Russia blacklist law takes effect

31 October 2012 Last updated at 20:06 ET

A law that aims to protect children from harmful internet content by allowing the government to take sites offline has taken effect in Russia.

The authorities are now able to blacklist and force offline certain websites without a trial.

The law was approved by both houses of parliament and signed by President Vladimir Putin in July.

Human rights groups have said the legislation might increase censorship in the country.

The law is the amendment to the current Act for Information.

The authorities say the goal is to protect minors from websites featuring sexual abuse of children, offering details about how to commit suicide, encouraging users to take drugs and sites that solicit children for pornography.

If the websites themselves cannot be shut down, internet service providers (ISPs) and web hosting companies can be forced to block access to the offending material.

The list of banned website will be managed by Roskomnadzor (Russia's Federal Service for Supervision in Telecommunications, Information Technology and Mass Communications). It is meant to be updated daily, but its contents are not available to the general public.

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It will be [an attack on] the freedom of speech on the internet"

End Quote Yuri Vdovin Citizens' Watch

Critics have described it another attempt by President Vladimir Putin to exercise control over the population.

"Of course there are websites that should not be accessible to children, but I don't think it will be limited to that," Yuri Vdovin, vice-president of Citizens' Watch, a human rights organisation based in Saint-Petersburg, told the BBC.

"The government will start closing other sites - any democracy-oriented sites are at risk of being taken offline.

"It will be [an attack on] the freedom of speech on the internet."

Mr Vdovin said that to close a website, the government would simply have to say that its content was "harmful to children".

"But there are lots of harmful websites out there already, for example, fascist sites - and they could have easily been closed down by now - but no, [the government] doesn't care, there are no attempts to do so," he added.

A risk for websites?

Besides NGOs and human rights campaigners, websites including the Russian search engine giant Yandex, social media portal Mail.ru and the Russian-language version of Wikipedia have all protested against the law.

The latter, for instance, took its content offline for a day ahead of the vote in July, claiming the law "could lead to the creation of extra-judicial censorship of the entire internet in Russia, including banning access to Wikipedia in the Russian language".

Yandex temporarily crossed out the word "everything" in its "everything will be found" logo.

"The way the new law will work depends on the enforcement practice," said a spokesman.

"Yandex, along with other key Russian market players, is ready to discuss with lawmakers the way it is going to work."

In July, the Russian social networking site Vkontakte posted messages on users' homepages warning that the law posed a risk to its future.

However, the country's telecom minister Nikolai Nikiforov, suggested that such concerns were overblown when he spoke at the NeForum blogging conference this week.

"Internet has always been a free territory," he said, according to a report by Russian news agency Tass.

"The government is not aimed at enforcing censorship there. LiveJournal, YouTube and Facebook showcase socially responsible companies.

"That means that they will be blocked only if they refuse to follow Russian laws, which is unlikely, in my opinion."

There is also evidence suggesting public support for the move.

A survey conducted by pollster Levada Centre in late July indicated that about 62% of those asked supported the idea of a blacklist, with only 16% opposing it.

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Dotcom reveals Mega download site

1 November 2012 Last updated at 07:04 ET

Kim Dotcom has announced plans for Mega, a service to replace his shut down file-sharing website Megaupload.

Mega is expected to use encryption methods which will mean only users will know what they are uploading.

It will be decided in March whether Mr Dotcom should be extradited from New Zealand to the US to face charges relating to copyright theft.

The 38-year-old said he would launch Mega on 20 January 2013 - a year to the day since his arrest.

By keeping details of files uploaded on Mega secret from the site's administrators, Mr Dotcom said he believed this would mean the site was not in violation of US laws.

"The new Mega will not be threatened by US prosecutors," he said.

"The new Mega avoids any dealings with US hosters, US domains and US backbone providers and has changed the way it operates to avoid another takedown."

'LOL!!!'

Announcing the new site on Twitter, Mr Dotcom said the holding page - hosted at Me.ga - was already getting "millions" of hits.

He said many of the visits were from US authorities themselves, tweeting: "All FBI agents pressing reload hahaha... We see their IP addresses. LOL!!!"

Exact details of the encryption methods on the upcoming site have not been released. However, it appears to look to shift responsibility for unlawful content onto the users, rather than the site's owners.

"In the past, securely storing and transferring confidential information required the installation of dedicated software," a message on Mega's holding page said.

"The new Mega encrypts and decrypts your data transparently in your browser, on the fly. You hold the keys to what you store in the cloud, not us."

