Technology | The Guardian

The World Esports Association will fight for players’ rights in pro-gamingEight of the world’s biggest pro-gaming teams have joined together to form the World Esports Association [WESA], fighting for player representation, tournament standardisation, and revenue-sharing among teams.The founding teams, all drawn from the ESL Pro-League for Counter-Strike, hope that WESA will provide an important counter-weight on the side of players in an industry dominated by publishers, event organisers, and the publishers of the games themselves – often all the same company. Continue reading...

Corporation in talks with potential partners including ITV and NBC Universal about new subscription service

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

Uncharted 4 takes adventure gaming to another level, Fire Emblem sticks to a winning formula, but Battleborn is a messy mishmashPS4, Sony, cert: 16

Of 14 companies valued above $1bn, five are against leaving EU, while others are neutral or have declined to commentNone of Britain’s so-called unicorns, private companies with a valuation above $1bn (£710m), will support Britain leaving the EU, the Guardian can reveal.Of the 14 companies on the list, five have come out as explicitly against Britain’s exit from the EU, while the rest either remained officially neutral or declined to comment on the matter. Continue reading...

Retailer tells shareholders ahead of refinancing vote that poor Christmas led to insurers lowering or removing protectionGame Digital has told shareholders it lost “significant” levels of credit insurance in the aftermath of a second year of poor Christmas trading.

Banks used a series of slurs targeting Muslims in a post aimed at Zayn Malik, whom she accused of copying her styleAzealia Banks has apologised for a stream of racist and Islamophobic invective against former One Direction member Zayn Malik that led Twitter to suspend her.

Tien Phong Bank says it spotted the fraud on the Swift messaging system quickly enough to prevent Bangladesh-style theft

C of E creating guidelines so 10,000 rural churches may be used to provide wireless internet access to help meet PM’s vowThe medieval church spires of rural England are to bring superfast broadband to the remotest of dwellings, with the Church of England offering their use as communication towers.

The new generation of mobile computers are powerful, sleek and able to cope with the demands of both work and play£50 Continue reading...

Fans may rejoice at their game being given a story, but it’s one that lacks laughs and eleganceFans of the computer game will probably admire the way that the film-makers managed to crowbar a narrative into the baffling silliness of this phenomenon. But if you are not a regular player, the story feels like an inelegant and pointless scramble of trampolines, catapults, eggs and anger management classes. Despite the best efforts of Jason Sudeikis, the voice of the central character, Red, who drenches every line with a thick coating of irony, this simply isn’t funny enough to charm the parents of the film’s intended audience: impressionable and not particularly discerning children. Continue reading...

Fed up with hills and hard work? The latest generation electric bike from Electra could well tempt you back into the saddleIn Holland, a country that knows a thing or two about cycling, they now sell more electric bikes than traditional city bikes. The lurking snobbery that an eBike is ‘cheating’ has gone and in the coming years many more of us will be powering up for a sweat-free pedal. One of the brands ready to take advantage of this is Electra – it’s already on to its second generation pedal-assist bike. The Townie Go! 8i has a frame-mounted Bosch mid-drive system, rather than a hub engine, which has four levels of support: Eco, Tour, Sport and Turbo with a top speed of 20mph. It takes 3.5 hours to charge and for that you have a range of 20-100 miles. It’s comfortable and relaxed and those ‘Fat Frank’ tyres really soak up the bumps. It is pricey, but maybe it’s time to turn down easy street (electrabike.com).Price: £1,999

It’s the high-pitched menace that spoils your day at the beach – unless of course it’s you riding it…Price: £4,999

Walkers and other members of the public will be asked to help create new generation of healthy plantsA £1.2m project to recruit thousands of walkers and other members of the public to help save Britain’s ash trees is to be launched on Monday.The aim of the AshTag project is to use “citizen science” to pinpoint trees that are resistant to ash dieback disease. Cuttings from these resilient trees could then be used to create a new, healthy generation of ash trees that could replace those ravaged by chalara dieback, which reached the UK in 2012 and is devastating many woods. In Denmark, the disease has killed 90% of the ash trees. Scientists hope to minimise the damage by building up details of resistant trees. Continue reading...

Yes, it’s a people carrier, but don’t let that put you offI looked at this car and thought it was going to drive a bit wheezy and puffed out. I don’t know if that’s an assumption I have about seven-seaters, or whether I got some subliminal message from its eminently reputable face, but whatever it was, I was wrong. The Sharan is not a particularly nippy vehicle, but it has more welly than you’d think, and is incredibly solid and reassuring. Obviously the point of a people carrier is not welly but wellies; can everybody fit into it with their stuff, and do they do lumbar stretches and moan when they get out? Is the middle seat big enough, not just for adults but adults who don’t really know each other and would rather die than rub thighs? It is.It doesn’t have a huge boot with the seats up, but if it did, it wouldn’t be a car, it would be a bus. With the seats down, you could fit another car in there. The seat-flattening is incredibly intuitive and well-designed, and you finish with a space so airy, you’re almost compelled to lug stuff around. The only place there isn’t very much space is in the oddment stowage; but who needs a nook for your keys when you’ve got a table, four chairs and a man in a hammock in your boot? It’s big; you’ve got that, right? Continue reading...

No premises on the high street – that is what unites these new entrants. Here’s a look at what the new players will offerThey are the new breed of digital banks for people who live on their smartphones and want something that looks more like Netflix than NatWest. They typically have snappy, quirky, one-word names – Starling, Mondo, B – and make claims such as “we’re redefining what a bank should be”. And they tout themselves as genuine alternatives to the big high street players.These new entrants are all trying to plug into our rapidly increasing use of digital technology as branch visits decline. But what’s in it for us as potential customers? Do they offer enough in financial terms to tempt us to ditch our existing bank? What are the downsides? Continue reading...

International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition president reportedly holds Alibaba stock and has ties to an Alibaba executiveAn anti-counterfeiting group said on Friday it was suspending Alibaba’s membership following an uproar by some companies that view the Chinese e-commerce giant as the world’s largest marketplace for fakes.The International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition also told members it had failed to inform the board of directors about conflicts of interest involving the group’s president, Robert Barchiesi. Continue reading...

The revelation that some of the social media site’s journalistic decisions are made by people, not algorithms, has shone a fascinating light on the rapidly changing news landscape

UK-based Zed Books’ page was removed with no warning after it ran a series of posts about its books on the Turkish governmentFacebook has denied involvement in the deletion of the page of a London-based academic publisher who had published articles that criticised the Turkish government and discussed the outlawed (in Turkey) Kurdistan Workers party.The deletion sparked accusations of censorship against the social network, which has often been accused of siding with the Turkish government in battles over free speech. But Facebook says it did not delete the page, and Zed Books has accepted the claim. Both companies say they are trying to discover how the page was removed from the site, and who by. Continue reading...

A new Doom title is released today, but the 1993 original had the impact of punk rock in the 1970s – especially for this young drama studentThis was how it happened for me, and I guess for a lot of people at the time. In 1993 I was working part-time at a game development studio while studying English and Drama at Warwick university. The studio, Big Red Software, was five guys in a small office above a printers in Leamington Spa. We ate, drank and breathed video games. If we weren’t making them, we were playing them. One day, we got Doom working across the office computer network. It meant that we could play together, co-operatively. That was 10am in the morning. We played for 16 hours straight. When I got outside, I saw every garage door as a potential demon entry point.Today, More than 20 years later, Id Software is releasing a new version of Doom. It is throughly updated, with high-end visuals and contemporary design sensibilities – early word is that it’s a successful modernisation. But it can never do what Doom did back then. There had been other first-person games before it – Id itself made the Wolfenstein titles. But for this game, the brilliant coder John Carmack built a new engine, capable of rendering more complex environments in 3D. Well, sort of 3D. The maps themselves were 2D, and there was no vertical camera movement. Everything happened on a fixed plane. Continue reading...

Review follows criticism of Sussex police for not charging Oliver Whiting, despite him admitting he targeted five womenDetectives are considering whether to reinterview a man accused of revenge pornography after being criticised over their failure to charge him.Oliver Whiting, 36, from Eastbourne, was cautioned after five women came forward complaining they were the victims of revenge porn and malicious communications. Continue reading...

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

West’s memoir is full of a wild, joyous vulgarity and ranges from body images and rape threats to puberty and her love for her husbandIn 2013, Lindy West got a message on Twitter from her dead father. “Embarrassed father of an idiot,” his bio said. But no: “My dad was never mean. It couldn’t really be from him. Also, he was dead – just 18 months earlier, I’d watched him turn grey and drown in his own magnificent lungs.” Someone wanted to hurt her.At that moment in her career, West was fielding daily online harassment for her opposition to rape jokes in standup comedy. “I was eating 30 rape threats for breakfast at that point (or, more accurately, ‘You’re fatter than the girls I usually rape’ threats),” she writes in this memoir. “No one could touch me any more.” Continue reading...

As Facebook battles a report accusing it of suppressing conservative news, CEO says he plans to ‘invite leading conservatives ... to share their point of view’Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced that he plans to invite “leading conservatives and people from across the political spectrum” to talk with him about accusations of political bias at the social media company.Zuckerberg made the announcement Thursday evening in a Facebook post that continued to deny the allegations of bias and the claim that the Facebook trending topics team suppresses conservative news. Continue reading...

Tim Cook says investment – single largest ever in Chinese ride-hailing service – allows Apple to learn more about the market thereApple has invested $1bn in Didi Chuxing, China’s version of Uber, CEO Tim Cook said on Thursday.Ahead of a high-profile visit to the country later in May, Cook told Reuters that the investment would create opportunities to partner with Didi – fuelling speculation that Apple is making a strategic investment that complements its own plans for a new electric car. Continue reading...

The financial messaging network says a commercial bank was targeted in an attack with ‘deep knowledge of operational controls’Swift, the global financial messaging network that banks use to move billions of dollars every day, warned on Thursday of a second malware attack similar to the one that led to February’s $81 million cyberheist at the Bangladesh central bank.The second case targeted a commercial bank, Swift spokeswoman Natasha de Teran said, without naming it. It was not immediately clear how much money, if any, was stolen in the second attack. Continue reading...

For four months, this Vancouver studio was at the centre of an internet maelstrom. But it had overcome bigger challenges“Recent events have thrust our company under a spotlight …” It was with those words, in September 2014, that Lucas J W Johnson, one of the founding members of Silverstring Media, began a blogpost about his company. “Under a spotlight”, it turned out, was something of an understatement. Silverstring Media had been targeted by the burgeoning online movement GamerGate, a loose affiliation of Twitter, Reddit and game forums users claiming to expose and protest corruption in the video games media. The company was accused of being “corrupt” and “creepy”, supposedly pushing ideologies and cultish practices that worked towards taking “the fun out of video games”. Connections were established between Silverstring and the original GamerGate target Zoe Quinn. Then everything snowballed.“[GamerGaters] got it into their heads that Silverstring Media was a PR firm, and that as such we must have been behind a conspiracy to release a series of ‘gamers are dead’ articles all at once from multiple different venues,” Johnson said. “As conspiracies do, that then spiralled into further corruption with the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA), and eventually allegations that we work with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa). We became ‘the final boss’ of GamerGate, responsible for all their woes.” Continue reading...

Exclusive: Leaked internal guidelines show human intervention at almost every stage of its news operation, akin to a traditional media organizationLeaked documents show how Facebook, now the biggest news distributor on the planet, relies on old-fashioned news values on top of its algorithms to determine what the hottest stories will be for the 1 billion people who visit the social network every day.The documents, given to the Guardian, come amid growing concerns over how Facebook decides what is news for its users. This week the company was accused of an editorial bias against conservative news organizations, prompting calls for a congressional inquiry from the US Senate commerce committee chair, John Thune.

Almost 50 years after Kirk and Uhura’s kiss on Star Trek, there are plenty of parts for black women - provided they want to play blue- or green-skinned aliens …“Interspecies love is in the air!” enthuses one movie fansite at the prospect of the forthcoming Warcraft movie.There’s a lot to get up to speed with in Warcraft. The original video games were so wildly popular that their community of players exceeds the population of Norway, and the World of Warcraft wiki has over 100,000 pages. For novices, it’s a fantasy world not far removed from Lord of the Rings or Dungeons and Dragons: a realm of elves, dwarves, mythical creatures and medieval weaponry. Warcraft the movie revolves around Azeroth, a kingdom apparently ruled by European humans. Azeroth is invaded by orcs: hulking, relatively primitive ogres with overdeveloped lower canines. Rather than open arms, Azeroth greets these refugee orcs with medieval arms. “They’re beasts. They should all be destroyed,” says one character. It’s essentially a race war, although the battle lines are by no means cut and dried, so there’s still room for a bit of interspecies love. Continue reading...

Aleks Krotoski focuses on the emotional impact in this debate on how technology is changing too fast for parents to keep up‘Scary, intimidating. Are these the words we want to be using to describe how our kids are using technology?” asks the ever-enthralling Aleks Krotoski in Changeling. Previous episodes of Radio 4’s absorbing Digital Human series have focused on taste, body and mind and they’re all worth a listen. Now, talk turns to the contentious issue of children being better at using technology than their parents.Krotoski always brings out the human emotion behind the digital story and she has no problem firing up the most paranoid part of a parent’s brain with this debate. That moment when you realise your child can unlock your tablet also unlocks peace and quiet, but what happens when the terror of your three-year-old overtaking your technical skills kicks in? Continue reading...

YouGov’s online poll comes amid claims in US that site’s staff working on its trending articles feature censored rightwing newsPeople in the UK from across the political spectrum think that they see more leftwing news on Facebook than stories from neutral or rightwing sources, according to a YouGov poll.The findings from an online poll come as a debate rages in the US over allegations that Facebook staff working on its trending articles feature censored rightwing news. Continue reading...

The likes of Facebook and Microsoft have spurned fireworks, paintball guns and erectile dysfunction ads, much as publishing outlets have done for decadesGoogle was widely applauded this week for announcing it would stop selling ads for long-reviled payday loan companies. Facebook, it turns out, banned payday loan ads last year, along with those for weapons and “unsafe supplements”.Related: 'Dangerous' payday loans join guns and drugs on Google's banned ad list Continue reading...

Michael Fassbender’s movie already looks better than Warcraft, with Marion Cotillard on top femme fatale form and director Justin Kurzel embracing the video gameAlong with Duncan Jones’s Warcraft it’s been billed as the video game movie that might just make us forget all about the cinematic crimes of Uwe Boll and his ilk, that can induce glorious amnesia for those struggling to wipe clean memories of Prince of Persia, Hitman or Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life. Continue reading...

Don’t count your chickens before they’re accelerated at 1,200km an hour down a modified railgun through a vacuum tubeThe future of transportation is here! Deep in the Nevada desert on Wednesday morning, a linear accelerator propelled a small sled along a purpose-built test track to a speed of almost 187km/h in just over a second. It may just be a very early test but, the assembled media assured us, it means that the Hyperloop – the utopian transport system first mooted by technology entrepreneur Elon Musk – in 2013 is one step closer to reality.Except, well, it doesn’t. The test shows that Hyperloop One has reached the technological heights of a 1996-era rollercoaster when it comes to its propulsion systems, but does nothing to calm very real doubts that the company will be able to deliver what it promises, when it promises, for the price it promises. Continue reading...

Hyperloop One conducts the first public test of a prototype propulsion system which could eventually transport people through tubes at the speed of sound. Held in Nevada on Wednesday, the custom-built sled accelerates to 116mph in 1.1 seconds. The idea for Hyperloop was first proposed by tech billionaire Elon Musk, but dropped in 2013. Executives and engineers from Hyperloop One want to begin transporting cargo by 2019 and people by 2021

Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Google have moved outside their comfort zone by trying to curate ‘unbiased’ news – but journalists aren’t like computersSilicon Valley is trying to make the news business as neutral as its code. The problem is the humans.

Telecoms firm reveals cost of attack hit £42m, cutting its profits from £32m to £14mTalkTalk profits more than halved following a cyber-attack in which the personal details of thousands of customers were hacked.The telecoms company was hit with £42m in costs when almost 157,000 customers were affected by the attack in October last year. Almost one in 10 of those customers had their bank account numbers and sort codes accessed. Continue reading...

Noel intends to register on AirBnB and wants to offer porn-free internet access without giving away all his security detailsI intend to register on AirBnB and I’d like to know how to share my fibre optic internet connection safely, without giving out the main Wi-Fi password. I believe some routers have guest access features, but not the one I use: a BT Home Hub 3. I am also thinking about OpenDNS as an additional option to screen out pornography etc. I am open to buying another router if necessary. NoelThis is a topic that should interest people renting out their homes and small businesses that want to offer clients free Wi-Fi access – I wish my dentist did, for example. Continue reading...

Company carries out public track run of prototype that might one day rocket commuters between San Francisco and Los Angeles in a supersonic podHyperloop, the supersonic transport system proposed by tech billionaire Elon Musk, has taken a tentative step towards reality with the first public test of a prototype propulsion system.One of the companies vying to make the idea a reality, Hyperloop One, which changed its name from Hyperloop Technologies on Wednesday to coincide with the open-air propulsion test in the Nevada desert, has also closed an $80m series B funding round which includes investment from the French national rail company SNCF. Continue reading...

The social network had a grand plan to connect millions of Indians to the internet. Here’s how it all went wrongUntil Mark Zuckerberg arrived in a bright orange helicopter in October 2014, Chandauli had never seen a celebrity visitor. One of 44,795 villages in the state of Rajasthan, Chandauli is only three or four hours’ drive from Delhi, but it exists alone and forgotten, tucked away, a kilometre off a quiet highway. Last year, when a local boy used the internet to buy a used motorcycle, astonished villagers called him an online shopping hero.Zuckerberg had come to see an experiment at work. Earlier that year, with its sights set on the forthcoming elections, the government had asked a foundation to help give Chandauli’s mostly Muslim villagers a digital education. And so, with uncommon haste, a small administrative building was turned into a community centre, where locals could learn how to access email and find information online. Soon, almost every household in the village had one person who knew how to use a computer. Continue reading...

Officials face setback similar to that of FBI after San Bernardino shooting, as other suspects’ phones showed alleged evidence of ‘inspections’ of various sitesItalian investigators have been unable to unlock the Apple iPhone 6 plus of a suspect involved in an alleged terror ring in Bari, in a development that mirrored a similar setback faced by US law enforcement officials following the San Bernadino attack.The development raises the prospects of another standoff between Apple and officials involved in a terror investigation, after the California technology company staunchly refused to cooperate with US investigators seeking to pull information from the phone that belonged to San Bernadino gunman Syed Farook. Continue reading...

Company pledges to block ‘harmful’ ads but move will not cover car, commercial or student loans, mortgages or credit cardsGoogle has said it will ban ads for payday loans because they can be “deceptive or harmful”.The ban, which will come into force globally from 13 July, will cover loans that can be due within 60 days and, in the US, loans that carry an annual interest rate of 36% or higher. Continue reading...

Prosecutors launch inquiry after 19-year-old uses Twitter’s service to film herself jumping in front of train in ParisFrench prosecutors have launched an investigation after a 19-year-old woman killed herself by jumping in front of a suburban train in Paris and streamed the act live on Periscope.The unnamed French woman “sent a text to one of her friends several minutes before her death to make them aware of her intentions”, said the prosecutor Eric Lallement on Wednesday. Continue reading...

Nascent studio also announces debut original movie: Doug Liman-directed sniper thriller The Wall, starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson

Photo sharing app unveils new sunset-coloured logo and a sleeker in-app look, but opinion is mixedInstagram, the photo sharing app owned by Facebook, responsible for such cultural highlights as hot-dog legs, The Fat Jewish memes and Rich Kids of, well, Instagram, has debuted a new logo.The previous one, a retro-looking camera, and one of the most recognisable tech logos out there, has been replaced by a background swirl of sunset colours (orange, yellow, pink, purple) and a white outline of a camera. As if the camera was murdered, and chalk was drawn around its body. Murdered at sundown. Here it is: Continue reading...

Peeved about Facebook’s curation of trending topics? Its news feed is reinventing censorship for a technological age, and humans need not applyBad news: Facebook is censoring the internet every day, warping your understanding of the world around you to benefit its corporate interests, and fundamentally changing the media landscape in a potentially apocalyptic fashion.Good news: that has little to nothing to do with the fact that the human curators of its trending topics feature are a bit sniffy about linking to Breitbart News. Continue reading...