Technology | The Guardian

For those of us whose range of experience runs beyond brides, haircuts and dancing Playboy bunnies, a list of alternative female emoticonsWhen it comes to women and emojis, it can feel a bit like the 1950s got trapped in your keyboard. The “femoji” are all girly girls; they get their nails done , get haircuts , get married , and dress up as dancing Playboy bunnies .. Meanwhile “menmoji” are policemen , construction workers and cyclists ..There have been many suggestions as to how best to change the emoji-optics. Michelle Obama tweeted that she’d like to see an emoji of a girl studying. Always and Bodyform, the feminine hygiene companies, have both launched campaigns to introduce less stereotypical emoji. In Bodyform’s case these revolve around periods and include an angry-PMS-face emoji, which isn’t stereotypical at all. Continue reading...

Google has quietly become an important force in PC sales, according to latest figuresMore Google Chromebooks are sold in the US than Apple Macs, according to the latest figures from analyst firm IDC.While few think of the company, famous more for its mobile and internet software, as a major creator of PC operating systems, the slimmed-down Chrome OS has powered almost 2m laptops sold to Americans in the first quarter of 2016, IDC told the Verge. Continue reading...

Once, people like Sam Lee would have aspired to work in music journalism or radio. Now they’re curating playlists for services like Deezer“One of our most popular playlists is Sad Songs For Crying. That is a bit worrying, actually, now I think about it.”Sam Lee is one of an emerging breed of music tastemakers. He doesn’t work for a magazine or music blog, nor does he work for a radio station. Instead, he’s the UK and Ireland editor at music-streaming service Deezer. Continue reading...

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

Monsters battle teens who have gods on their side, a North Korean US dystopia is uninspired, and Enter the Gungeon goes great gunsPS Vita, Acttil, cert: 12 Continue reading...

Fewer than half of consumer payments were cash in 2015, while direct debits were worth £1.22tnBritain has passed another milestone on the path to a cashless society, with 2015 the first year that cash was used for fewer than half of all payments by consumers.Cash usage will be eclipsed by debit cards and contactless payments by 2021, according to Payments UK, which represents the major banks, building societies and payment providers. Continue reading...

There are plenty of great social apps jostling to be the next smartphone hit. Here are some of the contendersThe most popular social apps – Facebook and WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram, as well as Twitter and Snapchat – have hundreds of millions of people using them. They’re not in any immediate danger of being dislodged from your home screen. That hasn’t stopped startups from trying, though. There are hundreds releasing new social apps all hoping to be the next big smartphone hit. Most fail, some get bought by bigger fish as they start to grow, but many have some inventive ideas along the way about what the next social networking trends will be. Here are some of the social apps making waves in 2016. Continue reading...

From Lacroix’s hi-tech racer to Pininfarina’s take on an old-school steely, the LikeBike show in Monaco is all about gallery-grade cyclesLast summer masked men smashed through the plate glass of a boutique on Regent Street and made off with a £25,000 haul. Nothing unusual in that, except for one thing: their targets were the latest, finger-light bikes from cult brand Pinarello.Bicycles today are more desirable and more collectable than ever before. They have become highly fetishised objects which manage to be both machines and works of art at the same time. Those interested in these “hyper” bikes would do well to head to Monaco for what is being billed as the “most glamorous bike show on earth”. Held in the Grimaldi Forum overlooking the Mediterranean, LikeBike will be a showcase for cyclophilia and excess, with everything from diamanté-encrusted carbon frames to bikes made of 50 layers of compressed ash. Be sure to wear your smartest Lycra… Continue reading...

Despite renewed efforts to clean up the market for tickets in major events, it remains easy to purchase tools that defeat vendors’ security measuresSoftware that helps touts bypass the security systems of major ticketing companies and scoop up tickets at the expense of fans is easily available online – and even comes with YouTube videos to explain how to use it.Scrutiny of ticketing firms and touts has reached fever pitch ahead of a government-backed report into the industry due to be published this week. Continue reading...

