Technology | The Guardian

Internet retailer will suck up the costs of in-app purchases on customers’ behalf, paying developers $0.002 per minute their apps are usedIn-app purchases may have become the dominant way for developers to make money from charging for their apps, but Amazon’s new app takes a sledgehammer to the model.Well, in a sense. Amazon Underground is an app for Android smartphones that offers a catalogue of apps and games with their in-app purchases all reduced to zero. Users can still “buy” virtual currency and items, but Amazon will pay for them – touting an “actually free” slogan. Continue reading...

More than 75m PCs were upgraded to Windows 10 in the first month, and readers still have questions about installation disks, product keys, downgrading and more Continue reading...

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

The trend for uploading holiday photos on social media has led one travel company to include a personal photographer to document your trip and deliver a daily supply of Instagram-friendly images for you to share onlineIt’s difficult not to feel insecure scrolling through the Instagram feed of El Camino Travel. Svelte, well-dressed travellers dance in front of brightly painted doorways on Latin American streets, plunge into crystal clear waters, and generally look like they’re having a better holiday than you ever will. They’re certainly having a more beautiful one.Still, it’s easier to look good when you’ve got a personal photographer in tow – and El Camino includes a professional snapper as part of the package on its small group tours in Colombia and Nicaragua. The photographer will deliver dozens of images to you each morning that “you can immediately share on social media”. Launched last year and with tours already sold out for 2015, it’s one of a growing number of travel companies capitalising on the desire among travellers to capture their trip in stunning photographs and, perhaps more significantly, share them online. Continue reading...

Autonomous vehicles capable of driving using GPS waypoints or following human-driven vehicles will be part of roadworkers’ fleet

Despite 50m downloads of Angry Birds 2 game, 38% headcount reduction aims to help ‘leaner and more agile’ company recover from over-expansionAngry Birds creator Rovio Entertainment is preparing for another round of layoffs, announcing plans for up to 260 redundancies following the departure of 110 staff in late 2014.The new layoffs will be accompanied by a previously-announced focus on games, media and consumer products, which seemingly spells the end for the company’s efforts in the education sector. Continue reading...

Online games sites breached UK advertising standards on social responsibility, as well as direct exhortation and parental authority, rules watchdog

Service aims to help Google-owned video streaming company compete for live gaming audience after it failed to buy market leader

From wall runs to underwater shoot-outs, developer Treyarch has sought to up-end the game’s multiplayer experience. Here’s what a pro player makes of the changesTreyarch, the LA-based studio behind the Call of Duty: Black Ops series, first revealed its plans for the third game in the series back in April. At the time, the setup looked like an intriguing extension of the tech-focused Advanced Warfare, with its exoskeletons, directed energy weapons and jet pack manoeuvres. However, Treyarch was promising an even more fluid experience, complete with wall running, underwater fights, and the ability to string together moves into Tony Hawk-like environmental combos.The studio also introduced the idea of Specialist classes, a selection of nine super-powered combat archetypes offering online players access to a range of devastating attacks as well as interesting defensive options. These effects can be earned during a match and then triggered at key moments – just like the eponymous mech suits in Titanfall. Continue reading...

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

Authorities in Gastonia, North Carolina, have been unable to determine source of photos that have gone viral: ‘We don’t know if someone is playing around’Images of a cloaked figure who reportedly dropped raw meat near an apartment complex in North Carolina last week went viral and frightened local residents enough that police looked into the matter.

Paula Hawkins’ bestseller leads a crop of psychological thrillers, in a top 20 dominated by womenDark psychological thrillers dominate the list of the year’s bestselling ebooks unveiled by Amazon, with MP Nadine Dorries making it into a line-up composed almost entirely of female writers.The British arm of the online retail giant said that Paula Hawkins’ hit novel The Girl on the Train, a thriller about marriage, murder and alcoholism, was its bestselling ebook of the year to date. Just two of Amazon.co.uk’s bestselling ebooks of 2015 so far are by male writers: Lee Child’s thriller Personal, in 10th place, and David Nicholls’ story of a crumbling marriage, Us, in 12th. Continue reading...

Venture capitalists and market analysts warn that Chinese ripple effect could force tech startup ‘unicorns’ to settle for buyouts instead of going publicSilicon Valley startups basking in billion-dollar valuations may face a long-overdue reckoning as a result of the global panic set off by roiling Chinese markets, investors and analysts have warned.

Former Top Gear trio ‘won’t be getting mobbed’ in their home country after their move to ‘Amazon Past Their Prime’, claims journalist and ex-CNN presenter

Court ordered ban on page about charas, an Indian form of hashish, but some Russian users found entire site blocked due to secure https protocolRussian authorities briefly banned the entire Wikipedia site over a page relating to drug use which the site had refused to edit or delete.The ban was quickly lifted on Tuesday, before it had even gone into effect for most Russian internet users but not before the news had created a wave of panic in the country’s online community. There is increasing concern in Russia about a crackdown on internet freedom. Continue reading...

