Technology | The Guardian

What happened, why hackers were able to steal the data and what can you do if your details appear onlineA dating site with the tagline “Life is short. Have an affair” which offers married people the opportunity to cheat on their spouses. With a claimed 37m users, it is one of the biggest of its sort, and no stranger to controversy: the site had previously allowed a sports scientist to eavesdrop on conversations between its users to write a paper on how women seek affairs, and regularly contacted journalists to offer “adultery insights” based on data from their users. Continue reading...

Hacked dating site has been filing copyright takedown requests to try to keep its leaked database and its customers’ personal details out of the public eyeHacked extramarital dating service Ashley Madison is trying to prevent dissemination of its stolen database by sending copyright takedown notices to social networks and file-sharing sites.The action, after 33m user records were posted online, mirrors the largely-successful attempt to get an earlier, smaller, leak of user data scrubbed from the internet. But this time, the main dump remains very much online, as the arms race between hackers and hacked has escalated to include the use of technology such as peer-to-peer file sharing protocol bittorrent and the anonymous browsing service Tor. Continue reading...

Technology that pinpoints exact locations saves money and lives but critics say devices garner inflated sense of security, and prompt people to take more risksAs the line between civilization and wilderness becomes increasingly thin, do true adventurers still exist?Technology allows climbers to tweet from the top of Mount Everest. Antarctic skiers can instantly upload selfies from the South Pole. Anyone can obtain an inexpensive device with a panic button that allows them to request a rescue from any place on earth, for any reason – adventure’s version of a “get out of jail free” card.

Comedian turned political activist says he has ‘gone as far as we can’ with his YouTube show and wants to spend some time ‘learning’Russell Brand says he is stopping his YouTube show The Trews and taking a break from Facebook and Twitter to spend some time “learning”.“I think we’ve gone as far as we can with the Trews for now,” he said in in a video titled “Final Episode Of The Trews – Goodbye, Good Luck”. Continue reading...

The business of protecting data is getting tougher by the day – but there are ways not to breach the law and still safeguard customer dataSince the Snowden revelations, the market for privacy-oriented services has only grown – indeed, it’s likely that it will keep growing. We’re not at peak surveillance, but we’re way past peak indifference to surveillance.

Smartphone addicts may be using their devices while sitting on the toilet, but does that mean they want to chat to one another?Three quarters of smartphone owners admit to using their devices while sitting on the toilet, so perhaps the only surprise is that it’s taken this long for an app to link them up to other random people also perching on the loo.Released by developer Ricardo Gruber, the free iPhone app Pooductive offers anonymous messaging, with the hook that everyone you encounter will be similarly occupied. Continue reading...

The place to talk about games and other things that matterIt’s Thursday. I think we may have featured this game before, but what the heck, it’s pretty beautiful. This is the twin-stick shooter, A Quiver of Crows from Californian studio Sheado.net. It’s coming to Steam this autumn. Continue reading...

Brian Krebs says public shaming culture could put lives at risk after the release of personal information from the infidelity websiteTop data security analyst Brian Krebs has warned that people could take their lives after their personal details were exposed in a hack of infidelity website Ashley Madison.“We have to be very cautious and I think sensitive to this,” Krebs, who broke the initial story, said. “There’s a very real chance that people are going to overreact. I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw people taking their lives because of this, and obviously piling on with ridicule and trying to out people is not gonna help the situation.” Continue reading...

Messaging app, with more than 800m active users, rolls out its web client to work with Apple’s iPhonesWhatsApp has rolled out its web service to Apple iPhone users, allowing them to send and receive messages on their computers as well as their phones.Support for iOS has been a long time coming, but now means WhatsApp offers its web option - which works on both Mac and PC - to users with most phones running Windows, Google, Blackberry and Nokia operating systems. Continue reading...

The married SNP representative for Edinburgh West denies using the adultery website and claims her identity was ‘harvested’A married SNP MP whose email address was among the millions released in a data hack on adultery website Ashley Madison has said she is the victim of a smear campaign.Michelle Thomson, the MP for Edinburgh West, said her identity was “harvested” by hackers who published what they claim to be the personal information, including names, email addresses, phone numbers and partial credit card numbers of the social network’s 37 million users. Continue reading...

