Technology | The Guardian

Dido Harding received £2.81m at a time when cyber-attack cost company £60m and 101,000 customers, annual report showsTalkTalk paid its chief executive, Dido Harding, an extra £1.8m last year when the telecoms company suffered a cyber-attack that cost it £60m and 101,000 customers.Baroness Harding received £2.81m for 2015, up from £1.05m the year before, the company’s annual report showed. Her pay, including £550,000 salary, increased because of a £1.97m payout under TalkTalk’s long-term incentive plan (LTIP). The payment covered TalkTalk’s performance from 2012 to 2015 and was half the maximum Harding might have received. Continue reading...

If you are already sad that summer solstice has arrived damp and dreary, maybe avoid going on FacebookGood morning, Britain! We hope you like your rain/mist/clouds (delete as geographically appropriate) this morning , and don’t feel too let down that today is technically midsummer.But if you are already a bit sad that the longest day of the year is going to have about four hours of actual sunlight, maybe don’t check Facebook. Somebody at the social network decided to flick the switch on a special morning greeting for the summer solstice without, apparently, checking the weather forecast. Continue reading...

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

The annual LA games expo revealed dystopian futures, post-apocalyptic worlds and the odd funny pirateThere may have been question marks surrounding last week’s annual video games expo – E3 in Los Angeles – with some publishers not hosting booths, but gamers need not fear: it was as bombastic as ever and promised much for the year ahead.EA and Activision did not have huge stands, for once, while Nintendo – usually one of the show’s biggest exhibitors – had just one game to unveil, but the show was still filled with new hardware, blockbuster sequels and inventive IP. Continue reading...

More than a third of European ‘unicorns’, technology firms worth over $1bn, were founded in the UK, with Sweden in second placeEurope is a successful Unicorn ranch. The number of private technology companies valued north of $1bn – originally nicknamed after the mythical creature due to their supposed rareness – that are based in Europe has risen to 47, according to tech investment bank GP Bullhound.The count is up by 10 in the past year, and the combined value of the companies on the list is now $130bn (£90bn). Continue reading...

As the price of digital radios continues to drop, which one best suits your listening habits?Digital is on the way to accounting for half of radio listening, although uptake hasn’t been quick enough for a date to be set for switch-off of the AM-FM analogue network. The two reasons most often cited for this are the preponderance of AM-FM units fitted in cars and the expense of DAB sets. However, the prices of DAB radios have been falling, so here we look at some of the more reasonably priced units in the shops.Apart from the Logik, these units feature DAB+, a higher quality audio format. Only a handful of UK stations broadcast in DAB+ at present and older sets should be compatible, sometimes requiring a firmware upgrade. A further switch over to DAB+ is certainly a long way off. Continue reading...

His death, along with France murder in which killer took to Facebook Live, highlights the huge challenge tech companies face with live stream video

Apple says it would have replaced it as it stopped charging in less than two years, but Tesco disagreesI bought an iPad Air from Tesco Direct in August 2014, which cost £399 and came with a one-year warranty. The iPad started charging intermittently in mid-April 2016, and about a week later stopped taking a charge at all.The Apple store checked it for me and considered it be in good condition and that there had been no misuse, but said it would be too expensive to repair. It said it would have replaced it “like for like” under EU regulations as it was less than two years old. Continue reading...

A blisteringly quick track-ready car. But is it really the ideal choice for a trip to the shops?Price: £29,995

A sleek, lightweight carbon folding bike that rides as well as it looksPrice: £3,500

At $255 per active user, the social network is an expensive buy, but the tech giant is confident that access to so much personal data will soon pay offAs news broke of Microsoft’s $26.2bn acquisition of LinkedIn last week, one wag took to Twitter to quip: “Satya Nadella makes bold final attempt to stop LinkedIn from emailing him.”Many people worn down by the site’s relentless emails will have echoed that sentiment. But Microsoft’s chief executive is in fact taking a bold and optimistic gamble in buying LinkedIn at a 50% premium to its share price. Nadella is betting that social networks will be at the centre of our professional lives, while bolstering Microsoft products that must take over from fading mainstays such as Windows if the company is to ensure its long-term survival. Continue reading...

Netflix is still king of TV streaming but US downloads of HBO Now, Amazon Video, Hulu and Showtime via Apple and Google surpassed the site in AprilThe new season of Orange is the New Black came online on Friday and binge watchers around the world celebrated. But the Netflix prison drama doesn’t have the stage to itself.When season 6 of Game of Thrones premiered in April, HBO’s standalone video-streaming service HBO Now was overwhelmed by the wildling hordes of fandom.

