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

WikiLeaks says documents about CIA’s computer hacking tools came from US, but many perceive group as pro-Russia following role in 2016 electionThe latest WikiLeaks document dump about the CIA’s computer hacking tools highlights the intelligence agency’s penetration of everyday consumer electronics, heightening profound fears about privacy aroused in 2013 by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.In the Washington security establishment, however, the leaks are being viewed more as the latest battle in a struggle between US and Russian intelligence services being played out in the US political arena – a fight in which WikiLeaks is widely seen as sitting firmly in Moscow’s corner. Continue reading...

Anas Modamani’s injunction rejected after judge says social network not obliged to seek out and delete defamatory postsA Syrian refugee who took a selfie with Angela Merkel has failed in his attempt to sue Facebook over a series of posts falsely linking him to terrorist attacks.The photograph which Anas Modamani, from Darayya near Damascus, took of himself and the German chancellor at a Berlin refugee shelter in September 2015 has since been repeatedly shared on doctored photomontages supposedly identifying him as the culprit behind crimes and terrorist attacks across Europe. Continue reading...

Arkansas resident James Bates willing to allow police to review information that Seattle-based tech company twice declined to provideAmazon has stopped fighting a legal battle to keep Echo recordings secret, after the defendant at the heart of the case gave his permission for the evidence to be handed over.Arkansas resident James Bates was charged with the murder of a man found dead in his hot tub in November 2015. Continue reading...

MP critical after BBC sends evidence to Facebook, which at first removes only 18% – and reports corporation to police“Grave doubts” have emerged about the effectiveness of Facebook’s moderation system after an investigation revealed the social network was failing to remove sexualised images of children even after they were reported.Damian Collins, chair of the culture, media and sport committee, made the comments as he criticised Facebook’s handling of the images, dozens of which were reported to the company by the BBC and fewer than 20% were removed. Continue reading...

The visas, which allow skilled workers to come to the US temporarily, are in especially high demand in Silicon Valley and the medical sectorThe US has temporarily suspended the fast-track processing of H-1B visas, leaving many foreign workers in limbo.Related: Trump travel ban: new order targeting six Muslim-majority countries signed Continue reading...

‘Chances are you, or at least someone you know, is affected,’ says security expert Chris Vickery, after one of largest spam operations in world’s database exposedOne of the largest spam operations in the world has exposed its entire operation to the public, leaking its database of 1.37bn email addresses thanks to a faulty backup.As well as email addresses, the holy grail of the spam operation, personal information including real names, IP addresses and physical addresses have also been leaked, though on a smaller scale than the email information that makes up the bulk of the dataset. Continue reading...

A new app, Smartify, allows you to point your phone at artworks and instantly know everything about them. But while facts can enrich enjoyment, it is the shock of the unknown that really makes art resonateLooking at art should be like walking in the countryside. You may not know exactly where you are, or what bird is making that peculiar sound, or what the hill ahead of you is called, but that’s part of the fun of it. You don’t need to know those things to feel the poetry of nature. Being slightly lost and adrift in a landscape can only deepen its power.Of course, if you do know your birds, trees and local history, a walk might be still more entrancing. Yet such knowledge comes gradually. It is picked up through experience. A true knowledge of nature cannot just be got through an app on your phone – and if it could, it would mock sensitivity with shallow instant factoids. Imagine pointing your phone at the hill on the horizon and getting a load of info on screen. Would that enrich your dreamy walk or ruin it? Continue reading...

Gamers distracted by display issues told that their consoles are not defective, as well as being told not to play near microwaves, laptops, phones – or aquariumsSwitch owners complaining of distracting dead or stuck pixels, or light or dark patches on the screens of their brand new consoles, are being told by Nintendo that they are “normal” and are not defects.

Featured snippets in search function repeatedly shares false information, which can result in Google Home speakers reading out conspiracy theories as factGoogle is facing accusations of spreading fake news, after being repeatedly discovered sharing falsehoods and conspiracy theories through its “featured snippets in search” functionality.The feature automatically pulls in short answers to common queries from popular websites. It can show them in the search results directly, and is also the basis for the quick answers provided through Google’s smart speaker device, the Google Home. Continue reading...

Firm behind deal with Barts in London says it will include cancer and dementia patients and could reduce bed-blockingUber taxis could soon be used to transfer non-emergency patients with illnesses ranging from cancer to dementia back and forth from NHS hospitals in a deal that could play a part in “cracking down” on bedblocking, according to the social care company behind it.The agreement with Barts health NHS trust in London will allow patients to use Uber for journeys including hospital appointments, the care service startup Cera said. Continue reading...

