Technology | The Guardian

Shares in Snapchat company opened Thursday at $24 and rose to $27 by Friday, but analysts predict struggles similar to those of Twitter, Groupon and Fitbit

Ride-hailing app firm argued that standard required of Transport for London test to obtain licence was too high

The new Nintendo Switch title offers a vast world to explore, which can be as frustrating as it is magical. Here are some hints for those about to enter Hyrule

How social media and populism are coupling in new and powerful ways – and changing our lives in the processWhat makes social media so conducive to populist discourse? What similarities are there with the propaganda of yore?To find out how old power structures are being shaken by new platforms, Leigh Alexander hears from Paulo Gerbaudo, a professor of digital culture at King’s College London; Anastasia Denisova, a lecturer in journalism at University of Westminster; and Emmy Eklundh, a teaching fellow in Spanish and international politics at King’s College London. Continue reading...

Since the 17th century we’ve been strapping bits and pieces to our bodies in pursuit of technological nirvanaWearable technology is arguably the most exciting area of consumer technology at the moment, but its beginnings go a lot further back than you might expect. Continue reading...

Snap Inc’s IPO pushes Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy’s company ahead of Twitter and potentially creates a serious rival for FacebookSnap Inc, the company behind disappearing messaging app Snapchat, has gone public with stocks soaring 44% on their first day of trading and valuing the company at $28bn.

Susan Fowler says Uber has hired a law firm to investigate her while company says inquiry’s target is her published claims, ‘not her personally’The former Uber engineer who published a viral account of sexual harassment and discrimination said her former employer had hired a law firm to investigate her.Susan Fowler, whose blogpost about sexism and misconduct sparked widespread debate about the mistreatment of women in Silicon Valley, said on Thursday that Uber was investigating her and that she had hired the law firm Baker Curtis & Schwartz to represent her. Continue reading...

The flotation of this tech company is an absurdity, where desperate investors pay to own a piece of a company that they will have no say in running

The Nintendo Switch launch title takes the Zelda franchise to a whole new level, producing something even greater than the sum of its finely honed partsNintendo tricked us all. For years, it gave the impression that it was content to live in its own little corner of the gaming world, making well-received updates to its own franchises, without really caring about what the wider industry was doing.Now we know that for all that time, it was watching and learning. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is the result of that examination: a game that marries the best bits of the franchise’s long history with the best bits of the rest of the gaming world, and produces something even greater than the sum of its parts. Continue reading...

Same agent as used in anti-nail biting treatment coats Nintendo Switch game cartridges to help prevent children swallowing themThe Nintendo Switch is a mixed-use, family friendly console and its games come on little proprietary memory cards. Those cards have been with reviewers for a week or so now and, while information about the games on them may still be embargoed, it has emerged the cartridges themselves taste horrendously bitter.History does not definitively record who first thought it a necessary part of their review to lick one, but someone did. Continue reading...

Robotics and artificial intelligence will continue to improve – but without political change such as a tax, the outcome will range from bad to apocalyptic

This technophile’s optimism for the future appears well founded if the past is any guideGeoff Dyer has complained that much current non-fiction is reducible to a snappy thesis that can be summed up “without the tedious obligation of reading the whole book”. Such books, he writes, seem like expanded versions of “skilfully managed proposals … which then get boiled back down again with the sale of serial rights”.Steven Johnson’s Wonderland is one of those books. Its claims can be condensed into a sentence. “When human beings create and share experiences designed to delight or amaze,” he writes, “they often end up transforming society in more dramatic ways than people focused on more utilitarian concerns.” Don’t look to the struggles for survival, land and wealth for the forces that drive social change, he says. Look to wherever you see “people mucking around with magic, toys, games and other seemingly idle pastimes”. Continue reading...

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

An outage at cloud provider Amazon Web Services resulted in websites and smart homes failing. Is this the future of our internet-connected lives?Here’s a cautionary tale about the future of the internet: an over three-hour outage in an obscure, if tremendously profitable, wing of online retailer Amazon resulted not only in websites such as Medium and Business Insider failing, but also in people unable to turn on their lights.This outage affected Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon subsidiary that provides cloud computing services to other businesses. If you’ve ever been told something is stored or run “in the cloud”, the likelihood is that it was in servers owned by Amazon – or by similar services provided by its two main competitors, Microsoft and Google. Continue reading...

