Technology | The Guardian

With Fallout 4, Call of Duty: Black Ops III and Star Wars Battlefront drawing lukewarm reactions, what is the critic’s role in the age of patches and updates?Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.”

The search firm is fixing the issues which led to rivals being hidden in the results, it saysGoogle has claimed that a change to its search rankings that pushed rivals TripAdvisor and Yelp far down the search results is due to a bug, which it is working to fix.Over the weekend, executives from the two companies complained on Twitter that a search for locations prioritised Google’s own local search – even when the query explicitly mentioned a rival company. Continue reading...

Daily Mail & General Trust reports decline in print advertising of 12% in second half of financial year as online operation’s annual growth slows to 16%Mail Online has missed its target of making £80m in revenue this year as annual digital advertising growth slowed by more than half and profits at the Mail’s combined print and digital operation rose by 12%.Mail Online reported £73m in revenues for the year to the end of September, reporting an annual underlying growth rate of 16%, down on the 41% reported in parent company Daily Mail & General Trust’s full year results last year. Continue reading...

Metropolitan police say 18-year-old taken into custody after raid on south Wales property as part of investigation into October data breachA fifth person has been arrested as part of an investigation into the cyber-attack on telecoms firm TalkTalk in October, the Metropolitan police have said. The 18-year-old was taken into custody after police raided a property in Llanelli, south Wales, on Tuesday and was held at the Dyfed Powys police station on suspicion of blackmail.Four others have been arrested during the investigation: two 16-year-old boys, a 20-year-old man, and a 15-year-old boy from Northern Ireland who was released on Monday. It was the third in a spate of similar attacks affecting TalkTalk within eight months, with incidents in August and February resulting in customers’ data being stolen. Continue reading...

Ed Miliband and Gordon Brown pull rank on Labour party leader in search results, and even John Major makes a comebackWhat happens when you look up “Labour leader” on Google? A flurry of muddled entries on a host of former party chiefs – with wrong pictures to boot – but not much on Jeremy Corbyn.Users discovered little sign of the incumbent leader when they asked the world’s biggest search engine who he was. Continue reading...

Amazon and Blue Origin boss Jeff Bezos has beaten Tesla and SpaceX’s Elon Musk to the first space rocket landing saying it ‘can look easy’Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and head of space privateer firm Blue Origin, has taken to Twitter to brag about the “rarest of beasts”, a reusable space rocket that can land vertically. (Unsaid: unlike Elon Musk’s many exploding SpaceX rockets.)After the many “almost” tweets from Musk, as his rocket very nearly landed before actually exploding or, as he put it, suffered “rapid unscheduled disassembly”, Bezos showed he is no longer playing catchup in the tech billionaire space rocket race as his New Shepard touched down. Continue reading...

Taxi firm launches investigation after Barber tweeted that a ‘sharia Uber driver’ told her she should not be out late at nightUber is investigating allegations made by the actor Frances Barber, who claimed one of its drivers made disparaging remarks about her attire and said she should not be out late at night.The actor, who has starred in BBC dramas including Doctor Who and Silk, had reportedly ordered the taxi to take her home after the London Evening Standard theatre awards at the Old Vic theatre in London. Continue reading...

A Superfish-style security certificate left users open to being hacked by attackers posing as legitimate organisationsDell has apologised to customers for deliberately shipping new computers with an inherently insecure support tool and has provided a removal tool to fix affected machines.Recently-produced Dell machines were shipped with a security certificate which makes it easy for an attacker to perform a man-in-the-middle attack and potentially steal personal information, even over an encrypted connection. Continue reading...

The place to talk about games and other things that matterTuesday. I’ve got a cold. Continue reading...

A teenager from the US, Lucas Etter, breaks the world record for the completion of a traditional Rubik’s Cube at an event in Clarksville, Maryland, on Sunday, finishing the puzzle in an amazing 4.9 seconds. The feat is the first time the 5 second threshold has been broken with the previous record standing at 5.25 seconds. Etter, 14, is a “speedcuber” - that is, someone who completes Rubik’s Cubes competitively

Apple’s new smart TV box has some some very good bits and puts iTunes, Siri and the App Store on your television – but it feels unfinishedThe new Apple TV promises to revolutionise your television-viewing experience with apps, iTunes and Siri, but feels very much like a half-baked first-generation product, not a fourth-generation one.

