By Dave Lee
Technology Reporter, BBC News

The kiosks have been fitted in 16 London boroughs for a 12-month trial

The Metropolitan Police has implemented a system to extract mobile phone data from suspects held in custody.

The data includes call history, texts and contacts, and the BBC has learned that it will be retained regardless of whether any charges are brought.

The technology is being used in 16 London boroughs, and could potentially be used by police across the UK.

Campaign group Privacy International described the move as a “possible breach of human rights law”.

Until now, officers had to send mobiles off for forensic examination in order to gather and store data, a process which took several weeks.

Under the new system, content will be extracted using purpose built terminals in police stations.

It will allow officers to connect a suspect’s mobile and produce a print out of data from the device, as well as saving digital records of the content.

‘Retained and handled’

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

Mobile phones and other devices are increasingly being used in all levels of criminal activity”

End Quote
Stephen Kavanagh
Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service

A Met Police spokesman told the BBC that when a suspect was released, “data received from the handsets is retained and handled in accordance with other data held by the MPS [Metropolitan Police Service]” – regardless of whether charges had been brought.

Guidelines given to officers state that data extraction can happen only if there is sufficient suspicion the mobile phone was used for criminal activity.

“Mobile phones and other devices are increasingly being used in all levels of criminal activity,” said Stephen Kavanagh, Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service.

“When a suspect is arrested and found with a mobile phone that we suspect may have been used in crime, traditionally we submit it to our digital forensic laboratory for analysis.

“Therefore, a solution located within the boroughs that enables trained officers to examine devices and gives immediate access to the data in that handset is welcomed.”

‘Illegal’

Over 300 London officers will be trained in using the “intuitive, fully-guided touchscreen desktop data acquisition tool”, created by mobile forensic firm Radio Tactics.

The cost of leasing the 16 terminals for 12 months and training the officers will be £50,000, the Met said.

Privacy International has warned against the possibility of such tech eventually be used on the streets

Privacy International has expressed serious concern over the system.

“We are looking at a possible breach of human rights law,” spokeswoman Emma Draper told the BBC.

“It is illegal to indefinitely retain the DNA profiles of individuals after they are acquitted or released without charge, and the communications, photos and location data contained in most people’s smartphones is at least as valuable and as personal as DNA.”

Ms Draper added that while the Met’s current plans were limited to fixed extraction terminals in stations, portable technology was readily available.

“Examining suspects’ mobile phones after they are arrested is one thing, but if this technology was to be taken out onto the streets and used in stop-and-searches, that would be a significant and disturbing expansion of police powers.”

Article source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18102793#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa

According to a report on CNBC television, HP is looking to cut anywhere from 8 to 10 per cent of its 324,600-strong workforce, and will make the announcement next Wednesday, when it puts out its financial results for the second quarter of its fiscal 2012.

The total cuts would be somewhere in the range of 26,000 to 35,000 employees, if the CNBC report is correct.

The idea, their sources say, is to cut costs not only to move to higher profits, but also to free up cash to reinvest in the company.

Bloomberg has also caught wind of the impending job cuts, and says that Whitman and her management team are looking to shed around 25,000 workers, with somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 being culled from its Enterprise Services group, which provides outsourcing and other consulting services to IT departments all over the world.

Both reports say that HP will be doing a combination of early retirement offers for several thousand employees and layoffs for the rest to reach its workforce-reduction targets.

Consulting firm McKinsey Co is helping HP come up with the plan, according to the Bloomberg report.

An HP spokesperson told El Reg that the company does not comment on such rumors. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/17/hp_whitman_job_cuts_rumor/

By Dave Lee
Technology reporter, BBC News

The UK government has a vast portfolio of services available online, such as this Directgov portal

Ahead of a nationwide deadline over regulating the use of cookies, the BBC has learned that the “majority” of the UK government’s own websites will fail to comply in time.

All UK sites have been given until 26 May to make sure visitors are able to give “informed consent” over cookies.

Cookies are pieces of personal data stored when users browse the web.

The Cabinet Office said the government was “working to achieve compliance at the earliest possible date”.

Once the new rules take force, consent will most likely be obtained by ticking a “yes” box when visiting a site – although other approaches have been suggested.

The regulations are designed to protect user privacy when using the web.

“As in the private sector, where it is estimated that very few websites will be compliant by the 26th May, so it is true of the government estate,” a Cabinet Office spokesman told the BBC.

