Technology | The Guardian

What you call your wireless network might seem a trifling decision, but it’s a window into the way a person wants to present themselves in a connected worldWhat you choose to call your wireless network can say a lot about you. If you’re the attendee of an “alt-right” event at Texas A&M University who decided to promote genocide in the form of a network ID, it can say you are violently racist. While it is perhaps not surprising to see the USA’s new far-right white supremacist movement engaging with the language of Nazism, there seems something particularly insidious in using such hateful language in something as benign as a Wi-Fi connection.What turns a simple technical feature into a personalised billboard? Amber Burton, a senior lecturer in digital media and communications currently researching digital identities, likens the naming of our networks to a “digital T-shirt”. Continue reading...

Brian Krebs has been sent heroin and a wreath in an attempt to discredit and intimidate him but sees irresponsible hardware manufacturers as the real threatBrian Krebs does not use heroin, but sometimes people send it to him anyway. The 43-year-old Alabama native writes Krebs on Security, a one-man operation focused on digital crime. His encyclopedic knowledge of the subject and his network of contacts has made his blog essential reading for anyone interested in cybercrime and a coveted lecturer at some of the biggest companies in the world. It has also made him some dangerous enemies – hence the heroin, meant as a sinister, silencing message.Looking back on a year in which Russian cyber-spies have been accused of meddling in the US election, Yahoo announced that 1bn email accounts were compromised and hackers used internet-connected devices including baby monitors, webcams and thermostats, to take down some of the world’s biggest websites, what surprises Krebs the most is that people are surprised at all. Continue reading...

The star of the video game adaptation – alongside co-star Marion Cotillard and director Justin Kurzel – discusses the plausibility of past lives and inheriting the experiences of our ancestors. Fassbender also cautions against colonisation, while Kurzel speaks about mainstream snobbishness towards the gaming community.• Assassin’s Creed opens in the UK on 1 January 2017 Continue reading...

The place to talk about games and other things that matterIt’s Friday! And this is the last Chatterbox before Christmas, so we’d like to wish all out chatterboxers a very merry Christmas and a wonderful new year. Thank you for reading our stuff and chatting here with us. Continue reading...

Bridgewater Associates has a team of engineers working on a project to automate decision-making to save time and eliminate human emotional volatilityThe world’s largest hedge fund is building a piece of software to automate the day-to-day management of the firm, including hiring, firing and other strategic decision-making.

Breman Museum in Atlanta says it is paying $2 a click to stop neo-Nazi site being top result for ‘did the Holocaust happen’A Jewish heritage museum has accused Google of profiting from Holocaust denial because it is paying to prevent a neo-Nazi website from appearing as the top result for “did the Holocaust happen”.The marketing director of the Breman Museum in Atlanta, Georgia, said it was “nauseating” that Google directed users to the white supremacist site, and added that it was paying Google up to $2 a click to direct searchers to its own site via AdWords, Google’s pay-per-click advertising service. Continue reading...

CrowdStrike says malware implant was used to track movements of artillery units, adding to suspicions Russia is involvedA new report suggests the same hacking group believed to have hacked the Democrats during the recent presidential election also targeted Ukrainian artillery units over a two-year period, that if confirmed would add to suspicions they are Russian state operatives.The report, issued by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, said a malware implant on Android devices was used to track the movements of Ukrainian artillery units and then target them. The hackers were able to access communications and geolocations of the devices, which meant the artillery could then be fired on and destroyed. Continue reading...

The 2016 US presidential election wasn’t the first case of a successful email hacking faux scandalA batch of stolen emails was released to the public, with evidence pointing towards Russian hackers. The media ran through the formerly private correspondence with a fine-toothed comb, looking for dirt. Although little if any damning information was found, public trust in the hacking victims was severely eroded. The volume of media coverage created the perception that where there’s smoke, there must be fire, and a general presumption of guilt resulted.The year was 2009, and the victims were climate scientists working for and communicating with the University of East Anglia. The story was repeated in 2016 with the Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee. Continue reading...

