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Transport secretary defends deal as move in right direction but expects audit office to come under pressure to investigate

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

Tech giant’s ‘sweetheart’ deal with the UK taxman raised eyebrows on Thursday but the company’s ties with leading British politicians goes back a decadeThe furore over Google’s £130m deal with the UK taxman has triggered outrage among politicians, business figures and tax campaigners. It has also raised questions over the search engine group’s proximity to the corridors of power in Britain. An analysis of meetings between Google executives and senior politicians, as well as the regular appointments of political figures to major positions within the company’s PR machine, shows how the California-based tech company has become deeply entwined within the British political landscape. Continue reading...

Names and addresses of officers, forum posts critical of Barack Obama, and controversial contracts were posted online in the Fraternal Order of Police hackPrivate files belonging to America’s biggest police union, including the names and addresses of officers, forum posts critical of Barack Obama, and controversial contracts made with city authorities, were posted online Thursday after a hacker breached its website.The Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), which says it represents about 330,000 law enforcement officers across the US, said the FBI was investigating after 2.5GB of data taken from its servers was dumped online and swiftly shared on social media. The union’s national site, fop.net, remained offline on Thursday evening.

Problem of poor voice recognition of Australian accents has been addressed, as well as recognition of slang terms and difficult place namesGoogle has improved voice searches for phone and computer applications to help it understand Australian accents and slang terms such as footy and servo.It has also improved its ability to recognise difficult place names such as Tibooburra and Unanderra, and can now recognise the term “drop bear”, an Australian slang term used to describe a fictional bear-like animal that drops from trees. Continue reading...

Users in the US will be able to use the new feature on Facebook’s iPhone app in the next few weeks, part of a drive to expand video on the siteFacebook will start broadcasting live video in a dedicated space on its iPhone app, it announced on 28 January.

Social network lets campaigns match profiles with political habits and contact info, as Silicon Valley influence becomes ‘game-changer’ for targeted adsIf you lived in north-east Iowa, the evangelical stronghold where the battle for the soul of conservative American politics will play out in person on Monday, and happened to have given Senator Ted Cruz’s campaign your email address sometime in the last few months, you might find something especially appealing this weekend in your Facebook feed.You might see, amid the family photos, a menacing video of Donald Trump talking about how “my views are a little bit different than if I lived in Iowa”. LIKE ON ABORTION, blares the sponsored ad from Cruz’s deep-pocketed, social media-savvy digital team. And you might wonder how this campaign managed, by paying Facebook, to differentiate between Trump’s “New York values” and “OURS”. Continue reading...

Former public accounts committee chair Margaret Hodge says figure shows Google UK is ‘not a back office support operation’Google’s 2,300 staff in the UK earned an average wage of £160,000 each last year, despite the group’s insistence that its British operation is a modest outpost of the company’s global empire.Margaret Hodge, the former chair of the public accounts committee, said high pay among London staff was further evidence that Google’s “complex structure of companies is a sham”. Its UK employees mainly provide marketing and support services to offices in Dublin. Continue reading...

Romina, a whippet, receives a prosthetic leg, made using the latest 3D printing technology on Tuesday in Mexico. The leg is unique because it mimics an actual dog’s leg, allowing Romina to move around much as she did before. The dog is still adapting to having the new limb but her owners say she has made good progress so far Continue reading...

The achievement has been hailed as a breakthrough in artificial intelligence, but computers are much less efficient than usToday we were greeted by the front page of Nature hailing a breakthrough in artificial intelligence: computers are now outperforming even the best humans at the Chinese game of Go, long been seen as the last preserve of human game-playing mastery. The breakthrough, from a team based at Google’s DeepMind group in London, has come much earlier than many experts expected.Related: Google AI in landmark victory over Go grandmaster Continue reading...

Some plugs for iPhones, iPads and Macs used in Europe, Australia and elsewhere at risk of breaking and giving electric shocksApple is recalling some power adapters sold with Mac computers, iPhones, iPads and iPods since 2003.

How technology is being increasingly used to treat mental illnessFrom Fitbits that monitor the sleep patterns of patients with schizophrenia and apps that help you manage your mood to online therapy sessions, tech is increasingly being seen as a viable alternative to traditional health and wellbeing techniques.But is it too good to be true? What are the benefits, and what are the risks? Continue reading...

Pierre Moscovici warns ‘zero rate is not the best idea’ but Britain would have veto on any proposal to do away with exemptionsThe European Union executive is planning a review of value added tax across the bloc that might call into question Britain’s right to waive the sales duty on food, medicines and children’s clothing.