Employees, asked what they would hate to see go wrong, listed privacy and security flaws prominentlySenior staff at Ashley Madison, the hacked extramarital dating site, were raising concerns over its security procedures as recently as June, just a month before the site was attacked.Internal documents leaked as part of the attack show concerns over “a lack of security awareness across the organisation” being raised by one vice president. A database containing the documents and more than 30 million user records exfiltrated in the attack, was posted to the internet on Tuesday. Continue reading...

The story is baffling, the characters disappointing and the twists anticlimactic, but this video game adaptation has violent energyThere’s probably a more effective way of killing people, but extending both arms perpendicular to your chest as you spin and shoot handguns is certainly a photogenic method. With any luck, your long coat will billow, adding the right touch of panache. The emotionless assassin played by Rupert Friend at the heart of Aleksander Bach’s Hitman: Agent 47 uses this move a number of times, like a dancer proudly pirouetting or a jazz drummer returning to a specific fill he’s perfected.This vaguely science-fiction action picture based on a video game (and not a sequel to 2007’s Hitman) is an idiotic mess with a bafflingly dense prologue, an endless final battle, lifeless performances and anticlimactic twists, but it does have a degree of visual flair. When the characters finally shut up and get to shooting, one must give credit to the creativity of the kills. Heads pop like ripe grapes, bodies flail as they are sucked into jet engines and arteries spray all over white staircases. While there’s zero to recommend about this film regarding its story or dialogue, it’s worth appreciating that it all seems very well rehearsed. Continue reading...

Shark, selfie and carrot emojis being mooted for release in 2016 – but there’s still no sign of the elusive redheadThirty eight new emoji are under consideration by the Unicode Consortium, the organisation which designs and approves emoji, for inclusion in its next release.New emoji candidates include a pregnant woman, bacon and a partner for the dancing emoji woman in the red dress. Continue reading...

Data published from infidelity website includes dating profiles with names, addresses, phone numbers, encrypted passwords and partial credit card numbersHackers have released what they claim to be the personal information, including names, email addresses, phone numbers and partial credit card numbers of 37 million users of the infidelity site Ashley Madison.

World No 2 invests in three small firms that he says share his ‘dedication, hunger and standards’ via crowdfunding firm in which he is shareholderTennis star Andy Murray has made investments in a number of startups, including a company that builds virtual reality shops online, through equity crowdfunding firm Seedrs.The world No 2, who joined London-based Seedr’s advisory board in June, has made three investments and will take a stake in the British businesses. Continue reading...

The place to talk about games and other things that matterIt’s Wednesday. Today’s game is the open-world narrative adventure Affliction from Mastermind Games. It’s set in a small town in fifties America where a meteor strike brings disaster. Continue reading...

Justine Roberts falls victim to ‘swatting’ prank, which comes as parenting website is temporarily shut during cyber-attack by hacker called @DadSecurityArmed police officers were sent to the home of the founder of Mumsnet after a hacker made a hoax call as part of a wider attack on the parenting forum and its 7.7 million users.Justine Roberts said the website, which has more than 14m visits a month, was forced offline during a cyber-attack claimed by an internet troll called @DadSecurity on Twitter who posted taunts such as “RIP Mumsnet” on the social network.

Advertising watchdog says video bloggers have complained of pressure to keep commercial tie-ups secret from their fansThe UK advertising watchdog has introduced new rules governing how popular video bloggers such as Zoella promote products, after a number complained of pressure to keep commercial tie-ups secret from their legions of fans.The move comes less than a week after the way vloggers, bloggers and celebrities endorse products was put in the spotlight when regulators forced Kim Kardashian to delete a selfie promoting a drug for breaking US ad laws. Continue reading...

Clinton stands by server use as legally permitted as officials examining system may uncover whether anyone tried to break in and who else had accountsA forensic examination of Hillary Clinton’s private computer server could unearth more details than what she put in her emails. It could answer lingering questions about the security of her system, who had access to it and whether outsiders tried to crack its contents.Clinton last week handed over to the FBI her private server, which she used to send, receive and store emails during her four years as secretary of state. The bureau is holding the machine in protective custody after the intelligence community’s inspector general raised concerns recently that classified information had traversed the system. Continue reading...

Survey finds two-thirds of customers likely to pay for service after free trial ends but 61% turn off auto-renewal optionJust over half the people who sampled Apple Music have stuck around to use the service regularly, a study by music industry analytics firm MusicWatch has found. Apple recently took a victory lap for hitting the 11 million user mark among people who had sampled its new service, which is meant to compete with similar offerings from Spotify and Pandora. But 48% of those users aren’t there any more.Related: Apple Music has 11m listeners five weeks after launching Continue reading...