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

While Kim Jong-un’s regime has hacked other countries, US attempts to damage his nuclear programme face tough challengesThat the United States has been working to hobble North Korea’s missile programme through cyber and electronic strikes is important, but not especially surprising. Pyongyang’s technological advances, if not yet as impressive as it claims, are real and alarming. Sanctions have had limited impact. Intelligence on the country is so inadequate, and its technology so advanced, that a preemptive military strike – reportedly one option the White House wants to consider – would be very unlikely to eradicate its capability and very likely to provoke a damaging response. The US also has experience: working with Israel, it is believed to have used the Stuxnet computer worm to wipe out roughly a fifth of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges and delay its nuclear weapons programme.This time, results appear to have been mixed. Discussions of state-directed hacking often focus on its advantages as a form of asymmetric engagement, allowing countries such as North Korea to counter their relative military weakness. But this case exposes a different kind of asymmetry. Though the US is infinitely wealthier, better armed and more powerful than North Korea, it is much more vulnerable in one regard: it is an open and democratic society and its citizens expect access to freely flowing information. Continue reading...

While other autonomous car projects rely on an expensive radar-like system called Lidar, AImotive is trying to do the same using regular cameras and AIThe AImotive office is in a small converted house at the end of a quiet residential street in sunny Mountain View, spitting distance from Google’s headquarters. Outside is a branded Toyota Prius covered in cameras, one of three autonomous cars the Hungarian company is testing in the sleepy neighbourhood. It’s a popular testing ground: one of Google’s driverless cars, now operating under spin-out company Waymo, zips past the office each lunchtime.Related: AI, self-driving cars and cyberwar – the tech trends to watch for in 2017 Continue reading...

From Medal of Honor to Sniper Elite 4, we just can’t seem to resist the lure of the second world warFor a while it seemed like all we ever did in video games was shoot Nazis. In 1997, Steven Spielberg, post-Schindler’s List, pre-Saving Private Ryan and apparently in the midst of a second world war fixation, met with a team at DreamWorks to outline an idea for a first-person shooter set in 1944. In the resulting game, Medal of Honor, you played as protagonist Lieutenant Jimmy Patterson, who parachutes into Nazi territory in a bid to single-handedly turn the tide of war. In this way, Spielberg’s game was reminiscent of Hollywood’s most jingoistic postwar output. Like 1949’s Sands of Iwo Jima or 1965’s Battle of the Bulge, Medal of Honor used the theatre and mud-flecked aesthetic of the war to present a revisionist, nationalistic yet deeply cathartic take on the war of our grandparents.Nazis offer us uncomplicated, centrally organised bad guys, a simplistic antidote to dispersed, incognito pariahs Continue reading...

MPs are increasingly turning to tech to coordinate political skulduggery, but their ignorance of encryption is a security riskThere are well-founded fears that few of the politicians tasked with devising legislation covering the use of encryption technology have any expertise in that field – and in many cases, much understanding of how it even works. Yet a growing number of politicians and their aides are getting hands-on, day-to-day experience of encryption through their use of messaging apps for that most traditionally political pastime: plotting.The Times recently revealed that Brexit-backing MPs have been coordinating their attacks on chancellor Philip Hammond, Bank of England governor Mark Carney, high court judges and other perceived enemies of a hard exit from Europe via a WhatsApp group called “ERG DExEU/DIT Suppt Group”. Meanwhile, on the left, a WhatsApp group called the Birthday Group reportedly played a key role in the coordination of Labour frontbench resignations in 2016, in an effort to unseat Jeremy Corbyn. Continue reading...

Investigation follows revelations of digital firm’s involvement in BrexitThe UK’s privacy watchdog is launching an inquiry into how voters’ personal data is being captured and exploited in political campaigns, cited as a key factor in both the Brexit and Trump victories last year.The intervention by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) follows revelations in last week’s Observer that a technology company part-owned by a US billionaire played a key role in the campaign to persuade Britons to vote to leave the European Union. Continue reading...

I had been enjoying the Vitus Mach 3 very much before it was stolenI am not a violent person. I’ve never punched anyone in the face, or kicked them in the knackers. Even in my netballing days on the pitiless Lancastrian high school circuit I was not one for scratching a rival when the referee wasn’t looking. Yet I wish nothing but pain and prolonged misery for the subhuman scum who stole this lovely bicycle from outside Fred Aldous in Manchester’s Northern Quarter while I went to the dentist.Perhaps it was a compliment to this neatly utilitarian machine from the cult French brand, whose pioneering aluminium frames changed the game in the Tour de France in the late 70s. Maybe the thief just couldn’t resist a go on Shimano’s new Metrea groupset, which has a single chainring on the front and just one shifter on the handlebars to change between the 11 gears. Probably, though, they were just a thoughtless goon with a pair of bolt cutters and a mate in a van around the corner. May they suffer eternal punctures and an unending headwind. Continue reading...

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.