Launch of rival to Amazon Echo takes fight to Jeff Bezos’s Seattle-based company, but experts say it’s still Google’s to loseGoogle is launching its rival to Amazon’s Echo, the Google Home, in the UK as the battle for the living room hots up.The smart speaker, which can play music, control Internet of Things devices, and answer questions, will cost British customers £129, £20 less than Amazon’s Echo, when it launches in Britain on 6 April. Continue reading...

Company trying to manage stockpile of four million handsets that were recalled after battery explosionsSamsung has announced it could refurbish and sell some of the millions of Note 7 smartphones that were recalled for safety reasons, in an effort to manage its stockpile in an “environmentally friendly” manner.

A prototype security device promises to film pilferers in the act and email you the evidence. But is it worth entering a moral minefield for the sake of 15ml of semi-skimmed?When you head to your workplace fridge, only to find that some thoughtless colleague has nabbed your milk, what is the appropriate response?a) Shrug it off and say: “Oh well, that only cost me around 8p when you think about it”; Continue reading...

UK home secretary wants police to be able to access WhatsApp, but any backdoor also makes services vulnerable to criminalsTech companies are facing demands from the home secretary, Amber Rudd, to build backdoors into their “completely unacceptable” end-to-end encryption messaging apps. Speaking on Sunday, just five days after a terror attack in Westminster killed five and injured more than 50, she said “there should be no place for terrorists to hide”.This may sound familiar. Two years ago, after the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, the then British prime minister David Cameron said Britain’s intelligence agencies should have the legal power to break into the encrypted communications of suspected terrorists. He promised to legislate for it in 2016. Continue reading...

Database contains photos of half of US adults without consent, and algorithm is wrong nearly 15% of time and is more likely to misidentify black peopleApproximately half of adult Americans’ photographs are stored in facial recognition databases that can be accessed by the FBI, without their knowledge or consent, in the hunt for suspected criminals. About 80% of photos in the FBI’s network are non-criminal entries, including pictures from driver’s licenses and passports. The algorithms used to identify matches are inaccurate about 15% of the time, and are more likely to misidentify black people than white people.These are just some of the damning facts presented at last week’s House oversight committee hearing, where politicians and privacy campaigners criticized the FBI and called for stricter regulation of facial recognition technology at a time when it is creeping into law enforcement and business. Continue reading...

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

Office for National Statistics to harvest data from traffic sensors, mobile phones and satellite images at new campus in WalesThe UK’s official statistics office is looking into using traffic sensors, mobile photo data and satellite images as new ways of measuring the shape of the economy.The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is opening a new data science campus at its headquarters in Newport, south Wales, on Monday as part of a £17m investment in the way the UK collects and presents data. Continue reading...

My colleague Gordon Reece, who has died aged 76, was an unconventional academic. He was a pioneer of computational fluid dynamics and of novel mathematics teaching methods for engineers, but he was also an election forecaster and spoke German and French fluently. He was a socialist, humanist, trade unionist and CND supporter.Gordon was born in Stafford, the son of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, Horst Riesenburg (later anglicised to Reece), and his wife, Hilde (nee Gans), who were both teachers. He attended Kempsey primary school, near Worcester, and then the Royal Grammar School Worcester. Continue reading...

Amber Rudd has repeated calls that intelligence services be able to access technology companies, from the American giants to those run from a bedroomThe social media giant became a favourite with extremists in the early years of online radicalisation; it is free, international and allows anyone to sign up and post what they please. Profiles sympathetic to Islamic State and al-Shabaab were once common on the site, but have become less visible since Twitter actively started removing extremist material. Continue reading...

A previous plan to ban end-to-end encryption was dropped after widespread opposition, including from David DavisAmber Rudd’s call for “no hiding place for terrorists” on the web echoes and revives David Cameron’s 2015 proposal to ban end-to-end encryption on services such as WhatsApp.That proposal was dropped from the “snooper’s charter” legislation because of widespread opposition in the tech industry and from Conservative libertarians, including David Davis, now Brexit secretary and one of the home secretary’s cabinet colleagues. Continue reading...

A museum in Quebec is offering to find your lookalike among its ancient sculptures using facial recognition softwarePast searches for my doppelganger proved disappointing. A website I uploaded a picture to some months ago promised to locate an identical stranger, but then responded with two pictures of German guys who looked nothing like me. When I refused to acknowledge either as a dead ringer, the website stopped sending me prospective matches. My plans to seek employment as somebody else’s evil twin were put on hold.But what if my true doppelganger belonged to another era? The Musée de la Civilisation in Quebec has launched a project called My 2,000-Year-Old Double, allowing anyone to track down their twin among the statues of antiquity. Upload a photo (no smiling; think like a block of marble) and your features will be measured to locate your closest match from the museum’s admittedly narrow database of 60 Greek and Roman sculptures. The best looky-likies will be photographed to appear in an exhibition alongside their ancient counterparts. I am resolved to find mine. Continue reading...

The home secretary, Amber Rudd, says WhatsApp and other messaging applications must not provide a secret platform for terrorists to communicate. Speaking on The Andrew Marr Show on Sunday, Rudd said that the government’s intelligence services should have access to encrypted messages, following reports that Khalid Masood had used the service prior to the Westminster attack

Protect your privacy, your data and your peace of mind with this guide to beating thieves, whether they’re online or on the streetAs we’ve recently seen from leaked CIA documents, no one is immune to hacking attacks. Here’s how to protect yourself against them, whether they come from opportunist thieves or state-sponsored spies. Continue reading...

A sci-fi franchise’s new mission is beset by old bugs, the Switch gets musical and a shoot’ em up provides a powerfully pure arcade experiencePS4, Xbox One, PC, EA, cert: 16

SsangYong has always served up bumper helpings for budget motorists. Now it’s added some flavour, too

Major brands including Verizon and Walmart pulled their ads after they were found to be appearing next to videos promoting extremist views or hate speechIt’s been a bad week for Google, with major brands pulling millions of dollars in advertising amid rows over extremist content on YouTube.

Major companies pulling advertisements a sign that many doubt Google’s ability to prevent marketing campaigns from appearing alongside repugnant videosPepsiCo, Walmart and Starbucks on Friday confirmed that they have suspended their advertising on YouTube, joining a growing boycott in a sign that big companies doubt Google’s ability to prevent marketing campaigns from appearing alongside repugnant videos.

You are a sea of caterpillars in an alien river. You are a cluster of stars. What do you do in a game about everything? Anything at all, it turns outA daisy creeps across a rocky landscape. It becomes a blade of grass, which, in turn, becomes a caterpillar, which then turns itself into a very miniature zebra. Nearby, a patch of clover says to the zebra, “Repetition is the only form of permanence I am capable of.”This is a kind of everything.

Security feature enabled for all users to help protect accounts from being compromised by password reuse and phishingInstagram has become the latest social network to enable two-factor authentication, a valuable security feature that protects accounts from being compromised due to password reuse or phishing.Users can, and should, opt in by clicking on the settings icon in the top right of their profile, hitting two-factor authentication in the following menu, and enabling the setting to “require security code”. Continue reading...

Ride-hailing startup faces yet another discrimination scandal after a manager who was recruiting Kamilah Taylor made the comment in a LinkedIn messageUber is facing yet another discrimination scandal after a manager who was recruiting a female engineer defended the company by saying “sexism is systemic in tech”.On 14 March, an engineering manager at Uber tried to recruit Kamilah Taylor, a senior software engineer at another Silicon Valley company, for a developer position at the San Francisco ride-hailing startup, which is struggling to recover from a major sexual harassment controversy. Continue reading...

Are we facing a new cyber cold war, or is there more behind allegations of Russian hacking in the US?The troubling allegation that Russia interfered in the 2016 US presidential election raises important questions. Are we facing some kind of new cyber cold war? Or is there more to the story? Continue reading...

After Donald Trump was elected, I removed people on Facebook and Twitter to avoid upsetting myself. Am I part of the problem?Q: On Facebook and Twitter I unfriend or unfollow people I don’t agree with to avoid upsetting myself. Is this wrong and am I part of the problem that ended with Trump?A: After the disaster of the US election, the answer to this question is supposed to be yes – yes, you must follow people you don’t agree with; yes, you are part of the problem unless you toughen up and engage with the Other Side. If opposing views upset you, you are either weak-minded and vulnerable to manipulation by bigots or locked in your liberal echo chamber, where the only possible explanation for why Trump won the election is that people in general are idiots. Continue reading...

Facebook turned on Safety Check during the Westminster attack. In telling friends you are ‘not marked as safe’, is it providing another avenue for fear?This morning, after reading the latest news updates about the terror attack on Westminster, I fired up Facebook. There I was met with an atypical request: a friend who lives an eight-hour flight away in Canada had asked me to mark myself “safe”.

Major phone networks express concern over video sharing site and parent company’s inability to guarantee money won’t flow to extremismThe growing advertiser boycott of YouTube has reached the US, with AT&T, Johnson & Johnson, Verizon and Enterprise all halting adverts on the site, as well as Google’s wider ad networks, over the video-sharing site’s inability to guarantee promotional messages won’t appear alongside extremist content.Some of the new members of the boycott have also expanded the scope of the complaints, from a specific focus on YouTube to a broader criticism of Google’s ad platform. “We are deeply concerned that our ads may have appeared alongside YouTube content promoting terrorism and hate,” AT&T said. “Until Google can ensure this won’t happen again, we are removing our ads from Google’s non-search platforms.” Continue reading...

The app for automating common actions on iOS and iPad will remain on the app store, but its $2.99 pricetag has been slashed to nothingApple has acquired Workflow, a popular iOS app for automating common actions on iPads and iPhones.The app, which fills a similar niche on iOS to services such as IFTTT on the web and Apple’s own Automator on desktop, was highly praised by its users, and by Apple itself, which commended its developers with a design award in 2015. Continue reading...

Evaldas Rimasauskas charged after allegedly sending phishing emails to representatives of major tech firms and pretending to work for Asian companyTwo major American tech companies were tricked by a Lithuanian man’s phishing scheme into wiring him over $100m, according to the justice department.Evaldas Rimasauskas, 48, was arrested last week by Lithuanian authorities and charged on Monday by prosecutors in the southern district of New York. Announced on Wednesday, the charges of wire fraud, money laundering and aggravated identity theft could carry a sentence of 20 years in prison. Continue reading...

The whistleblower lists damning claims of spying on innocent individuals by a secretive Scotland Yard unit. It’s now vital that we hold the police to accountAs the only Green party peer I receive a lot of post to my office in the House of Lords. Rarely, though, do I open letters like the one that has been revealed. The anonymous writer alleged that there was a secretive unit within Scotland Yard that has used hackers to illegally access the emails of campaigners and journalists. It included a list of 10 people and the passwords to their email accounts.Related: Met police accused of using hackers to access protesters' emails Continue reading...

Developer preview version of new operating system released showcasing a suite of improvements

Police investigating alleged attack, which came to light when teenager’s mother approached police with screengrab photosA 15-year-old girl in Chicago was apparently sexually assaulted by five or six men or boys on Facebook Live, and none of the roughly 40 people who watched the live video reported the attack to police, authorities have said.It is the second time in recent months that the Chicago police department has investigated an apparent attack streamed live on Facebook. In January, four people were arrested after mobile phone footage showed them allegedly taunting and beating a mentally disabled man. Continue reading...

The company’s philosophy once followed Warhol’s line about Coke. But with a premium iPhone Pro rumoured, this sense of egalitarianism no longer appliesFor the past decade, Apple’s philosophy has been summed up by an Andy Warhol line about Coca-Cola.“What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest,” Warhol wrote in his 1975 autobiography. “You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the president drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.” Continue reading...

Offer from Zapier comes as high-paid tech workers in Bay Area have complained about the cost of living in a region that suffers from a major housing shortageA Silicon Valley startup is paying employees $10,000 to leave Silicon Valley.Zapier, an automation company founded in 2011, has announced that it is offering new recruits a hefty “de-location package” if they’re willing to move away from the Bay Area, an unusual perk that offers yet another sign of the worsening housing crisis in northern California. Continue reading...

Feature – which flags content as ‘disputed’ – trialled on story that falsely claimed thousands of Irish people were brought to the US as slavesFacebook has started rolling out its third-party fact-checking tool in the fight against fake news, alerting users to “disputed content”.The site announced in December it would be partnering with independent fact-checkers to crack down on the spread of misinformation on its platform. Continue reading...

Board member Arianna Huffington and other executives repeatedly said they support Travis Kalanick despite weeks of turmoil and public relations crisesTop executives at Uber defended its CEO, Travis Kalanick, on Tuesday, claiming that the company roiled by scandals can “fundamentally change” its culture with the embattled founder at the helm.Board member Arianna Huffington and two executives repeatedly said they supported Kalanick during a conference call with reporters. The call was the latest damage-control effort at the ride-sharing company, which has faced weeks of turmoil and public relations crises including a massive sexual harassment scandal, a series of high-profile departures, an explosive intellectual property lawsuit and revelations that the company used secret software to deceive law enforcement. Continue reading...

Government ‘read the riot act’ to the firm, which must do more to tackle far-right videos on YouTubeGoogle’s public apology over placing advertising next to extremist material came only after it was “read the riot act” at a Whitehall summit last Friday, it has emerged.

This year’s must-have accessory isn’t a handbag, it’s a Louis Vuitton phone case – sealing a trend that speaks volumes about our selfie-obsessed times

Exclusive: Watchdog investigates claim that secretive unit worked with Indian police to obtain campaigners’ passwordsThe police watchdog is investigating allegations that a secretive Scotland Yard unit used hackers to illegally access the private emails of hundreds of political campaigners and journalists.The allegations were made by an anonymous individual who says the unit worked with Indian police, who in turn used hackers to illegally obtain the passwords of the email accounts of the campaigners, and some reporters and press photographers. Continue reading...

Google’s video platform is being attacked by advertisers for not censoring enough and by creators for censoring too much. But don’t feel sorry for it just yetYouTube has found itself fighting battles on two fronts this week.Advertisers have launched a concerted attack against the video-streaming platform for its devil-may-care attitude to extremist content. They argue it is too hard to guarantee that advertising spend won’t end up going to the likes of far-right group Britain First, and have decided to boycott the platform en masse until YouTube can confirm changes. Continue reading...

Company drops ‘Air’ branding from iPads while launching a new colour in collaboration with Product Red and a new video app, ClipsApple has updated its iPad line, dropping the “Air” branding as it boosts the specs on its mid-tier product. The new hardware launches alongside another colour for the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, and an unusually timed announcement of a new video app, Clips.Starting at £339 for a 32GB model with wifi only, and rising to £559 for a 128GB model with 4G, the new iPad, an update to the iPad Air 2, solidifies Apple’s intentions to split the line into three: an expensive iPad Pro, available in two sizes, for those needing a laptop replacement; a cheap iPad mini for those needing a small portable tablet; and the iPad sitting in between the two. Continue reading...

The gay dating app has introduced its own, quite graphic, graphics to help their users communicate. But one symbol went a little too close to the boneName: Gaymoji.Appearance: Bright, cute, lewd. Continue reading...

‘We deeply apologise,’ says company’s CBO Philipp Schindler as he announces tougher stance on hateful, offensive and derogatory contentGoogle has promised a wide-ranging overhaul of its advertising policies in response to a growing boycott of the company’s platforms from leading brands and advertisers including the UK government, Marks & Spencer and McDonald’s.In a blogpost published on Monday night, Philipp Schindler, the company’s chief business officer, wrote: “We have strict policies that define where Google ads should appear, and in the vast majority of cases, our policies and tools work as intended. But at times we don’t get it right. Continue reading...

Why days before the presidential election did the FBI announce it was reopening an investigation into Hillary Clinton – when it was silent about its probe into Mr Trump’s Russia ties?When the president’s own staff turn up in Washington to publicly rebut his accusations that he had been wiretapped by his predecessor, it’s not good news for the White House. Yet the longer the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, James Comey, and Mike Rogers of the National Security Agency appeared in front of a committee of Congress, the worse it got. Since last July, Mr Comey said, the president’s campaign has been investigated for colluding with Russia to influence the 2016 election. Donald Trump’s election machine is coating his White House with sewage.Yet Donald Trump, with the insouciance of a Bourbon monarch, shows no sign of taking any notice of the facts. Nor, it seems, will he retract false claims, nor will he be held accountable for his dissembling. Mr Trump is prepared to carry on in disgrace. He spent the minutes after his own intelligence officers called him out for peddling falsehoods by trying to create a bizarre counter narrative with the @POTUS twitter account that stretched his credibility so far it snapped. Continue reading...

My father-in-law, Raymond Hardman, who has died aged 96, was a modest man from a working-class family who overcame his relative poverty to rise to academic excellence in his chosen field of electrical engineering.Raymond was born in Oldham to Joseph Hardman, a carder in a cotton mill, and his wife, Jessie (nee Oliver), a cotton mill worker. As a result of injuries sustained during the first world war Joseph died when Raymond was only two, and he and his younger sister, Mabel, were brought up by their mother and her sister, their Auntie Bina. Continue reading...

Matt Brittin says company ‘needs to do more’ but declines to say whether it will actively seek out inappropriate materialGoogle’s European chief has publicly apologised after online adverts for major brands appeared next to extremist material, but declined to say whether the company would begin actively seeking out such content and taking action against it.Matt Brittin, Google’s head of Europe, the Middle East and Africa, told the Advertising Week Europe conference in London on Monday: “I want to start by saying sorry to the brands affected by this. I take the issue very seriously and I apologise in the instances where that may have happened.” Continue reading...

The US president has not tweeted from Android for 11 days, while some missives coming from an iPhone have been more Trump-esque than usualDonald Trump appears to have ditched his infamous Android phone – at least when it comes to tweeting.The President of the US has not tweeted from an Android device for almost two weeks, since he noted a survey that showed positive employment news. Instead, every tweet sent since 8 March from his Twitter account has been sent using Twitter for iPhone. Continue reading...

A court in Minnesota has told Google to hand over the names of everyone who inputted a particular search

Jeff Jones’s exit is latest blow for firm after revelations of secret tool to evade law enforcement and claims of discrimination and sexual harassmentUber president Jeff Jones left the taxi-hailing firm after just six months in the job because working at Uber was incompatible with his values, he said.Jones’s departure is the latest blow to the San Francisco-based company, after revelations of a secret programme to evade law enforcement, allegations of workplace discrimination and sexual harassment, and a string of departures of high-level executives. Continue reading...

Jones, hired to boost taxi hailing app’s reputation, is latest in string of high-level executives to leave as firm faces multiple controversiesTaxi hailing app Uber has been thrust deeper into turmoil with the departure of company president Jeff Jones, a marketing expert hired to help bolster its reputation.

Vodafone and trio of high street banks take action as industry and UK government ask how their ads became attached to extremist materialGoogle executives are bracing for a two-pronged inquisition from the advertising industry and the government over the company’s plans to stop ads being placed next to extremist material.A slew of big-name companies, advertising firms and government departments have either pulled their adverts from Google and its YouTube video site or are considering whether to do so, with media giant Sky, telecoms group Vodafone and a trio of banks adding their names to a growing list over the weekend. Continue reading...

Can all those drinks, capsules and powders really improve your sporting performance? We asked the expertsThere are hundreds of powders, gels and bars that promise to improve an athlete’s performance. But judging which ones are based on good scientific evidence and which might be useful for a particular activity or individual is a bewildering business.Even the fact that professional sports teams use particular products might not be an indicator of their effectiveness – they may merely be fulfilling their sponsorship obligations. Continue reading...

Social media companies could face regulation as Google advertisers pull out in protest over extremist contentPoliticians and advertisers have warned Google that it must overhaul advertising practices or risk being hit by regulation and advertiser boycotts.A major global marketing company became the first to pull all its advertising spending with Google after the news that adverts for a range of organisations had been inadvertently placed next to extremist material. MPs meanwhile threatened that legislation could be put on the table if social media companies did not effectively self-regulate. Continue reading...