Technology | The Guardian

Basketball star joins a growing list of famous venture capitalists who, having earned a fortune in one field, look to Silicon Valley to lose a fortune in anotherThere are no second acts in American lives. There are only Series B financing rounds.Four months after Kobe Bryant ended a 20-year career with the Los Angeles Lakers by going 6 for 21 from the three-point line against the Utah Jazz, the retired basketball star revealed in the Wall Street Journal that he would be launching a venture capital fund with partner Jeff Stibel. Continue reading...

From speedier replies, settings and app switching to more emoji, hidden settings and a weird cat collecting gameGoogle’s latest version of Android is already rolling out to the company’s Nexus and Pixel devices and will begin launching on new smartphones starting with the new LG V20.

Oscar-nominated actor refused the Napster billionaire’s request to preside over ceremony dressed in character, saying: ‘Gandalf doesn’t do weddings’Ian McKellen says he turned down $1.5m (£1.14m) to officiate at Napster billionaire Sean Parker’s wedding dressed as Gandalf the wizard.McKellen, who played the character in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, didn’t know the source of the offer when he was asked to marry Parker and his wife, singer Alexandra Lenas. The request came via a mutual acquaintance of Parker and McKellen’s, according to the Mail on Sunday. McKellen said he would have considered the offer if Parker hadn’t stipulated that he come in character. Continue reading...

The death of the gorilla has turned into a meme, but the zoo is ‘not amused’ by the onslaught of jokes on social mediaCincinnati zoo has deactivated its social accounts after it asked the public to stop making memes about Harambe the gorilla.The animal was shot dead this year after a three-year-old child climbed into his enclosure. Since then, Harambe has turned into a source of humorous content online. Continue reading...

Sleekly designed air purifier and bladeless fan removes pollutants from your surroundings, quickly bringing respite from hay fever and other allergiesDyson’s first Internet of Things fan, the Pure Cool Link, is also an air purifier that claims to be able to turn your pollution- or pollen-filled rooms into clean, hay-fever-free zones within minutes.

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

Blogger and plus-size model forced to take a break from Ireland’s community Twitter account after being told to ‘return to your ancestral lands’ by trollsA black British woman who was chosen to tweet from the @ireland account for a week has been subjected to a barrage of racist abuse, forcing her to take a break from Twitter.Michelle Marie took over the account – which is curated by a different Twitter user in Ireland each week – on Monday. She introduced herself as a mother, blogger and plus-size model. Continue reading...

The Lifestage app invites Generation Z to create a series of selfie videos, but gives its young users no tools for controlling privacy and who sees the contentFacebook has launched a video selfie sharing app for teenagers which has no privacy settings. What could possibly go wrong?Lifestage, which launched in the US on Friday, is restricted to users under the age of 21. It’s designed to make it “easy and fun to share a visual profile of who you are with your school network”. Continue reading...

Experts believe hacker ‘Fancy Bear’ hacked Democratic National Committee and World Anti-Doping Agency, the second in retaliation against whistleblowerThe cybercriminals who defaced the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) website after it triggered a ban on Russian athletes at the Rio Olympics were likely the same hacking team behind the breach of the Democratic National Committee revealed in July, according to hacking experts.

Subtle surface changes, including improved notifications and better multitasking, mask big improvements underneath in a solid step forward for AndroidAndroid 7.0 Nougat is the new version of Google’s mobile operating system, used by billions of devices around the world.It features longer battery life, improved multitasking and smarter notifications in a slimmed down and refined Android experience – following on the work done in last year’s version 6 Marshmallow Continue reading...

Would it be better to hit a granny or swerve to hit a toddler? It seems like a dilemma, but the designers of self-driving cars say otherwiseAs self-driving cars move from fiction to reality, a philosophical problem has become the focus of fierce debate among technologists across the world. But to the people actually making self driving cars, it’s kind of boring.The “trolley problem” is the name for a philosophical thought experiment created as an introduction to the moral distinction between action and inaction. The classic example is a runaway mine cart, hurtling down tracks towards a group of five oblivious people. With no time to warn them, your only option is to pull a switch and divert the cart on to a different track, which only has one person standing on it. You will save five lives, but at the cost of actively killing one person. What do you do? Continue reading...

Eidos Montreal’s near-future thriller presents a visually impressive dystopian playground, but a wonky narrative and some shoddy touches tarnish its potentialSince its debut 16 years ago, Deus Ex’s primary weapon has been choice: where to go, how to get there, who to speak to and how to speak to them are all up to you in a series where almost every scenario has multiple outcomes. After releasing 2011’s Human Revolution – a lavishly depicted near-future thriller – to widespread critical acclaim, developer Eidos Montreal’s follow up, Mankind Divided, picks up the exact same threads that its predecessor left tantalisingly unanswered five years ago.This is a tall order and its makers clearly recognise it, front-ending the game’s campaign with an almost laughably long 12-minute recap to bring you up to speed on everything Deus Ex. Protagonist Adam Jensen returns – still half-Lagerfeld, half-Motorola Razr – working as a special agent at Interpol two years after the events of Human Revolution. Like many, he’s coming to terms with the devastating aftereffects of The Incident – a cyber-attack that deliberately caused the bio-technologically “augmented” population to turn violent against their will, leaving millions dead. It was a global catalyst, accelerating the divisions between the human and augmented populations, but as thematically charged a setup as this is, Adam and his world can’t help but feel outdated.

Abe popped up at the Olympic closing ceremony dressed as the video-game plumber to introduce Tokyo as the next host city

Lenovo-owned Motorola publicly whines on Twitter that Samsung stole its ambient display idea, perhaps forgetting it wasn’t the first to do itThe world of technology is so full of innovations, borrowed ideas and repackaged functions that it is sometimes difficult to work out who did what, and when.At least, that’s probably Motorola’s excuse. Continue reading...

Officers recover devices with packages containing illegal drugs and phones in operation around north London prisonPolice have seized two drones loaded with drugs and mobile phones being flown towards a prison in north London.

The American singer and actor reveals personal plea to Apple head to fix Siri’s butchery of her name which will be fixed on 30 SeptemberHow do you ensure that Siri pronounces your name correctly? If you’re Barbra Streisand you go straight to the source and call the chief executive, Tim Cook.

As Google and Uber trial prototypes, the future of fully driverless cars and safer roads should come sooner than anyone thought – but they’re in no mood to rushSitting in the passenger seat of Google’s self driving car is a less bizarre experience than sitting in the driving seat, but it’s still unsettling. In the streets of Mountain View, outside the headquarters of X (once Google X, in the post-Alphabet age it’s moved out of mum and dad’s house and dropped the prefix), I got the chance to do just that.It’s partly unsettling because it’s hard not to feel a flicker of anxiety when you look over and notice that the person driving the car hasn’t got their hands on the wheel, even as you head towards a red light on a corner with a huge truck bearing down on you. Continue reading...

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

A survival game featuring 18 quintillion planets offers an open world experience like no other, plus a rewarding journey beneath the wavesPS4, Hello Games, cert: 7

The cryptocurrency has a volatile past, but is now being traded around the world. Here’s the lowdown on going digital with your moneyLooking at the negligible returns offered on cash investments, Edward Cunningham started searching for alternatives. Instead of going to the stock market or buying up gold bars, however, the 45-year-old from Sherborne in Dorset turned to the internet, and last September invested in the digital currency bitcoin. Since then his stake has more than doubled.Bitcoin is a paperless, bankless, stateless currency which exists on computers, and carries with it a whiff of peril for investors. Cunningham admits to being nervous when he first signed up to trade in the currency, especially when he had to make his first deposit via a bank in Estonia. “It all turned out well and I bought my first coins for $225 each, well below today’s price of around $575,” he says. Continue reading...

Hi-tech imaging has revealed exceptionally rare manuscript overlaid by 16th-century deerhide document held at Oxford UniversityOne of the rarest manuscripts in the world has been revealed hidden beneath the pages of an equally rare but later Mexican codex, thanks to hi-tech imaging techniques.

A growing number of companies are specializing in virtual reality experiences for wealthy real estate shoppers – and VR may head to the non-luxury market nextI am sitting in a Starbucks with an architect. He hands me an Oculus virtual reality headset with a Samsung phone slipped into the goggle area. In his hands is an iPad. I put the headset over my eyes and the cafe disappears. Suddenly I am in Miami, inside a sleek luxury apartment. I can see white condo towers and water views from the vast windows.Related: Symphonies in space: orchestras embrace virtual reality Continue reading...

Say goodbye to the humble razor – beauty products for men are now part of a global industry worth billionsI’m not sure my grooming regimen really counts as a regimen: it takes six minutes, and the hottest product I own is a Lynx Africa gift set left over from Christmas. I can’t say I’m very proud of myself. I’m aware this kind of blokish indolence is fast becoming passé. Male grooming is a multibillion pound worldwide industry, and once-frivolous creams and lotions have broken into the mainstream. Under pressure to get with the times, I tried out a handful of grooming gadgets in the hope that they would make me look more like British model David Gandy. Continue reading...

Apple pours resources into the iPhone camera because of what it might be used for in future – not for the photo enthusiasts of the pastAs some readers may remember, I’m a keen photographer. For many years, I’ve always carried a camera. In the early days of digital photography, that meant a succession of small point-and-shoot cameras – Canon Ixus and S models generally – concealed in a small leather pouch attached to my belt. And then there came a point when I stopped carrying these charming little devices. Why? Because I’d just bought my first iPhone. Since then, I still always carry a camera. Except that it’s not called a camera any more: it’s a smartphone.Living and working, as I do, in a historic city that is swamped by tourists in the summer, I regularly get the opportunity to do some photo-ethnography. You can tell someone’s age by the kind of camera they are using. Elderly folks are still using point-and-shoot compacts. Middle-aged folks are sporting “prosumer” digital single-lens reflex cameras (DSLRs) from Canon, Nikon, Fuji and Panasonic. But as far as I can see, everyone under the age of 25 is using a smartphone, possibly with the assistance of a selfie stick. Continue reading...

From exercise trackers to blood pressure monitors, we give the latest bits of biometric tech a close examinationYou can record your heart rate manually by holding your wrist and counting your pulse, but this hasn’t stopped technology companies producing devices to do the job with electronics. Most of these devices collect heart data all day long and record it on a smartphone app which builds up a richer set of data than you might get with a stopwatch and pencil. One of the most useful metrics they collect is your RHR (resting heart rate) a reading taken when you are relaxed, most typically first thing in the morning. In most cases a low RHR indicates a strong, healthy heart which has to beat fewer times to circulate blood around the body. However in older people a low RHR might indicate diseased heart muscle or overmedication. Some day-to-day variation in your RHR (or indeed in many of the metrics these devices measure) isn’t something to be worried about, explains Dr Satpal Arri of the British Heart Foundation Centre of Research Excellence, King’s College London, “A certain amount of variability is normal, healthy in fact – as you get older variability tends to decrease.” So by all means listen to your heart, but don’t become obsessed. Continue reading...

Comfort and a smooth ride courtesy of EpicCarbon-fibre frames are increasingly cheap. This is partly down to local dealers sourcing their own lines of bikes from the factory, as Ludlow bike shop Epic does with its Nero brand. It is also because development is so rapid that what was top of the tree two years ago is now mid-range, and so on down the line. Epic’s top-of-the-range Corsa Evo comes with custom componentry: ours had Shimano’s 600 groupset. The finish is suitably shiny with appetising details – notably a logo on the seat tube where the rider sitting on your wheel can spot it. Strengthened areas of carbon around the brackets make the frame stiffer without sacrificing comfort. The smooth ride is also thanks to the Ikon handbuilt carbon wheels. This good high-end bike does everything it should.Price: from £1,399 (as reviewed £2,699)

Tour de France journalists know all about long, hot days in the car. So the padded seats in Ford’s new range are a gift…Price: £29,395

Michael Birch, Bebo’s co-founder, has bought Woolsery’s pub and the chippie. And villagers are more than happyWoolsery in north Devon has all the features that might be expected of the present-day British village: towering hedgerows bordering winding lanes, tidy culs-de-sac bearing regimented rows of bungalows and, in the centre of the village, the medieval church, the empty listed building and the boarded-up pub.Sonia Hamilton, vice-chairwoman of the parish council, gestures at the listed building, known as the Manor House. “The state of that and the pub was depressing,” she says. Continue reading...