Amazon staff in the UK and abroad are being pushed beyond their limits and some are developing physical and mental illnesses, according to a UK trade union. Elly Baker, GMB’s lead officer for Amazon, says some British staff are suffering from musculoskeletal problems, work-related stress and anxiety, and often feel scared to speak up for fear of losing their job. The claims made by the union come after a damning expose by the New York Times into Amazon’s corporate culture. Amazon’s founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos has since refuted the claims Continue reading...

Employees are using time management apps to make better use of the working day. But do they really work – and are they too Big Brother?Andrew Chen, an investor in the San Francisco Bay Area, used to think that reaching zero in one’s inbox was folklore. The tech entrepreneur now uses an app, Streak, to regularly clear his emails. He also gets all his scheduling done with the help of another digital time manager, Esper.Time management apps have proliferated over the past few years as consumers increasingly try to squeeze more productivity out of their waking – and even sleeping – hours. Users hoping to curtail their time on Facebook and squeeze in more hours at the gym have flocked to apps like RescueTime and Toggl. You define the tasks and set the app to measure how long you spend on them. Continue reading...

Released without prior notification, the bug allows attackers to run programs as though they are the administrator of the computerApple has been hit by a second unpatched “privilege escalation” bug in as many months, allowing an attacker to take complete control of a computer by abusing a flaw in the operating system’s memory handling.The bug, which is similar to the DYLD vulnerability revealed in late July, affects versions of Mac OS X from 10.9.5 through to the recently released 10.10.5. It does not affect the beta versions of the next version of Mac OS X, called El Capitan, which is due out this autumn. As a privilege escalation bug, it opens up the possibility of malware bypassing security measures that are put in place to limit the abilities of malicious code, which somehow ends up running on a users’ computer. Continue reading...

Augmented reality company records net loss after it acquired rival Layar and tripled its headcount in preparation for growthBritish startup Blippar recorded a loss of £4.96m in its last financial year, as it more than tripled its headcount in the expectation of future growth in the augmented reality (AR) technology market.The company’s AR mobile apps, which overlay digital information and interactivity over real-world scenes and printed media, have been installed by more than 50 million people since they launched in 2011. Continue reading...

Rob from the rich, give to the poor, wipe an AI’s memory and practice your stealth skills – Volume has it allThere are two types of Metal Gear Solid fans. Some love the game for its increasingly dense plot, rich with oblique references to philosophy, information science, and conspiracy theories, as well as developer Hideo Kojima’s off-kilter sense of humour and love of easter eggs. For those people, September’s Metal Gear Solid V is likely to scratch that itch.The other type of Metal Gear Solid fan loves the series for its self-proclaimed “tactical espionage action”. That’s the aspect of the series I’ve always loved: stealth gameplay which verges on pure puzzles at times, throwing the protagonist Snake into a room full of cameras, guards and mines and tasking the player to get to the other side without being seen. Continue reading...

Rio de Janeiro Olympics among events companies may work together to cover following deal that values news and media site at $1.5bnNBC Universal has confirmed a $200m (£127m) investment in BuzzFeed in a deal that values the news and media company at about $1.5bn.Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed founder and chief executive, said the strategic partnership would “combine our respective strengths to build the future of news and entertainment”. Continue reading...

GMB says staff at distribution centres across UK under pressure to be ‘above-average Amazon robots’, in wake of US revelations

London event this September unveils the first four of its headline actsThe first raft of headliners for the Apple Music festival in London in September have been announced. Four acts have been named for the event, which was previously called the iTunes festival, and which takes place at the Roundhouse in north London.The headliners announced so far are: One Direction (supported by Little Mix) on 22 September; Disclosure on 25 September; Pharrell Williams on 26 September and Florence + the Machine (supported by James Bay on 28 September). Continue reading...

The place to talk about games and other things that matterIt’s Tuesday. Today’s screenshot comes from an isometric RPG named Seven. The game is being developed using the Unreal Engine 4 by indie studio Fool’s Theory, which is made up of ex-staff from CD Projekt RED. Continue reading...