The problems of storing and carrying energy for our gadgets and homes are proving difficult to solve. But a breakthrough is sorely neededFrom the phones in our pockets to the cars on our roads, almost everything with an electrical circuit needs a battery. But while the rest of the technology industry has made great leaps over the past couple of decades, batteries have not.The shortcomings of batteries are now one of the biggest bottlenecks in transport, energy, infrastructure and more. Our power demands are ever-increasing, but our ability to carry or store power is limited. Smartphones barely last a day, electric vehicles have much shorter ranges than petrol or diesel cars, and storing energy from sources such as solar panels is difficult. Continue reading...

Scotland Yard figures reveal scale of violence on capital’s roads and prompt fresh spat between rivalsA surge has been recorded in violent crimes against London taxi drivers, prompting a fresh spat between Uber and black cabs over who is to blame.New figures from Scotland Yard reveal that violent offences against taxi drivers have risen by more than two-thirds, from 856 in 2014 to 1,403 last year. Black-cab drivers have blamed Uber for the increase, alleging that “poor English” and the inadequate street knowledge of drivers working for the taxi-hailing app company have generated so much frustration among passengers that it has led to violence. Continue reading...

The driver’s seat is wide enough for two, and three stone cold enemies could sit in the middle row without compromising their implacable distanceThe Citroën Grand C4 is certainly large – the dash was so wide and deep that I couldn’t reach the front of it; and the windscreen is gigantic, which, along with the glass roof, made the roads feel American. Don’t ask me how that works, I just felt several times as if I were in Wyoming.The driver’s seat is wide enough for two, though it’s arguable how useful that is, and three stone-cold enemies could sit in the middle row without compromising their implacable distance. The third row is a bit more intimate, and luggage would have to get on extremely well. But you wouldn’t want this car to be any larger, particularly if you park like an idiot at the best of times, which by the ancient laws of the universe of cars, people who need seven seats always do. Continue reading...

Standard words won’t protect you from determined hackers. But you can make your online accounts safe in just a few easy stepsOnly idiots, we know, use “password” as their password. Or “123456”. Or “football” (the seventh most common password in the world). Maybe you carefully add an upper case letter, an unusual character or two, plus a few numbers to your Pa$swOrd.But with hackers using “brute force” software to make as many as 8m password guesses a second, don’t kid yourself you are safe. This week LinkedIn told users to reset their accounts after more than 100m passwords appeared for sale online. Continue reading...

As fallout continues over raids on Labor party, Mitch Fifield appears to contradict AFP commissioner on whether government was aware of inquiryThe communications minister, Mitch Fifield, has confirmed he knew the Australian Federal Police were investigating leaks from within NBN Co but said he did not tell the prime minister.Fifield said on Saturday he had no interaction with the AFP regarding the investigation, including over Thursday’s night’s raids on properties linked to Senator Stephen Conroy and the Labor staffer Andrew Byrne. Continue reading...

Device helps doctors accurately measure patient’s drinking history, and not just depend on most recent testsA San Francisco-based company has won a US government-sponsored competition with an alcohol monitoring devices that can be worn on the wrist, the latest milestone in the development of wearable technologies that monitor and diagnose medical conditions.BACtrack, a privately held medical device maker, took the $200,000 top prize in the National Institutes of Health Wearable Biosensor Challenge with its wristband monitor – dubbed BACtrack Skyn – which measures blood alcohol levels via sweat on the skin. Continue reading...

While technology has undoubtedly improved our lives, history shows we need rules and regulations to ensure workers can share in the gig economy’s wealthAcross the country, new companies are using the internet to transform the way Americans work, shop, socialize, vacation, look for love, talk to the doctor, get around, and track down a 10ft feather boa – which was my latest Amazon search.These innovations have improved our lives in countless ways, reducing inefficiencies and leveraging network effects to help grow our economy. This is real growth. Continue reading...

