Technology | The Guardian

Two of the digital industry’s biggest bugbears unite to launch Flattr Plus, which aims to get 10 million people paying $5 a month

The studio that began the Call of Duty story is now taking it into space. We talk to the narrative and design directors about this giant leap for the first-person shooter seriesSpace. The final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Call of Duty. Its 14-year mission: to boldly blow up more stuff than any game has blown up before. Now the series, which began in world war two, is finally braking its bonds with Earth. The solar system awaits and it is heavily armed.In a live Twitch session, held on Monday evening, the Infinity Ward narrative director, Taylor Kurosaki, and the design director, Jacob Minkoff, revealed some fresh information about the latest game in this billion-dollar series. The action takes place in a future where Earth’s natural resources are depleted, and new outposts spread throughout the solar system must now provide all the essentials. However, a fascist collective known as the Settlement Defence Front has arisen, determined to capture all those vital space settlements, strangling supply routes. Continue reading...

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

Streaming firm hopes to persuade some of its 175m listeners to start paying £9.99 a month by being ‘less spreadsheet, more Snapchat’Music-streaming service SoundCloud is launching its £9.99-a-month SoundCloud Go subscription tier in the UK and Ireland.The company hopes that features including track downloads for offline listening, and a bigger music catalogue courtesy of label licensing deals, will persuade some of its free listeners to start paying. Continue reading...

Twitter campaign calls on producers to use Frozen 2 to reveal that blockbuster’s heroine is a lesbianTwitter users are calling for Disney to give its Frozen heroine Elsa a girlfriend in the blockbuster’s keenly anticipated sequel.The record-breaking and critically acclaimed 2013 animated film tells of Princess Elsa’s struggle to master her magical powers to reconnect with her sister Anna. Continue reading...

The comments mark the latest example of a male tech CEO making aggressive, insensitive and tone-deaf remarks about people less fortunate than themA Silicon Valley tech CEO has sparked backlash for comments slamming local fruit vendors, saying he would “make their life miserable” and “destroy” their produce if they were stationed near his house – making him the latest wealthy Californian entrepreneur to publicly rail against low-income people.Mark Woodward, CEO of software company Invoca, published – and later deleted – a Facebook post saying that he would have no qualms about aggressively harassing unauthorized fruit sellers in his neighborhood if they got near his home. Continue reading...

Despite assertion by an Australian entrepreneur that he is Satoshi Nakamoto, critics demand technical proofFor years the identity of the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, creator of bitcoin, the world’s leading digital currency, has eluded even the best cryptographers.So when Craig Wright, an Australian computer scientist and entrepreneur, outed himself on Monday as the inventor of the cryptocurrency it seemed to be the end of a mystery that began with the first bitcoin in 2009. Continue reading...

Two bitter rivals have agreed to drop mutual antitrust cases across the globe. Why? To fend off the greater regulatory threat of democratic oversightMicrosoft and Google, two of the world’s greatest monopolies, have been bitter rivals for nearly 20 years. But suddenly, in late April, they announced a startling accord. The companies have withdrawn all regulatory complaints against one another, globally. Rather than fighting their battles in public courts and commissions, they have agreed to privately negotiate.This is a gentleman’s agreement. The specifics are secret, but the message on both sides is that the deal reflects a change in management philosophy. Microsoft’s new chief, Satya Nadella, is eager to push the vision of a dynamic, collaborative Microsoft, partnering with everyone from Apple to Salesforce. Continue reading...

Internet giants say removing diesel particulate filters which reduce toxic emissions is not illegal, although driving without them isGoogle, Gumtree and eBay have refused to ban adverts for a service which removes crucial pollution filters from the exhausts of diesel cars, sending toxic emissions soaring.Over a thousand diesel car owners have already been caught after removing the filter, though experts warn the problem may be far more widespread.