In an interview with Reuters, Mr Dotcom suggested that content owners might even get direct access to users' uploaded files "if they agree not to make us responsible for actions of users".

The site's servers will not be hosted in the US, Mr Dotcom added. A page on the Mega site makes a plea to encourage more investors for the service.

"We have raised sufficient funds to cover the launch," the message reads, "but we would like to provide Mega free of charge for as long as possible."

Mr Dotcom had previously released details of a sister service, Megabox, which will offer music-related downloads.

Unlawful raid

Mr Dotcom - formerly Kim Schmitz - currently resides in his New Zealand mansion which was raided by local authorities at the start of this year.

The raid and seizure of assets was later deemed illegal by a New Zealand court.

It was also later ruled that intelligence agencies had illegally spied on Mr Dotcom - an incident which drew an apology from New Zealand Prime Minister John Key.

"We failed to provide that appropriate protection for him," he said.

"It is the GCSB's [Government Communications Security Bureau] responsibility to act within the law, and it is hugely disappointing that in this case its actions fell outside the law."

If extradited and convicted in the US, Mr Dotcom faces up to 20 years in prison.

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Man beats robot car on race track

1 November 2012 Last updated at 08:26 ET

A race between a robot car and a human has ended with a win for the humans - but only just.

The race was run on Thunderhill Raceway in California between an Audi TTS that can drive itself and a racing car driver familiar with the circuit.

The human driver completed a lap around the circuit a few seconds faster than the robotic car.

The race was part of research to develop control systems that will help to make domestic cars more autonomous.

Human race

The robot car in the race has been developed by researchers at the Centre for Automotive Research at Stanford University (Cars).

Called Shelley, the autonomous vehicle is fitted with sensors that work out its position on the road, feed back information about the grip of its tyres and help it plot the best route around the circuit.

Prof Chris Gerdes, head of the Cars Lab at Stanford, said Thunderhill was chosen because its 15 turns present the car's control systems with a wide variety of challenges. Some corners can be taken at high speed, some are chicanes, others are sharp and come at the end of long straights down which the car hit a top speed of 115mph (185kph).

Once familiar with the three-mile circuit the car was raced against one of Thunderhill's staff who was very familiar with the track and logged a slightly faster time.

"What human drivers do consistently well is feel out the limits of the car and push it just a little bit further and that is where they have an advantage," said Prof Gerdes.

He added that follow-up work had been done to record what the best human drivers did with the car's brakes, steering and throttle as they drove so this could be incorporated into the control systems the Stanford team is developing.

Continue reading the main story

"It's not so much the technology as the capability of the human that is our inspiration now."

End Quote Prof Chris Gerdes

For instance, he said, in situations where the car is being driven at the limit of the grip of its tyres, the car cannot be turned via the steering wheel. Instead, said Prof Gerdes, race drivers use the brake and the throttle to force a car round a corner.

"We're learning what they are doing and it's those counter-intuitive behaviours that we are planning to put in the algorithm," he said.

"Our ultimate objective is not really to robotify [car racing] but to take these sorts of technologies, learning from the very best human drivers and turn those into safety systems that can work on cars," he told the Big Science Summit, a conference organised by The Atlantic magazine.

Currently, he said, driver assistance systems in vehicles actively prevent them performing manoeuvres that the best drivers use to avoid or get out of trouble.

Driving fast on a race track was one way to expose those high level abilities, he said. The maths of making a car steer safely at high speed around a tight bend was very similar to that needed to keep a car on the road if it hits a patch of ice. Both, he said, involved a calculation based on how much friction there was between the road and the tyres.

"As we set up these systems in the future, it's important not to build autonomous vehicles that are merely a collection of systems designed for human support but to think a little bit more holistically about making them as good as the very best human drivers," said Prof Gerdes. "It's not so much the technology as the capability of the human that is our inspiration now."

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Uganda delays mobile switch-off

1 November 2012 Last updated at 10:13 ET

Uganda has delayed plans to switch off "fake" mobile phones until 1 July 2013.

The crackdown - which is designed to prevent counterfeit handsets connecting to local networks - had originally been planned to come into effect this month.

Kenya implemented a ban in October disconnecting millions of devices.

The Uganda Communications Commission (UCC) has suggested about 30% of East Africa's 17 million mobiles are illegitimate copies of popular brands and models.

Users have until March to make sure their Sim card is registered with the regulator ahead of the action.

They are also asked to verify the 15-digit IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identity) code of legal devices. Fakes usually do not have an IMEI code or have copied another one.

