Technology | The Guardian

Regional publisher to launch titles such as the Bristol Post and Leicester Mercury through apps that launch at 5pm dailyLocal World is to launch digital evening editions for 10 of its titles, including the Bristol Post, Leicester Mercury and Nottingham Post.The regional newspaper publisher has struck a deal with Google that will see the titles make a return to the evening market through an app edition that will launch at 5pm daily. Continue reading...

Clare Balding and Jack Whitehall court danger, a birthday greeting from Game of Thrones, Nicki Minaj joins the queen of pop, and Toy StoryWe start this week with a dream come true for an Ed Sheeran fan who was surprised by her hero as she sang hit song Thinking Out Loud. Sydney Bourbeau was performing at her Canadian music school’s fundraiser for the Edmonton Humane Society when Sheeran walked out of an HMV store and on to a stage in the shopping mall. Bourbeau, 13, said: “I was like, should I stop? I didn’t want to stop, but I wanted to talk to him. This is, like, the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”If only tennis fans Clare Balding, Jack Whitehall and One Direction’s Liam Payne had been so thrilled to meet their hero. Former Wimbledon champion Andy Murray put them through their paces as he coached them to raise funds for Unicef’s Children in Danger Summer Disease Appeal. It was definitely game, set and match to Andy. Continue reading...

Lifeline measure subsidises broadband bills for poor households, whose lack of access shuts children out of schools and keeps adults away from vital dataHigh-speed internet access could now be more accessible to low-income Americans after the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) passed a measure on Thursday to subsidise their internet bills.Fewer than half of American households making less than $25,000 a year have internet access. The FCC voted 3-2 to expand a Reagan-era measure called Lifeline to include broadband. The subsidy program currently serves 1.2 million Americans, providing $9.25 total per household to citizens who qualify. Continue reading...

Royal Bank of Scotland executive Simon McNamara says staff working around the clock to sort payments crash but no system is failsafeRoyal Bank of Scotland cannot rule out suffering another meltdown in its computer systems despite pledging to spend £150m a year making them more resilient, one of the bank’s most senior executives said on Thursday.With the bank still battling to put 600,000 payments into customer accounts that went missing on Wednesday, the bank’s chief administrative officer, Simon McNamara, said he could not make the system failsafe. Continue reading...

Electric Frontier Foundation’s ‘Who Has Your Back’ ratings give full marks to Dropbox, while messaging service is criticised for data request policies

Research by Which? shows ‘poor’ levels of broadband service across the UKThree quarters of British households aren’t getting the promised speeds on their broadband package according to research, which found the problem affects over 15 million households.While 90% of those polled by Which? said speed was an important factor when choosing a provider, the consumer group found just 26% of households with fixed broadband connections were getting the speeds they were paying for. Continue reading...

The place to talk about games and other things that matterThursday! I’m seeing all of EA’s games on this final day of E3. Continue reading...

Court throws out conviction of two men accused of involvement in knife fight after judge sent texts during trial to babysitterA German federal court has granted two defendants a retrial because their judge was sending texts from her mobile phone during testimony to arrange a babysitter for her children.The federal court of justice (BGH) found that “even in an age of limitless mobile phone and internet use”, a judge “must devote full attention to the hearing”. Continue reading...

Firm hopes to persuade regulators to give the go-ahead to £12.5bn deal, which it says is needed to help Britain stay ahead of its peersBT set out to convince regulators to pass its £12.5bn merger with mobile operator EE on Wednesday, claiming the deal will create a digital champion for the UK.The nation’s biggest telecoms company said that swallowing the UK’s largest mobile network will not be bad for consumers, as rivals warned a lessening of competition could lead to price increases. Continue reading...

Uber to appeal California Labor Commission ruling that it is ‘involved in every aspect of the operation’Uber has appealed a California labor commission ruling that declared employees of the ride-sharing company are employees and not contractors.In its ruling, the California labor commissioner said Uber is “involved in every aspect of the operation”, negating the company’s longstanding claim that its drivers are contractors. Continue reading...

Vulnerability remains months after discovery, allowing hackers to eavesdrop on calls, steal data and activate camera, microphone and GPS remotelyA vulnerability in Samsung’s Android keyboard installed on over 600m devices worldwide could allow hackers to take full control of the smartphone or tablet.

British channel’s compilation of nursery rhymes has been watched more than 655m times, sending it into YouTube all-time top 30The wheels on the bus go round and round... and those wheels have helped British YouTube channel Little Baby Bum overtake One Direction’s biggest hit on the video site’s most-viewed chart.Related: Little Baby Bum: how UK couple built world's fifth-biggest YouTube channel Continue reading...

Justin Vernon took to Twitter in support of Spotify – but says physical media is still betterJustin Vernon, bandleader of the Grammy-winning Bon Iver, has criticised Apple’s recently announced streaming service Music and put his support behind Spotify – but, perhaps befitting his indie-rock credentials, he stated that physical LPs are still best of all.Quoting a Fact magazine article, he wrote on Twitter: Continue reading...

Avoiding eating, drinking and getting angry before sunset is tough during fasting month – but these apps can help keep prayer time, habits and diet in checkThe alarm on your phone buzzes at 2:39am. Bleary eyed, you wolf down your toast and sip your water in the last minute before the day of fasting begins. No eating, no drinking, and no getting angry before sunset. You roll your eyes as your phone pings with notifications of yet another message with a mosque emoticon, or a cheesy “I have a date every night in Ramadan” joke. The fast begins. Continue reading...

Smart connected trackers are making it easier to study animals – and find out how the world is reacting to global warming

Government looks into viability of turning whole NHS estate in England into massive free Wi-Fi zoneEvery hospital and GP surgery in England is likely to start providing free Wi-Fi in a move by the NHS to keep patients entertained and help doctors and nurses use much more technology in their work.

Loopimal, Alexi, Detour, Relook, Tiki Taka Soccer, You Must Build a Boat, Fallout Shelter, Angry Birds Fight! and moreWelcome to this week’s roundup of the latest, greatest iPhone and iPad apps and games. All these apps have been released for the first time – ie not updates – since the last roundup.All prices are correct at the time of writing, with “IAP” indicating use of in-app purchases. Continue reading...

Virtual reality is front and centre at the opening of the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2015 - better known as E3 - in Los Angeles, with Oculus, Sony and Microsoft all lined up to make it a technology battleground. Dan Ackerman, a senior editor at CNET, the online technology and consumer electronics review site, believes user-friendly VR might finally be here Continue reading...

A Dutch startup has unveiled plans to use robotic printers to weld the structure drop-by-drop in the first large-scale test of the technologyA Dutch startup has unveiled plans to build the world’s first 3D-printed bridge across an Amsterdam canal, a technique that could become standard on future construction sites.

The place to talk about games and other things that matterHey there, it’s Wednesday. Continue reading...

Personal information of almost every government employee was stolen from the Office of Personnel Management, which neglected basic cybersecurity practicesThe agency that allowed hackers linked to China to steal private information about nearly every US government employee and detailed personal histories of military and intelligence workers with security clearances failed for years to take basic steps to secure its computer networks, officials acknowledged to Congress on Tuesday.Related: OPM hack: China blamed for massive breach at US federal agency Continue reading...

The e-tailing giant reportedly developing a mobile app On My Way that would pay participating members of the public to deliver goodsAmazon.com is considering recruiting the man on the street to deliver packages to the rest of his neighborhood.The e-tailing giant is developing a mobile app that would pay participating members of the public to deliver goods, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. The low-tech meets hi-tech move is the latest in a long list of schemes to cut the costs of one of the most expensive parts of the Amazon business model, namely doorstep delivery. Continue reading...

Researchers at New York’s Columbia University harness the element’s natural process to power miniature vehicle and an LED lampMachines that harness the power of evaporating water have been created by scientists in the US.Researchers at Columbia University in New York have built a miniature car that draws on the process to propel itself along, as well as an evaporation-driven generator that powers a flashing LED lamp. Continue reading...

Android Security Rewards offers bug bounties to developers who find critical flaws in the operating systemGoogle will start to pay security researchers who find bugs in its Android devices a reward of up to $40,000 (£25,600), in the first extension of its bug bounty programme to the mobile operating system.The company has also announced a new programme to ensure the security of third-party software on the Android OS by nudging developers to stop using programming libraries which are known to be out-of-date in their applications. Continue reading...

From Last Guardian, Uncharted 4 and Dreams to Destiny, Project Morpheus and Call of Duty Black Ops III, here’s everything you need to knowSony showed off a large collection of new games, gave new details on exclusive elements in some big games, and announced that its Project Morpheus virtual reality headset would be available next year.

For these ‘citizens of the world’, the office can be anything from a beach hut in Brisbane to a Starbucks in Seattle, thanks to the growing prevalence of remote-based work. But roaming the globe from cafe to cafe is not without its challenges

Adobe Photoshop Mix, Kamcord, Monster Mingle, Dash Radio, Tiki Taka Soccer, You Must Build a Boat, Hitman: Sniper and moreWelcome to this week’s roundup of the latest, greatest Android apps and games, covering smartphones and tablets.All these apps have been released for the first time – ie not updates – since the last roundup. All prices are correct at the time of writing, with “IAP” indicating use of in-app purchases. Continue reading...

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

Can you build a half-size, hypersonic passenger pod? If so, Elon Musk wants to hear from youElon Musk, the man behind the futuristic spaceflight company SpaceX, the futuristic electric car company Tesla and, er, the payment company PayPal, is ramping up the focus on his third futuristic transportation obsession: the Hyperloop.Musk is setting up a competition to design a passenger pod to run in the Hyperloop, a low-pressure tube between LA and San Francisco which will use a railgun to rocket passengers between the two cities at supersonic speeds. Continue reading...

US online video startup says more than half of its viewing comes from outside its home country, as it sets sights on signing more creatorsMore than half of online video service Vessel’s usage is coming from outside the US, 11 weeks after the San Francisco-based company launched its iOS app and website.The company has been pitching itself to YouTube creators and musicians as a “first window” for web video, promising to pay them more money than they get from their cut on free video services if they grant it at least three days’ exclusivity on their new videos. Continue reading...

Plans to hire ‘ambitious, detail-oriented journalists’ to work on recently-unveiled app, but what happens when Apple becomes the news?That news story you just read on your iPhone: did Apple pay the editor responsible? Actually, from this autumn, it’s possible that the company did.Related: News outlets face losing control to Apple, Facebook and Google Continue reading...

NetPark in Southend-on-Sea is using Wi-Fi and apps to add an artistic layer and help bring nature to lifeA leafy expanse in Southend-on-Sea might seem like the epitome of analogue attraction, but the modest appearance of Chalkwell Park belies a radical twist. For this summer its verdant fields will be turned into a garden of digital delights.The brainchild of “artistic laboratory” Metal, and dubbed “NetPark”, the project is bringing together an international team of artists, writers and musicians to unleash a host of virtual artwork within the park, from interactive stories to poetry and music. “The way that I think about it is [as] a 21st-century sculpture park where all of the pieces of work are in the digital layer rather than in the landscape,” explains Metal’s artistic director, Colette Bailey. Continue reading...

Web service that promises secure central storage for passwords says people’s main accounts may have been compromisedA web service that promises to help people keep their various passwords secure has reported hackers may have obtained some user information — although not actual passwords — from its network.The company was advising users to change their LastPass master passwords, which are used to retrieve encrypted individual passwords for the users’ other online services or accounts. But it said they did not need to change individual passwords for all their accounts. Continue reading...

French publisher seeking to redefine the sandbox action adventure with its co-op shooter set in a vast intricate landscape with no cinematic narrativeUbisoft may well have just announced the end of the open-world action adventure as we know it. Ghost Recon: Wildlands, the latest title in the French publisher’s strategy shooter series, is the first to take place in a freely explorable landscape. But instead of adopting the usual approach of providing a main through-line of story missions, backed up with side quests (as in games like Far Cry and Grand Theft Auto), Wildlands, has no fixed narrative at all.Instead, players – taking part alone or with three friends – will be able to travel the world’s nine different environments, taking on missions in any order they want. There are no cinematic sequences to drive the plot. A range of land, sea and air vehicles including helicopters, trucks, motorbikes and speedboats are available for navigation and the landscape – based around Bolivia – is scattered with towns and villages to discover. Continue reading...

Microsoft promised the greatest line-up in Xbox history for its E3 press briefing – then delivered with fan favourites, and Xbox 360 compatibilityMinecraft is coming to the real world - and in 3D. Just don’t hold your breath.Microsoft delivered a convincing press briefing at E3 2015, revealing a muscular line-up of exclusive titles and features. Continue reading...

Clone site buckling under influx of new users seeking a ‘censorship-free’ experience after Reddit banned five subredditsDisgruntled Redditors have decamped en masse to a Swiss-based clone of Reddit called Voat after the site’s administrators banned five subreddits for harassing behaviour.In response to the deluge, Voat, which mimics Reddit’s design and layout (albeit using “subverses” rather than “subreddits”) was forced to ask for bitcoin donations to keep the site live. Continue reading...

The place to talk about games and other things that matterSorry everyone, I literally just woke up, at 3am in Los Angeles, and thought “oh no, I forgot Chatterbox!” Continue reading...

Woven into the fabric of every element of our lives, the internet isn’t the most important fight we have, but it is the most foundationalIn the endless prairie in which the strawmen crowd, thousands of acres are populated by the one of the laziest, and yet most excitingly topical sorts of strawman: the Internet Utopian.The Internet Utopian has just read John Perry Barlow’s Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, a beautiful piece of rhetoric that articulates a vision for a society of the mind, out of reach of the most venal impulses of the “governments of the industrial world … weary giants of flesh and steel,” where freedom is more universal, and co-operation simpler, than at any time in the past. Continue reading...

Social network has realised that just because you didn’t like, share or comment doesn’t mean you weren’t interestedFacebook has announced the latest change to the algorithm governing what stories its users see in their news feeds on the social network.The company says it hopes to help more “meaningful” stories bubble up in people’s feeds by looking beyond metrics like comments, likes and shares when judging what’s interesting. Continue reading...

Are landlines dead, is DNA private, and what will you do if a robot takes your job? Answer these questions and more to find out how future-proof you are

Create your own monsters with Sago Mini Monsters and use Frozen fever to educate your kids Continue reading...

(PS4, Capcom, cert 12)Served up as an appetiser for next year’s PS4-exclusive Street Fighter V, Sony has commissioned a quick and dirty next-gen port of the landmark title responsible for reviving the fighting game genre. Sadly, the emphasis here is on the dirty. Sure, the content presented is comprehensive, featuring the most up-to-date revision of the game, complete with 44 characters, the hyperactive Omega mode and every DLC costume to date (including the hilarious animal wild pack).Sadly, the quality of the port falls some way short of Capcom’s in-house standards. Menus are jerky, music skips, moves are buggy and broken and, to top it all off, it suffers from input lag, an issue the PS4 version was promoted as having fixed over the PS3 iteration. Considering this is a modest six-year-old engine that runs flawlessly on the existing PC port, there’s really no excuse for such poor performance. Inevitably, there will be a patch that beats the game into shape, but until that day it’s impossible to recommend this spoiled update of Capcom’s evergreen title. Continue reading...

(PS Vita, NIS America, cert 6)A dungeon crawler in the vein of the 3DS’s complex and challenging Etrian Odyssey series on the more powerful Vita should be a win. Yet while Operation Abyss packs sharper visuals and a richer, brooding musical score into its nightmare tale of strange powers and extra-dimensional monsters (that only Japanese teenagers can vanquish, naturally), in almost every other respect it’s a disappointment.From reused environments to typos in the text and the rote emulation of Etrian Odyssey’s nuanced role-playing, this feels like a job half done. More effort has been put into character creation, for the squads you explore dungeons with, than in explaining any of the game’s overcomplicated systems to the player. Continue reading...

The Hövding airbag is the latest piece of hi-tech hardware offering vital head protection to cyclistsI’m lying on the ground in the middle of the park, feeling a bit like a crash test dummy. My ears are ringing and my head is held in the vice-like grip of safety gear more suited to a spaceship.But what I’m actually wearing is a cycling helmet. It’s a Hövding, an “airbag for cyclists”, invented in Sweden and billed as the helmet for people who don’t like wearing helmets. The Hövding promises superior protection in a crash without the need to actually put anything on your head. Continue reading...

Industry report says phone calls to banks have also declined sharply with smartphones and tablets predicted to overtake use of branches this yearThe use of bank branches fell by 6% last year as customers channelled more transactions over phone networks and the internet, according to a report published on Sunday that predicts the use of smartphones and tablets will usurp branches this year.It insists, however, that banks are not giving up on bricks and mortar altogether despite a wave of closures and job cuts in recent years. Continue reading...

New spin-off will launch in the summer as a site and app, gathering YouTube games videos in one place, and taking on Amazon’s TwitchYouTube is launching YouTube Gaming, a new spin-off app and website for gamers that will make its debut in the summer, initially in the US and UK.It will seek to capitalise on the popularity of gaming videos on YouTube, with profile pages for more than 25,000 games “from Asteroids to Zelda” collecting videos related to each title. Games publishers and YouTube gamers will also be prominently featured. Continue reading...

Sunday Times says Downing Street believes Russia and China have hacked into American whistleblower’s files, endangering US and British agentsDowning Street and the Home Office are being challenged to answer in public claims that Russia and China have broken into the secret cache of Edward Snowden files and that British agents have had to be withdrawn from live operations as a consequence.

Gill Pratt is set to leave the wing of the US defense department that develops cutting-edge technologies but lets us in on what’s next for the venerated agencyGill Pratt invented legs. Well, sort of: the MIT-educated scientist invented electric series-elastic actuators, the technology that carried the bipedal “dinosaur” robots that wowed the scientific community in the early aughts.Since 2010, he has worked for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), the wing of the US defense department devoted to funding and developing new technologies, from a self-steering bullet called Exacto to the packet-switching system, Arpanet, that became the internet. He is now set to leave the robotics challenge program. Continue reading...

The choirmaster says technology has transformed his work and he even auditions singers via Skype and FaceTimeAre you a gadget fiend or a technophobe?Definitely a gadget fiend. I was a proper nerd as a kid. A spod. I programmed my Amstrad CPC 464 in Basic and built my own number games. My first paid music job was singing in the touring production of Evita, aged 10 – a seminal moment in my life – and from the proceeds I bought a sampler. But because of the Amstrad’s memory limitations, you only had one second to play with, so you could only make stuff like the “Ta-ta-ta-take” bit in Respectable by Mel & Kim. Continue reading...

Digital technology has changed the way we listen to music – but what about the way it is made? Metronomy, a band who straddle the analogue/digital divide, discuss the uneasy terrain of modern music, and test out some of the most advanced gear available.