Technology | The Guardian

Are electric cars really good enough to take four adults and a week’s worth of luggage from London to the Loire? Samuel Gibbs finds outThe alarm went off at 6am to kickstart our journey, and I was full of trepidation. Driving 706 km (439 miles) in a car with three other adults and enough luggage for a week’s holiday might already feel like a modern labour of Hercules for some, but this trip had an extra challenge: the car would be all electric.The chariot to take us from the south of London to the middle of France would be a Tesla Model S 90D. Fortunately, unlike most other electric cars, the Model S is not a small car, so fitting everyone and everything in wouldn’t be an issue. But a quoted range of just under 350 miles per charge, though one of the longest available, left me a little worried. Would we really get anything like that much milage, with a fully laden car, and at motorway speeds? Would there be enough chargers along the way? And after the fourth recharging stop, would my passengers mutiny? Continue reading...

Thiel acknowledged that he secretly bankrolled lawsuits against the gossip-tinged company and its journalists in order to put the publisher out of businessIt may be a post-ink age, but a Silicon Valley billionaire’s legal campaign against Gawker Media is about to offer a modern test of the old adage: never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.In a blog post Thursday, Gawker CEO Nick Denton warned PayPal cofounder and Facebook board member Peter Thiel that he will face consequences for trying to take down the gossip-tinged media company and challenged him to a public debate in person or online. Continue reading...

Two senators say it could expand nonjudicial subpoena to acquire email records, chat accounts, account login records, browser histories and social media usageTwo US senators have warned that a new bill would vastly expand the FBI’s warrantless access to Americans’ online records.

Dominance of Facebook and Google has seen print ads plummet and newspapers’ once-bright digital future recedeThe boss of the media firm Vice has predicted a “bloodbath” in the industry this year – and, judging by the investor panic that attended the Daily Mail’s latest results, Shane Smith may be right.Investors took fright at a 16% drop in print advertising revenues at the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday in the six months to the end of March, sending parent company DMGT’s share price tumbling by 13%. Continue reading...

Developers expected to welcome ruling that finds Google’s employment of Java code in its Android operating system was fair useGoogle has won a six-year court case brought by software firm Oracle, which claimed Google had infringed its copyright by using 11,500 lines of Java code in its Android operating system.The jury ruled that Google’s use of 37 Java APIs (application programming interfaces) was fair use. The news will be welcomed by developers, who typically rely on free access to APIs to develop third-party services. Continue reading...

Hugely popular on the PC version of Minecraft, multiplayer competitive games are coming to console, starting with a battle modeFor years, PC owners have been able to load up Minecraft, find a server and play a variety of mostly fan-made mini-games, set within the blocky confines of Mojang’s creative masterpiece. From competitive survival tests to giant hide n seek challenges, participants can compete with and against friends in online sessions. So far, the console versions of Minecraft have not supported this feature. Until now.In June, 4J Studios, the Dundee-based developer behind the Xbox, PlayStation and Wii U versions of the game, will launch a free update to the console editions of Minecraft featuring the first in what they plan to be a series of mini-games. They’re starting off with the simply named Battle, an eight-player deathmatch in the last survivor is the winner. Continue reading...

Government Accountability Office report details ‘museum-ready’ machines controlling nuclear force messaging system that are ‘obsolete’The US military’s nuclear arsenal is controlled by computers built in the 1970s that still use 8in floppy disks.A report into the state of the US government, released by congressional investigators, has revealed that the country is spending around $60bn (£40.8bn) to maintain museum-ready computers, which many do not even know how to operate any more, as their creators retire. Continue reading...

Inspiration drawn from titles as diverse as Doom and Hearthstone drive the developer, according to senior game designer Michael ChuOverwatch, the new team-based first-person shooter from World of Warcraft developer Blizzard, has been out for less than 48 hours, but it’s already fairly clear that the game is a hit.Its short, open beta, which concluded two weeks ago, was popular enough to spark a meme in the intervening period detailing all the things players were doing now they couldn’t play the game (sample post: the person who drew all the Overwatch heroes as if they were bowls of lukewarm water). Then, on release day, the Overwatch subreddit briefly drew more traffic than the front page of Reddit itself, seemingly a result of users hammering refresh to find out when the servers were turned on.

