Aaron Chen: the 10 funniest things I have ever seen (on the internet)

The internet is one of the funniest places on earth where you can be who you want to be and do whatever you want to do. It is one of the main distractions in our modern world and the advent of the internet has led to increased atomisation, loneliness and the stripping of our meaning. […]

Mafia: Definitive Edition review – a modernised, much-loved mob story

In the wake of Grand Theft Auto III’s success in the early noughties, many action games were happy to follow Rockstar’s blueprint and build a big city map, where the player could roam freely and do heinous things to passers-by. Illusion Softworks (now 2K) saw things differently: if the hardware of the day was capable […]

Farmville foreclosure! Why Facebook is canning its most popular game

Name: FarmVille. Appearance: Cute, colourful agricultural community filled with innocent, wide-eyed people and animals who are never slaughtered. Is that somewhere in the midwest of the United States? If you want it to be. How long has it been around? Eleven years. And how is FarmVille doing? Not well. In fact, it’s about to be […]

Covid: UK spent GBP569m on 20,900 ventilators but most remain unused

The government spent GBP569m buying 20,900 ventilators to keep people alive during the Covid-19 pandemic but lack of demand means NHS hospitals have used just a few of them. All but 2,150 of the machines it bought are still being held in a Ministry of Defence warehouse in case they are needed in the coming […]

Apple iPad 2020 review: all the iPad you need, none of the tablet you don’t

Apple’s cheapest iPad just got faster with revamped chips to keep it ahead of the competition. The eighth-generation iPad costs from GBP329, slotting in under the iPad Mini, iPad Air and iPad Pro lines, yet offering much of the same experience. The design of the iPad has changed little over the last few years. Apple […]

Google to lease extra 70,000 sq ft in UK offices despite remote working

Google is to lease an additional 70,000 sq ft in office buildings close to its GBP1bn new UK headquarters in London, despite telling all of its 4,500 UK staff that they will be working from home until at least July 2021. The US tech giant, which is in the process of building a 330 metre-long […]

Airbnb pays GBP1.8m extra UK tax after investigation

Airbnb has paid an additional GBP1.8m in tax following an investigation by HM Revenue and Customs into its UK tax arrangements. It also said it was cooperating with HMRC to share data on the money made by Airbnb hosts – who are believed to number around 225,000 in the UK alone – in the tax […]

Trump’s bid to ban TikTok and WeChat: where are we now?

It’s been a dizzying few weeks for TikTok and WeChat, the Chinese social media apps caught up in a trade war between the US and China. In the latest twist, a judge temporarily blocked an order from the Trump administration on Sunday, just hours before it would have gone into effect and removed TikTok from […]

PlayStation at 25: it put video games at the centre of life

There was a sense of fundamental cultural change in the air – or that’s how I remember it. Nineteen ninety-five was the year I started out in video game journalism, as a writer for Edge magazine, the most forward-looking gaming publication in the world at the time. My introduction to the industry was booting up […]

Global Microsoft outage brings down Teams, Office 365 and Outlook

Microsoft has said it is investigating an outage that brought down Microsoft’s cloud-based office services including the meetings software, Teams, worldwide. Microsoft reported issues with authentication for its cloud services at around 9.25pm UTC, meaning people were having issues logging into the online services Teams, Outlook and Office. The outage had affected services worldwide. itro […]