Technology | The Guardian

From EA Sports’ NCAA Football to the classic Tecmo Bowl, we run down half a dozen classic sports video game console franchisesFor football nerds, it was a new Star Wars sequel every July. You cleared your datebook for the day it dropped, and by “cleared,” we mean excavated. A night. A week. A month. Whatever. The second-biggest compliment you can give NCAA Football is that, for a generation, it isolated you from the concepts of sunrise, sunset, responsibility, loved ones, hygiene or real life, a black hole of bliss, one of the singular greatest and most pleasurable time-sucks of the new millennia. If the zombie apocalypse upstairs coincided with a rivalry game or the prizing of a 5-star high-school quarterback with the kind of wheels that’d make Michael Vick look like Cory Sauter, the undead would have to wait. You have an Outback Bowl to win. Continue reading...

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

Survey reveals the moral dilemma of programming autonomous vehicles: should they hit pedestrians or avoid and risk the lives of occupants?There’s a chance it could bring the mood down. Having chosen your shiny new driverless car, only one question remains on the order form: whether your spangly, futuristic vehicle be willing to kill you?To buyers more accustomed to talking models and colours, the query might sound untoward. But for manufacturers of autonomous vehicles (AVs), the dilemma it poses is real. If a driverless car is about to hit a pedestrian, should it swerve and risk killing its occupants? Continue reading...

Faced with two deadly options the public want driverless vehicles to crash rather than hurt pedestrians – unless the vehicle in question is theirsIn catch-22 traffic emergencies where there are only two deadly options, people generally want a self-driving vehicle to, for example, avoid a group of pedestrians and instead slam itself and its passengers into a wall, a new study says. But they would rather not be travelling in a car designed to do that.The findings of the study, released on Thursday in the journal Science, highlight just how difficult it may be for auto companies to market those cars to a public that tends to contradict itself. Continue reading...

Film criticism remains ‘a heavily male pursuit’, according to a study of Rotten Tomatoes by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film

The first $10bn technology company from Europe is Finland’s Supercell, following a buyout from TencentFinland’s Supercell has become Europe’s first ever “decacorn” – that’s a technology company worth $10bn – after a buyout from Chinese internet leviathan Tencent.The deal will see Tencent and its partners secure an 84.3% stake in Supercell, best known for its Clash of Clans mobile game, paying $8.6bn (£5.78bn) for the pleasure. That values the overall company at $10.2bn, the first European technology startup to break that barrier. Continue reading...

Simon Wheatcroft was blind at 17. Yet today, he runs marathons. Here’s howLeigh Alexander delves into the incredible story of how Simon Wheatcroft, who has been legally blind since he was 17, runs marathons with the help of some particularly innovative technology. Continue reading...

Advances in artificial intelligence could give us digital immortality, distilling a lifetime’s worth of online presence into a deathless version of ourselvesWould you like a version of yourself to live on after death? A radical new concept called “augmented eternity” could make that fantasy a reality, creating a posthumous impression of our knowledge, opinions and even parts of our personality in digital form.Researchers at the MIT Media Lab and Ryerson University in Toronto believe that by applying artificial intelligence to all the data we produce each day, we may be able to transfer our thoughts to a virtual entity that not only survives our physical demise but continues to learn as new information is plugged into it. Continue reading...

Jan is planning to buy a new laptop with an SSD that won’t have room for all her photos. How can she store them separately so that she and her husband can both view them?I store my photos on a six-year-old MacBook Pro, which still has a traditional hard drive. My next laptop will probably have a 512GB or smaller SSD, so I will need another way to store them. I would like to share a database with my husband, so we can store family and travel photos from phones and cameras. I’m still uncomfortable with the thought of all my family photos being online somewhere, which I accept may be a little illogical as I do use cloud back up for other items.