Research finds leaving social network for a week increases life satisfaction, especially among heavy users and ‘lurkers’Taking a break from Facebook can boost emotional wellbeing and life satisfaction, with the effects particularly pronounced among people who “lurk” on the social network without actively engaging with others, a study suggests.The research by the University of Copenhagen showed the effects of quitting for a week were also strong among heavy users and those who envied their Facebook friends, suggesting that people who pore irritably over the posts of others may benefit the most. Continue reading...

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

Imaginative readers shared their home tech projects – here are some of our favourites, from their visionary solutions to the delightfully pointless

Sheets bear the message ‘welcome to Japan’ and contain information on Wi-Fi spots and other travel informationJapan has taken its reputation for hygiene up another notch with the introduction of “toilet paper” for smartphones inside toilets at Narita international airport.In a new take on the meaning of public convenience, users are invited to pull off a piece of paper from a dispenser next to the regular toilet roll and give their phone screens a germ-busting polish. Continue reading...

California DMV announced it had revoked the registration of 16 autonomous Uber cars, which were caught on numerous occasions running red lightsCalifornia has forced Uber to remove its self-driving vehicles from the road, canceling the company’s controversial pilot program in San Francisco after a week of embarrassing reports of traffic violations and repeated legal threats from state officials.The department of motor vehicles (DMV) announced late Wednesday that it had revoked the registration of 16 autonomous Uber cars, which the corporation deployed without proper permits last week and which were caught on numerous occasions running red lights. Continue reading...

Company insists traffic violations in San Francisco are the result of ‘human error’ by drivers who can take control if needed, but witness account contradicts thisAn autonomous Uber malfunctioned while in “self-driving mode” and caused a near collision in San Francisco, according to a business owner whose account raises new safety concerns about the unregulated technology launch.The self-driving car – which Uber introduced without permits, as part of a testing program that California has deemed illegal – accelerated into an intersection while the light was still red and while the automation technology was clearly controlling the car, said Christopher Koff, owner of local cafe AK Subs. Continue reading...

If board games just won’t do it this year, here are some alternatives guaranteed to get everyone dancing, racing, cooking or indeed fightingAt Christmas – as with any occasion where your whole extended family is crammed into one house amid an abundance of unresolved tensions and alcohol – Monopoly is not always the answer. Similarly, there are times in life when Trivial Pursuit is just going to make everything worse, and when people simply don’t want to hear you explain the rules to Settlers of Catan for the 300th time. Sometimes, only video games will do.So, if at any point during the festive season you find yourself desperate for shared entertainment options (that don’t involve getting out in the fresh air, of course), here is a selection box of local multiplayer titles that will fit the bill. All of them are available for current machines, and most can be downloaded in a couple of hours. This Christmas, don’t become a victim of charades. Continue reading...

From Russia and the US election to revelations about Yahoo, the hallmark of the major cyber-attacks this year has been just how public they have becomeWhile new revelations about Russian hacking during the US election continue to make headlines, they were by no means the only big cyber-attacks of the last year. In fact, there were so many that you could dub 2016 as “the year of the hack”.A hallmark of 2016 cyber-attacks has been just how public they have become. On 21 October, an attack on internet infrastructure provider Dyn with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack took down access to Netflix, Facebook, Twitter plus the Guardian, CNN, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and others. Continue reading...

Fifa belongs to a select group of titles familiar to people who have no interest in gaming – or even real football. What’s the secret of its success?Jan Tian stood in nervous silence in the departure hall of Beijing Capital International Airport. Beside him, his sister held an envelope containing a thousand yuan, close to her entire year’s wages. It was May 1993 and China’s capital was humid, its parks ablaze with tulips, crab apples and red azaleas. But Tian, who had graduated from Beijing University a decade earlier and now worked in Vancouver for the video game company Electronic Arts, had not come to sightsee. The previous week, he had received a phone call to say that his father had suffered a stroke and Tian’s bosses had booked him an emergency flight to China.After a week, the doctors had given their prognosis: Tian’s father would be paralysed down his left side, but would recover. As concern yielded to relief, Tian’s thoughts returned to the work he had left behind in Canada. The release date for EA Soccer, his current project, had recently been brought forward, after an executive walked past an office and heard staff, who were playing an early version of the game, whooping with excitement. For the game to be on shelves by Christmas, it would need to be finished by October. They had less than five months. Continue reading...

