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Disney have teamed up with Sphero – a robotic toy company – to bring the droid BB-8 from the new Star Wars: The Force Awakens film to life. Though many of his skills are being heavily guarded ahead of release, Sphero’s Chief Creative Officer Rob Maigret brought him into the Guardian office to say helloStar Wars droid BB-8 is real and you can take him home Continue reading...

Robotics company Sphero partners with Disney to make pint-sized version of new Star Wars droid kids and big kids can now ownSince its debut in the first trailer for Episode VII, cute little BB-8 - which looks an upturned bowl balancing on a football - has become the unofficial droid mascot of Star Wars: The Force Awakens.Unlike the much-loved robotic pal from the original trilogy, R2-D2, BB-8 is a droid with intelligence that you can actually buy – albeit in a tennis ball sized-version. Continue reading...

Man filmed balancing on hands-free Segway-style device while performing tawaf ritual around Islam’s most sacred shrineThe Ka’bah is Islam’s most sacred shrine, circled reverently by Muslims taking part in the hajj and umrah, the pilgrimage to Mecca that is one of the five pillars of the religion. It is therefore somewhat unusual to see a pilgrim performing the tawaf on what looks like a hoverboard.A YouTube video, which has been making the rounds on social media, shows an unidentified man balancing on the hands-free Segway-style device, his hands clasped in front of him. Continue reading...

Vice president of iTunes International says company is getting ‘a lot of feedback’ about streaming service and ‘trying to make it better every day’Apple has “a bit of homework to be done” to improve its Apple Music streaming service, the company’s international iTunes boss has said.Apple Music launched in June as a rival to Spotify and while it has been praised for its curated playlists it has been criticised over its user interface and bugs affecting people’s existing iTunes libraries. Continue reading...

Ian wants to know if he should switch to LibreOffice or – since he uses Windows 10 and a Windows Phone – go back to using Microsoft’s office software

Boy’s file will remain active for at least 10 years after he sent a naked image of himself to a classmate who shared it with othersA 14-year-old boy has revealed that he was added to a police database after he sent a naked image of himself to a female classmate.The boy, whose identity has not been made public, said he sent the image by Snapchat from his bedroom while flirting with a girl of the same age, who then shared it with others. Continue reading...

Boost your trivia knowledge ahead of the next pub quiz or kids homework assignment with search engine’s new ‘I’m feeling curious’ featureBored at work today? Need to boost your trivia knowledge now that all the kids are back in school? Try Googling “fun facts” or “I’m feeling curious”.

The venerable online auction site eBay is preparing to celebrate its 20th birthday. We want to see and hear about the best and most terrible purchases you’ve madeHere’s a fact to make the internet generation feel old: online auction site eBay is approaching its 20th birthday. In a few short days, the place for selling off your old clothes or a coffee cup once used by Jeremy Corbyn is officially old enough to be considered an adult in Japan or vote in Bahrain, if it were a person, which it is not.To celebrate twenty years of wheeling, dealing, and things you bought accidentally after bidding for them when slightly drunk, we want to hear about all your eBay triumphs and disasters. Continue reading...

The latest Metal Gear instalment somehow lives up to the hype and expectations, providing a luxurious cinematic gaming experience without equalWhen Hideo Kojima was a young boy, his parents introduced a daily ritual. Each evening, the family would sit down to watch a movie together. Kojima wasn’t allowed to go to bed till the film had finished, even if it contained sex scenes. His experience was, he has said, the “opposite” of how it is for most children. Those kids had to finish their cauliflower. Kojima had to finish his Coppola.

The tech company chief says she will take only two weeks off and be ‘working throughout’ when she gives birth to twins but campaigners lament her exampleYahoo’s chief executive, Marissa Mayer, has been criticized after announcing she is taking as little as two weeks of maternity leave and will be “working throughout” when she gives birth to identical twins later this year – with some upset that her break will be so brief, and others that she even has to talk about it at all.Related: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer pregnant with twin girls Continue reading...

