Technology | The Guardian

The Google affair reveals gaping holes in our tax system – from the smoke and mirrors of royalty payments, to the charade of the tech giant’s Irish questionFirst, the case for the defence. It is not true that Google pays UK corporation tax at a rate of only 3%. That is not possible. Corporation tax, currently 20%, is the same for all companies.Nor is it true that Google paid no tax at all before the settlement earlier this month with HM Revenue & Customs. Google UK’s accounts show a £20m tax payment in 2013, for example. The bill for back taxes of £130m, covering the past 10 years, arises from an audit by HMRC that was started in 2009. And, finally, the company’s statement that it “complies with the law” is 100% accurate. It now has a stamp of approval from HMRC to demonstrate as much. Continue reading...

The team behind Siri have a new idea: a voice-controlled personal assistant – linked to all your devices – that will take care of your every needSo I’ve arrived late at the office of Viv, an artificial intelligence company based in San Jose, California. I missed my train from San Francisco after dawdling leaving my apartment and then finding the taxi service app on my phone wouldn’t work. Dag Kittlaus, who I’ve kept waiting, looks on the bright side. “Your trials of getting here are a perfect illustration of how Viv will be helpful,” he says. “Wouldn’t it be nice to say ‘I need to get to San Jose, give me my options’ and Viv would know how close you are to the train station, when the next train is coming, where the nearest cars, how much it was going to cost…”Kittlaus is the co-founder and CEO of Viv, a three-year-old AI startup backed by $30m, including funds from Iconiq Capital, which helps manage the fortunes of Mark Zuckerberg and other wealthy tech executives. In a blocky office building in San Jose’s downtown, the company is working on what Kittlaus describes as a “global brain” – a new form of voice-controlled virtual personal assistant. With the odd flashes of personality, Viv will be able to perform thousands of tasks, and it won’t just be stuck in a phone but integrated into everything from fridges to cars. “Tell Viv what you want and it will orchestrate this massive network of services that will take care of it,” he says. Continue reading...

It may be named after Picasso, but what would the artistic genius have made of Citroën’s big people carrier?Price: £19,970

Microsoft co-founder chooses the Beatles track Two of Us in memory of Apple boss and talks about his charity work and how he met his wifeBill Gates speaks about his relationship with the late Apple founder Steve Jobs and chooses a song in memory of their work together shaping the technology of the modern age, in an appearance on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs on Sunday.Describing Jobs, who died in 2011, as an “incredible genius”, Gates, 60, chooses as one of his allotted eight favourite tracks the Beatles’s Two of Us, for its apposite line: “You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead.”. Continue reading...

Opposition figures react angrily to news that government has objected to EU’s proposed blacklisting of Bermuda as ‘unhelpful’Britain has been privately lobbying the EU to remove the tax haven through which Google funnels billions of pounds of profits from an official blacklist, the Observer can reveal.Treasury ministers have told the European commission that they are “strongly opposed” to proposed sanctions against Bermuda, a favoured shelter for Google’s profits and one of 30 tax jurisdictions in Brussels’s sights. Continue reading...

It’s the kind of car you might buy if you had a drug-dealing empire and wanted to splash some cash without getting stopped by the police

Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and security researcher Ashkan Soltani says he has been denied security clearance for his new job with White HouseThe White House has denied a security clearance to a member of its technology team who previously helped report on documents leaked by Edward Snowden.

Licensed firearm retailers will still be able to advertise on the site, but updated policy will forbid individual users from coordinating peer-to-peer sales of gunsFacebook announced that it is banning the private sale of firearms on its social network, which can take place without background check.While licensed firearm retailers will still be able to advertise on the site, the updated policy will forbid individual users from coordinating peer-to-peer sales of guns. Facebook already prohibits the private sale of marijuana, pharmaceuticals, and illegal drugs.