Jim Crawford is a self-confessed dilettante who moves from project to project in the blink of an eye. How did he create the most anarchic video game ever made?When Jim Crawford released a browser game named Frog Fractions in 2012, half the people who played it called him a genius; the rest thought he was deranged. What most of them seemed to agree on however, was that they loved it. When influential site Rock Paper Shotgun covered the game, it did so under the header: “Frog Fractions might be the greatest game of all time”.Unpredictable and absurd, Frog Fractions starts out under the guise of a piece of edutainment software in which you control a frog sat on a pond scooping up bugs and defending fruit. Then after buying a few upgrades, you’re suddenly riding a dragon through an underground tunnel that takes you into Crawford’s own bizarre version of video game wonderland. Many read it as a comment on the absurd conventions of video games. Many others read it as weird frog game. Continue reading...

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

Kalanick apologized after a video obtained by Bloomberg showed him in a heated exchange with a driver who told the CEO: ‘I’m bankrupt because of you’

Outage of several hours affected websites including Medium, Business Insider, Slack, and a large part of the US east coastAmazon’s S3 cloud service experienced an outage of several hours on Tuesday that caused problems for many websites and mobile apps that rely on it, including Medium, Business Insider, Slack, Quora and Giphy.The company said earlier on Tuesday that it was experiencing “high error rates” on the platform affecting a large part of the east coast of the US. Then on Tuesday afternoon, Amazon posted on its service health dashboard that the issue had been resolved: Continue reading...

Company’s data compromised, leaking information including email addresses, passwords and voice recordingsThe personal information of more than half a million people who bought internet-connected fluffy animals has been compromised.The details, which include email addresses and passwords, were leaked along with access to profile pictures and more than 2m voice recordings of children and adults who had used the CloudPets stuffed toys. Continue reading...

Ride-hailing app challenges Transport for London over demand that minicab drivers pass language test to obtain licenceA plan to force London minicab drivers to pass written English tests would put nearly a third of them out of business, the ride-hailing app Uber has argued.In a high court battle with Transport for London, lawyers for Uber said the transport body’s estimates suggest 33,000 drivers would either fail the test or be deterred from trying to renew their licence. Continue reading...

Footage from Google-owned robotics firm Boston Dynamics shows its latest creation. The robot, named Handle, can stand on four legs, like previous creations, but at the end of its back two legs are two stabilised wheels, which let it stand up vertically and roll around at speeds of up to 9mph

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

News everyone’s favourite mobile phone is making a comeback has thrilled tech fans. Could the same happen to the Game Boy or PlayStation?There has rarely been as much excitement in the phone world as over news that the iconic Nokia 3310 is making a comeback. Launched way back in 2000, a naive age when people bought mobile phones in order to talk to each other, the handset is still famed for its lengthy battery life, structural solidity and Snake II. Seventeen years later, modern smartphones are crammed with high-tech features, but you have to charge them constantly and their demands on our attention – via endless social media alerts, updates and notifications – are becoming tiresome. Some people yearn for a simpler age when the phone just did what it was primarily designed for and most of your text messages were from confused relatives saying ‘AM I USING THIS CORRECTLY’.This kind of industrial technology nostalgia is usually just that – nostalgia. Very rarely do people actually really want to go back to primitive formats. You can yearn whimsically for the warm-toned glory days of the VHS player, but just remember when you had to program one to record Match of the Day. That’s right, they called it programming – because it was complicated and it often didn’t work. But the Nokia 3310 was also easy to use. It provided a service that is still relevant and valid today. Continue reading...

Big tech companies pay some of the country’s best salaries. But workers claim the high cost of living in the Bay Area has them feeling financially strained“I didn’t become a software engineer to be trying to make ends meet,” said a Twitter employee in his early 40s who earns a base salary of $160,000. It is, he added, a “pretty bad” income for raising a family in the Bay Area.The biggest cost is his $3,000 rent – which he said was “ultra cheap” for the area – for a two-bedroom house in San Francisco, where he lives with his wife and two kids. He’d like a slightly bigger property, but finds himself competing with groups of twentysomethings happy to share accommodation while paying up to $2,000 for a single room. Continue reading...

A point-and-click adventure on the ocean wave, mechanised warfare and a beguiling puzzler with colour-coded insectsPC, Wispfire, cert:7

The ‘indestructible’ handset returns, complete with the familiar ringtone, one-month standby time, colour screen and bags of nostalgia. Nokia’s revitalised phone business has reintroduced a brightly coloured version of the classic 3310 talk and text phone, the world’s most popular device in 2000 Continue reading...

Update lets consumers know when they should be able to buy the fast broadband service from a retailerNBN Co has updated its website to make it easier for people to find out when they can get the national broadband network connected at their home or business.

The gay dating app has appointed LGBT writer Max Wallis to be its first resident bard. I’m continuing what Byron started, he saysPoetry and sex have a long and venerable history, one often being used in the service of setting up the other. Catullus kicked things off, and Lord Byron, Sharon Olds and Carol Ann Duffy, among others, have run with the ball since. The work of those poets is perhaps best thought of as the context for what I am doing now. Starting next week, I will be the gay social networking app Grindr’s first poet in residence, making a video poem each month to be flashed in the app and also on its new platform, Into. They will be directed by Ashley Joiner, whose documentary Pride? premieres at the BFI’s LGBT film festival in March.The poems play on the essential themes of the app – relationships, our increasingly unsympathetic world and quite a lot of sex (topics that have been the subject of my last two books – Modern Love and Everything Everything). Each video threads into the next, telling a larger story about what is to be gay now (although I thought it best not to limit myself to what it means to be gay and on Grindr now – as that would mean a lot of requests to “send more pics” and any number of unsolicited anatomical images). Continue reading...

The governance specialist is clamping down on executive pay and more at AppleIt’s a brave soul who takes on the might of Apple. But corporate governance specialist Pirc is giving it a go before the US tech group’s annual meeting on Tuesday. It has advised investors to vote against a resolution on executive pay, partly on the basis that bonus targets may not have been challenging enough. And it is also advising against the reappointment of a number of non-executive directors, including Al Gore – yes, the man who was nearly US president and is a committed environmentalist – because he is apparently no longer independent, having been on the board for more than nine years. However it backs Apple on most of the resolutions which have been put forward by shareholders, and which the company opposes.In any case, it seems unlikely that Apple chief executive Tim Cook will be losing much sleep over all this. After all, the company is clearly doing the right thing as far as billionaire investor Warren Buffett is concerned, since he recently quadrupled his stake. And Cook already has a lot on his plate. April sees the opening of Apple’s new doughnut-shaped campus building in California – an homage to confectionery-loving Homer Simpson and the cartoon’s Mapple spoof perhaps? Continue reading...

A fascinating study by Adam Alter explains why many of us find our smartphones and computers so addictiveThe school near the GP practice where I work held an internet safety evening recently, subtitled “How to Keep Your Child Safe Online”. It was in the school hall, hosted by police officers, and explained the role of something called the “Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre”. The blurb on the leaflet promised parents of children between five and 11 would learn more about the dangers of the internet, and in particular, social media. I’m not sure when it became normal for kids to have to cope with malicious online messages, and be savvy about paedophiles masquerading as peers. In Irresistible, Adam Alter makes the frightening case that even without these hazards, modern connectivity threatens the health of not just our children, but everyone.A child I knew of killed herself after a humiliating post was shared widely around her school. An adolescent patient told me that he wakes three or four times each night to check his phone for messages, and struggles to concentrate in class. Last week a social worker told me that children in an “at-risk” family were being neglected – the mum lying on the sofa playing with her phone while the kids put themselves to bed. I know a six-year-old who walks with his hands held to his chest, thumbs blurred by movement, adopting his dad’s habitual posture, though he doesn’t yet have a phone. Continue reading...

If you don’t want a new car then for heaven’s sake don’t test drive Peugeot’s 3008. You’ll never be able to resist its charmsPrice: £21,795

As the messaging app company prepares for its initial public offering, its 26-year-old co-founder looks to build on talent, chutzpah and hard-heartednessEvan Spiegel, Snap Inc’s 26-year-old co-founder, has a reputation for playing nasty – but these days he is playing nice. If it works out, he’s going to be a very rich man. Next month Snap, owner of the Snapchat app, will go public on the New York stock exchange, cementing Spiegel and co-founder Bobby Murphy’s place in the ranks of tech billionaires.Snapchat has the same backstory as many of tech’s biggest names: started in a dorm room in Stanford, phenomenal growth, twentysomething college dropout founders, blah, blah, blah. It might sound like the same old, same old. But this share sale is different and could mark a turning point for tech sales of the future.

