Premature claims of victory will be blocked from Twitter and Google in the run-up to November’s US presidential election, as both companies follow Facebook in trying to fight the prospect of a stolen vote. Under its new rules, Twitter will treat as harmful misinformation any tweet which makes false claims about election rigging, or prematurely […]
Uber and Lyft are waging a scorched-earth regulatory battle to avoid providing basic benefits to their drivers, now considered essential workers, in their largest US market: California. In response to a lawsuit by the California attorney general, Xavier Becerra, a judge found the companies’ drivers to be employees and ordered Uber and Lyft to act […]
The UK government’s Covid contact-tracing app will finally launch in England and Wales on 24 September, the government has announced, more than four months later than initially promised. Currently being trialled in the Isle of Wight and the east London borough of Newham, the app was redeveloped entirely over the summer to adopt a framework […]
One billion hours, veteran game designer Sid Meier notes in this light and enjoyable memoir, is an unfathomable length of time. And yet it took just six years for players to spend a billion cumulative hours on the fifth iteration of Meier’s engrossing Civilization series, a nation-building game that has seen them shepherding their peoples […]
Stormzy has filmed the music video for Rainfall, the forthcoming single from his No 1 album Heavy is the Head, entirely inside a video game. The award-winning grime artist and social activist will also star as a future version of himself in a mission in the game, Watch Dogs: Legion, which is released on 29 […]
Microsoft has confirmed that its Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X consoles will launch on 10 November. The former will be priced at GBP249 (and $299), the latter at GBP449 ($499). Pre-orders for both will be available from 22 September. The company was forced to announce its lower priced Xbox Series S machine on […]
Scorching blue skies, snaking roads, crudely animated spectators: Hotshot Racing really knows its arcade racing staples. This exercise in pure, unapologetic nostalgia is a loving tribute to early 1990s driving games such as Ridge Racer, Virtua Racing and Daytona USA, with a flat-shaded polygonal art style, primary colour cityscapes and overexcited voiceovers that perfectly recall […]
Fortnite could be banned from iPhones and other Apple devices for a year, the game’s developer, Epic Games, has revealed, as the court battle between the two companies continues. The scale of the ban was revealed in a legal filing from Epic, which asks the court to force Apple to allow the game back on […]
Would you trust Masayoshi Son, the man who did so much to promote and finance the WeWork silliness, to take huge short-term punts on your behalf on the value of US technology stocks? Retail shareholders in Softbank, the Japanese firm founded and led by Son, clearly do not. Softbank’s value fell by almost $9bn (GBP6.8bn), […]
Gracie Mae Bradley of Liberty writes that “People often ask why objections to proposed ID systems in the UK have historically been so strident when such schemes are widespread in mainland Europe” (The UK’s online ID plans: expensive, intrusive, unnecessary, 6 September). Alas, she does not answer this question. Countries with stronger civil liberties traditions […]