Technology | The Guardian

Monarch’s London home becomes first UK landmark in Google Expeditions Pioneer programme, offering 3D, fully immersive field trips to classrooms around the worldHundreds of thousands of schoolchildren around the world are to be “teleported” into Buckingham Palace as part of a virtual reality project with Google.The Queen’s London home is the first UK landmark to feature in the Google Expeditions Pioneer programme, an innovative virtual reality experience that brings 3D, fully immersive field trips right into the classroom.

Search company’s head of ideas sees short term wins against non-tech-savvy organisation, but says stifling group’s propaganda must not be neglectedGoogle’s head of ideas, tasked with building tools to fight oppression, has said that to stop Isis being able to publicise itself on the internet requires forcing Isis from the open web.During a talk with the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House, Jared Cohen said that it will not be possible to stop terrorists such as Isis from using Tor and the dark web. The key to stopping the terrorist group from propagating online is therefore to hound them from the traditional web – that which can be indexed by search engines. Continue reading...

Blackmailers using sex tapes to extort money from victims in Newtownabbey, Carrickfergus and Antrim, say policeA number of men in Northern Ireland who were filmed performing sex acts have been targeted by blackmailers.A spokesman for the Police Service of Northern Ireland said there had been several local reports of cyber-related blackmail relating to men in Newtownabbey, Carrickfergus and Antrim. Continue reading...

If your password appears on this list, you should probably change it right awayGood news! People are still astonishingly bad at picking secure passwords, and if you run your fingers across the top row of your keyboard, you will probably type seven of the 15 most-used passwords at once.When we say “good news”, we mean “good news for people who want to break into password-protected accounts”, of course. If you are one of the people with a bad password, that is very bad news indeed. Continue reading...

Jamal Edwards’ 10-year-old channel follows example of Vice by moving from youth lifestyle into mainstream news

Android users can browse Facebook app anonymously after Tor support addedUsers of Facebook’s Android app can now privately browse the world’s largest social network through the anonymity service Tor, the company said on Tuesday.

Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency one of 61 agencies seeking warrantless access to telecommunications informationThe government agency overseeing doctors, dentists and chiropractors has applied to regain warrantless access to Australians’ phone and web metadata to help it investigate whether medical practitioners are sleeping with their patients.The Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (Ahpra) is one of 61 agencies on a list released by the government who have applied to the attorney general, George Brandis, for ongoing access to be classed as enforcement agenciesto gain warrantless access to telecommunications data. Continue reading...

Microblogging site hit by global outage followed by intermittent access across all platformsA technical problem that affected access to Twitter for more than six hours has been resolved.The microblogging site posted an update on its status page that read: “The intermittent issue affecting some users between 00:40 to 06:50 PST (Pacific Standard Time) has now been resolved. The issue was related to an internal code change. We reverted the change, which fixed the issue. Thank you for your patience.” Continue reading...

Once worth £175m, the networking site has now closed. But what became of MySpace? When did we say goodbye to Ello? Not to mention Menshn …As with the fate of so many social networks, news of Friends Reunited’s closure was greeted with surprise that it had been continuing at all. Since its peak in 2005, when it was sold to ITV for £175m, the site’s key demographic – old people who wanted to snoop on the loves of their teenage years – had been in steady decline, cannibalised by Facebook stalking, LinkedIn lurking and a quick Google Image search.Like many of those teenage relationships, our online socialising platforms can make us think they are for ever. One day, we look back and wonder when or why it ended. So here’s a roundup of the flings and LTRs of our digital lives from the last decade or so, for a quick update on what they’re up to, whether they’ve gone bald yet, and if, just maybe, they still hold a candle for us … Continue reading...

French carmaker acts after admission that emissions filtering system did not work in all temperatures, but denies wrongdoingRenault has recalled more than 15,000 diesel cars after an admission that its emissions filtering system does not work in all temperatures.

Proposal from an activist shareholder would require Apple to adopt an ‘accelerated recruitment policy’ to increase diversity at senior levelsApple’s board has recommended against a shareholder motion that would commit it to increase the diversity of senior management and its board of directors.The motion, proposed by the Apple shareholder Antonio Avian Maldonado II, would require the board of directors to “adopt an accelerated recruitment policy” if it were voted in by a majority of shareholders. Continue reading...

Atlas robot assistant from Team IHMC has a way to go before it can perform tasks nearly as effectively as humans canRobotic humanoid butlers still have a way to go before you’ll be able to let them have free reign of the house, but Team IHMC from Florida and their multimillion dollar Google-developed US government Atlas robot are giving it a good try.