World Cube Association confirms speedcuber Lucas Etter, 14, has beaten previous 3x3 record, with reported time of just 4.9 secondsA 14-year-old boy has solved a Rubik’s cube in under five seconds, beating the previous world record time by 0.35 seconds.Lucas Etter was taking part in the River Hill Fall competition in Clarksville, Maryland, on Saturday when he managed to unmix the 3x3 cube in just 4.9 seconds. Continue reading...

Des Browne says there can be no guarantee that UK will have a reliable nuclear deterrent unless it can be wholly protected from cyber-attacksBritain’s Trident nuclear weapons system may turn out to be obsolete unless David Cameron can offer assurances that it is wholly protected from cyber-attacks by a hostile state, the former defence secretary Des Browne has said.As Cameron put the replacement of Trident at the heart of the defence review, Browne told the Guardian there could be no guarantee of a reliable deterrent without an “end-to-end” assessment of the cyber-threat to the system. Continue reading...

As the cryptocurrency loses favour, it looks like some companies may be rewriting history to explain away their namesWe’ve all been there: sometimes you start a company, run it successfully for a few years, and then realise you hitched your horse to a slowly dying technology and there’s nothing you can do about it.So spare a thought for the companies scrabbling to jump off the bitcoin ship before it sinks. The currency’s value has been static for months (except for a brief boom and bust in early November when it was caught up in a Chinese ponzi scheme), but perhaps more damningly still, the hype has all but disappeared. Continue reading...

Ed Catmull, who launched the animation company with Jobs, has criticised Danny Boyle’s Oscar-tipped dramaPixar president Ed Catmull has said that Steve Jobs would be “appalled” with Danny Boyle’s biopic.Related: Michael Fassbender on playing Steve Jobs: 'Was he flawed? Yeah! We all are' Continue reading...

Bethesda’s epic post-apocalyptic adventure has enraptured millions – but some of its systems are not as clear as they could be. Here are some survival tips“We will all go together when we go,” sang the satirist Tom Lehrer of the nuclear arms race. “What a comforting fact that is to know.” But how wrong he was: Bethesda’s Fallout 4 gives us a post-apocalypse jam packed with survivors, mutations, and all sorts of opportunities for the entrepreneurial survivor.Much of the appeal of a Bethesda game lies in creating your own adventure in the enormous spaces they provide, but Fallout 4’s many depths are poorly served by the tutorials – even central mechanics are explained with cursory text windows, soon forgotten, or sometimes never touched on at all. Continue reading...

London office of site to be run by Sarah Raphael, previously acting editor of i-DRefinery29, the US-based lifestyle site targeting millennial women, launched a UK site backed by an editorial team of 11, the first stage of a major international expansion.

Video site will defend strong examples of fair use against copyright claims, saying creators can be ‘intimidated’ by the effort required to defend their rightsYouTube will go to court to defend film-makers wrongly accused of copyright infringement, the site has announced.It will now offer legal support to “a handful of videos” which Google (YouTube’s parent company) believes represent “clear fair uses”. It will also feature them in a special section of the site dedicated to showcasing strong examples of fair use. Continue reading...

The spy agency’s use of stencil graffiti recruitment adverts in trendy east London reveals their struggle against not just bad guys, but cooler employersDavid Cameron’s response to the Paris attacks was swift. At the G20 summit in Turkey he previewed the forthcoming defence and security review, which will promise to recruit 1,900 more intelligence officers for MI5, MI6 and GCHQ. Easier said than done, however. Because these days hiring spies is maybe the hardest part of spying.

Activision sticks to a winning formula, while Nintendo serves a fault on the court but shows sartorial brilliance in the shops(PS3, PS4, Xbox One, Xbox 360, PC, Activision, cert: 18)

Tablet use is also on the rise with half the country’s population expected to own one before New Year as density of mobile devices hit an all time high

State government moves to revolutionise regulation of the taxi industry by introducing licence fee for Uber driversUber is set to be legalised in NSW.Changes to the taxi industry were to be formally announced by the state government on Monday, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph reported. Continue reading...