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

Plaintiff says Avid Life Media, owner of adultery website, could have taken ‘necessary and reasonable precautions’ to keep customers’ data safeRelated: Toronto police report two suicides associated with Ashley Madison hackThe infidelity website Ashley Madison and its parent company are being sued in US federal court by a man who claims that the companies caused him emotional damage by failing to adequately protect personal and financial information from theft. Continue reading...

If bill is signed by governor, it will be a trespass violation to fly unmanned aircraft or drones over private property below 350ft without consent of owner or tenantCalifornia lawmakers have sided with privacy advocates to pass a bill that bans drones from flying lower than 350ft (106m) over private property.If the bill is signed by Governor Jerry Brown it will create a no-fly zone and make it a trespass violation for someone to fly an unmanned aircraft or drone over private property below 350ft without the consent of the owner or tenant. Continue reading...

Joseph Cannataci describes British oversight as ‘a joke’ and says a Geneva convention for the internet is neededThe first UN privacy chief has said the world needs a Geneva convention style law for the internet to safeguard data and combat the threat of massive clandestine digital surveillance.Speaking to the Guardian weeks after his appointment as the UN special rapporteur on privacy, Joseph Cannataci described British surveillance oversight as being “a joke”, and said the situation is worse than anything George Orwell could have foreseen. Continue reading...

Toronto police say at least two suicides may be linked to the hacking of infidelity website Ashley Madison which exposed exposed tens of millions of people’s personal information. Bryce Evans, acting staff superintendent, says the reports are still unconfirmed but possibly associated with the leak. Evans also details threatening messages sent to the site’s administrators, including the message ‘Time’s Up’, as the information was released Continue reading...

Tech companies valued at £1bn or more, once as rare as unicorns, are increasingly common – raising fears of another dotcom bubbleName: Unicorns.Age: About two. Continue reading...

Businesses have been shedding their identity as employers for at least 30 years, profiting from the work performed by ‘independent contractors’ without the cost, risk or aggravation of actually dealing with employeesWhining about cab drivers transcends national boundaries. From New York to Sydney, the complaints are indistinguishable. Sitting among 450 of the world’s leading labour law scholars at the University of Amsterdam in June, I met a young Belgian scholar who confided that he only used Uber because it provided a superior service. “I never use Belgian cab drivers,” he said. “They are fucking pigs.”

Chief executive of Swiss watchmaking group says its smartwatches will last nine months per battery and not collect user dataThe chief executive of watchmaking corporation Swatch has dismissed the Apple Watch as an “interesting toy”, as he set out the company’s smartwatch plans.

Company blames bad iSight camera component but says that only ‘a small percentage’ of devices are affectedIf you’ve had a run of blurry photos taken with an iPhone 6 Plus smartphone, the problem may not be your photographic skills.Apple has launched a camera replacement programme for the device after a number of owners complained about the quality of photos taken using its iSight camera. Continue reading...

Group that archives deleted tweets from legislators has its access to social network shut offTwitter has shut off access to 31 accounts that chronicled and archived the deleted tweets of politicians, diplomats and embassies around the world.The move follows the social network’s earlier blocking of Politwoops US, which archived deleted tweets by American lawmakers. Continue reading...

The place to talk about games and other things that matterIt’s Monday. I’m actually on holiday in Devon, but I will keep Chatterbox going anyway because I am a wonderful person. Continue reading...

The communications minister maintains earlier figures were known to be unreliable as they were based on inadequate financial informationThe costs of building Australia’s largest infrastructure project, the national broadband network, could rise by as much as $15bn according to a new corporate plan released on Monday.The communications minister, Malcolm Turnbull, acknowledged the forecast costs associated with the project had risen as he released the new corporate plan of the NBN Co – the company overseeing the rollout. Continue reading...

A revamped classic fails to measure up while a box set brings 30 of Rare’s best titles together – and the latest in a long-running serial cannot fail to please

Two men suspected of making social media threats stopped trying to enter competition in Boston, and guns and ammunition susequently foundBoston police have arrested two men heading to the Pokémon world championships after firearms and several hundred rounds of ammunition were allegedly found in their car.The men were originally suspected of making violent social media threats to people attending the gaming event in Boston. Security at the convention reported the threats on Thursday and the suspects were stopped as they were about to enter the gaming event hours later, Boston police said. Continue reading...