“The majority of department websites will not be compliant with the legislation by that date.”

Showing ‘commitment’

The BBC understands that the sites, which range from those run by local councils to national departments, have been told that no action will be taken by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) over the deadline miss – provided they were “showing a commitment” to eventually make changes.

Continue reading the main story

Cookie flavours

Cookies are small files that allow a website to recognise and track users. The ICO groups them into three overlapping groups:

Session cookies

Files that allow a site to link the actions of a visitor during a single browser session. These might be used by an internet bank or webmail service. They are not stored long term and are considered “less privacy intrusive” than persistent cookies.

Persistent cookies

These remain on the user’s device between sessions and allow one or several sites to remember details about the visitor. They may be used by marketers to target advertising or to avoid the user having to provide a password each visit.

First and third-party cookies

A cookie is classed as being first-party if it is set by the site being visited. It might be used to study how people navigate a site.

It is classed as third-party if it is issued by a different server to that of the domain being visited. It could be used to trigger a banner advert based on the visitor’s viewing habits.

“The impression I’m getting from the ICO is that even if there are complaints and you’re found not to be compliant, unless it can be shown your intent was to avoid compliance, then they would work with you,” said Mike MacAuley from the Local Government Association, which has hosted discussions on the issue.

The ICO did not want to comment on the issue when contacted by the BBC.

On 26 May the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) imposes an EU directive designed to protect internet users’ privacy.

The law says that sites must provide “clear and comprehensive” information about the use of cookies.

In computing, cookies are small text files that help organise and store browsing information. However, cookies are increasingly being used to power targeted advertising, by gathering data about sites visited and search terms used.

It is these “tracking” cookies, which users do not often know about, which the EU hopes to clamp down on with the regulations.

The deadline had originally been set for May last year. However, the ICO – which will be enforcing the rules in the UK – decided to give firms an extra year to comply with the laws in order to avoid an “overnight” change.

At the time, communications minister Ed Vaizey said: “It will take some time for workable technical solutions to be developed, evaluated and rolled out so we have decided that a phased in approach is right.”

‘No problem’

While government websites do not carry advertising, cookies are still used to carry out various tasks, such as helping site administrators monitor levels of traffic.

“If people listen to our advice and are prepared to take steps towards compliance there shouldn’t be a problem,” Dave Evans, the ICO’s group manager for business and industry, told E-Consultancy last month.

“However, if businesses deliberately stop short of total compliance, then there is a risk.”

Mr MacAuley said meetings had been held earlier this month between the LGA’s members and the ICO to discuss how best to comply.

“I think the issue is really more about what the spirit of the regulations is intended to prevent,” he said.

“They’re intended to prevent any kind of malicious exploitation of cookies, or any wilful avoidance of the regulations. I think the ICO takes a very dim view of that.

“However I don’t think local governments would in any way try to do either of those things.”

Business frustration

Vinod Bange, a lawyer for Taylor Wessing who has spent time consulting companies who are cautious of the changes, said the small number of businesses who have invested in meeting the guideline deadline could be left feeling frustrated.

The ICO’s website has implemented its own consent mechanism on its site

“There will be some companies out there wondering why they’ve gone to the expense, and committed a lot of resource, into trying to tackle a problem which is not going to be enforced,” he said.

In the interview with E-Consultancy, the ICO’s Mr Evans said there would not be a team of investigators seeking out infringing sites, but would act on complaints.

“How likely it is that complaints will flood in, we don’t know,” he said.

“It may be that the great British public simply isn’t that concerned about cookies.”

Article source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18090118#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa

In the latest instalment Corbis has been ordered to fork out US$12.75 million in damages by the Washington State Court of Appeals as part of the three-year fraud and breach of contract case. The legal tangle has been going on since 2007 in a matter that alleges Corbis stole trade secrets.

Infoflows provides software that monitors licensed digital content and original worked for Corbis in a development capacity.

According to the claim by Infoflows, Corbis abruptly terminated the contract after four months and claimed ownership of the technology. Infoflows then discovered that Corbis was patenting its own system based on what Infoflows saw as its own IP. In January 2007, Corbis sued Infoflows for breach of contract and trade secret misappropriation. Infoflows countersued claiming several charges of fraud.

Corbis was originally ordered to pay $36 million in damages but appealed the decision.