Trials at New Mexico’s Spaceport Authority are using new millimetre wave technology to deliver data from drones – potentially 40 times faster than 4GGoogle is testing solar-powered drones at Spaceport America in New Mexico to explore ways to deliver high-speed internet from the air, the Guardian has learned.In a secretive project codenamed SkyBender, the technology giant built several prototype transceivers at the isolated spaceport last summer, and is testing them with multiple drones, according to documents obtained under public records laws. Continue reading...

As the Broncos and Panthers face off on the field, the titans of tech and the NFL compete to be the center of attention during biggest sports event of the yearSilicon Valley technologists may not be the most athletic bunch, but they do understand eyeballs.

The chancellor’s ‘huge success’ in securing £130m in back taxes from the technology company raises a number of issuesWhen Google reached a £130m settlement with the British taxman last week, George Osborne described the deal as a “major success”. But the chancellor and the search giant have been on the back foot ever since, accused of striking a “sweetheart deal” that might have short-changed taxpayers and has drawn the close attention of Brussels.Should Osborne have hailed Google’s tax deal? Did he misjudge how it would be received?

The 31-year-old also overtook the Koch brothers to become the fourth-richest in the US, as Facebook’s record fourth-quarter profits bring net worth to $47.5bnFacebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is now the sixth-richest person on Earth and the fourth-richest person in US, his net worth surpassing that of the politically influential Koch brothers, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.Facebook reported a quarter of record revenue, with sales up 52% and net income more than doubling since last year. Zuckerberg’s wealth rose by $6bn on Thursday, taking his net worth to $47.5bn. Continue reading...

British surveillance agency advises cryptography enthusiasts to join forces if they want to meet Sunday deadline

Social network has suffered from stagnating users, according to figures it publically reveals, but third-party data suggests that the real story is worse stillTwitter’s American userbase may have fallen by a third over the past two years, according to figures from third-party analytics firm 7Park Data.The figures contradict Twitter’s own numbers, which report a 25% growth over the same period. Continue reading...

The court order included the words ‘cookie’ and ‘browser’, which social network claims is against Belgian law for use of Dutch, French or GermanFacebook is objecting to the use of English words such as “cookie” and “browser” in a Belgian court order, which has demanded the site stop tracking users without their consent, saying that Belgians may not understand the words.

The bank admits its internet banking facility was made unavailable following a ‘denial of service’ attack, but says no transactions were affectedHSBC customers have been locked out of internet banking after the company was targeted by cyber criminals in a “denial of service” attack.The bank, which has 17 million personal banking and business customers in the UK, said its website had been attacked, but it had “successfully defended” its systems. It said it was working to restore services, would waive any fees incurred by customers as a direct result of the incident. Continue reading...

Kellogg’s Frosties mascot asked social media users to ‘keep things gr-r-reat’ after being inundated with lewd anthropomorphic imagesIf you think your Thursday was bad, just bear this in mind: someone woke up, went to their job where they pretend to be Kellogg’s Frosties’ mascot Tony the Tiger on the internet, and had to ask people to stop sending them anthropomorphic animal porn.I’m all for showing your stripes, feathers, etc. But let’s keep things gr-r-reat – & family-friendly if you could. Cubs could be watching Continue reading...

Whitechapel Gallery, London

Transport secretary defends deal as move in right direction but expects audit office to come under pressure to investigate

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

Tech giant’s ‘sweetheart’ deal with the UK taxman raised eyebrows on Thursday but the company’s ties with leading British politicians goes back a decadeThe furore over Google’s £130m deal with the UK taxman has triggered outrage among politicians, business figures and tax campaigners. It has also raised questions over the search engine group’s proximity to the corridors of power in Britain. An analysis of meetings between Google executives and senior politicians, as well as the regular appointments of political figures to major positions within the company’s PR machine, shows how the California-based tech company has become deeply entwined within the British political landscape. Continue reading...

Names and addresses of officers, forum posts critical of Barack Obama, and controversial contracts were posted online in the Fraternal Order of Police hackPrivate files belonging to America’s biggest police union, including the names and addresses of officers, forum posts critical of Barack Obama, and controversial contracts made with city authorities, were posted online Thursday after a hacker breached its website.The Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), which says it represents about 330,000 law enforcement officers across the US, said the FBI was investigating after 2.5GB of data taken from its servers was dumped online and swiftly shared on social media. The union’s national site, fop.net, remained offline on Thursday evening.

Problem of poor voice recognition of Australian accents has been addressed, as well as recognition of slang terms and difficult place namesGoogle has improved voice searches for phone and computer applications to help it understand Australian accents and slang terms such as footy and servo.It has also improved its ability to recognise difficult place names such as Tibooburra and Unanderra, and can now recognise the term “drop bear”, an Australian slang term used to describe a fictional bear-like animal that drops from trees. Continue reading...

Users in the US will be able to use the new feature on Facebook’s iPhone app in the next few weeks, part of a drive to expand video on the siteFacebook will start broadcasting live video in a dedicated space on its iPhone app, it announced on 28 January.

Social network lets campaigns match profiles with political habits and contact info, as Silicon Valley influence becomes ‘game-changer’ for targeted adsIf you lived in north-east Iowa, the evangelical stronghold where the battle for the soul of conservative American politics will play out in person on Monday, and happened to have given Senator Ted Cruz’s campaign your email address sometime in the last few months, you might find something especially appealing this weekend in your Facebook feed.You might see, amid the family photos, a menacing video of Donald Trump talking about how “my views are a little bit different than if I lived in Iowa”. LIKE ON ABORTION, blares the sponsored ad from Cruz’s deep-pocketed, social media-savvy digital team. And you might wonder how this campaign managed, by paying Facebook, to differentiate between Trump’s “New York values” and “OURS”. Continue reading...

Former public accounts committee chair Margaret Hodge says figure shows Google UK is ‘not a back office support operation’Google’s 2,300 staff in the UK earned an average wage of £160,000 each last year, despite the group’s insistence that its British operation is a modest outpost of the company’s global empire.Margaret Hodge, the former chair of the public accounts committee, said high pay among London staff was further evidence that Google’s “complex structure of companies is a sham”. Its UK employees mainly provide marketing and support services to offices in Dublin. Continue reading...

Romina, a whippet, receives a prosthetic leg, made using the latest 3D printing technology on Tuesday in Mexico. The leg is unique because it mimics an actual dog’s leg, allowing Romina to move around much as she did before. The dog is still adapting to having the new limb but her owners say she has made good progress so far Continue reading...

The achievement has been hailed as a breakthrough in artificial intelligence, but computers are much less efficient than usToday we were greeted by the front page of Nature hailing a breakthrough in artificial intelligence: computers are now outperforming even the best humans at the Chinese game of Go, long been seen as the last preserve of human game-playing mastery. The breakthrough, from a team based at Google’s DeepMind group in London, has come much earlier than many experts expected.Related: Google AI in landmark victory over Go grandmaster Continue reading...

Some plugs for iPhones, iPads and Macs used in Europe, Australia and elsewhere at risk of breaking and giving electric shocksApple is recalling some power adapters sold with Mac computers, iPhones, iPads and iPods since 2003.

How technology is being increasingly used to treat mental illnessFrom Fitbits that monitor the sleep patterns of patients with schizophrenia and apps that help you manage your mood to online therapy sessions, tech is increasingly being seen as a viable alternative to traditional health and wellbeing techniques.But is it too good to be true? What are the benefits, and what are the risks? Continue reading...

Pierre Moscovici warns ‘zero rate is not the best idea’ but Britain would have veto on any proposal to do away with exemptionsThe European Union executive is planning a review of value added tax across the bloc that might call into question Britain’s right to waive the sales duty on food, medicines and children’s clothing.

WePod shuttle carries handful of people on 200m journey in first trial of its kind – with hopes to extend systems to cargo trucksAn electric, driverless shuttle bus has taken to Dutch public roads on Thursday, rolling six passengers along a 200m stretch of road in the first trial of its kind worldwide.The WePod, one of a fleet to be rolled out in coming years, took a few people on a short journey back and forth along the side of a lake in the central Dutch agricultural town of Wageningen. Continue reading...

Many people now gather data about their own bodies on personal trackers, but the jury is still out on their accuracy and effectivenessFitness trackers are surging in popularity, but are they any good for you? And are they any good for the doctor who is treating you?The devices, worn on the wrist, clipped to the belt or shoved into a pocket, measure your movements and, at the very least, promise to calculate how many calories you burned on your walk to work. Some offer considerably more, with myriad sensors measuring health indicators. Continue reading...

Chris Boucher, from Antrim in Northern Ireland, donated his kidney to his three-year-old daughter Lucy in a ground-breaking operation that was made possible using 3D printing technology. 3D replicas of Lucy’s abdomen and her father’s kidney were made before surgery. The printed models helped surgeons at Guy’s and St Thomas’ hospital in London plan how to put an adult-sized kidney into the body of a toddler

Dylan is getting account sign-ups from someone with the same name, who is mistakenly using Dylan’s email address. What can he do?I subscribed to Apple’s MobileMe service, so I received an email address with my full name @me.com. When the service switched to iCloud, I also received the @icloud.com suffix.My problem is that someone with the same name, based in America, is using my @icloud.com address to sign up for accounts and services, including Instagram. For example, I know that he has purchased a case for his iPhone 4, is interested in a new Ford pickup truck, and has signed his child up for a Scholastic education account.I get this as well. A surprising number of people don’t seem to be able to remember their email addresses. This is a growing problem because of the use of real names. We used to think this was a great idea, overlooking the fact that there are often hundreds and sometimes thousands of people with the same name, and now they’re all coming online. We might have been better off using fabricated but memorable names. Continue reading...

Company executives and UK tax officials to appear before public accounts committee, while it could also face EU investigationGoogle executives and UK tax officials are to face a grilling from MPs within weeks after they agreed to appear before the Commons public accounts committee to discuss their controversial tax settlement.Representatives from the US internet company and HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) are due to give evidence in a hearing on 11 February, the committee confirmed. Continue reading...

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

Free-to-play games such as Hearthstone offer huge prize money but winning tournaments is not actually a good way to make a living, finds Alex HernIt’s the lot of every sports fan to sit on the sofa watching their stars play and think “I could do that, if I tried” safe in the knowledge that no one is ever going to call them on that claim.

In the tight-knit online gaming community Epic Mafia, Eris was an infamous celebrity. So when news of his suicide reached the forums, many players were grief stricken. But in a virtual world where it pays to lie, could it really be true?Everyone who played Epic Mafia knew Eris, or at least knew of him. In real life, he was a 32-year-old computer programmer, who lived alone with his border collie in upstate New York, but in the tight-knit online gaming community of Epic Mafia, he was a celebrity, the impresario of the site’s many forums, constantly flirting, philosophising, gossiping. In the seven years since the site had launched, he had formed many intense friendships with people he had never met, but who had come to depend on him. Eris had the gift of easy intimacy. He asked real questions. He wanted to know you. And best of all, he was always right there when you needed him: online.“Many people will probably wonder why I’ve decided to do this,” read the beginning of the suicide note that Eris had scheduled to appear on his Tumblr on 27 April 2015, two days after his death. “I was sexually abused as a child … and have dealt with the consequences of that my entire life. Imagine going through life with an ever-present shadow hanging over you, worrying if you too might be like the people who destroyed your childhood and life.” Continue reading...

