Technology | The Guardian

While cybersecurity specialists say hack of DNC files on Donald Trump was connected to Russian intelligence, Trump points to his political adversariesA dossier containing critical information about Donald Trump that was hacked from files belonging to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) was posted on the internet on Wednesday, prompting the presumptive Republican nominee to claim his political adversaries, not Russian hackers, were responsible.The hack of the DNC server, which a specialist cybersecurity company attributed to hackers connected to Russian intelligence, gave outsiders access to internal emails, chat messages and a 200-page book of opposition research that the committee had compiled on Trump. Continue reading...

FBI did not properly disclose privacy impact of storing 411m photos and has no information on how often software returns false positives, a new study findsThe FBI maintains a huge database of more than 411m photos culled from sources including driver’s licenses, passport applications and visa applications, which it cross-references with photos of criminal suspects using largely untested and questionably accurate facial recognition software.A study from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released on Wednesday for the first time revealed the extent of the program, which had been queried several years before through a Freedom of Information Act request from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The GAO, a watchdog office internal to the US federal government, found that the FBI did not appropriately disclose the database’s impact on public privacy until it audited the bureau in May. Continue reading...

Nine Inch Nails musician and Apple Music executive joins music industry’s debate over Google’s video service, but YouTube hits backNine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor is the latest artist to join the music industry’s war of words with YouTube, attacking Google’s video service over the role it plays for musicians.“I find YouTube’s business to be very disingenuous. It is built on the backs of free, stolen content and that’s how they got that big,” said Reznor in an interview with Billboard. Continue reading...

Andrew House says PlayStation 4 Neo console isn’t ready to show off yet and Sony will wait until there is enough content to illustrate its benefitsSony will not show the updated PlayStation 4 Neo console until there is enough content available to illustrate the benefits of the machine, PlayStation boss Andrew House has stated.Speaking at the E3 video games conference in Los Angeles, the president and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment also expressed surprise that Microsoft had announced its Project Scorpio hardware over a year before launch. Continue reading...

Social network drops the dot-@, usernames and attachments from the 140-character limit while also allowing users to retweet their own tweetsTwitter has finally given into its true nature and allowed users to retweet themselves, cementing itself as the mother of all self-reinforcing echo chambers.

The games industry cliche is that every conference panel is full of stubble-faced white men in suit jackets and T-shirts. Is it true this year?Ask five people who follow the video games industry what to expect from an E3 press conference and they’ll all paint you a similar picture. Bright lights on a big stage, lengthy cinematic trailers for shooters starring gravelly-voiced stubble-faced white men, interspersed with awkward patter from white men in suits (or, depending on the publisher, suit jackets and T-shirts and trainers), cheered and whooped at by a largely white male audience. This industry is often unwelcoming to women and underrepresented minorities, and these widely watched events do little to counter that.Of course, some conferences do better than others. This year, we’ve judged EA, Bethesda, Microsoft, Ubisoft, and Sony for the diversity of their speakers and of the games and characters on show. How do they compare?

Google Trends data shows number of economy-related searches come only third behind immigration and NHS

Victoria & Albert Museum, London

If you were ‘in favour of leaving the EU’, Facebook wanted you to tell people. Remaining, not so muchFacebook has denied bias in the forthcoming EU referendum, after users noticed that the social network offered the ability to mark yourself as “in favour of leaving the EU”, but not in favour of remaining.The feature was highlighted by Jon Worth, a writer and strategist based in Berlin. When writing a status update on Facebook, if he tapped to add a “feeling/activity” tag to the update, then tapped on “more”, only a pro-Leave option was included in the list of available activities. Continue reading...

Robin Hanson’s strange, very serious, book predicts what will happen in a Matrix-like world when computers have software emulations of human brains and our bodies are destroyedIn the future, or so some people think, it will become possible to upload your consciousness into a computer. Software emulations of human brains – ems, for short – will then take over the economy and world. This sort of thing happens quite a lot in science fiction, but The Age of Em is a fanatically serious attempt, by an economist and scholar at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, to use economic and social science to forecast in fine detail how this world (if it is even possible) will actually work. The future it portrays is very strange and, in the end, quite horrific for everyone involved.It is an eschatological vision worthy of Hieronymus Bosch. Trillions of ems live in tall, liquid-cooled skyscrapers in extremely hot cities. Most of them are “very able focused workaholics”, who “respect and trust each other more” than we do. Continue reading...

