Technology | The Guardian

Whether you’re a hardcore tabletop strategist or looking for something to enjoy with the family, here are the best festive afternoon distractionsNothing says “festive” quite like gathering round a board game, still the ideal gift to bring the family together for Christmas in loved ones’ company through the mediums of escapism and nonsensical arguments. And 2015 has been another superb year for interesting, quality tabletop gaming.One of the best for stoking a little seasonal togetherness is the new Ghostbusters game (right), based on the original films. Here you’ll find a wealth of plastic ghouls and heroes, who are the stars of this cooperative, scenario-based game. That means an experience you tackle as a group, undertaking various chapters of a story in separate sessions around an hour in length. Ghostbusters: The Board Game deftly captures the theme and tone of its source material, and excels in keeping all players involved. Assuming the roles of different characters with various strengths, team-mates will have to work together to prosper, in an experience that stands as a highlight of recent cooperative releases, and is lively and light-hearted. Continue reading...

Star Wars fans will appreciate the Nissan Juke’s styling – and the top of the range Nismo RS has the performance to matchPrice: £21,650

A tough, well-built and well-priced mountain bike for fearless pros and fretful amateursStamped on the downtube of this MTB is the name Joe Murray. He was a US pioneer in the sport of hurtling down mountains on specially built bikes. He won dozens of races over a 10-year career before going on to focus on design. The hardtail VooDoo Bizango 29er, one of Halfords’ bestsellers, comes from his stable.For the price, you get an astonishingly sturdy, lightweight and agile beast. Front air forks by Suntour Raidon matched with giant knobbly 29in Maxxis tyres destroy the toughest of tracks and trails, while the slick 20-speed Shimano Deore drivetrain means you’ll actually be able to cycle uphill, too. The lime paint job does take some getting used to, but the handling, spec quality and sheer rideability of this go-anywhere bike will win you over from the start (halfords.com). Continue reading...

Mass timber projects in Portland and New York City offer eco-friendly dwellings, but can ‘plywood on steroids’ actually catch on in the industry?The concrete jungle has a rival: forests. Two urban building projects, in New York City and Portland, Oregon, will be changing their city’s skylines with an environmentally sustainable, cost-competitive building material. The key ingredient? Wood.Related: Wood replaces concrete in eco-friendly building projects – in pictures Continue reading...

If your French doesn’t go beyond bonjour, you can still enjoy a night at a Parisian theatre thanks to new glasses that provide simultaneous translationsIt’s Saturday night at Le Comédia theatre in central Paris and I’m staring at the stage through square plastic glasses. While the actors in the musical Mistinguett, Reine des Années Folles sing boisterously in French, the words appear simultaneously in English on a small screen in the right-hand lens. Though it’s not the same as watching the show unfettered, I find it surprisingly easy to follow the translated dialogue along with the action.For visitors to the city who like the theatre but don’t speak French, new augmented-reality glasses, launched this week by Theatre in Paris, open up the choice of evening entertainment, and there are plans to introduce them at a variety of shows next year. Continue reading...

Site developer says Transport for London lawyer asked for deletion because some people use it to fake noticeboards with ‘racially offensive messages’A parody website allowing users to make a fake “handwritten” London Underground sign has been taken down because Transport for London was concerned it was being used to circulate racist messages.Yorkshire-based developer Tim Waters tweeted on Thursday that he had been asked by TfL to delete the website due to concerns that people believed the images were real. Continue reading...

Graffiti on wall of ‘the Jungle’ camp in Calais depicts late Apple founder’s background as son of Syrian migrant

Carmaker plans to launch 13 eco-friendly vehicles by 2020 as regulators call for lower emissions and tech companies encroach on marketFord is to invest $4.5bn (£3bn) in electric vehicles over the next five years as part of a push by global carmakers to overhaul their product range.The US company will launch 13 eco-friendly vehicles by 2020, meaning that 40% of its models will come in an electric version, up from 13%. Continue reading...

The developer’s imprisonment is a sign that technologists are being targeted along with journalists and human rights lawyersSyria never had a hackerspace until Bassel Khartabil – known online as Bassel Sudafi – started Aiki Lab in Damascus in 2010. The Palestinian-Syrian open-source software developer used it as a base from which to advanced the free software and free culture movements in his country. Because of Khartabil’s work, people gained new tools to express themselves and communicate.