“We are pleased that the court of Appeals saw this case for what it was — repugnant conduct by executives of Corbis who attempted to deceive Infoflows and misappropriate its intellectual property and then cover their actions,” said Infoflows CEO Steve Stone.

Corbis is still considering further appeal. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/16/gates_fights_ex_employee/

A world without work for millions who want it? A world where we can diagnose strokes or heart attacks well before they happen? A world of machines talking to machines? All are possible, even likely, because of cloud computing, which he sees as the next driver of huge social change.

And he also has a clear idea of what the Newton really needed to succeed – and which of Apple’s visions from the time really matches what we’re seeing now.

“I’m an optimist,” declares Sculley, now 73 but still deeply involved in technology. “You can’t be an entrepreneur if you’re not essentially an optimist, so I’m an optimist by nature.”

Cloud computing, has says, means that we’re shifting from the growth of Moore’s Law – a doubling every 18 months – to something even more exponential. “The curve is accelerating upwards, at a level that means that technologies are coming out that can do things that you couldn’t even envision even two or three years ago.”

Robust data storage costs are falling too, from around $5 (£3.14) per gigabyte a year ago to 25c now. “The speed at which a lot of this technology is commoditising is unprecedented,” Sculley says.

Even so, he sees some areas for concern. First, imagine a world where computers have driven humans out of all but the highest-skilled jobs – so that driverless cars, automated factories and similar processes mean that the middle class that has for years been happily thriving on jobs that couldn’t be done otherwise suddenly find themselves disenfranchised.

Sculley admits he’s not as optimistic about that. “The more we bring in these sophisticated technologies, the higher the skills of the people that are needed to be able to use it, and the fewer people we need in the workforce, so the issue is not about work moving to lower-cost workers, it’s about automation replacing many of the jobs that we had counted on, particularly for our middle class in the past.”

The political gridlock in the US – caused by the warring demands of the Tea Party, which thinks government and taxation is destroying jobs, and those of the Democratic Party, which has been trying to drive growth by boosting the money supply – is one example. Another is the Eurozone, where the tensions between Spanish, Greek, German and French voters and their leaders is coming into starker focus as unemployment rises.

“Those are the things that technology may not be able to solve, but it certainly is a consequence of technology, that the sophistication of automation is changing how work is done, and is changing the skill requirements of workers,” says Sculley. “In many cases jobs that used to be done by people are going to be able to be done through automation. I don’t have an answer to that. That’s one of the more perplexing problems of society.”

Even so, he does think that – as has happened previously – technology will throw up a solution. (In the early 1900s, the problems of horse manure in London streets threatened to overwhelm them; the car solved that – but, of course, eventually brought its own set of challenges.)

On a more optimistic note, Sculley – who now works as a venture capitalist, and has investments in companies looking at healthcare – things that cloud computing is going to make a colossal difference to the quality of our lives.

Healthcare in the US is a $2.6tn market, driven by insurers which pay doctors who often carry out procedures and expensive tests in order to avoid lawsuits. The problem is that healthcare costs are rising more quickly than inflation, incomes or tax receipts.

“Politicians are arguing among themselves as to who’s going to pay for it,” says Sculley. “It’s completely unaffordable at its current growth rates, and the more I get a chance to understand health care, the more convinced I am that the problem is very solvable, but it’s solvable through innovation, not through just governments trying to work out who pays for what.

“We see healthcare shifting from a procedure reimbursement where in this country doctors are reimbursed for how many procedures they conduct, to a world where people will be reimbursed for the outcomes – did the patient actually get better, and what was the total cost of the cycle of care. So it’s not just about taking cloud computing and automating the healthcare system we have today, it literally means innovating and reinventing the health care system to make it it much more patient-centric.”

“Big data analytics” – the analysis of colossal amounts of data which could amount to terabytes of information – will change healthcare, he forecasts, from one where doctors are paid to carry out procedures, to one where they’re paid based on keeping people well. (In that sense, it sounds like the longstanding Chinese principle where a doctor’s quality is measured on how infrequently patients get sick, not how quickly they’re cured.)