It runs on hydrogen and emits nothing but a dribble of water. Could Hyundai’s ix35 Fuel Cell be the car of the future?Price: £53,105

Nothing beats cruising round town in a BMW – but now you can do it on two wheelsPeugeot, Skoda, Rover… there are lots of car manufacturers which first made their name as bike builders. But here is one going the other way. BMW’s Cruise bike is a distinctive update of the original Californian cruisers which launched the mountain bike craze back in the 80s.It’s all sleek lines and minimal detailing: the white paint job and blue rims are very Beemer in their aesthetic. The only other hint of its provenance is a discreet BMW badge lurking on the head lug. It has 30 slick Shimano gears, hardcore disc brakes and chunky tyres to ward off glass shards outside pubs. Continue reading...

The company’s hi-tech TV viewing system is a necessary riposte to burgeoning rivals in a complex multiscreen worldWhen Sky launched its pay-TV platform in the UK, it was the outsider in the broadcast industry. But now it is part of the media establishment, and last week’s launch of its new set-top box was the first move in its fight against a new breed of rivals. Sky Q is its response to the gauntlet Apple threw down in September. Launching a revamped version of the company’s Apple TV set-top box, Apple chief executive Tim Cook proclaimed: “The future of TV is apps.”But Sky’s forthcoming “Q” service is aimed at a very different future from the one targeted by Apple, Google, Amazon and Roku. Those services all have streaming set-top boxes that would make broadcast TV channels just another app icon to pick. Continue reading...

No one hurt in Manhattan incident that saw man, who police said appeared to be emotionally disturbed, taken into custodyA man swinging a samurai sword at an Apple store terrified shoppers on Friday.The man walked into the Manhattan store and began waving the sword, authorities said. A video posted online showed him swinging the sword as he walked down a staircase. Continue reading...

We had Rory Carroll invite ‘Alexa’ aka the Echo into his home. There was helpful cooking assistance, endless facts and figures, an amusing misunderstanding – and concerns over what exactly Amazon does with all that interaction dataThe experiment with having a robot in my home was going well – useful exchanges, mutual learning, some bonding – right up until the robot thought I told it to “fuck off”. I hadn’t. But the robot was convinced. It flashed its blue light and scolded me in a tone mixing hurt, disappointment and reprimand: “That’s not very nice to say.”I could have laughed. Or shrugged. Or bristled, saying it had erred and should pay more attention before leaping to conclusions. I could have unplugged the thing. Continue reading...

CEO of drone technology company says initial regulations on all but the cheapest unmanned aerial vehicles will be ‘really bad’ but will improveRegulations are likely to apply to all but the very cheapest drones before Christmas, according to an expert who helped write the upcoming rules.“Yes, registration will happen for this Christmas. And yes, it will be really bad,” says Bob Young, CEO of drone technology company PrecisionHawk, a member of the FAA’s Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) Task Force. “What I’m focused on is just to be a little bit better tomorrow, and that allows you to embrace the fact that you’re really bad today.”

‘In a traffic snarl-up, I noticed I didn’t look as catastrophically grumpy as everyone else’I have a delusion that I’m somehow immune to plushness, that I can see through fancy stitching and embossed lettering and leather finish, and intuit my way, monastically, to the true value of the thing beneath. It is total manure. I love a panoramic sunroof an unreasonable amount, considering the amount of time, as a responsible driver, I spend gazing through it. I had the Renault Kadjar in its range-topping Signature Nav version. They must have seen me coming.High off the road and handsome, it is a very French sort of SUV: much more, “Join us – we’re on a safety-first journey to a ski lodge” than the Scando-German, “Check out my girth – in a clash with an elk, I’d definitely win” (let alone the Anglo-Saxon, “By the glint of my bull bars, you can see I’d very easily be adapted to suit a paranoid yet thrifty dictator”). Continue reading...

Zuckerberg announced in July he and his wife, Priscilla Chan, are expecting a baby girl following three miscarriagesFacebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is planning to take two months of paternity leave when his daughter is born.He said in an online post “outcomes are better for children and families” when working parents take time off to be with their newborns. He called the decision “very personal”. Continue reading...

Elon Musk says electric car company is ramping up its Autopilot system for advanced autonomous drivingTesla is accelerating with its self-driving car efforts, taking on Google, Uber, Apple and traditional vehicle manufacturers.