Steven McCarroll, the director of the Stanley Centre for Psychiatric Research, Beth Stevens, an assistant professor of neurology at Boston Children’s Hospital, and Eric Lander, the director of the Broad Institute, discuss efforts to understand if there is a link between molecular and cellular events and the development of schizophrenia. A study by the Broad Institute says people are more at risk of schizophrenia if they inherit genes that lead to excessive loss of healthy brain synapses during adolescence. The study says a person’s risk of schizophrenia is increased if they inherit specific variants in a gene related to ‘synaptic pruning’ — the elimination of connections between neurons. The findings represent the first time the origin of the disease has been causally linked to specific gene variants and a biological process• Schizophrenia breakthrough as genetic study reveals link to brain changes Continue reading...

Vince Cable, Rupert Murdoch and Margaret Hodge among figures to speak out as questions grow over government links with senior company executivesDavid Cameron has been accused of getting too close to Google amid growing anger over the government’s £130m tax deal, which has been criticised for being too lenient towards the tech giant.

Multinationals would file single European tax return under plan proposed by EU tax commissioner to stamp out aggressive avoidanceOne of the most powerful opponents of Google’s controversial tax structures, European tax commissioner Pierre Moscovici, is expected on Thursday to call on Britain and Ireland to drop their objections to radical tax reform across the EU.Moscovici, who has previously advocated a Europe-wide “digital tax” on companies such as Google, now wants to tackle aggressive tax avoidance among multinationals by requiring them to file a single European tax return. Continue reading...

Media mogul, whose own tax affairs came under scrutiny in Australia, says ‘posh boy’ politicians were too awed by tech giantRupert Murdoch has accused the “posh boys in Downing Street” of being too easily awed by Google as the government came under fire over its £130m tax deal with the technology giant.Murdoch, the multibillionaire executive chairman of News Corp who ultimately controls the Times and the Sun newspapers, sent a series of tweets on Wednesday suggesting Downing Street was too close to Google and accusing the company of “paying token amounts for PR purposes”. Continue reading...

An issue with Apple’s Safari web browser that caused it to crash for many iPhone, iPad and Mac users globally has now been resolved, the company said

How can a company with so many employees in such lovely and expansive offices not have a permanent establishment? It’s really very simple …Google’s decision to finally pay a one-off £130m settlement to HMRC, settling a long-running argument about its astonishingly low UK corporation tax bill, was hailed as a “major success” by the chancellor, George Osborne.

Seven years after the release of his indie smash hit Braid, the reclusive designer is back with The Witness, a video game of seemingly endless perplexing puzzlesIn the summer of 2008, at the beginning of what would become a sort of revolution in independent gaming, Jonathan Blow released his first game, Braid, on the Xbox 360’s digital Live Arcade.

Chair of book publisher Penguin Random House UK and Wikipedia founder take up their roles with immediate effect

3D printing and design expertise enabled six children with upper-limb differences to build prosthetics that gave them superpowersIn a hidden room in the back of a pier overlooking the San Francisco Bay, a young girl shoots glitter across the room with a flick of her wrist. On the other side of the room, a boy is shooting darts from his wrist – some travelling at least 20ft high, onto a landing above. It feels like a superhero training center or a party for the next generation of X-Men and, in a way, it is.This is Superhero Cyborgs, an event that brings six children together with 3D design specialists and augmentation experts to create unique prosthetics that will turn each child into a kind of superhero. Continue reading...

Tim Cook sees some ‘interesting applications’ around VR, but Apple has already filed headset patents, hired a VR expert and funded 360-degree music videosApple is mulling its options for virtual reality, judging by comments made to analysts by its chief executive, Tim Cook, after his company’s latest financial results.Asked by one analyst whether virtual reality is “more of a geeky niche or something that could go mainstream”, Cook plumped for the latter scenario. “No, I don’t think it’s a niche,” he said. “It’s really cool and has some interesting applications.” Continue reading...

Central European News and its founder Michael Leidig claim that an article titled ‘The King of Bullsh*t News’ deliberately set out to damage the business