Storing voice recordings of people younger than 13 via Alexa, Google Home and Siri appears to flout the Children’s Online Privacy Protection ActIn a promotional video for Amazon’s Echo virtual assistant device, a young girl no older than 12 asks excitedly: “Is it for me?”. The voice-controlled speaker can search the web for information, answer questions and even tell kids’ jokes. “It’s for everyone,” enthuses her on-screen dad.Except that it isn’t. An investigation by the Guardian has found that despite Amazon marketing the Echo to families with young children, the device is likely to contravene the US Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), set up to regulate the collection and use of personal information from anyone younger than 13. Continue reading...

The majority of the questions sent to Ask Jack are about Windows 10. Here are 10 recent ones, plus a bonus: how to stop or block the upgradeHow much data do I need to download to install Windows 10? Brian Continue reading...

Billionaire venture capitalist, outed as gay by online news site in 2007, provided $10m to support wrestler’s case over sex tapePeter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, has admitted that he is the secret funder of Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against online news site Gawker.Hogan, whose real name is Terry Bollea, sued for invasion of privacy after Gawker published an excerpt of a leaked sex tape in 2012. In March this year, a Florida jury awarded Bollea $140m (£95.1m) in damages against the media organisation. Continue reading...

From Thursday 12pm BST we will be hosting a panel discussion at the Continue conference about the untapped value of games to the cultural establishment

Alyssa Azar, the youngest Australian to summit world’s tallest mountain, took three goes to tell her father the newsIf there is one phone call you do not want to miss, it is the one your daughter makes standing on top of the tallest mountain in the world.But that is what happened to Glenn Azar when his “baby”, Alyssa, made it to the summit of Mount Everest on Saturday. Continue reading...

Labour’s Yvette Cooper is at forefront of cross-party campaign aiming to tackle the growing menace of online abuseLabour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat politicians will come together to call for a national campaign to defeat online misogyny as research reveals the scale of abuse aimed at women on social media.Yvette Cooper is joining forces with the former Tory minister Maria Miller, former Lib Dem MP Jo Swinson and Labour’s Jess Phillips to launch an online public consultation in an attempt to create a national conversation about tackling the growing scale of online abuse. Continue reading...

Volvo is testing driverless lorries to work underground and Google has autonomous cars on the road – but what does it mean for the future of motoring?From self-driving cars to robot lorries, autonomous vehicles are the future of road transportation. But who’s in pole position, who’s stuck in the pit lane and how far away is the starting grid? Continue reading...

Dark Souls meets tilt shift photography in the latest project from respected Toronto developer Capybara Games – and it’s a big deal for Microsoft’s consoleIn the early 1980s, two computer science students Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman released a program on to the University of California’s Unix mainframe that would eventually inspire the most important genre in independent video game development. Named Rogue: Exploring the Dungeons of Doom, Toy and Wichman’s project was a fantasy adventure, in which players crept through a series of visually sparse underground locations, battling monsters and collecting loot. The unique aspect was that these dungeons were procedurally generated, meaning that every time the player loaded up the program, the layout was different. It was like playing a new game every time.Over three decades later and the roguelike genre has become a staple of the indie scene. The basic elements – exploration, looting, procedurally generated environments and the concept of permadeath (ie no lives: once you’re dead, the game is over) – can be found informing hundreds of titles, from Spelunky to Nuclear Throne to Don’t Starve. Continue reading...

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

The cuts, which will mainly fall in Finland, mark the end of the US company’s attempt to take on Apple and SamsungMicrosoft is cutting up to 1,850 jobs in its smartphone business just two years after it bought handset maker Nokia in an ill-fated attempt to take on market leaders Apple and Samsung.

The man reportedly bankrolling Hulk Hogan’s sex-tape lawsuit against Gawker knows the importance of secrets – and what happens when they’re exposedBillionaire Silicon Valley investor, Donald Trump delegate and Facebook board member Peter Thiel has made secrecy his brand. So when it emerged that Thiel appeared to be bankrolling former wrestler Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker, many people were surprised.Yet by publicly outing him as gay in 2007, Gawker founder Nick Denton shattered the privacy of Thiel’s fiercely guarded personal life and techno-libertarian vision. And Thiel, it turns out, can hold a grudge. Continue reading...

I read Michele Hanson’s article (G2, 24 May) with a wry smile, having spent time earlier modifying a friend’s computer to prevent it updating to Windows 10, as the same thing had nearly happened to me last month.What happens is that Microsoft installs a Trojan horse update along with all the normal ones. Sometime later this malware initiates an upgrade to Windows 10 without asking permission, and no method of cancellation without turning the computer off. Continue reading...

