Nasa acts to tackle lost laptops

15 November 2012 Last updated at 09:09 ET

US space agency Nasa has ordered that the data on all its laptops must be encrypted, after losing another one of its portable computers.

Until the process is complete, it has forbidden staff from removing Nasa-issued laptops containing sensitive information from its facilities.

The order follows the loss of a device containing "sensitive personally identifiable information".

There have been several similar incidents over recent years.

Nasa said the latest incident had occurred on 31 October, when a laptop and documents were stolen from a locked vehicle of one of its employees at Nasa headquarters in Washington DC.

The machine was password protected, but the agency acknowledged that the information might still be accessible to hackers since it was not encrypted.

Encryption would have scrambled the data, requiring a complicated code to make it understandable again.

As a result, Nasa has warned its workers to watch out for bogus messages.

"All employees should be aware of any phone calls, emails, and other communications from individuals claiming to be from Nasa or other official sources that ask for personal information or verification of it," an agency-wide email published by news site Spaceref stated.

"Because of the amount of information that must be reviewed and validated electronically and manually, it may take up to 60 days for all individuals impacted by this breach to be identified and contacted."

Encryption order

As a result of the security breach, Nasa's chief information officer, Linda Cureton, has said that with immediate effect laptops containing information about the following topics could only leave its buildings if the relevant data was encrypted:

• the international sale or transport of weapons, nuclear equipment or other materials that fall under the US's export administration regulations
• information about Nasa's human resources
• other "sensitive but unclassified" data

She said that she wanted the maximum possible number of laptops to be encrypted by Wednesday and a target of all laptops a month later. In addition employees have been banned from storing sensitive data on mobile phones, tablets and other portable devices.

The Nasa Watch blog, which comments on affairs at the agency, had previously criticised it for a series of other data losses.

It noted that the organisation had been warned in 2009 that it was not taking enough steps to sufficiently protect information and had reported the loss or theft of 48 of its mobile computing devices between April 2009 and April 2011.

This is not the first time Nasa has promised action to address the problem.

In March, Nasa administrator Charles Bolden told the House Appropriations Committee Subcommittee on Commerce that that he was going to sign a directive ordering all portable devices to use encryption, after acknowledging the agency was "woefully deficient" when compared to other government departments.

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Google TVs to get gaming service

15 November 2012 Last updated at 10:18 ET

The OnLive gaming service is to be made available to Google TV users, following a deal with electronics firm LG.

One of a handful of firms making hardware for Google TV. LG's G2 series sets have Google's TV service built in.

Rather than using a dedicated device, OnLive's cloud-based gaming service relies on fast net links to let people play popular video games on demand.

People using Google TV via an LG set will get OnLive via an update and it will be standard on all future devices.

The deal was unveiled after Google itself revealed a broader update for its TV service. This added voice searching and updated other applications to make it easier to find programmes.

To be able to play games users will also need to buy a wireless controller that, in the US, costs about $50 (£31). A demonstration of the gaming service running on Google TV was first given at the Electronic Entertainment Expo held in Los Angeles in June.

Games available via OnLive include Sleeping Dogs, Darksiders II and Civilisation V. Rather than use disks or downloads, OnLive streams game data to users as they play.

OnLive was embroiled in controversy earlier this year when its founder, Steve Perlman, sold the firm's assets to a venture capital firm for $5m (£3m). The deal meant early investors in OnLive got almost nothing and it also wiped out any return for employees from staff share deals. Mr Perlman left the company soon after.

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Hi-tech school kit 'lying unused'

16 November 2012 Last updated at 03:57 ET By Judith Burns BBC News education reporter

Costly digital technology that has the power to transform education often sits in boxes because teachers do not know how best to use it, a study claims.

Researchers for the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta) say there is clear evidence that technology can boost learning.

Their report sets out examples of best practice from all over the world.

Chief executive Geoff Mulgan said: "The emphasis is too often on shiny hardware rather than how it is to be used."

The researchers estimate that schools in England alone spent more than £1.4bn on technology in the past three years but they claim that all too often it is not being used to its "full promise and potential".

The team, from the University of Nottingham and the London-based Institute of Education Knowledge Lab, looked at evidence from hundreds of academic papers, blogs and reviews from all over the globe.

Right training

They found there was no question that hardware such as interactive whiteboards, digital tablets or software such as educational games could help improve pupils' learning if used properly.

But they say that too often they are used without a strong understanding of their power to transform education, and many schools still use technology to support 20th Century teaching methods and learning objectives.

Associate professor Shaaron Ainsworth from the University of Nottingham told BBC News: "We are saying that technology could be much more effective if teachers and learners are given the right sort of training and use it in the right sort of ways.

"We have lots of examples of brilliant use of technology from all over the world and this report brings them all together."

Mr Mulgan said: "A tablet replacing an exercise book is not innovation, it's just a different way to make notes.

"There is incredible potential for digital technology in and beyond the classroom but it is vital to rethink how learning is organised if we are to reap the rewards."

For example, he said that digital technology offered vast opportunities for pupils to learn with others but these ideas were simply not filtering through to the education system where tests and examinations still focus on individual attainment.

'Victorian system'

The report, Decoding Learning, says that for the past decade technology has been put ahead of teaching, and excitement at innovation has been put ahead of what actually helps children learn.

It calls on experts from industry and education to work together to harness technology to "put learning first".

Dominic Savage of the British Educational Suppliers Association welcomed the report: "Schools should only invest in technology when they understand what they want to do with it and what it will achieve."

He said that while money had been wasted in the past, there was now plenty of information available to help schools understand what technology to buy and how best to use it.

Valerie Thompson of the E-learning foundation called for the education system to embrace technology. "Consider the consequences of continuing to subject young people to an education system rooted in the Victorian era as a preparation for a post-school period of study and work in a digital age," she said.

"If Nesta can use their significant financial clout to accelerate the adoption of best practice in schools across the country, and make sure that our education ministers are made aware of the extraordinary things that teachers are doing so that they are encouraged and not criticised, then perhaps this report will have made a positive contribution."

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Spotify nets Coca-Cola cash

16 November 2012 Last updated at 04:24 ET

Spotify, the Swedish music streaming service, has attracted fresh investment from Coca-Cola, Goldman Sachs and Fidelity.

The $100m (£63m) of new money gives Spotify a valuation of about $3bn.

But the private, loss-making company is facing increased competition from rival music streaming companies, such as French company Deezer, which raised $130m in new funding last month.

Microsoft and Apple have also said they will be entering the market.

Spotify, which launched in the US in 2011, charges a monthly fee for unlimited access to its digital library of 18 million songs, and limited access for free, supported by advertising.

Rivals, such as Rhapsody, Rdio and Deezer, do not offer any free listening beyond trial periods.

Spotify now has more than 15 million active users and about four million paying subscribers, but still lost 45.4m euros (£37m) in 2011, 59% more than in 2010, despite a doubling of revenues.

The recent funding round also raised less than the $200m Spotify was originally hoping for, indicating a more cautious approach from investors following the Facebook flotation debacle and worries about growing competition in the sector.

For example, Microsoft is offering ad-supported free streaming via its Xbox Music service, but only for computers and smartphones running its Windows 8 and Windows RT operating systems.

Users of the Xbox 360 video game console will also get access.

Spotify is beta-testing a browser-based version of its music streaming service, allowing users to play music without having to download an app.

The company hopes this will increase the accessibility of the service and widen its appeal.

But music streaming providers face growing opposition from artists disgruntled at the low royalties they receive.

Pandora Media, the leading internet radio brand measured by listener hours, which pays about half its annual revenues in royalties to artists, has been lobbying the US Congress to pass the Internet Radio Fairness Act, which could see royalties cut by up to 85%.

The move prompted 125 artists, including Bryan Adams, Billy Joel and Ne-Yo, to write an open letter in protest, branding Pandora's proposal "not fair".

Artists' songs often need millions of plays before they make any significant royalty money.

In a feature for music site Pitchfork , Damon Krukowski, of US band Galaxie 500, revealed how 5,960 plays of their song Tugboat over three months on Spotify netted the three songwriters just 35 cents each.

Pandora paid them even less.

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Rat heart cells power 'bio-bots'

16 November 2012 Last updated at 05:53 ET

Tiny biological robots that walk to the beat of a thin sheet of rat heart cells have been created by US scientists.

The "bio-bots" were fabricated using a 3D printer and then seeded with the cardiac cells.

The regular twitching motion of the heart cells makes the tiny structure flex and slowly inch along.

The project could lead to bio-bots with different shapes, seeded with all sorts of cells, that find a role in medicine or as sensors, said the researchers.

The 7mm long bio-bots were fabricated at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and resemble a diving board. They have one long leg supported towards one end by a broad stumpy foot.

A 3D printing process was used to build up layers to form the board and foot of the bio-bot from hydrogel - a biologically inert goo often used in tissue engineering work.

Cleaning up

A separate procedure was used to coat the underside of the long board with a single sheet of living rat cardiac cells. When the heart cells twitch in unison they make the long board curl and act as a lever to push the bio-bot a tiny distance forward. The bio-bot's top speed has been clocked at about 1mm every four seconds.

Prof Rashid Bashir, who led the research at the University of Illinois, said the team's tiny bio-bots could find a role as sensors or in environmental reclamation projects.

"Our goal is to see if we can get this thing to move toward chemical gradients, so we could eventually design something that can look for a specific toxin and then try to neutralise it," said Prof Bashir in a statement. "Now you can think about a sensor that's moving and constantly sampling and doing something useful, in medicine and the environment."

The research team is now making bio-bots of many shapes to find other ways for them to move and coating them with different types of cells to give them new abilities. They could be seeded with nerve cells or light-sensitive cells to give them more control over where they went.

"We have the design rules to make these millimetre-scale shapes and different physical architectures, which hasn't been done with this level of control," said Prof Bashir. "What we want to do now is add more functionality to it."

A paper describing the Illinois research appeared in Nature's Scientific Reports.

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Data jam threat to UK networks

16 November 2012 Last updated at 07:36 ET

Steps need to be taken now to head off a looming "capacity crunch" on the UK's mobile networks, says regulator Ofcom.

As more people use broadband-connected smartphones and tablets, the amount of data Britons consume on the move each month has hit 20 million gigabytes.

The main reason for the data explosion is users' love of video, TV and films while on the move.

Without swift action, mobile networks will gradually grind to a halt, warned the agency.

If current trends play out, said Ofcom, demand for mobile data would grow by 80 times by 2030.

To cope with the data tsunami Ofcom has drawn up plans to release more radio spectrum and make the industry's use of existing spectrum more efficient.

The 700MHz frequency band, currently used by digital terrestrial television, will be opened up to mobile services by 2018 as part of a global plan to harmonise frequencies for mobile users.

Digital television will eventually migrate to the 600MHz frequency under Ofcom's plans.

'Migration'

Consumers worried that this will mean new set-top box equipment and yet more upheaval need not be alarmed, said Ofcom.

"This will not be a new digital switch over; all it will need is a simple retune," said Ed Richards, Ofcom chief executive. "It's a migration."

Initial industry concerns about the migration plans had "substantially diminished", he added.

By making better use of the UK's existing 16,000 wi-fi hotspots, which are significantly underused at the moment, and introducing new transmission and compression technologies, Ofcom believes there will be plenty of new capacity to cope with the expected increase in mobile data usage.

The mobile industry is currently collaborating on a new wi-fi protocol called PassPoint which will allow consumers to use one sign-in to join any public wi-fi network, wherever they happen to be.

Ofcom hopes this will encourage more mobile users to make use of the existing public wi-fi network and help lighten the load on mobile networks.

"The overall outcome for the UK, the economy, and consumers is a positive one," said Mr Richards. "The public cost of this will be utterly marginal, but there will be a massive benefit to the public."

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Hackers attack Israeli websites

16 November 2012 Last updated at 08:13 ET

Hacking group Anonymous has launched a series of cyber attacks against websites in Israel.

Data bombardments briefly knocked some sites offline and led to others being defaced with pro-Palestinian messages.

The OpIsrael campaign was launched by the hacking collective in retaliation for attacks on Gaza.

The cyber attacks come as the Israeli army updates its web campaign adding "achievements" and "badges" for regular visitors.

Propaganda war

Anonymous said it had launched the OpIsrael campaign following threats by the Israeli government to cut all Gaza's telecommunication links. This, said the group in a statement posted to the AnonRelations website, "crossed a line in the sand".

"We are ANONYMOUS and NO ONE shuts down the Internet on our watch," it said.

The group warned the Israeli government not to cut off telecom and web links and urged it to end military operations in Gaza. If the attacks did not end, Israel would feel the group's "full and unbridled wrath".

Hours after the statement was launched, Anonymous posted a list of 87 sites it claimed had been defaced or attacked as part of OpIsrael. Many of the sites had their homepages replaced with messages in support of Hamas and the Palestinians.

Anonymous also produced a package of information for people in Gaza detailing alternative ways for them to communicate if net and other telecommunication links were cut.

At the same time as the Anonymous attacks were being carried out, the Israeli Defence Force re-started tools on its blog that reward people for repeat visits and interacting with the site.

Called IDF Ranks, the tools add a "game" element to the blog and reward repeat visitors with points. When visitors have amassed enough points they get a virtual military rank.

A visitor who goes to the site 10 times gets a "consistent" badge and someone who does lots of searches gets rewarded with the "research officer" rank.

The army said the rank system was turned off briefly as its social media sites had received very heavy traffic. On Wednesday, it began a live feed about its military operation against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Similarly, Hamas has been giving running commentaries on its mortar and rocket attacks on Israeli targets via Twitter.

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Verizon chokes pirates' bandwidth

16 November 2012 Last updated at 11:10 ET

US net firm Verizon has declared war on illegal downloaders, or pirates, who use technologies such as BitTorrent to steal copyrighted material.

Verizon has said it will first warn repeat offenders by email and voicemail.

Then it will restrict or "throttle" their internet connection speeds.

Time Warner Cable, another US internet service provider (ISP) pledging to tackle piracy, says it will use pop-up warnings to deter repeat offenders.

Private enforcers

After that it will restrict subscribers' web browsing activities by redirecting them to a landing page.

The moves come as part of a concerted effort by five major US ISPs - AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Verizon - to bear down on illegal downloading and sharing of copyrighted material.

In September 2011, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) teamed up with the ISPs to launch the Center for Copyright Information, a body dedicated to deterring copyright infringement and advising consumers on legal file sharing options.

Verizon and Time Warner unveiled their latest anti-piracy plans at a panel discussion hosted by the Internet Society in New York on Thursday.

Continue reading the main story

1. Avatar

2. Batman: The Dark Knight

3. Transformers

4. Inception

5. The Hangover

6. Star Trek

7. Kick-Ass

8. The Departed

9. The Incredible Hulk

10. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

Source: TorrentFreak

Dubbed the "six-strikes" policy, referring to the number of warnings pirates may receive, the campaign is due to kick off in full from the end of November, according to file-sharing news site TorrentFreak.

But the industry freely admits that the campaign is unlikely to deter "hardcore" pirates, who can easily circumvent the copyright alert system by setting up virtual private networks.

It claims the campaign is aimed at educating mainstream consumers who may not even realise they are doing something illegal.

While the industry maintains it has no plans to take legal action against persistent offenders, observers believe it remains the ultimate sanction.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which campaigns for digital freedom, is highly critical of the imminent campaign, saying: "Big media companies are launching a massive peer-to-peer surveillance scheme to snoop on subscribers."

ISPs will be acting as "Hollywood's private enforcement arm", it added.

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Help wanted on porn piracy cases

16 November 2012 Last updated at 11:32 ET

A digital rights group is seeking financial help to stop an adult film-maker contacting Britons suspected of pirating pornographic movies.

The Digital Rights Group has applied to intervene in a legal battle between O2 and Golden Eye International.

In 2011, Golden Eye started legal action to make O2 reveal the names of about 9,000 suspected porn pirates.

A successful court challenge meant it only got details on 2,845 people and now it wants to pursue the others.

Cash offer

The UK's Consumer Focus group intervened in the original case saying the adult film-maker had no grounds to pursue 6,155 of them as they were suspected of pirating films for which Golden Eye did not hold the copyright.

The Consumer Focus intervention also changed the wording of letters sent out to suspected pirates to make it clear what penalties people faced. In the letters sent to suspected pirates, Golden Eye said payment of a settlement fee would head off a potential court case.

Golden Eye has now gone to court to get personal details of the 6,155 people released by O2. The Open Rights Group (ORG) has applied to intervene to stop this.

The ORG said it wanted to intervene because Golden Eye had no specific mandate from the 12 other porn studios whose works are believed to have been pirated. Instead, it said, Golden Eye had an "enforcement only" licence which would see it hand over 25% of the cash it got from those it contacted to the studios. Golden Eye would keep the remaining cash.

The ORG has appealed for cash to help pay £5,000 for legal fees and mount the court challenge. If it successfully intervened, said the ORG, O2 would not have to hand over any names and future schemes that try to get cash from suspected pirates may be shelved.

Golden Eye has yet to comment on the case and the ORG's intervention.

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Warning over hidden customer data

16 November 2012 Last updated at 18:47 ET

The UK government has repeated its threat to legislate if businesses do not voluntarily release data gathered on customers who ask to see it.

An initiative called Midata calls on firms to provide details to the public in a "machine-readable" format.

Ministers had warned in August they would introduce a new law if utilities, web firms and shops did not voluntarily comply with their request.

Consumer Affairs Minister Jo Swinson will provide more details on Monday.

Under the existing Data Protection Act consumers already have the power to make a "subject access request" to see the personal information companies and other organisations hold on them.

But doing this can incur a fee of up to £10 and not all data has to be handed over.

The government is hoping that the Midata scheme will make the process easier and help consumers make more informed decisions about issues such as which energy deal or mobile subscription would best match their habits.

"Many businesses reap huge commercial benefits from the information they gather from consumers' daily spending patterns", said Ms Swinson ahead of next week's announcement.

"Why shouldn't consumers also benefit from this by having access to their own data to enable them to make better choices?"

Security concerns

Consumer advocacy group Which? believes the information transparency encouraged by the Midata scheme could boost competition to the benefit of consumers.

Executive director Richard Lloyd said: "Giving consumers more power with their personal data will help them make better use of their money, and that's not only good for customer-friendly businesses, but good for growth in the economy."

But several details of the scheme still need to be fleshed out.

The government talks of third-party developers making apps that could access the data on consumers' behalf, but has not specified which formats companies need to provide the information in to ensure the software could make like-for-like comparisons.

Consumer Focus has also cautioned that collating data in this way could pose a security risk, telling the Financial Times it could open a new avenue for personal information to be leaked or become the subject of a hack attack.

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills says 20 businesses in the energy, finance and telecoms sectors have already signed up to the voluntary scheme.

But it is holding out the threat of legislation should insufficient numbers of companies comply.

If secondary legislation is needed, the department suggested new powers could come into force by early 2014.

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