It’s Call of Duty v Battlefield 1 on YouTube, while classic first person shooter Doom has an awkward returnRelated: God of War, Spider-Man and Resident Evil 7 star in Sony's busy E3 press eventDespite the sophistication of their products, video game publishers are just as susceptible as less technically inclined brands to finding their carefully organised media coverage turning on them. This month, the trailer for upcoming game of drones and shooting people Call Of Duty: Infinite Warfare became the second most disliked video in YouTube history, while fellow online first-person shooter, Battlefield 1 became one of the 150 most liked. Continue reading...

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

Lawmakers used live-stream video app Periscope and Facebook Live to broadcast their protest over gun control, in what TV network calls ‘a first’Lawmakers turned to Periscope and Facebook Live to broadcast a sit-in protest in the House of Representatives on Wednesday after the Speaker’s office switched off the TV cameras inside the chamber.

Ride-sharing service directly competes with maxi-cabs with vehicles that seat up to six despite increases in fines and penaltiesUber has thumbed its nose at the Queensland government’s crackdown on illegal ride-sharing businesses by launching a service in direct opposition to maxi-cabs.Uber has emailed its customers to announce the launch of UberXL, which gives access to vehicles that seat up to six, and the ride-sharing service claims is up to 30% cheaper than a maxi taxi. Continue reading...

Medical journal reports that two women experience ‘transient smartphone blindness’ after constantly checking phones in the darkWarning: Looking at your smartphone while lying in bed at night could wreak havoc on your vision.Two women went temporarily blind from constantly checking their phones in the dark, say doctors who are now alerting others to the unusual phenomenon. Continue reading...

A celebratory Instagram post by Mark Zuckerberg revealed that the Facebook CEO covers his webcam to make it hacker-proof. What other useful tricks can the titans of big tech teach us?

This is a thought-provoking manifesto for a ‘connected world’, a suggested agreement on how we disagree. But is freedom of expression what Garton Ash says it is?

The one-hour delivery service’s launch on Thursday threatens small shops and quality of life for locals, says mayorThe mayor of Paris has promised to be “intransigent vis-a-vis Amazon” after the US retail company launched its same-day delivery service, Prime Now, in the French capital with less than a week’s notice.In a statement released on Sunday the mayor, Anne Hidalgo, said: “While this operation is likely to seriously destabilise the balance of Parisian trade, this large American company saw fit to inform the City of Paris just days before its launch.” Continue reading...

The developer of Banjo Kazooie returns to its roots with this imaginative open-seas pirate game featuring cannons, grog and accordion jamsThe crew are below deck when the battle starts. Unbeknown to them, another galleon has drawn up alongside and is now pummelling their ship with cannon fire. They know they should race up and into their battle positions, they know this is the only way to defend their craft. But there’s a problem. They’re all drunk. And besides, this accordion rendition of Ride of the Valkyries isn’t going to finish itself.Welcome to Sea of Thieves, a multiplayer pirate yarn that lead designer Mike Chapman brilliantly describes as a “shared world adventure game” ... or SWAG. Players take to their ships, form crews with their friends, and then head out onto the vast open ocean, searching for treasure-stuffed islands. There will be sea monsters to face, and a variety of journey quests to discover, some quick, some epic in scope. But there is no over-arching narrative; just a world to ransack. Continue reading...

In a pilot study influential incubator Y Combinator will hand over cash monthly to 100 families in Oakland, California. What’s UBI’s payoff for tech entrepreneurs?Silicon Valley has, paradoxically, become one of the most vocal proponents of universal basic income (UBI). Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, web guru Tim O’Reilly and a cadre of other Silicon Valley denizens have expressed support for the “social vaccine of the 21st century”, and influential incubator Y Combinator announced on 31 May that it will be conducting its own basic income experiment with a pilot study of 100 families in Oakland, California – a short hop over the San Francisco bay.Y Combinator will give each family between $1,000 and $2,000 a month, for between six months to a year, to be spent on anything anywhere. Oakland, as Y Combinator says, is “a city of great social and economic diversity, and it has both concentrated wealth and considerable inequality”. It might earn the tech sector some goodwill from locals suffering Oakland’s gentrification by invading techies, but Y Combinator also hopes to collect valuable data from the pilot on how to implement, manage and scale further UBI initiatives. Continue reading...