Latest racing title’s eSports mode could lead to successful drivers receiving a real-life licence. How easy will it be for gamer drivers to transfer to the track?Two seemingly contradictory pieces of information came out of Sony’s recent unveiling of Gran Turismo Sport at a lavish event in London. First, this definitely isn’t Gran Turismo 7. In a similar vein to the ‘offshoot’ Prologue series it’s an update, adding new vehicles and tracks to a framework that is, essentially, 2013’s Gran Turismo 6. However, one key addition – the new Sport Mode – could well make this the most important Gran Turismo title so far.At its most basic, Sports Mode is an eSports competition that offers drivers two competitive possibilities: a Nations Cup, in which top players advance through regional finals and on to the world championship; and a Manufacturer Fan Cup, with teams formed by the top driver from each of the three participating continents entering a final 24-hour race. Continue reading...

It used to be Instagram posts of glamorous parties and beach selfies. Now it’s Netflix and bragging about your chilled weekendSocial media is often called out as an outlet for bragging. Or its spin-off, the #humblebrag. We hear all the time about how the pressure to keep up with the shiny, happy people we see on Facebook is making our mental health suffer.It can seem that everyone else’s existence is all #marbs, postcoital selfies, and smug invitation acceptances. Except for my Instagram feed, which is literally just pictures of Hampstead Heath. Continue reading...

Is Android just not good enough for the 15-year Google veteran, or is the one-time search company CEO just keeping tabs on the competition?Despite having been the chief executive of Google for 10 years where he oversaw the launch of Android, and now the executive chairman of Google’s holding company Alphabet, Eric Schmidt uses an iPhone.

In this podcast originally published in April 2012, Aleks Krotoski explores the tension between online identity and anonymity in an interview with Chris Poole

Company unveils new factory in Germany that will use machines to make shoes instead of humans in AsiaAdidas, the German maker of sportswear and equipment, has announced it will start marketing its first series of shoes manufactured by robots in Germany from 2017.

The billionaire investor, who has a difficult history with the site’s tech branch, is paying the legal bills for the ex-wrestler in his sex-tape lawsuit, Forbes reportsBillionaire Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel is secretly funding lawsuits to financially ruin journalist Nick Denton and his media empire Gawker, according to a new report from Forbes.Thiel – who co-founded PayPal, was an early investor in Facebook and has an estimated wealth of $2.7bn – is allegedly paying the legal bills for former wrestler Hulk Hogan’s fight against Gawker. Hogan, who sued Gawker for posting a clip from a sex tape, was recently awarded $115m, a decision Denton is appealing.

Magistrates investigating tax payments reveal tech giant is being investigated for aggravated financial fraud and organised money launderingFrench investigators have raided Google’s Paris headquarters, saying the company is now under investigation for aggravated financial fraud and organised money laundering.In a major escalation of France’s long-running enquiry into Google’s tax affairs, magistrates revealed on Tuesday that the software giant is suspected of evading taxes by failing to declare the full extent of its activities in the country.

A free school for low-income students set to open this fall in Silicon Valley with Priscilla Chan as CEO can’t get permits to start buildingA new school funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, is facing delays in construction due to a water crisis in East Palo Alto, a Silicon Valley city that has struggled with poverty amid the region’s tech boom.The Primary School, a private school for low-income students scheduled to open this fall with Chan as CEO, cannot currently get permits to build its facilities due to a major local water shortage that is creating obstacles for numerous development projects in East Palo Alto, according to city officials. Continue reading...

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

Internal report finds ‘virtually identical’ rates of conservative and liberal topics, but guidelines updated to ‘exclude possibility of improper actions’Facebook has denied allegations that the team responsible for its trending topics section deliberately suppressed conservative views – but says it will improve the feature.Allegations have been made anonymously that the team responsible for choosing trending topics did so with little oversight and deliberately suppressed conservative views. Continue reading...

Facebook has apologized for wrongly banning a photo of plus-sized model Tess Holliday for violating its ‘health and fitness’ advertising policyFacebook has apologized for banning a photo of a plus-sized model and telling the feminist group that posted the image that it depicts “body parts in an undesirable manner”.Related: The ‘perfect body’ is a lie. I believed it for a long time and let it shrink my life Continue reading...