Zuckerberg’s dead-eyed delivery during a two-minute humblebrag about his artificial intelligence tool Jarvis makes you question who the real robot isIt’s been a horrible year for Facebook and the world, but that hasn’t stopped Mark Zuckerberg from sending a saccharine digital Christmas (sorry, non-denominational holiday season) card, in the form of a two-minute video, showcasing his perfect life.Soundtracked by plinky-plonky music, Zuck presents a simple AI called “Jarvis” (named after Iron Man’s butler) that he’s spent about 100 hours this year programming. Jarvis, who is voiced in the video by Morgan Freeman, is the virtual assistant the Facebook CEO set out to build as a personal challenge that would help him understand the state of artificial intelligence. Continue reading...

Social network could face fine of up to 1% of global turnover in 2014 prompted by privacy policy change for WhatsApp that shared user data with FacebookThe European commission (EC) has filed charges against Facebook for providing “misleading” information in the run-up to the social network’s acquisition of messaging service WhatsApp after its data-sharing change in August.

Game designer Jack de Quidt asks Oculus whether its VR headset – and Touch controllers – will really deliver new narrative experiencesThe very first thing I saw in virtual reality was Wevr’s theBlu demo, back in the early days of the HTC Vive headset. It’s the thing a lot of people mention when they’re asked about the most compelling VR experiences, and with good reason: the demo transports you to the helm of a sunken ship, the whole ocean above your head; it allows you to take in the beauty of the scene for a few minutes before, out of the depths, a vast blue whale slowly emerges, dwarfing you.I took the headset off and walked away across the busy floor of the game conference, but I could still feel the water around me. I told my friends. They joined the long queues. They told their friends. And that was the entire story that was told: there is a whale and it is beautiful. Since then, I’ve flown spaceships and climbed buildings and repaired robots in VR. I’ve shot a variety of floating objects. I’ve sat cross-legged in the middle of Venice’s Piazza San Marco and looked down on the people in the flooded square. Continue reading...

At company Q&A, Apple CEO argued it is important to engage with president-elect and suggested a bright future for desktopTim Cook has spoken to Apple employees in a closed Q&A about his decision to meet with US president-elect Donald Trump, arguing that it’s more important to engage than stand on the sidelines “yelling”.Cook also answered employee questions about the perception that Apple has abandoned its Mac line of desktop computers, and about what he thinks most differentiates the company from its competitors. Continue reading...

Taxi-hailing app loses $2.2bn in first nine months of the year amid setback to roll-out of self-driving carsUber lost $2.2bn (£1.77bn) in the first nine months of the year despite a surge in revenues, according to reports, adding to the taxi-hailing app’s woes as it faces a setback in plans to launch self-driving cars.The San Francisco-based firm was valued at more than $65bn in a $12.5bn fundraising effort earlier this year but has remained secretive about its financial performance. Continue reading...

Milorad Trkulja sued Google, arguing when terms such as Melbourne underworld criminals were entered, images of him showed upAn appeals court has found in favour of Google after a man claimed the search engine had defamed him by publishing photos of him linked to hardened criminals of Melbourne’s underworld.Milorad Trkulja sued Google, arguing when search terms such as Melbourne criminal underworld photos and Melbourne underworld criminals were entered, images of him showed up. Continue reading...

2016 was an unexpected year. Some in Silicon Valley soared, while others tanked. And some took a trip to Trump TowerThe year 2016 was supposed to be when the tech bubble finally burst. Instead the world blew up.Amid Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and the increasingly catastrophic consequences of climate change, the dominance of a handful of technology companies over society became increasingly obvious – from Facebook’s troubling impact on democracy to Elon Musk’s plan to colonize a new planet before we destroy this one. Continue reading...

