Technology | The Guardian

Latest response in long-running antitrust case over price comparison tools says renewed charges are not in users’ interestsGoogle has responded to the European commission’s (EC) renewed statement of objections, declaring its case against Google Shopping to be “wrong on the facts, the law, and the economics” and dismissing it as just “the interests of a small number of websites”.

Large-screened smartphone hopes to fill the gap left by Samsung’s exploding Note 7 and solidify Huawei as a premium handset manufacturerHuawei’s new smartphone has a massive 5.9in screen. But just how big do you really want your smartphone to be?

Marie is buying a computer for her son and seeks something that can be upgraded and won’t need replacing in a couple of yearsI am getting my son a new laptop for Christmas. My budget is around £500. He is adamant that he wants a 15in HP laptop – he won’t be lugging it anywhere – but I’ve also been looking at Dell and Asus ZenBooks. My question is: Can I future-proof my purchase to take him through his GCSEs to A-levels, or should I just go for an entry-level laptop with the view of replacing it in a couple of years?His usage will be mostly be Microsoft Office, web browsing and watching YouTube videos. From my headache-inducing searches of various forums and guides, I think my basic requirements would be a Core i5, 8GB and SSD (solid-state drive) storage. Marie Continue reading...

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

Near tripling of the social media giant’s profits comes at a time when traditional news publishers are hemorrhaging ad dollars and announcing cutbacksFacebook almost tripled its profits in the third quarter of 2016 as the social media giant took an even larger slice of the online advertising market. The company reported a 59% year-over-year increase in advertising revenue on Wednesday. Net income for the three months ending 30 September rose to $2.38bn from $896m a year earlier.The jump in profits and revenues comes as traditional publishers are hemorrhaging advertising dollars and announcing cutbacks. News groups including the Daily Mail, the Guardian, New York Times and Wall Street Journal have all announced layoffs in recent weeks. Continue reading...

Mesmerizing online puzzles and optical illusion have been widely debated and shared across the internet. The latest craze: figure out which box contains the carFrom widely shared optical illusions and brain teasers to the strange, blue-and-black phenomenon that was The Dress, it’s clear that the internet is infatuated with puzzles.The latest which seems to have captured collective attention is about choosing which box contains a car. Posted on Monday by the Daily Mail, the puzzle was found on Brilliant.org, a problem-solving site. Continue reading...

I reject Uber completely: not primarily because it pays drivers too little – which may now change temporarily in the UK (Report, 29 October), until Uber fires them all – but because of its injustice to passengers themselves. One basic injustice is that Uber requires riders to run a proprietary app. A proprietary program is controlled by a company and gives the company power over whoever runs it. This is wrong in itself, and often tempts the company to design the program to snoop on users or otherwise mistreat them (see http://gnu.org/proprietary/).The other basic injustice of Uber is that it makes customers identify themselves – and records where they go. If Uber or similar services replace today’s taxis, we will all suffer a loss of freedom. The data Uber collects is easily available to the state (see http://gnu.org/philosophy/surveillance-vs-democracy.html). Continue reading...

Commission calls on government to create ‘comprehensive right’ that would give Australians greater control of personal dataThe Productivity Commission wants to revolutionise how personal data is collected and handled in Australia.It is calling on the federal government to create a “comprehensive right” for consumers to give them far greater control over their personal data. Continue reading...

Don’t be fooled by the social network’s hostile response to Admiral’s plan to price car insurance based on postsFacebook’s terms of service are pretty clear, by the standards of such things. (I should know: I once read 150,000 words of small print in a week to see what I would find out.) There are very few random blocks of all-caps, it’s fairly short, and it has hyperlinks in it. You don’t even have to scroll down to find one of the key sections, which lays out what it means when you share information with Facebook.“You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook,” the company assures you, “and you can control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings.” Continue reading...

Prejudice, harassment and hate speech have crept from the real world into the digital realm. For virtual reality to succeed, it will have to tackle this from the startIt won’t be long, the technologists tell us, before we’ll all be vacationing in virtual reality. We’ll can the commute and hold meetings in virtual reality offices. We’ll hang out with our friends around virtual reality campfires, or attend virtual reality concerts. And at those gigs or football games, we’ll also run the risk of getting sexually assaulted.On 20 October, Jordan Belamire (a pseudonym) wrote a Medium post describing how, while she was recently playing a VR game, another player groped her crotch. He’d heard her voice, you see, deduced that she was female, and decided to put her in her place. Continue reading...