Apple chairman Steve Jobs, chief executive John Sculley and co-founder Steve Wozniak unveil the new Apple IIc computer in San Francisco in April 1984. Photograph: Sal Veder/AP

And helping that will be computing that will analyse everything – even the levels of proteins in our blood. “I’m working with a company right now where we’re doing this – you can track in real time peoples’ vital signs and take that data, you can imagine that’s massive amounts of data when you’re tracking each individual in real time, the vital signs – it could be their heart, could be how much they weigh, could be their fluid retention, could be even tracking proteomics, which are protein changes inside the body.

“If you can take that data and then be able to analyse it, it means that the future of medicine is going to be able to make predictions and measure outcomes of patient health improvement at a level of accuracy and a level of personalisation that we’ve never seen before.”

All this, he says, will rely on the computing power brought together by the cloud: “It isn’t just the compute power, it’s that you can enable the big data analytics, in a specialised way. That’s going to give us hope that what looked like insolvable problems like health care can be solved.”

Don’t expect overnight change, but do expect change: ” It may not be done in a few years,” Sculley warns. “it may take five or 10 or 15 years to see the impact, but there’s no question in my mind that it’s going to have as big an impact on things like healthcare as personal computers did in empowering individuals and really created the productivity we’ve had for 30 years with knowledge workers.”

The cloud doesn’t just stop with people, though. Imagine too a world where there are around 20bn internet-connected devices – but only around 7 billion people, as there are now. That’s the forecast from various research companies for 2020.

“Having 20bn connected devices means that the majority of those connected devices will be machine to machine,” Sculley explains. “It means we’re just at the beginning era of very powerful sensors that can be built into clothing, that can be used for tracking almost anything that one can conceive and doing that in real time and using cloud computing to manipulate data which is going to be many many orders of magnitude larger and more complex that anything we’ve ever considered before.”

Speaking of connected devices, might one of the flaws in the Newton have been it lack of connectivity – something that now exists through mobile broadband? Sculley has, of course, had a long time to reflect on this.

“Well, I think the idea [of Newton] was right, it was just 20 years ahead of its time. So actually, a lot of people were able to see where the industry’s going, the hardest part is to figure out when it’s going to happen.

“In the case of the PDA, the idea was right – that the content and communication and computing were going to converge – but I think we greatly underestimated that we needed broadband, that we need far more powerful devices, that we needed something a lot more powerful in the background which we now know as ‘cloud’ to be able to handle the tremendous amount of data, and connecting people up through social networking. So it was a good idea, but it was just several decades too early.”

Was it then one of those projects that simply gets out of hand, and acquires a momentum that can’t be stopped as it thunders into the market? “We never looked at Newton as being the seminal product. That was just one step along the way, You can get a much better view of the seminal experience if you go back – you can go to YouTube, i think it’s 1988 [in fact 1987], a concept video we created called Knowledge Navigator.”

Indeed, Knowledge Navigator ) – from the days when Apple made concept videos – has become famous for prefiguring many elements we’re now familiar with: tablet computing, internet search, voice control. It shows the internet as a graphical medium – predating the web, which hadn’t yet been invented – and suggests effortless interaction with digital “assistants”.

Apple’s Knowledge Navigator concept video from 1987 – prefiguring the web, tablet computing and voice control

Knowledge Navigator, says Sculley, “is really something we couldn’t build at the time. But technically we could use special effects and be able to simulate what the experience would be like. That was 24 yeas ago and if you look at that, I think is pretty accurate, almost to the point of being uncanny as to what the experience of tablet computing and mobile devices have turned out to be like.”

Which leads to the obvious final question: how does he organise his computing life? Is he, to coin a phrase, post-PC? “I’m clearly post-PC,” he replies. “I carry an iPhone, a BlackBerry, a [Samsung] Galaxy Note, and I carry an iPad. When I’m in my home office I use a Mac, so I think I’m more typical than not in using many, many different devices.”

The post-PC era doesn’t mean the end of devices, he says: “It means you can be on any device that you happen to have, and everything basically is more and more connectible through the cloud.”

• John Sculley is giving the keynote address at the Cloud Computing World Forum in London on 12-13 June

Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/may/16/john-sculley-cloud-computing-newton

By Laura Locke
Technology reporter, San Francisco

So far, Flipboard has had eight million downloads, with 1.6bn “flips” through its content per month

Flipboard, the popular social news magazine, has started integrating audio into its app for Apple’s hand-held devices.

The move makes it the first mobile reader of its kind to do so.

Flipboard’s partners in the deal are SoundCloud, National Public Radio and Public Radio International (PRI).