April event is centrepiece of £1.2m initiative to make London the world’s game development capitalThe mayor of London, Boris Johnson, is backing a new initiative to make London a leading creative hub in the global video games industry. Titled Games London, the project, backed with a £1.2m investment from the London Enterprise Panel, will include a two-week games festival taking place in venues around the city.Between 1-10 April, the first London Games Festival will include a consumer games exhibition at Somerset House, a series of talks at the British Film Institute and a London Games Fringe of smaller events. The festival is also set to feature two already established events: the popular indie games gathering, Rezzed, and the annual Bafta video game awards. Continue reading...

Social network has been suffering an ongoing outage across all platforms since 8:20am GMTTwitter was unavailable for users worldwide on Tuesday morning, with the site apparently suffering a total outage followed by serious access problems lasting over an hour.Access to the service began failing over the web, mobile and its API (application programming interface, the system that applications use to speak to the Twitter service) at 8:20am GMT, with error messages warning the network is both “over capacity” and suffering an “internal error”. By 10:00am, the majority of the service had returned to some semblance of normality, with the company’s image handling service and home timelines still suffering, but Twitter continued to sporadically fail throughout the day. Continue reading...

Political and business leaders gather at Swiss ski resort to discuss issues including robots, terrorism, migration and inequalityThe world’s political and business leaders, plus the usual smattering of celebrities – including Leonardo DiCaprio – are heading to Davos, the Swiss Alpine resort where the World Economic Forum’s annual conference begins on Tuesday evening. The ensuing four days of debate will focus on the following themes: Continue reading...

This autobiographical game explores the death of a boy and shows the possibilities of the medium of video gamesIt was once trendy for major game developers to talk about how they would one day make players cry. You don’t hear it so much now – partly because this sentiment resulted in a lot of pompously overwrought stuff like Heavy Rain, but partly there was a realisation that away from the mainstream industry, games have been doing it for years. Indie developers have always used games to explore real-life topics from a personal perspective, whether that’s a life-changing event, or just settling in a new town. That Dragon, Cancer is in this lineage but the experience, losing a child to terminal illness, is so painful even in the abstract, you may at first wonder who would choose to share it.While I was playing TDC, Barack Obama devoted a portion of his last State of the Union address to declaring war on cancer, a clarion call only slightly dampened by it being 45 years since the Nixon administration’s National Cancer Act promised the same. I say this not to jeer at a noble cause, but to show what an universal and intractable obsession the disease has become for our longer-lived societies. I still remember a careers teacher telling a class of bewildered teenagers that one-third of us would get cancer – he’d dropped the bomb about our parents “not being around forever” a few weeks previously. Continue reading...

Hackers can simulate a login dialogue so closely that even careful users might simply give them their username, password and even their two-factor keyA security researcher has released a tool that can steal the login details and two-factor authentication key for the popular LastPass password manager, leaving users potentially exposed.

Game let players fight Taliban gunmen who attacked Peshawar school in 2014 and was released as part of peace campaignA gory video game set inside the Pakistani school where more than 130 children were massacred by Taliban gunmen has been withdrawn, weeks after it was released as part of an army-backed campaign to promote peace and tolerance in the country.Players of Pakistan Army Retribution take the role of a soldier attempting to “protect precious lives from terrorists” who attacked the Army Public School (APS) in Peshawar in December 2014.

Taavet Hinrikus hopes to shake-up the money transfer market much as Skype disrupted the phone industryTaavet Hinrikus is a disruptor. As the first employee of the internet phone service Skype, he helped spark a revolution in the way people communicate with each other. Now, Hinrikus is aiming to transform the way people move cash around the world through TransferWise, an online money transmission service.The 34-year-old Estonian is plotting his latest revolution from the unglamorous location of Old Street in London, better known as the silicon roundabout hub where like-minded digital disruptors are based. Continue reading...

Polling also shows 16- to 25-year-olds in developed countries less confident in IT skills than those in emerging economiesYoung people in the UK and other developed nations are much more concerned about the level of their technological skills than their counterparts in emerging economies, a report suggests.The report also says that 40% of young people across all countries polled were concerned about their jobs being automated in the next decade. The proportion is highest in Britain, with 45% believing technology will imminently replace what they are doing. Continue reading...

Company acknowledges clock bug which causes meter to display wrong percentage charge when date and time settings alteredApple has admitted to a bug with its smartphone battery meter that could see the iPhone 6S or iPhone 6S Plus displaying a higher charge than the phone actually has.

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

More than 60 departments, councils and other agencies at all levels of government want their access to stored personal data backMore than 60 government agencies are seeking to regain warrantless access to Australians’ phone and web metadata, in what appears to be a major pushback after the federal government restricted the number of agencies that could access it.In 2015, the federal government succeeded in passing controversial news laws that vastly increased the amount of Australians’ personal phone and web data required to be held by telecommunications companies. Continue reading...