São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Brasília have moved to ban the mobile application, while the San Francisco-based startup declines to commentThe president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, has criticised ride-sharing service Uber for increasing unemployment, adding to a chorus of labour concerns about the world’s most valuable venture-backed startup.Rousseff said local authorities must regulate the service, which has led conventional taxi drivers to stage protests and lobby lawmakers in Brazil’s three biggest cities. Continue reading...

Twitter account holder in Lithuania claims responsibility for apparent denial of service attack that disabled force’s websiteThe Greater Manchester police website has been taken down by what appears to be a denial of service (DOS) attack, with a Twitter account in Lithuania claiming responsibility.

Misgivings about safety and confidentiality over Jeremy Hunt’s plans to enable patients to access GP record via smartphone and to add information themselvesThe health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has announced plans to give patients in England access to their entire medical record by 2018, and to let them read and add to their GP record using their smartphone within a year.The announcement at NHS England’s annual conference in Manchester prompted fears of a repeat of last year’s row over care.data, a programme in which patient records were shared outside the NHS without their consent. The opposition forced NHS England to halt the scheme temporarily while it addressed the concerns. Continue reading...

The 56 Dean Street clinic in London apologises after sending newsletter disclosing names and email addresses of 780 people, many living with HIVThe health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has ordered an inquiry into how the NHS handles confidential medical information after the “completely unacceptable” breach of the privacy of hundreds of HIV patients.

Hacked dating site says it has millions of real female users, but fresh questions are raised over alleged fake accountsHacked extramarital dating site Ashley Madison has hit back at claims that the company filled its website with fake female profiles, saying that almost 3m messages were sent by women in the last week alone.The company was responding to claims that it had been actively misleading customers over the number of real female users of its dating service, which bears the tagline: “Life is short. Have an affair.” Continue reading...

New 5.5in phablet has four times the number of pixels of an iPhone, and beats rivals Samsung and LG on display sharpnessSony has skipped 2K and gone straight to 4K for the launch of the world’s first UHD 4K smartphone, which has four times the number of pixels of Apple’s iPhone 6 Plus.

Full-page app-install adverts will lead to sites no longer being dubbed ‘mobile-friendly’ by Google’s search algorithmGoogle will begin to downgrade search results for websites that show an interstital advert for their mobile app from 1 November, as part of its ongoing effort to promote “mobile-friendly” sites on its web search.The new policy means that websites that show mobile users a whole-page advert for an app before they can use the site itself will be penalised in their search ranking. Sites that use an app install banner across the top of the page will continue to be classed as mobile-friendly under the new rules. Continue reading...

The unveiling of the company’s new design is meant to show ‘how Google is working for you’. We’re not sure it does. Can you do better?

Misconfigured contact-us form on retailer’s website sends data to company’s entire mailing listNewsagent WHSmith has compromised users’ private data sending it in hundreds of emails to customers due to a misconfigured “contact us” form on the retailer’s magazine website.Information typed into the form, which is supposed to then be passed on to the company itself, was instead apparently sent to its entire mailing list. Continue reading...

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

Time spent on sites including Facebook, Gawker Media and Reddit account for 17% of all time people in the UK spend onlineSocial media has overtaken entertainment as the UK’s favourite activity online, accounting for almost a fifth of the two hours and 51 minutes a day people in the UK on average spend on the web.Social media use – including time on sites such as Reddit or Gawker Media that are built on blog platforms – accounted for nearly 17% of all time online, up from 12.2% a year ago, according to research commissioned by the Internet Advertising Bureau. Continue reading...

Rules requiring firms to store data of Russian citizens on Russian soil seen as a way for Putin to tighten control over internetA new law has been implemented in Russia that in theory demands companies store data about Russian citizens on Russian territory, throwing thousands of firms with online operations into a legal grey area.The law, which came into operation on Tuesday, is part of an attempt to wrest control of the internet, which president Vladimir Putin has called a “CIA project”. The Russian authorities are keen to ensure greater access for domestic security services to online data, and lessen the potential for foreign states, especially the US, to have the same access. Continue reading...

