Technology | The Guardian

Users hijack hashtag of PR tweet from state news agency to share images of injured civilians and devastation from four-year conflictPictures of colourful Damascus markets, squad photos at pool parties, or panoramas of festival crowds holding glow sticks were not what Syria’s state news agency got when it tweeted asking for Syrians to share their summer snaps.Instead, users have been sharing photographs of the country’s conflict in response to the tweet sent out this week as part of a social media campaign from Sana English. Continue reading...

90m players will be able to buy Korean rapper as an in-app purchase, complete with signature moves and a new dance-pad scoring systemGangnam Style made South Korean rapper Psy a global star, with nearly 2.4bn views of the YouTube video since its release in July 2012. Now he’s extending his digital fame into mobile game Crossy Road.The game, which has attracted more than 90 million players since its launch in November 2014, has focused on Korean pop culture for its latest update, including a playable Psy. Continue reading...

Videos from social media sites and apps shared on Twitter to be aired between programmes as broadcaster aims to ‘shed our skin and reinvent again’It has been MTV’s trademark for more than 30 years and was immortalised by Sting in Dire Straits’ Money for Nothing.

In this fresh take on the interactive movie genre, players must analyse clips to solve a crime – it’s a fascinating new way to tell stories through gamesRaise your hands and scream if you remember “interactive movies”. The games industry has foisted some awful fads upon us over the last 40 years, but the full motion video (FMV) games of the early 1990s are among the worst. From the stodgy teen horror of Sega’s Night Trap to the blink-and-you’ll-complete-it brevity of Critical Path, it turned out that non-interactivity and Z-list B-movie footage was a bad combination.Two decades later, Her Story is a new breed of narrative game that does looks suspiciously like an interactive movie. You play an anonymous protagonist looking at an internal police computer. The terminal has been unlocked by a friend, you’ve been left alone, and it contains several hundred interview clips concerning a fictional 1994 murder case. Continue reading...

Rocksteady Studios proves its mastery of the Dark Knight with this third and apparently final gothic adventureNote: this is a review of the PlayStation 4 version of Arkham Knight. The PC version has been withdrawn from sale by Warner Bros owing to technical issues. This review should not be considered a reflection of the PC version of the game.If Arkham Knight really is the end for developer Rocksteady Studios and the Dark Knight, at least the two are parting on a high. Not only has this development team polished its series game mechanics to near-perfection, it has also reached a perfect understanding of this grimy comic book world. Continue reading...

Warner Brothers apologises for the port, and suggests unhappy gamers apply for a refundWarner Brothers have pulled the PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight from sale, after widespread reports of massive technical issues with the game.Released on Tuesday for PC, PS4 and Xbox One, the game has been well received by critics, with an 89% rating on aggregation site Metacritic. But the PC version has been repeatedly criticised for performance issues. A Reddit thread details multiple gamers having issues, with frame-rate dropping below 30 even on ultra-high-spec computers. Continue reading...

Search company removes ‘eavesdropping’ audio-monitoring software from open-source base of Chrome browser after outcry from privacy campaignersGoogle has pulled its listening software from the open-source Chromium browser after complaints from developers and privacy campaigners.

After 600k personalised picture-book sales, London firm secures investment from Silicon Valley firms Google Ventures and GreycroftChildren’s storytelling startup Lost My Name raised its first $100k of funding in 2014 on TV show Dragon’s Den. Now the London-based firm is turning to Silicon Valley for a $9m funding round.The investment – led by Google Ventures with venture capital firms Greycroft and The Chernin Group also participating – follows more than 600k sales of Lost My Name’s first personalised picture-book since its launch two years ago. Continue reading...

The place to talk about games and other things that matterIt’s Thursday and today’s screenshot comes from Counter-Strike Nexon: Zombies which is getting a content update at the end of June, in the form of the ‘Into the Darkness’ expansion. Which has zombie giants. ZOMBIE GIANTS. Continue reading...

It was born as a niche project, but went on to become one of the biggest games of the decade. Here’s part one of our inside story on Blizzard’s big adventureOn the set of ITV’s costume drama Mr Selfridge, in a quiet moment between takes, actor Greg Austin is a world away from his co-stars. Although dressed as an Edwardian gentlemen, he is glued to his iPhone, and to one game in particular. Hearthstone.“I got into it somewhat late, about a year after its release,” he says. “But since then I’ve been playing avidly. It is easy to learn, which means anyone can play it and enjoy themselves, but it is also difficult to master.” Austin loves the game so much, he now has his own dedicated YouTube gaming channel, EuphAuric, posting regular Hearthstone videos. Continue reading...

‘High-definition digital terror’ proliferating too easily online, says panel, calling for industry to brief security council on what is being doing to stop itA UN panel that advises the security council has called for internet and social media companies to respond to the exploitation of their services by al-Qaida and other extremist groups who use the web to recruit fighters and spout “increasingly horrific propaganda”.The panel recommended in a report circulated on Wednesday that these companies brief the security council committee monitoring sanctions against al-Qaida, its affiliates and the Islamic State group on measures they are taking to prevent such misuse. Continue reading...

If there was an electronic device that claimed it could make you feel relaxed (extremely relaxed) or energised (extremely energised) would you buy it? Thync is a new breed of 'mood-altering wearable' that promises it can do both.

Online retailer’s Luxembourg unit took £5.3bn sales from British internet shoppers, a rise of 14%, but Amazon.co.uk Limited recorded profit of just £34.4m

My father, Michael Westbrook, who has died aged 88, was one of the first professionally trained electronics engineers in the UK and, during a long career in the field, invented and patented a number of useful devices, including a fuel injection system for cars and a photoelectric fog detector for ships. He also became an early expert in the technology behind electric vehicles.Born an only child into a farming family in Preston Candover, Hampshire, to George and Phyllis (George’s cousin, also born Westbrook), Mike went to Peter Symonds school in Winchester, where even then he showed ability in the emerging field of electronics. From 1945 to 1948 he served in the RAF near Cheltenham. He married Barbara (nee Maw), a secretary, in 1949, and they moved to Upham in Hampshire while Michael studied at University College, Southampton (now the University of Southampton) under the electronics pioneer Eric Zepler. Continue reading...

Mayor speaks out in defence of black cab drivers, and says Transport for London are consulting on language and geography tests for minicab firmsBoris Johnson, the mayor of London, has suggested that Uber drivers should have to pass language and geography tests before being allowed to operate in the city.Speaking at his last ever State of London debate, Johnson came to the defence of black cab drivers, who have been locked in a rivalry with cab app Uber since the firm came to the UK. Continue reading...

Executives vow video site will not be used as a platform for ‘brutally violent propaganda produced by terrorists’, but argue against blanket censorshipGoogle has issued a call to arms against Isis, arguing that the terror group has engineered a “viral moment” on social networks with propaganda and beheading videos that needs to be challenged.Two of Google’s top executives – legal chief David Drummond and policy director Victoria Grand – used the Cannes Lions advertising festival to launch an attack, and appeal, against terrorist propaganda on Google-owned YouTube. Continue reading...

Popular feature that recalls email after sending will become standard part of Google’s webmail after years in beta modeIf you’ve ever drunkenly emailed your devotion to a former partner or accidentally used reply-all on an email thread to thousands of colleagues, good news: Gmail’s “undo send” feature has come to the masses.The feature, which can prevent massive social embarrassment and help avoid long chats with the HR department about what you just mistakenly sent to a colleague, is to be a standard part of Google’s webmail. Continue reading...

The place to talk about games and other things that matterWednesday! Today’s screenshot is Crossed from Gaijin Entertainment and Targem Games. It’s a team based multiplayer vehicle combat game set in a post-apocalyptic world, where society has seemingly descended into a series of truck battles. This is a very realistic scenario, so Crossed is basically a training sim. Continue reading...

The San Andreas star will headline video game adaptation Rampage, reuniting him with the producer of the hit earthquake rompEven though he’s only just finished surviving an earthquake in this summer’s disaster hit San Andreas, poor Dwayne Johnson will have to protect America from a gorilla, a lizard and a wolf in an adaptation of 1980s arcade game Rampage.According to Deadline, Johnson will reunite with San Andreas producer Beau Flynn for the action film, set to start production next summer. The script will come from Ryan Engle, who wrote the Liam Neeson airborne thriller Non-Stop. The project is still seeking a director. Continue reading...

Researchers find corresponding decline in STI transmission as high-speed internet access rolls out

Amazon Marketplace allows smaller businesses access to millions of shoppers but some question whether the benefits outweigh the costsAs the “everything store”, it was never going to stop at books. Founded by Jeff Bezos with the aim of being the one-stop shop for the world, Amazon now sells 120m different items.Alongside the stacks of paperbacks in its warehouses are CDs, DVDs, TVs, iPads, iPods, toys, clothing – but also the less obvious: jewellery, washing machines, garden furniture, windscreen wipers, bonsai trees, doubles basses, boomerangs, pet headstones, inflatable walking sticks, a One Direction onesie. Continue reading...

Pyongyang censors blacklist site popular with journalists and tourists for sharing photographs from inside the DPRKWarnings have started appearing on Instagram accounts in North Korea, with users being told that access to the popular photo-sharing app has been denied.Opening the app using the North Korean carrier Koryolink results in the the following message in English: “Warning! You can’t connect to this website because it’s in blacklist site”. A similar notice in Korean says the site contains “harmful content”, not mentioned in the English version.

Photography agency complaint over Google Image search could see European Commission antitrust investigation expandedPhoto agency Getty Images has been added as an “interested third person” to the European Commission’s antitrust investigation into Google, according to reports.

Senior producer Nick Channon runs through the latest title’s most interesting updates and alterations, including changes to defensive AI and shooting physicsWe’re on the show floor at E3 and somewhere within the hulking Electronic Arts stand, as music and gunfire blares out all around us, EA Sports senior producer Nick Channon and I are preparing to play Fifa 16. Naturally, the game’s demo mode features the two teams of the moment – Barcelona and Real Madrid. Generously, Channon has let me play as the former.But we’re not just having a kickabout. Nick wants to show off the changes to this latest iteration in EA’s annual footie sim. And, as usual, there are big promises. Continue reading...

The Malloy Aeronautics prototype, powered by four bladed fans, is intended to do many of the jobs of a helicopter but will be safer and cheaperScience fiction-obsessed children of the 1960s might have been disappointed to know that half a century later they would neither live in space nor get their meals in the form of pills. One thing that would have impressed them about 2015, though, is the ability to order your own personal hoverbike.You can now do just that, even if it is currently a request for an order with the delivery date uncertain. Malloy Aeronautics, the UK-based firm developing the machine, has already had understandable interest in their creation from the US military. Continue reading...

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

Armed with an “insane audio system”, Sheffield post-rockers 65daysofstatic have made an infinite soundtrack for the year’s biggest video gameRelated: No Man's Sky creator: 'We wanted to build a universe'“A soundtrack to infinity” sounds like the sort of thing a hairy bunch of proggers might say about their new album, but Sheffield post-rock outfit 65daysofstatic can actually lay claim to making one, or at least something very close. The band have been chosen to write the soundtrack for the much-anticipated PlayStation 4 game No Man’s Sky, where the player flies by spacecraft through a galaxy that, in playable terms, will be neverending: it comprises more than 18 quintillion planets, each with its own flora, fauna and, of course, lethal robotic drones, and each needs a soundscape to fit. Manic Miner it ain’t. Continue reading...

Sir Martin Sorrell’s marketing services group joins newspaper and tech company in new venture that aims to work across media and ad industry

Taxi app wants access to customers’ data even when they’re not using the app so it can ‘launch new promotional features,’ but a group says it’s a threat to privacyRegulators are being urged to investigate Uber over the taxi app company’s controversial plan to track its customers’ locations – even when they’re not using the service – and harvest details of their contacts.Campaigners at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (Epic) on Monday filed a complaint with the The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) claiming that forthcoming changes to Uber’s privacy policy “threaten the privacy rights and personal safety of American consumers”, “pose a direct risk of consumer harm” and “constitute an unfair and deceptive trade practice”.

Study finds significant degradations of networks for five largest ISPs, including AT&T and Time Warner, representing 75% of all wireline households in USMajor internet providers, including AT&T, Time Warner and Verizon, are slowing data from popular websites to thousands of US businesses and residential customers in dozens of cities across the country, according to a study released on Monday.

Taylor Swift’s power over Apple has got the internet thinking. What else can she ask it to change about our iPhones, iPads and Macs?Everything has changed. Taylor Swift has spoken out against Apple and seemingly achieved the impossible – she’s persuaded the tech giant to actually change something. After Swift’s intervention, Apple will now pay artists as it gives their music away for free as part of its Apple Music streaming service trial.Some might say Apple were always looking for a way to shake off its previous stance, but that shouldn’t lead us to underestimate the sway Swift holds. There’s no bad blood between the parties that we know of, so what’s to stop Swift asking Apple for more? What else could she change for us? What in our wildest dreams … Continue reading...

The place to talk about games and other things that matterIt’s Monday. Today’s screenshot comes from Anna’s Quest, a new point-and-click adventure from Daedalic Entertainment. It was shown at E3 last week and will be released on PC and Mac soon. The trailer is right here. Continue reading...

From Ada Lovelace to Sheryl Sandberg, women have been shaping the development of technology since the 1800s Continue reading...

Star says plans to not pay royalties during free streaming trial are ‘completely unlike this historically progressive and generous company’Update: Apple has announced a change in policy, and will now be paying royalties during its three-month free trial. The original story follows below.Taylor Swift has spoken out again about streaming music, but this time her target is Apple rather than Spotify. Continue reading...

Amazon says it is ready to fly deliveries by drone as soon as federal rules allow but experts suggest technological intricacies still need to be ironed outHow far away are we from a world where drones deliver packages? If Amazon is to be believed, not far at all. Others are not so sure: technical progress past this point isn’t merely a matter of invention, it’s a matter of public safety.Related: Congress warned that drones present 'a nightmare scenario for civil liberties' Continue reading...

Banks want to become a ‘lifestyle partner’ but consumers are warned to be wary of sharing their dataYou walk past your favourite clothing retailer. You’ve not bought anything for a while, so your mobile phone flashes offering you a discount on the type of things you usually buy.You receive an alert from your bank saying your water bill has shot up and you should check for a leak. Another arrives saying you are paying 20% more for broadband than your neighbours. But don’t worry – your bank has already switched your provider. Continue reading...

The Mercedes-Benz C300 is compact and frugal, yet also smart and luxurious – perfect for the undercover boss£38,120

Court decides that rule would have placed undue burden on women’s right to an abortion as activists praise decision: ‘Politics should never trump medicine’The Iowa supreme court has struck down a restriction that would have prevented doctors from administering abortion-inducing pills remotely via video teleconferencing, saying it would have placed an undue burden on a woman’s right to get an abortion.Iowa is one of only two states that offers so-called telemedicine abortions – Minnesota offers them on a smaller scale – and doctors at Iowa’s urban clinics that perform abortions had been allowed to continue offering the remotely administered abortions while the ruling was pending. Continue reading...

PS3/4/Vita, Xbox One/360, Wii U, 3DS, PC; Warner Bros; £24.99-39.99It’s dressed in the trappings of Jurassic World, but this is a Lego game from top to shiny plastic toe, which means you’ll be wandering around smashing everything into its component bricks, before reassembling them into useful machines that eventually lead you to the next area. Arriving on Jurassic Park’s Isla Nublar, you can choose to play through either the original film’s story or that of Jurassic World, in both cases reimagined with a loving silliness through its surprisingly expressive animated mini-figures.

PS4, Xbox One; Bethesda; £49.99The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was a game so titanically vast you could lose yourself in it for hundreds of hours and still stumble across new places. The fact that Skyrim is just one region of Tamriel tells you all you need to know about the mind-blowing potential of The Elder Scrolls Online, which splices this scale with a population of thousands of real players. While the landmass is just as intimidatingly endless as you’d imagine, the experience of playing Tamriel Unlimited lacks the atmosphere and solemnity of the earlier single-player games. Wherever you go you’ll find players running in all directions, swarming enemies and standing in loose gaggles around important points in quests, blasting immersion-breaking drum’n’bass over voice chat or talking loudly to other people in the room with them. Mechanically things fair slightly better, its relatively dull quests underpinned by solid combat and complex, hard-won upgrade paths. It’s not pretty, never coming close to last month’s Witcher 3, and can feel a little monotonous as you trudge between similarly structured busy work, although it is very early days for a game designed to be played for months on end. Continue reading...

Mobile app connects amateur photographers in the UK with potential buyers in a bid to democratise stock photographyThe photographs that we share on social networks often have emotional value, but could they have a commercial value too?Although nobody is going to pay for your filtered KFC big-bucket snaps anytime soon, the idea of people paying for amateur smartphone shots is not as strange as it may seem. Continue reading...

‘The company is rich and the drivers go back home with empty pockets’ says one ‘freelance’ operator as commission rules drivers are employees, not contractorsShifera Sahilu thought Uber would be his passport to a better life in America. Instead, he said, the ride-sharing company almost ruined him.The fast-growing tech company has built a global business promising new sources of revenue for “freelance” drivers like Sahilu. This week, in a major blow to the company, a court questioned exactly how freelance those drivers are. Uber’s critics cheered the decision. Sahilu is not so sure it will make a difference. Continue reading...

Ketchup buyer mistakenly exposed to porn after Heinz allows a competition domain to lapse, allowing adult entertainment firm to buy itHeinz has apologised to a German customer after a QR code on one of its tomato ketchup bottles linked to a porn site.

Growth of news sharing on sites such as Facebook and Twitter prompts tabloid to make selected digital content available for freeThe Sun is to start to make content available outside its digital paywall for the first time as the tabloid aims to capitalise on the explosion of news sharing on social media such as Facebook and Twitter.Mike Darcey, the chief executive of News UK, said that from early July “select digital content” will be made available for free. Continue reading...

The feature will allow users to follow live events through curated streams of tweets, photos and videosTwitter is going live. After years of attempting to compete with market leader Facebook on its own turf, Twitter is poised to embrace the key aspect that differentiates the two social networks with a new feature, the code-named Project Lightning, which will allow users to follow live events through curated streams of tweets, photos and videos.Those events could be organised events such as the World Cup final or Eurovision, or breaking news events such as natural disasters or terrorist attacks. Continue reading...

Cycling is safe and easy inside the search giant’s Mountain View HQ, but getting to the site from elsewhere in Silicon Valley means crossing fast-moving expressways and busy train tracks. Is Google’s new bike plan the answer?Inside the Googleplex – the tech giant’s headquarters in Mountain View, California – hundreds of multi-coloured bikes are scattered around. With bright yellow frames and big blue and green rubber tires, they’re seemingly everywhere – clustered at the edges of parking lots, lined near building entrances, or clumsily toppled over into the office park landscaping. The bikes make it easy for Google’s employees to move between its many office buildings, spread over roughly two miles of land at the southern tip of the San Francisco Bay in a neighbourhood known as North Bayshore. Inside the Googleplex, biking is safe and easy.Outside the Googleplex, not so much. Continue reading...

Finally confirmed by Sony, the latest adventure from the creator of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus marks the return of a singular talent in gamingWhen the Japanese game designer Fumito Ueda was a child, he loved to capture and care for wild animals. He was obsessed with the way they moved; and later as a young game designer he imported a copy of the Amiga classic Lemmings, seeing in it something other than a colourful puzzler. “I sensed life on the TV screen for the first time in my life,” he said.Since then, he has become famous for games that explore humanity and companionship. After joining Sony Japan’s development studio in 1997, he oversaw two of the most fascinating and beautiful action adventures of the PlayStation 2 era: Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. These doleful, reflective titles, with their hazy visuals and vast silences, showed us new ways to tell stories and invoke emotions through games. The moment in Ico where the eponymous lead character takes the hand of Yorda, the princess he seeks to rescue from an evil queen, has become one of the great images of the medium. Continue reading...