Smaller, independent app fights back by asking users to tweet pictures of their socks with #TinderSuckMySocksTwo’s company but three’s a crowd according to dating app Tinder, which has launched a legal bid to kill off a rival app aimed at people looking for threesomes.Related: Tinder launches group dating feature – and exposes you to Facebook friends Continue reading...

For those of us whose range of experience runs beyond brides, haircuts and dancing Playboy bunnies, a list of alternative female emoticonsWhen it comes to women and emojis, it can feel a bit like the 1950s got trapped in your keyboard. The “femoji” are all girly girls; they get their nails done , get haircuts , get married , and dress up as dancing Playboy bunnies .. Meanwhile “menmoji” are policemen , construction workers and cyclists ..There have been many suggestions as to how best to change the emoji-optics. Michelle Obama tweeted that she’d like to see an emoji of a girl studying. Always and Bodyform, the feminine hygiene companies, have both launched campaigns to introduce less stereotypical emoji. In Bodyform’s case these revolve around periods and include an angry-PMS-face emoji, which isn’t stereotypical at all. Continue reading...

Google has quietly become an important force in PC sales, according to latest figuresMore Google Chromebooks are sold in the US than Apple Macs, according to the latest figures from analyst firm IDC.While few think of the company, famous more for its mobile and internet software, as a major creator of PC operating systems, the slimmed-down Chrome OS has powered almost 2m laptops sold to Americans in the first quarter of 2016, IDC told the Verge. Continue reading...

Once, people like Sam Lee would have aspired to work in music journalism or radio. Now they’re curating playlists for services like Deezer“One of our most popular playlists is Sad Songs For Crying. That is a bit worrying, actually, now I think about it.”Sam Lee is one of an emerging breed of music tastemakers. He doesn’t work for a magazine or music blog, nor does he work for a radio station. Instead, he’s the UK and Ireland editor at music-streaming service Deezer. Continue reading...

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

Monsters battle teens who have gods on their side, a North Korean US dystopia is uninspired, and Enter the Gungeon goes great gunsPS Vita, Acttil, cert: 12 Continue reading...

Fewer than half of consumer payments were cash in 2015, while direct debits were worth £1.22tnBritain has passed another milestone on the path to a cashless society, with 2015 the first year that cash was used for fewer than half of all payments by consumers.Cash usage will be eclipsed by debit cards and contactless payments by 2021, according to Payments UK, which represents the major banks, building societies and payment providers. Continue reading...

There are plenty of great social apps jostling to be the next smartphone hit. Here are some of the contendersThe most popular social apps – Facebook and WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram, as well as Twitter and Snapchat – have hundreds of millions of people using them. They’re not in any immediate danger of being dislodged from your home screen. That hasn’t stopped startups from trying, though. There are hundreds releasing new social apps all hoping to be the next big smartphone hit. Most fail, some get bought by bigger fish as they start to grow, but many have some inventive ideas along the way about what the next social networking trends will be. Here are some of the social apps making waves in 2016. Continue reading...

From Lacroix’s hi-tech racer to Pininfarina’s take on an old-school steely, the LikeBike show in Monaco is all about gallery-grade cyclesLast summer masked men smashed through the plate glass of a boutique on Regent Street and made off with a £25,000 haul. Nothing unusual in that, except for one thing: their targets were the latest, finger-light bikes from cult brand Pinarello.Bicycles today are more desirable and more collectable than ever before. They have become highly fetishised objects which manage to be both machines and works of art at the same time. Those interested in these “hyper” bikes would do well to head to Monaco for what is being billed as the “most glamorous bike show on earth”. Held in the Grimaldi Forum overlooking the Mediterranean, LikeBike will be a showcase for cyclophilia and excess, with everything from diamanté-encrusted carbon frames to bikes made of 50 layers of compressed ash. Be sure to wear your smartest Lycra… Continue reading...

Despite renewed efforts to clean up the market for tickets in major events, it remains easy to purchase tools that defeat vendors’ security measuresSoftware that helps touts bypass the security systems of major ticketing companies and scoop up tickets at the expense of fans is easily available online – and even comes with YouTube videos to explain how to use it.Scrutiny of ticketing firms and touts has reached fever pitch ahead of a government-backed report into the industry due to be published this week. Continue reading...