Regulator to investigate charities that sold and bought personal details of Samuel Rae, who lost £35,000 to scams

Google releases app that links Android watches to Apple operating systems for directions, fitness information and event notifications, emails and Facebook

The place to talk about games and other things that matterIt’s Tuesday, and I’m back from sabbatical! Have I missed anything in the games industry? Continue reading...

John Felton posted video on Facebook in which an officer said he had pulled the 25-year-old African American over due to a failure to signal a turn in good timeAn Ohio traffic stop that a police officer justified by saying a black driver “made direct eye contact” has prompted a promise of review by the Dayton police department and an acrimonious response from police supporters defending the stop.On the night of 15 August, according to a Facebook account by 25-year-old John Felton, he was driving with his brother to his mother’s house in Dayton when an officer pulled him over for failing to use his turn signal “100ft prior to your turn”. Unnerved by how the patrol car had followed him, Felton said he turned on his phone’s camera and questioned the traffic stop.

The collision between a hapless Segway-mounted cameraman and Usain Bolt has thrust the motorised scooter into the limelight for all the wrong reasons. But how tricky can they be to master? Rebecca Nicholson gets on a rollSteve Jobs famously declared that the Segway would be “as big a deal as the PC”, until he actually saw one, at which point he recanted and decided that “it sucks”. Since its launch, the self-balancing motorised scooter has had just one other big moment in the spotlight, in 2011, when Jimi Heselden, the British businessman who acquired the US-founded company, rolled off a cliff to the great scrapyard in the sky. Far from changing the world, the Segway has been an underwhelming innovation, limited in its reach, lacking in transformative powers. It evokes images of retirees gently trundling through Florida towards the golf course, or portly security guards trundling towards the coffee machine, or tourists with tired legs trundling around European landmarks. Trundle is not a very sexy word.Until last week, when a humble, trundling scooter took out the fastest man in the world. At the World Athletic Championships in Beijing, cameraman Song Tao interrupted Usain Bolt’s 200m victory lap, knocking the world’s greatest sprinter clean off his speedy feet with a misjudged lean against an unseen barrier. The Segway was everywhere, again, for the wrong reasons, again. It looked as if Tao’s battery-run vehicle had careered out of control. It looked painful. But how hard can it be to learn to ride the world’s most talked-about gyroscopic balancing machine? I went to Segway Unleashed to find out.

Representatives from the site dispute claims that only 1,492 women have ever checked their messages and most of its female users are fake ‘angel’ botsThere were lots of women looking to cheat on their partners on our site, honest, representatives of hacked infidelity service Ashley Madison claimed on Monday.The latest – unattributed – statement from the Canadian company came after Annalee Newitz, a writer for several Gawker Media websites including Gizmodo, studied the hacked database for indications that the site’s purported 5.5 million female users had arranged trysts using the service. She found that “only 1,492 women had ever checked their messages” according to the stolen information, though she allowed for the possibility that the data might have been corrupted. Continue reading...

Do you need your dry cleaning dropped off or some cat litter picked up? Capitalism insists you shouldn’t bother – pay a startup to do it for youA good invention, popular wisdom tells us, ought to either fulfill a need or create one. But popular wisdom greatly underestimates our laziness.These days, a good invention simply indulges our sloth: what are Seamless and Drizly if not attempts to make perfectly accomplishable tasks a little easier? I understand the impulse – indeed, it’s difficult to resist the sites’ appeal. Imagine a 10-minute errand forcing you off the couch in the middle of a Netflix binge-watch. It won’t do. Continue reading...

British gamer Daniel Middleton’s Minecraft videos beat WWE wrestling, Little Baby Bum, BuzzFeed and Taylor Swift with 400m July viewsThe most popular channel on YouTube now belongs to British gamer Daniel Middleton, whose Minecraft videos published as The Diamond Minecart were watched more than 402m times in July 2015 alone.That was enough to make him the biggest channel on YouTube that month ahead of wrestling body WWE’s 399m views, according to the latest chart published by analytics firm OpenSlate and online-video industry site Tubefilter. Continue reading...