It also looks a delight and is clearly aimed at the fashionable retro marketIt was one of those days when we had jumped the gun putting Lycra on. We sat in the front room in our cycling shorts looking out at the rain, willing the other to suggest hibernation instead. Neither did, so when the deluge had dulled to a drizzle, out we went. There was a bicycle to be tested, after all.The Peak District lanes were wet, but it didn’t really matter to me. The Ribble had excellent mudguards; my bottom would stay dry. The same could not be said for my face. My cycling companion that day was not only a mudguard refusenik but also far faster than me, which meant an afternoon chasing him down, sucking his wheel and drinking puddle water until the sun came out. He is also a mountain biker, which meant a few ill-advised “shall we just see where this one goes?” diversions. One, past the Derbyshire village of Wash, involved pedalling up a gravelly stream and almost an early bath. Continue reading...

Former director of ‘privilege fund’, which Yiannopoulos set up for white men to balance scholarships for women and minorities, says money was mismanagedThe rightwing writer and internet troll Milo Yiannopoulos has apologised for mismanaging a “privilege grant” college scholarship fund for white men.Yiannopoulos admitted on Friday he had missed a deadline to turn donations into bursaries but denied speculation he had spent the cash. Continue reading...

Campaigners hope Deliveroo couriers’ victory over pay will rally more temporary, self-employed workers to organiseCampaigners against low pay are hoping that a victory for Deliveroo couriers this week will encourage further action by gig economy workers. One of the biggest barriers to a repeat, however, is the very nature of the work Britain’s part-time, self-employed army carries out.Workers at Deliveroo, the online food delivery firm, won a rare victory in seeing off an attempt to force them to sign up to new pay terms. Deliveroo’s change of heart followed several days of protests by its drivers. Continue reading...

In latest clean energy plan, Tesla purchases SolarCity to make solar ‘shingles’: ‘It’s not a thing on the roof. It is the roof,’ CEO saysA new venture spearheaded by Elon Musk will create house roofs made entirely of solar panels, in a sweeping expansion of Tesla’s clean energy ambitions.Tesla has finalized a $2.6bn deal to buy solar power company SolarCity to produce solar “shingles” – photovoltaic material that would be fashioned into the shape of a house roof. Continue reading...

On 1 July, 2016, the United Nations resolved that access to the internet is to be considered a human right. Our digital culture podcast, Chips with Everything, has produced an in-depth series on the topic. Listen to all four episodes hereEarlier last month the United Nations’ General Assembly sat down to discuss, among a multitude of other looming sociopolitical issues, whether or not access to the internet should be a basic human right. Stretching back to 2009, this debate has been taken to the floor five times to no avail, but this time round a resolution was adopted (.pdf), co-sponsored by 70-odd countries.Given the degree of influence a connection to the internet can have on a person’s life in the 21st century – from seeking government services to expressing an opinion on social media – the UN resolved that any human rights one has offline must be guaranteed online as well. Continue reading...

Independent review of draft terrorism laws says there is strong case for allowing police and spy agencies to gather private data

Critics of No Man’s Sky tend to see games as entertainment products, while fans of this eccentric space exploration sim view it as an experience

Rebranded Microsoft Rewards will now pay you to dump Google’s Chrome for its browser – but only if you make Bing your default search engineMicrosoft has a new browser. It launched with Windows 10 and it’s called Edge. The company says it’s faster, more battery efficient and all-round better than Chrome or Firefox. You can even draw on websites with a stylus. Trouble is, not very many people are using it. So now Microsoft’s trying to bribe you to switch.

Anthony Levandowski is one the most influential engineers behind self-driving vehicles. Now that Uber has bought his latest startup Otto, he talks about how it all startedSelf-driving vehicles have been developed in many places, over many years, but few people have as strong a claim as Anthony Levandowski to being considered their inventor. And it all started with a phone call from his mother.“My mom called me up and said, there’s this robot race it would be interesting for you to find out about,” he recalls. That race was the 2004 Grand Challenge, the first of three long distance contests for driverless cars organised by the Pentagon’s research arm, Darpa. “I was like wow, this is absolutely the future.” Continue reading...

Popular password meters don’t pick up on awful character sequences that are obvious to hackers, giving users a false sense of security and bad adviceThe meters that supposedly tell you when you’ve entered enough different characters to make a secure password when signing up for a new site are next to useless, according to a web security consultant.

With Uber set to deploy autonomous cars in Pittsburgh, some drivers for the company wonder if they’ve been expendable all along“Wo-o-o-o-w,” Cynthia Ingram said. “We all knew it was coming. I just didn’t expect it this soon.”Ingram, a 60-year-old Uber driver in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, had just learned that Uber would be deploying autonomous cars to accept fares in her city within weeks. The announcement on Thursday morning sent shockwaves through the community of about 4,000 drivers that serve Pennsylvania’s second largest city. Continue reading...

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts is to assess digital-only releases on a case by case basisFilms without a cinema release have the chance to be considered eligible for the British film industry’s most prestigious awards, following a rules changed announced on 19 August.Previously, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts had required competing titles to be released in cinemas. As of the 2017 awards, movies released only digitally will be able to be submitted. Continue reading...

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

Police shut down site that encouraged schoolboys to upload naked pictures of female students from about 70 schoolsA parent of a student at Kambrya College, a state school in Melbourne’s south-east, says she was “mortified” by the way the school responded to victims of a website that carried sexually explicit images of underage female school students.The college was one of 70 schools whose students were reportedly involved in uploading the images to the website, which was believed to be hosted overseas until Australian federal police said it had been shut down on Friday.

Whether nostalgic for older versions or looking forward to something new, the game seems eager to please both campsIf news that Final Fantasy XV has been delayed, has you desperately searching for alternatives to get your JRPG fix, then here’s something that should take up a good chunk of time: SquareEnix has released a full hour of gameplay footage taken from the gold master of the game, giving a more in-depth look at its systems, side quests and early plot than anything to date.The game was delayed by two months to 29 November, apparently, because Hajime Tabata, its director, felt the contents of the planned day-one patch should ship with it, not be made available to download after the fact, hence the two-month delay to the “master version”. Continue reading...

Prior to the proposed settlement the case had been scheduled to go before a jury in June, leaving its future outcome unclearA federal judge has rejected the proposal to settle a major class-action lawsuit by California and Massachusetts drivers against Uber for $84m, ruling that “the settlement as a whole as currently structured is not fair, adequate, and reasonable”.In a ruling issued Thursday, Judge Edward M Chen noted that the settlement “yields less than 5% of the total verdict value of all claims being released”. Continue reading...

Ride-sharing firm to trial autonomous vehicles in Pittsburgh as it also announces tie up with Volvo to develop driverless carsUber passengers in Pittsburgh will be able to hail self-driving cars for the first time within the next few weeks as the taxi firm tests its future vision of transportation in the city.The company said on Thursday that an unspecified number of autonomous Ford Fusions will be available to pick up passengers as with normal Uber vehicles. The cars won’t exactly be driverless – they will have human drivers as backup – but they are the next step towards a fully automated fleet. Continue reading...

New fulfilment centre in Tilbury will create 1,500 permanent jobsAmazon plans to open a new delivery warehouse in Essex next year, creating 1,500 permanent jobs.It will be the company’s 13th fulfilment centre in the UK, where Amazon employs a total of 15,500 people.

The final segment of our four-part series. With the United Nations’ resolution considered, Chips with Everything discusses what the future of internet access looks like in developing countriesOn 1 July the United Nations resolved that access to the internet is to be considered a basic human right. While this decision may seem straightforward, with the complex nature of human rights law considered, the resolution is far from simple.In the final episode of our series, we explore internet accessibility in the developing world and discuss how the United Nations’ resolution might increase widespread internet access in these countries. To help us dig into this topic, we speak to the Guardian’s global development desk’s Liz Ford, the World Wide Web Foundation’s Africa regional coordinator Nnenna Nwakanma, and lead council at the World Bank David Satolas. Continue reading...

‘They will soon be calling me MR BREXIT!’ the Republican presidential nominee tweeted on first day with new campaign team, setting off wave of jokesDonald Trump has sent some questionable tweets in the past, but none have been so mind-boggling as one posted early Thursday morning.“They will soon be calling me MR. BREXIT!” the Republican presidential nominee tweeted at around 8am. Continue reading...

Vlogger forced to deny his videos in North Korea were funded by its governmentA strange controversy has been bubbling in the world of travel YouTube. A popular vlogger has been forced to deny being paid by the North Korean government to make feel-good travel videos from the DPRK.You read that correctly. Continue reading...