WePod shuttle carries handful of people on 200m journey in first trial of its kind – with hopes to extend systems to cargo trucksAn electric, driverless shuttle bus has taken to Dutch public roads on Thursday, rolling six passengers along a 200m stretch of road in the first trial of its kind worldwide.The WePod, one of a fleet to be rolled out in coming years, took a few people on a short journey back and forth along the side of a lake in the central Dutch agricultural town of Wageningen. Continue reading...

Many people now gather data about their own bodies on personal trackers, but the jury is still out on their accuracy and effectivenessFitness trackers are surging in popularity, but are they any good for you? And are they any good for the doctor who is treating you?The devices, worn on the wrist, clipped to the belt or shoved into a pocket, measure your movements and, at the very least, promise to calculate how many calories you burned on your walk to work. Some offer considerably more, with myriad sensors measuring health indicators. Continue reading...

Chris Boucher, from Antrim in Northern Ireland, donated his kidney to his three-year-old daughter Lucy in a ground-breaking operation that was made possible using 3D printing technology. 3D replicas of Lucy’s abdomen and her father’s kidney were made before surgery. The printed models helped surgeons at Guy’s and St Thomas’ hospital in London plan how to put an adult-sized kidney into the body of a toddler

Dylan is getting account sign-ups from someone with the same name, who is mistakenly using Dylan’s email address. What can he do?I subscribed to Apple’s MobileMe service, so I received an email address with my full name @me.com. When the service switched to iCloud, I also received the @icloud.com suffix.My problem is that someone with the same name, based in America, is using my @icloud.com address to sign up for accounts and services, including Instagram. For example, I know that he has purchased a case for his iPhone 4, is interested in a new Ford pickup truck, and has signed his child up for a Scholastic education account.I get this as well. A surprising number of people don’t seem to be able to remember their email addresses. This is a growing problem because of the use of real names. We used to think this was a great idea, overlooking the fact that there are often hundreds and sometimes thousands of people with the same name, and now they’re all coming online. We might have been better off using fabricated but memorable names. Continue reading...

Company executives and UK tax officials to appear before public accounts committee, while it could also face EU investigationGoogle executives and UK tax officials are to face a grilling from MPs within weeks after they agreed to appear before the Commons public accounts committee to discuss their controversial tax settlement.Representatives from the US internet company and HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) are due to give evidence in a hearing on 11 February, the committee confirmed. Continue reading...

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

Free-to-play games such as Hearthstone offer huge prize money but winning tournaments is not actually a good way to make a living, finds Alex HernIt’s the lot of every sports fan to sit on the sofa watching their stars play and think “I could do that, if I tried” safe in the knowledge that no one is ever going to call them on that claim.

In the tight-knit online gaming community Epic Mafia, Eris was an infamous celebrity. So when news of his suicide reached the forums, many players were grief stricken. But in a virtual world where it pays to lie, could it really be true?Everyone who played Epic Mafia knew Eris, or at least knew of him. In real life, he was a 32-year-old computer programmer, who lived alone with his border collie in upstate New York, but in the tight-knit online gaming community of Epic Mafia, he was a celebrity, the impresario of the site’s many forums, constantly flirting, philosophising, gossiping. In the seven years since the site had launched, he had formed many intense friendships with people he had never met, but who had come to depend on him. Eris had the gift of easy intimacy. He asked real questions. He wanted to know you. And best of all, he was always right there when you needed him: online.“Many people will probably wonder why I’ve decided to do this,” read the beginning of the suicide note that Eris had scheduled to appear on his Tumblr on 27 April 2015, two days after his death. “I was sexually abused as a child … and have dealt with the consequences of that my entire life. Imagine going through life with an ever-present shadow hanging over you, worrying if you too might be like the people who destroyed your childhood and life.” Continue reading...

Steven McCarroll, the director of the Stanley Centre for Psychiatric Research, Beth Stevens, an assistant professor of neurology at Boston Children’s Hospital, and Eric Lander, the director of the Broad Institute, discuss efforts to understand if there is a link between molecular and cellular events and the development of schizophrenia. A study by the Broad Institute says people are more at risk of schizophrenia if they inherit genes that lead to excessive loss of healthy brain synapses during adolescence. The study says a person’s risk of schizophrenia is increased if they inherit specific variants in a gene related to ‘synaptic pruning’ — the elimination of connections between neurons. The findings represent the first time the origin of the disease has been causally linked to specific gene variants and a biological process• Schizophrenia breakthrough as genetic study reveals link to brain changes Continue reading...

Vince Cable, Rupert Murdoch and Margaret Hodge among figures to speak out as questions grow over government links with senior company executivesDavid Cameron has been accused of getting too close to Google amid growing anger over the government’s £130m tax deal, which has been criticised for being too lenient towards the tech giant.