Will Ubisoft’s bloodthirsty romp through history consign previous celluloid terrors to the dustbin of history?The history of video game-to-film adaptations is littered with the rotting corpses of productions featuring half-arsed storylines, C-grade casting and a distinctly regrettable absence of directorial vision. The famously appalling German director Uwe Boll has made a living from trotting out cheap and nasty films, which usually make their money back thanks to gamers who are fooled into thinking they are about to re-experience their greatest moments spent with a PlayStation or Xbox on the big screen.The reality is usually rather different. Movies and video games operate under a completely different set of rules, and quite often the extended non-playable sequences in games which most resemble traditional film narrative are the bits gamers click through in boredom after the first dozen times of viewing. Only the Resident Evil movies have achieved successful franchise status, and only then without any particular degree of critical traction, and largely because zombie films will always have their place in the heart of a certain type of filmgoer. Continue reading...

Aims to increase proportion of women and underrepresented minorities, with no African American or Hispanic staff currently in US leadership positionsTwitter has outlined its ambitions to boost the proportion of women and underrepresented minorities in its workforce, publishing targets for “a more diverse Twitter” in 2016.The social network is aiming to increase the percentage of women on its payroll to 35% that year, as well as ensuring that 16% of its tech roles and 25% of its leadership roles are filled by women. Continue reading...

‘Nothing will fox this car, not your active lifestyle, nor your ridiculous boat’Friends of mine already have the Volvo XC90, the previous incarnation, which to all intents and purposes is the same, only not so safe. (When I say “not so safe”, that is within the margin of “extremely safe: I would look as safe to an inhabitant of the 80s or 90s as a Bugaboo would look to a person on a ski lift”.) The new version has its sensors and its autobraking, its blind spot information system, its cross traffic alert (a lane discipline feature, basically) and its intelligent cruise control, which effectively enables you not only to stop driving but also to go to sleep. It’s a progressive version of the mega-car, cocooning its inhabitants but paying more than lip service to the fact that it is also nice not to kill cyclists.Back to my friends – I asked them what they thought of the previous model, and the man said: “This is really a criticism of myself more than the car – when all you ever do is drive two miles down a gentle hill, and then two miles back up, this is the worst car imaginable.” The woman said: “I like the automatic tailgate, it’s designed so you can sit on it and take your wellies off. But when all you ever walk on is pavement…” It’s not an urban car, or if you think it is – you see them everywhere – then you’re not an urban person. Continue reading...

Matt Brittin praises station for going to the right places for its audience and securing 2 million subscribers on YouTube

Biderman to step down as CEO of infidelity website as third leak of emails is released and company pledges to restore service to membersThe chief executive of extramarital affairs website Ashley Madison has left the company after a third leak of emails and suggestions that he had affairs despite earlier denials.“Effective today, Noel Biderman, in mutual agreement with the company, is stepping down as Chief Executive Officer of Avid Life Media Inc (ALM) and is no longer with the company,” said an unattributed statement on the Ashley Madison website. “Until the appointment of a new CEO, the company will be led by the existing senior management team.”

One in seven people worldwide used the social network on one day this week, says Mark Zuckerberg. Here is how it has changed our lives – for better or worseOn Monday, one in seven people on Earth used Facebook – 1 billion people, according to founder Mark Zuckerberg. In a decade, the social network has transformed people’s relationships, privacy, their businesses, the news media, helped topple regimes and even changed the meaning of everyday words.“A more open and connected world is a better world. It brings stronger relationships with those you love, a stronger economy with more opportunities, and a stronger society that reflects all of our values,” wrote Zuckerberg in the post announcing the numbers. Continue reading...

Matt Brittin cites newspapers’ failure to grasp impact internet companies would have on business and says producers should take advantage of web’s growthGoogle’s European boss has warned that the TV industry risks repeating the mistakes of newspapers by trying to “protect the past from the future”.Matt Brittin told the Guardian Edinburgh International Television Festival that the “Edinburgh bubble” and debates over the BBC reminded him of how newspapers failed to grasp how companies like Google would affect their businesses. A former Olympic rower, Brittin had first-hand experience of the internet’s impact on newspapers as an executive at Trinity Mirror before joining Google in 2007. Continue reading...

A selection of educationally-focused apps that shows there’s more to iOS and Android for children than gamesThe summer holidays are either over or nearly over depending where your child is in the world. Parents are breathing a sigh of relief at the prospect of making a cup of tea without being screamed at / bundled into / forced to referee an over-aggressive game of split-screen Minecraft.And their children? They’re back at school learning, then coming home every night eager to continue the education on whatever devices at hand. Or, alternatively, to continue eagerly smashing one another’s blocky windows. Continue reading...

Paul Buccieri, president of US channel, says issue is bigger than ever, with increase in digital making problem more difficult to deal withPiracy is a bigger issue than ever for the TV industry, despite it being talked about less, according to one of the US’s top cable executives.Paul Buccieri, president of US channels A+E and History, told the Guardian Edinburgh International Television Festival that the industry needs to keep up its efforts to tackle people illegally watching content. Continue reading...

It may not live up to financial analysts’ high expectations but sales are six times bigger than nearest competitor making it the best selling smartwatch in historyApple sold 3.6m Watches in the second quarter of this year, but compared to the 40m sales estimates, does that make the company’s first smartwatch a flop?

The electronic band are translating their striking live 3D and surround sound performances to Blu-Ray formatKraftwerk have confirmed details of a “3D album” – translating their current visual show into a release scheduled for autumn 2015.

What happens when our maps get gamified? A team at Ordnance Survey decided to find out – and created a Minecraft map of Great Britain

New iPhones are expected at Apple’s 9 September event, but as the competition improves and phones last longer the next upgrade has its work cut out for itApple is expected to launch a pair of new iPhones at its 9 September event in San Francisco, and along with it a renewed push for its Siri and HomeKit features.But if Apple intends its devices to become the central hubs of people’s connected homes, or even just to persuade customers to upgrade, what does the company need to get right with its iPhone 6s and 6s Plus? Continue reading...

‘It turns out that nearly one in five photos or videos people post aren’t in the square format,’ admits Facebook subsidiary, with eye on video adsInstagram built its community of 300 million users around a simple rule: every photo or video that they shared using its app would be square. Now the Facebook subsidiary is ditching that policy.The app’s latest update introduces portrait and landscape options for both photos and videos, in a move that may be aimed at encouraging more brands to run video advertisements on Instagram. Continue reading...

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

Social network hit 1bn user milestone on Monday, but Mark Zuckerberg maintains it is still ‘just the beginning of connecting the whole world’As the fictional Sean Parker might put it: ‘A million people logging in to Facebook on a single day isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion people’.The non-fictional Mark Zuckerberg has announced a new milestone for the social network: one billion daily users. Continue reading...

Twitter’s six-second looping videos app will now help users add music to their clips: but for artists this means promotion not paymentsVine has already been a launchpad to stardom for musicians like Shawn Mendes, whose six-second loops on Twitter’s video-sharing app propelled him to a major record deal, chart-topping sales and a tour with Taylor Swift.Where Mendes and fellow Viners Jack & Jack and Us the Duo have blazed a trail, other musicians are following. Now Vine is making music even more of a priority with new features within its app. Continue reading...

The company is widely expected to unveil the iPhone 6S and the iPhone 6 Plus S, and potentially a new version of its Apple TV set-top box and a new iPadApple Inc on Thursday invited journalists to a 9 September event, where it is expected to unveil new iPhones and potentially a new version of its Apple TV set-top box.The email invitation includes a colorful Apple logo with the sentence “Hey Siri, give us a hint,” referring to Apple’s popular digital voice assistant. Continue reading...

Legal action by European commission over shopping price comparison service ‘wrong as matter of fact, law and economics’, says GoogleGoogle has described the European commission’s antitrust case against its search engine business as “wrong as a matter of fact, law and economics” in a lengthy counter submitted to the regulator.The commission’s competition policy chief, Margrethe Vestager, launched a full-scale legal attack on Google in April, accusing the company of abusing its market dominance by systematically favouring its shopping price comparison service. Continue reading...