The UCC says the moves will help law enforcement agencies track criminals who use unregistered devices for illegal activities.

Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania are among other African nations to have discussed counterfeit phone bans.

Dropped calls

Fake phones are popular because they are sold at significantly cheaper prices than official models - in part because retailers have avoided paying import taxes.

But officials suggest they can pose health risks. They say the handsets have not been tested to meet safety standards meaning that they may suffer higher than recommended radiation levels or battery leaks.

They also say that because the phones had not been properly configured for local networks that they can cause dropped calls for all users.

The UCC has faced complaints that service quality has worsened over recent months.

The regulator has also threatened network providers with fines if they are responsible for other causes of blocked or dropped calls, or loss of coverage.

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Apple slammed over Samsung notice

1 November 2012 Last updated at 10:39 ET

Apple has 48 hours to re-write a statement on its website relating to its design rights dispute with Samsung, UK judges have ruled.

Apple was forced on 18 October to publish a message making it clear that Samsung had not infringed the iPad's registered design.

However Samsung complained the statement Apple had posted did not comply with the court order.

Judges agreed and have told Apple it must be removed within 24 hours.

A new, compliant version must then be posted.

Michael Beloff QC, representing Apple, told judges that the company had thought that it had complied with the court order.

"It's not designed to punish," he said.

"It's not designed to make us grovel. The only purpose must be to dispel commercial uncertainty."

He asked that the company be given 14 days to post the replacement - but the request was firmly denied.

Lord Justice Longmore told Mr Beloff: "We are just amazed that you cannot put the right notice up at the same time as you take the other one down."

One of the other judges, Sir Robin Jacob, added: "I would like to see the head of Apple [Tim Cook] make an affidavit about why that is such a technical difficulty for the Apple company."

Apple told the BBC it did not want to comment further.

'Horse's mouth'

Samsung complained that the notice posted by Apple was "inaccurate and misleading" because it added comments about other rulings in Germany and the US that had gone in the iPad-maker's favour.

"This has received enormous publicity and has perpetuated confusion as to Samsung's entitlement to market the Galaxy tablet computers in issue," a Samsung lawyer said in a written statement to judges.

"It has created the impression that the UK court is out of step with other courts."

The UK's ruling applies to the whole of the EU.

The court order is the latest twist in an ongoing legal saga involving the two companies.

Apple brought the case to the UK courts, alleging that Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10 had infringed the design of its iPad.

But in July, Judge Colin Birss disagreed on the grounds that Samsung's product was not as "cool".

His ruling meant that Apple was denied the opportunity to impose a sales ban on Samsung's products.

Apple was unsuccessful in appealing the ruling, and was ordered to place a notice on its website, newspapers and magazines explaining that Samsung had not infringed its designs.

The intention, judges said, was not to make Apple "grovel", but to remove "commercial uncertainty" surrounding Samsung's products.

"A consumer might well think: 'I had better not buy a Samsung - maybe it's illegal and if I buy one it may not be supported'," Sir Robin said.

"Apple itself must (having created the confusion) make the position clear: that it acknowledges that the court has decided that that these Samsung products do not infringe its registered design.

"The acknowledgement must come from the horse's mouth."

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Comet to go into administration

1 November 2012 Last updated at 12:26 ET

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Dan Wagner, Powa Technologies: "They failed to leverage their physical presence... ten years ago"

About 6,500 retail jobs are at risk after electrical chain Comet confirmed that it would be put into administration next week.

Private equity firm OpCapita, which owns the 240-store business, has lined up restructuring specialist Deloitte to act as administrator.

OpCapita bought Comet last year for the nominal sum of £2, but the business has struggled in the consumer downturn.

Comet's demise is one of the biggest High Street casualties of recent years.

Two weeks ago, OpCapita said it was examining a number of potential bids for the retailer.

The administrator will run the business as a going concern while it assesses options for sales, closures and liquidation.

Comet said it was "urgently working" on plans to secure the company's future. Customers with outstanding orders are being told it is "business as usual until further notice" and that the group intends to fulfil deliveries of products that have been paid for.

Comet's customer care team is handling customer inquiries on 0844 8009595.

