Technology | The Guardian

iPhone game live with Android to follow as creators target existing fans and new mobile audiencesCard game Exploding Kittens remains one of the most popular projects of all-time on crowdfunding site Kickstarter, having attracted 219,382 backers and $8.8m (£6.2m) of pledges in early 2015.Now the game’s creators are targeting a new, digital audience with the release of an Exploding Kittens iPhone app, with an Android version to follow. Continue reading...

MPs, television pundits and young Israelis say new app will encourage online bullyingA new Israeli mobile app heralded as the “next big messaging application” is coming under fire amid allegations that it will encourage online bullying and sexual harassment.Blindspot works by accessing a user’s contacts, allowing them to send text messages, videos, or photos to anyone without the receiver knowing who the message came from. To read the message, a recipient needs to download Blindspot, but would not know who sent it. It has been developed by a company with a number of celebrity investors, including the singers Nicki Minaj and will.i.am and the Chelsea football club owner Roman Abramovich.

Packed with sensors, comfortable to wear without being sweaty while providing interesting insights into your sleep, exercise and healthMicrosoft’s second attempt at making a fitness tracker is a lot more comfortable and attractive than its first, packed with sensors and relatively easy to live with.

Facebook Sports Stadium will be competing with Twitter in providing live updates, statistics and fan posts for its ‘650 million sports fans’Facebook is tackling the sports arena with a new platform called Facebook Sports Stadium, which the social media site said will provide real-time updates on games, popular posts from fans, statistics and commentary from experts.

Two months after opening its own shop, small independents in Seattle are feeling the pinch from the online behemothA 116-year-old independent bookstore in Seattle is feeling the threat from Amazon. But this time the risk comes not from the online behemoth – but the physical bookstore that the company opened just two months ago.Amazon Books, a brick and mortar shop in an upscale mall in Seattle, is a looming presence to the remaining independents that Amazon.com has yet to take down. Continue reading...

Company promises to add new protections agains malware and bots in 2016Google banned almost 800m “bad” adverts from its online ad networks last year as the web giant continued to crack down on advertising fraud.The figure of 780m was an almost 50% increase on 2014. Google also said that this year would see a major focus on stepping up efforts to fight back against bots – software applications that mimic the behaviour of internet users. Continue reading...

Berkeley researchers will get unprecedented access to data from both companies and riders to analyze if on-demand ride services are climate friends or foesAre on-demand ride services like Uber and Lyft good or bad for the environment? It’s an increasingly urgent question as the services proliferate, but the answer is currently unclear .The companies have held their data close and are only now beginning to share, making it hard to assess critical questions like how people would have gotten to their destinations if Uber and Lyft did not exist. Continue reading...

Federal safety commission investigating explosions warns self-balancing board users to ‘gear up’, keep off roads and keep fire equipment nearbyThe US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CSPC) has warned hoverboard owners to have a fire extinguisher nearby while charging or using the self-balancing devices, after launching an investigation into a series of explosions.

From making your browser do a ‘barrel roll’ to playing a quick game of Breakout with your search results, Google’s full of quirky little easter eggsGoogle’s easter eggs – funny little images, programs or widgets – are legendary, but many of them lie dormant, just waiting for users to type the magic words into the search box.

The co-creator of id software’s legendary first-person shooter has revisited his masterpiece 20 years later. We ask him whyOn its release in 1993, Doom exploded onto the video game scene like nothing before or since. It wasn’t just faster, smoother and sexier than any other shooter around at the time, it introduced game design principles that can still be seen in hundreds of titles to this day. Admired by players and demonised by moral campaigners, it’s one of the most important video games ever made. And now, over 20 years later, co-creator John Romero has gone back to hell.The news came, as it usually does these days, via Twitter. On 15 January, Romero casually announced that he had created a new level for the original game – having not been involved with the series since his resignation from id software in 1996. To the delight of fans, the zip file came complete with a readme document, which contains the wry statement: “Other Files By Author: doom1.wad, doom2.wad.” The level can be played in a browser, but for a much smoother experience it should be experienced via the original game (instructions at the bottom of this article). The map is entitled Tech Gone Bad, and in the description Romero writes it is “my boss level replacement for e1m8 ... 22 years later.” Continue reading...

Linda’s old Windows XP system died, and she’d like to retrieve the data from the hard drive and transfer it to her new MacI have read with interest your article regarding the disposal of old PCs. I have a defunct Dell running Windows XP, which crashed out before I had a chance to retrieve any data. I am now wondering about safe disposal of the old PC and whether or not I can transfer any data to my Mac. I am not a technophile and this may be a silly question, but can you tell me where the hard drive is located? How can I access it, and should I keep this in a safe place even if I can no longer use it? LindaI wrote a comprehensive answer to How can I safely recycle my old PCs? almost a year ago, but it’s still a question that comes up often. For example, Kris has just asked a similar question, saying: “I seriously do not even know where a hard drive is located, let alone how to remove it.” The motherboard in Janice’s PC has failed so she wants to know if she can get access to her data, and wonders if “the only option is to take a sledge hammer to the hard drive and commit it to landfill”. And so on. Continue reading...

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

Twitter’s shares have risen on rumours that it is becoming viewed as an acquisition target, as unconfirmed chatter about News Corp interest circulatedRupert Murdoch’s News Corp said rumors about the company’s interest in buying microblogging site Twitter or building a stake in it were untrue.

Meaningful collaboration between people and machines must not subvert human creativity, feeling and questioning over speed, profit and efficiency

Judge says traditional cabs are ‘devoid of inherent distinctive character’, in legal row involving new eco-friendly taxi groupA high court judge has ruled that one of London’s most famous sights, the black cab, is not that unique after all, concluding that they are “devoid of inherent distinctive character”.

Our relationships are mediated by technology, surveilled by governments, with no guarantee our intimate words of digital love are privateIn John Cheever’s book The Enormous Radio, a couple purchase a radio after their old one stops working. What first sounds like static between stations turns out to be their apartment’s doorbells and lift shafts and, it transpires, the new radio can be tuned into the conversations of other tenants in the building.With a growing obsession, housewife Irene Westcott begins to spend her days listening to other people’s lives. She wakes up at night to sneak into the living room, to turn dials “flooded with a malevolent green light”.

Data shows average contribution from an AOL address is $159, compared to $31 from a Gmail address, as campaigns depend heavily on email fundraisingYou’ve got donations! Having an AOL email address might make you look about as cool as leg warmers but as far as the political class is concerned, you’re the hippest kid on the block.Data from email marketing firm Fluent has revealed the average contribution to a political campaign by email domain name, and while a donation-friendly user with a Gmail address will net a candidate an average of $31, the average donation from an AOL address is a full $159. Continue reading...

Analytics firm App Annie outlines the big trends in the Android and iOS world, as Apple and Google continue to do battleApple started 2016 with the boast that its App Store customers had spent more than $1.1bn on apps and in-app purchases over the Christmas period, including $144m on New Year’s Day alone.But there is more to the apps world than just Apple. Analytics firm App Annie spends its time crunching data from Apple and Google’s respective app stores, and its new 2015 Retrospective report sheds light on some key trends. Continue reading...

After hearing about the most recent one, Fridge cam, we thought we’d add names to the list so you know never to download any of themThere are a lot of apps available for your phones. Some of them are fun and perform an important service, like Instagram and Snapchat and that one with the candy. But many, if not most, are useless. And rubbish. And terrible. After hearing about the most recent one, Fridge cam, we thought we’d add names to the list so you know never to download any of them. Continue reading...

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...