The most popular messaging apps have hundreds of millions of users, but how secure are they really? The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been finding out,producing a “secure messaging scorecard” to rate them on a range of criteria. Are messages encrypted in transit, and encrypted so the provider can’t read them? Can you verify contacts’ identities? Are past communications ...
Even if you’re not that angry about the rise of free-to-play (or “freemium”) gaming in the world of smartphones and tablets, the latest episode of South Parkpromises to be a hoot. It takes aim at the trend of games funded by in-app purchases of virtual items, and judging from reports, nails the flaws of some of the more cynical cash-in titles. VentureBeat has a good summary of ...
The way Facebook curates the news feed of its users – through an algorithm designed to prioritise 300 updates a day out of 1,500-plus that you could see from friends and pages that you follow – has often been controversial. Now the social network says it’s giving more control back to those users, or as it put it in a blog post: “more ways for you to control and give feedback ...
The UK’s next general election looks like it may be dominated by the topic of immigration, thanks to the rise of UKIP and the desire of the established political parties to head off a drain in supporters by edging closer to its policies. If there’s a looming threat to British jobs, though, isn’t it more likely to come from robots rather than immigration? A new report published ...
The default stance on King’s Candy Crush Saga mobile game in the Guardian’s comments section seems to be “It’s rubbish and cynical, and the people who play it are fools”. It gets quite a kicking whenever we cover it. And yet... Candy Crush Saga has been phenomenally popular, with tens of millions of daily players who don’t give two hoots about online anger over freemium business models ...
The current generation of games consoles feels like a relatively open battle: Sony’s PlayStation 4 is perceived to have had the edge over Microsoft’s Xbox One so far, but latest figures from the latter suggest the race is far from won. “As we head into the busy holiday season Xbox One led generation 8 console sales in the US for the past two weeks,” wrote Microsoft’s ...
Apple’s new Health app – and the HealthKit platform that lets other companies’ health and activity-tracking apps tie into it – was one of the big new features in its iOS 8 software, which launched a couple of months ago. Health is capable of collecting, storing and analysing a range of personal data, but there are clear privacy implications here – for Apple and any company ...
Facebook may control the social graph of 1.3 billion people, but now it has ambitions to stretch deeper into the workplace, according to the Financial Times’ report on plans for “Facebook at Work”. This isn’t about getting around corporate firewalls to ensure you can see which Frozen character your friends are, though. It’s a proper move to compete with services from Google Drive ...
This year has seen plenty of debate about the portrayal of women in games, but now Swedish trade association Dataspelsbranchen is launching an intriguing new project to analyse the topic. What’s more, the government-backed research could end in some kind of labelling scheme, although news site The Local stresses that it’s currently unclear whether this would be a rating ...
Uber clarifies data privacy policy as controversy rumbles – today's Open Thread
posted on , by Unknown
The story that broke earlier in the week about an Uber executive threatening to investigate critical journalists’ private lives rumbles on, with the company providing a couple of official responses yesterday. First, chief executive Travis Kalanick went on a tweetstorm with 13 tweets addressing the issue, although while it concluded with a direct apology to Sarah Lacy, the ...