Apparent battery fire of rose gold iPhone 7 Plus prompts investigation following Samsung Galaxy Note 7 fearsApple is investigating claims that an iPhone 7 Plus “blew up” due to battery issues, following the posting of a video and photos of the destroyed smartphone on Twitter.

Game of Thrones actor on playing 600-year-old Asari, Lexi T’Perro, even though she doesn’t have time to play games herself“I’m not a gamer per se … I don’t have a life where I can spend hours gaming,” says Natalie Dormer. It’s a bold admission for an actor who has just been revealed as having a starring role in the new Mass Effect game, and one that may not be met kindly by fans of the franchise, but she adds: “I know if I did, this is exactly the kind of thing that I would play.”Mass Effect: Andromeda, the BioWare title which pairs combat with conversation, should be a good fit for Dormer. She is no stranger to backstabbing, high stakes and court intrigue from her TV work. The characters she plays in the Tudors, the Hunger Games and Game of Thrones are focused, conniving, manipulative. Hard-edged. She swishes silk skirts and allegiances fall; she rises up from the rubble with a shaved head and her fist in the air. To take these traits into the chromed expanse of the Mass Effect universe feels like a logical step. Dormer is voicing a 600-year-old Asari called Lexi T’Perro, one of several aboard the Tempest comprising what she calls “a motley crew”. Continue reading...

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

It all began with the Magnavox Odyssey, and there have been some truly brilliant, innovative machines since. But which made the cut?10 most influential mobile phones Continue reading...

Have you seen the gif of the guy blinking in disbelief? Meet Drew Scanlon, the man behind the memeHow does it feel when your face is plastered all over the internet?Ask Drew Scanlon – he knows all about it. He’s the face of a new meme you may have seen in the past few weeks. Continue reading...

Researchers call for alarms with lower tones combined with woman’s voice as they look for families to take part in studyChildren are at risk of dying in house fires because they often remain asleep when smoke alarms sound, say researchers.They are calling for high-pitched buzzers to be replaced with lower tones combined with a woman’s voice.

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

Britain will soon be down to just one paging provider, but for the nation’s paramedics, lifeboat crews and birdwatchers the devices remain essential kit

For those keeping count, we’re up to 17 copies, acquisition attempts, or inspirationsNot content with taking on Snapchat by shipping two clones of Snapchat Stories, attempting two acquisitions (one of Snapchat, one of a Chinese company making Snapchat-style camera apps), making four standalone Snapchat-style apps, bundling two ephemeral messaging implementations, and creating five new cameras with AR lenses, (see also here, here, here, here, here, here and here), Facebook is again shamelessly taking on Snapchat.Twice. Continue reading...

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

Former US attorney general brought in after female engineer claimed company frequently dismissed complaints and protected a repeat offenderUber has hired the former US attorney general Eric Holder to investigate allegations of sexual harassment after an engineer went public with claims that she repeatedly faced sexism and discrimination at the ride-sharing company.In a staff email shared with the Guardian on Monday, Uber’s CEO, Travis Kalanick, said Holder would conduct an “independent review” and also revealed that women made up only 15% of the company’s workforce in engineering, product management and scientist roles. Continue reading...

Its hunter/gatherer gameplay hasn’t moved on from Far Cry and Tomb Raider, but Zero Dawn sets a new visual benchmarkOn the face of it, a lavish and original fantasy epic set in a wonderfully realised world sounds like a welcome escape from the very real horrors being played out across the nightly news bulletins.Then again, given that Horizon: Zero Dawn deals with the consequences of hubristic ambition and sentient robots combining to bring about the near-annihilation of the human race, perhaps you’d be better off with an Enid Blyton book instead. At times Horizon: Zero Dawn, the latest title from Dutch studio Guerrilla Games, those behind the Killzone series, feels uncannily like prophecy rather than escapism. Or perhaps even a survival manual. This is a world where technology has all but defeated the human race, where the most powerful inhabitants are robot monsters, and where the lead character is looking to discover exactly what happened to the grand civilisation of the past. It could be a particularly bleak New Scientist article about 2025. Continue reading...