If you’re an inventor at heart, we want to see your ideas for what planes, trains, cars, bikes and boats might look like 50 to 100 years from nowMachines that can propel themselves on the road or in the air while carrying passengers were once a fantasy that only existed in the minds and sketchbooks of inventors like Leonardo da Vinci and the Wright brothers. Now, they’re an everyday reality, dramatically changing where and how people live and work.Many big ideas that have transformed life as we know it started out as simple renderings. Could you be the next Thomas Edison or Nikola Tesla? For our series on the future of transportation, we want to see your ideas about what cars, bikes, trains, ships and airplanes – or even hoverboards – might look like 50 or 100 years from now. Your concept can be as simple as a single vehicle or even a piece of a vehicle or as complex as a new traffic system or reimagined transportation plan for your city or town. Continue reading...

While Isis may be promoting a medieval ideology of beheadings, rape and enslavement, their use of technology is anything but backwardExtremist groups have long used the internet to recruit new members and citizens have long left home to fight in foreign countries. But Islamic State stands apart in the way it has mastered online propaganda and recruitment.In the aftermath of the attacks in Paris we look at the process of online radicalisation: how it's evolving, what it means and what is being done to intervene. And as hacktivist communities declare cyberwar on Isis we discuss the battle for hearts and minds online and whether these kinds of attacks can really do anything to dent their digital juggernaut. Continue reading...

The tech company pledges to cover legal costs for handful of videos that it claims represent clear fair use despite being issued DMCA takedown noticesGoogle is stepping up its defense of YouTube users who find themselves on the wrong side of a copyright claim, the tech company said on Thursday.After a series of skirmishes with established media and others the company said it was “offering legal support to a handful of videos that we believe represent clear fair uses which have been subject to DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] takedowns”. Continue reading...

Swedish music streaming firm will backdate policy so all its 1,600 employees worldwide with a child born after 1 January 2013 are eligibleSpotify is to offer staff up to six months’ parental leave with 100% pay as part of a global policy it says recognises the importance of “a healthy work-family balance”.

Stock opens at $9, less than CEO Jack Dorsey had hoped for, but rises to over $12 in early trading to keep hope alive for so-called unicorn startupsThe “unicorns” are still alive! Just. The share sale of mobile payment company Square got off to a good start on Thursday – but only after the Silicon Valley startup was forced to slash the price of its offer.Square, one of the Silicon Valley “unicorn” startups – companies valued at billions of dollars despite an absence of profits – began trading on Thursday morning on the New York stock exchange. Continue reading...

Social network users say the site’s decision to extend ‘marked safe’ option to victims outside Paris is a ‘sign of respect’Nigerians have welcomed Facebook’s move to switch on its Safety Check feature for people affected in the country’s north-east after a string of suicide bombings by Islamist group Boko Haram.“After the Paris attacks last week, we made the decision to use safety check for more tragic events like this going forward,” founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a post on his Facebook page. Continue reading...

Startup, in partnership with UN-Water initiative, wants to get people messaging and playing games on the looMobile app Pooductive sounds like a silly gimmick: a smartphone app for messaging and playing games with strangers while sitting on the toilet.However, the app has a more serious aim: raising awareness of the 2.4 billion people in the world who do not have access to improved sanitation and clean water. Continue reading...

Wearable health monitors will likely make way for gadgets that can detect heart and breathing rate from the insideThe days of having to wear electrodes, clips and gadgets to monitor your health while in hospital or your fitness when going about your daily business may be over. Your next tracker could be ingestible.Researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed an sensor that monitors a patient’s heart rate and breathing from the inside. Continue reading...

Online hacktivist collective claims Isis-affiliated websites are using company’s services to protect against hacking attacks

Peter does a lot of sound recording, and wonders if a genuinely silent PC is worth the extra costAre fanless PCs now a sensible purchase? I do a lot of sound recording and the idea of a genuinely silent PC is very attractive. PeterRecent innovations in the PC market have been devoted to producing cheaper fanless PCs, though that wasn’t actually the goal. The focus was on producing thinner laptops and tablets, but these have huge problems dissipating heat. Intel tackled this problem by gradually reducing the amount of power its chips consume. Now they don’t get as hot, they have less need for fans. Continue reading...