Google’s path to developing machine-learning tools illustrates the stark challenge that tech companies face in trying to make machines act like humansMachines may yet take over the world, but first they must learn to recognize your dog.To hear Google executives tell it at their annual developer conference this week, the technology industry is on the cusp of an artificial intelligence, or AI, revolution. Computers, without guidance, will be able to spot disease, engage humans in conversation and creatively outsmart world champions in competition. Such breakthroughs in machine learning have been the stuff of science fiction since Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Banks may like wristbands warning us we’ve spent too much. But I’d rather have one to stop me arguing on Twitter and saying yes to thingsTechnology is no longer one of life’s benign helpers. I blame the Microsoft paperclip. He started it, with his incessant questions. Now we have an activity app on the Apple Watch that tells users to stand up if it thinks they have been sitting down for too long. Worse still is the proposed wearable tech invented by a British firm that could send bank customers an electric shock if they overspend.While the latter sounds like a story from the Onion, (and wouldn’t you just take the watch off when you felt a bit spendy?), let’s consider for a moment some uses such irritating warnings may have: Continue reading...

Organised troll-reviewing of the remake’s trailer is inevitable, but it won’t stop the thrilling transformation in pop culture that is finally taking placeWe live in a post-mainstream culture. As the way we consume books, movies and television changes, artists and directors no longer need to cater to a “universal” audience viewpoint. This means there is slightly less obligation to pander to what straight white men are supposed to want from culture. Not everyone is happy about that fact, and across the literary and cultural spectrum, tantrums are being thrown.Related: Who ya gonna call? Why Ghostbusters is leading the charge for female buddy movies Continue reading...

It’s the 30th anniversary of Top Gun, and here are the finest air combat games inspired by the classic movieIt was the quintessential 1980s action movie, boasting turbo-charged machismo, ridiculous military hardware and the most homoerotically charged beach volleyball scene in memory.Unsurprisingly, with its tense and beautifully short aerial combat scenes, Top Gun – which is 30 years old today – also inspired a whole era of flight-shooter video games. Unfortunately, most of the licensed Top Gun games were awful. So here are our favourite flight blasters that were clearly influenced by that unforgettable motion picture event. Continue reading...

Whether you’re fighting mythical creatures or baking egg- and dairy-free cakes, there is pleasure to be found in imposing constraintsI’m a level one gal in a level 12 world, but I’m scraping by. I time my dodges carefully, angling just right to catch the boss as he lunges where I’m no longer standing. Then I jump back, down an estus flask and restore my health, staying a whisker out of reach. But this time I’ve miscalculated. I’m not quite far enough away. The game forces me to watch as my outmatched, under-levelled character meets the business end of an axe in a frustratingly long cinematic sequence.“YOU DIED,” the screen glares. Continue reading...

ALP complains to Australian federal police that photos taken and disseminated from raid on Stephen Conroy’s office could have included its broadband policyLabor has complained to the Australian federal police that an NBN staff member disseminated photos taken during Thursday night’s police raid on the former communication minister Stephen Conroy’s office which could have included the party’s broadband policy.The federal Labor party was engaged in a legal wrangle with the AFP for most of Friday and has secured agreement that the material seized in the dramatic late-night raids, part of an investigation into damaging leaks regarding the National Broadband Network, is covered by parliamentary privilege and will be sealed and stored by the clerk of the Senate, probably until parliament resumes after the election campaign. Continue reading...

Harvard researchers say leaked documents show bureaucrats fabricate positive posts to distract from criticism of government

The place to talk about games and other things that matterYay, Friday! And comments are open now! Continue reading...

One of the UK’s most creative studios was shut by Microsoft in April, we talk to co-founder Peter Molyneux and his staff about the end of an eraFor almost 20 years, Lionhead Studios was a beacon of the UK games industry. In a medium where big budgets tend to shrink ambitions, here was a group of experimenters, inventors, and craftspeople who always produced something curious, whether that was creative oddity The Movies or the hugely successful Fable series. Formed in Guildford in 1996, the studio was independent for a decade before Microsoft acquired it. Another decade later, on 31 April 2016, the lights were turned off for the final time. Lionhead made games with big choices, and it was ended by a cruel one.For much of its history, the studio was synonymous with Peter Molyneux, the idiosyncratic game designer who co-founded seminal Guildford studio Bullfrog in the 1990s. There, he oversaw a string of classic sim titles – Populous, Powermonger, Syndicate, Theme Park – before selling up to Electronic Arts in 1995. That publisher’s subsequent mishandling of the studio, which would flounder and then close six years later, is a foundation myth of the games industry; a stark cautionary tale on what can happen when big money meets creative genius. Usually, one of the two doesn’t make it out alive. Continue reading...