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

Sharing apps – from Airbnb to Uber – were supposed to make services open to everyone. But real-life discrimination can be exacerbated in an economy where we are vulnerable to others’ biasesThe problem started when Reed Kennedy tried to book an Airbnb house in upstate New York for New Year’s Eve. “I made a few attempts,” the 42-year-old real estate investor says. “Each time the host would reject my request, but when I went back it was still available for those dates. I realised something was going on.” Kennedy, who is African American, decided to get a white member of the group to attempt the booking. “She was able to get it immediately,” he continues. “I’d had a profile on Airbnb for three years, validated by email, Facebook and Google, as well as my driver’s licence and passport. She set up a profile with no references, no validations and was able to book immediately. At that point I realised my race was an issue.”At a time when racial tensions have exploded and racist hate crime is on the rise in the UK and US, discrimination has reared its head in another, more unexpected place: the sharing economy, bastion of feelgood values, sustainability, social responsibility and trust. “Belong anywhere” promises Airbnb. “Your day belongs to you,” Uber enthuses. “We do chores,” assures TaskRabbit, “you live life.” The messages are bold, slick and utopian. These platforms are a force for good. It’s all about sharing, after all. Except they now find themselves blamed for doing the opposite. Uber and Lyft have been accused of fostering discrimination. A 2016 study in Boston and Seattle found “significant evidence of discrimination”. Rides for men with black-sounding names were cancelled more than twice as often as for other men. Black people faced notably longer waiting times to get paired with drivers. Women were taken on longer routes. Away from the on-demand economy, Amazon was criticised for excluding black neighbourhoods when it launched its same-day delivery offer (it has since expanded its services to correct the problem in several cities). Continue reading...

Move comes after former Uber engineer Susan Fowler wrote blog outlining allegations of discrimination and sexism at cab-hailing app companyA former Uber engineer has come forward with allegations of sexual harassment and discrimination, claiming that management repeatedly dismissed her complaints, protected a repeat offender and threatened to fire her for raising concerns.The accusations from Susan Fowler, a former site reliability engineer who now works for technology company Stripe, prompted CEO Travis Kalanick to announce an “urgent investigation” on Sunday. Continue reading...

Gaming company Rocketwerkz claims staff focus better when not stressed by issues that need attention outside the workplaceA gaming company in New Zealand is luring employees from around the world by offering unlimited paid annual leave, a share in the company’s profits and no set work hours.Dean Hall became famous in international gaming circles for being the lead designer on the popular zombie apocalypse video game DayZ.

A pen-like device linked to a smartphone app, this gadget claims to be more accurate than a ruler – but will it go the distance?Billed as “the world’s first dimensioning tool”, the InstruMMent 01 looks like a pen, writes like a pen and doubles up as a handheld measuring device. Late last year, its creators raised $464,000 (£374,000) on crowdfunding site IndieGoGo, and last week InstruMMent 01 went on sale at Selfridges in London, advertised on the shop’s website as “the future of design”. It has been described by tech magazine Wired as a gadget “on a mission to finally kill the tape measure”, much to the annoyance of the man behind it.“We hear this over and over,” says Mladen Barbaric, CEO of Instrumments, at the product launch. “But we’ve never said that we’re trying to replace the measuring tape.” The firm’s repeated reference to “dimensioning” emphasises the distinction from mere measuring – but is it even a real word? “It is. You can look it up,” says Barbaric. “The real scientific definition is ‘quantifying in space’.” Continue reading...

The leader of the free world’s ‘invincible ignorance’ about cybersecurity is worrying in the extremeMy favourite image of the week was a picture of the Queen opening the National Cyber Security Centre in London. Her Majesty is looking bemusedly at a large display while a member of staff explains how hackers could target the nation’s electricity supply. The job of the centre’s director, Ciaran Martin, is to protect the nation from such dangers. It’s a heavy responsibility, but at least he doesn’t have to worry that his head of state is a cybersecurity liability.His counterpart in the United States does not have that luxury. To the astonishment of everyone in the tech community, King Donald is still tweeting and nattering away on his Samsung Galaxy phone, an Android device that in security terms is the equivalent of emmental cheese. When Trump was elected, most people assumed that he would give up his favourite phone, just as Obama had to give up using his beloved BlackBerry, in favour of something that had been “hardened” by the NSA. It hasn’t happened. Continue reading...