As part of the government’s new national cyber-security programme, 50 people with non-tech backgrounds will be recruited to become hack-breakers. Do you have what it takes?Want to become a government codebreaker, but worried that your profound lack of technological nous will hold you back? Fear no more! Next year, as part of a £1.9bn national cyber-security programme, the government will push hopefuls with no background in technology through an intensive 10-week cyber-security bootcamp. By the end of the GCHQ-certified scheme, it hopes to find 50 high-aptitude individuals to protect our nation from cyber attacks.Are you one of those individuals? Here’s a quiz to test your flair for cyber security. Continue reading...

The team behind Football Manager 2017 have produced a stunningly detailed collection of football data. In this short film, Copa90 find out how they did itBy Copa90, part of the Guardian Sport Network“The last time we tried to calculate our strike rate it was around 99.5%,” says Football Manager head honcho Miles Jacobson. For him and his team at Sports Interactive, the aim is always to create the most real-life representation of football year after year. Creating Football Manager 2017 has not just been about building a commercial product. It’s also about constructing a game they want to play over the next year until they release the next edition.Jacobson strives to build the most realistic game yet so he can live out his dream of leading Watford to the Premier League title, albeit with the heavy heart that comes after he has relieved Walter Mazzarri of his duties in the process. Continue reading...

Insurer withdraws initiative with hours to go as privacy campaigners criticise ‘intrusive’ attempt to analyse users’ dataAdmiral has been forced to pull a new initiative that used Facebook to analyse the personalities of car owners and set the price of their insurance after the social media site blocked it.Admiral was due to launch firstcarquote officially on Wednesday but delayed it with just two hours to go. Continue reading...

Instead of pressuring women in the tech industry to solve sexism, this feminist activist is teaching men how to stop biased behaviorIt’s a Friday afternoon at a tech startup in downtown San Francisco, and Valerie Aurora is arming men with phrases they can use to try to make their Silicon Valley environment less sexist: “Not cool.” “We don’t do that here.” “Awkward!”She wants them to use them against other men when they encounter biased comments or actions aimed at women, and tells them not to worry if they freeze the first time. “Just keep practicing and wait for the next time. I guarantee it will happen again.” Continue reading...

Smartphones and tablets become king as the share of desktop web browsing traffic shrinks to 48.7%, according to dataMobile devices are used more than traditional computers for web browsing, as smartphone and tablet use overtook desktop for the first time, October figures show.

The company is to use Facebook data to calculate customer premiums. But even more invasive ways to monetise lives are coming with the Internet of ThingsAnybody who has been overcharged by an insurance company, denied a claim or given the runaround by an insurer’s customer disservice should shudder at the idea of insurers learning how to deploy the internet as a way of monitoring customers and using their online data to determine how much they should pay.The latest, inevitable news is that Admiral, one of the UK’s biggest insurers, is to use customers’ Facebook data to help calculate how much car insurance they should pay. Continue reading...

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

The last few instalments in the simulation series have provided major improvements. But has the Football Manager team run out of energy this year?The question every annual franchise has to answer is whether the new entry in the series expands enough on the previous title to warrant a purchase. This year, and for the first time in a few seasons, Football Manager 2017 doesn’t make enough of a step to confidently recommend it outright. Though it does build on the strengths of its excellent predecessor Football Manager 2016, it doesn’t offer enough of a change for anyone outside the hardcore fanbase to warrant an immediate purchase.This feels like a strange thing to write, because in many ways – through a series of small but positive changes to the way players interact with the game – FM 2017 offers the best experience of pretending to be a football manager there’s ever been. Although the series shares the lineage of Championship Manager, FM 2017 is getting closer than ever to abolishing that game’s reputation as glorified football spreadsheet. Continue reading...

Insurer’s algorithm analyses social media usage to identify safe drivers in unprecedented use of customer dataOne of the biggest insurance companies in Britain is to use social media to analyse the personalities of car owners and set the price of their insurance.The unprecedented move highlights the start of a new era for how companies use online personal data and will start a debate about privacy. Continue reading...

At the heart of the app is the belief that mass surveillance makes the world a better, fairer place through the question: can injustice survive transparency?

Investigators hired by Alfa Bank say server logs show no sign of secretive contact after online report sparks debate between internet security expertsA US cybersecurity firm hired by a Russian bank to investigate allegations of a secret line of communication with the Trump Organization said on Tuesday there was no evidence so far of substantive contact, email or financial links.