Is the Dyson’s Supersonic really worth at least twice as much as its top-end rivals? We put them to the testCan a hairdryer really be worth £300? That’s the price of Dyson’s Supersonic. It’s the most expensive consumer option on the market, and by more than a hair’s breadth. We wanted to know if the extra money is worth it, so tested it and four other top-end rivals.Our team of testers – with various different hair types, from dense, tight curls of afro-textured hair to pencil-straight east-Asian hair (type makes a big difference when it comes choosing a good dryer) – put the top brands through their paces, judging how fast they worked, how heavy they felt and most importantly how they made hair feel. Continue reading...

Engineers were working to fix programming flaw that could have deadly results for cyclists days after Uber announced it would openly defy California regulatorsUber has admitted that there is a “problem” with the way autonomous vehicles cross bike lanes, raising serious questions about the safety of cyclists days after the company announced it would openly defy California regulators over self-driving vehicles.

User-unfriendly gadgets | WH Auden’s nether regions | Nut roast denigration | Trump’s spelling error | Rebranding Buckfast | A Brexit resolutionSuzanne Moore is not alone (Gadgets are supposed to streamline life, G2, 15 December). I always ask myself two questions: is it just because we are in the midst, rather than the end, of a technological revolution that so-called labour-saving gadgets and their bits often pose problems or go wrong? And, will technology and algorithms ever find a way to give us the chance delights found in the diversity of nature or in a bookshop?

The technology multisquillionaire tweeted from a traffic jam that he is going to build some tunnel-boring machines and dig us into utopiaName: Boring.Age: John Wilkinson invented the first boring machine tool 241 years ago. Continue reading...

Dublin government argues it should be allowed to choose how much it levies on foreign companiesIreland will appeal the European Union’s order to force it to collect a record €13bn in taxes from Apple, the Irish government has said.The Irish finance department’s announcement on Monday comes nearly four months after EU competition authorities hit Apple with the back-tax bill based on its longtime reporting of European-wide profits through Ireland. The country charges the American company only for sales on its own territory at Europe-low rates that in turn have been greatly reduced by the controversial use of shell companies at home and abroad. Continue reading...

Company’s UK rental commission earnings pass through Ireland where corporate tax regime is more favourableAirbnb paid UK tax of £317,000 last year after its London company handled hundreds of millions of pounds in global rent payments which generated commissions for its Irish HQ.The UK arms of the booming home sharing website paid tax on a £1.4m profit for the 11 months ending in December 2015, their first full UK accounts reveal. One of the companies handled such a large amount of rental cash that at one point it held £430m on account. Continue reading...

Kelvin Onaghinor faces nine counts, including identity theft, in case that may have exposed personal data of more than 750,000 peopleA Nigerian national has been charged in connection with a hack of Los Angeles County emails that might have exposed personal data from more than 750,000 people who had business with county departments, officials said.Kelvin Onaghinor, 37, faces nine counts, including unauthorized computer access and identity theft, according to the office of the Los Angeles County chief executive. He has not been arrested and officials are not sure if he is on US soil. Continue reading...

The problems with introducing driverless cars are greater than you identify in your editorial (Intelligent cars raise questions that only society can answer, 16 December) and yet almost certain to be ignored.No amount of testing can prove them as safe as human drivers unless the software is frozen and never updated Continue reading...

Imagine waking up one day to find that your voice is programmed into tens of millions of mobile phones without your prior knowledge. For voiceover artist Susan Bennett, in 2011, that was her realityIn 2005, Atlanta-based voiceover artist Susan Bennett recorded hundreds of hours of audio for a text-to-speech company. Six years later, on 4 October 2011, she quickly learned that those recordings had been licensed by Apple for the iPhone 4S’s built-in personal assistant, Siri. Overnight, Susan’s voice became globally recognised, whether she liked it or not. Continue reading...

