Technology | The Guardian

The vehicles could build a ‘gold mine’ of personal data for private companies, and a profile of users, Queensland law expert saysDriverless vehicles could build a “gold mine” of personal data for private companies and would make it easier for them to target people as consumers, an Australian law professor has warned.Des Butler, of the Queensland University of Technology, said the privacy risks involved in driverless vehicles were a “sleeper issue” that regulators were yet to fully consider, even though car manufacturers say the technology could be on roads in Australia by 2020.

Facebook’s systems didn’t fail when they let Russians target American voters with divisive political messages. They workedMark Zuckerberg marked his return from paternity leave Thursday with a concerted effort to put lipstick on the pig of Facebook’s role in swaying the 2016 presidential election. In a Facebook live address from an earth-toned, glass-walled office, the chief executive laid out a series of steps the company will take to “protect election integrity and make sure that Facebook is a force for good in democracy”.Related: Facebook to give Congress thousands of ads bought by Russians during election Continue reading...

Mark Zuckerberg says providing ads will ‘help government authorities complete the vitally important work of assessing what happened’ in the electionFacebook will provide to Congress the contents of 3,000 advertisements purchased by Russians during the 2016 US presidential race, Mark Zuckerberg announced on Thursday following weeks of scrutiny surrounding the social network’s potential role in influencing elections.The CEO said in a Facebook live video that the company would provide the controversial ads to government officials to support ongoing investigations in the US and as part of the social media company’s renewed efforts to protect the “integrity” of elections around the world. Continue reading...

Paul gave up his broadband contract when he went travelling. Having survived using mobile, he wonders if he could do without a landline altogetherWhen we went travelling, we gave up our Virgin contract for an internet and TV package. We have been using Three’s “Feel at home” for mobile phone internet access on data roaming quite successfully. Now, going home, I am wondering about signing up for Three’s 40GB HomeFi. It has to cover our home internet needs – two computers, two mobile phones – in central Edinburgh. I’m not bothered about internet TV because we can get a new DVD player/Freeview HD recorder. Would this be feasible? PaulThe general answer is no. Today, most people are better off paying for a wired internet connection. The specific answer is: it depends.

Quick switch simply disconnects phone from access points and devices rather than turning off the radios, in move criticised by security researchersThe new, redesigned Control Centre in iOS 11, which appears to allow users to toggle various settings such as turning wifi and Bluetooth off, doesn’t actually turn them completely off.Control Centre has a plethora of quick toggles, designed to allow users to quickly change a few key settings including activating the flashlight, turning off screen rotation and controlling the display’s brightness. Continue reading...

I was once a sharp shooter but I’m being outgunned by younger competitors. If this was the real military, I’d be honourably dischargedThere comes a point in every athlete’s career when they realise they are what commentators often euphemistically refer to as “off the pace”. They’re not winning those 50/50 balls anymore, they’re not as fast, they’re getting injured more often and it’s taking longer to recover. The same thing happens in competitive video games, and I think it’s pretty much happened to me.Earlier this month, games publisher Activision ran two closed beta tests for Call of Duty: WWII, the latest title in the blisteringly fast online multiplayer shooter series. Betas are early previews in which a selection of people are invited to play the game online while the developers study the data to make sure the servers work and that nothing gets in the way of the shooting. Continue reading...

Chief operating officer announces policy change after social network allowed advertisers to seek out ‘Jew haters’, saying company ‘never intended’ such usageFacebook is tightening controls on its advertising targeting tools, chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg announced in a statement acknowledging that the ability for advertisers to target “Jew haters” until last week was “totally inappropriate and a fail on our part”.The policy change follows an embarrassing report by ProPublica on Thursday that the company’s ad-buying system allowed advertisers to target users interested in antisemitic subjects. Subsequent reporting found additional bigoted terms in Facebook’s system that could be used to target advertisements. Continue reading...

At a Global Citizen event in New York, The Napster founder and early president of Facebook says it took the election of Donald Trump to alert people of the need to take their activism offline to be heardSean Parker is one of the biggest names associated with the earliest days of social media, but the tech billionaire on Tuesday urged those interested in activism – especially against the Trump administration – to go offline if they wanted to make their voices heard.Related: How social media saved socialism Continue reading...

Admission comes as British PM and French president propose fining firms that move too slowly to remove extremist contentFacebook has conceded that technology companies could do more to counter online extremism after Theresa May and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, proposed fining firms that move too slowly to remove extremist content being shared by terrorist groups.The social media giant told a meeting between political leaders and its own executives as well as others from Google and Microsoft at the United Nations general assembly in New York that it is now employing thousands of content reviewers around the globe and a staff of 150 people dedicated to countering terrorism on its platform in an attempt to remove more extremist content. Continue reading...

Taiwanese smartphone and VR headset maker could become in-house manufacturer for Google-branded productsThe Taiwanese smartphone and virtual reality headset manufacturer HTC will halt shares from Thursday, pending the “release of material information” following media reports of a purchase by Google’s parent, Alphabet.The once-powerful smartphone market player, which started life as a manufacturer of other brands’ handsets and now makes the Vive VR headset, has seen sales fall year on year for the best part of half a decade as competition from Chinese and South Korean rivals increased. Continue reading...

Unlike Google Glass and Snapchat’s Spectacles, the glasses reportedly won’t feature a camera, instead focusing on linking to Amazon’s voice assistantAmazon is planning to release a pair of Alexa-enabled smartglasses as the latest addition to its range of voice-controlled devices, according to reports.Unlike most previous smartglasses, such as the ill-fated Google Glass experiment and Snapchat’s Spectacles, the Amazon glasses won’t feature a camera in any form, bypassing the privacy concerns that have plagued the form-factor in the past. Continue reading...

As hundreds of thousands flee a brutal campaign by the Myanmar military, the social media company labels an insurgent group a ‘dangerous organization’Amid international accusations that Myanmar’s military is engaging in “ethnic cleansing” of the Rohingya Muslim minority, Facebook designated a Rohingya insurgent group a “dangerous organization” and ordered moderators to delete any content “by or praising” it.

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

Companies including Google have lobbied against bill that would hold websites liable for publishing information ‘designed to facilitate sex trafficking’A bill to combat sex trafficking that has pitted US lawmakers against Silicon Valley was at the center of debate on Tuesday, as one Republican senator decried the selling of human beings online as “one of the dark sides of the internet”.

In a region where companies like Uber and Airbnb have cashed in on unauthorized cabs and boarding houses, vendors trying to make a living selling food without a license face police crackdownsFrom their spot on the sidewalk outside San Francisco’s Dolores Park, Miguel Muniz and Juan Anguiano could see children running around the playground and hundreds of hipsters lounging on a grassy hillside amid games of beer pong and men hawking loose joints in mason jars.But the pair of palateros, or ice cream vendors, were hesitant to go to the place near the jungle gym where they would have the best shot at selling $2 ice cream bars. Park rangers would confiscate their carts and give them tickets, they said, if they ventured inside the park’s perimeter. Continue reading...

Royal Society of Arts survey suggests technology could phase out mundane roles, raise productivity and bolster wagesFour million jobs in the British private sector could be replaced by robots in the next decade, according to business leaders asked about the future of automation and artificial intelligence.

Maligned Atlanta-based agency finally goes public on earlier data breach, which happened in March, following reports company only notified payroll customersEquifax, the credit monitoring agency that lost personal data of 143 million US customers in a massive hack in May, has revealed that it was also the victim of an earlier breach in March.The earlier breach was serious enough for the company to notify customers, and bring in the information security firm Mandiant to investigate. But the millions of Americans whose personal data the company stockpiles to power its services are not technically customers of the company, and so it did not inform them. Continue reading...

New version of Apple’s smartphone and tablet software includes customisation and multitasking additions, and will be available for download todayApple’s iOS 11 will be available to download on iPhones and iPads everywhere from today, adding various new features including the ability to customise Control Centre for the first time.

Tool now owned by security firm Avast was hacked via a supply chain attack, an increasingly common method of infectionMore than two million users of anti-malware tool CCleaner installed a version of the software that had been hacked to include malware, the app’s developer confirmed on Monday.Piriform, the developer of CCleaner now owned by security firm Avast, says that its download servers were compromised at some point between 15 August, when it released version v5.33.6162 of the software, and 12 September, when it updated the servers with a new version. Continue reading...

How technology is making our minds redundant. By Franklin FoerAll the values that Silicon Valley professes are the values of the 60s. The big tech companies present themselves as platforms for personal liberation. Everyone has the right to speak their mind on social media, to fulfil their intellectual and democratic potential, to express their individuality. Where television had been a passive medium that rendered citizens inert, Facebook is participatory and empowering. It allows users to read widely, think for themselves and form their own opinions.We can’t entirely dismiss this rhetoric. There are parts of the world, even in the US, where Facebook emboldens citizens and enables them to organise themselves in opposition to power. But we shouldn’t accept Facebook’s self-conception as sincere, either. Facebook is a carefully managed top-down system, not a robust public square. It mimics some of the patterns of conversation, but that’s a surface trait. Continue reading...

New iOS 11 and macOS High Sierra will stop ads following Safari users, prompting open letter claiming Apple is destroying internet’s economic modelFor the second time in as many years, internet advertisers are facing unprecedented disruption to their business model thanks to a new feature in a forthcoming Apple software update.iOS 11, the latest version of Apple’s operating system for mobile devices, will hit users’ phones and tablets on Tuesday. It will include a new default feature for the Safari web browser dubbed “intelligent tracking prevention”, which prevents certain websites from tracking users around the net, in effect blocking those annoying ads that follow you everywhere you visit. Continue reading...

They may have only become part of the everyday internet experience in recent years, but gifs are old school. Here we chart its rise in its 30th yearThe humble gif is turning 30. The multi-purpose bitmap image format has established itself as part of internet culture, so much so that people have almost stopped arguing over how it is pronounced (overwhelmingly it is with a hard g, although the inventor of the format says he meant for it to be a soft g).The gif, or graphics interchange format, was created by programmer Steve Wilhite, who longed for an image format that could be used across different computer platforms. At the time, in 1987, this included the likes of Atari, Apple and IBM. Plus modem speeds were slow and images took a long … time … to … load. Continue reading...

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

Pro Evolution Soccer gets a Bolt boost, an arcade cult favourite prospers online, but a five-year-old 3DS game shows it age in a console revampPS4, Xbox One, PS3, Xbox 360, PC, Konami; cert: 3

Political spending on TV and press is transparent but there are no rules for online ads. With allegations of Russian influence in last year’s election, that may changeEvery time a television station sells a political ad, a record is entered into a public file saying who bought the advertisement and how much money they spent.In contrast, when Facebook or Google sells a political ad, there is no public record of that sale. That situation is of growing concern to politicians and legislators in Washington as digital advertising becomes an increasingly central part of American political campaigns. During the 2016 election, over $1.4bn was spent in online advertising, which represented a 789% increase over the 2012 election. Continue reading...

The new 3 from Mazda is one of the sweetest drives on the road, thanks to the union of human and hatchbackPrice: £17,780

US credit rating firm’s announcement comes after UK authorities order it to alert British clients of cybersecurity breachAbout 400,000 people in the UK may have had their information stolen following a cybersecurity breach at the credit monitoring firm Equifax.

Instagram ‘influencers’ told to clarify paid-for ads, while health claims are taken down after advertising breachesConsumer protection bodies in the UK and US are increasing their crackdown on Instagram “influencers”, in an attempt to rein in the big business being done covertly on social media.

Chief information officer and chief security officer to exit immediately, company announces as it highlights security effortsEquifax announced late Friday that its chief information officer and chief security officer would leave the company immediately, following the enormous breach of 143 million Americans’ personal information.It also presented a litany of security efforts it made after noticing suspicious network traffic in July. Continue reading...

Don’t be suckered in: navigating the multitude offers reveals buying an iPhone 8 outright and signing up to a cheap sim-only deal is the most cost-effective optionThe iPhone 8 is available to pre-order from today, but don’t be distracted by flashy offers with low upfront costs and a high monthly fee: the cheapest way to get one is still simply buying it outright from Apple or another retailer, and taking out a low cost sim-only contract.The 64GB iPhone 8, the cheapest of the newly launched phones, costs £699 when bought directly from Apple or from a third-party electronics store such as Currys or John Lewis. Combined with a low-cost contract or pay-as-you-go sim, such as the £5 plan offered by O2’s corporate sibling Giffgaff, the cost of owning the phone for two years is £819 – lower than any competing deal of the major retailers we reviewed. Continue reading...

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

Yet HMRC’s rules are clear: you must pay VAT on your £390-plus US purchases when you fly home, which makes those big savings a lot less appealing

Electric Semi truck will be ‘tentatively’ ready for first test rides and is ‘worth seeing in person’, but can batteries and self-driving trucks really replace diesels?Tesla is set to launch its first electric lorry, which is expected to be able to drive itself, in late October as the company attempts to break into the commercial market.Chief executive Elon Musk said that the “Tesla Semi truck” is “tentatively scheduled” for unveiling and first test rides one month behind schedule on 26 October in Tesla’s hometown of Hawthorne, California. Continue reading...

Steve has only been getting 1Mbps when he has paid for 70Mbps. An engineer said there is nothing wrong with his wifi router – is there another way to check?Recently, I have only been getting 1Mbps from my wifi when it is supposed to be up to 70Mbps. An engineer came round and said there was nothing wrong with the router. His speed checker – unlike mine – showed that it was getting the required speed. He said this test was more reliable as it only used his company’s network. Can you recommend a speed checker that is reliable, and not connected to any particular company? SteveThe engineer should have made it clear that you cannot check the speed of your broadband using wifi. When you buy a broadband service from an ISP (Internet Service Provider), they are only responsible for the service delivered to your premises or, at best, to the router.

The South Park goons turn into caped crusaders, the Star Wars Death Star is avenged, Cuphead catapults players back to the ravishing 1930s, and Mario unleashes his super magic cap• Autumn arts preview 2017: Stage | Music | Film

Two ex-Google employees have said they want their new startup, Bodega, to replace corner shops. Share photos and stories of your favorite corner shops and the people who work thereTwo former Google employees have launched a tech startup with the aim of replacing corner shops. No surprise, there’s been swift backlash against the Silicon Valley techies and their company, named Bodega after a commonly used term in New York for local stores typically run by immigrants.The company is marketing essentially glorified vending machines – 5ft-wide pantries that users can unlock with their smartphones to pick up non-perishable items. There are no humans at the “stores”, which are already stationed in spots like apartment buildings, offices and gyms, and a computer program automatically charges customers’ credit cards.

Federal agencies have been barred from using cybersecurity software made by Kaspersky Lab over fears the firm has ties to state-sponsored spying programsThe US government has banned federal agencies from using cybersecurity software made by Russian company Kaspersky Lab over fears that the firm has ties to state-sponsored spying programs.

Online marketplaces face criticism from public accounts committee over foreign sellers misusing their platformsAmazon and eBay have been accused by MPs of profiting from VAT evasion at the expense of taxpayers and UK businesses.Executives representing the ecommerce groups were told that their firms were “turning a blind eye” as organised criminals in the UK and China handle undervalued or misclassified goods for the British market.

Apple’s iPhone 8 and iPhone X come with wireless charging, so there’s no need to reach for a cable any more. How does it work, what supports it and is it any faster?The new iPhone X and iPhone 8 support wireless charging for the first time in an Apple smartphone – but what is it, how does it work and is it worth using? Continue reading...

New products have same price in both currencies, suggesting Apple is taking advantage of British customers’ acceptance of price hikes since the EU Referendum

Apple’s new smartphone will unlock using face recognition, thanks to infrared and 3D sensors. This technology is spreading – and complacency is not an option

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

User reported photo of Harry Beswick, 12, who has no left eye, to app’s content moderators, prompting outrageInstagram has apologized for taking down a photo of a boy with a facial deformity after another user reported it to the app’s content moderation team.Twelve-year-old Harry Beswick was born with Goldenhar syndrome, which means he has no left eye, eye socket, nostril or left ear. His mother, Charlie, runs a parenting blog and Instagram account where she posts about parenting Harry and his twin brother Oliver. Continue reading...

The iPhone X’s facial recognition system fails on the first attempt at the unveiling of the latest handset on Tuesday in California. Apple’s VP of software engineering, Craig Federighi, had to switch to a backup phone in order to demonstrate the face-unlocking feature after describing its ease of use

Researchers say artificial intelligence will soon be able to detect a person’s political allegiance – just by looking at photos of their face.We’ve put together a quiz to see if you can beat the algorithms and work out, from someone’s face, their political allegiance. We’ve chosen 15 pictures of city councillors from Bristol, Connecticut and San Diego – eight Democrats, seven Republicans. Can you figure out which is which?Republican or Democrat?RepublicanDemocratRepublican or Democrat?RepublicanDemocratRepublican or DemocratRepublicanDemocratRepublican or Democrat?RepublicanDemocratRepublican or DemocratRepublicanDemocratRepublican or Democrat?RepublicanDemocratRepublican or Democrat?RepublicanDemocratRepublican or Democrat?RepublicanDemocratRepublican or Democrat?RepublicanDemocratReRepublican or Democrat?RepublicanDemocratRepublican or Democrat?RepublicanDemocratRepublican or Democrat?RepublicanDemocratRepublican or Democrat?RepublicanDemocratRepublican or Democrat?RepublicanDemocratRepublican or Democrat?RepublicanDemocrat Continue reading...

New model with 3 November release date promises better cameras, ability to unlock with facial recognition, animated emojis, longer battery life and wireless chargingApple has unveiled the iPhone X, its new radically redesigned smartphone that drops the traditional home button for an all-screen design, as well as a new iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus models.Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, Phil Schiller, took to the stage of the company’s new Steve Jobs Theater situated within the brand new Apple Park “spaceship” headquarters to unveil the new iPhones. Continue reading...

Leaks suggest we should expect Face ID, all-screen design, no home button, multi-purpose side button, animated poo emojis – and a $1,000 price tag

As the world welcomes the latest iPhone, we speak to people who are bucking the trend and doing withoutMany will be eagerly awaiting the release of the new iPhone X, the latest model of Apple’s smartphone. It’s expected to be the biggest change in design yet.For some, however, the event will go by without them so much as batting an eyelid. The Guardian has heard from people who have shunned phones altogether or keep the use of their mobiles to a bare minimum.

In interview CEO says Apple isn’t a ‘high-margin’ company on eve of the launch of what’s expected to be its first $1,000 smartphone, the iPhone X