Users complain about load times and third-party scripts, but if ad-blocking continues to rise, what happens to the web’s business model?As you’ve probably heard, the “infidelity” website Ashley Madison (motto: “Life is short. Have an affair”) has been hacked and the personal details of its 33 million users have been dumped on the internet, with predictable results. Reckoning that it’s the kind of story that is made for tabloid news outlets, I logged on to Mail Online, and sure enough, they did it proud.Mail Online is one of the world’s most popular news websites and it’s free: no paywall. But my browser has a plug-in program called Ghostery, which will scan any web page you visit and tell you how many “third-party trackers” it has found on it. These are small pieces of code that advertisers and ad-brokers place on pages or in cookies in order to monitor what you’re doing on the web and where you’ve been before hitting the current page. Continue reading...

Driving this extraordinary stripped-back little sports model is like sitting on a rocket. And about as comfortable …Price £27,790

Last week’s revelations of the lengths Amazon goes to monitor staff come amid growing evidence that thousands of other companies are using technology to check on workersActivity-tracking devices made by companies like Fitbit, Jawbone and Misfit are increasingly popular gadget purchases, but they’re also making their way into the workplace: research firm Gartner estimates that 10,000 companies offered activity-trackers to staff in 2014. Their motivation is being questioned, however: will your boss have access to the data from these devices? (Imagine your annual review including criticism of your sofa-loafing nature at weekends). And will they share it with advertisers or insurance companies? Continue reading...

A Microsoft product called Yammer was open to anyone who’d ever been a contractor or an employee at the Department of Veterans AffairsA chat network used by staff at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) was a major security risk and open to anyone who had ever been a contractor or an employee at the VA, an internal investigation found.According to the VA’s Office of the Inspector General the chat software, a Microsoft product called Yammer, “did not have an administrator or system set in place to ensure removal of former VA or contractor employees”. Only an administrator could remove an employee from the system, so everyone who had ever logged maintained access to the service.

The current table-gaming renaissance boasts some of the best designers in the world. Digital games can’t let these inventions slip them byTwo years ago, when I left video games criticism to work full-time in table top games, a lot of people, my mum chief among them, were startled.These days, it’s easy to explain. Board game cafes are springing up all over the world, and investors are pouring millions into the industry.

This week 33 million records of people who had used a website for secret affairs had their names and identifying details leaked online by hackers. We spoke to five people for whom the hack has had profound personal ramificationsI joined Ashley Madison this year, during a very, very stressful period, both personally and professionally. But my intentions were never actually to meet another woman, and I quickly realised that this was not going to be a good way of meeting new people.In total, I used the site for a single month, getting almost zero responses. Once I realised that it was going nowhere, and that I would have never left my family behind, I decided to just quit. So I paid my €19 (£15) to get rid of everything, deleted the mobile app and removed everything: email accounts, messages, etc. Continue reading...

A press report detailing an allegedly soulless, dystopian workplace at the online retailer generated headlines but has had minimal impact on the bottom lineA dark and lengthy exposé of the work culture of Amazon, the world’s most powerful online retailer echoed round the world last week. The article, in the New York Times, made Amazon sound like the Hunger Games crossed with 1984. The sick and the pregnant fell by the wayside, trampled on by colleagues who are encouraged to snitch on co-workers. Only the meanest survived.A tidal wave of think pieces followed along with calls for a boycott. Dr Evil himself – Amazon founder Jeff Bezos – was forced to speak out and claim such behavior was anathema to himself and the company. But a week on, the reaction from shoppers and – perhaps more importantly – Wall Street and the tech community is a big “meh”. Continue reading...

‘It has a huge amount riding on the affections of people who would prefer to be on a motorbike, or MDMA’I feel bad mentioning it, because it’s not the brand’s fault when a person crashes a car: but the car crashes in the news recently, the ones that left several injured or involved a mountain, often seem to have featured a Seat Leon (not always the Cupra, though, which is the hottest of the Leons, my ST280 the hottest of the hot, at 276bhp).In the UK we’d call the size the “small family car” and be led to wonder what kind of family would like to drive it; in Europe, it’s a C-segment, small but not the smallest, and it recalls the time in a person’s life when they like to fill their car with friends. Your 20s, in other words; not your 30s – by then, your friends have their own cars, or you have dropped them, and anyway, you are all too drunk to drive. Continue reading...

More than 800 user profiles in hacked details from the Ashley Madison infidelity website used Australian government email addressesThe chief of the defence force, Air Chief Marshal Mark Binskin, has warned the alleged hack of personal information from the Ashley Madison infidelity website, including that of defence personnel, is unlikely to be an isolated event.Related: Ashley Madison hack: five people on getting caught up in the data breach Continue reading...

Controversial taxi app’s revenues double every six months according to unverified investor report but profit figures still remain shrouded in secrecyUber’s global bookings are projected to more than treble to $10.8bn (£6.9bn) this year and reach $26.1bn the next, according to an investors’ presentation that indicates a flotation for the ride-hailing business by 2017.The taxi app, which operates in more than 50 countries, keeps 20% of booking revenue, according to the confidential slideshow, obtained by Reuters. Based on those figures, 2015 revenue would be around $2bn. Continue reading...