Telco confirms NBN and ADSL users having difficulty and says it is working to ‘restore services as quickly as possible’Telstra has apologised to customers affected by an internet outage, the fourth service failure from the telco in as many months.A Telstra spokesman confirmed its NBN and ADSL users might be having difficulty connecting to the internet on Friday. Continue reading...

Sales of vinyl records grow for eighth year in row, but labels attack ‘meagre’ payouts from advert-funded streaming websitesResurgent sales of music on vinyl generated more income for UK artists than YouTube last year, with British acts including Adele and Ed Sheeran accounting for a record one in six of all the albums sold worldwide.Vinyl sales grew for the eighth consecutive year in 2015 with more than 2m LPs sold in the UK, the most since at least 1994 when Wet Wet Wet and Bon Jovi were among the year’s biggest artists. Continue reading...

Election 2016: Federal police operation condemned by Bill Shorten as ‘unprecedented’ during a federal election campaignSound, sound the clarion, fill the fife, throughout the sensual world proclaim: It’s Friday!Welcome to the end of week two of the election campaign, only six more to go. Six weeks to go and it has already got quite ugly, the dog whistling already served up, the members interests – specifically failures to declare them – already nipping the parties’ backsides. Continue reading...

This lowish-budget British film about gamers playing a VR shoot ’em up gone wrong is a modest update on all those killer-website movies in the noughtiesWith the Imax-scaled Warcraft inbound, this lowish-budget Brit attempt to replicate gaming’s immersive properties – stalking nerds around an, of course, mysterious corporation’s wipe-clean HQ while they beta test a VR shoot ’em up – risks looking a bit Amstrad. Yet it’s been capably produced: writer-director Charles Barker may cleave to a dusty old slasher-pic template but he hustles everybody briskly between levels, sending his industrious design team ahead of him to redress a presumably limited number of sets. If it’s far from bleeding edge – within days, it’ll look as dated as Tron and The Lawnmower Man do today – it’s a modest upgrade on all those killer-website movies that popped up a decade ago, keeping us at least semi-interested as to who stands and falls. It’ll fill a slot, if your Xbox connection is down and you feel inspired to quit the sofa. Continue reading...

Google will offer the popular videos for VR and will sell a plastic headset in which consumers will insert a phone along with a controller that serves as a handIf Google gets its way, you will explore the world with your phone strapped over your eyes.At its annual developer conference in Silicon Valley, the internet company showed how it plans to get more people using virtual reality in the coming year by baking the technology into newer smartphones. The vision is for the world’s billions of people to ditch the physical world and explore far off places, take in the news, meet a friend or, as Google repeatedly demonstrated Thursday, water a virtual garden. Continue reading...

This little flying machine, dubbed a “RoboBee”, has been designed to perch on a host of different surfaces, opening up new possibilities for the use of drones in providing a bird’s-eye view of the world, scientists say. The total weight of the robot is about 100mg - similar to the weight of a real bee

New technology can link wearable device to bank accounts and give electric shocks to help customers manage their spending

Fantasy tabletop warfare meets historical strategy simulation in a game that should be inaccessible but ends up excitingWarhammer is a range of tabletop strategy games; Total War is a series of historical battle simulations. Combining the two should have produced a black hole of nerdiness so unapproachable it would crush all mortals. Strangely, however, this is probably the most accessible each game has been for years.Typically taking place over the surface of a continent, the Total War games have taken in medieval Europe, the Napoleonic era, the Roman world and the warring states era of Japan. Like the turn-based Civilization series, players control one faction, building settlements, researching new technologies and recruiting armies. When those armies clash on the campaign, players then control them in real-time battles against opposing factions and nations. Continue reading...

