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

Forever Project in Nottingham records elderly survivors answering 1,500 questions from children on Nazi eraWhen she was nine Janine Webber lived in a hole in the ground. She was there for a year. There was little room to move, no fresh air or daylight and nothing to eat apart from crusts of bread and raw onions. By then she had already lost to the Holocaust her father, mother, brother and grandmother.Against all odds the little Jewish girl survived. Now, at almost 84, she knows the days are numbered. The living memory of Europe’s darkest days is fading as Jews who escaped the Nazis and emerged from the death camps pass away.

Attitudes in the Middle East are changing – and women leading by example in the tech and games sectors are claiming an important roleIf you left your country of birth in the midst of a war and found yourself in a promising career at Google, you’d be forgiven for staying put. But Lara Noujaim had other ideas. The business graduate travelled from Lebanon to California in 2006 and, after completing an MBA at Santa Clara University, she found work in America’s thriving tech sector, joining Google as a Data Evaluator in 2010. Three years later, however, she gave it up to pursue a very different ambition: she wanted to help create a games industry back home.“I could have stayed and built a career in the States, but I’m a very patriotic person, we all are in Lebanon,” she says. “The games industry didn’t exist, I came home to be part of creating it. I wanted to give something back.”

The Hyperloop, first envisioned by Tesla Motors’ Elon Musk, involves using magnets to levitate pods to shuttle people and cargo inside an airless tubeMoscow has signed an agreement with Los Angeles-based company Hyperloop One to explore building a futuristic, high-speed transportation system known as a Hyperloop in the Russian capital.

Casey Nocket banned from all US national parks and sentenced to 200 hours of community service after users on Reddit tracked her down through social mediaA graffiti artist has been banned from all national parks and other federally administered land – that’s more than 20% of the US – for vandalism after Reddit users tracked her down on social media.Casey Nocket was also sentenced to 200 hours of community service and a fine for drawing faces in acrylic paint in at least six national parks: Death Valley, Colorado National Monument, Canyonlands, Zion and Crater Lake. Continue reading...

The Obama administration has green-lit commercial drones so long as they stay within sight of a pilot – which isn’t exactly what companies had in mindIn the not-too-distant future, Amazon could use a drone to deliver a package from a country warehouse all the way to … a nearby farm.And that, the government said on Tuesday, is about it. Continue reading...

Company begins paying out more than $400m to customers who were overcharged for ebooks

A new app will detect incoming texts from a person you’re hoping to cease all communication with and send unenthusiatic automated responsesRejecting unwanted suitors over text is an awkward challenge for a generation of online daters. So why not outsource the thorny interaction to a robot?Ghostbot will detect incoming texts from the person you’ve chosen to “ghost” – a modern (and cowardly) dating trend that involves ceasing all communication with an unwanted suitor – and send automated responses, lacking in warmth of enthusiasm, until the other person takes the hint. Continue reading...

Milestone hailed by photo-sharing app’s founder, who says huge user growth is signal of company’s ambitionThe photo-sharing app Instagram now has 550 million users, reaping the benefits from the growth of selfies and the propensity for celebrities such as Kim Kardashian to share images with a wider audience.Launched in 2010, it was bought by Facebook for $1bn (£680m) when it had 30 million users. Continue reading...

Legislation will permit security services to hack all phones and laptops in an entire town, as long as it is overseas

Online retailer is quietly rooting out sellers who do not hold UK VAT numbers to guard against HMRC’s new tax evasion powersAmazon is quietly rooting out many of its Chinese traders who do not hold UK VAT numbers to try to protect itself from tax evasion inquiries later this year when new HMRC powers come into force, the Guardian has learned.The online retailer has been conducting a review of sellers’ VAT compliance in the UK. It is understood to have contacted many Chinese sellers, giving them until the end of the month to provide their VAT numbers. Continue reading...

Cyber-security expert Etay Maor talks to Olly Mann and takes a look at the underbelly of the internetEtay Maor, a cyber-security advisor at IBM, talks to Olly Mann about the darknet, the shady underside to the web. The two look at what lives there, including automatic guns, marijuana and fake passports.

Beeban Kidron says technology companies cannot continue prioritising freedom of expression over safeguarding young people

The adaptation of the computer game bombed in the US and has been panned by critics – but has grossed more than $378m so far. So who’s paying to watch?Name: Warcraft: The Beginning.Appearance: Lots of monsters and warriors with cool costumes but no sense of humour. Continue reading...

The driving series hits Australia, bringing 350 new cars to a map twice the size of Forza Horizon 2. But to understand its technical ambition, you’ve got to look upAt the E3 games conference two years ago, the creative director of Forza Horizon, Ralph Fulton, was trying to communicate the visual beauty of the game’s sequel. During a demo session for journalists, he explained how road surfaces in the game would gather rain water after a storm, and that the resulting puddle would be truly reflective, mirroring the chassis of passing cars, and reflecting sunlight.It was a teeny detail but it spoke volumes about developer Playground Games and the studio’s obsession with sleek aesthetics. For the third title, which takes the open-world driving festival to Australia, they’ve rather outdone that boast, which now seems rather quaint in comparison. Continue reading...

Logging into Google should be a lot faster and less irritating using one-tap push notifications instead of fiddly codes to verify your username and passwordUsing two-step authentication, normally a code from an app or texted to you, is a crucial, but highly irritating, part of logging into all manner of things.

The I Sea app claimed to help people call lifeboats to refugees by locating their vessels, but actually showed static images of the seaAn app which purported to offer aid to refugees lost in the Mediterranean has been pulled from Apple’s App Store after it was revealed as a fake.The I Sea app, which also won a Bronze medal at the Cannes Lions conference on Monday night, presented itself as a tool to help report refugees lost at sea, using real-time satellite footage to identify boats in trouble and highlighting their location to the Malta-based Migrant Offshore Aid Station (Moas), which would provide help. Continue reading...

Chrome may be the most popular web browser but it can be a beast. Here are some tips to help stop it bringing your PC or Mac to a crawlMany would say Chrome is the best browser out there. It’s certainly the most popular, used by more than half of the online world. But it’s a beast that can slow your computer to a crawl if left unchecked.Multiple tabs, dodgy extensions and over-active plugins can leave you feeling like you’re using Windows 3.1 on a pre-Pentium 486, without the turbo switched on. Continue reading...

Writer and Times columnist says Twitter needs to ‘grow up’ and tackle abuse against womenCaitlin Moran, the author and Times columnist, has called on Twitter and other social media platforms to do something about abuse against women.The award-winning writer said on Tuesday that Twitter could afford to “hire three people” to tackle threats against women if it aimed to be the place to be for global debate. Continue reading...

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

The new Bluetooth headphones from Bose shut out the noisy world around you and fill your mind with sweet music, without the need for wiresBose headphones are held up as the gold standard for active noise cancelling and demand a premium for it. But can the US company’s new QC35 model, its first Bluetooth noise-cancelling headphones, live up to expectations? Continue reading...

Christopher Nelson, a former Liberal party member from the central coast of New South Wales, pleads guilty to using Facebook to send offensive messagesA 64-year-old man from the New South Wales central coast has pleaded guilty to posting racist and offensive online messages to the outgoing Labor senator Nova Peris.Chris Nelson, a chiropractor, pleaded guilty at the Woy Woy local court on Tuesday to one count of using a carriage service to offend. Continue reading...

Pets come out for rival leave and remain campaigns in viral referendum memeAn alliance ranging from the prime minister to the assembled might of leading British business figures have already unleashed their combined firepower against the case for a UK withdrawal from the European Union.Now, in what might yet earn the moniker of “Project Feline”, comes the latest onslaught against those urging a referendum leave vote: #CatsAgainstBrexit. Continue reading...

Charity reveals more than 3,000 cyber-enabled sexual crimes were committed against children in past year

Lockable pouches created by startup Yondr were given out at a recent Alicia Keys concert to get people to pay attention to the music instead of recording itLast month singer Adele singled out a concertgoer for using a video camera instead of living in the moment and experiencing the gig.The 28-year-old pop star pointed to a woman in the crowd and said: “Could you stop filming me with that video camera? Because I’m really here in real life, you can enjoy it in real life rather than through your camera.”

A man in Almaty, Kazakhstan, drives a Tesla Model S into floodwater and uses the thrust from the wheels to propel it forward, through the water, and back onto dry land. Tesla Motors have said they don’t recommend it Continue reading...

Developer EA Dice thrilled fans when it announced the Battlefield series is returning to historical conflict. The E3 demo suggests it was the right decisionFor almost 10 years, a small group of staff within the EA Dice development studio have been pitching a first world war version of Battlefield. During that time, the military shooter series was moving inexorably in the other direction, toward more and more technologically advanced scenarios. But after Battlefield 4, the heads of the studio looked at the latest version of the pitch, and gave it some thought.“When we came out of Battlefield 4, we knew we wanted to challenge ourselves creatively, and to challenge the player a little bit more,” says the senior producer, Aleksander Grøndal. “When I first saw the first world war pitch I had some initial reservations, but after putting it through various iterations, they had done a good job of removing my worries. I saw the opportunities and started researching the war myself. The more I learned, the more I realised this was what we needed to do.” Continue reading...

New emojis including chopsticks and curling stones will be released in latest version of Unicode, but one dropped off the listAt least eight new emoji will be arriving in 2017, including chopsticks, curling stones and dumplings, but one that won’t be coming to smartphones any time soon is the rifle emoji.The gun had been proposed as part of a set of new icons representing winter sports (as was the curling stone emoji and a sled emoji, both of which have been approved). Rifles are used in the biathlon, which combines cross-country skiing and shooting at a target. Continue reading...

Y Combinator will give up to 100 people money for basic needs but tech incubator with deep pockets leaves some in Oakland questioning leadershipThe Black Panther party began experimenting with “survival programs” in its hometown of Oakland, California, nearly 50 years ago. Programs like Free Breakfast for Children side-stepped government bureaucracy and directly provided people with food, clothing, healthcare and schooling.Fast forward to 2016, and the wealthy capitalists behind Y Combinator could not be more different than the Marxist-Leninist black revolutionaries. But on 31 May, Silicon Valley’s premier startup incubator announced a project that in some ways recalls the radical experiments of the 1960s and 70s. Continue reading...

Video of vehicle floating through flooded Kazakhstan tunnel suggests electric cars can turn into makeshift boats in a pinch – but Musk doesn’t recommend itThere’s a common misconception that electric vehicles don’t like water any more than gas guzzlers, but apparently that isn’t true. It turns out if you find yourself flooded, a Tesla Model S can float and effectively drive on water.We *def* don't recommended this, but Model S floats well enough to turn it into a boat for short periods of time. Thrust via wheel rotation. Continue reading...

Dido Harding received £2.81m at a time when cyber-attack cost company £60m and 101,000 customers, annual report showsTalkTalk paid its chief executive, Dido Harding, an extra £1.8m last year when the telecoms company suffered a cyber-attack that cost it £60m and 101,000 customers.Baroness Harding received £2.81m for 2015, up from £1.05m the year before, the company’s annual report showed. Her pay, including £550,000 salary, increased because of a £1.97m payout under TalkTalk’s long-term incentive plan (LTIP). The payment covered TalkTalk’s performance from 2012 to 2015 and was half the maximum Harding might have received. Continue reading...

If you are already sad that summer solstice has arrived damp and dreary, maybe avoid going on FacebookGood morning, Britain! We hope you like your rain/mist/clouds (delete as geographically appropriate) this morning , and don’t feel too let down that today is technically midsummer.But if you are already a bit sad that the longest day of the year is going to have about four hours of actual sunlight, maybe don’t check Facebook. Somebody at the social network decided to flick the switch on a special morning greeting for the summer solstice without, apparently, checking the weather forecast. Continue reading...

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

The annual LA games expo revealed dystopian futures, post-apocalyptic worlds and the odd funny pirateThere may have been question marks surrounding last week’s annual video games expo – E3 in Los Angeles – with some publishers not hosting booths, but gamers need not fear: it was as bombastic as ever and promised much for the year ahead.EA and Activision did not have huge stands, for once, while Nintendo – usually one of the show’s biggest exhibitors – had just one game to unveil, but the show was still filled with new hardware, blockbuster sequels and inventive IP. Continue reading...

More than a third of European ‘unicorns’, technology firms worth over $1bn, were founded in the UK, with Sweden in second placeEurope is a successful Unicorn ranch. The number of private technology companies valued north of $1bn – originally nicknamed after the mythical creature due to their supposed rareness – that are based in Europe has risen to 47, according to tech investment bank GP Bullhound.The count is up by 10 in the past year, and the combined value of the companies on the list is now $130bn (£90bn). Continue reading...

As the price of digital radios continues to drop, which one best suits your listening habits?Digital is on the way to accounting for half of radio listening, although uptake hasn’t been quick enough for a date to be set for switch-off of the AM-FM analogue network. The two reasons most often cited for this are the preponderance of AM-FM units fitted in cars and the expense of DAB sets. However, the prices of DAB radios have been falling, so here we look at some of the more reasonably priced units in the shops.Apart from the Logik, these units feature DAB+, a higher quality audio format. Only a handful of UK stations broadcast in DAB+ at present and older sets should be compatible, sometimes requiring a firmware upgrade. A further switch over to DAB+ is certainly a long way off. Continue reading...

His death, along with France murder in which killer took to Facebook Live, highlights the huge challenge tech companies face with live stream video

Apple says it would have replaced it as it stopped charging in less than two years, but Tesco disagreesI bought an iPad Air from Tesco Direct in August 2014, which cost £399 and came with a one-year warranty. The iPad started charging intermittently in mid-April 2016, and about a week later stopped taking a charge at all.The Apple store checked it for me and considered it be in good condition and that there had been no misuse, but said it would be too expensive to repair. It said it would have replaced it “like for like” under EU regulations as it was less than two years old. Continue reading...

A blisteringly quick track-ready car. But is it really the ideal choice for a trip to the shops?Price: £29,995

A sleek, lightweight carbon folding bike that rides as well as it looksPrice: £3,500

At $255 per active user, the social network is an expensive buy, but the tech giant is confident that access to so much personal data will soon pay offAs news broke of Microsoft’s $26.2bn acquisition of LinkedIn last week, one wag took to Twitter to quip: “Satya Nadella makes bold final attempt to stop LinkedIn from emailing him.”Many people worn down by the site’s relentless emails will have echoed that sentiment. But Microsoft’s chief executive is in fact taking a bold and optimistic gamble in buying LinkedIn at a 50% premium to its share price. Nadella is betting that social networks will be at the centre of our professional lives, while bolstering Microsoft products that must take over from fading mainstays such as Windows if the company is to ensure its long-term survival. Continue reading...

Netflix is still king of TV streaming but US downloads of HBO Now, Amazon Video, Hulu and Showtime via Apple and Google surpassed the site in AprilThe new season of Orange is the New Black came online on Friday and binge watchers around the world celebrated. But the Netflix prison drama doesn’t have the stage to itself.When season 6 of Game of Thrones premiered in April, HBO’s standalone video-streaming service HBO Now was overwhelmed by the wildling hordes of fandom.

I suppose, for the person to whom this would appeal, it is a big deal that you’d look more like a company man than a minicab driver‘Sports-style front seats,” brags the Vauxhall Astra Sports Tourer. “Chrome-effect upper window trim.” It is the smallness of the boasts that makes them sound so Alan Partridge, that and the fact the seats aren’t sports style in any meaningful sense; and if they were, they would look radically dissonant against the car itself, which is about as sporty as a flesh-coloured surgical truss.The emerald green of mine is the kind of colour that conveys status to people who play golf. Elaborate alarm systems complain constantly about factors over which you, as driver, have no control; a person walking behind you in stationary traffic will unleash the beeping of imminent catastrophe; parking is like an atonal symphony. Visibility isn’t great, owing to the rather thick and overcautious window pillars, and there is a fragrance diffuser, upon request – the very endpoint of middle-management fussiness, like having a fan on your underpants. Continue reading...