Online dating has gone mainstream, but what about expanding your social circle? Here’s how to make virtual friendships work IRLI don’t know how much wine I’d had when I offered to marry Nathan, an American living in Berlin whom I had never met. The time stamp on our Facebook chat history says my proposal occurred at 7.23pm one Friday in January, so hopefully not too much. The (non-serious) offer of marriage was friendly rather than romantic: Nathan and I have a similar sense of humour and marrying me would allow him to remain in the EU without having to navigate the complicated bureaucracy of German visa applications. He politely declined.True, we’d never met in real life, but that has never been much of a problem for me. Most of the new friends I have made in the past two years, since moving to London, I have initially encountered online. Continue reading...

Music streaming service asks to access contacts, photos and GPS locations from user mobiles as it tries to personalise its serviceThe chief executive of music service Spotify has apologised to users after anger over sweeping changes to its privacy policy that give the company much greater access to personal data on users’ phones.As well as collecting personal information, such as email addresses and birthdays, Spotify will be able to sift though users’ contacts, collect their photos and in some cases, even check their location and determine how quickly they are moving. Depending on the device being used, Spotify said it may be able to collect sensor data, such as “data about the speed of your movements, such as whether you are running, walking, or in transit”. Continue reading...

Summer camps such as one at Georgetown university in the US aim to encourage more teenage girls into computer coding careersThe group of high school girls sat before a potted plant with wires running down the sides. India Bhalla-Ladd, 15, fiddled with a button on the broadboard, a pegboard for electronic devices. With each press, a different plant type appeared on a black-and-white screen – veggie, flower, and the one she eventually landed on: succulent.That morning, in a Georgetown University classroom, the toggling device for their project was acting up. They had to troubleshoot a plant. Continue reading...

With the new season well underway, here’s a handpicked selection of apps and games for fans of the beautiful gameFootball: bloody hell! After a summer of Fifa shenanigans, it’s good to be back in the swing of the club season.Jose Mourinho is scowling and firing his blamecannon; Arsenal have a dodgy keeper; Sunderland are making my school team (1997-98 season: played one, lost one, scored two, let in 14) look like Barcelona; mascots are giving children nightmares… It’s like the beautiful game never went away. Continue reading...

As a woman working in the male-dominated gaming industry, I realised that sexism is still rife. And it’s not just the trolls who are to blameThe terrible one-year anniversary of Gamergate is nearly here, and the women that make your games are war-weary, exhausted by a cultural battle that we never asked for. We are professionals trying to do our job, screamed at by children who don’t want girls in their clubhouse.Elizabeth Sampat is one of these professionals. She’s a game designer at PopCap, one of the most successful studios in the world. In the aftermath of Gamergate, she’s struggling with an ethical dilemma. She’s uncomfortable asking girls to enter the game industry, knowing the abuse they will inevitably face. “I will no longer participate in encouraging young women and girls to become game industry professionals,” wrote Sampat in a popular Facebook post. “I will continue to fight tooth and nail for every woman who is currently here. But until the industry and gaming culture improves, it’s unethical.” Continue reading...

The place to talk about games and other things that matterIt’s Friday! Today’s screenshot is from Lucky’s Tale, the visually impressive virtual reality platformer from Playful Corp. Continue reading...

Investors growing increasingly concerned over Twitter’s ability to compete with Facebook after shares fall 6% to below $26 initial public offer price set in 2013Twitter shares have crashed below the price they originally sold for as investors grow increasingly concerned that the service won’t be be able to become a mainstream platform like Facebook.

Cyber-attack, pilot error and privacy issues must be considered by makers, users and insurers of unmanned aerial vehicles, according to reportA sharp escalation in the use of drones will bring increasingly complex risks from cyberattack, reckless pilots and privacy issues, a new report from the Lloyd’s of London insurance market has warned. Spending on unmanned aerial vehicles is likely to double to more than $90bn by 2024, Lloyd’s predicted, but makers and users of the machines, as well as insurers, are relatively unprepared for the emerging consequences.“Drone technology has significant potential, but is a particularly novel – and controversial – emerging technology. Insurance is expected to be a key component in the risk-management framework that will need to be developed for the systems to operate safely and with due regard to third-party interests,” it argues in the report “Drones take flight”. Continue reading...

UK data protection watchdog orders search engine to remove search result links to news stories about right to be forgotten link removalsGoogle has been ordered by the Information Commissioner’s office to remove nine links to current news stories about older reports which themselves were removed from search results under the ‘right to be forgotten’ ruling.The search engine had previously removed links relating to a 10 year-old criminal offence by an individual after requests made under the right to be forgotten ruling. Removal of those links from Google’s search results for the claimant’s name spurred new news posts detailing the removals, which were then indexed by Google’s search engine. Continue reading...