messages, regardless of whether they have been encrypted.The attorney general, George Brandis, said on Friday: “What we are proposing to do, if we can’t get the voluntary cooperation we are seeking, is to extend the existing law that says to individuals, citizens and to companies that in certain circumstances you have an obligation to assist law enforcement if it is in within your power to do so.”

Two men now charged with rape and police believe other sexual assaults may have happenedQueensland police are urging women who have been sexually assaulted while using Uber to come forward after a second Brisbane driver was charged with rape.A 37-year-old man was due to face Brisbane magistrates court on Friday charged with the rape of a 16-year-old girl in the city’s south on 8 July. Continue reading...

Museum of London

Ride-hailing company makes second embarrassing climbdown after selling its Chinese operations last yearUber is scaling back in Russia by spinning off its operations in the country to form a new company majority-owned by local rival Yandex.The deal involves Uber’s ride-hailing and food-delivery services in Russia, as well as Azerbaijan, Belarus and Kazakhstan, folding into the new firm, along with Yandex’s own taxi app, which also operates in Armenia and Georgia. Both brands will continue to operate, but the driver-side apps will be merged into one, the company said Continue reading...

The streaming giant has been accused of commissioning generic instrumental music to go on its hugely popular playlists – and save it millions in royalties. We take a listenIt is 10pm on Tuesday, and I have just become the 1,106,079th Spotify user this month to listen to an artist called Charles Bolt. The track I’m playing, Far and Beyond, is a gentle piano instrumental, not unlike the music Yann Tiersen composed for the soundtrack of whimsical French movie Amélie. This, I confess, is proving something of a problem. I have been listening to gentle piano instrumentals not unlike the music Yann Tiersen composed for the soundtrack of Amélie all day, and I suspect I reached the limits of my tolerance for it some hours back. This music long ago ceased to make me feel chilled or peaceful or any of the adjectives used in the titles of the Spotify playlists that contain it. Now I suspect it has turned me faintly hysterical. I can’t stop laughing at it. A playlist prosaically titled Piano in the Background has made me snigger.There’s something ineffably hilarious about the thudding inevitability of what comes out of my headphones. The mysteriously named Novo Talos and the Hellenic-sounding Milos Stavos both make gentle piano instrumentals not unlike the music Yann Tiersen composed for the soundtrack of Amélie. So does Wilma Harrods. And so does an artist called Mayhem, which part of me really hopes is the legendary Norwegian black metal band, famed for their horrifying backstory of church-burning, suicide and murder. I quite like the idea of their members taking a break from performing songs called things such as Chainsaw Gutsfuck in order to make gentle piano instrumentals not unlike the music from the soundtrack of Amélie. Continue reading...

Exclusive: Tami Barker, who said she was canceling a guest’s booking because the woman was Asian, must take a course in Asian American studiesAn Airbnb host who canceled a woman’s reservation using a racist remark has been ordered to pay $5,000 in damages for racial discrimination and take a course in Asian American studies.Dyne Suh, a 26-year-old law clerk, had booked Tami Barker’s mountain cabin in Big Bear, California, for a skiing weekend with friends in February, but Barker canceled the reservation by text message minutes before they arrived,stating: “I wouldn’t rent it to u if u were the last person on earth” and “One word says it all. Asian”. Continue reading...

Who needs Tim Cook? Colonel Sanders is launching a red smartphone with Huawei in China, complete with Snapdragon processor and fingerprint scannerNot content with ruling the fried chicken market, Colonel Sanders has set his sights on another avenue, the smartphone, with Kentucky Fried Chicken’s brand new Enjoy 7 Plus Android device. Watch out Apple.The new 5.5in smartphone, made in partnership with Huawei, has a Snapdragon 425 processor, 3GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, a microSD card slot and comes with Android 7.0. There’s even a fingerprint scanner on the back right above the laser engraved image of the Colonel’s head, just in case the red colour, KFC app and Sanders-based wallpaper weren’t enough. Continue reading...

Mike Ashley swoops on video games retailer after profit warning forced by shortage of Nintendo Switch consolesThe founder of Sports Direct, Mike Ashley, has added a near 26% stake in the struggling video games retailer Game Digital to his string of high street investments.Game Digital said Sports Direct, controlled by the billionaire, had acquired 44m shares, amounting to a 25.75% stake. Game released a profit warning last month due to a supply shortage of Nintendo’s Switch console and a weaker lineup of new games. Continue reading...

Japanese developers say device could help bring end to ‘sumehara’, or ‘smell harassment’, by those who disturb colleagues with their body odourWorried your body odour is out of control but suspect your colleagues are too polite to say anything about it? Now there’s an app for that, too.A Japanese tech company has begun selling a device that allows people to self-test their sweaty exteriors for three categories of smell. Continue reading...

The tech company has funded 329 papers on public policy since 2005, according to the US-based Campaign for AccountabilityGoogle has spent millions funding academic research in the US and Europe to try to influence public opinion and policymakers, a watchdog has claimed.Over the last decade, Google has funded research papers that appear to support the technology company’s business interests and defend against regulatory challenges such as antitrust and anti-piracy, the US-based Campaign for Accountability (CfA) said in a report. Continue reading...

International Convention Centre, Sydney