The much-anticipated Star Wars shooter captures the look and feel of the series perfectly, but as with the original movie, this is just the beginningWhen George Lucas first discussed Star Wars with his sound designer Ben Burtt, the director stressed that all the noises in the film – from the lightsaber swings to the whoosh of the landspeeder – had to be organically produced, rather than computer generated. He wanted this fantastical environment to feel downbeat and real. That is the magic of the original trilogy: it creates a universe that feels used.EA Dice, the developer behind Star Wars: Battlefront, seems to understand that perfectly. This is a game that absolutely revels in the audio visual wonder of the movies. The unearthly moan of AT-AT fire; the scream of a swooping TIE Fighter; the spacecraft covered in dents and rust. This game looks, sounds and feels like being inside Star Wars. In aesthetic terms, it is the most accurate video game rendition of the series ever made. Continue reading...

We can watch HD films on the train and play games in VR headsets but there’s a hitch – motion sicknessWhen we come to define the overarching feeling of the early part of the 21st century, it may come down to one word: queasiness. Some of the most exciting advances in technology – virtual reality, wearable tech, superfast smartphones and 3D films and operating systems – may all be scuppered by a basic human weakness: motion sickness.“If you walk into a room, you see the visual input that shows us we’re moving, and our vestibular system, the organs of balance, tell us we’re moving, [as does] the perception from your muscles and bones,” says Dr Cyriel Diels, human factors specialist at the Centre for Mobility and Transport at Coventry University. “Below deck on a ship, you are physically moving, but because you are moving with the boat, the visual field seems to be stationary. The two seem to conflict. Your body responds with motion sickness: vomiting, feeling dizzy.” Continue reading...

For the second time in a week, users can ensure their loved ones are safe following a terror attack via the social networkFacebook has turned on its Safety Check feature for users in Nigeria, following a bombing in the city of Yola on Tuesday.Safety Check allows any user of the site who is present in an area affected by a disaster or attack to mark that they are safe. Its use in Nigeria is only the fifth time that the feature has been activated, and the second time that it has been enabled after a terrorist attack. The first was during Friday’s shootings in Paris. Continue reading...

Possibly inspired by singer Adele (possibly not), Samsung is bringing a new flip-phone model to the marketWe all owe Adele an apology. After the internet mercilessly took the piss out of the flip-phone she used in her video for Hello (a decision the director said was thought through – “it’s so distracting to see an iPhone in a movie”), news has emerged that Samsung is releasing a flip model.Buy Adele An Upgrade For Her Flip Phone #RejectedKickstarterFund pic.twitter.com/4PkKF2sokz Continue reading...

Social network is focusing on communities and collections, in a bid to be less like Zuckerberg’s social network and more like sites such as PinterestWe all thought Google+ was dead; Google+ is not, it turns out, dead. The search firm’s on-again-off-again obsession with building a successful social network is on, again.Just a few months ago, Google announced that it was stripping features from Google+ in an effort to offer “a more focused” experience, a move many saw as the first step towards an eventual shutdown of the site. For the first time since it was launched, users were freed from the requirement to have a Plus account to use popular features of Google such as sharing content, chatting with contacts, or creating a YouTube channel. Continue reading...

Uber portrays itself as weaker side in ‘David and Goliath’ battle when it is a $50bn global company Australian tax commissioner saysAustralia’s tax commissioner has launched a strongly worded attack on Uber at an inquiry into corporate tax avoidance, arguing the ride-sharing service liked to portray itself as the weaker party in a David-and-Goliath battle when it fact it was the big multinational player.Uber is challenging an Australian tax office ruling that all drivers must register to collect the goods and services tax, regardless of whether they are likely to meet the $75,000 annual turnover threshold that applies to other small businesses. Continue reading...

Latest Taiwanese Android smartphone apes the design of Apple while failing to quite live up to the high standards set by competitorsHTC’s latest One A9 smartphone looks and feels like an iPhone and runs the latest version of Android, but is that a compelling package?

Android and iOS app will feature local channels including Stampy, Morph and Little Baby Bum, funded by ‘family friendly’ advertisementsYouTube is launching its YouTube Kids app in the UK and Ireland, nine months after its child-friendly service went live in the US.More than 10 million American parents have downloaded the app, which serves up a filtered selection of videos and channels that are appropriate for children. Continue reading...

Yellow cabbies and financial backers tell court that authorities are bankrupting them by letting app-based drivers operate without the same costly licensesNew York taxi owners and the lenders behind some of them are suing New York City and its Taxi and Limousine Commission, saying the proliferation of Uber is destroying their businesses and threatening their livelihoods.