The actor’s analogue handset represented, to me, almost the last link to a better timeI’m sure everyone will always remember where they were last Monday when they heard that Eddie Redmayne’s analogue handset had died.I was in a traffic jam in the Seven Sisters Road, with my two daughters, nine and five, as the quizzical tones of the Today programme’s Nicholas Robinson broke the news. At his wife’s insistence, it appeared the actor Eddie Redmayne had finally abandoned his analogue handset in favour of a modern iPhone. Continue reading...

The Tivoli is attractive and dizzyingly good value, but has SsangYong done enough to make you fall for it?Price: £12,996

Renewable natural gas is a growing industry for fuel, electricity and heat, but advocates says it’s a largely untapped market in the USNo matter how you spin it, the business of raw sewage isn’t sexy. But in Colorado, the city of Grand Junction is making huge strides to reinvent their wastewater industry – and the result is like finding a diamond in the sludge.

How MyFitnessPal, Lose It, Noom Coach and HAPIcoach could help you towards healthier eating habits in 2016“Never mind the calories, it’s time to eat more turkey / pour more sherry / wolf another chocolate orange. I’ll eat healthily in January though … ”The traditional British approach to Christmas is well known, but now January has come and the festive treats have run out. And for many of us trying to get back to healthy habits, food-tracking apps are playing a role. Continue reading...

Forget debates about Britain’s nuclear deterrent. New technology means a country can be brought to its knees with the click of a mouseThe naval base at La Spezia in northern Italy is in an advanced state of decay. The grand Mussolini-era barracks are shuttered; the weeds won their battle with the concrete some time ago. But amid the crumbling masonry, there is an incongruously neat little building, shaded behind a line of flags, with smartly outfitted security men behind its glass doors. This is Nato’s Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE). As one battleship after another has been removed from what remains of the Italian navy, and the base is wound down, the centre is preparing for a new kind of marine warfare amid the wreckage of the old.In a line of workshops along the quay, technicians tinker at the innards of the next generation of naval weapons. They may look like large bright yellow torpedoes, but they are in fact underwater drones, capable of being remote controlled on the surface and taking autonomous actions in the deep. Several will be able to stay submerged for months, eventually for years, only surfacing to report an encounter with an enemy submarine. Continue reading...

The commission’s crackdown on multinational corporations extended to tech giant in investigation that revealed potentially illegal use of Ireland tax sheltersApple may owe $8bn in back taxes from its use of potentially illegal tax shelters in Ireland.The European commission’s recent ruling against tax breaks for multinational corporations in Belgium strongly suggests that the tech behemoth could be subject to a hefty bill when the open investigation against its activities in Ireland concludes. Continue reading...

Nine Entertainment joint venture ends as Mail Online’s global chief executive says 100% ownership is best business modelThe Daily Mail has ended its joint venture with Nine Entertainment and taken full control of its Australian news and entertainment website.The two companies, which described the decision as mutual, announced the joint venture in 2013 with the newsroom opening in Sydney on 1 January 2014. Continue reading...

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

Company says it is making progress towards offering all content universally, but viewers should be able to access only the library from their own countryNetflix has cracked down on people using proxy servers to get around regional restrictions on content, a move that is likely to affect thousands of Australians and users in other countries and prompt renewed calls for universal access.The television shows and movies offered by Netflix differ by territory because of licensing restrictions, which some members bypass with proxies, virtual private networks (VPNs) or “unblockers” that make it appear as though they are in a different country. Continue reading...

Tamara Fields, whose husband Lloyd died in 9 November 2015 attack, accused Twitter of letting Islamic State use its network to spread propagandaThe widow of an American killed in a shooting attack at a Jordanian police training center has sued Twitter, blaming the social media company for making it easier for Islamic State to spread its message.Tamara Fields, a Florida woman whose husband Lloyd died in the 9 November attack, accused Twitter of having knowingly let the militant Islamist group use its network to spread propaganda, raise money and attract recruits. She said the San Francisco-based company had until recently given Isis an “unfettered” ability to maintain official Twitter accounts. Continue reading...

Across the sector shares – including Apple, Alphabet, Twitter and Facebook – have tumbled and smaller companies such as GoPro have not recoveredAs 2016 ushers in one of the worst stock market routs in years, cracks in the tech sector have suddenly widened from mild to serious – and in some cases, potentially fatal. Shares of tech giants from Apple to Alphabet to Netflix took immediate hits when the market opened, and smaller companies like GoPro – down more than 24% in one day – have not recovered. Continue reading...