Tennessee family blames an exploding battery – a common occurrence that has led to a mass recall – for setting their million-dollar home on fireIt has been nearly a year since the self-balancing scooters known as hoverboards were setting sales charts on fire, but the resulting litigation (from the resulting real-world fires) is just getting started.A family in Nashville, Tennessee, has filed a $30m lawsuit against Amazon, arguing that the online retailer should be held liable for the ill-fated Christmas present that burned their house down. Continue reading...

Inventor of world wide web says hackers could cause major disruption with open economic or traffic dataHackers could use open data such as the information that powers transport apps to create chaos, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, has said.“If you disrupted traffic data for example, to tell everybody that all the roads south of the river are closed, so everybody would go north of the river, that would gridlock you [and] disable the city,” he said. Continue reading...

The search engine company publicised a critical Windows bug 10 days after informing the software firm about itGoogle and Microsoft are in a war of words after the search engine company publicised a critical Windows bug just 10 days after telling the software firm about it.The bug, which allows privilege escalation in Windows, was discovered by Google on 21 October. An attacker can use it to access things they should not be able to, and according to Google, it is already being actively exploited in the wild. Continue reading...

Search company cuts access to feature, called battery status API, which allows websites to request information about the capacity of a visitor’s deviceMozilla Firefox is dropping a feature that lets websites see how much battery life a visitor has left, following research showing that it could be used to track browsers.The feature, called the battery status API, allows websites to request information about the capacity of a visitor’s device, such as whether or not it’s plugged in and charging, how long it will last until it is empty, and the percentage of charge remaining. Continue reading...

Along with similar declines in the PC industry, tablet sales fall for five quarters with only budget models showing growthSales of tablet computers fell by more than 6m over the past year as the market contracted 14.7%, according to a report.At a time when consumers are questioning whether they really need both a computer and a tablet or either along with a smartphone, the only part of the market to grow was the sub-$200 offerings.

Forged rail tickets are now being sold as well as drugs and passports, in an explosion of goods on offer from dark web retail servicesMachine guns, class-A drugs, stolen credit cards and … a return ticket to Hastings. The shopping list of the “dark web” consumer, more used to a wild west better known for the highly illegal and illicit, appears to have taken a more ordinary diversion.At least that’s the impression left by an investigation into the sale of forged train tickets on hidden parts of the internet. BBC South East bought several sophisticated fakes, including a first-class Hastings fare, for as little as a third of their face value. The tickets cannot fool machines but barrier staff accepted them on 12 occasions. Continue reading...

Philip Hammond has announced a £2bn investment into UK cybersecurity. But what exactly does that cover? Can you have cybercrime without hacking? And could your kitchen appliance turn against you?The chancellor, Phillip Hammond, has announced a £1.9bn investment in Britain’s cybersecurity strategy. The money is to be used to protect the country from hacking attacks on all fronts, from opportunistic raids on individuals and businesses to focused cyberwar led by state-run teams.Hammond has promised a big sum, but the world of hacking is easily large enough to occupy all that money and more. It’s double the amount set out for a similar strategy in 2011, but has to deal with a world where cybercrime has moved from science-fiction novels and Hollywood movies to our banks, phones and even kettles. Continue reading...

Human impact and a booming bird population are devastating the Mojave desert tortoise. But one man is trying some unusual methods to save themA baby desert tortoise is no match for a raven. The tiny reptile’s soft shell is easily pierced, offering the bird a tantalizing fix of delicious entrails.Related: World on track to lose two-thirds of wild animals by 2020, major report warns Continue reading...

The billionaire tech investor in a speech painted a dark picture of America as he praised the GOP nominee as a ‘political outsider’ who would reverse US declinePeter Thiel has defended his support of Donald Trump, dismissing concerns about the Republican nominee’s anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim campaign positions as the result of the media “taking Trump literally” but not “seriously”.Thiel used a speech Monday at the National Press Club in Washington to praise the Republican candidate as a “political outsider” who would reverse America’s decline. Continue reading...

Growing online threat putting national and personal security at risk, says chancellorOutdated computer systems are allowing malicious hackers to target everyone from companies at board level to individuals in their living rooms, according to the chancellor, who is promising to strike back against cyber-attacks.

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

Waiting times for black Seattle passengers were 35% longer, and Boston drivers cancelled rides for black passengers more than twice as frequently, study foundA new academic study has found “a pattern of discrimination” against passengers with African American-sounding names by Uber and Lyft drivers.The findings call into question a central narrative of ride-hail apps that they solve the entrenched and humiliating problem of hailing a cab for black passengers. Continue reading...