Does covering his laptop camera and microphone with tape make Facebook’s boss paranoid, or are they really after him? Probably a bit of bothDon’t worry, Mark Zuckerberg: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you. And as the richest millennial in the world, you can probably be confident that someone, somewhere, is after you.Which is why it makes perfect sense that you’ve joined the growing number of people doing a little DIY hardware hacking, and disabling their computer’s webcam and microphone. Even if a sneaky hacker does manage to penetrate your security, they’re not going to be seeing you in your tighty whities. Continue reading...

Threat to ‘kill your kids and grandkids’ was tweeted to Labour MP following her campaigning for the remain campYvette Cooper has said that she has informed police and Twitter about a tweet in which a user threatened to kill her children and grandchildren.The Labour MP, who has been campaigning for a remain vote in this week’s EU referendum, posted an image on Tuesday of the tweet, which was sent from an account which had been suspended on Tuesday night and accused her of issuing propaganda. Continue reading...

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

Forever Project in Nottingham records elderly survivors answering 1,500 questions from children on Nazi eraWhen she was nine Janine Webber lived in a hole in the ground. She was there for a year. There was little room to move, no fresh air or daylight and nothing to eat apart from crusts of bread and raw onions. By then she had already lost to the Holocaust her father, mother, brother and grandmother.Against all odds the little Jewish girl survived. Now, at almost 84, she knows the days are numbered. The living memory of Europe’s darkest days is fading as Jews who escaped the Nazis and emerged from the death camps pass away.

Attitudes in the Middle East are changing – and women leading by example in the tech and games sectors are claiming an important roleIf you left your country of birth in the midst of a war and found yourself in a promising career at Google, you’d be forgiven for staying put. But Lara Noujaim had other ideas. The business graduate travelled from Lebanon to California in 2006 and, after completing an MBA at Santa Clara University, she found work in America’s thriving tech sector, joining Google as a Data Evaluator in 2010. Three years later, however, she gave it up to pursue a very different ambition: she wanted to help create a games industry back home.“I could have stayed and built a career in the States, but I’m a very patriotic person, we all are in Lebanon,” she says. “The games industry didn’t exist, I came home to be part of creating it. I wanted to give something back.”

The Hyperloop, first envisioned by Tesla Motors’ Elon Musk, involves using magnets to levitate pods to shuttle people and cargo inside an airless tubeMoscow has signed an agreement with Los Angeles-based company Hyperloop One to explore building a futuristic, high-speed transportation system known as a Hyperloop in the Russian capital.

Casey Nocket banned from all US national parks and sentenced to 200 hours of community service after users on Reddit tracked her down through social mediaA graffiti artist has been banned from all national parks and other federally administered land – that’s more than 20% of the US – for vandalism after Reddit users tracked her down on social media.Casey Nocket was also sentenced to 200 hours of community service and a fine for drawing faces in acrylic paint in at least six national parks: Death Valley, Colorado National Monument, Canyonlands, Zion and Crater Lake. Continue reading...

The Obama administration has green-lit commercial drones so long as they stay within sight of a pilot – which isn’t exactly what companies had in mindIn the not-too-distant future, Amazon could use a drone to deliver a package from a country warehouse all the way to … a nearby farm.And that, the government said on Tuesday, is about it. Continue reading...

Company begins paying out more than $400m to customers who were overcharged for ebooks

A new app will detect incoming texts from a person you’re hoping to cease all communication with and send unenthusiatic automated responsesRejecting unwanted suitors over text is an awkward challenge for a generation of online daters. So why not outsource the thorny interaction to a robot?Ghostbot will detect incoming texts from the person you’ve chosen to “ghost” – a modern (and cowardly) dating trend that involves ceasing all communication with an unwanted suitor – and send automated responses, lacking in warmth of enthusiasm, until the other person takes the hint. Continue reading...

Milestone hailed by photo-sharing app’s founder, who says huge user growth is signal of company’s ambitionThe photo-sharing app Instagram now has 550 million users, reaping the benefits from the growth of selfies and the propensity for celebrities such as Kim Kardashian to share images with a wider audience.Launched in 2010, it was bought by Facebook for $1bn (£680m) when it had 30 million users. Continue reading...

Legislation will permit security services to hack all phones and laptops in an entire town, as long as it is overseas

Online retailer is quietly rooting out sellers who do not hold UK VAT numbers to guard against HMRC’s new tax evasion powersAmazon is quietly rooting out many of its Chinese traders who do not hold UK VAT numbers to try to protect itself from tax evasion inquiries later this year when new HMRC powers come into force, the Guardian has learned.The online retailer has been conducting a review of sellers’ VAT compliance in the UK. It is understood to have contacted many Chinese sellers, giving them until the end of the month to provide their VAT numbers. Continue reading...

Cyber-security expert Etay Maor talks to Olly Mann and takes a look at the underbelly of the internetEtay Maor, a cyber-security advisor at IBM, talks to Olly Mann about the darknet, the shady underside to the web. The two look at what lives there, including automatic guns, marijuana and fake passports.

Beeban Kidron says technology companies cannot continue prioritising freedom of expression over safeguarding young people

The adaptation of the computer game bombed in the US and has been panned by critics – but has grossed more than $378m so far. So who’s paying to watch?Name: Warcraft: The Beginning.Appearance: Lots of monsters and warriors with cool costumes but no sense of humour. Continue reading...

The driving series hits Australia, bringing 350 new cars to a map twice the size of Forza Horizon 2. But to understand its technical ambition, you’ve got to look upAt the E3 games conference two years ago, the creative director of Forza Horizon, Ralph Fulton, was trying to communicate the visual beauty of the game’s sequel. During a demo session for journalists, he explained how road surfaces in the game would gather rain water after a storm, and that the resulting puddle would be truly reflective, mirroring the chassis of passing cars, and reflecting sunlight.It was a teeny detail but it spoke volumes about developer Playground Games and the studio’s obsession with sleek aesthetics. For the third title, which takes the open-world driving festival to Australia, they’ve rather outdone that boast, which now seems rather quaint in comparison. Continue reading...

Logging into Google should be a lot faster and less irritating using one-tap push notifications instead of fiddly codes to verify your username and passwordUsing two-step authentication, normally a code from an app or texted to you, is a crucial, but highly irritating, part of logging into all manner of things.

The I Sea app claimed to help people call lifeboats to refugees by locating their vessels, but actually showed static images of the seaAn app which purported to offer aid to refugees lost in the Mediterranean has been pulled from Apple’s App Store after it was revealed as a fake.The I Sea app, which also won a Bronze medal at the Cannes Lions conference on Monday night, presented itself as a tool to help report refugees lost at sea, using real-time satellite footage to identify boats in trouble and highlighting their location to the Malta-based Migrant Offshore Aid Station (Moas), which would provide help. Continue reading...

Chrome may be the most popular web browser but it can be a beast. Here are some tips to help stop it bringing your PC or Mac to a crawlMany would say Chrome is the best browser out there. It’s certainly the most popular, used by more than half of the online world. But it’s a beast that can slow your computer to a crawl if left unchecked.Multiple tabs, dodgy extensions and over-active plugins can leave you feeling like you’re using Windows 3.1 on a pre-Pentium 486, without the turbo switched on. Continue reading...

Writer and Times columnist says Twitter needs to ‘grow up’ and tackle abuse against womenCaitlin Moran, the author and Times columnist, has called on Twitter and other social media platforms to do something about abuse against women.The award-winning writer said on Tuesday that Twitter could afford to “hire three people” to tackle threats against women if it aimed to be the place to be for global debate. Continue reading...

