Technology | The Guardian

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.

A host of innovations were on display at the Imagine Festival in Milton KeynesWant to experience driverless pods before they hit the road? Fancy dodging transport problems before they happen? What about a system for rewarding those who walk rather than take the car?At the Imagine Festival in Milton Keynes last week, the potential of technology to revolutionise the way we move about was on display, as a host of young entrepreneurs vied to offer creative solutions to 21st-century travel dilemmas. Continue reading...

‘The wasted capacity made me feel guilty I wasn’t transporting a Portaloo or towing a horse’What a beast, what a gigantic monument to shininess. When they parked the Toyota Hilux Invincible X outside my house, my first worry was I might need planning permission. It has a massive, open flatbed with a flap-down back door, along the lines of a classic pickup, with extra bling. I texted my mother a picture of it to ask if she needed anything. “Can I have seven labourers from the 1930s?” she said. “I have work they could do and crusts of bread.” Seven cases of wine didn’t even leave a trace on its capacity. I stuck the kids in the back. They begged me to drive down the road. I realised how illegal that was, and how much the world had changed.It has legitimate seats as well, of course: a double cab and four seats. Imagine yourself in a regular car, with a huge other car stitched on to the back. There is nothing obnoxious, jerky or hard to control, but it’s unlike anything else, even any other SUV, I can think of. It has a 2.8-tonne towing ability; the sheer bulk of the engineering makes it more like a removal expedition, or driving a ski lift. Continue reading...

As chief Dick Costolo departs, investors must stop pushing Twitter to be the next big social media network and focus on its simple strengthsWhen the chief executive of Twitter announced he was stepping down on Thursday, staff knew there was only one way to mark his surprise departure. A hashtag on the social network was created – #thankyoudickc – for colleagues to lavish praise on Dick Costolo, a former standup comedian turned Silicon Valley entrepreneur. “140 characters certainly not enough #thankyoudickc,” said one employee.In his nearly five years in the job, Twitter has grown from a few million users to 302 million. Why then would the 51-year-old leave one of the most high-profile jobs at one of the tech industry’s brightest shining stars? Despite his popularity and success in helping the company mature, Costolo has always been caught between conflicting visions of what Twitter is capable of being: a social utility that promises to be a democratic civic space for all, or a commercial service.

‘BuzzFeeds, SchmuzzFeeds’ said the Daily Express owner in his Financial Times interview. Here are 10 more insights into the mind of the media mogulRichard Desmond dismissed BuzzFeed in his Financial Times interview as “BuzzFeeds, SchmuzzFeeds – at the end of the day, you trust the Daily Express”. So here’s a list of 10 things we learnt about Desmond during media correspondent Henry Mance’s expensive lunchtime encounter with the porn baron.1) He is not an internet fan, saying about meeting Google to put OK! magazine online: “They’re all very smooth, they’re all like out of Thunderbirds, and they’ve all got these fantastic sweaters – don’t know where they get them. By the time you have the fourth meeting, the whole deal’s completely fucking changed. They are the biggest gangsters in the world and they get away with it. One thing I’ve got to say about the European Union is that they are giving them a good kicking. I was always slow to adopt the internet, because I knew what would happen. It’s interesting how vinyl’s coming back, isn’t it?” Continue reading...

The taxi-app firm calls them the engine of the business, but drivers complain of falling pay, insecure employment and vulnerability to difficult passengersMost days at midday, Uber’s nondescript office in London’s King’s Cross opens its doors and dozens of men clutching sheaves of driving licences and insurance documents pour in. Many are first- or second-generation immigrants from places such as Afghanistan, Poland, Somalia and Nigeria eager to sign up to drive for the US tech company, whose phone-based minicab-hailing app has transformed the taxi industry in 58 countries.Related: Uber whistleblower exposes breach in driver-approval process Continue reading...

Oculus Rift has linked up with Microsoft as it prepares to bring VR to the home, and developers’ enthusiasm appears undiminished by past disappointments