While privacy debates will be dominated by issues such as surveillance, we must also find ways to make people care enough about their personal data

The Pew research shows most citizens are willing to trade some amount of privacy for useful tech services – but not without some suspicionAmericans have walked a fine line on privacy in the internet age.Taking constant pictures with iPhones is considered normal, while wearing Google Glass creeps people out. Facebook’s data analysis is OK; the National Security Agency’s isn’t. Continue reading...

British vlogger catches on camera moment of self-balancing board’s explosion, showing just how volatile they can beA British vlogger has shown just how dangerous hoverboards can be, capturing on video a device exploding in flames on its first run.

Profound and sometimes exhausting, That Dragon, Cancer has much to say about fear and death. And it will speak to those who have experienced lossHuman beings do not effectively process tragedy. Much of what we do in life is automated. Our days are made up of mindless routines - both physical and emotional - processes that allows us to function without being constantly bombarded with decisions.

John runs Microsoft Windows 7 and Firefox, but pop-ups are driving him crazy – fortunately there are some free things he can do to make things clearMy question, tongue deep in cheek, is this: will I ever be able to buy a Windows system with no pop-up ads of any kind whatsoever? (What I call pop-ups may include other intrusive ads.) I’d be willing to pay extra! What I have is Windows 7 Ultimate with Firefox as my browser, and I am being driven crazy.Most likely I have add-ons of which I have lost track. I spend hours web surfing, which can, I suppose, lead to inadvertent nefarious acquisitions. Is there a catch-all list of my add-ons? JohnR.I was just going to say that there are no pop-up ads in Windows 7 – which is true unless you include the ones promoting Windows 10. Otherwise, ads and various pop-ups may come directly from websites or from “nefarious acquisitions”. These include “potentially unwanted programs” (PUPs) and the malware that sometimes infects browsers. Continue reading...

CyberSquirrel1 aims to show that it’s not hackers we should be afraid of – it’s squirrelsAcross the world blackouts are happening and power grids are being shut down. From Europe to America, and across Asia and Africa, we’re losing the cyberwar. But the enemy is not who you might think: it is squirrels.While we’re busy worrying about hackers and rogue states, squirrels scamper into electricity substations and chew through power cables. They’re the kamikaze troops in nature’s war against national infrastructure. Continue reading...

In the face of chaos on the streets of the Indonesian capital, citizens respond with solidarity, declaring: ‘We are not afraid’

The place to talk about games an other thing that matterIt’s Thursday! Continue reading...

There are currently more phone-holding monopods on the market than you can shake a stick at. But not all are created equally, so we put them to the testSelfie sticks are either the epitome of what is wrong with society or the best thing since camera phones, depending on your point of view. But as you start to use them, you realise that they aren’t all created equally, even if many of them are produced in the same factory in China.

Theresa May gives first hint costs may far exceed £240m estimate as it emerges even small-scale providers could be targetedCoffee shops running Wi-Fi networks may have to store internet data under new snooping laws, Theresa May has said.Small-scale networks such as those in cafes, libraries and universities could find themselves targeted under the legislation and forced to hand over customers’ confidential personal data tracking their web use. Continue reading...

US libraries are doing something even the most security-conscious private firm would never dream of: deleting sensitive information in order to protect users

Muhammad Khan’s name appeared on a US government list of people subject to economic sanctions, which saw him barred from signing up for Paragon

Autonomous ambulance that took its first untethered flight in Israel is capable of landing in spaces that helicopters can’t, and will be able to airlift two peopleA drone ambulance designed to airlift two people has taken autonomously to the air for the first time.

White House tech summit reportedly saw Apple’s CEO call for a ‘no backdoors’ policy when it comes to communications encryptionApple chief executive Tim Cook has challenged the US government to adopt a policy of “no backdoors” in its approach to the encryption technology used by his company and other technology firms.Cook made his comments at a recent meeting between US administration officials and technology companies including Facebook, Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Twitter, Dropbox and Cloudflare as well as Apple. Continue reading...

Dozens of listings on occupied Palestinian land on the accommodation bookings site raise questions about its legal position in profiting from the rentalsAirbnb is listing dozens of properties located in Jewish settlements on occupied Palestinian land as being inside the state of Israel, raising questions about the technology platform’s legal position in profiting from rentals on the land.The global accommodation bookings website boasts listings in over 190 countries, including Israel and the “Palestinian Territories”, as the West Bank and Gaza are described on the company’s website. But while a search for Airbnb properties in the Palestinian Territories turns up rentals in the Palestinian cities of Ramallah and Nablus, properties in settlements such as Efrat, Ma’ale Rehavam and Tekoa are listed as being in Israel. Continue reading...

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