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• Any customers with Comet vouchers or gift cards can use them in stores at present
• Administrators would decide whether they would be honoured were the business to enter administration
• Generally, gift card holders are fairly low on a list of creditors when a business folds
• Extended warranties are overseen by a separate business. If it ceased trading, then a trust fund would be set up to meet obligations to customers who hold extended warranties
• The Comet website is currently out of action
• Customer enquiries are being answered by its customer card team on 0844 8009595

Shares of Comet's rivals rose on news of the planned administration, with Dixons Retail, which owns PC World and Currys, jumping 15% as investors speculated that a major competitor could be removed from the market.

OpCapita bought Comet last February from Kesa Electricals, which had itself struggled to turn around the business. Comet is thought to have had operational losses of about £35m last year.

'Market failure'

The economic downturn and pressure on consumer spending has led many people to put off purchases of big-ticket items such as TVs and large appliances. But sales of such items have also moved increasingly online.

Dan Wagner, a technology entrepreneur who has backed several internet businesses, told the BBC that Comet "was an accident waiting to happen" because successive managements had failed to understand the online world.

Retailers must now offer multi-channel options - shops, a website, purchases via mobile phones - to be successful, he said. "Comet failed to understand the importance of this for driving business."

Jon Copestake, retail analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit, also felt that Comet's problems "come as little surprise".

He said: "Not only has Comet faced deflationary pressures thanks to stiff competition and cheaper production costs, but core audio visual products are being undermined by combined platforms on smartphones and tablet computers."

Comet is one of the biggest retail casualties since the demise of Woolworths in 2008. Other recent High Street collapses have included JJB Sports, Clinton Cards, Blacks Leisure, Game, and Peacocks.

America's Best Buy recently pulled the plug on 11 giant electrical stores after failing to make inroads into the UK market.

Comet was founded in 1933 as a business charging batteries for wireless sets. It opened its first store in 1968, in Hull, and was bought by Kingfisher in 1984, which expanded the Comet brand into one of the most familiar names on the High Street.

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Huge fine for sharing pornography

2 November 2012 Last updated at 06:33 ET

An American man has been hit with a $1.5m (£932,000) fine for pirating 10 gay porn movies via BitTorrent.

A federal court in Illinois awarded the damages of $150,000 per movie to Flava Works - the creator of the pornographic films.

The figure is believed to the biggest awarded in a file-sharing case.

The award is thought to be so large because the accused, Kywan Fisher, did not defend himself against claims that he pirated the movies.

In court, Flava Works presented evidence which it said demonstrated that Mr Fisher was the person who put copies of its films on a BitTorrent site.

In its evidence, Flava revealed that it had embedded unique codes in the copies of its films that customers pay to view. Digital detective work connected the code in the pirated films back to Mr Fisher, who had earlier signed up as a customer of Flava and paid to view the movies.

Once shared via BitTorrent the films were downloaded or viewed 3,449 times, said Flava during its court statements.

Flava claimed Mr Fisher had exhibited "wilful copyright infringement" and violated the terms and conditions of the pay-to-view video service he signed up for.

US Judge John Lee noted Flava's evidence in his summary and said in light of that and the lack of any defence or objection by Mr Fisher, he had no choice but to issue a default judgement in favour of the adult movie maker.

It is not clear whether Mr Fisher will appeal against the judgement or whether he can pay the fine.

Mr Fisher was one of 15 people that Flava pursued for pirating its movies. However, the cases against all the others were dropped earlier this year for lack of evidence.

Many content creators, including movie studios and record labels, have pursued pirates in the courts using net, or IP, addresses as evidence.

However, many of these cases have been dropped as in May, a US federal judge ruled that an IP address was not sufficient evidence to accuse a person of being a pirate.

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UK government backs open IT rules

2 November 2012 Last updated at 07:44 ET

The UK government is drawing up a set of open technology standards all future IT projects must comply with.

The standards will dictate how data should be formatted and the ways that software should interoperate.

The push for open standards builds on earlier work to standardise the hardware on which government services are built.

The decision to mandate the open standards follows a four-month consultation exercise.

"For too long, government IT has been too expensive, over-specified and run in contract structures that encourage complexity, duplication and fragmented user services," said Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude in a speech announcing the strategy.

The standards the government wanted to adopt would favour smaller, innovative tech firms and would demand compliance with open data formats and protocols from every IT supplier, he said.

In the technology world, open standards stand in opposition to proprietary formats. As their name implies they let everyone that wants to look at how a program is built or data is formatted.

This openness helps to flush out bugs in software and makes it easier for data to travel and be re-used as programmers can easily see how it is structured.

'Lag behind'

From 1 November, said Mr Maude, government departments applying for cash to bankroll IT projects must refer to open standards when drawing up their proposals.

Departments and agencies could apply for an exemption, he said, but warned that the process of winning one would be "challenging".

Only by standardising the way that departments dealt with data would the government be able to significantly cut its IT bill, he said.

The lack of common ways of working with data held back the push to put more public services online, he said.

"At the moment we lag behind," said Mr Maude. "For example, 74% of people use the internet for car insurance, but only 51% buy car tax online."

He said this was "inefficient" as digital channels were "much cheaper than post, phone, or face to face interactions".

Some steps towards more open government technology had already been taken, said Mr Maude. The infrastructure underpinning official IT was being standardised and some services all departments use had been made available centrally.

To take this further, he said, work had begun on the guidebook that would detail the open standards that departments and suppliers would be expected to work to.

Only by becoming more open would departments "migrate away" from big, sclerotic contracts to the digital future, said Mr Maude.

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Facebook flaw bypasses passwords

2 November 2012 Last updated at 08:39 ET

Facebook has moved quickly to shut down a loophole which made some accounts accessible without a password.

The bug was exposed in a message posted to the Hacker News website.

The message contained a search string that, when used on Google, returned a list of links to 1.32 million Facebook accounts.

In some cases clicking on a link logged in to that account without the need for a password. All the links exposed the email addresses of Facebook users.

Throwaway account

The message posted to Hacker News used a search syntax that exposed a system used by Facebook that lets users quickly log back in to their account.

Email alerts about status updates and notifications often contain a link that lets a user of the social network respond quickly by clicking it to log in in to their account.

In a comment added to the Hacker News message, Facebook security engineer Matt Jones said the links were typically only sent to the email addresses of account holders. Links sent in this way can only be clicked once.

"For a search engine to come across these links, the content of the emails would need to have been posted online," he wrote. Mr Jones suspected this is what happened as many of the email addresses exposed were for throwaway mail sites or for services that did a bad job of protecting archived messages.

Most of the million or so links exposed would already have expired, said Mr Jones.

"Regardless, due to some of these links being disclosed, we've turned the feature off until we can better ensure its security for users whose email contents are publicly visible," he said.

Mr Jones added that Facebook had taken steps to secure the accounts of people who had been exposed by the flaw. Many of the exposed accounts were in Russia and China.

In an official statement, Facebook said the links were sent "directly to private email addresses to help people easily access their accounts, and we never made them publicly available or crawlable."

However, it said, the links were then posted elsewhere online which lead to them being indexed on search engines.

It said: "While we have always had protections on these private links to provide an additional layer of security, we have since disabled their functionality completely and are remediating the accounts of anyone who recently used this feature."

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Teenager launches top selling app

2 November 2012 Last updated at 08:45 ET

A smartphone app which provides summaries of news stories soared to number nine in Apple's app store just two hours after its release in the US.

The app, called Summly, was designed by 17-year-old Londoner Nick D'Aloisio, and has received more than $1m in funding from investors.

High-profile supporters include Stephen Fry, Tech City CEO Joanna Shields and Newscorp owner Rupert Murdoch.

However some early reviewers have described the app as "confusing".

"Navigation unclear," wrote Oliver Devereux on the app store's review page, while another described it as "quite unintuitive".

But the app is still rating an average score of four out of five possible stars from users overall.

Mr D'Aloisio took time off school to develop his idea for a smartphone application that offers summaries of existing news stories published on the net.

The free-to-download app uses algorithms to process news stories into summaries which users can then swipe to see in full if they wish.

"We worked hard on an interface that looks like nothing else on iPhone," he told the BBC.

"We merged algorithm with beautiful design. It's summarising thousands of articles every minute."

'Big visions'

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Nick D'Aloisio talks to Jane Wakefield about the app in December 2011

Mr D'Aloisio, who celebrated his 17th birthday on Thursday, has appointed Bart Swanson, who oversaw the roll-out of retailer Amazon in Europe, to chair the company behind Summly.

"I see big visions for the company longer term," the teenager said.

"We can really become the de-facto format for news on mobile. People are not scrolling through 1,000-word articles - they want snack-sized information."

In the longer term Mr D'Aloisio would like to see users make micro-payments to read some stories in full should they choose to view the entire article.

"Traditionally publishers have been confined to a paywall system," he said. "You can either give away the headline or the full article. But we can really sell the summary level."

Mr D'Aloisio now intends to finish his education and go to university - but he also wants to remain involved in the company.

"I'm going to do my best to stay, I'm the founder and it's my vision and I want to see that through," he said.

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