Readers will now be able to “flip” through content while listening to music or radio programmes in the background.

The Flipboard app creates a magazine out of real-time social media content, as well as news.

A “personal soundtrack” to the social reading experience is how the Palo Alto-based start-up describes it.

“This is really going to change the entertainment experience of Flipboard,” Marci McCue, head of marketing, told the BBC.

Podcast potential

Other social reading apps such as Google Currents, Pulse and CNN-owned Zite have random audio elements on their free services – mainly through video links and YouTube clips tied to news stories.

The Daily, the paid social reading app from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, offers spoken audio versions of select news stories, but Flipboard is the first to make sound omnipresent throughout its social magazine.

For users, this is achieved by an audio control window that pops up whenever the musical note icon is clicked on the lower left corner of every page. It makes sound easy to turn on, off, pause, favourite, or share via Twitter, Facebook, or email.

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

I don’t know where the money comes from yet – right now everyone is losing money”

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Adam Curry
Founder, Podshow

Curated audio is also part of the updated app. To access hand-selected picks from Flipboard, SoundCloud, or NPR and PRI, users tap on the red ribbon or magnifying glass found on the top right corner of any page.

Editorial selections include interview programs like Fresh Air, All Things Considered, Science Friday; songs from the Atlantic Records catalogue or original beats from rapper Snoop Dogg – one of the most prolific artists on SoundCloud – he regularly shares his latest work on the service and solicits his audience for new producers or extra verses on his latest tracks.

Fans can comment right in the audio timeline, making SoundCloud an unusual, crowdsourced, immersive experience.

SoundCloud has emerged as the “go-to-place for anything audio”, said Adam Curry.

He is a former MTV video DJ who created the world’s first podcast and founded Podshow, the start-up that developed the technology for iTunes’ podcasting platform.

Mr Curry told the BBC he is particularly intrigued by the creative possibilities brought on by the tie-up between SoundCloud and Flipboard.

“If producers can now link their podcasts to show notes, background articles, news stories, or fan tweets, etc – that could be highly interesting,” Mr Curry said.

Unproven model?

SoundCloud, the Berlin-based “social audio platform”, with 15 million users, is helping to bring sound of all kinds – not just recorded music – to the broader web.

An in-app microphone provides recording capabilities that can easily pick up ambient noises on the fly, let users make their own podcasts, do live interviews, and assemble their own tracks.

SoundCloud count the likes of US rapper Snoop Dogg among their ranks

“Un-muting the mobile web,” is how Alexander Ljung, founder and chief executive, SoundCloud, sees it.

“It’s a win for consumers without a doubt,” Mr Curry noted. “You now have a very interesting model which surpasses what traditional media organisations are doing.”

But he questions the business angle. “I don’t know where the money comes from yet, other than a typical advertising play.

“With Spotify or Pandora, or any music service… it’s apples to oranges,” Mr Curry added.

“Both have yet to prove their model actually works. Right now everyone is losing money.”

Mr Curry co-hosts his own podcast, No Agenda, with technology pundit John C Dvorak.

The show is 100% listener-funded and it is profitable despite there being no ads, Mr Curry says.

For Flipboard, adding audio is an attempt at reeling in users and keeping them around longer in a bid, ultimately, to attract brand advertising.

Today, Flipboard has had eight million downloads. There are 1.6bn “flips” through its content per month. On average, users spend 90 minutes a month on the service and the majority – over 70% – connect through a social network.

Once brand advertising – which is being tested now with publishers such as Conde Nast and Sports Illustrated – is rolled out, Flipboard anticipates the addition of audio will further increase engagement and ad revenue.

“We put the content first,” Flipboard’s chief executive Mike McCue has said.

His start-up, not unlike Facebook, is fixated on user growth and getting its product design and user experience right before fully exploiting its advertising strategy.

With $60m (£37.5m) in venture backing, Mr McCue and his team have some time to tinker.

Article source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18080023#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa

That’s the conclusion of the Australian Payments Clearing Association’s (APCA’s) new report, The decline of cheques: Building a bridge to the digital economy (PDF).

The result of community consultation that commenced in June 2011, the report found that consumers and businesses are voting with their wallets and abandoning cheques at a decent rate. Overall use has dropped 60% in a decade and the report says “In the past three years alone, cheque use has declined by over one-third.”

But some people and industries still rely on cheques, the report says, with the elderly and residents of rural areas are still keen to send and get them in the mail. Those groups, the report suggests, should be subjected to gentle pressure through education campaigns that steer them towards electronic payments. Such programs will be useful, the report says, because as the volume of cheques declines the cost of using them will likely increase. The Reserve Bank’s current estimates suggest that the cost of processing a cheque, as of 2007 processing a cheque is A$7.69, compared to $1.21 for credit cards, 67 cents for EFTPOS and 55 cents for cash. Education to wean cheque-lovers off cheques and onto other payment schemes will therefore help them to avoid those extra costs.

Industries that still rely on cheques, like real estate and superannuation, will receive APCA assistance to develop electronic payment schemes that satisfy their particular needs.

APCA also intends to conduct a range of activities aimed at making electronic payments more efficient. The report also recommends “policymakers and law reform bodies address regulatory barriers currently preventing a movement to electronic payments”.

Those activities may hasten the demise of the cheque, but APCA does not intend to make that a goal. Indeed, the group also wants its members to work on better and cheaper cheque processing and will also form “a legal working party with state legal representative organisations and the government to undertake further research to identify legislative issues arising from the decline of cheques.”

Another initiative will see APCA “liaise with financial institutions, the government and representative groups to improve access to the electronic payments system particularly for welfare recipients, low income earners, and the elderly.”

None of those plans are expected to prevent the cheque’s demise, which the report says will come as a result of market forces. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/15/cheques_not_bouncing_yet/

Pornography filters come as standard on many mobile phones

Pornography filters on mobile phones are “censoring” normal web content, according to the Open Rights Group.

Its report found that 60 websites were incorrectly blocked by mobile filters designed to prevent children viewing adult content.

The affected sites included political commentaries, personal blogs and community websites.

The government is considering whether to apply similar blocks to fixed-line broadband services.

Peter Bradwell of the Open Rights Group, author of the report, said the study proved such tools were ineffective.

Automatic block

“Child protection filters can actually affect many more users than intended and block many more sites than they should. These blunt blocks effectively add up to a system of censorship across UK networks,” he said.

In a response published on the ORG website, Hamish MacLeod, chairman of the Mobile Broadband Group, denied this.

“Even allowing for the ORG missing a few, 60 misclassified websites does not amount to anything that could reasonably be described as ‘censorship’, particularly when mobile operators are happy to remove the filters when customers show they are over 18 and will re-classify websites when misclassifications are pointed out to them,” he said.

“This is how the small handful of websites that get referred to mobile operators each year are already dealt with,” he added.

MPs campaigning

In 2004, the UK’s mobile operators, under the auspices of the Mobile Broadband Group, published a code of practice about how to offer a safe browsing experience for children.

At that time, few children accessed the internet via mobiles.

The result was that filters were automatically put on all pay-as-you-go handsets, regardless of the age of the user. In order to remove the filters, users needed either to ring up customer services or go into a mobile shop with proof of age. With its contract phones, Orange and Three customers need to ask if they want filters put on the handsets.

A group of MPs led by Conservative Claire Perry is campaigning to introduce similar filters to fixed line broadband services.

Mr Bradwell called on the government to reject automatic network filtering and instead give parents the option of whether they want such filters turned on.

“Default-on blocks can have significant harmful and unintended consequences for everybody’s access to information,” he said.

Article source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18071119#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa

The data about the UK, revealed for the first time by the company, indicates that 8 million who logged in to the company’s site in the past 30 days did so from a mobile phone, compared to Twitter’s global average of 55%.

Independent studies suggest that the UK is the fourth-largest country for Twitter users in the world, after the US, Brazil and Japan.

The UK’s proportion of mobile users is 45% higher than the average for the world, indicating the strength of Twitter use in the UK. Although most users are almost certain to log in via a desktop or laptop computer at some point, a Twitter UK spokeswoman said: “We have seen growth in the number of people signing up from a mobile.”

That, she said, went back to the DNA of Twitter – which was originally set up in 2006 as a service that would work over SMS, which is why its messages are limited to 140 characters.

Twitter also points out that its users are particularly active in generating content: 60% have contributed to the network, either through tweeting or posting a picture or other content, compared to the world’s biggest video site YouTube, where sources say just 1% of users ever posts a video.

However, the figure for active users suggests a high attrition rate: a study by research firm Semiocast in January claimed about 383m Twitter profiles had been created up to the beginning of 2012, with about one-third of those in the US.