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

Pacific Gas and Electric, a company Bill Morrow joined in 2006 as chief operating officer, reportedly facing 13 criminal countsThe executive appointed by Malcolm Turnbull to run NBN Co appears likely to be called as a witness in legal actions now under way in the US, flowing from one of the worst utility disasters in the country’s history.Legal actions have begun in San Francisco involving Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), a company Bill Morrow joined in 2006 as chief operating officer, before becoming chief executive a year later. Morrow left PG&E in September 2008. Continue reading...

The Facebook CEO floated the far out idea in a Facebook Live video, while also chatting with comedian Jerry Seinfeld about his broken armFirst Facebook had pictures. Then it had videos. And soon it will have virtual reality. But some day, CEO Mark Zuckerberg imagines a way for users to be able to transmit thoughts directly from one brain to another.“You’re going to just be able to capture a thought, what you’re thinking or feeling in kind of its ideal and perfect form in your head, and be able to share that with the world in a format where they can get that,” Zuckerberg said in a live video Q&A broadcast from his Facebook page. “There’s some pretty crazy brain research going on that suggests we might be able to do this at some point.” Continue reading...

Hackers lurked in systems since at least last summer but only recently exfiltrated files on his business dealings and past political statements, investigators saidHackers linked to the Russian government stole research files on Donald Trump from the Democratic National Committee, according to a US firm investigating the breach.Some of the hackers had been lurking in the systems since at least last summer, well before Trump sealed the Republican nomination, but only recently exfiltrated the Democratic party’s cache of files on Trump’s business dealings and past political statements, investigators said. Continue reading...

Premium aluminium body, good screen and camera, great fingerprint scanner, bloat-free software, and a day’s battery – at half the cost of a SamsungThe OnePlus 3 is the latest top-end smartphone sold at mid-range prices from Chinese manufacturer OnePlus, which offers a refined experience for considerably less than Samsung, HTC, LG or Apple.The 3 is the fourth smartphone from OnePlus – a small Chinese startup aiming to provide the best experience possible product for significantly less money than rivals – and is a big step in all directions over last year’s OnePlus 2. Continue reading...

DC circuit court votes 2-1 in favor of FCC’s rules that treat broadband service like public utility and prevent providers from offering preferential ‘fast lanes’An appeals court upheld the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality rules on Tuesday, requiring internet providers to treat all web traffic equally.The three-judge panel’s 2-1 decision is another victory for consumer advocates, the regulator and the Obama administration who have campaigned for years to protect an open internet. Continue reading...

It’s always worth catching the French publisher’s E3 show – and this year virtual reality, snow sports and motorcycle stunt shooting added to the mixAmid the slick hyperbole and dead-eyed “we’re excited to announce” monotony of the E3 press conference weekend, Ubisoft events always stick out. Whatever the games are like, there will surely be something to amaze, bedazzle or bemuse – whether that’s a disastrous laser quest enactment or E3’s first passing of the Bechdel Test. This year it was a bizarre opening performance of Just Dance 17 featuring pandas and giraffes dancing to Queen’s Don’t Stop Me know. This would absolutely not happen at an Electronic Arts event.But there were certainly moments that stood out for the right reasons. Star Trek: The Bridge from Ubisoft’s Red Storm studio is essentially a virtual reality take on the brilliant multiplayer mobile game Space Team, set aboard a federation starship named USS Aegis. Up to four players take different positions on a VR representation of the bridge and have to work together to beat a series of missions. While the captain has overall control, a tactical expert navigates the combat options while the navigator steers. Apparently, there’s a single-player mode, but the fun is going to be playing online with similarly nerdy friends shouting “make it so” repeatedly until you’re kicked off the server. It’s out this autumn for Vive, Rift, and PlayStation VR. Continue reading...

Second major expansion for Destiny hits in September, and the game’s developers revealed more about what’s in storeIn September, Destiny returns, and so do the Lords of Iron.Bungie’s massively multiplayer online first-person shooter has been quiet for the past six months, since the launch of September’s Taken King expansion (save a small content update in April). But now it’s back, with a new area, new raid, and new strikes – as well as the return of the fan-favourite rocket launcher Gjallahorn. Continue reading...

Shares in Premier Farnell, maker of £20 educational computer for children, rise by 50% as sale is announcedPremier Farnell, the maker of the low-cost Raspberry Pi mini computer, has agreed to sell itself for £615m to the Swiss industrial components maker Dätwyler.The Leeds-based electronic components distributor said Dätwyler would pay 165p in cash for each Premier Farnell share – 51% more than the UK company’s closing share price on 13 June. Premier Farnell shares rose 50% to 163.5p. Continue reading...

Apple launch new version of iPad and iPhone operating system, including redesigned Apple Music, internet of things Home app, and new Apple Watch OS

With the first half of 2016 already under our belt, we look back at the best releases of the year, in no particular orderThe concluding instalment in From Software’s acclaimed action role-playing series provides all the impassable enemies, labyrinthine locations and gothic cruelty we expect from director Hidetaka Miyazaki.

The place to talk about games and other things that matterTuesday! Continue reading...

The presumptive Democratic nominee would pressure tech companies to be more cooperative to government requests and countering online propagandaPresumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton said on Monday that if elected, she would pressure US technology companies to help intelligence agencies disrupt violent plots after a gunman killed 49 people in an Orlando nightclub.

Pepper the humanoid robot has started work as an assistant on the reception desk in hospitals in Liege and OstendTwo Belgian hospitals have added an innovative staff member to their reception desks: humanoid robots called Pepper.The robots took up assistant reception duties at hospitals in Ostend and Liege on Monday.. Continue reading...

At its annual developer event, CEO Tim Cook led a silence for victims in Orlando, before revealing updates to iOS and Siri, its voice-controlled AIApple, known for its steady stream of slick consumer electronic devices, used its annual developer conference in San Francisco to roll out a collection of millennial-friendly texting tools to enhance emojis, improve image sharing and add animations to messages.Related: Apple WWDC keynote: key points at a glance Continue reading...

Court orders subpoena to gather account details of Queensland university student accused of making online racist commentFacebook has been dragged into a racial discrimination case involving three Queensland university students.On Monday federal circuit court judge Michael Jarrett ordered the social media giant be subpoenaed for information on the account details of a Queensland University of Technology student accused of making a racist comment online. Continue reading...

The OS X era that Steve Jobs started comes to a close, as operating system moves in line with iOS on mobile and tablet

From smartphone-camera ‘clicks’ to websites that emulate the sound of a turning page, you shouldn’t believe everything you hearThere’s a “fantastic cackle” from the Jaguar F-Type’s V8 engine, while the new Ford Mustang makes a beautiful “wub-wub”, according to motoring broadcaster Quentin Willson. Increasingly, however, the throb of a high-performance engine is faked or artificially boosted and then piped into a car’s cockpit. A new invention developed by Ford for “generating engine noise” has been lodged with the US Patent and Trademark Office, demonstrating that artificial sounds are now a big global business.We live in a world of ersatz noise, where computers mimic sounds once made by machinery, from the old-fashioned shutter-style click of the camera on phones to websites that shuffle like paper when we turn a page. Continue reading...

It’s loud, chaotic, expensive and some say increasingly irrelevant – but attending E3 is still a games industry rite of passageYou see them at LAX airport in the second week of June every year, long snaking lines of them, sloping off long haul flights and waiting to pass through customs. They’re mostly men, mostly in their 20s and 30s, dressed in jeans, T-shirts and trainers; they’re in big groups, laughing and joking, enjoying the air of jubilant anticipation, but pretending not to. They’re all here for the same thing; the same thing 50,000 other people are coming to Los Angeles for; the same thing I’ve now been doing for 10 years. They’re here for E3.E3 – the electronic entertainment expo – is effectively the Mecca of the mainstream video game industry. Held every year at the vast Los Angeles convention centre (except for a couple of ill-remembered jaunts to Atlanta, and two years when it was semi-cancelled), it is a trade-only event that everyone in the business has to attend at least once. This is where the big players – Activision, EA, Ubisoft, Microsoft, Sony, etc – show off their forthcoming multimillion dollar releases to a highly excitable crowd of retailers, investors and journalists. They do it at considerable cost (a stand on the show floor can cost around $20m) and with a ton of planning that takes all year. They do it because this is now a $100bn-a-year industry and there is a lot riding on building a buzz around your latest annual franchises. Even in this age of mass digital dissemination, you still need a focal point.

Social network attempts to convince users to install its new photo-sharing app by threatening to remove all photos synced from the Facebook appFacebook will delete all the photos users have synced from the main Facebook app if they do not install its dedicated photo-sharing app Moments before 7 July.

Digital art project in Liverpool allows ex-servicemen to use a virtual world canvas, FF Gaiden, to explore their past experiencesThe pent-up fury and impotence that Iraq war veteran Jay Bell felt when he found himself back on Civvy Street could easily have landed him in prison, had it not been for a Liverpool-based digital art project aimed at ex-servicemen doing time.The 30-year-old ex boxer, who served in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers from 2004 to 2009, highlights his training to “kill for a living”, to underline his astonishment at the way the slide of his life into chaos has been reversed by art. He observed the same effect on prisoners he worked with at HMP Altcourse and HMP Liverpool, as a volunteer on a project with Fact – the Liverpool-based media, film and digital art centre.

The former Mötley Crüe member has written to site owners Google, accusing it of stonewalling musicians in negotiationsMötley Crüe co-founder Nikki Sixx has ramped up his campaign to get YouTube to pay better royalties to artists by writing directly to Larry Page, accusing the Google-owned video-sharing site of stonewalling musicians in negotiations.Sixx, along with James Michael and the rest of his current band Sixx:AM, became the latest in a string of musicians to criticise YouTube’s music video royalty pay out policies in April. Continue reading...

New release will include a 64-person multiplayer, while Titanfall will feature a single-person story campaignElectronic Arts has revealed new trailers and tantalizing details for Battlefield One, the first world war-era setting of its headline shooter title, as well as demonstrating the game’s new option to live-stream a 64-player multiplayer version.Ahead of the huge games industry E3 event in Los Angeles, EA was keen to show off its Frostbite engine, which is being used in games as diverse as Battlefield One, Titanfall II, and the new Madden Football and Fifa 17 titles. Continue reading...

The place to talk about games and other things that matterIt’s Monday! I’m at E3 so please expect erratic service. Continue reading...

Systemic problems with computer training costs economy £63bn a year in lost income, Commons committee says

In road tests following the VW scandal, diesel cars were shown to produce more exhaust pollution in colder weatherDiesel car tests by the UK, French and German governments in the wake of the VW scandal answered some questions but raised many more.In official tests, cars are gently accelerated to 30mph (50kph) and then slowed down several times on rollers in a laboratory. This is then repeated to faster speeds. All diesel cars passed. The UK testers then reversed the order, starting with the faster part. Continue reading...

Bill Shorten says more users can have fibre-to-the-premises connections at no extra cost to budgetLabor has promised to unravel the “national broadband network mess” left by the Turnbull government and deliver the “real NBN”, via fibre-to-the-premises, for up to 2m more Australian homes and businesses.It claims this can be done with no budget impact, with the public equity contribution being the same under Labor as under the Liberals.

There are signs that the conference’s love affair with silence may be waning, but it remains secretive and highly policed“The paintings at the old master picture gallery are wonderful!” gushed the LVMH director Marie-Josée Kravis, as she wafted stylishly back to the conference. “You simply must go and have a look.” It was a charming and engaging answer to my question, even if my question had been: “Do you think Bilderberg will hold a press conference this year?”It is possible, as a Bilderberg steering committee member, that she has forgotten what the words press conference mean. The phrase must have sounded like a baffling mishmash of alien syllables, so Kravis panicked and talked about art instead. Continue reading...

People are putting brackets round their Twitter handles in an attempt to subvert a far-right attempt to identify and harass Jews onlineLike many digital non-natives (are we digital tourists? Immigrants? Reluctant asylum seekers?), I like to assume that social media trends I don’t understand can’t be that important, otherwise I would somehow, maybe telepathically, understand them. So it was with the triple-brackets around a person’s name on Twitter. On my timeline, which is roughly divided between foodies and lefties, people started to triple-bracket themselves – (((like this))) – but this is a response to and subversion of the main trend, which is to triple-bracket others. Continue reading...

Sentient machines are a greater threat to humanity than climate change, according to Oxford philosopher Nick BostromYou’ll find the Future of Humanity Institute down a medieval backstreet in the centre of Oxford. It is beside St Ebbe’s church, which has stood on this site since 1005, and above a Pure Gym, which opened in April. The institute, a research faculty of Oxford University, was established a decade ago to ask the very biggest questions on our behalf. Notably: what exactly are the “existential risks” that threaten the future of our species; how do we measure them; and what can we do to prevent them? Or to put it another way: in a world of multiple fears, what precisely should we be most terrified of?When I arrive to meet the director of the institute, Professor Nick Bostrom, a bed is being delivered to the second-floor office. Existential risk is a round-the-clock kind of operation; it sleeps fitfully, if at all. Continue reading...