Surviving in the post-apocalyptic wasteland is no longer enough – you also need a nice place to live. We can help you build itIn a lot of ways Fallout 4 feels very familiar to its predecessor – you’re still wandering a ruined US shooting mutants and collecting stuff. However, one significant improvement is the ability to tidy up parts of this disorderly wasteland and make them liveable. Popular with players who like simulation and resource management games, and compulsory if your chosen path through the main plot involves siding with the Minutemen, settlement building is a major part of Bethesda’s newest role-playing adventure.However, while the system is impressive, the interface is fiddly. If you find yourself several hours into the game and wanting to rebuild your first few hamlets from scratch, you may have a laborious process ahead. Continue reading...

Spoiler alert: series of brainteasers and codes put online by spy agency to ‘exercise grey matter over holiday period’ has nearly been solved after one dayPerhaps being one of the country’s leading cryptologists isn’t so difficult after all.When a mysterious puzzle was posted on the website of the government spy agency GCHQ on Wednesday, its creators presumably hoped it would continue to fox recipients well into the festive season. Continue reading...

US consumers paying most for services, with British customers choosing separate providers making best savings, according to Ofcom researchUK and French consumers are getting some of the best deals for TV, internet and mobile services, while those in the US are paying the most, according to research on the UK, Italy, France, Germany and the US by Ofcom.

Hacktivists claim to have crashed Shinzo Abe’s website in protest at Japan’s Antarctic mission to kill whales for ‘research’Hackers have claimed to have disabled the website of the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, in protest at his country’s decision to resuming its whaling programme in the Southern ocean, in defiance of international opinion.

Company chief tells users case is not designed for people who charge their phone every day, and that lump is a design featureThe reason the Apple Smart Battery Case has a bulbous lump on the back of it is because you shouldn’t need it on all the time, according to chief executive Tim Cook.

Software was only available for five days before being taken offline by a temporary restraining order in October

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

Facebook founder says Muslims are always welcome following row over Donald Trump saying they should be banned from entering the US

James Comey says makers should have keys to encrypted devices as he points to growing difficulty of law enforcement at hearing on San Bernardino shootingFBI director James Comey called on tech companies to create backdoor access to their users’ data on Wednesday, arguing it was necessary to tackle everything from terrorism to child kidnapping.In a hearing about the San Bernardino massacre, Comey said keys to encrypted devices should be held by device manufacturers “so that they could comply with judicial orders”. Continue reading...

Australian Craig Wright could be the mysterious Bitcoin creator. But the same thing has been said about others before – the currency is bigger than one personCraig Wright, an Australian academic, might be the secret creator of cryptocurrency bitcoin, unmasked by an anonymous hacker after seven years in the shadows. Or he might be the target – maybe even the perpetrator – of one of the most meticulous hoaxes of the internet age.And yet, amazingly, whichever is true, the result is likely to have only the smallest effect on the future of bitcoin. The currency is now bigger than its creator, who hasn’t been openly involved since 2010, and decentralised governance is built into the very core of bitcoin, often to a fault. Continue reading...

Struggling tech company announces ‘reverse spin’ that involves keeping Alibaba and spinning itself into a separate publicly traded holding companyYahoo has abandoned plans to sell its $31bn stake in Chinese e-commerce business Alibaba, announcing instead that it would be keeping Alibaba and getting rid of everything else.CEO Marissa Mayer and chairman of the company’s board Maynard Webb called the process a “reverse spin” in a conference call with investors on Wednesday. Rather than spin off one division, Yahoo will spin itself off into a separate, publicly traded holding company that will contain Yahoo’s core business and its stake in Yahoo Japan.

Tech company ditches plan to offload stake in Chinese e-commerce giant and will consider spinning off mail, news and ad services into a new business

Staff will not get in trouble for their descriptions of Republican presidential candidate on social media, says Ben Smith

Algerian Mourad Mosdefaoui, who was living in Edinburgh, regrets ‘naive’ posts and has since come to oppose terror group, lawyer saysAn Algerian man who posted messages in support of Islamic State on Facebook has been jailed for two years.Mourad Mosdefaoui, 34, who entered the UK seven years ago and had been living in Edinburgh, put three posts on Facebook from September 2014 to March 2015 celebrating the group and their terrorist acts. Continue reading...

If you want to get a ride from one pre-arranged location along a fixed route to another pre-arranged location, but don’t want to get a bus, UberHop is for youMinicab company Uber has launched a new service in Seattle which allows riders to save money and time by waiting for their cab in a pre-arranged location, sharing it with strangers, and being dropped off at any point along a predetermined route.It’s a bus. Uber has launched a bus. Albeit a car-sized bus. Continue reading...

It may be visually striking, but King’s College’s Alana Harris found Ubisoft’s game seriously lacking: ‘If we’re liberating poor children, what are we liberating them to?’

Parents complained after adverts featuring naked women appeared in the My Talking Tom game

Report claims Coldplay were in line to be the first artist to benefit from change in policy on music-streaming serviceSpotify is reviewing its policy of not allowing musicians to reserve their albums for paying subscribers only, making the music inaccessible to the music-streaming service’s free users.Since its launch in 2008, the company has maintained a policy of all its music being available to both free and paying users, with the strategy one of the main reasons Spotify fell out so publicly with Taylor Swift in 2014. Continue reading...

Police search the Sydney home of Australian entrepreneur and academic, Craig Wright, who tech publications had claimed hours earlier was key to creation of cryptocurrency and could be figure known as Satoshi Nakamoto. Australian police confirmed the search was linked to the Australian Taxation Office but said the matter was unrelated to media reporting on bitcoin Continue reading...

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

Separate investigations by US tech publications suggest an Australian could be at the heart of the cryptocurrency and may even be ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’. How certain are the claims – and why was he raided by police on Tuesday?Craig Wright has been named as one of the mystery men who could be behind the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. Both Gizmodo and Wired published investigations on Wednesday alleging he was the previously anonymous founder of the currency, known by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto.But without an admission from Wright, these claims are based largely on documents that have not yet been verified. On Wednesday it also emerged the New York Times decided not to pursue the story. Reporter Nathaniel Popper tweeted that while the emails were convincing, he thought Wright “didn’t match” because of his writing and personality. Continue reading...

Microblogging company confirms it is conducting ‘experiment’ whereby posts no longer appear with the most recent at the topTwitter has confirmed on Tuesday it is testing a new format for tweets that sorts them by presumed relevance, rather than in reverse chronological order.Related: Twitter is replacing favourites with likes – but does anyone heart it? Continue reading...

Investigations by Wired and Gizmodo point to Craig Steven Wright as true identity of cryptocurrency’s creator – but questions still remain

We asked designers to envision travel in 2115. From high-speed electric pods to wind-powered roving homes, their sketches provide a glimpse into the future

Photo-sharing app goes offline for five hours leaving users unable to login, send messages or accessing Discover section

Devices can recognise you from your fingerprints, iris pattern and even your heartbeat but while a stolen password can be changed, pilfered prints cannotWade Prince pulls out his iPhone and opens up his banking app. Instead of entering a password or pin, he looks into his phone’s front-facing camera, as if he were taking a selfie. He lines up his face in a window on the screen and within seconds he’s logged in.“It’s so simple,” he says. “I can then access my checking and savings accounts, or handle my homeowner’s insurance or car insurance through the app.” Continue reading...

Users constantly searching for a plug to charge their iPhones can now just strap on an Apple-made case, which doesn’t seem as capable or attractive as third-party cases, but has an Apple logo on itBattery life has been the bane of iPhone users for the last four years, but now Apple has solved the issue, just not the way you might have hoped.The company has released the Apple-made Smart Battery Case for the iPhone 6 and 6S, which promises to boost the total talk time for the latest iPhone to 25 hours, or give 18 hours browsing over 4G. Continue reading...

Washington Post owner offers to put Republican presidential hopeful on his Blue Origin rocket in response to Twitter tirade

So much for good cheer: in the major games releases, it’s all about ArmageddonIt may well be the season to be jolly but even at this time of the year we remain obsessed with the end of the world: one of the biggest sellers for Christmas 2015 is the post nuclear-apocalypse of Fallout 4 and its ragged wasteland’s grim battle for survival.Look at the big games releases of the past decade or so and you’ll see Armageddon everywhere: nuclear war, alien invasion, technological singularity, fatal political ideology, attack of the flower people. Gamers have survived it all. But just what is it that makes us so enamoured with dystopia and apocalypse? Continue reading...

A new project is putting manuscripts from letters to recipes online for volunteers to read and translateHang up your hose and ditch your doublet – there’s a new way to experience Shakespeare’s era. An online project is asking volunteers to tease apart the spidery scrawl of manuscripts to reveal new insights into daily life as it was more than 400 years ago.Launching on Thursday, Shakespeare’s World is a joint project between crowdsourcing organisation Zooniverse, the Oxford English Dictionary and Folger Shakespeare Library, and features a multitude of manuscripts penned by the Bard’s contemporaries from letters to recipes. Continue reading...

The place to talk about games and other things that matterTuesday! Continue reading...

Official figures claimed that the homegrown fantasy beat Furious 7 in China, but reports suggest the audience tally was artificially inflatedChina’s highest grossing film ever, the CGI fantasy film Monster Hunt, has been accused of manipulating its box-office figures in its bid to break records in the country’s rapidly swelling movie market.

Women in science and technology had criticised the campaign as sexist and misjudged after it asked them to conduct experiments with hairdryersIBM has discontinued a campaign encouraging women to get into technology by asking them to “hack a hairdryer” after widespread criticism from women in the industry.The company admitted the campaign “missed the mark for some” and apologised. Continue reading...

The car’s automatic safety features reported the accident to emergency services as the driver was fleeing the scene, police sayA Florida woman has been arrested for a hit-and-run accident in Port St Lucie, after her car called the police to report the collision.According to police, who say the 57-year-old driver hit a truck and a van before driving off, her car’s emergency assistance feature automatically called 911, reporting the accident and location. Continue reading...

The pop star is back on the streaming service after pulling her music, but something odd has happenedThis is weird: Taylor Swift was briefly back on Spotify. With just one song, from her 2012 album Red. And with the copyright attributed to paedophile former rock star Ian Watkins and his band, Lostprophets. Continue reading...

The latest instalment in the brash action series provides a whole Mediterranean country to blow up – but there are problems in paradiseJust Cause 3 introduces its protagonist Rico Rodriguez as a “dictator removal specialist” who then punches the flying missile he’s standing on. The series has always been gargantuan, explosive and delightfully daft, but from its opening sequence this sequel ups the ante.This time round, Rico returns home to liberate Medici, 400 square miles of Mediterranean splendour oppressed by cartoon despot Di Ravello who thinks nothing of torching his own people in a quest for world domination. Don’t expect any kind of political subtext though: the plot is forgettable and any moral message is clouded by the indifference shown towards Rico’s endless collateral damage. Medici is a place where you casually board a civilian’s boat miles from land and throw them overboard while quipping: “It’s a good day for a swim”. The game is knowingly ridiculous and more fun for it, its mantra amounting to Homer on a prison trolley yelling: “Must kill Di Ravello, wee!”. Continue reading...

Apple’s streaming music service comes to Android; there’s a United Nation’s app making it easy to donate to children around the world, and the Firefox browser is now available on Apple iOS devices Continue reading...

It’s time to stop the snobbishness about how superior a ‘proper computer’ isWhat constitutes “real work”? Anyone who has dug a ditch by hand would say that certainly qualifies, but when it comes to computing and screens, the distinction becomes more difficult. Since the introduction of the iPad in 2010, the insistence among some that what gets done on an iPad is not “real work”, while stuff done on a computer with a keyboard running some flavour of Windows is, has become gradually more hilarious.What stopped people from doing “real work” on the first iPad? According to various comments after its introduction, the lack of Photoshop; no access to the file system; no USB port for flash memory drives, or a spinning hard drive capable of storing 160GB, or a physical keyboard. Then there was the lack of computer-aided design/manufacturing programs, and the absence of Microsoft Office. How could you do “real work” in the modern age without touching Office?

As Facebook turns to drones, Google is pushing ahead with balloons in the quest to bring the internet to everyone – but is it really going to work?Founder, E-MAGINE Continue reading...

US presidential candidate is using TV coverage and the power of the social web to publicise his campaignThe US woke up on Friday to the news that Donald Trump was a full 20 percentage points ahead of Ted Cruz, his nearest rival, for the Republican nomination, and a good 16 percentage points higher than America’s top political analysts thought he would be.Running on a platform of “making America great again”, his campaign has been noteworthy for Trump’s egregious widespread insults and total fabrications, on a gargantuan scale. The most recent of which was him claiming to have seen “thousands of Muslims” dancing in the streets of New Jersey after 9/11. No evidence exists of this, because it never happened. Continue reading...

Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and others say new monitoring is needed following violence in Paris and San Bernardino – but they disagree on detailsPresidential candidates from both parties came together at the weekend to call for beefed-up government surveillance programs in the wake of recent terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California.The candidates did not agree, however, on what kind of surveillance – new dragnet metadata collection, tools to fight encryption or some even more powerful capability – was needed. Continue reading...