Technology | The Guardian

Initial coin offerings involve selling a number of crytographic tokens to investors at the launch of a projectThe latest cryptocurrency boom is beginning to stall as regulators worldwide turn their attention to the “initial coin offerings”, which have driven a precipitous rise in the sector’s market value reaching a high of $177bn (£136bn).The total value of the hundreds of tracked cryptocurrencies has fallen by more than 18% to $145bn since Friday’s high, according to analytics site CoinMarketCap. The collapse seems to have been triggered by a ruling from the Chinese central bank that declared it illegal to raise money through launching new cryptocurrencies. Continue reading...

Latvian foreign minister says there is increasing evidence that Russia is automating disinformation on social mediaThe west is failing to get to grips with Russian hacking and fake news, the Latvian foreign minister, Edgars Rinkēvičs, has said.Speaking on a visit to London, Rinkēvičs said there was increasing evidence that Russia was automating disinformation on social media. Pointing to new Nato-sponsored research showing more than five times the number of Russian language tweets sent in Latvia concerning Nato came from bots, instead of from individuals. The figure in Estonia was nine times as many. He described the tactic as ”very systematic and a new way to spread propaganda amongst young people”. Continue reading...

North Korea ‘low on our list of concerns’ says Tesla boss following Putin’s statement that whoever leads in AI will rule worldElon Musk has said again that artificial intelligence could be humanity’s greatest existential threat, this time by starting a third world war.The prospect clearly weighs heavily on Musk’s mind, since the SpaceX, Tesla and Boring Company chief tweeted at 2.33am Los Angeles time about how AI could led to the end of the world – without the need for the singularity. Continue reading...

From Star Trek to The Matrix via The HitchHiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, science fiction has long predicted computing innovation before the designers haveScience fiction has an uncanny ability to predict the future of technology, from Star Trek’s Padd, essentially an iPad, to the Jetsons’ robot vacuum, basically a Roomba.Now that the voice assistant is here, that’s another checklist off the sci-fi predictor, but while our Alexas, Siris, Cortanas and Google Assistants are pretty basic right now, if sci-fi continues its great prelude to the future, what will the computers of the future really be like? Continue reading...

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

The jazz pioneer on Mass Effect: Andromeda, Watford boxing star Anthony Joshua, Notting Hill carnival’s Panorama and a lovely frittataBorn in London in 1964, Courtney Pine began teaching himself the saxophone aged 14, later adding bass clarinet, flute and keyboard to his repertoire. One of Britain’s pre-eminent jazz artists, Pine has fused jazz with genres including reggae, drum’n’bass, hip-hop and jungle. His debut album, Journey to the Urge Within, entered the UK top 40 in 1986; since then he has released 17 more albums, including 1995’s Mercury-nominated Modern Day Jazz Stories and 2015’s Song (The Ballad Book). He was awarded an OBE in 2000 and a CBE in 2009 for services to jazz music. His latest album, Black Notes from the Deep, is released on 27 October on Freestyle Records and he tours the UK from September. Continue reading...

Naughty Dog’s long-running, much-garlanded series aces the Bechdel test and breaks new boundaries with two female leadsThroughout the latter half of the 1990s, video games were often talked about as a looming threat to cinema. The advent of CD-Rom technology promoted the medium’s blocksome characters from avatars to actors, complete with lines of dialogue written by professional scriptwriters and spoken by performers loaned from TV and film. Soaring orchestral soundtracks backed three-act structures and, as games popped from 2D to 3D, the composition of scenes, lighting and lines of sight became concerns for digital directors as well as film.At some point the trajectory shifted. Games still borrow filmic techniques, but the truly cinematic video game – that which seeks to mimic the characterisation, structure and run-time of a blockbuster movie – is endangered, squeezed out by world-conquering, team-based eSports on one side and, on the other, everlasting online worlds where the game’s geography expands to match the player’s wanderlust. Naughty Dog remains one of the few purveyors of the filmic game. The American studio’s flagship Uncharted series remains the final bastion of this expensive, sophisticated form of game-making, earning plaudits from Hollywood-preeners such as Bafta and the Writer’s Guild of America. Continue reading...