Google’s new OS emphasizes security after last OS, Lollipop, contained a bug that allowed users to take control of a device by sending a textGoogle’s new operating system is called Marshmallow. The new name was revealed on Monday not in a press release but in a statue outside Google’s office in Mountain View, California. This will be the 13th official, renamed iteration for the Linux-based operating system, on which the company’s mobile phones and tablets are run.Eleven of the other names for the mobile system software kept with the dessert theme (the first two were just Alpha and Beta): Continue reading...

Your article about paternoster lifts (Why Germans fought so hard to save their paternoster lifts, 14 August) brought back happy memories of sixth-form voluntary service at school in central London in the late 1960s. To get out of any sport-related activity, my friend Sheila and I wheeled a tea trolley round all the outpatient departments of St Thomas’ hospital on Wednesday afternoons, doing our bit to help those waiting to be seen. Our self-selected reward at the end of the day was a ride on the staff-only paternoster lift, something we’d never come across before or, as far as I’m concerned, since. Like Dejan Tuco, we thought it particularly daring to do the full circuit, going round the hidden top and bottom of the lift, where you could hear the mechanism grinding away. Such innocent pleasures!

Former White House press secretary Jay Carney defends the competitive work environment of his new employer Amazon after a damning New York Times exposé into the retail giant. Speaking to CBS This Morning on Monday, Carney says he does not recognise the company portrayed in the article, which described working conditions devoid of empathy and a brutal push for greater productivity and efficiency. He says employees are drawn to the company because they agree with its ‘spirit of innovation’• Watch Jay Carney’s full interview on CBS This Morning Continue reading...

App offers practical assistance to refugees arriving in the eastern German city and comes in response to recent anti-immigrant hostilityA smartphone app has been launched to help asylum seekers find their feet in Dresden, which became the epicentre of anti-immigrant hostility in Germany earlier this year.The Welcome to Dresden app, developed by two IT companies based in the eastern German city, gives refugees information on how to register with the authorities, get health insurance and find their way around.

Read receipts – those signifiers that a message has been opened and read – fill me with terror, but plenty of people keep them on. Why?There was a time when the main thing you had to worry about in casual social situations was the decision between a peck-on-the-cheek, a handshake, or a hug upon greeting.Meanwhile, relationships have always been fraught with double meanings and crossed wires. Flowers – a spontaneous, fresh-scented display of thoughtfulness? Or a floral attempt to make amends, reeking of guilt? Continue reading...

Chief executive said in an internal email that the New York Times article did not describe the Amazon he knewAmazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos has defended his company after allegations of employee cruelty made by the New York Times.In a rare communication from the 51-year-old, Bezos told staff to carefully read the “very long” article and compared it with a “very different take by a current Amazonian” in an internal all-staff email.

Even though I will miss the convenience of buying stuff on my laptop in my underpants, claims about its brutal office culture are the final straw

The meal-replacement startup argues that the metals are only present in safe levelsFood replacement startup Soylent has hit back at claims that its product contains unhealthy levels of lead and cadmium, after environmental campaign group As You Sow announced its intention to sue the firm under California’s Proposition 65.The law, also known as the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986, imposes strict limits on the levels of toxic elements that can be found in foodstuffs without a warning label. But Soylent argues that its only error is one of labelling, and that the levels of the metals in its product are totally safe. Continue reading...

The bitcoin wars have begun, as Bitcoin XT squares off against the classic flavour of the cryptocurrencyCryptocurrency bitcoin is facing civil war, with two high-profile developers announcing plans to split the code that underpins the network.Known as a “fork”, the new version of bitcoin (dubbed Bitcoin XT) would support more transactions per hour, at the cost of increasing the amount of memory required to hold a full database of all the bitcoin transactions throughout history, known as the blockchain. Continue reading...

FAA says ‘technical issues’ with an air traffic control computer undergoing a software update caused 492 flight delays and 476 cancellations over weekend

Insurer also criticises taxi industry for ignoring its customers, warning ‘the sharing economy is here to stay’A major insurer has accused the taxi industry of a “campaign of self-interest” after it became the target of a complaint to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission over its coverage of UberX drivers.NRMA, one of the few companies that has publicly stated its willingness to insure UberX drivers, also criticised the taxi industry for ignoring its customers and warned “the sharing economy is here to stay”. Continue reading...

Microsoft Translator, InboxVudu, MSTY, Morpholio Journal, Monsters Ate My Metropolis, Loot & Legends, March of Empires and moreWelcome to this week’s roundup of the latest, greatest new iPhone and iPad apps and games. All prices are correct at the time of writing, with “IAP” indicating use of in-app purchases.You can read the previous Best iPhone and iPad Apps roundups for more recommendations, but if Android is your platform of choice, check the Best Android Apps roundups. On with this week’s selection. Continue reading...

Multibillionaire says new Jeremy Clarkson show will be ‘very, very, very expensive’ and says UK could be early-adopter of drone-delivered parcelsThe Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, has admitted it will be “very, very, very expensive” to launch a new motoring show with Jeremy Clarkson and his Top Gear co-stars after signing up the controversial trio in a multimillion-pound deal following their departure from the BBC.The billionaire tech entrepreneur said viewers were enjoying a golden era of television and that the new Clarkson series would be a global success. Continue reading...

The app became embroiled in a Twitter storm last week after a reporter accused it of being a forum for casual sex. So is Tinder really destroying romance? We asked two young people who have used it for their viewsAccording to Nancy Jo Sales’s précis of Tinder in Vanity Fair this month, the online app prompts easy access to instant hook-ups and has created a generation of sex-obsessed commitment-phobes. “You’re always prowling, you can swipe a couple hundred people a day,” says a “handsome twentysomething man” she interviewed. The controversial article even made it onto Newsnight last week, when presenter Evan Davis asked a psychologist whether women were “disadvantaged” because of the hit-it-and-quit-it culture Tinder has allegedly invented. Is Sales’s account brutal, or brutally honest? According to my male mates, yes, most men go on Tinder just to hook up. As Andrew shrugged: “Finding a girlfriend on Tinder is like trying to find one in Ibiza.” But, if we’re being brutally honest, it’s not just men exploiting the app for their sexual gain. I think the idea that women are at any disadvantage is entirely patronising. Though most of my single, female friends use Tinder in the hope of meeting “a nice guy who won’t just send me pictures of lubricant,” I know several who are on it purely for casual dates, and some simply for casual sex. Every bloke I know on Tinder has had at least one proposition from a girl he’s “matched” with on the app before they’ve even swapped phone numbers. Continue reading...

Google’s radical restructuring seems inspired by the veteran investor’s Berkshire Hathaway empire. Suddenly, the most unfashionable of corporate models is backConglomerates have been distinctly unfashionable among investors for decades. But that may be about to change.Just as Warren Buffett put the final touches to a $37.2bn deal to add a nuts-and-bolts maker to his sprawling Berkshire Hathaway empire last week, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin unveiled a restructuring that borrowed liberally from the sage of Omaha’s rulebook. Continue reading...

The creation this week of Alphabet has put the 43-year-old in the driver’s seat of a slimmed-down Google, giving him the authority to put his ambition to the testLast weekend, one of the most glittering alumni of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Kharagpur did not show up to give a school prize as he had promised. Sundar Pichai, then head of product at Google, begged off for reasons that became abundantly clear over the next few days: he had just been promoted to chief executive, and he had work to do.The tech industry has seen its share of strange corporate maneuvers, but Google’s realignment this week has to be among the strangest. The company pulled off a sort of upside-down merger with itself, in effect creating a holding company called Alphabet that runs a mega-profitable company called Google on the one hand and a dozen other money-losers and long-odds bets that Google has called “moonshots” on the other. Continue reading...

Susan is wary of switching to the latest version of Microsoft’s operating system following recent negative publicity. Is it worth upgrading?What is your opinion on the privacy issue concerning Microsoft Windows 10? Currently I use InPrivate Browsing on Windows 7 Professional to protect myself from intrusive tracking. Continue reading...

Exclusive: Correspondence obtained by the Guardian shows Project Titan is further along than many suspected and company is scouting for test locationsApple is building a self-driving car in Silicon Valley, and is scouting for secure locations in the San Francisco Bay area to test it, the Guardian has learned. Documents show the oft-rumoured Apple car project appears to be further along than many suspected.

Laurence Bain led Premier Farnell, which makes the educational mini-computer, for three years but saw stock plunge to a six-year low in JulyPremier Farnell, which makes the Raspberry Pi mini-computer, has ousted its chief executive, Laurence Bain, following disappointing recent results.Bain ran the company for the last three years after taking over from Harriet Green, who left to take charge of Thomas Cook. Mark Whiteling, Premier’s chief financial officer, has been appointed as interim chief executive until a permanent successor is found. Continue reading...