Hire millennials, invest in assets and be concise, and you’ll have short, snappy and highly shareable videos for Facebook and TwitterThey are called dabs, those short, snappy and highly shareable videos that dominate your Facebook or Twitter feed. News organisations such as NowThisNews and AJ+ (Al Jazeera) are leading the way in this micro-video style, based on the idea of a little bit of news, every now and then.

Company is appealing against decision by French data protection authority to apply search-results ruling to all its domainsGoogle is appealing to France’s highest court over a legal ruling that could force it to censor its search results worldwide.The search firm has filed an appeal with the Conseil d’État, the French court with the final say over matters of administrative law, in an attempt to overturn a ruling from the country’s data protection authority (CNIL), which would greatly extend the remit of the so-called “right to be forgotten”. Continue reading...

Speaking at Cannes, the multiple Oscar winner and BFG director expressed fears that storytelling will suffer if viewers of virtual reality films are given the choice where to lookRelated: The BFG review: delicate touch of Spielberg and Rylance proves hugely charmingSteven Spielberg has warned the rise of virtual reality technology represents a potentially “dangerous” development for traditional film-makers. Continue reading...

When engineer husbands relocate to pursue dream jobs, their H4 visa-holding wives must cope with the resentment and loneliness of losing their own careersThe South Bay H4 visa holder’s support group is having lunch in Palo Alto. The group organizes several meet-ups a week: coffees, dinners and shopping expeditions. Today, turnout is high. Fifteen women – some carrying babies and toddlers – take their seats at the table running down the centre of an upscale burger restaurant. The contrast with the other customers – groups of software engineers and VC associates carrying silver laptops – is striking.These are the wives of Silicon Valley: women who are integral to the continued success of the Valley’s multibillion-dollar computing industry – but also entirely invisible to it. Their husbands are the engineers who, headhunted from across the globe, emigrate to Silicon Valley as H1B “skilled workers”, helping to drive innovation in companies like Apple, Google and Facebook. Continue reading...

Live coverage, which was also free to non-subscribers on YouTube, attracts peak of 3.5 million viewersIt was heartbreak for Liverpool but Jürgen Klopp’s side’s 3-1 Europa League defeat by Sevilla scored BT Sport’s biggest audience to date with a peak of 3.5 million viewers.

There was a lot to get through at the annual developer conference in California but the company still managed to surpriseGoogle I/O is the biggest date in the firm’s calendar: it’s the conference where it gets everyone together in one big room (actually, this year it was a tent) in California to reveal all the cool stuff it has been working on.This year was more focused than most. It’s the first I/O since the company restructured itself into Alphabet, hiving off the wilder projects such as Google Glass, self-driving cars and life-extension research into other subsidiaries. Gone are the days of livestreaming a parachute jumper wearing Google Glass from the I/O stage. But that doesn’t mean the company wasn’t trying to impress with more down-to-earth revelations. Continue reading...

Star Wars: The Force Awakens mascot droid turned from inspirational robotic pal into a 2001 disaster with the help of Microsoft’s operating systemEveryone knows that Star Wars: The Force Awakens is actually an uplifting story about a little robot named BB-8 overcoming adversity with the help of his human servants. But that feelgood film quickly turns into a horror movie with the introduction of Windows XP.

Director’s masterclass will cover everything from obtaining financing to scouting locations – but not storyboarding, which is ‘an instrument of the cowards’He fought running battles with Klaus Kinski on the set of 1972’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God, dragged a real ship over a steep hill for 1982’s Fitzcarraldo and even opened his own film school. Now Werner Herzog is promising to teach budding directors the art of guerrilla film-making online for the small matter of $90 (£61).Herzog, who famously stole his first camera from the Munich film school, claims in a video for the Werner Herzog Film-making Masterclass that his students can learn the essentials of the art in two weeks. He berates wannabe directors who shoot hundreds of hours of footage for later editing, warning them that film-makers “are not garbage collectors”. Continue reading...