The hard as nails Hilux is the enforcer of the pick-up world. But is Toyota in danger of softening it up?Price: £25,556

Sex scandals, rows over terrorism, fears for its impact on social policy: the backlash against Big Tech has begun. Where will it end?Just a decade ago, Silicon Valley pitched itself as a savvy ambassador of a newer, cooler, more humane kind of capitalism. It quickly became the darling of the elite, of the international media, and of that mythical, omniscient tribe: the “digital natives”. While an occasional critic – always easy to dismiss as a neo-Luddite – did voice concerns about their disregard for privacy or their geeky, almost autistic aloofness, public opinion was firmly on the side of technology firms.Silicon Valley was the best that America had to offer; tech companies frequently occupied – and still do – top spots on lists of the world’s most admired brands. And there was much to admire: a highly dynamic, innovative industry, Silicon Valley has found a way to convert scrolls, likes and clicks into lofty political ideals, helping to export freedom, democracy and human rights to the Middle East and north Africa. Who knew that the only thing thwarting the global democratic revolution was capitalism’s inability to capture and monetise the eyeballs of strangers? Continue reading...

A storm has erupted around the dismissal of Barry Lynn, a Silicon Valley critic, from his Google-funded thinktank. We have every reason to be concerned

I have no apps. I play no games. I don’t tweet. But still my phone exerts its holdI recall my first mobile phone with a mixture of fondness and irritation. I bought it 20 years ago in Australia in preparation for the arduous trek from Perth to Broome in the far north-west. Broome was known to be a feral place. Superannuated pearl fishermen roamed the streets in cowboy boots. Six-foot goannas broke into kitchens to rummage through the rubbish. Brahminy kites patrolled the skies, waiting for whatever sidled poisonously out of the mangrove swamps. Temperatures reached a thousand degrees in the shade, only there was no shade. When you’re that remote, a mobile phone is a necessity. “Hello, is that air rescue? Helicopter me out of here. Now.”It was a chunky Nokia cased in leather with a waterproof plastic window and a clip for hanging on your belt, alongside your crocodile knife and snake eviscerator. A phone was just a phone then. It sent a call and it received a call. Except that in Broome it did neither. No signal that far north. I wore it on my belt anyway, in case I needed to throw it at a goanna. Continue reading...

Tom and Ruth Chapman join the ranks of the mega-rich after selling their online designer fashion empire to investorsA husband and wife who started in fashion retail with one shop in Wimbledon 30 years ago have banked £400m after selling their online designer empire Matchesfashion.com to private equity investors.

An academic fired after criticising Google shows how Silicon Valley shapes our realityWhen Google received a record $2.7bn fine from the European Union in June for abusing its search engine monopoly to promote its shopping search service, a relatively minor member of an American thinktank, the New America Foundation, posted a short statement praising the regulator, and calling on the US to follow suit.The New America Foundation is intimately intertwined with the search firm. It has received more than $20m over its lifetime from Google and related companies and individuals. So when Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google’s parent company Alphabet, expressed his displeasure over the statement, the foundation moved quickly. The tussle that followed ended up with its author, Barry Lynn, departing the group, along with his entire team at the Open Markets programme. Continue reading...

Smartphone manufacturers are looking to the new iPhone to boost a lagging market, which has seen annual sales growth slumpIt is less than a fortnight until the launch of the new iPhone, but shoppers outside Apple’s flagship London store express no enthusiasm at the thought of queuing up for it.A common refrain among phone owners outside the shop is to point to their handset and state: “I’ll probably wait till it breaks.” The new iPhone makes its debut on 12 September and is rumoured to have a number of new features for an Apple device, including doing away with the home button on the front of the handset, but there is a perception among mobile phone owners that the pace of technological evolution has slowed. Continue reading...

What was your favourite team to manage? Which signing was key to your success? And what happened to that social life?The first edition of Championship Manager was released 25 years ago today. The first release included four playable English divisions, each containing only 20 teams – despite there being 22 or 24 at the time – with foreign teams outside of the English divisions including players called “No1” all the way through to “No11.” One of the game’s key innovations was player ratings match by match. Football Manager has long since become the bigger franchise but we’d like to hear your Championship Manager experiences through the early years.Were you on board with the game right from the start, taking a team up the divisions? Or were you more interested in the Championship Manager Italia games that followed, allowing you to lead your favourite Serie A or Serie B team to glory? Were you a member of the Cherno Samba fan club, or were there other unpolished gems you always made sure to sign? Did you miss a particularly important social event because it took you longer to earn promotion with Scarborough than you had expected? Have you ever added any Championship Manager achievements to your CV? Share all your memories with us by filling in the form below. We’ll hopefully do a round up of your favourite stories next week. Continue reading...

