Technology | The Guardian

Infinity’s Star Wars is a force to be reckoned with, while Super Mario Maker takes wannabe designers to a new levelThis year the Disney Infinity series of toys-to-life games has a trump card over the competition – Star Wars. The collectable figurines that unlock characters and adventures when placed on a console peripheral now have a galaxy of household names and craft available from the franchise. Continue reading...

Technology startup Wonder Workshop says its toys aim to fuel children’s imaginations as well as their technical skillsMy cat is pretty unflappable, given that she shares a house with four children. But when a three-wheeled robot trundles into the living room, even Lola can’t belt out of the cat-flap fast enough. Perhaps it’s the barking that spooked her.The robot is called Dash, and like its smaller, stationary friend Dot, it’s the work of technology startup Wonder Workshop. It’s excellent at yapping cats off the sofa, but its real goal is teaching children to code. Continue reading...

At Telluride premiere of movie about Apple co-founder, director cautions about underestimating extent of influence of tech pioneers, while Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen and scriptwriter Aaron Sorkin discuss stickiness of paring apart fact and fictionThe director Danny Boyle has called for more films to be made about the creators of influential new technology. Speaking at the Telluride film festival, where his Aaron Sorkin-scripted biopic of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs is winning largely rave reviews, Boyle said that those in the movie industry had a responsibility to examine the import of people such as Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook creator who was the subject of Sorkin’s 2010 hit, The Social Network.

Jimmy Wales says system is secure after users posed as senior editors and demanded payment from businessesThe founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, has spoken out in defence of the online encyclopedia’s systems for detecting and dealing with abuse for the first time since an extortion scam was uncovered, which led to hundreds of Wikipedia editor accounts being blocked.Wales said the blocking of 381 Wikipedia editor accounts for “black hat” editing as part of an attempt to extort money from people and businesses was proof that the site’s systems for detecting and dealing with abuse were working. Continue reading...

Support groups want crime treated as sex offence which ban victims from being named, arguing it would encourage more people to report revenge pornRelated: Experience: I was the victim of revenge pornCampaign groups have called on the government to grant anonymity to revenge porn victims amid concern publicity surrounding convictions only causes more people to search for explicit images.

Hundreds of cases likely to be brought in wake of data breach, claims lawyerThe lawyer investigating claims on behalf of a number of patients whose identities were mistakenly revealed last week by an HIV clinic has said that it could face hundreds of legal claims.The 56 Dean Street clinic in London’s Soho sent a newsletter last Tuesday to around 780 patients who were copied into the “To” section of the email, rather than anonymously via the “bcc” address bar. This meant that, instead of hiding the personal details of those on its recipient list, it included their full names and email addresses. A spokesman for the clinic acknowledged that the mistake was caused by human error. The Information Commissioner’s Office is making inquiries. Continue reading...

Taxi drivers in the capital are using Uber’s own weapon, the smartphone app, in their latest attempt to fight back agains the US companyA bank of monitors in the reception area of the Victorian office block that is the headquarters for London’s black-taxi drivers shows rolling videos of cabs blocking streets in central London this year and last in protest at the rise of rival car service Uber.It seems a trifle negative for a body representing drivers who pride themselves on getting people around the capital quickly, comfortably and safely. Continue reading...

Brooklyn startup Modern Meadow says it is developing laboratory-grown meat but the process currently relies on the blood of unborn calvesMeat without murder, or “animal” flesh grown in a lab for human consumption, has been touted as an ethical gourmand’s dream for nearly a century, but is it a fantasy too good to be true?Not according to Modern Meadow, a Brooklyn biotech startup that is promising to bring so-called in vitro meat to a dinner table near you, although it is not without its critics. Continue reading...

‘Lighten up about the terrible visibility, and there is fun to be had in the upper gears’They call it “ink blue”; I call it indigo. The DS5 has sharp, aggressive styling at the front, and it has separated itself from its Citroën branding, so that its identity is conveyed by a funny, squiggly swoosh on the rear. My father-in-law looked askance at this, as if it were a recalcitrant adult child trying to divorce its parent. But I thought it looked chic and modern: goodbye, boring colours and marques; hello, the colour of midnight and the world of the post-marque.Then I got in. The cabin is fine: in the Prestige version, which I had, you can electrically control your driver’s seat, but you can’t electrically control the firmness of the ride, or the way the poky gear shifts bring out the racer in you. Nor would you want to: that’s the entire point of buying it, because, at £30,000, this is neither the thriftiest nor the most responsible car in its compact-exec class. The parking camera was one of the best on the market (sounds like a small thing, but often they’re set to be incredibly melodramatic, sounding the alarm when you’re metres away from anything, so that you finish every journey in a state of mild panic). Continue reading...

It’s had more than 16 million loops, but why is a vine sung to the tune of Next’s Too Close an internet hit? Because, ironically, it speaks the truthAlong with Blackstreet’s No Diggity and Boyz II Men’s End of the Road, it was one of the defining R&B jams of the 90s. Now, 18 years after its release, Next’s Too Close has provided the source material for one of the best vines on the internet.A good vine is funny. A great vine is hilarious, but also, crucially, exposes a fundamental truth of our times. This is what Nicholas Fraser has hit on in his immensely popular (16 million loops and counting) vine, which we’ll call Why You Always Lyin’. Continue reading...

Labour deputy leadership candidate reads out some of the offensive messages sent to her during her campaignLabour deputy leadership candidate Stella Creasy has responded to internet trolls by releasing a video in which she reads out some of the offensive messages she has been sent during the campaign.

New rules require federal law enforcement officials to get search warrant before using ‘Stingray’ tracking technology, tricking phones to believe it’s a cell tower

What happens when you post a video of screaming duck toys on the internet? For the first episode of Guardian Tech’s new podcast Updog we spoke to the creator of the viral duck army video and discovered a horrifying truthThe hottest thing on the internet this week, you’d have been hard pressed to have missed the video of a trolley-full of screeching duck toys.Short, but sweet, it went viral almost immediately sparking parodies and pastiches. So what’s the story behind it? Continue reading...

In our new podcast dedicated to the biggest viral video, meme or internet cultural quirk Alex and Elena talk to the man behind The Duck ArmyAll hail our duck overlords!The video is short and sweet, but that hasn't stopped it from taking over our timelines. We're talking about the Duck Army, of course. For the first episode of Updog, we've spoken to the man behind the meme. Continue reading...

Search engine’s ‘direct answers’ service pulls in information from antisemitic conspiracy theoriesWith its “direct answers” service, search engine Google aims to cut down on the amount of time users spend seeking information by algorithmically answering common queries.Unfortunately, sometimes it goes wrong: Continue reading...

Studios behind some of the biggest games in the world are set to create games for new compilation marking 20th anniversary of charity’s classic Help albumMajor video game developers around the world are set to collaborate on a compilation of new games for the charity, War Child.The teams behind blockbusting titles such as Halo 5, Alien: Isolation and the Football Manager series, will each be given six days to produce a game based around themes provided by the charity, which seeks to help children in conflict-affected countries, including Syria. The resulting compilation, titled HELP: Real War is Not a Game, will be available via digital download early in 2016. Continue reading...

The place to talk about games and other things that matterIt’s Thursday. I don’t know what happened yesterday. Continue reading...

Sales of cordless vacuum cleaners and humidifiers drive sales at British group, which spends £3m on research and development each weekDyson, the privately owned British engineering group famous for its vacuum cleaners and bladeless fans, has announced record-breaking profits of £367m, up 13% on the year, despite spending £3m a week on research and development.Max Conze, the company’s German-born chief executive, said Dyson’s ownership structure had helped it keep its investment in new technology at high levels. “We’re playing a long game for the future. One needs to have some appetite for risk,” said Conze. Continue reading...

Programmatic ad buying predicted to account for more than half of the UK’s £3bn digital display market this year, according to researchAOL’s acquisition of mobile ad firm Millennial Media underlines the rapid rise of programmatic advertising, as new research shows that automated buying will grow massively this year and account for more than half of the UK’s £3bn digital display market.AOL, which was acquired by telecoms giant Verizon for $4.4bn in May, has paid $238m for the publicly listed Millennial Media. Continue reading...

A first look at the Harry Potter star playing one of the British video game designers behind the controversial GTA seriesIn this drama set in 2002, Daniel Radcliffe plays Sam Houser, “the British genius behind one of the most lucractive video games ever”. Houser is one of the co-founders of Rockstar Games, the company which launched the Grand Theft Auto series – AKA “the fastest-selling entertainment title in history”. He’s pitched against Bill Paxton as Christian lawyer Jack Thompson, who lead the campaign against the controversial game and its graphic depictions of violence and sex. Continue reading...

Censors kept busy as netizens put their own spin on extravagant show in Beijing marking end of second world warChina’s military parade commemorating the end of the second world war was, as expected, a highly choreographed piece of stagecraft, with cameras seemingly placed to capture every possible angle.But as is often the case in China’s somewhat freewheeling social media world, ordinary netizens were quick to put their own spin on the events.

Disney have teamed up with Sphero – a robotic toy company – to bring the droid BB-8 from the new Star Wars: The Force Awakens film to life. Though many of his skills are being heavily guarded ahead of release, Sphero’s Chief Creative Officer Rob Maigret brought him into the Guardian office to say helloStar Wars droid BB-8 is real and you can take him home Continue reading...

Robotics company Sphero partners with Disney to make pint-sized version of new Star Wars droid kids and big kids can now ownSince its debut in the first trailer for Episode VII, cute little BB-8 - which looks an upturned bowl balancing on a football - has become the unofficial droid mascot of Star Wars: The Force Awakens.Unlike the much-loved robotic pal from the original trilogy, R2-D2, BB-8 is a droid with intelligence that you can actually buy – albeit in a tennis ball sized-version. Continue reading...

Man filmed balancing on hands-free Segway-style device while performing tawaf ritual around Islam’s most sacred shrineThe Ka’bah is Islam’s most sacred shrine, circled reverently by Muslims taking part in the hajj and umrah, the pilgrimage to Mecca that is one of the five pillars of the religion. It is therefore somewhat unusual to see a pilgrim performing the tawaf on what looks like a hoverboard.A YouTube video, which has been making the rounds on social media, shows an unidentified man balancing on the hands-free Segway-style device, his hands clasped in front of him. Continue reading...

Vice president of iTunes International says company is getting ‘a lot of feedback’ about streaming service and ‘trying to make it better every day’Apple has “a bit of homework to be done” to improve its Apple Music streaming service, the company’s international iTunes boss has said.Apple Music launched in June as a rival to Spotify and while it has been praised for its curated playlists it has been criticised over its user interface and bugs affecting people’s existing iTunes libraries. Continue reading...

Ian wants to know if he should switch to LibreOffice or – since he uses Windows 10 and a Windows Phone – go back to using Microsoft’s office software

Boy’s file will remain active for at least 10 years after he sent a naked image of himself to a classmate who shared it with othersA 14-year-old boy has revealed that he was added to a police database after he sent a naked image of himself to a female classmate.The boy, whose identity has not been made public, said he sent the image by Snapchat from his bedroom while flirting with a girl of the same age, who then shared it with others. Continue reading...

Boost your trivia knowledge ahead of the next pub quiz or kids homework assignment with search engine’s new ‘I’m feeling curious’ featureBored at work today? Need to boost your trivia knowledge now that all the kids are back in school? Try Googling “fun facts” or “I’m feeling curious”.

The venerable online auction site eBay is preparing to celebrate its 20th birthday. We want to see and hear about the best and most terrible purchases you’ve madeHere’s a fact to make the internet generation feel old: online auction site eBay is approaching its 20th birthday. In a few short days, the place for selling off your old clothes or a coffee cup once used by Jeremy Corbyn is officially old enough to be considered an adult in Japan or vote in Bahrain, if it were a person, which it is not.To celebrate twenty years of wheeling, dealing, and things you bought accidentally after bidding for them when slightly drunk, we want to hear about all your eBay triumphs and disasters. Continue reading...

The latest Metal Gear instalment somehow lives up to the hype and expectations, providing a luxurious cinematic gaming experience without equalWhen Hideo Kojima was a young boy, his parents introduced a daily ritual. Each evening, the family would sit down to watch a movie together. Kojima wasn’t allowed to go to bed till the film had finished, even if it contained sex scenes. His experience was, he has said, the “opposite” of how it is for most children. Those kids had to finish their cauliflower. Kojima had to finish his Coppola.

The tech company chief says she will take only two weeks off and be ‘working throughout’ when she gives birth to twins but campaigners lament her exampleYahoo’s chief executive, Marissa Mayer, has been criticized after announcing she is taking as little as two weeks of maternity leave and will be “working throughout” when she gives birth to identical twins later this year – with some upset that her break will be so brief, and others that she even has to talk about it at all.Related: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer pregnant with twin girls Continue reading...

São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Brasília have moved to ban the mobile application, while the San Francisco-based startup declines to commentThe president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, has criticised ride-sharing service Uber for increasing unemployment, adding to a chorus of labour concerns about the world’s most valuable venture-backed startup.Rousseff said local authorities must regulate the service, which has led conventional taxi drivers to stage protests and lobby lawmakers in Brazil’s three biggest cities. Continue reading...

Twitter account holder in Lithuania claims responsibility for apparent denial of service attack that disabled force’s websiteThe Greater Manchester police website has been taken down by what appears to be a denial of service (DOS) attack, with a Twitter account in Lithuania claiming responsibility.

Misgivings about safety and confidentiality over Jeremy Hunt’s plans to enable patients to access GP record via smartphone and to add information themselvesThe health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has announced plans to give patients in England access to their entire medical record by 2018, and to let them read and add to their GP record using their smartphone within a year.The announcement at NHS England’s annual conference in Manchester prompted fears of a repeat of last year’s row over care.data, a programme in which patient records were shared outside the NHS without their consent. The opposition forced NHS England to halt the scheme temporarily while it addressed the concerns. Continue reading...

The 56 Dean Street clinic in London apologises after sending newsletter disclosing names and email addresses of 780 people, many living with HIVThe health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has ordered an inquiry into how the NHS handles confidential medical information after the “completely unacceptable” breach of the privacy of hundreds of HIV patients.

Hacked dating site says it has millions of real female users, but fresh questions are raised over alleged fake accountsHacked extramarital dating site Ashley Madison has hit back at claims that the company filled its website with fake female profiles, saying that almost 3m messages were sent by women in the last week alone.The company was responding to claims that it had been actively misleading customers over the number of real female users of its dating service, which bears the tagline: “Life is short. Have an affair.” Continue reading...

New 5.5in phablet has four times the number of pixels of an iPhone, and beats rivals Samsung and LG on display sharpnessSony has skipped 2K and gone straight to 4K for the launch of the world’s first UHD 4K smartphone, which has four times the number of pixels of Apple’s iPhone 6 Plus.

Full-page app-install adverts will lead to sites no longer being dubbed ‘mobile-friendly’ by Google’s search algorithmGoogle will begin to downgrade search results for websites that show an interstital advert for their mobile app from 1 November, as part of its ongoing effort to promote “mobile-friendly” sites on its web search.The new policy means that websites that show mobile users a whole-page advert for an app before they can use the site itself will be penalised in their search ranking. Sites that use an app install banner across the top of the page will continue to be classed as mobile-friendly under the new rules. Continue reading...

The unveiling of the company’s new design is meant to show ‘how Google is working for you’. We’re not sure it does. Can you do better?

Misconfigured contact-us form on retailer’s website sends data to company’s entire mailing listNewsagent WHSmith has compromised users’ private data sending it in hundreds of emails to customers due to a misconfigured “contact us” form on the retailer’s magazine website.Information typed into the form, which is supposed to then be passed on to the company itself, was instead apparently sent to its entire mailing list. Continue reading...

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

Time spent on sites including Facebook, Gawker Media and Reddit account for 17% of all time people in the UK spend onlineSocial media has overtaken entertainment as the UK’s favourite activity online, accounting for almost a fifth of the two hours and 51 minutes a day people in the UK on average spend on the web.Social media use – including time on sites such as Reddit or Gawker Media that are built on blog platforms – accounted for nearly 17% of all time online, up from 12.2% a year ago, according to research commissioned by the Internet Advertising Bureau. Continue reading...

Rules requiring firms to store data of Russian citizens on Russian soil seen as a way for Putin to tighten control over internetA new law has been implemented in Russia that in theory demands companies store data about Russian citizens on Russian territory, throwing thousands of firms with online operations into a legal grey area.The law, which came into operation on Tuesday, is part of an attempt to wrest control of the internet, which president Vladimir Putin has called a “CIA project”. The Russian authorities are keen to ensure greater access for domestic security services to online data, and lessen the potential for foreign states, especially the US, to have the same access. Continue reading...

Regulator to investigate charities that sold and bought personal details of Samuel Rae, who lost £35,000 to scams

Google releases app that links Android watches to Apple operating systems for directions, fitness information and event notifications, emails and Facebook

The place to talk about games and other things that matterIt’s Tuesday, and I’m back from sabbatical! Have I missed anything in the games industry? Continue reading...

John Felton posted video on Facebook in which an officer said he had pulled the 25-year-old African American over due to a failure to signal a turn in good timeAn Ohio traffic stop that a police officer justified by saying a black driver “made direct eye contact” has prompted a promise of review by the Dayton police department and an acrimonious response from police supporters defending the stop.On the night of 15 August, according to a Facebook account by 25-year-old John Felton, he was driving with his brother to his mother’s house in Dayton when an officer pulled him over for failing to use his turn signal “100ft prior to your turn”. Unnerved by how the patrol car had followed him, Felton said he turned on his phone’s camera and questioned the traffic stop.

The collision between a hapless Segway-mounted cameraman and Usain Bolt has thrust the motorised scooter into the limelight for all the wrong reasons. But how tricky can they be to master? Rebecca Nicholson gets on a rollSteve Jobs famously declared that the Segway would be “as big a deal as the PC”, until he actually saw one, at which point he recanted and decided that “it sucks”. Since its launch, the self-balancing motorised scooter has had just one other big moment in the spotlight, in 2011, when Jimi Heselden, the British businessman who acquired the US-founded company, rolled off a cliff to the great scrapyard in the sky. Far from changing the world, the Segway has been an underwhelming innovation, limited in its reach, lacking in transformative powers. It evokes images of retirees gently trundling through Florida towards the golf course, or portly security guards trundling towards the coffee machine, or tourists with tired legs trundling around European landmarks. Trundle is not a very sexy word.Until last week, when a humble, trundling scooter took out the fastest man in the world. At the World Athletic Championships in Beijing, cameraman Song Tao interrupted Usain Bolt’s 200m victory lap, knocking the world’s greatest sprinter clean off his speedy feet with a misjudged lean against an unseen barrier. The Segway was everywhere, again, for the wrong reasons, again. It looked as if Tao’s battery-run vehicle had careered out of control. It looked painful. But how hard can it be to learn to ride the world’s most talked-about gyroscopic balancing machine? I went to Segway Unleashed to find out.