The famous Sega video game character will reportedly be brought to the big screen with a combination of CGI animation and live actionLess than two weeks after leaving the Deadpool 2 project after “creative differences” with star Ryan Reynolds, director Tim Miller has revealed he is working on bringing Sonic The Hedgehog to the big screen.The director is working on a film about the Sega character, according to the Hollywood Reporter, which claims it will be a hybrid of CGI animated and live action representation of the character who was first introduced to the world in 1991. Continue reading...

Rights groups such as the ACLU expressed deep concern over censorship in letter to Mark Zuckerberg, particularly when posts are removed at the request of policeA coalition of more than 70 civil rights groups have written to Facebook demanding that the company clarifies its policies for removing content and alleging that it has repeatedly removed posts documenting human rights violations.In a letter addressed to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the rights groups – including the ACLU, Center for Media Justice, SumOfUs and Color of Change – express deep concern over the censorship, particularly when posts are removed at the request of police. Continue reading...

I am very happy that the rights of Uber drivers are being protected by the courts, but it is worth remembering that Uber isn’t just successful because it is cheap, it also offers a remarkably convenient service which is head and shoulders above what was available before (Uber is misleading drivers about its legal defeat, claims union, 30 October).It is a joy to be able to see my car coming down the street rather than wandering the high street looking for a black cab or engaging in repeat conversations with a minicab operator (“he’s just coming, love – he’ll be there in three minutes, definitely”), followed by a 25-minute wait, occasionally a total no show. It is amazing to be driven from point A to point B in a foreign city without having to have the right cash or speak the language. I was wary at first, because of the social implications of the gig economy, but conversations with drivers have all been remarkably positive too. Continue reading...

A pair of tweets promoting the game caused outcry and ridicule at the insensitive nature of the campaignEA games has removed a pair of tweets promoting its new world war one-set first person shooter Battlefield 1 after they sparked outcry and ridicule at the tone-deaf nature of the campaign.Accompanied with the hashtag “#justWWIthings”, the two tweets were sent over the weekend. The first, posted on Friday, contained an animated gif of a number of WW1-era soldiers posing in front of a collapsing airship, captioned “when your squad is looking on point #justWWIthings”; the second, posted on Sunday, was an animated gif of a soldier being burned with a flamethrower, captioned “When you’re too hot for the club #justWWIthings”. Continue reading...

The first-person shooter returns with a bunch of new multiplayer modes and a lone campaign that seeks to add emotional weight to the thundering actionIt’s always worth remembering where Titanfall developer Respawn Entertainment came from. The studio was founded by the creators of Call of Duty and staffed by some of the most skilful stalwarts in the first-person shooter genre; from the best entries in Activision’s behemoth franchise all the way back to 2002’s Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, Respawn’s collective has made great cinematic shooters, and this team knows how to reinvent, rethink and reignite the genre. Titanfall 2 expands the multiplayer concept established by the original sci-fi shooter two years ago, adds an incredible single-player campaign and acts as a bold reminder of how brilliant this band of veteran gunslingers really is.As with the original game, Titanfall 2’s core ideas exist on two parallel playing fields. Firstly, there’s the Pilot, a superhuman soldier capable of hyper athletic wall-running and double-jumping, with split-second reflexes that make for unrivalled marksmanship. They are the masters of any gun, the ultimate commander of any squad, and they treat the battlefield more like a jungle gym than a place of warfare. Obstacles and debris are not safe cover in the eyes of a Pilot. Instead they are opportunities for movement in order to turn impossible odds into a cakewalk. Continue reading...

Reader mode is a Safari feature, which strips out most of the formatting from a webpage, removing adverts, navigation links and commentsTwitter is testing a new feature on its iOS app which turns on Apple’s “Reader” mode by default on every link opened in its in-app browser.First introduced in 2010, and ported to iOS in 2011, Reader mode is a oft-forgotten feature in Safari that strips out most of the formatting from a webpage, removing adverts, navigation links, comments, and almost everything else except for the main content of a text-based article. Continue reading...

Left yourself with nothing to do this Halloween? Go on one of these spooky adventures and ensure you get absolutely no sleep at allIf you’ve already had your Halloween party this weekend and were planning a quiet night in front of the TV, hiding from trick or treaters, we’ve got another idea for you.All of the following horror titles are easily available for download on console or PC, so by early this evening you could be scaring the bejesus out of yourself, looking for ghosts in an abandoned castle, or running into a poorly lit bathroom to escape a clown doll. Continue reading...

At one time it was used for diagnostics, but the world moved on. Now Apple finally has too with its new laptop, the first of a brave new line of chimeless MacsApple has finally put one of the most annoying and potentially embarrassing aspects of the MacBook Pro to bed: the Mac startup chime is no more.

Facebook has repeatedly tried to take on Snapchat by replicating its features or by buying them inFacebook has been trying to steal Snapchat’s thunder for a while, but this weekend the social network beat even its own covetous record.On Friday came the news that Facebook is testing a new camera in its main app that offers Snapchat Lens-style photo and video filters to users. The camera, available to users in Ireland for now, is accessed by swiping right on the homescreen of the Facebook app. Continue reading...

The place to talk about games and other things that matterMonday. Continue reading...

Nintendo’s dog with a ’fro makes us all slaves to the rhythm, while the toys-to-life genre gets another boost3DS, Nintendo, cert: 7

The victory against Uber by drivers and the GMB is an important one, and not just for the many workers suffering the effects of bogus self-employment and poverty wages at the hands of big companies (Uber drivers triumph in rights battle, 29 October). The rise of Uber has affected the livelihoods of traditional taxi firms all over the country and the pressure to drive down fares has compromised passenger safety.Hedge-funded Uber’s success started with the Tory-Liberal coalition government’s deregulation legislation, which received the royal assent 18 months ago. While the consultation around the bill was going on, I supported the taxi trade here in Medway and many other drivers’ associations and their trade unions who lobbied against deregulation because they knew it would drive down wages and weaken the powers of local councils to determine how many cabs were licensed, or to maintain safe working practices. Continue reading...

After a long period as a mid-market manufacturer, rapid shift signals a reaction to the changing shape of the PC marketApple released its latest laptops on Thursday, a new range of computers to replace the ageing range of Retina MacBook Pros. They are thinner and lighter than their predecessors, with a new touch bar at the top of the keyboard and a fingerprint sensor replacing the power button.They are £750 more than the machines they replace were – though their price has also gone up. The larger of the two new MacBook Pros, the 15in with Touch Bar, is the first laptop the company has released with a starting price of more than £2,000 for more than a decade: it begins at an eye-watering £2,349, with build-to-order options taking it well north of £4,000. Continue reading...

Whether you’re struggling to get gig tickets or being fat-shamed by an app – AI is calling the shots. Weren’t these algorithms supposed to be on our side, not making thing worse?

Reporter Alan Yuhas highlights the bogus stories, clickbait and disinformation framed as trending ‘news’ by one of the world’s most powerful companiesLast month Facebook announced it would join a coalition with Twitter and more than 20 news organizations to tamp down on the proliferation of fake news on the social network. Since that announcement, conspiracy theories and explicitly fake news have continued to slip past Facebook’s algorithm.The company did, however, confront a September 11 conspiracy theory post that it had circulated around the anniversary of the attack. It took down the entire trending topic – including on the anniversary itself – rather than selectively edit out the false stories. Adam Mosseri, the company’s News Feed product vice-president, insisted earlier this month that Facebook is not a publisher or media company. Continue reading...

Internet security is time-consuming and increasingly useless. Now, technology firms are racing to find a new universal ‘open sesame’ to our digital livesI’m old enough to remember a life in which you could confidently expect your skill for guessing passwords to be redundant by about the age of nine. That was when your mate down the road finally overcame his love of spy games and his obsessive desire not to allow you past his front door or into his garden shed without you first establishing his favourite crisp flavour. Unfortunately, however, it seems that mate, who subsequently spent his lunch hours in the school’s windowless computer room, up to his knees in punch cards, has long since taken over the world.Related: Banks' online security is failing customers, says Which? Continue reading...

Discover your inner aviator, from the entry level Parrot Mambo to the high-spec DJI PhantomWe all have our own way of transcending the banality of everyday life. A good book, going to the gym, watching our football teams struggle to reach the heights or avoid the lows. Taking to the sky with a drone is peak escapism, an adrenaline blast that, for a few short minutes, raises the pulse, puts a stupid grin on your face and revives childhood dreams.With so many jostling for your attention, though, which drone do you choose? Some drones are small and cheap, can be used to terrorise pets and are controlled only with your smartphone. Others have fancy cameras, the range of a light aircraft and can get you in trouble with the law… but how on earth do you choose which one to buy? Continue reading...