Women in the public eye, especially politicians, are used to brushing off threats of death, rape and horrendous comments about their appearance – will Jo Cox’s murder be the wake-up call we need to finally clean up the web?Less than two weeks ago, Tulip Siddiq, the Labour MP for Hampstead and Kilburn, was talking about the online abuse she was regularly getting, including death threats. “If I could I would kill you,” was just one of them. “Being a female politician, there is no way you are going to avoid abuse. I don’t know anyone who has not had to deal with it,” she said, adding it could be “frightening and upsetting” and that a group of female MPs had an unofficial support group to deal with it. But at the same time, she also brushed off the effects on her. In an interview with the Sunday Times, she described herself as “a tough middle child” who wouldn’t be silenced. Now, the day after the devastating murder of the Labour MP Jo Cox, she doesn’t sound so sure. “When I spoke about it before, I was one of those who shrugged it off and said I was not as affected by it as other people,” she says. “I felt I could handle it and not let it get to me. What I do know is that what happened to Jo has changed the environment.” Continue reading...

From sticking to a monthly budget to ensuring your bank balance stays out of the red, here’s how technology could help you manage your financesThe lives of millions of people in Britain are so precarious that a third of families would have trouble finding £500 for an emergency bill. With average wages still below where they were eight years ago, it’s hardly surprising so many people, particularly the young, struggle to make ends meet. But there are a string of smartphone apps that could make the task of staying in the black that little bit easier.They all claim to be simple to use, and are not just for geeks. They track your spending closely and alert you when you’re going wrong, with some claiming to save you thousands. Unfortunately, they aren’t all free – so your budget may have to include spending oney on an app. But are they worth using? Guardian Money put them to the test. Continue reading...

Pinchas Gutter survived a Nazi death camp – and now his story will live on through a hologram that can answer your questionsPinchas Gutter goes out of his way to find me biscuits. In a sun-baked living room in his north London home, he opens a packet of Rich Tea, sits down and tells me about the Holocaust.Gutter was seven years old when the second world war broke out. He lived in the Warsaw ghetto for three and a half years, took part in its uprising, survived six Nazi concentration camps – including the Majdanek extermination camp – and lived through a death march across Germany to Theresienstadt in occupied Czechoslovakia. Continue reading...

Governor Mark Carney highlights importance of financial technology and its potential role in managing economyThe Bank of England plans to encourage innovation in financial technology by collaborating with companies which are designing innovative payment systems and cybersecurity, to further build on Bitcoin’s blockchain concept.Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, had intended to announce the so-called fintech accelerator in his annual Mansion House speech on Thursday. However, he did not deliver the scheduled speech and instead paid tribute to the late MP Jo Cox as a “remarkable person” who “dedicated her life to helping others”. Continue reading...

Reports that the capital’s intellectual property regulator has accused Apple of infringing design patents for a Chinese phoneBeijing has ordered Apple to stop selling the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus in China’s capital, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.The city’s intellectual property regulator has ruled that the design of the two phones is overly similar to another phone, the 100C, made by the Chinese company Shenzhen Baili. In a statement, the Beijing Intellectual Property Bureau wrote that the phones infringe on a Chinese patent for exterior design held by Shenzhen Baili. Continue reading...

How does Facebook translate broad ethical values into its decision-making process for research?When Facebook was revealed to have been experimenting on the emotional state of 700,000 of its users back in June 2014, many were outraged that the company had violated ethical guidelines and “harmed” its users.The fallout of that “emotional contagion study” haunts Facebook’s reputation among ethicists and researchers. But it has also compelled the company to clean up its ethical act, and inspired the introduction of a newly developed internal ethics review process this week. Continue reading...

The race is on to get driverless trucks on the roads, and experts say the impact on professional drivers ‘is going to be huge’Driverless trucks will be safer and cheaper than their human-controlled counterparts, but that doesn’t mean America’s 3.5 million professional truck drivers are giving up to the machines without a fight.Across the US, truckers collectively haul more than 10bn tons of freight each year, but it’s a tough job – the hours are long and lonely, the pay is low and the lifestyle is sedentary. In many ways it’s a job ripe for disruption; robots v truckers. Continue reading...