A mountain bike with an electric engine to help you cope with the hillsI’ve grown used to smug slobs surging silently along on their pedal-assist electric bikes. They’re cheating, but as they’ve found a quick, effortless solution to city transport, I can forgive them (I try to, anyway). Now, however, we have the electric mountain bike – and that’s just not fair. Twisting the throttle to make mincemeat of hills without breaking sweat so you can enjoy the swoop and whoop of plunging downhill is just plain lazy. But if that’s you, you’ll love the electric Strada from Raleigh. Rugged and reliable, the bike is to all intents and purposes a standard off-roader with decent Suntour forks and pin-sharp disc brakes. But it also has a TranzX M16 motor giving a range of up to 125km in eco mode. If you can live with your conscience, it’s a blast… (raleigh.co.uk)Price: £1,550

British supermarkets are nervous about the launch of Amazon Fresh. But it hasn’t exactly set the US alight yetAfter years of expectation, Amazon finally launched its Fresh grocery service in the UK last week, parking its tanks on the lawns of the country’s biggest retailers. It promises “everything you need for your weekly shop”, from artisanal Stilton to tangy cheese Doritos, delivered to your door in a cool box.Some analysts are predicting the US online giant could grab up to 3% of the UK grocery market by 2020. That would represent £1.4bn of sales, much of which would be stolen from the already struggling traditional supermarkets – Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons. Continue reading...

With Jennifer Lawrence signed on to star in a film about Theranos, we made a list of the Silicon Valley hotshots we want to see played on the big screenThe story of blood-testing startup Theranos’ fall from grace may still be playing out in real life, but it’s already being made into a movie starring Jennifer Lawrence.

It could be from an 80s film about some neets who steal a carThere will always be something ludicrous about the two-tone car. It makes you look as if you’ve taken its decorative aspect too literally, and think it’s a handbag. But if you’re going to have two colours, black and red are at least mischievous and not twee. And the Peugeot 208 needs to look like that: it’s gunning for the boy racer market, but its shape doesn’t really give that away. Only the headlight clusters at the front look modern, curved blinking eyes echoed in a near-symmetrical low light. Otherwise, no offence, it could be from a 1980s film about some neets who steal a car – if it weren’t for the colourway. Often I couldn’t find it in a car park, because I couldn’t remember which end was which colour or, for that matter, which way I’d parked. But I filed that under “my problem”.The cabin looks sleek, and then you sit down. The seats are low and hard, there is very little cushioning, inside or out, and road shocks ring through you like the starting gun at a poorly attended sports day. The positioning of the wheel, bizarrely, obscured the speedometer, so I could tell how fast I was going only by disapproving looks. The 1.6 litre turbo-charged engine is generous for the car size, but in the city you felt the lag on the turbo more than the turbo itself. Accelerating off the lights wasn’t as much fun as you’d think. Continue reading...

California electric car maker says one of its cars that had an abnormal amount of rust on a suspension part had over 70,000 miles on it and was caked in dirtElectric car maker Tesla Motors is denying allegations that there are safety problems with its vehicle suspensions.The Palo Alto, California, company says one of its cars had an abnormal amount of rust on a suspension part, a problem it hasn’t seen in any other car. Continue reading...

Ex-Google division Niantic Labs have teamed up with the Pokémon Company for an augmented-reality take on the gaming franchise. Can it really take on Candy Crush in the mobile games market?The first Pokémon game for smartphones is coming this year, two decades after the RPG first came to the Game Boy. And its new incarnation all came about because of an April Fools’ Day joke.Called Pokémon Go, the game is an unprecedented co-production between the Pokémon Company, and a former Google division called Niantic Labs. The first seed of it was sown in April 2014, when Google teamed up with the Pokémon Company to hide Pokémon throughout Google Maps. Continue reading...

In Silicon Valley, being ahead of the jargon curve can bring great social and financial rewards – and it may even be confused for true innovationIt’s as common as the hoodies and the Soylent: Silicon Valley loves its jargon while simultaneously groaning over the weight of its pretense. However, this “pain point” is also an opportunity for enterprising wordsmiths.In the Valley, speaking fluent cutting-edge startup is the bare minimum required to inspire confidence. Being ahead of the jargon curve can bring great social and financial rewards. It may even be confused with true innovation.

With a dark, ominous atmosphere and gibberish script, short film Sunspring was penned by a computer and stars Silicon Valley’s Thomas MiddleditchArtificial intelligence has recently been trying its hand at various human creative endeavours, from cooking to art, poetry to board games, but nothing is quite as surreal as a robot writing the script for a science fiction movie – until now.