I suppose, for the person to whom this would appeal, it is a big deal that you’d look more like a company man than a minicab driver‘Sports-style front seats,” brags the Vauxhall Astra Sports Tourer. “Chrome-effect upper window trim.” It is the smallness of the boasts that makes them sound so Alan Partridge, that and the fact the seats aren’t sports style in any meaningful sense; and if they were, they would look radically dissonant against the car itself, which is about as sporty as a flesh-coloured surgical truss.The emerald green of mine is the kind of colour that conveys status to people who play golf. Elaborate alarm systems complain constantly about factors over which you, as driver, have no control; a person walking behind you in stationary traffic will unleash the beeping of imminent catastrophe; parking is like an atonal symphony. Visibility isn’t great, owing to the rather thick and overcautious window pillars, and there is a fragrance diffuser, upon request – the very endpoint of middle-management fussiness, like having a fan on your underpants. Continue reading...

Women in the public eye, especially politicians, are used to brushing off threats of death, rape and horrendous comments about their appearance – will Jo Cox’s murder be the wake-up call we need to finally clean up the web?Less than two weeks ago, Tulip Siddiq, the Labour MP for Hampstead and Kilburn, was talking about the online abuse she was regularly getting, including death threats. “If I could I would kill you,” was just one of them. “Being a female politician, there is no way you are going to avoid abuse. I don’t know anyone who has not had to deal with it,” she said, adding it could be “frightening and upsetting” and that a group of female MPs had an unofficial support group to deal with it. But at the same time, she also brushed off the effects on her. In an interview with the Sunday Times, she described herself as “a tough middle child” who wouldn’t be silenced. Now, the day after the devastating murder of the Labour MP Jo Cox, she doesn’t sound so sure. “When I spoke about it before, I was one of those who shrugged it off and said I was not as affected by it as other people,” she says. “I felt I could handle it and not let it get to me. What I do know is that what happened to Jo has changed the environment.” Continue reading...

From sticking to a monthly budget to ensuring your bank balance stays out of the red, here’s how technology could help you manage your financesThe lives of millions of people in Britain are so precarious that a third of families would have trouble finding £500 for an emergency bill. With average wages still below where they were eight years ago, it’s hardly surprising so many people, particularly the young, struggle to make ends meet. But there are a string of smartphone apps that could make the task of staying in the black that little bit easier.They all claim to be simple to use, and are not just for geeks. They track your spending closely and alert you when you’re going wrong, with some claiming to save you thousands. Unfortunately, they aren’t all free – so your budget may have to include spending oney on an app. But are they worth using? Guardian Money put them to the test. Continue reading...

Pinchas Gutter survived a Nazi death camp – and now his story will live on through a hologram that can answer your questionsPinchas Gutter goes out of his way to find me biscuits. In a sun-baked living room in his north London home, he opens a packet of Rich Tea, sits down and tells me about the Holocaust.Gutter was seven years old when the second world war broke out. He lived in the Warsaw ghetto for three and a half years, took part in its uprising, survived six Nazi concentration camps – including the Majdanek extermination camp – and lived through a death march across Germany to Theresienstadt in occupied Czechoslovakia. Continue reading...

Governor Mark Carney highlights importance of financial technology and its potential role in managing economyThe Bank of England plans to encourage innovation in financial technology by collaborating with companies which are designing innovative payment systems and cybersecurity, to further build on Bitcoin’s blockchain concept.Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, had intended to announce the so-called fintech accelerator in his annual Mansion House speech on Thursday. However, he did not deliver the scheduled speech and instead paid tribute to the late MP Jo Cox as a “remarkable person” who “dedicated her life to helping others”. Continue reading...

Reports that the capital’s intellectual property regulator has accused Apple of infringing design patents for a Chinese phoneBeijing has ordered Apple to stop selling the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus in China’s capital, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.The city’s intellectual property regulator has ruled that the design of the two phones is overly similar to another phone, the 100C, made by the Chinese company Shenzhen Baili. In a statement, the Beijing Intellectual Property Bureau wrote that the phones infringe on a Chinese patent for exterior design held by Shenzhen Baili. Continue reading...

How does Facebook translate broad ethical values into its decision-making process for research?When Facebook was revealed to have been experimenting on the emotional state of 700,000 of its users back in June 2014, many were outraged that the company had violated ethical guidelines and “harmed” its users.The fallout of that “emotional contagion study” haunts Facebook’s reputation among ethicists and researchers. But it has also compelled the company to clean up its ethical act, and inspired the introduction of a newly developed internal ethics review process this week. Continue reading...

The race is on to get driverless trucks on the roads, and experts say the impact on professional drivers ‘is going to be huge’Driverless trucks will be safer and cheaper than their human-controlled counterparts, but that doesn’t mean America’s 3.5 million professional truck drivers are giving up to the machines without a fight.Across the US, truckers collectively haul more than 10bn tons of freight each year, but it’s a tough job – the hours are long and lonely, the pay is low and the lifestyle is sedentary. In many ways it’s a job ripe for disruption; robots v truckers. Continue reading...

Apps such as Pacemaker, Serato Pyro and djay Pro could help you practise your mixing skills and ensure parties go with a (beat-matched) swingHey boys. Hey girls. Superstar DJs? Here we go – on a touchscreen, rather than a set of physical decks.DJ apps can be a touchy subject in dance circles, but they shouldn’t be. Rather than posing a threat to the traditional, physical craft of professional DJing, they’re more aimed at interested amateurs. Continue reading...

Founding member of Sony’s flagship console Andrew House comes clean about Death Stranding, virtual reality and yelling at NintendoIt was certainly not a conventional E3 game trailer. The forthcoming release from Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima and his self-named studio saw actor Norman Reedus naked on a beach, clutching a baby and surrounded by dead sea creatures – and that was essentially that. But occupying the centre point of Sony’s pre-event press conference, Death Stranding made a huge impact, both in the auditorium and among the hundreds of thousands watching online. If it was a gamble to give prominent placing to such a surreal and oblique video, it certainly paid off.Tweeting later, Kojima made it clear that the game is some time away – an unnecessary clarification from a man whose previous titles have often undergone several years of development. It was perhaps exasperation with his unhurried approach that recently led Konami to end its 30-year relationship with the developer. Now, he joins Fumito Ueda and David Cage in a collection of the industry’s most unpredictable auteurs, all working for Sony. Continue reading...

Social media accounts associated with the group got an LGBT-friendly makeover courtesy of WachulaGhostAnonymous has launched another wave of hacking attacks against Islamic State (Isis), taking over social media accounts associated with the group and giving them an LGBT-flavoured makeover.The loose hacking collective, which grew out of the infamous 4Chan forum in the late 2000s, announced its war on Isis in 2015, taking control of almost 100 twitter accounts following the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris that year. Continue reading...

Latest Motorola, now Lenovo, Moto G has grown in size, power and price, with a good screen, camera and microSD slot, but no NFCThe first Moto smartphone since Motorola was bought by Lenovo is an update of the budget superstar, the Moto G. Can the new fourth generation Moto G4 capture what was so good about the last three Moto G phones?

The place to talk about games and other things that matterIt’s Friday! E3 is so over! Continue reading...

Health service seeks to use of technology to help patients manage conditions such as diabetes and heart diseaseMillions of people will receive devices and apps free on the NHS to help them manage conditions such as diabetes and heart disease in an major drive to use technology to reduce patient deaths.

Company announces partnership with Kind Financial, a Los Angeles firm that sells computer systems to governments that track legalized marijuana salesMicrosoft, the famously conservative company best-known for producing office software like Windows, has taken the unexpected step of entering the burgeoning industry of marijuana.The company, founded by Bill Gates, announced a partnership on Thursday with Kind Financial, a Los Angeles firm that sells computer systems to governments that track legalized marijuana sales.

Nohemi Gonzalez’s family filed the lawsuit on Tuesday in San Francisco, claiming the social media companies provide ‘material support’ to IsisThe family of a California design student killed in November’s terror attacks in Paris have sued Twitter Inc, Google and Facebook Inc, claiming the social media companies provide “material support” to the militant group Islamic State.Nohemi Gonzalez’s family filed the lawsuit on Tuesday in federal court in San Francisco, asking the court to rule that the companies are violating the US Anti-Terrorism Act. It seeks compensatory damages to be determined by the court. Continue reading...

Despite luxury carmaker’s grandiose description of Vision Next 100, concept vehicle receives mixed responseRolls-Royce has unveiled its first driverless vehicle, a concept car that promises to help its owner announce their importance to the world.The Vision Next 100 is an autonomous vehicle aimed at “the most discerning and powerful patrons in the world”. It has no steering wheel and a silk “throne” from which its occupants can watch the world go by. Continue reading...

Omar Mateen warned of the rampage on Facebook accounts thought to be associated with him, and searched for ‘Pulse’ and ‘shooting’ while still at the clubThe Orlando gunman used Facebook during his deadly rampage, apparently seeking to gauge reaction in real time while also vowing more attacks, it emerged on Thursday, as Barack Obama flew in to the city to console families of the victims.

Zoltan Istvan leads the Transhumanist party and believes that, through science, humans will reverse ageing and eventually death. Can he convert the skeptics?

The biggest draw at this year’s E3 event is the game that Nintendo fans have craved for years - and it looks set for huge acclaimIn 2013, Nintendo teased the game which, everyone believed, would be the making of its Wii U console. It insisted that teaser was merely a tech-demo, but enraptured Nintendo fans paid little heed because it featured the character Link, which meant a new game in the Legend of Zelda series – Nintendo’s most revered franchise - was on the way. Three years on, at E3 2016, that tech-demo finally became reality: Nintendo devoted its entire booth to a single game, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.Never mind the fact that 2017, when Breath of the Wild arrives, is when Nintendo will cut its losses on the Wii U and release a new console, the ever-mysterious NX. The latest chapter of the Zelda franchise will run on both consoles, and at last is a reality. We have played it – luckily without having to endure the 5 ½-hour queue that E3 Show attendees wishing to do likewise had to negotiate. While we didn’t quite see enough to be able to assert categorically that it will be acclaimed as a classic like its predecessors, it certainly represents a considerable change-up, while oozing an irresistible level of charm. Continue reading...

Easter egg which coincides with Euro 2016 and Copa América is Facebook’s latest ploy to turn Messenger into another billion-user platform for the social networkFacebook has an aptly timed new hidden game within its Messenger app that challenges you to a surprisingly difficult and addictive game of keepie uppie.

Later this month sees the third running of CycleHack, a collaborative brainstorming event which has grown to cover 38 cities on five continents. Will this year’s hacks outdo past successes like the viral hit Penny in Yo’ Pants?

Bree was a funny, friendly 16-year-old video blogger with a strange family. But all was not what it seemed. Ten years on, we revisit YouTube’s first viral sensationIn June 2006, a 16-year-old girl began a video blog on YouTube. Her name was Bree, she’d been lurking in the burgeoning community for a while. She was a self-described dork, she thought her hometown was really boring – “Maybe that’s why I spend so much time on my computer …”She was funny, friendly, had great eyebrows. Her first few videos were relatable and cute, introducing her friend Daniel and complaining about being home-schooled and having to do homework in June. It soon became clear she was pretty lonely, which was probably why her username was Lonelygirl15. Continue reading...

Employers are increasingly looking to the digital community to build apps and games that help them recruit a more diverse workforceWe’re a nation glued to our smartphones, according to a 2015 Ofcom report. Sixteen- to 24-year-olds are the biggest user group – 90% of them own one and look at it 387 times each day on average. It’s clear that if recruiters are searching for a young, captive audience from which to source talent, they should be thinking mobile.And they are. Software companies are seeing growing demand from employers looking for gamified recruitment apps. Whether companies are seeking greater diversity or bubbly shop assistants, there’s much in this new breed of digital tools to attract businesses. But what are the benefits for job hunters? Continue reading...

While cybersecurity specialists say hack of DNC files on Donald Trump was connected to Russian intelligence, Trump points to his political adversariesA dossier containing critical information about Donald Trump that was hacked from files belonging to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) was posted on the internet on Wednesday, prompting the presumptive Republican nominee to claim his political adversaries, not Russian hackers, were responsible.The hack of the DNC server, which a specialist cybersecurity company attributed to hackers connected to Russian intelligence, gave outsiders access to internal emails, chat messages and a 200-page book of opposition research that the committee had compiled on Trump. Continue reading...

FBI did not properly disclose privacy impact of storing 411m photos and has no information on how often software returns false positives, a new study findsThe FBI maintains a huge database of more than 411m photos culled from sources including driver’s licenses, passport applications and visa applications, which it cross-references with photos of criminal suspects using largely untested and questionably accurate facial recognition software.A study from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released on Wednesday for the first time revealed the extent of the program, which had been queried several years before through a Freedom of Information Act request from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The GAO, a watchdog office internal to the US federal government, found that the FBI did not appropriately disclose the database’s impact on public privacy until it audited the bureau in May. Continue reading...

Nine Inch Nails musician and Apple Music executive joins music industry’s debate over Google’s video service, but YouTube hits backNine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor is the latest artist to join the music industry’s war of words with YouTube, attacking Google’s video service over the role it plays for musicians.“I find YouTube’s business to be very disingenuous. It is built on the backs of free, stolen content and that’s how they got that big,” said Reznor in an interview with Billboard. Continue reading...

Andrew House says PlayStation 4 Neo console isn’t ready to show off yet and Sony will wait until there is enough content to illustrate its benefitsSony will not show the updated PlayStation 4 Neo console until there is enough content available to illustrate the benefits of the machine, PlayStation boss Andrew House has stated.Speaking at the E3 video games conference in Los Angeles, the president and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment also expressed surprise that Microsoft had announced its Project Scorpio hardware over a year before launch. Continue reading...

Social network drops the dot-@, usernames and attachments from the 140-character limit while also allowing users to retweet their own tweetsTwitter has finally given into its true nature and allowed users to retweet themselves, cementing itself as the mother of all self-reinforcing echo chambers.

The games industry cliche is that every conference panel is full of stubble-faced white men in suit jackets and T-shirts. Is it true this year?Ask five people who follow the video games industry what to expect from an E3 press conference and they’ll all paint you a similar picture. Bright lights on a big stage, lengthy cinematic trailers for shooters starring gravelly-voiced stubble-faced white men, interspersed with awkward patter from white men in suits (or, depending on the publisher, suit jackets and T-shirts and trainers), cheered and whooped at by a largely white male audience. This industry is often unwelcoming to women and underrepresented minorities, and these widely watched events do little to counter that.Of course, some conferences do better than others. This year, we’ve judged EA, Bethesda, Microsoft, Ubisoft, and Sony for the diversity of their speakers and of the games and characters on show. How do they compare?

Google Trends data shows number of economy-related searches come only third behind immigration and NHS

Victoria & Albert Museum, London

If you were ‘in favour of leaving the EU’, Facebook wanted you to tell people. Remaining, not so muchFacebook has denied bias in the forthcoming EU referendum, after users noticed that the social network offered the ability to mark yourself as “in favour of leaving the EU”, but not in favour of remaining.The feature was highlighted by Jon Worth, a writer and strategist based in Berlin. When writing a status update on Facebook, if he tapped to add a “feeling/activity” tag to the update, then tapped on “more”, only a pro-Leave option was included in the list of available activities. Continue reading...

Robin Hanson’s strange, very serious, book predicts what will happen in a Matrix-like world when computers have software emulations of human brains and our bodies are destroyedIn the future, or so some people think, it will become possible to upload your consciousness into a computer. Software emulations of human brains – ems, for short – will then take over the economy and world. This sort of thing happens quite a lot in science fiction, but The Age of Em is a fanatically serious attempt, by an economist and scholar at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, to use economic and social science to forecast in fine detail how this world (if it is even possible) will actually work. The future it portrays is very strange and, in the end, quite horrific for everyone involved.It is an eschatological vision worthy of Hieronymus Bosch. Trillions of ems live in tall, liquid-cooled skyscrapers in extremely hot cities. Most of them are “very able focused workaholics”, who “respect and trust each other more” than we do. Continue reading...

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

Pacific Gas and Electric, a company Bill Morrow joined in 2006 as chief operating officer, reportedly facing 13 criminal countsThe executive appointed by Malcolm Turnbull to run NBN Co appears likely to be called as a witness in legal actions now under way in the US, flowing from one of the worst utility disasters in the country’s history.Legal actions have begun in San Francisco involving Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), a company Bill Morrow joined in 2006 as chief operating officer, before becoming chief executive a year later. Morrow left PG&E in September 2008. Continue reading...

The Facebook CEO floated the far out idea in a Facebook Live video, while also chatting with comedian Jerry Seinfeld about his broken armFirst Facebook had pictures. Then it had videos. And soon it will have virtual reality. But some day, CEO Mark Zuckerberg imagines a way for users to be able to transmit thoughts directly from one brain to another.“You’re going to just be able to capture a thought, what you’re thinking or feeling in kind of its ideal and perfect form in your head, and be able to share that with the world in a format where they can get that,” Zuckerberg said in a live video Q&A broadcast from his Facebook page. “There’s some pretty crazy brain research going on that suggests we might be able to do this at some point.” Continue reading...

Hackers lurked in systems since at least last summer but only recently exfiltrated files on his business dealings and past political statements, investigators saidHackers linked to the Russian government stole research files on Donald Trump from the Democratic National Committee, according to a US firm investigating the breach.Some of the hackers had been lurking in the systems since at least last summer, well before Trump sealed the Republican nomination, but only recently exfiltrated the Democratic party’s cache of files on Trump’s business dealings and past political statements, investigators said. Continue reading...