The problems of storing and carrying energy for our gadgets and homes are proving difficult to solve. But a breakthrough is sorely neededFrom the phones in our pockets to the cars on our roads, almost everything with an electrical circuit needs a battery. But while the rest of the technology industry has made great leaps over the past couple of decades, batteries have not.The shortcomings of batteries are now one of the biggest bottlenecks in transport, energy, infrastructure and more. Our power demands are ever-increasing, but our ability to carry or store power is limited. Smartphones barely last a day, electric vehicles have much shorter ranges than petrol or diesel cars, and storing energy from sources such as solar panels is difficult. Continue reading...

Scotland Yard figures reveal scale of violence on capital’s roads and prompt fresh spat between rivalsA surge has been recorded in violent crimes against London taxi drivers, prompting a fresh spat between Uber and black cabs over who is to blame.New figures from Scotland Yard reveal that violent offences against taxi drivers have risen by more than two-thirds, from 856 in 2014 to 1,403 last year. Black-cab drivers have blamed Uber for the increase, alleging that “poor English” and the inadequate street knowledge of drivers working for the taxi-hailing app company have generated so much frustration among passengers that it has led to violence. Continue reading...

The driver’s seat is wide enough for two, and three stone cold enemies could sit in the middle row without compromising their implacable distanceThe Citroën Grand C4 is certainly large – the dash was so wide and deep that I couldn’t reach the front of it; and the windscreen is gigantic, which, along with the glass roof, made the roads feel American. Don’t ask me how that works, I just felt several times as if I were in Wyoming.The driver’s seat is wide enough for two, though it’s arguable how useful that is, and three stone-cold enemies could sit in the middle row without compromising their implacable distance. The third row is a bit more intimate, and luggage would have to get on extremely well. But you wouldn’t want this car to be any larger, particularly if you park like an idiot at the best of times, which by the ancient laws of the universe of cars, people who need seven seats always do. Continue reading...

Standard words won’t protect you from determined hackers. But you can make your online accounts safe in just a few easy stepsOnly idiots, we know, use “password” as their password. Or “123456”. Or “football” (the seventh most common password in the world). Maybe you carefully add an upper case letter, an unusual character or two, plus a few numbers to your Pa$swOrd.But with hackers using “brute force” software to make as many as 8m password guesses a second, don’t kid yourself you are safe. This week LinkedIn told users to reset their accounts after more than 100m passwords appeared for sale online. Continue reading...

As fallout continues over raids on Labor party, Mitch Fifield appears to contradict AFP commissioner on whether government was aware of inquiryThe communications minister, Mitch Fifield, has confirmed he knew the Australian Federal Police were investigating leaks from within NBN Co but said he did not tell the prime minister.Fifield said on Saturday he had no interaction with the AFP regarding the investigation, including over Thursday’s night’s raids on properties linked to Senator Stephen Conroy and the Labor staffer Andrew Byrne. Continue reading...

Device helps doctors accurately measure patient’s drinking history, and not just depend on most recent testsA San Francisco-based company has won a US government-sponsored competition with an alcohol monitoring devices that can be worn on the wrist, the latest milestone in the development of wearable technologies that monitor and diagnose medical conditions.BACtrack, a privately held medical device maker, took the $200,000 top prize in the National Institutes of Health Wearable Biosensor Challenge with its wristband monitor – dubbed BACtrack Skyn – which measures blood alcohol levels via sweat on the skin. Continue reading...

While technology has undoubtedly improved our lives, history shows we need rules and regulations to ensure workers can share in the gig economy’s wealthAcross the country, new companies are using the internet to transform the way Americans work, shop, socialize, vacation, look for love, talk to the doctor, get around, and track down a 10ft feather boa – which was my latest Amazon search.These innovations have improved our lives in countless ways, reducing inefficiencies and leveraging network effects to help grow our economy. This is real growth. Continue reading...

Google’s path to developing machine-learning tools illustrates the stark challenge that tech companies face in trying to make machines act like humansMachines may yet take over the world, but first they must learn to recognize your dog.To hear Google executives tell it at their annual developer conference this week, the technology industry is on the cusp of an artificial intelligence, or AI, revolution. Computers, without guidance, will be able to spot disease, engage humans in conversation and creatively outsmart world champions in competition. Such breakthroughs in machine learning have been the stuff of science fiction since Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey.