Technology | The Guardian

Report says getting 4.1 billion more people online would lift 500 million out of poverty over five yearsBringing internet access to the 4.1 billion people in the world who do not have it would increase global economic output by $6.7 trillion (£4.6tr), raising 500 million people out of poverty, according to a study by PwC.The report, titled Connecting the world: Ten mechanisms for global inclusion, was prepared for Facebook by PwC’s strategy consultants Strategy&. Continue reading...

From mid-cycle PlayStation upgrades to episodic entertainment and virtual studios, something big is happening in the way games are bought, made and soldFor 30 years the games industry worked in a certain way. People rented offices and set up studios to create games; they employed staff to work in-house, then got those projects funded and distributed by publishers. If you wanted to opt out of that setup, you worked alone, or in a small team, as an indie developer – you operated in a totally separate stratosphere; the system neatly self-segregated. Meanwhile, in the background, the business worked to the seven-year cycles dictated by the lifespan of the major consoles. It was a machine of discreet components.

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

Facebook CEO will meet with a senior Trump adviser and several influential conservatives, but Breitbart News said it has ‘zero interest in a photo-op’Mark Zuckerberg, a critic of Donald Trump, now wants to make nice with his campaign and conservative media.The feeling isn’t entirely mutual. Continue reading...

A report alleging the electric car company exploited workers from eastern Europe to build a high-tech paint shop has prompted Musk to launch an investigationTesla relied on cheap foreign labor to build a hi-tech paint shop in California, paying workers as little as $5 an hour, according to a damning report that prompted CEO Elon Musk to launch an investigation.The electric car company used roughly 140 workers from eastern Europe, primarily Slovenia and Croatia, to build a paint shop in Fremont in northern California as part of its production of the Model 3 sedan. Continue reading...

Conglomerate buys 9.8m shares of Apple in surprise move that equates to a bet that shares will rebound after sales dropped for first time in more than a decadeWarren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway has bought $1bn worth of Apple shares in a bet that the iPhone-maker will bounce back from a recent slump.

Alex Hern told us about the apps that he relies on. Now Hannah Jane Parkinson shares the apps she uses every dayThis month my colleague Alex Hern listed the apps he can’t live without. Specifically, the apps that he uses to pretend that he is “a competent adult”. I sit opposite him daily, and I am reserving judgment on that one. (Just kidding, Alex! )Like Alex, I rely on Citymapper (when I’m not taking an Uber) and I am now trying out You Need A Budget. Because guys, I really need a budget. I am a person whose bank statement, if rendered into a video game, would essentially be me as a character bouncing from one ATM to the next. Continue reading...

We still love the exploits of characters like Nathan Drake and Lara Croft, but this may change as attitudes to cultural theft hardenThere’s a question at the heart of the Uncharted games that the latest title, released to great acclaim this month, tackles most directly: is the dashing lead protagonist, Nathan Drake, a hero or a thief?The continuing success of Naughty Dog’s action-adventure series, along with the resurgent Tomb Raider games, shows that the “adventuring archaeologist” trope is a resilient one. The modern precursor of both Nathan Drake and Lara Croft is of course Indiana Jones, who retains a vice-like grip over the public imagination. Continue reading...

In a future where robots take our jobs, the tech elite see universal basic income as a fair exchange. But don’t forget – their wealth came from what we providedEvery month, nearly 20% of the country gets a Social Security check. What if that number were 100%? What if the government gave everyone an income?That’s the premise behind universal basic income (UBI), an idea with a long and surprisingly mainstream history. Its popularity last peaked in the 1970s and now, after a relatively dormant few decades, it’s making a comeback. Pilot projects have been announced in Finland, the Netherlands, and Canada. This summer, Swiss voters will vote in a referendum that could give every adult about $2,500 a month. Continue reading...

Low population density means phone and internet companies don’t upgrade services – but in the Navajo Nation vital infrastructure was never installedIt’s been two years since Sonia’s husband’s fatal heart attack. Almost anywhere else in the United States, emergency services could have helped her. But in an isolated corner of the 27,000 square miles that constitute the Navajo Nation, she, her daughter and one of her granddaughters had to manage without technology most of the rest of America takes for granted.The family were outside Tolani Lake, in part of the vast Navajo Nation’s land in north-east Arizona. “My husband had roped a bull that we were dealing with,” Sonia said. “He said he needed to catch his breath. I told him to sit down and he did.” He started to feel better, got back to work and then faltered again.

The World Esports Association will fight for players’ rights in pro-gamingEight of the world’s biggest pro-gaming teams have joined together to form the World Esports Association [WESA], fighting for player representation, tournament standardisation, and revenue-sharing among teams.The founding teams, all drawn from the ESL Pro-League for Counter-Strike, hope that WESA will provide an important counter-weight on the side of players in an industry dominated by publishers, event organisers, and the publishers of the games themselves – often all the same company. Continue reading...

Corporation in talks with potential partners including ITV and NBC Universal about new subscription service

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

Uncharted 4 takes adventure gaming to another level, Fire Emblem sticks to a winning formula, but Battleborn is a messy mishmashPS4, Sony, cert: 16

Of 14 companies valued above $1bn, five are against leaving EU, while others are neutral or have declined to commentNone of Britain’s so-called unicorns, private companies with a valuation above $1bn (£710m), will support Britain leaving the EU, the Guardian can reveal.Of the 14 companies on the list, five have come out as explicitly against Britain’s exit from the EU, while the rest either remained officially neutral or declined to comment on the matter. Continue reading...

Retailer tells shareholders ahead of refinancing vote that poor Christmas led to insurers lowering or removing protectionGame Digital has told shareholders it lost “significant” levels of credit insurance in the aftermath of a second year of poor Christmas trading.

Banks used a series of slurs targeting Muslims in a post aimed at Zayn Malik, whom she accused of copying her styleAzealia Banks has apologised for a stream of racist and Islamophobic invective against former One Direction member Zayn Malik that led Twitter to suspend her.

Tien Phong Bank says it spotted the fraud on the Swift messaging system quickly enough to prevent Bangladesh-style theft

C of E creating guidelines so 10,000 rural churches may be used to provide wireless internet access to help meet PM’s vowThe medieval church spires of rural England are to bring superfast broadband to the remotest of dwellings, with the Church of England offering their use as communication towers.

The new generation of mobile computers are powerful, sleek and able to cope with the demands of both work and play£50 Continue reading...

Fans may rejoice at their game being given a story, but it’s one that lacks laughs and eleganceFans of the computer game will probably admire the way that the film-makers managed to crowbar a narrative into the baffling silliness of this phenomenon. But if you are not a regular player, the story feels like an inelegant and pointless scramble of trampolines, catapults, eggs and anger management classes. Despite the best efforts of Jason Sudeikis, the voice of the central character, Red, who drenches every line with a thick coating of irony, this simply isn’t funny enough to charm the parents of the film’s intended audience: impressionable and not particularly discerning children. Continue reading...

Fed up with hills and hard work? The latest generation electric bike from Electra could well tempt you back into the saddleIn Holland, a country that knows a thing or two about cycling, they now sell more electric bikes than traditional city bikes. The lurking snobbery that an eBike is ‘cheating’ has gone and in the coming years many more of us will be powering up for a sweat-free pedal. One of the brands ready to take advantage of this is Electra – it’s already on to its second generation pedal-assist bike. The Townie Go! 8i has a frame-mounted Bosch mid-drive system, rather than a hub engine, which has four levels of support: Eco, Tour, Sport and Turbo with a top speed of 20mph. It takes 3.5 hours to charge and for that you have a range of 20-100 miles. It’s comfortable and relaxed and those ‘Fat Frank’ tyres really soak up the bumps. It is pricey, but maybe it’s time to turn down easy street (electrabike.com).Price: £1,999

It’s the high-pitched menace that spoils your day at the beach – unless of course it’s you riding it…Price: £4,999

Walkers and other members of the public will be asked to help create new generation of healthy plantsA £1.2m project to recruit thousands of walkers and other members of the public to help save Britain’s ash trees is to be launched on Monday.The aim of the AshTag project is to use “citizen science” to pinpoint trees that are resistant to ash dieback disease. Cuttings from these resilient trees could then be used to create a new, healthy generation of ash trees that could replace those ravaged by chalara dieback, which reached the UK in 2012 and is devastating many woods. In Denmark, the disease has killed 90% of the ash trees. Scientists hope to minimise the damage by building up details of resistant trees. Continue reading...

Yes, it’s a people carrier, but don’t let that put you offI looked at this car and thought it was going to drive a bit wheezy and puffed out. I don’t know if that’s an assumption I have about seven-seaters, or whether I got some subliminal message from its eminently reputable face, but whatever it was, I was wrong. The Sharan is not a particularly nippy vehicle, but it has more welly than you’d think, and is incredibly solid and reassuring. Obviously the point of a people carrier is not welly but wellies; can everybody fit into it with their stuff, and do they do lumbar stretches and moan when they get out? Is the middle seat big enough, not just for adults but adults who don’t really know each other and would rather die than rub thighs? It is.It doesn’t have a huge boot with the seats up, but if it did, it wouldn’t be a car, it would be a bus. With the seats down, you could fit another car in there. The seat-flattening is incredibly intuitive and well-designed, and you finish with a space so airy, you’re almost compelled to lug stuff around. The only place there isn’t very much space is in the oddment stowage; but who needs a nook for your keys when you’ve got a table, four chairs and a man in a hammock in your boot? It’s big; you’ve got that, right? Continue reading...

No premises on the high street – that is what unites these new entrants. Here’s a look at what the new players will offerThey are the new breed of digital banks for people who live on their smartphones and want something that looks more like Netflix than NatWest. They typically have snappy, quirky, one-word names – Starling, Mondo, B – and make claims such as “we’re redefining what a bank should be”. And they tout themselves as genuine alternatives to the big high street players.These new entrants are all trying to plug into our rapidly increasing use of digital technology as branch visits decline. But what’s in it for us as potential customers? Do they offer enough in financial terms to tempt us to ditch our existing bank? What are the downsides? Continue reading...

International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition president reportedly holds Alibaba stock and has ties to an Alibaba executiveAn anti-counterfeiting group said on Friday it was suspending Alibaba’s membership following an uproar by some companies that view the Chinese e-commerce giant as the world’s largest marketplace for fakes.The International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition also told members it had failed to inform the board of directors about conflicts of interest involving the group’s president, Robert Barchiesi. Continue reading...

The revelation that some of the social media site’s journalistic decisions are made by people, not algorithms, has shone a fascinating light on the rapidly changing news landscape

UK-based Zed Books’ page was removed with no warning after it ran a series of posts about its books on the Turkish governmentFacebook has denied involvement in the deletion of the page of a London-based academic publisher who had published articles that criticised the Turkish government and discussed the outlawed (in Turkey) Kurdistan Workers party.The deletion sparked accusations of censorship against the social network, which has often been accused of siding with the Turkish government in battles over free speech. But Facebook says it did not delete the page, and Zed Books has accepted the claim. Both companies say they are trying to discover how the page was removed from the site, and who by. Continue reading...

A new Doom title is released today, but the 1993 original had the impact of punk rock in the 1970s – especially for this young drama studentThis was how it happened for me, and I guess for a lot of people at the time. In 1993 I was working part-time at a game development studio while studying English and Drama at Warwick university. The studio, Big Red Software, was five guys in a small office above a printers in Leamington Spa. We ate, drank and breathed video games. If we weren’t making them, we were playing them. One day, we got Doom working across the office computer network. It meant that we could play together, co-operatively. That was 10am in the morning. We played for 16 hours straight. When I got outside, I saw every garage door as a potential demon entry point.Today, More than 20 years later, Id Software is releasing a new version of Doom. It is throughly updated, with high-end visuals and contemporary design sensibilities – early word is that it’s a successful modernisation. But it can never do what Doom did back then. There had been other first-person games before it – Id itself made the Wolfenstein titles. But for this game, the brilliant coder John Carmack built a new engine, capable of rendering more complex environments in 3D. Well, sort of 3D. The maps themselves were 2D, and there was no vertical camera movement. Everything happened on a fixed plane. Continue reading...

Review follows criticism of Sussex police for not charging Oliver Whiting, despite him admitting he targeted five womenDetectives are considering whether to reinterview a man accused of revenge pornography after being criticised over their failure to charge him.Oliver Whiting, 36, from Eastbourne, was cautioned after five women came forward complaining they were the victims of revenge porn and malicious communications. Continue reading...

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

West’s memoir is full of a wild, joyous vulgarity and ranges from body images and rape threats to puberty and her love for her husbandIn 2013, Lindy West got a message on Twitter from her dead father. “Embarrassed father of an idiot,” his bio said. But no: “My dad was never mean. It couldn’t really be from him. Also, he was dead – just 18 months earlier, I’d watched him turn grey and drown in his own magnificent lungs.” Someone wanted to hurt her.At that moment in her career, West was fielding daily online harassment for her opposition to rape jokes in standup comedy. “I was eating 30 rape threats for breakfast at that point (or, more accurately, ‘You’re fatter than the girls I usually rape’ threats),” she writes in this memoir. “No one could touch me any more.” Continue reading...

As Facebook battles a report accusing it of suppressing conservative news, CEO says he plans to ‘invite leading conservatives ... to share their point of view’Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced that he plans to invite “leading conservatives and people from across the political spectrum” to talk with him about accusations of political bias at the social media company.Zuckerberg made the announcement Thursday evening in a Facebook post that continued to deny the allegations of bias and the claim that the Facebook trending topics team suppresses conservative news. Continue reading...

Tim Cook says investment – single largest ever in Chinese ride-hailing service – allows Apple to learn more about the market thereApple has invested $1bn in Didi Chuxing, China’s version of Uber, CEO Tim Cook said on Thursday.Ahead of a high-profile visit to the country later in May, Cook told Reuters that the investment would create opportunities to partner with Didi – fuelling speculation that Apple is making a strategic investment that complements its own plans for a new electric car. Continue reading...

The financial messaging network says a commercial bank was targeted in an attack with ‘deep knowledge of operational controls’Swift, the global financial messaging network that banks use to move billions of dollars every day, warned on Thursday of a second malware attack similar to the one that led to February’s $81 million cyberheist at the Bangladesh central bank.The second case targeted a commercial bank, Swift spokeswoman Natasha de Teran said, without naming it. It was not immediately clear how much money, if any, was stolen in the second attack. Continue reading...

For four months, this Vancouver studio was at the centre of an internet maelstrom. But it had overcome bigger challenges“Recent events have thrust our company under a spotlight …” It was with those words, in September 2014, that Lucas J W Johnson, one of the founding members of Silverstring Media, began a blogpost about his company. “Under a spotlight”, it turned out, was something of an understatement. Silverstring Media had been targeted by the burgeoning online movement GamerGate, a loose affiliation of Twitter, Reddit and game forums users claiming to expose and protest corruption in the video games media. The company was accused of being “corrupt” and “creepy”, supposedly pushing ideologies and cultish practices that worked towards taking “the fun out of video games”. Connections were established between Silverstring and the original GamerGate target Zoe Quinn. Then everything snowballed.“[GamerGaters] got it into their heads that Silverstring Media was a PR firm, and that as such we must have been behind a conspiracy to release a series of ‘gamers are dead’ articles all at once from multiple different venues,” Johnson said. “As conspiracies do, that then spiralled into further corruption with the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA), and eventually allegations that we work with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa). We became ‘the final boss’ of GamerGate, responsible for all their woes.” Continue reading...

Exclusive: Leaked internal guidelines show human intervention at almost every stage of its news operation, akin to a traditional media organizationLeaked documents show how Facebook, now the biggest news distributor on the planet, relies on old-fashioned news values on top of its algorithms to determine what the hottest stories will be for the 1 billion people who visit the social network every day.The documents, given to the Guardian, come amid growing concerns over how Facebook decides what is news for its users. This week the company was accused of an editorial bias against conservative news organizations, prompting calls for a congressional inquiry from the US Senate commerce committee chair, John Thune.