Multinationals would file single European tax return under plan proposed by EU tax commissioner to stamp out aggressive avoidanceOne of the most powerful opponents of Google’s controversial tax structures, European tax commissioner Pierre Moscovici, is expected on Thursday to call on Britain and Ireland to drop their objections to radical tax reform across the EU.Moscovici, who has previously advocated a Europe-wide “digital tax” on companies such as Google, now wants to tackle aggressive tax avoidance among multinationals by requiring them to file a single European tax return. Continue reading...

Media mogul, whose own tax affairs came under scrutiny in Australia, says ‘posh boy’ politicians were too awed by tech giantRupert Murdoch has accused the “posh boys in Downing Street” of being too easily awed by Google as the government came under fire over its £130m tax deal with the technology giant.Murdoch, the multibillionaire executive chairman of News Corp who ultimately controls the Times and the Sun newspapers, sent a series of tweets on Wednesday suggesting Downing Street was too close to Google and accusing the company of “paying token amounts for PR purposes”. Continue reading...

An issue with Apple’s Safari web browser that caused it to crash for many iPhone, iPad and Mac users globally has now been resolved, the company said

How can a company with so many employees in such lovely and expansive offices not have a permanent establishment? It’s really very simple …Google’s decision to finally pay a one-off £130m settlement to HMRC, settling a long-running argument about its astonishingly low UK corporation tax bill, was hailed as a “major success” by the chancellor, George Osborne.

Seven years after the release of his indie smash hit Braid, the reclusive designer is back with The Witness, a video game of seemingly endless perplexing puzzlesIn the summer of 2008, at the beginning of what would become a sort of revolution in independent gaming, Jonathan Blow released his first game, Braid, on the Xbox 360’s digital Live Arcade.

Chair of book publisher Penguin Random House UK and Wikipedia founder take up their roles with immediate effect

3D printing and design expertise enabled six children with upper-limb differences to build prosthetics that gave them superpowersIn a hidden room in the back of a pier overlooking the San Francisco Bay, a young girl shoots glitter across the room with a flick of her wrist. On the other side of the room, a boy is shooting darts from his wrist – some travelling at least 20ft high, onto a landing above. It feels like a superhero training center or a party for the next generation of X-Men and, in a way, it is.This is Superhero Cyborgs, an event that brings six children together with 3D design specialists and augmentation experts to create unique prosthetics that will turn each child into a kind of superhero. Continue reading...

Tim Cook sees some ‘interesting applications’ around VR, but Apple has already filed headset patents, hired a VR expert and funded 360-degree music videosApple is mulling its options for virtual reality, judging by comments made to analysts by its chief executive, Tim Cook, after his company’s latest financial results.Asked by one analyst whether virtual reality is “more of a geeky niche or something that could go mainstream”, Cook plumped for the latter scenario. “No, I don’t think it’s a niche,” he said. “It’s really cool and has some interesting applications.” Continue reading...

Central European News and its founder Michael Leidig claim that an article titled ‘The King of Bullsh*t News’ deliberately set out to damage the business

In this morbid and demanding role-playing adventure, only the least stressed-out will survive“Slowly, gently,” intones the noble bass of Darkest Dungeon’s narrator as a foe bleeds out and slumps to the ground. “This is how a life is taken.”Except it is sometimes anything but. During one quest I stumbled across an altar and, despite specific warnings, offered flame and summoned some Eldritch terror from the void. My party was terrified by the sight – then, as the first member was cut down, they were driven mad. Continue reading...

Tech company’s 2015 earnings will be announced next week as governments aim to crack down on Google’s controversial tax avoidance arrangementsGoogle is poised to confirm next week that controversial tax structures in Ireland, the Netherlands and Bermuda have boosted its offshore cash mountain to more than $43bn (£30bn), figures from financial analysts suggest.

Sales of its top-selling device grew by only 0.4% over the holidays, compared with 46% over same period last year, but company posts record revenuesApple’s iPhone sales are flatlining, the tech company said on Tuesday, as it announced a sharp slowdown in sales growth for its top-selling mobile device.The company sold 74.8m of its flagship devices in the final three months of 2015, below analysts’ expectations. In the same period in 2014 the company sold 74.46m iPhones, meaning sales were essentially flat. Continue reading...

There’s intense competition in the novelty potato-sending market, with three main sites specializing in sub-niches, from plain old spuds to heartfelt messagesAfter serving as the scoutmaster of a boy scout troop, Jeff Kelly spent half a career as a manager and engineer for global travel company Expedia before he got into the business of sending potatoes through the mail.

Move will differentiate the app, which Apple says has 40 million readers, from competitors as publishers seek more data from firm over who is reading contentApple is working to make subscription content available through its News app, giving publishers with paywalls a new way to control who sees their articles, two sources familiar with the matter said.

Former Mirror executive, who also launched data journalism project Ampp3d, appointed as social and new formats editorThe Guardian has hired Martin Belam, founder of the Mirror’s now-defunct UsVsTh3m, as social and new formats editor.Belam will work on developing an integrated social strategy for the Guardian, working alongside the community team. Continue reading...

No 10 seeks to further distance itself from deal under which internet firm will pay £130m of tax on £7.2bn profits over 10 yearsDowning Street has further distanced itself from the deal to make Google pay £130m of tax, stressing that it was purely an operational decision of HM Revenue and Customs officials.Amid heavy criticism of the government for extracting so little from Google, David Cameron’s official spokesman said it was a good agreement but again refused to repeat the verdict of George Osborne, the chancellor, that it was a “major success”. Continue reading...

Federal Aviation Administration recorded details of about 10,000 unmanned aerial vehicles a day after launching compulsory registrationNearly 300,000 drones have been registered in the US in the last 30 days, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has revealed.

The long-awaited game from the makers of Braid takes the format of classic PC adventure Myst and draws you into a world of puzzlesSeven years is a long time to speculate, but despite Jonathan Blow and his team at Thekla revealing few details expectations for this game have remained high. After all, the company’s legendary platform adventure Braid was important not only for its role in the rise of independent games but for showing what video games could be.People have watched trailers for The Witness and theorised that the game’s little mazes are secondary to the real, deeper purpose. But those maze puzzles are the game. The Witness answers the question: what would a very smart man who loves puzzles do with a lot of money? Continue reading...

Research finds that on average five- to 15-year-olds are spending three hours a day on the internet

The viral videos have become an industry, now with their own gathering – and with that comes a ‘cattoo’ parlor, astrology readings and a sexed-up music videoWhen Joel Shepard started selling tickets for an internet cat video festival, he wasn’t sure how much interest there would be beyond the cat fanatics (of which I am one).

With the the prime minister otherwise engaged, the defence of HMRC’s ‘sweetheart deal’ was left to a delighted treasury ministerWhen George Osborne typed “How much tax should I pay?” into Google, only one answer appeared: “Absolutely nothing for 10 years and then only £130m if you twist my arm.” Having entered the same question into a different search engine and come up with a figure roughly 10 times higher, John McDonnell asked the chancellor to explain to the House of Commons why he reckoned the deal HMRC had reached with Google was such “a major success”.Osborne checked his diary. “What a pity,” he declared. “I’ve only just this minute arranged to meet Bill Gates in Liverpool so I’ll have to pass. So I guess you’ll have to make do with one of my sidekicks.” David Gauke, financial secretary to the Treasury, looked less than thrilled at having been handed this hospital pass. When the prime minister has gone out of his way not to hail the Google deal as a massive success and the mayor of London has described it as derisory, you know you are in for a bad afternoon. Continue reading...

Prank website forces iPhones to reboot and will cause computers and Android devices to hangFollowing the fun users had with the “effective power” iPhone text message bug, people have been sending a link to users of Apple’s Safari browser that will crash their iPhones or Macs.

Deal makes Guardian Media Group exclusive partner for Founders Factory investments in businesses in the media sectorThe publisher of the Guardian has invested in Founders Factory, a company that funds technology startups across a range of industries launched by lastminute.com co-founder Brent HobermanUnder the exclusive deal, Guardian Media Group, the parent company of the Guardian and Observer, becomes the exclusive partner for Founders Factory investments in businesses in the media sector.

Who would want to buy a game that can only be played through a maximum of 24 times? Everyone

From mad scientists to stealthy assassins, we celebrate the video game women who get things doneOver the years, there has been no shortage of articles about “the best female characters in video games”. The problem is, what they’ve usually meant is “the sexiest female characters in video games”, which has made for some very repetitive and occasionally rather creepy reading.For this alternative selection, three women games writers have chosen 30 interesting and complex examples, who have more to offer than either looking good in an armoured bikini or fulfilling the “strong female character” archetype. And as Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft has dominated every discussion about women in games for the last 20 years, she’s been respectfully jettisoned too. Continue reading...

Politician who once said ‘I’m not into this detail stuff – I’m more concepty’ says of his solitaire game: ‘I’ve spent countless hours on beta releases’Donald Rumsfeld, the two-time US secretary of defence who presided over the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, has released a video game.The game, initially released as an iOS app, is based on a version of solitaire favoured by Winston Churchill. The variant uses two decks of cards rather than one, 10 rows of cards instead of seven, and an extra pile of six cards called “the Devil’s Six” for the player to work into their strategy. Continue reading...