On Facebook, the only member of the immediate Zuckerberg family you can block is Beast, their dog – plus Mark’s sister RandiBad news! You still can’t block Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook. And now you can’t block his wife Priscilla Chan either.The saga began back in January, when people first noticed that Zuckerberg’s account was immune to the block button. Continue reading...

It wasn’t all about blockbuster titles at the world’s biggest games convention – here are the most weird, wonderful and odd offerings from the show floor

Successful bid with Bain Capital may help iPhone maker source memory chips for smartphones in battle with rival SamsungApple has joined a consortium of businesses led by the investment company Bain Capital in a last-ditch £14bn offer for Toshiba’s chip unit.Toshiba is the world’s second-largest producer of Nand memory chips, which are used in smartphones and computers. A deal may be crucial for Apple in keeping down prices of components for its iPhone, as well as reducing dependence on the market leader, Samsung. Continue reading...

Phone numbers and email addresses of high-profile users exposed just days after Selena Gomez’s account posted naked shots of ex-boyfriend BieberA bug in Instagram that allowed criminals to steal the private information of celebrities has come to light just days after hackers took over the account of Selena Gomez to post nude pictures of Justin Bieber.Instagram admitted that the bug within its application programming interface (API) allowed at least one person to gain access to the private email addresses and phone numbers of high-profile users. Continue reading...

Barry Lynn has spent years studying the growing power of tech giants such as Google, and asking if they are monopolies. He believes the answer is yesEvery second of every day Google processes over 40,000 search queries – that’s about 3.5bn questions a day or 1.2tn a year. But there’s one question that Google apparently doesn’t want answered: is Google a monopoly?Barry Lynn, until this week a senior fellow at Washington thinktank the New America Foundation, has spent years studying the growing power of tech giants like Google and Facebook. He believes the answer is yes. And that opinion, he argues, has cost him his job. Continue reading...

Fraser starts his history course next month and still doesn’t know what laptop to buy. He’d rather not splurge £1,000 if he can get something for half the price Continue reading...

New America Foundation, which has received $21m from Google, dropped Open Markets initiative after senior fellow wrote blogpost praising EU fineAn influential Washington thinktank that has received more than $21m in funding from Google and its chairman Eric Schmidt dropped a team of scholars after its leader wrote an article praising the European Union’s decision to fine the tech giant.The New America Foundation is one of the leading left-leaning policy groups in the US and is led by Anne-Marie Slaughter, an author, foreign policy analyst and political scientist. In June, Barry Lynn, a senior fellow who led the thinktank’s Open Markets initiative, wrote a blogpost praising the EU’s decision to levy a record €2.42bn ($2.7bn) fine on Google for breaching antitrust rules and abusing its market dominance. “Google’s market power is one of the most critical challenges for competition policymakers in the world today,” Lynn wrote. Continue reading...

The two biggest players in smartphone software are pitching to win the war for AR. But will Ikea and Pokémon Go be enough to get consumers on board?This year the next big battleground between the titans of the smartphone industry will be augmented reality, as both Apple and Google duke it out with new phones, cameras and systems designed to provide Terminator vision – or Pokémon Go on steroids – to the masses.Augmented reality (AR) is nothing new. Many people’s first experience of the concept was seeing through the eyes of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 Terminator in James Cameron’s 1984 blockbuster. The movie showed the Terminator’s vision overlaid with information about subjects, objects and objectives. Continue reading...

Millions of passwords also contained in breach, a result of spammers collecting information in attempt to break in to users’ email accountsMore than 700m email addresses, as well as a number of passwords, have leaked publicly thanks to a misconfigured spambot, in one of the largest data breaches ever.The number of real humans’ contact details contained in the dump is likely to be lower, however, due to the number of fake, malformed and repeated email addresses contained in the dataset, according to data breach experts. Continue reading...

Autonomous vehicles have long been seen as a major security issue, but experts say they’re less vulnerable to hacks than human-controlled vehiclesSelf-driving cars feel like they should provide a nice juicy target for hackers.After all, a normal car has a driver with their hands on the wheel and feet on the pedals. Common sense suggeststhis provides a modicum of protection against a car takeover which a self-driving car, or even one with just the sort of assisted driving features already found on the road today, lacks. Continue reading...

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

The award is made up of 560,000 shares and has ballooned in value thanks to the company’s soaring stock priceTim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, has collected $89.6m as part of a 10-year deal that he signed as an incentive to keep the iPhone maker at the forefront of the technology industry after he took over the reins in 2011 from company co-founder Steve Jobs.The windfall was made up of the proceeds of the sale of 560,000 shares, according to a regulatory filing. Continue reading...

Iulian Enache, 31, shared intimate photos belonging to Ronan Hughes, from Northern Ireland, after teenager failed to pay ransomA man who blackmailed a Northern Irish schoolboy who went on to kill himself has been jailed for four years in prison.

Web.com pulls support for one of the oldest and largest neo-nazi hate sites following campaign by Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under LawOne of the oldest and largest neo-nazi sites on the internet, the white supremacist chatroom Stormfront, has been thrown off the open web by its domain registrar.

Holidays, children, natural phenomena: it’s easy to feel something didn’t happen unless you took a photo. But there are moments a picture can’t replicate

During his 12 years with Expedia it became a dominant name in the travel industry, but it will be a major challenge to steady Uber’s shipThe man designated as Uber’s new chief executive left Tehran for the US aged nine on the eve of the Iranian revolution, and became a driving force behind the success of the online travel company Expedia.Dara Khosrowshahi, who was chosen ahead of Meg Whitman, the chief executive of HP Enterprise, and the former General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt, is expected to join the ride-hailing company after 12 years at the helm of Expedia, during which time it made a series of acquisitions and took on a dominant role in the travel industry. Continue reading...

Announcement comes as ride-hailing service fights allegations of sexism and racism that led to ousting of founder Travis KalanickUber has chosen Dara Khosrowshahi, the chief executive of travel company Expedia, to be its new boss, ending a contentious search that has been marred by boardroom spats and leaks.The announcement, made on Sunday, comes as the ride-hailing service fights allegations of sexism and racism that led to the ousting of its founder, Travis Kalanick. Continue reading...

The furore caused by a Google engineer’s comments about gender bias overlooks the more endemic problem of male chauvinism within the tech industryA few months ago, a Google engineer named James Damore wrote an incendiary internal memo on a 12-hour flight to China. He had just attended a “diversity programme” run by his employer, which had clearly annoyed or disturbed him. “I heard things that I definitely disagreed with,” he later told an interviewer. He said there was a lot of shaming at the programme. “They said ‘No you can’t say that, that’s sexist… You can’t do this…’ There’s just so much hypocrisy in a lot of the things that they’re saying.”Related: Sexual harassment in Silicon Valley: have we reached a tipping point? Continue reading...

Sega’s blue hedgehog gets an out-of-house reboot, Uncharted 4’s spin-off proves good value, and Namco goes back in time Continue reading...

A crop of female developers is aiming to empower more women to break into a historically male-dominated industry to right the gender imbalance and, ultimately, creates game suited to, well, womenAt 23, Ally McLean already has what many would consider an enviable career.Currently the project lead at Sydney independent game development studio Robot House, McLean got her start as a professional cosplayer – designing and wearing elaborate gaming and pop-culture character costumes at comic book and gaming conventions. Continue reading...

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

The moreish multiplayer returns with a sprawling universe to explore, meaning you might spend as much time getting lost as you do shooting aliensThe greatest strength of Destiny – a game where even its biggest fans often struggle to explain why they continue playing for thousands of hours – is its core compulsion loop. Wandering around the Moon, shooting aliens in the head, picking up glowing engrams, harvesting helium filaments and completing patrols has proved immensely satisfying in a way that few other titles have managed.So it’s not surprising that the sequel doubles down on those elements, retooling the entire game to put that shooting-aliens-in-the-head experience front and centre. Continue reading...

Lee Jae-yong, the country’s third richest person, is to hear his fate in a scandal that has rocked the political and business worldsUntil a few months ago, Lee Jae-yong was well on the way to securing his status as South Korea’s most powerful business leader.

Britain to argue that there should be no substantial regulatory changes as a result of leaving the EUThe government is seeking to negotiate a deal over data sharing with Europe in which there are no substantial regulatory changes as a result of Brexit.The ambitious strategy emerged on Thursday in the last of a series of summer policy papers published by the Department for Exiting the European Union ahead of the next round of talks in Brussels on Monday. Continue reading...

Gareth’s son wants a laptop, but he might end up spending too much time playing games. If he got a Raspberry Pi would he learn more about computing?I just read your helpful article about laptops for children from November 2015. My eight-year-old is badgering us for a laptop. He has had a tablet for a few years, plays Minecraft and Lego games, and watches YouTube videos. I am worried that getting him a laptop will just feed an obsession with games and gamers. I would like him to learn more about computers and was thinking about getting a Raspberry Pi instead. Am I being a mean parent by not getting him a laptop or PC like many of his peers? If I go down this route, do you have any laptop recommendations for this year? GarethObsessive PC gamers usually know far more about computers than professional users. In their quest for performance, they learn about multi-threading, over-clocking, pixel-shading and software optimisation techniques, as well as things like memory, disk drive, keyboard and mouse speeds. As a result, they are much more likely to build their own machines. However, this rarely applies to children as young as your son.

SMS messages revealed in corruption trial show South Korean journalists requesting favours for positive coverage, as watchdogs decry company’s powerSouth Korea’s so-called “trial of the century” has seen Samsung’s crown prince Lee Jae-yong, the company’s vice-chairman, accused of bribing ousted president Park Geun-hye – but it has also shone new light on the depths of the electronics firm’s media manipulation.The company is awaiting this Friday’s verdict on several of Samsung’s current and former top executives, for their alleged involvement in a political scandal that has rocked South Korea. Lee could face a 12-year jail term if convicted of bribing Park to push through a controversial merger in 2015. Continue reading...

James Cameron’s smash-hit sequel gains a dimension and loses none of its splendour, but questions over whether it was truly necessary remain3D isn’t finished yet: James Cameron has supervised a new version of his smash-hit 1991 sequel Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and watching in immersive 3D is a possible new way of getting excited about the technical effects that were state-of-the-art at the time.Related: Hasta la vista: why not even James Cameron can save 3D movies Continue reading...

The ‘funny little hack’ started a decade ago with #barcamp, and now 125m of them are shared daily on Twitter alone – but not without a few misfiresThe hashtag turns 10 today, and its inventor, Chris Messina – aka user no 1186 on Twitter – has explained how a small group of early Twitter users wanted to make conversations easier to follow.Related: Obama's anti-racism tweet after Charlottesville is most liked ever on Twitter Continue reading...

Softbank’s humanoid robot ‘Pepper’ dons robes to provide low-cost funerals complete with live-streaming optionIn Japan robots can serve as companions, helpers for the elderly, entertainment bots and even sexual partners, but now SoftBank’s humanoid robot Pepper has put itself up for hire as a Buddhist priest for funerals.Taking the German blessing bot’s idea and running with it, Pepper’s new code will let it chant sutras in a computerised voice while tapping a drum, providing a cheaper alternative to a human priest to see your loved ones off into the eternal sleep. Continue reading...

Company follows Waymo’s lead in pivoting from full ‘Apple car’ to manufacturing tech to automate already existing vehiclesApple is following the road taken by Waymo, the autonomous vehicle subsidiary of Google-parent Alphabet, and downshifting on its still-unannounced self-driving car project, according to a report in the New York Times.The company has been working on its automotive technology under the internal code name “Project Titan” since at least 2014, and once intended to build its own vehicle from start to finish, creating a true “Apple Car”. Continue reading...

MPs have been urged to outlaw ‘catfishing’, when perpetrators steal the identity of someone else to strike up an online relationship

Personal data is to the tech world what oil is to the fossil fuel industry. That’s why companies like Amazon and Facebook plan to dig deeper than we ever imagined

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