Twitter use in the UK came into sharp focus in summer 2011 when it was initially blamed for inciting some of the riots in London and other cities.

It also saw a sharp peak in use in spring 2011 after the footballer Ryan Giggs sued the company when a number of tweets appeared on the service alleging that he had had an affair with the model Imogen Thomas – a claim which at the time was covered by a superinjunction.

The profusion of tweets led Lord Judge, the lord chief justice on the case, to complain that users of Twitter were totally out of control when it came to privacy injunctions and court orders.

But the company itself, which celebrates its first year of operating with a UK office on 1 June, and has grown from zero staff to more than 30, is pointing to its growing success as an advertising platform, which chief executive Dick Costolo is driving through “promoted” tweets, trends and other paid-for content, known collectively as “Promoted Products” and which Twitter has been selling in the UK since September 2011.

Since then organisations including the British Heart Foundation, Cadbury and Absolute Radio have used Twitter to promote their services, while many others have taken advantage of the platform to build use.

Among those was the Big Green Bookshop in Wood Green, which tweeted on 24 February 2011 that without help, it would have to close its doors in nine months because it would be unable to pay back a bank loan. The day after posting the tweet – which was picked up and became part of the trending tweets for London – the shop sold enough books to cover its bank loan repayments for nearly two months. That was followed by broader interest around the world; the site is now trading healthily.

The social networking service has come a long way since August 2009, when co-founder Evan Williams was interviewed on the BBC’s Newsnight and said: “London is our top Twitter-using city as of today and the UK is second only to the US in terms of number of Twitter users.”

Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/may/15/twitter-uk-users-10m

Blocking tool Pirate Pay draws its name from controversial piracy site The Pirate Bay

A Russian company has developed software it says can disrupt and prevent people from downloading pirated content.

Pirate Pay has been backed by Microsoft and has so far worked with Walt Disney Studios and Sony Pictures to stop “thousands” of downloads.

The tool poses as real bit torrent users but then “confuses” peer-to-peer networks, causing disconnections.

Critics argue that the method will be ineffective in the long term.

The entertainment industry claims that the downloading of pirated material costs copyright holders billions of pounds in lost revenue every year.

Last month, the British Phonographic Industry won a court battle to force UK internet service providers to block its customers from accessing high-profile piracy site The Pirate Bay.

However, the true extent of the financial impact is strongly questioned by internet rights campaigners.

Swamping

Bit torrent blog Torrent Freak reported that Pirate Pay began life as traffic management software for internet service providers.

From here they discovered it could be used to swamp peer-to-peer networks – which are used to share the files – with false information.

“After creating the prototype, we realised we could more generally prevent files from being downloaded, which meant that the program had great promise in combating the spread of pirated content,” said Andrei Klimenko, the company’s chief executive, in an interview with Russia Beyond the Headlines.

The technology has received high-profile praise from the president of Microsoft Russia – Pirate Pay was awarded one million rubles (£62,000, $100,000) from a seed investment fund set up by the company behind Windows.

Continue reading the main story

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You don’t solve social issues with technical fixes”

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Richard Clayton
University of Cambridge

A recent campaign saw Pirate Pay “protect” recent Russian film Vysotsky. Thanks to God, I am Alive, made by Walt Disney Studios.

Pirate Pay said it blocked 44,845 attempted illegal downloads of the film.

However, as the Torrent Freak blog pointed out, the blocked downloaders might have simply just tried again later.

‘Social issues’

Although exact details on how the system operates are not known outside of the company, security researcher Richard Clayton from the University of Cambridge told the BBC it was a process that could work, if only in the short term.

“If you flood the network with lots of lies, then you will be short of real things.

“[But] the networks are robust about this in the long term because you will say to your peer ‘please give me this data’, and when it gives you the data it will say ‘this doesn’t match’ and throw it away.”

Mr Clayton, who blogs about such issues, said peer-to-peer networks would eventually adapt, sharing information about “bogus” peers such as those reportedly utilised by companies like Pirate Pay.

Mr Clayton added: “You don’t solve social issues with technical fixes.

“The social issue here is that a lot of people think that the legal offerings are too expensive and don’t provide what they want.

“Once you solve that, nobody’s going to want to mess around with complicated bits of software to get what they need.”

Article source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18056727#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa