Messi treble is perfect order for Martino's last-chance saloon

The majestic attacker was the saviour as his compatriot stared down the barrel of an early exit from the Spanish title race

COMMENT
By Kris Voakes | International Football Correspondent

When it comes to Clasico football, there has never been anyone like Lionel Messi. And as the world wakes up to the morning after the blockbusting night before, Tata Martino will be celebrating that fact more than anyone.

The Argentine coach admitted that his Barcelona side faced a make-or-break moment in their title assault away to Real Madrid on Sunday night, and for long spells it seemed his worst fears would be realised. But Messi’s mesmerising show kept his compatriot dreaming of a Liga crown and an invite to continue in his job beyond this summer.

"This is the last chance we have. In the final rounds teams don't falter so often"

"This is the last chance we have," admitted Martino in his pre-match press conference. "After this round there are nine games left and cutting the gap to one point is not the same as it remaining four or even stretching to seven. In these final rounds teams don't falter so often."

And he was right. Moreover, a failure to win La Liga would more than likely see him shown the door. As such, Sunday’s game was monumental for Martino. But for as long as he remains in his current role, he will always have the ace up his sleeve that is Lionel Messi.

There can be no denying that things have been a little different at Barcelona this season. They are no longer considered the most fearful outfit in Europe, sit in third place in the Spanish league, and there have even been huge question marks about the club’s ethics in the midst of the Neymar affair. Tactical and technical shortcomings also appear more obvious, more prevalent, than in recent years.

But one thing that remains the same is the genius of Messi. Sure, two of his goals in the 4-3 win at the Bernabeu came from the penalty spot, but he deserved every bit of the magnificent hat-trick which sent him into the record books as the highest goalscorer in the world’s greatest footballing rivalry.

Martino had seemingly made a number of poor decisions, most notably the one which gave Neymar a starting shirt despite his current rut. Alexis Sanchez – the match-winner in the previous Clasico – has been in infinitely better form of late, while Pedro’s guile and skill was also sadly lacking. The Argentine had gone for the big-name option and looked set to pay the price.

With Barca trailing 2-1, Messi made his first great intervention by pouncing on a loose ball in the area and lashing home beyond Diego Lopez. After the break, he would hit two unstoppable penalties to reverse a second one-goal deficit. But it wasn’t just in his goals that he made the difference.

MAGICAL MESSI IN NUMBERS

	374	TOTAL BARCA GOALS
	347	COMPETITIVE BARCA GOALS
	400	TOTAL COMPETITIVE GOALS
	21	GOALS IN CLASICOS
	34	GOALS IN 2013-14

In general play, the No.10 was simply magic at times. It was his vision and pass which opened the space up for Andres Iniesta to give the Blaugrana an early lead. His sensational through-ball to Neymar took out three Madrid players as the Brazilian won a penalty.

Messi was the man making all the right moves in between the lines as the home defence was pulled out of shape. Had Neymar been on his game, the Argentine’s movement alone might have contributed to at least two more goals.

Barcelona’s current position in La Liga is proof enough that this hasn’t been their best campaign in recent memory, and Martino’s position will rightly continue to be questioned right down to the final day of the season. But Sunday night was just the latest reminder that it is Messi – not Martino – who will dictate whether the boss is back for a second stint next term.

The coach's future couldn't be in better hands.

Bayern ordered to partially close Allianz Arena for Man Utd game

The Bundesliga champions have been punished after a homophobic banner was seen during the game against Arsenal

Bayern Munich will have to close a section of the Allianz Arena for their Champions League quarter-final second-leg against Manchester United for displaying an illicit banner.

The banner referred to Arsenal as "Gay Gunners" and featured a crude drawing of the club's German midfielder Mesut Ozil.

The German champions have also received a €10,000 fine after their supporters committed the offence in the last-16 home leg against Arsenal on March 11.

"The Uefa Control and Disciplinary Body has decided to order the partial closure of the Allianz Arena," an official statement reads. 

"In particular, the closure of sector 124 for Bayern's next Uefa competition home match, namely their Champions League quarter-final second-leg against Manchester United FC on 9 April.  

"And to fine the German club €10,000 for the displaying of an illicit banner."

Bayern responded by promising action if the culprits are identified and insisted that the club wants nothing to do with the offending banners at the Allianz Arena.

"We regret this incident from the Arsenal match deeply and we dissociate heavily from this discriminating banner," club chief Karl-Heinz Rummenigge said in a statement.

"Bayern Munich will never accept this. Yet we have to accept Uefa's punishment. We will find the person who caused this and then we will check for the legal possibility on getting compensation from these people."

MtGox: That missing £70m of bitcoin? Er, here it is

Bitcoin trader Kolin Burges stands in protest outside an office building housing Mt Gox in Tokyo. Photograph: Shizuo Kambayashi/AP

Shuttered bitcoin exchange MtGox has found almost 200,000 bitcoins which it believed were lost, according to the company's CEO Mark Karpeles.

The money was sitting in a wallet which the firm thought no longer held bitcoins. However, following the application for civil rehabilitation (a Japanese legal procedure analogous to bankruptcy), "these wallets were rescanned and their balance researched," says Karpeles, and one wallet was found to hold a balance of 199,999.99 bitcoins.

Karpeles says that the money, discovered on 7 March, was moved first to online wallets, and then back to an offline wallet between 14-15 March. After the discovery, Gox now holds around 202,000 bitcoins, and still says that approximately 650,000 bitcoins have "disappeared".

MtGox closed doors in late February, after blaming hackers for the loss of millions of pounds worth of bitcoin. Since then, the firm's US subsidiary has applied for bankruptcy, and two class action lawsuits have been started by users.

As every bitcoin transaction is public, it is possible to double-check MtGox's claim. The rediscovered wallet appears to be one which was noticed on 7 March, when it sprung into life after a dormant period and transferred exactly 199,999.99 bitcoins in two separate transactions.

However, there remains a minor conflict between MtGox's public statement and the evidence in the "block chain", the record of all transactions. While Karpeles says "an" old-format wallet was discovered, the record shows that the money was spread between five wallets. The difference is minor, but in the highly charged reaction to MtGox's closure, it is likely to be seized upon as evidence of untrustworthiness on the company's part

Playstation 4 and Project Morpheus – developers react

Project morpheus virtual reality headset from Sony Photograph: Sony

It’s just so typical. You wait many years for a consumer-friendly virtual reality headset then two come along at once. This is the old joke currently facing VR fanatics at the Game Developers’ Conference in San Francisco , where Sony is now offering hands-on time with its newly announced Project Morpheus headset for PS4 – just as indie tech company Oculus is showing off the revised dev kit for its long-awaited alternative, the Oculus Rift.

But while the Rift, which was successfully crowd-funded in August 2012, is aimed at the thriving PC gaming scene, Morpheus is for console owners – ostensibly, a very different breed of gamer. So can it work?

Sony certainly hasn’t gone into this lightly, or indeed quickly. The technology behind Project Morpheus has been in development for three years, under the watchful eye of R&D chief Richard Marks, who oversaw the development of the groundbreaking EyeToy peripheral. At the GDC unveiling event on Tuesday, president of Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida revealed that the team had been working with a makeshift HMD featuring two Move controllers duct-taped to it, and the Santa Monica studio has a God of War demo running on the tech in 2011.

Morpheus rising

The current Morpheus model is not complete but based around the current DualShock and PlayStation camera platforms, it is up-to-date. With its 1080p screen, 90-degree field of view and 360-degree head-tracking, the fundaments are in place – it seems the device will also recognise Move as a virtual controller, which means you’ll be able to look down in the game world and see it in your hands, perhaps as a gun, a torch, or a tennis racquet.

The attitude seems to be right too. Richard Marks and colleague Anton Mikhailov stressed during their GDC talk that VR can’t just be about games, it has to be about all sorts of immersive experiences. The concept of virtual tourism was mentioned – the idea of simple exploring virtual words, whether based on ‘real’ places or not could be vital. 

What’s clear is that functionality can’t be dictated from the top. Kinect on Xbox 360 largely failed as a games peripheral, but when the development code was opened up to the public, homebrew motion controller applications flourished, with dozens of amazing implementations. That is why Morpheus was revealed here at GDC – its success is going to be largely down to developers figuring out what the hell to do with it. A bottom-up approach, if you will.

Motion and emotion

So what do the developers make of it. “We think this could be as revolutionary to console gaming as the Wii was,” says Si Stratton of Cardiff-based studio Mr Dog, which is working on both virtual reality games and movies. “Morpheus will inspire innovation in gaming – we’ve heard of a company that has already developed a game where you can move around without a controller – something that’s relatively easy on in VR as you can tell where the player is looking.

“Having said that, Sony seems to be designing the headset to combine with other controllers such as steering wheels and the PlayStation Move, as it believes this will be a more immersive experience. Combining the headset with other Sony devices on the Playstation will be the big advantage they have over the Oculus, but it means that in order to get the most out of games you’ll have to buy more kit.”

Other VR veterans are more cautious. “It’s definitely a good start – but it is not superior to Oculus yet,” says Hrafn Thorri Thorisson, co-founder ofAldin Dynamics, a Reykjavík studio that specialises in virtual reality simulations. “Personally I found the announcement rather vague – so many facts were left unsaid or undecided. Developers will need to know more about the specifications and what the hardware is capable of. It is also unclear how far along they are in creating the developer kit, and when developers can gain access to the hardware.”

VR war

More details are slowly emerging from the hands-on sessions at GDC, however. The Guardian has heard that although the visual fidelity of Morpheus is currently inferior to the latest iteration of Oculus Rift (developers say there is some blurring – but this is a prototype, remember), the Sony device is more comfortable and appears to be taking positional data from the Move controllers. This means that it can track player movement across the room and translate that into the virtual space – so you’re also walking through that at the same time. The new Oculus Rift DK2 headset does this, too, but it will be interesting to see how the implementations compare. Physical movements like peering around corners are going to be important in developing and maintaining the sense of “being there”.

But there are other concerns. The Rift audience is an enthusiast one; so far the device has flourished through a global network of early adopters who are willing to overlook some of the fundamental difficulties – such as nausea. “Ultimately, Sony’s audience is a lot more mainstream than the Oculus Rift’s,” says Stratton. ”It will live and die on whether they’ve solved the motion sickness issue when playing for long periods. No one wants to come home from work, plug in their PS4 and feel ill.”

But beyond the technical comparisons, other developers are unsure about the concept of a virtual reality tech attached to a mainstream console. “The fearful scenario is that Sony will use the VR as a peripheral, like a Playstation Eye or Kinect,” says designer and artist Daniël Ernst who has created a series of virtual dioramas for Oculus Rift, including Shoe Box and the forthcoming Great Gottlie. “Although games are an ideal platform for playful experimentation, the potential of VR surpasses that of gaming. If Sony treats it like a gimmick, people will get tired of it as fast as they did with the 3D TV.”

At the Morpheus event, Marks was very keen to stress that Sony understands the wider implications of VR. In a slide shown at the event, he laid out his vision for the technology, and at number one on the list was, “VR is a medium not a peripheral”. Marks spoke about the need to explore this new visual realm, to respect its differences. “It’s like the wild west,” he concluded. “There are no rules right now, and there’s no killer genre you have to support – it’s a once-in-a-career situation.”

Being there

Marks also emphasised the profound effect of presence in virtual worlds. Narrative 2D games rely on story and plotting to engross players, but when they put on a virtual reality headset, just being in the environment is often enough to engage interest. Scenic elements, once take for granted, become fascinating.

”We do relate to spaces differently when we’re in them,” says veteran game designer and author Jesse Schell. “I saw a research project once where they were trying to understand the difference between mouse and keyboard input and HMDs. They created a virtual room that had letters on the walls, and they asked the players question like ‘how many Zs are there?’. 

“The players using the standard mouse and keyboard interface would spend extra time checking, because they weren’t sure if they had missed something. But the player viewing the virtual version of the room through an HMD was like ‘there’s one, there’s one, there’s one, I’m done’. He knew it – and he was right. The mouse guy couldn’t be sure because he didn’t have that same connection to the space.”

Beyond PS4?

It all comes down to ambition. Project Morpheus as a PS4 peripheral is exciting to gamers right now, but developers feel it may also be limiting. The expanse of unexplored territory when it comes to virtual reality spaces is vast – will it be harmful to lock that off into just another gaming gimmick? 

“The hopeful scenario is that Sony learned from the failure of Playstation Move, Kinect and the 3D TV and will treat and market the Morpheus beyond the Playstation 4,” says Ernst. “I want to be able to use the device with my PC too. I mean, I can hook up my TV to my PC, my Wii, my Xbox, my ipad and so on. Why not treat the Morpheus like that? Then Oculus will have a good competitor and the consumer will benefit from it. Also, other people will then use the VR helmet for other more serious purposes such as architecture or defense, which can create a broad solid foundation. 

“Sony has the distribution prowess to introduce VR as the followup to the TV, and it has solid development studios for software. The company has been looking for a new Walkman. This is it

Silicon Valley's anonymous gossip apps whip up storm of ambition and jealousy

Julie Ann Horvath, above, resigned from software coders social site GitHub following an anonymous post on Secret.

Ten years ago Mark Zuckerberg ushered in the era of social media withthe creation of Facebook in his Harvard dorm, and fortunes have been made since coaxing people into sharing their personal information and thoughts online, often with "friends" they hardly know.

Now, it seems, comes the backlash.

Two new apps, Secret and Whisper, are capitalising on a trend to connect people anonymously to express opinions or ideas they might not share if their identities were revealed. Nowhere has the opportunity to dish the dirt anonymously been taken up with greater enthusiasm than in the heart of the tech industry, Silicon Valley, where the apps' online gossiping offers rare insight into a society shaped by opportunity – at one extreme, for talented entrepreneurs to make vast fortunes and, at the other, years of failure and frustration for tens of thousands of others. Postings that show up simply as "friend" or "friend of friend" reveal Silicon Valley not as a place of hard-working, peaceable tech engineers, but a hothouse of ambition, rivalry, jealousy and obsession.

David Byttow, a founder of Secret, recently described the app as a "masquerade ball" where "you know who is there and who is on the list, but no one can see faces", according to a report in the New York Times. Byttow and co-founder Chrys Bader-Wechseler believe people are more likely to hold honest conversations under a shroud of anonymity, so they decided to strip out the names and "put people into an environment with their friends to see what happens".

Last week an anonymous post on Secret triggered the resignation of Julie Ann Horvath, an engineer at the software coders' social site GitHub. She says a toxic workplace forced her out. In another incident, senior Facebook VP Andrew Bosworth was accused of being a power-hungry narcissist. He accused his detractors of jealousy. "This is just hurtful without being helpful. It's invective without accountability."

A spokeswoman for Secret says the company does not condone attacks against specific people. Tech critic and author Ryan Holiday says that while attribution is no guarantee of civilised discourse, Secret andWhisper represent a race to the bottom in terms of web content. "Because it's technology we think it's a net positive, but Secret and Whisper are serving darker parts of human nature and disguising it with techno-babble about truth and honesty. But does anyone need more unattributable gossip in their lives?"

Apparently, yes. Whisper – which shares gossip outside the users' immediate circle of friends – recently hired Neetzan Zimmerman from gossip site Gawker to be "editor in chief". Zimmerman drove traffic at the former site with what the Wall Street Journal described as "a deep connection to his audience's evolving, irreducibly human, primal sensibilities".

Both sites, Secret and Whisper, speak clearly to prevailing anxiety about the internet in general and social media in particular, says Professor John Clippinger of Massachusetts's Institute of Technology's Media Lab. He traces the desire for anonymity to fears over the loss of privacy to government data collection and, more acutely, to commercial sites such as Facebook and Google.

"We've gone from 'Privacy? Get over it' to people being very concerned about anonymity and how they share information. We're seeing a new parallel web developing in which people can express an opinion or post a picture and not have it traced."

But Clippinger agrees that the notion of pure anonymity is potentially insidious. What's needed are new methods of "authenticated anonymity" or "self-sovereign identity". He says: "People would be able to retain a certain amount of anonymity about their core identity but there are certain attributes that can be verified."

The drive behind this, of course, is pervasive worries over commercial data-collection and, increasingly, behaviour-predictive technologies. MIT's Media Lab believes we will ultimately want control over our profiles.

If Facebook used to be about the odd embarrassing photo, it's now about sensor data, medical data, search data – tons of information that's generated by you, then captured and monetised. "And none of it is in your control," Clippinger says.

He believes we are about to experience a dramatic loss of innocence. What exists in the government sector exists in the private sector, and we're only just beginning to become cognisant of it. Under these conditions, Clippinger says, sites like Whisper, Secret and the self-deleting messaging app Snapchat represent an effort to regain control of identity from big commercial sites that have begun to represent a surveillance state. "People who are knowledgeable about what's going on say we have to create a new internet architecture," he says. "This is the result."

To Clive Thompson, author of last year's Smarter Than You Think, anonymous sites are a reaction to the discomfort of trying to figure out what to post. "People have grown weary of the performance of the self in which everything you say is tied to your identity," he says. "Facebook has changed privacy policies so often, the things you thought were private no longer are. It's become algorithmically baffling and inscrutable."

But Thompson does not believe the quality of discourse is necessarily tied to anonymity. Several studies have shown it's more likely a response to the environment – civil or hostile – in which they are made. And in the sense that anonymity protects the community as a whole, the move back toward unattributable storytelling and commentary is one of several shifts in direction the web has taken on the issue.

"Anonymity is not necessarily a bad thing," says Thompson. "It's fascinating how people talk when they feel protected. They can tell candid stories or make confessions, and the response is often kind and thoughtful."

But have we learned anything we didn't know? "We already knew Silicon Valley was filled with unbridled venality and acquisitiveness, as most industries are, and Secret provides a way for people on the losing side to strike back a bit. The difference is, the tech industry makes bold statements about changing the world so it just seems more hypocritical."

Writing on the bathroom wall is not a bad analogy, he says. In a fairly circumscribed society, like school or Silicon Valley, the author is generally obvious. "When Party A insults Party B you usually know who it is because only Party A would have bothered."

Zuckerberg and Musk back software startup that mimics human learning

Vicarious is developing 'machine learning software based on the computational principles of the human brain'. Photograph: Sebastian Kaulitzki / Alamy/Alamy

Some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names are backing a hitherto low-profile tech startup that aims to recreate the human neocortex as computer code.

Vicarious, a four-year-old San Francisco-based startup, claims to be “building software that thinks and learns like a human”. According to theWall Street Journal Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Tesla's Elon Musk have just invested $40m in the company.

They join Peter Thiel, a PayPal billionaire, whose Founders Fund targets cutting edge technology. Ashton Kutcher, actor and tech investor, is also investing, as is Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.

The neocortex is the outer layer of the cerebral hemispheres and in humans is crucial to the use of the senses as well as activities such as language, motor commands and spatial reasoning.

According to the company’s website, Vicarious is developing “machine learning software based on the computational principles of the human brain. Our first technology is a visual perception system that interprets the contents of photographs and videos in a manner similar to humans. Powering this technology is a new computational paradigm we call the Recursive Cortical Network.”

The company has already managed to create software that will solve Captcha, the online tests used by many websites to supposedly identify humans from computers. Company founder Scott Phoenix told the WSJ that if they are successful, Vicarious will have created "a computer that thinks like a person except it doesn't need to eat or sleep".

Phoenix said his aim was to create a computer that can understand not just shapes and objects but the textures associated with them. He said he hopes Vicarious’s computers will learn to how to cure diseases and create cheap, renewable energy, as well as performing the jobs that employ most human beings. “We tell investors that right now, human beings are doing a lot of things that computers should be able to do,” he said.

The investment comes amid a boom in funding for artificial intelligence ventures, In January IBM announced it was investing more than $1bn to create the Watson Group, a 2,000-employee division dedicated to developing its self-learning super-computer. The money includes $100m to fund startups that find creative uses for Watson.

Earlier this week IBM announced a partnership with the New York Genome Center that will attempt to use Watson to identify the genetic components of brain cancer.

Yahoo, Google and Apple also claim right to read user emails

Who can read your emails – and what will they do with them? Photograph: Alamy

Microsoft is not unique in claiming the right to read users' emails – Apple, Yahoo and Google all reserve that right as well, the Guardian has determined.

The broad rights email providers claim for themselves has come to light following Microsoft's admission that it read a journalist's Hotmail accountin an attempt to track down the source of an internal leak. But most webmail services claim the right to read users' email if they believe that such access is necessary to protect their property.

Microsoft's own terms of service allow the company to access content"when Microsoft forms a good faith belief that doing so is necessary [to] protect the… property of Microsoft". It made use of that right to read the email of an un-named journalist who had allegedly taken possession of the source code to Windows 8 thanks to an internal leak at the firm.

Following the revelation that Microsoft could, and did, read users' email,the firm's deputy general counsel told the Guardian that it would be tightening up its privacy policy. The new rules require an internal and external legal team to review any internal requests for access, and commit the firm to increased transparency over future requests.

Yahoo, Google and Apple too

But other major email providers reserve exactly the same rights. Yahoo requires users to "acknowledge, consent and agree that Yahoo may access… your account information and Content… in a good faith belief that such access… is reasonably necessary to… protect the rights… of Yahoo."

Google's terms require the user to "acknowledge and agree that Google may access… your account information and any Content associated with that account… in a good faith belief that such access… is reasonably necessary to… protect against imminent harm to the… property… of Google". Apple "may, without liability to you, access… your Account information and Content… if we have a good faith belief that such access… is reasonably necessary to… protect the… property… of Apple".

Of the major webmail providers, only Microsoft was prepared to share the internal procedures they have in place governing who can access users' email without a court order and what reasons they must give to do so. Yahoo declined to comment. Neither Apple nor Google had responded to requests for comment ahead of publication.

"The problem is, this is a technically legal activity that we all agree to when we sign up to certain cloud services – whether knowingly or not," says Charlie Howe, director, EMEA at Skyhigh Networks, a cloud security software firm, of Microsoft's snooping.

"For instance, I would guess that most people don’t actually read the full Terms and Conditions before using a new application, and they would probably be surprised by what they are actually agreeing to when they click the ‘accept’ button on certain cloud services."