Local providers forced to secure more rights if circumventing geoblocking was legal, peak body claimsThe peak body for internet users has thrown its weight behind calls to end geoblocking, as increasing use of legal video-on-demand services is revealed by new figures.The Productivity Commission’s recommendation that the federal government oppose the restriction of online content by territory in an effort to rebalance Australia’s intellectual property system was met with widespread support on Friday. Continue reading...

Owners can no longer rent whole properties to tourists, as officals blame

Hulu, Vice and other new media services are preparing to gather in New York for this year’s NewFronts, as Facebook and Google watch ad dollars pour inTelevision executives have cause to be scared: though they’ve survived at least eight years of predicted doom, billions in ad money has disappeared, ratings have dwindled and new power players have emerged from unexpected corners. While the old guard has struggled on, Facebook and Google have risen. Continue reading...

Gunplay is a vital part of video games, but how will it work in virtual reality?I was 11 years old when Jonathan Cott first brought a gun to school. It was bright red, or maybe dark blue – colours tend to fade first in the memory – and the paint was chipped at the corners. Cotty, as we called him, was always in deluxe kinds of trouble. Once, while we sat at our desks awaiting the arrival of a long-suffering English teacher, Cotty balanced a large cardboard box on the frame of the classroom door. When the teacher entered, the box fell over his head, trapping his arms in such a way that it took a good 15 seconds for the man to unsheathe himself by bobbing his head back and forth, fellatially.Cotty’s gun fired potatoes, or, to be more precise, tiny chunks of potato. To reload the gun he’d simply plunge the barrel into a King Edward that he carried in his left hand, before squeezing off a shot. Potato fired from a spud gun hurts a lot more than you’d think – especially if it manages to find its way toward a budding bollock. At 11 years old I witnessed the mysterious power of the gun, and the way in which it transfers that power, instantly and sometimes irresistibly, to its holder. Continue reading...

The new list of Britain’s 50 most influential foodies features plenty of tech-savvy newcomers but supermarket bosses and familiar names are still very much in evidenceThe UK food scene is increasingly dominated by social media stars, healthy-eating advocates and tech-savvy startups devising innovative ways of delivering to our doors, according to a new list of 50 influential foodies released last week.The list, featured in the Grocer magazine, suggests that those seeking power and influence in today’s food world would greatly benefit from being fresh-faced, Instagram-literate and more interested in the nutritional benefits of food than as an opportunity for indulgence. Continue reading...

The volatile market in China, the urgency for a new product, and slumping phone sales are combining to create serious problems for the tech companySelf-made billionaire investor Carl Icahn is known for his very vocal endorsements and criticisms of the world’s biggest public companies, including Apple. Yet when he appeared on CNBC on Thursday, he wasn’t there to demand the company give shareholders dividends, as he’d been doing for years.Instead, he said he was out. Icahn said he’d dumped every share he held in Apple, claiming he made a $2bn profit and was done with the company, citing concerns about how the Chinese government could block the company from that market. “You worry a little bit, and maybe more than a little, about China’s attitude,” Icahn said, warning of a “tsunami” of trouble. Continue reading...

This made me immediately like it, and I didn’t stopThere’s something about the exterior of the Skoda Superb estate, the curve of its nose and the shape of its grill, that makes it look like a cartoon character with a friendly moustache – maybe the Lorax. This made me immediately like it, and I didn’t stop, all the way from the parking space I could never fit into to the motorway I was pleasantly tooled up for. Even though it makes the most sense on a long journey, the fact of its comfort made up for the fact that it’s too big, really, for nipping about. The cabin is spacious and actively pleasing to sit in, more like a train. Passengers feel as though they’re miles away.Cars this size divide into “family-ish” and “executive-ey”, and even though in real life almost all families are preferable to all executives, in car world the opposite is true. This feels like business; it is soundless, even at high speeds, and really smooth. All road surfaces are the same in this car: the A303 could be an autobahn built in 2013, for all the challenge it poses. It’s not particularly exciting. You’re neither high on the road, nor low to it. It corners like a 62-year-old man at a tea dance, unhurried and deliberate. I was in the two-litre turbo-diesel, and I mused for about a seventh of every day on how much turbo technology has improved since my early driving years, when to have a diesel meant that nobody would ever believe you were in a hurry. This moved readily through the gears, it had no trouble overtaking anything, and I do believe I even saw a “Huh, I didn’t know Skodas were that powerful” look in the eyes of the people I left eating my dust, although I can’t vouch for that. Continue reading...

Intelligence committee senator said he plans to introduce bill to block expansion to ‘rule 41’ on warrants for suspects who hide their location, set for December

Justin Smith says social network makes far more money from ads in its news feed than news organisations do from linked traffic

A dystopian future of family communication through headsets, or an inventive way to bring remote parents together with their kids – and dinosaurs?Disrupting children’s bedtimes? Most children are more than capable of doing that themselves, whether it’s noisy pillow fights, demands for a fourth snack / poo of the night, or 467 more questions about death.They don’t need an app for it. Samsung has other ideas, however, having unveiled “the future of children’s bedtime” in the form of an app called Bedtime VR Stories that “combines the latest innovations in virtual reality with the power and importance of traditional storytelling”. Continue reading...

The future of apps is chatbots, and it’s going to be terribleHave you heard? Apps are dead: chatbots are the new apps. And they will soon be doing everything, from taking your pizza orders to scheduling your meetings. This is the future and it’s going to be terrible.The rise of the chatbot has been foretold for some time but only in the past few weeks with Facebook’s Messenger bots, chat app Kik’s bot store and the rise of subversive artbots have they really hit the public consciousness. Continue reading...

Sam Barlow wanted to make a new kind of police procedural mystery. So he quit his job, read interrogation manuals and created one of the most interesting games of the last five yearsThere are no spoilers for Her Story in this article.When Sam Barlow was working at Climax Studios in Portsmouth, helping to design the survival horror sequel, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, he would get home at night and tinker with a couple of screenplay projects. They were just an exercise, a way to write about things that he couldn’t in his day job. But then one night, he realised something: both scripts were about a man just ambling along, seemingly quite happy in life, until a cataclysmic event changes everything. “I was like, ‘Oh right, this is me sending a message to myself’,” he says. “I realised I needed the impetus to leave the company and go indie. I was writing this stuff to tell that to myself.”

Top new Android apps of April 2016 include iPlayer Kids, Giphy and Airtime, while the best games include Disney Crossy Road and Exploding KittensApril was an excellent month for new Android apps and games: the Google Play store may be stuffed with apps already, but many of the latest releases are genuinely worth a slot on your device.As ever, prices are correct at the time of writing, and if you see “IAP” that means the app uses in-app purchases. Looking for iPhone and iPad apps instead? There’s a separate monthly roundup for them which will follow shortly. Continue reading...

Videogames speak culture with ever increasing fluency, but cultural policy doesn’t speak much videogame (yet)A year ago, we opened the National Videogame Arcade (NVA). We made a statement, creating a centre of gravity for the interpretation of games for everyone by opening five floors of permanent space dedicated to them. It’s a home for videogames.

US law enforcement agency in possession of mechanism for unlocking iPhone 5Cs or older – but identity of hackers closely guarded secretThe FBI doesn’t know how the hack used to unlock the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone 5C works, and yet it paid in the region of $1m for the mechanism, which can used again to unlock any other iPhone 5C running iOS 9, according to reports.Several US government sources told Reuters that the amount paid for the hack, bought from professional hackers, was substantially less than previous reports indicating a value over $1.3m. The technique can also be used as many times as needed without further payments. Continue reading...

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

Big, full and rounded sound akin to a full-sized Hi-Fi - with a price to match - but squeezed into a box that can stream almost all app-controlled music servicesThe new Play:5 is Sonos’s latest speaker – a revamp of its biggest and most powerful wireless system – and it hopes to be all the Hi-Fi you need in one powerful box.

Icahn has sold his shares in the company because of concerns over China’s influence on its stock priceCarl Icahn, the billionaire activist investor who has long been one of the most prominent voices declaring the company to be undervalued, says he has sold his entire stake in the technology firm, citing the risk of China’s influence on the stock.After years of high growth, reaching triple-digit percentage points in 2015, Apple now sells more in China than it does in the whole of Europe. But sales in the country are now shrinking, with revenue dropping 26% year-on-year in the company’s latest quarterly earnings. Continue reading...

Video games pioneer Nolan Bushnell is planning to revive the ‘hardcore fundamental game design’ of arcades to make mobile titles worth playingThe video game arcade is the cathedral of the games industry. Veteran players see these increasingly endangered places as shrines to design purity, difficulty and player skill, bathed in the glow of flickering monitors. They were, after all, the places where the conventions of the medium were forged, and their gradual disappearance has only served to make them more alluring.Mobile gaming, meanwhile, receives a great deal less reverence, thanks in part to its vast popularity. Despite design masterpieces like Monument Valley, The Room and Hearthstone, smartphone titles are collectively seen as casual time-killers, lacking cultural clout. Term’s like “free-to-play” and “microtransaction” are used with derision, and viewed as evidence of capitalism muscling out creativity. Continue reading...

A fifth of the site’s top 100 channels are focused on toys, while young viewers are also driving big views for kids’ music, cartoons and vlogsLike most pre-school children, Ryan loves playing with toys – from cars, trains and Lego to Disney toys, Play-Doh and Minions. Unlike most pre-school children, he’s playing with those toys for an online audience of millions.Ryan is the young star of Ryan’s Toys Review, a YouTube channel with more than 2.5 million subscribers and 4bn video views – startling figures given that his channel only launched in March 2015. Continue reading...

Commons culture, media and sport committee confirms Elizabeth Denham in £140,000-a-year roleElizabeth Denham has been confirmed as the UK’s new information commissioner.The Commons culture, media and sport committee confirmed the appointment of the Canadian, who currently holds a similar role in British Columbia, on Wednesday. Continue reading...

Company is likely to let its co-founder and CEO push that little bit further, given that it’s making more money, from more users

Is this a new form of native advertising? What’s next, Hurricane Cortana? Tropical storm Groove? Windows 10 whiteout?And you thought it was annoying when you leave your computer to make a cup of tea, returning to find Windows 10 installing.

Electric car buyers will receive €4,000 when they choose a purely electric vehicle and €3,000 for a plug-in hybridGermany will subsidise electric car purchases to give a jolt to sluggish growth in the sector and help meet national climate goals with zero-emission mobility, the government said Wednesday.

The South Korean company brought forward the launch of its new handset after a disappointing 2015Samsung Electronics, the world’s largest smartphone maker, has recorded better than expected first quarter profits thanks to the successful early release of its new flagship Galaxy handset.

Shares open down 7% and climb only a little throughout the day as company grapples with struggling Chinese economy, but Tim Cook voices optimismApple’s shares opened down 7% at the start of trading on Wednesday following the company’s first revenue decline in over a decade and gained back only a little as the day went on.The shares opened at $95.98 and made small gains throughout the morning; the hit initially knocked nearly $50bn off Apple’s market capitalization. Continue reading...

This week, the tech giant reported its first fall in sales for 13 years. Have we finally fallen out of love with its shiny new iPhones? Not quite – but there are some small issues ...

Tinder has introduced Tinder Social, a new feature to meet multiple Facebook friends, sparking privacy concernsTinder, the dating app notorious for translating physical attraction into the swipe of a single fingertip, has launched a group dating feature. Tinder Social has been rolled out on a trial basis in Australia, but has been met with alarm after users realised the new feature exposes Facebook friends that also use the app.In a blog post announcing the launch of Tinder Social, the company presents the function as a means to meet people on a platonic basis, promising to take “an average night out with your friends to the next level”. Continue reading...

Photo agency accuses Google of so-called scraping of images into galleries within search to maintain its dominance of the search marketPhoto agency Getty Images has filed a formal complaint with the European commission against Google over its alleged abuse of the company’s search dominance.

Doug Gurr’s appointment comes weeks after online retailer announced deal to sell fresh, chilled and frozen foodsAmazon has brought in Doug Gurr, the boss of its Chinese business, to run its UK operations in a move that could signal an acceleration of the online firm’s plans to sell groceries in Britain.Gurr was development director at Asda for nearly five years before joining Amazon in 2011. His return to the UK comes weeks after Amazon revealed a deal to sell fresh, chilled and frozen food made by Morrisons, the Bradford-based supermarket chain. Continue reading...

Media company had offered to set up an internal committee rather than recognise a union for its staff membersVice UK has been accused of an “old-fashioned union-busting ruse” by the head of the National Union of Journalists after the web-based company rejected a push for recognition from staff.The NUJ general secretary, Michelle Stanistreet, also said Vice’s claims the union had shown a “concerning lack of transparency” in negotiations were untrue and vowed to continue pushing for recognition. Continue reading...

Organisations are first official partners of Internet Matters, set up two years ago to cover issues such as cyberbullyingThe BBC and Google have joined forces with internet service providers on an initiative to promote online safety for children.The two organisations have become the first official partners of Internet Matters, which was set up two years ago by BT, Sky, Virgin and TalkTalk to teach parents and children about issues such as cyberbullying and protecting privacy. Google and the BBC already run their own internet safety programmes, but Internet Matters claims their support recognises the importance of a collaborative approach. Continue reading...

Filipino presidential supporters also affected by bug, sparking anger at opponentsA bug in Facebook’s anti-spam algorithm has been accidentally suspending groups on the social network, sparking anger from the groups’ founders and conspiracy theories from some of their followers.On Monday night, six pro-Bernie Sanders groups were temporarily suspended by Facebook. A day later, five Facebook groups supporting Filipino presidential candidate Rodrigo Duterte, with a total membership of more than 3 million people, were also taken down for a short period. Continue reading...

From what it is to how much it costs, we answer key questions about the solitary confinement of prisonersSolitary confinement is the practice of isolating people in closed cells for 22-24 hours a day, virtually free of human contact, for periods of time ranging from days to decades. Continue reading...

Based on former prisoners’ testimonies, our virtual reality prison, 6x9, replicates the experience in disturbing detailThere’s a thin mattress on a concrete platform bed, a stainless steel washbasin and toilet, a metal door with a slot for food, and four walls rather too close for comfort. Continue reading...

Find out more about 6x9, an immersive experience of solitary confinement in US prisons which places viewers in a virtual segregation cell they can explore and interact with. It highlights the psychological effects of long-term solitary confinement for people who have experienced it first-hand around the world

KPMG report also finds that 44% of UK adults are planning to block ads within the next six monthsAlmost half of people planning to use an adblocker say a general dislike of ads is one of the main reasons for doing so, according to a new report that highlights the scale of the problems facing digital media.

The humble blow dryer is the latest product to be Dyson’d. Is it as noisy as the cult brand’s other tools? Let’s put it to the testCatherine the Great once described the wind as giving you either imagination or a headache. She hadn’t, of course, accounted for Dyson, which, for the past 20 years, has had the monopoly on harnessing blown air in its award-winning vacuum cleaners, hand-dryers and fans. These products have made Dyson, the man and the company, one of the UK’s greatest stories of innovation and profit. Last year, product sales were up almost 25%, a figure that should soon be bolstered by the next device to be Dyson’d: the hairdryer, and last bastion of air-based appliances.Although Dyson’s products are efficient and cool if you like to see “where the magic happens” (they are often transparent so you can see the moving parts), they are often very loud. Famously loud. Dirty, too, apparently, but it’s mainly the noise. The hand-dryers and vacuums are thought to reach around 80 decibels, which is the same as standing 15m from a freight train. Continue reading...