A good projector can transform a patch of plain wall in your home into your very own movie theatreThe big screen at home has become commonplace of late. TVs the size of small aquariums can be bought for such paltry sums that everyone, it seems, now owns a domestic cinema of sorts.A projector takes that to the next level, creating the illusion of living room as auditorium for a fraction of the cost of the equivalent television. You don’t even need to splash out on a dedicated projector screen; any patch of white or lightly coloured wall will suffice. Which one to choose, though? Continue reading...

The new convertible from Rolls-Royce is packed with surprises. The biggest being that not everyone hates youPrice: £265,155

Technology can harness the best in humanity, but is increasingly being deployed against the will of the peopleIn 2009, in what future generations may see as the high-water mark of the ideology known as “techno-utopianism”, which may at some point be rebranded as “techno-delusionism”, Gordon Brown stepped on to the TED stage. The Silicon Valley thinkfest had come to Britain and he was there to talk about politics, technology and what he called “the creation of a truly global society”.He had a powerful message to deliver. “The power of our moral sense, allied to the power of communications,” he said, along with “our ability to organise internationally”, would enable us “to fundamentally change the world”. This was a politician telling a tech crowd what it wanted to hear and what he wanted to believe. What we all wanted to believe. Brown’s thesis was this: people are essentially good. We have feeling for our fellow man and technology would be the enabler of more goodness. It would harness the very best of us . Continue reading...

Google and others reap profits from their searches and they should be properly controlledCarole Cadwalladr is absolutely right to highlight how Google’s autocomplete and algorithmic search results can reinforce hate speech and stereotypes (“Google is not ‘just’ a platform”, Comment).But she is less right to claim I tried to absolve Google of responsibility by tweeting: “I’m sure @google will argue they aren’t responsible for the results” in support. What I actually tweeted was that plus – “but they reap advertising revenue from the search. Is that ethical?” Continue reading...

Google ‘is unhappy’ with Holocaust denial beating the truth in its search results – but it probably makes more money that wayThe Holocaust did not happen. At least not in the world of Google, it seems. One week ago, I typed “did the hol” into a Google search box and clicked on its autocomplete suggestion, “Did the Holocaust happen?” And there, at the top of the list, was a link to Stormfront, a neo-Nazi white supremacist website and an article entitled “Top 10 reasons why the Holocaust didn’t happen”.On Monday, Google confirmed it would not remove the result: “We are saddened to see that hate organisations still exist. The fact that hate sites appear in search results does not mean that Google endorses these views.” Continue reading...

Last week’s strikes over the removal of guards highlighted concern about the way technology is making real workers obsolete, hitting lower-paid roles hardestTrains with a guard become driver-only trains, which then become driverless trains. That’s the fear underlying Aslef’s dispute with Southern railways and accounts for the rearguard action to prevent further job losses across the rail industry.It’s not the only reason for the dispute. There is also scorn for Southern’s management, which has attacked drivers’ basic terms and conditions, and there is anger at transport secretary Chris Grayling’s anti-union stance. But, at its heart, the dispute is over the status and even the very existence of the job of train driver, which has been around for nigh on 200 years. Continue reading...

Justice minister threatens sanctions such as fines on tech companies if they still fail to delete illegal posts by early next yearGermany is to consider new laws that would force social media platforms such as Facebook and search engines such as Google to take a more active role in policing illegal hate speech on their sites.Measures considered by Angela Merkel’s coalition government include forcing companies to set up clear channels for registering complaints, to publish the number of complaints they receive and to hire legally qualified ombudsmen to carry out deletions. Continue reading...

The satnav is so attentive it’s like having a butlerYou can tell a lot about a car by the people who admire it. When young men swarm it in the streets, you know it is renownedly fast and has red piping. When people at the school gates like it, you know it looks new (there is something about playgrounds – they dampen the petrolheads and amplify a love of tidiness). And when a car, much like the Lexus RX 450h, attracts the attention of men who look like advertising executives (slouchy attire, confident hair, always in their 40s) you know it’s both right-on and a status vehicle.It’s a tricky combination, being fundamentally contradictory: if you care about climate change, you forget about status, surely? Except not really: the Lexus speaks to the crazy mixed-up people we truly are. Its hybrid efficiency has to be weighed against the old-fashioned inefficiency of its two-tonne bulk. It is modern all the way from its shapely headlamp cluster to its cavernous front grille; old school in its leather interior, and the fact that a lot of its not inconsiderable bulk is given over to driver comfort. It’s an SUV in which the passengers feel like they’re in a hot hatch, and the boot could belong to a 70s saloon. Yet the driver feels like she’s in an armchair, and that’s what counts. Continue reading...

Threat from the attorney general came shortly after Uber declared it would defy state regulations, a move the company said as ‘an important issue of principle’California’s attorney general Kamala Harris on Friday threatened legal action against the ride-sharing tech company Uber unless it “immediately” removes its self-driving from the roads in San Francisco.The threat from the office of the outgoing attorney general was contained in a letter released to the public Friday shortly after Uber declared it would defy state regulations, a move the company said was “an important issue of principle”. Continue reading...

The US president held his final press conference of 2016, criticizing the media for its coverage of Hillary Clinton’s emails, and discussing Russia and Syria

The Netherlands has found a solution to the problem of car doors and cyclists (Transport secretary knocks man off his bike, 16 December). Dutch motorists are trained to open the car door with their opposite hand. This forces the body to swivel, and your eyes to look backward, thus spotting a passing cyclist. Drivers must demonstrate this to pass the driving test. It is referred to sometimes as the “Dutch reach”. In the Netherlands it is simply called how you open your car door.

Regulator advising the government on improving broadband access across the UK says 1.4m homes get below-par speedsMore than a million UK homes are unable to get fast enough broadband for modern families’ needs, including watching streaming services such as Netflix and video-calling friends.Ofcom has revealed that 5% of UK homes and offices, or 1.4m properties, cannot access broadband speeds over 10 megabits per second. Continue reading...

A report this week ranked Britain’s 4G service behind Romania and Peru. It’s not quite as simple as that, but patchy signal is still a problem in plenty of the countryIs the UK’s 4G mobile phone coverage really worse than Romania, Albania and Peru, as a report suggested last week?

Everything we know so far about Moscow’s reputed involvement in the election that saw Donald Trump defeat Hillary ClintonAccording to US intelligence officials, Russian hackers made repeated attempts before this year’s election to get into major US institutions, including the White House and the state department. The tactics were simple: send out volleys of phishing emails and hope that someone clicked. Continue reading...

The listing, produced by the Freedom of the Press Foundation, was topped by the US site The InterceptThe Guardian has been listed as the second most secure news publication on the web, according to a ranking produced by the American non-profit Freedom of the Press Foundation.Points were awarded for supporting technologies which protect the privacy and security of visitors, with a focus on using HTTPS, a web protocol that allows for encrypted connections. Continue reading...

Can common-sense and our real-world intuition show us how to write secure software?It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire.During the battle, Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire’s ultimate weapon, the DEATH STAR, an armoured space station with enough power to destroy an entire planet.Creating secure software is one of the huge challenges of the modern age. Software security is generally considered an advanced topic but I believe there are important lessons we can learn from how people secure things in the real world. By considering well-understood real-world situations and thinking about how those lessons apply to our software, we can often stumble upon security best practices. Continue reading...

Bitcoin users still represent a tiny minority, but some believe that the currency will become more popular in Venezuela as economic uncertainty escalatesAmid growing economic chaos, and the highest inflation rate in the world, some Venezuelans are swapping bolivars for bitcoins in order to buy basic necessities or pay their employeesThe digital currency is free from central bank or government controls, and users in Venezuela see it as a safe alternative in an economy where the government has enforced strict foreign exchange controls, and inflation is running at an estimated 500%. Continue reading...