Almost 50 years after Kirk and Uhura’s kiss on Star Trek, there are plenty of parts for black women - provided they want to play blue- or green-skinned aliens …“Interspecies love is in the air!” enthuses one movie fansite at the prospect of the forthcoming Warcraft movie.There’s a lot to get up to speed with in Warcraft. The original video games were so wildly popular that their community of players exceeds the population of Norway, and the World of Warcraft wiki has over 100,000 pages. For novices, it’s a fantasy world not far removed from Lord of the Rings or Dungeons and Dragons: a realm of elves, dwarves, mythical creatures and medieval weaponry. Warcraft the movie revolves around Azeroth, a kingdom apparently ruled by European humans. Azeroth is invaded by orcs: hulking, relatively primitive ogres with overdeveloped lower canines. Rather than open arms, Azeroth greets these refugee orcs with medieval arms. “They’re beasts. They should all be destroyed,” says one character. It’s essentially a race war, although the battle lines are by no means cut and dried, so there’s still room for a bit of interspecies love. Continue reading...

Aleks Krotoski focuses on the emotional impact in this debate on how technology is changing too fast for parents to keep up‘Scary, intimidating. Are these the words we want to be using to describe how our kids are using technology?” asks the ever-enthralling Aleks Krotoski in Changeling. Previous episodes of Radio 4’s absorbing Digital Human series have focused on taste, body and mind and they’re all worth a listen. Now, talk turns to the contentious issue of children being better at using technology than their parents.Krotoski always brings out the human emotion behind the digital story and she has no problem firing up the most paranoid part of a parent’s brain with this debate. That moment when you realise your child can unlock your tablet also unlocks peace and quiet, but what happens when the terror of your three-year-old overtaking your technical skills kicks in? Continue reading...

YouGov’s online poll comes amid claims in US that site’s staff working on its trending articles feature censored rightwing newsPeople in the UK from across the political spectrum think that they see more leftwing news on Facebook than stories from neutral or rightwing sources, according to a YouGov poll.The findings from an online poll come as a debate rages in the US over allegations that Facebook staff working on its trending articles feature censored rightwing news. Continue reading...

The likes of Facebook and Microsoft have spurned fireworks, paintball guns and erectile dysfunction ads, much as publishing outlets have done for decadesGoogle was widely applauded this week for announcing it would stop selling ads for long-reviled payday loan companies. Facebook, it turns out, banned payday loan ads last year, along with those for weapons and “unsafe supplements”.Related: 'Dangerous' payday loans join guns and drugs on Google's banned ad list Continue reading...

Michael Fassbender’s movie already looks better than Warcraft, with Marion Cotillard on top femme fatale form and director Justin Kurzel embracing the video gameAlong with Duncan Jones’s Warcraft it’s been billed as the video game movie that might just make us forget all about the cinematic crimes of Uwe Boll and his ilk, that can induce glorious amnesia for those struggling to wipe clean memories of Prince of Persia, Hitman or Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life. Continue reading...

Don’t count your chickens before they’re accelerated at 1,200km an hour down a modified railgun through a vacuum tubeThe future of transportation is here! Deep in the Nevada desert on Wednesday morning, a linear accelerator propelled a small sled along a purpose-built test track to a speed of almost 187km/h in just over a second. It may just be a very early test but, the assembled media assured us, it means that the Hyperloop – the utopian transport system first mooted by technology entrepreneur Elon Musk – in 2013 is one step closer to reality.Except, well, it doesn’t. The test shows that Hyperloop One has reached the technological heights of a 1996-era rollercoaster when it comes to its propulsion systems, but does nothing to calm very real doubts that the company will be able to deliver what it promises, when it promises, for the price it promises. Continue reading...

Hyperloop One conducts the first public test of a prototype propulsion system which could eventually transport people through tubes at the speed of sound. Held in Nevada on Wednesday, the custom-built sled accelerates to 116mph in 1.1 seconds. The idea for Hyperloop was first proposed by tech billionaire Elon Musk, but dropped in 2013. Executives and engineers from Hyperloop One want to begin transporting cargo by 2019 and people by 2021

Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Google have moved outside their comfort zone by trying to curate ‘unbiased’ news – but journalists aren’t like computersSilicon Valley is trying to make the news business as neutral as its code. The problem is the humans.

Telecoms firm reveals cost of attack hit £42m, cutting its profits from £32m to £14mTalkTalk profits more than halved following a cyber-attack in which the personal details of thousands of customers were hacked.The telecoms company was hit with £42m in costs when almost 157,000 customers were affected by the attack in October last year. Almost one in 10 of those customers had their bank account numbers and sort codes accessed. Continue reading...