Gabriel’s organisation works with community groups on volunteering, and they want to collect photos of all the various projects as simply as possibleOnce a year we hold a big day of international volunteering. Community groups, churches, synagogues and so on organise their own projects under our banner. We encourage them to take photos of their project and send them to us.We would like to find a system that lets them upload photos easily, to a secure folder, without having to sign up for accounts or anything. We would then download the photos centrally, categorised by who uploaded them. DropEvent is the sort of thing we want, but it just gives us a big glut of photos without them being categorised into folders based on who uploaded them.DropEvent’s big idea is “everyone’s photos from your wedding in one place,” though it could equally be your Christmas party, school play, or whatever. Another attraction is that people can upload photos without having to sign up, though they still have to enter their email address. Continue reading...

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

From fashion and architecture to music and art, the optimism and techno-utopianism of the early 2000s found its way into every element of designIn the year 2000, a shiny new millennium spread out before us, glittering with the promises of modern technology.The angsty 1990s were behind us, the dotcom bubble was swelling and yet to come was the market bust and “war on terror”. Y2K – the supposed turn-of-the-century bug that would bring our infrastructure to a terrifying halt – had failed to materialise and for a brief moment there was nothing but glittering utopian futurism and faith in a new age of boundless possibility. Continue reading...

First major survey on the sharing economy finds most users of services such as Airbnb and Uber identify as liberal, but take conservative stance on regulationLiberals love Uber and Airbnb so much, they’re embracing conservative values – at least when it comes to regulating the sharing economy, according to a new survey from Pew.The poll – the first major survey on shared, collaborative, and on-demand services – found that the vast majority of Americans are not using ride-hailing and home-sharing services. But those that do are more likely to be opposed to regulating them, even if they identify as Democrats or liberals. Continue reading...

Conservative commentators had a wide-ranging discussion with Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook’s headquarters after accusations of political biasMark Zuckerberg on Wednesday held a wide-ranging discussion with a group of conservative commentators who said afterward the Facebook CEO acknowledged the giant social network has a problem reaching conservatives.The meeting at Facebook’s Menlo Park, California, headquarters came about after a report accused the company of harboring a bias against conservative views. Continue reading...

Adhesive technology on the front of a vehicle would aim to reduce the damage caused when a pedestrian hit by a car is flung into other vehicles or objectsGoogle has patented a new “sticky” technology to protect pedestrians if – or when – they get struck by the company’s self-driving cars.The patent, which was granted on 17 May, is for a sticky adhesive layer on the front end of a vehicle, which would aim to reduce the damage caused when a pedestrian hit by a car is flung into other vehicles or scenery. Continue reading...

Audit Scotland warns mismanagement means incomplete system may run out of funds before it can meet European commission deadlineNicola Sturgeon’s government faces a penalty of up to £125m after a crisis in a major IT system left tens of thousands of farmers without their farm subsidy payments.Audit Scotland has warned that the incomplete £178m system, designed to process common agricultural policy payments of £688m a year, is now in danger of running out of money before it can meet a European commission deadline of 30 June. Continue reading...

Alphabet’s flagship company presents Google Home, a speaker-turned-personal-assistant that will allow users to turn on their lights and surf the web, among other functions. The speaker is part of Google Assistant which aims to take on Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri. Speaking at an event in California, Google’s vice president of product management says the speaker will be available at the end of the year

Messaging tool will have ‘incognito mode’ that offers end-to-end encryption, making it difficult for law enforcement to recover messages during investigationsGoogle on Wednesday became the latest major technology company to join a standoff with the FBI over encryption.At its developer conference, the company announced that its new messaging app, Allo, would feature an “incognito mode” that offered end-to-end encryption. Such technology can make it difficult for law enforcement to recover messages during investigations even if they have a warrant. In Washington DC, the FBI director, James Comey, has lobbied the administration to put restrictions on such technology. Continue reading...