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

The new Bluetooth headphones from Bose shut out the noisy world around you and fill your mind with sweet music, without the need for wiresBose headphones are held up as the gold standard for active noise cancelling and demand a premium for it. But can the US company’s new QC35 model, its first Bluetooth noise-cancelling headphones, live up to expectations? Continue reading...

Christopher Nelson, a former Liberal party member from the central coast of New South Wales, pleads guilty to using Facebook to send offensive messagesA 64-year-old man from the New South Wales central coast has pleaded guilty to posting racist and offensive online messages to the outgoing Labor senator Nova Peris.Chris Nelson, a chiropractor, pleaded guilty at the Woy Woy local court on Tuesday to one count of using a carriage service to offend. Continue reading...

Pets come out for rival leave and remain campaigns in viral referendum memeAn alliance ranging from the prime minister to the assembled might of leading British business figures have already unleashed their combined firepower against the case for a UK withdrawal from the European Union.Now, in what might yet earn the moniker of “Project Feline”, comes the latest onslaught against those urging a referendum leave vote: #CatsAgainstBrexit. Continue reading...

Charity reveals more than 3,000 cyber-enabled sexual crimes were committed against children in past year

Lockable pouches created by startup Yondr were given out at a recent Alicia Keys concert to get people to pay attention to the music instead of recording itLast month singer Adele singled out a concertgoer for using a video camera instead of living in the moment and experiencing the gig.The 28-year-old pop star pointed to a woman in the crowd and said: “Could you stop filming me with that video camera? Because I’m really here in real life, you can enjoy it in real life rather than through your camera.”

A man in Almaty, Kazakhstan, drives a Tesla Model S into floodwater and uses the thrust from the wheels to propel it forward, through the water, and back onto dry land. Tesla Motors have said they don’t recommend it Continue reading...

Developer EA Dice thrilled fans when it announced the Battlefield series is returning to historical conflict. The E3 demo suggests it was the right decisionFor almost 10 years, a small group of staff within the EA Dice development studio have been pitching a first world war version of Battlefield. During that time, the military shooter series was moving inexorably in the other direction, toward more and more technologically advanced scenarios. But after Battlefield 4, the heads of the studio looked at the latest version of the pitch, and gave it some thought.“When we came out of Battlefield 4, we knew we wanted to challenge ourselves creatively, and to challenge the player a little bit more,” says the senior producer, Aleksander Grøndal. “When I first saw the first world war pitch I had some initial reservations, but after putting it through various iterations, they had done a good job of removing my worries. I saw the opportunities and started researching the war myself. The more I learned, the more I realised this was what we needed to do.” Continue reading...

New emojis including chopsticks and curling stones will be released in latest version of Unicode, but one dropped off the listAt least eight new emoji will be arriving in 2017, including chopsticks, curling stones and dumplings, but one that won’t be coming to smartphones any time soon is the rifle emoji.The gun had been proposed as part of a set of new icons representing winter sports (as was the curling stone emoji and a sled emoji, both of which have been approved). Rifles are used in the biathlon, which combines cross-country skiing and shooting at a target. Continue reading...

Y Combinator will give up to 100 people money for basic needs but tech incubator with deep pockets leaves some in Oakland questioning leadershipThe Black Panther party began experimenting with “survival programs” in its hometown of Oakland, California, nearly 50 years ago. Programs like Free Breakfast for Children side-stepped government bureaucracy and directly provided people with food, clothing, healthcare and schooling.Fast forward to 2016, and the wealthy capitalists behind Y Combinator could not be more different than the Marxist-Leninist black revolutionaries. But on 31 May, Silicon Valley’s premier startup incubator announced a project that in some ways recalls the radical experiments of the 1960s and 70s. Continue reading...