Google to retire Reader service

14 March 2013 Last updated at 08:19 ET

Google is to shut down its Reader service in July, as usage has declined.

A petition to save the service, which aggregates news content from web feeds, had 25,000 signatures in a few hours.

Experts say shutting Reader is part of Google's plan to migrate more people to its social media service, Google+.

Google said in its official blog: "There are two simple reasons for this - usage of Google Reader has declined, and as a company we are pouring all of our energy into fewer products."

It added users and developers who wanted to use alternatives could export their data, including their subscriptions over the next four months, using its Google Takeout service.

Google Reader launched in 2005, when Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds were a new way to keep tabs on favourite websites and blogs.

The news of its demise has led to a debate about the service on Twitter. Some said its launch had effectively destroyed other RSS competitors.

Security consultant @cortesi tweeted: "Google - a destroyer of ecosystems".

In his blog, he added:" "Google destroyed the RSS feed-reader ecosystem with a subsidised product, stifling its competitors and killing innovation.

"It then neglected Google Reader itself for years, after it had effectively become the only player."

Adam Leach, a principal analyst at research firm Ovum, said Google's business model was to offer free services in order to draw people into its other offerings.

Now, he said, Google wanted people to experience their favourite websites in a more social way and was seeking to migrate its aggregation platforms to its social media service.

"This has been on the cards for a while. It is part of Google's strategy to shift people to Google + and other social tools," he said.

Doomed to fail

He added he would personally miss the service.

"I use Google Reader every day," he said.

"It is one of those tools that sits in the background and allows you to keep pace with what is going on."

But Chris Wetherell, one of Reader's chief engineers, told tech news site GigaOm it had been "doomed to fail from the very beginning because Google "never really believed in the project".

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UK broadband hits double figures

14 March 2013 Last updated at 09:23 ET

The average speed of home broadband is now 12Mbps (megabits per second), according to research from regulator Ofcom.

That has risen by a third since its last report in May 2012 and trebled in the past four years.

Increasingly consumers are upgrading their broadband packages to super-fast services of 30Mbps or above.

The increasing appetite for online video and more devices per household were driving the changes, Ofcom said.

By November 2012, more than three-quarters of the UK's home broadband users were on packages with advertised speeds above 10Mbps.

Continue reading the main story

• Nov 2008 - 3.6Mbps average
• Nov 2009 - 4.1Mbps average
• Nov 2010 - 5.2Mbps average
• May 2011 - 6.8Mbps average
• Nov 2011 - 7.6Mbps average
• May 2012 - 9.0Mbps average
• Nov 2012 - 12.0Mbps average

The proportion of broadband connections classed as superfast was up to 13%, from 5% the previous year.

Superfast connections are getting faster, with average speeds rising from 35.8Mbps in May 2012 to 44.6Mbps in November 2012.

They are also getting cheaper - customers can upgrade for as little as £5, according to Ofcom.

Ed Richards, Ofcom's chief executive, said "Our research shows that UK consumers are adopting faster broadband packages to cater for their increasing use of bandwidth-heavy services such as video streaming.

"The increase in the average number of connected devices in UK homes is also driving the need for speed," he said.

Digital ghettos

The report also looked at upload speeds, important to consumers wishing to share large files or use real-time video communications. The average upload speed was 1.4Mbps, up from 0.3Mbps average in May.

Price comparison website broadbandchoices.co.uk said that the prices of super-fast services needed to fall.

"An increase of 3.1Mbps (34%) in UK broadband speeds is significant, but this is entirely down to the increased availability of fibre optic services and these do not come cheap - you could end up paying five times as much for fibre optic as you would for standard ADSL," said Dominic Baliszewski, the website's telecoms expert.

He also pointed out that the increasing speeds were unlikely to affect those struggling on much slower speeds in the countryside: "Unfortunately this report will be cold comfort to rural dwellers stuck in 'digital ghettos' who are struggling to get more than a few megabits per second.

"British households are still having to play a postcode lottery when it comes to broadband speed; the government's vision for UK broadband to be fastest in Europe by 2015 is a long way from being realised," he said.

Natural limit

This week the Community Broadband Network launched a report looking at fresh ways to fund broadband to the last 10% of the UK.

It wants the government to provide loans directly to communities wanting to build their own networks.

Meanwhile a report from telecoms analyst firm PointTopic said that there was a natural limit to the speeds consumers would need.

"Today that 'point' is in the 60-70Mbps range," said Oliver Johnson, chief executive at Point Topic.

"Enough to stream a high definition video or three with perhaps some light browsing on the side and if the kids are old enough an online game and a music stream," he added.

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Expert plays down 'cyberwar' threat

14 March 2013 Last updated at 12:42 ET

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Experts told the Public Accounts Committee cybersecurity was a rapidly changing field

Al-Qaeda lacks the technical expertise to sabotage Britain's national power and water systems, a cyber-security expert has told a committee of MPs.

Asked why a cyber-attack had never been launched on such assets, Thomas Rid said: "Al-Qaeda are too stupid and China doesn't want to do it."

China denies state-backed hacking and says it is, rather, a victim of it.

Dr Rid, a reader in war studies at King's College, London, was briefing the Public Accounts Committee.

He said Britain's critical infrastructure was vulnerable to disruption at sites where industrial control systems were linked to the internet.

In some cases, the owners of the equipment might not know it is capable of being connected to the internet or, if it was installed some years ago when cybersecurity was less important, it might not be adequately protected from attack, he told the MPs.

'Skills and intelligence'

But although cybersecurity was a rapidly changing field, his assessment was that terror groups did not currently have the expertise required to disrupt key public services.

"It requires intelligence about the targets you are trying to penetrate.

"And then it is not just enough to switch off the systems through a software attack, but you actually have to reprogram the system in order to modify outcome parameters and that is much more difficult. You need to know what you are doing.

"You need skills and intelligence. Right now militants don't have that."

Dr Rid, who has hit back at warnings from military experts about the risk of cyberwarfare in the past, said it was important to distinguish between sabotage and espionage.

"Let's put it this way, people in China have a commercial interest in stealing information from Western companies.

"They don't have a commercial interest in breaking anything. So they want to steal stuff, but they don't want to break stuff because, after all, they are part of the same economy."

Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude warned last year against the threats to British interests from "hostile foreign states and others".

'State actors'

In 2011, the British government launched a £650m National Cyber Security Programme, the latest phase of which was unveiled this week by security minister James Brokenshire..

The government has also issued advice to senior business leaders about how to combat the threat of electronic espionage.

Britain's major banks now share information on attempted cyber-attacks and hold regular meetings with officials from the UK's secret listening post GCHQ, the Public Accounts Committee was told.

But British officials have been reluctant to point the finger at China or any other foreign state suspected of being behind the attacks - in contrast to increasingly strident comments from Washington.

On Wednesday, President Barack Obama said he had made clear to Beijing and "some other state actors" that the US expect them to abide by international rules.

"We have seen a steady ramping up of cybersecurity threats," said Mr Obama in a television interview. "Some are state sponsored, some are just sponsored by criminals."

Last month, a US cybersecurity firm said a secretive branch of China's military was probably one of the world's "most prolific cyber-espionage groups", believed to have stolen hundreds of terabytes of data from at least 141 organisations around the world.

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Eye-tracking Samsung Galaxy unveiled

14 March 2013 Last updated at 20:52 ET By Dave Lee Technology reporter, BBC News

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The BBC's Michelle Fleury takes a look at the Galaxy S4, and asks whether it has more than just initial "wow factor"

Samsung has launched a smartphone which allows users to control its 5in (12.5cm) screen using only their eyes.

The Galaxy S4 follows on from last year's S3, a product that sold over 40 million units worldwide.

At a lavish, Broadway-themed event in New York, the company also demonstrated the phone's ability to take two different pictures at once.

Analysts widely regard Samsung to be the biggest challenger to Apple's dominance of mobile products.

The Galaxy S4 will be rolled out globally at the end of April.

Following the launch, shares in Samsung fell 1.7% in early trade in Seoul on Friday amid worries the market for phone upgrades was "flattening out".

The company's head of mobile communications, JK Shin said 327 mobile operators in 155 countries will carry the handset.

In the UK, Vodafone, Three, Orange, T-Mobile and EE have all announced plans to offer the device on their networks.

Through a series of role-playing scenes, the South Korean firm demonstrated the phone's key features.

Much was made of the device's ability to be controlled without touching it.

Using "Smart pause", the user can pause a video by looking away from the screen.

Additionally, the "Smart Scroll" software analyses the user's eyes and wrist to scroll through emails and other content.

'Gimmicky'

"The debut of nifty eye motion-sensitive controls to allow users to pause video and scroll through pages using eye movements alone is smart," said telecoms expert Ernest Doku from uSwitch.com.

"For commuters crammed in trains - or just those who love a bit of futuristic tech that makes their lives easier - this novel feature will really help the Galaxy S4 to stand out."

Continue reading the main story

The 5in display is the belle of the ball"

End Quote David Pierce The Verge

However, Charles Golvin from Forrester Research worried the swathes of new features may alienate some customers.

"The larger question is how much of this stuff can people actually use," he told the BBC.

"There's no question that there's a lot of powerful technology and innovative features - but whether people will care about them or use them I'm not sure.

"Including an image of yourself in a picture that you're taking for someone else - yes, I think that's a bit gimmicky.

"But on the video side, for a live chat where it's compositing you and your image to show both you and what you're seeing - that's not a gimmick."

Lighter and thinner

In another scene, depicting a backpacker in Shanghai, the phone was shown to translate English text into Chinese speech - before translating Chinese speech back into English text.

The dual camera feature makes use of the device's front and rear cameras simultaneously, blending the pictures together to make sure the picture taker is not "left out".

The rear has a 13 megapixel camera, while the user-facing camera captures pictures at 2 megapixels.

The phone weighs 130g, and is 7.9mm thick - making it slightly lighter and thinner than the S3.

The device uses Samsung's HD AMOLED technology, giving the S4's screen - which is marginally bigger than the S3's - a resolution of 441 pixels-per-inch.

As predicted by several industry experts before the event, most of the presentation focused on the phone's software rather than hardware.

As well as the "touchless" technology, the company also introduced the Samsung Hub - a multimedia storage facility that can be shared across multiple Samsung devices.

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4G interference helpline launches

14 March 2013 Last updated at 21:57 ET

The organisation set up to help households experiencing interference from 4G signals has launched.

Called at800, it has been given £180m by the UK's mobile operators to ensure that next-generation services do not cause interference with TV services.

Ofcom has estimated that up to 900,000 homes could experience interference with their TV signal.

The problem affects only Freeview users, which operates close to the 800MHz frequency 4G services will use.

Live trial

According to Freeview, around 20 million households watch TV via its platform. Of these about half have it as their sole TV service.

On Monday at 800 will begin live trials in the West Midland, temporarily activating 4G masts in Cradley Heath and Rowley Regis, to gauge exactly how many households are affected and how.

A website and contact centre will also go live - the number is 0333 31 31 800.

Residents and business are being asked to report the extent to which Freeview services are disrupted.

Different platform

Full commercial 4G launches are expected in the summer.

The organisation plans to produce maps of households most likely to be affected and inform them via post of the things they can do to mitigate the problem.

It estimates that the majority of homes will be able to solve any interference issues by fitting a filter, which it will supply free of charge.

For vulnerable people, an engineer will visit the home to fit it.

The filter will normally plug into the aerial lead between the TV and the antenna, blocking the 4G frequencies.

For those for whom that solution does not work, an engineer will be sent out to see if they need to change their cabling or aerial.

For a few, it may be necessary to move onto a different platform, such as satellite or cable.

Simon Beresford-Wylie, at800 chief executive, said of the process: "We are hoping for the best and planning for the worst."

Other countries, where 4G services have already gone live, have had few issues.

In Germany where 10% of the population watches digital terrestrial TV, less than 10 cases of interference have been reported.

Sweden also has had very few reported problems.

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N Korea says US 'behind hack attack'

15 March 2013 Last updated at 05:10 ET

North Korea has accused the US and its allies of attacks on its internet servers, amid tension on the peninsula.

KCNA news agency said the "intensive and persistent" attacks coincided with US-South Korea military drills.

Official sites such as KCNA, Air Koryo and Rodong Sinmun, the party newspaper, are reported to have been inaccessible on some occasions in recent days.

Tension has escalated in the wake of North Korea's third nuclear test last month.

The test led to fresh UN sanctions being imposed on Pyongyang, which has responded with strong rhetoric - both to the UN move and the annual joint drills, which it bitterly opposes.

It says it has scrapped the Korean War armistice and ended non-aggression pacts with Seoul. It has also cut off a hotline that connects the two countries.

The two Koreas remain technically at war because the 1950-53 conflict ended in an armistice, not a treaty. South Korea says North Korea cannot unilaterally dissolve the armistice and has called on Pyongyang to tone down its language.

North Korea called the cyber attack a "cowardly and despicable act".

"It is nobody's secret that the US and South Korean puppet regime are massively bolstering up cyber forces in a bid to intensify the subversive activities and sabotages against the DPRK [North Korea]," KCNA said.

Accusations of cyber attacks on the peninsula usually flow in the opposite direction, says the BBC's Lucy Williamson in Seoul.

South Korean intelligence sources say North Korea routinely attempts to access the network here, and Pyongyang is believed to have broken into Defence Ministry data at least once in the past few years, our correspondent adds.

The cause of the disruption remains unclear.

Current internet access in North Korea is extremely limited for locals, with most people only having access to a small number of state-run pages. The wider internet is available only to the government and the military.

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Net's 'bad neighbourhoods' mapped

15 March 2013 Last updated at 07:14 ET

About 50% of all junk mail on the net emerges from just 20 internet service providers (ISPs), a study has found.

The survey of more than 42,000 ISPs tried to map the net's "bad neighbourhoods" to help pinpoint sources of malicious mail.

The survey by a researcher in Holland found that, in many cases, ISPs specialise in particular threats such as spam and phishing.

Methods to thwart attacks and predict targets also emerged from the study.

The large-scale study was carried out to help fine-tune computer security tools that scrutinise the net addresses of email and other messages to help them work out if they are junk or legitimate. Such tools could make better choices if they were armed with historical information about the types of traffic that emerge from particular networks.

In his analysis Giovane Cesar Moreira Moura who studied at the University of Twente found that some networks could be classed as "bad neighbourhoods" because, just like in the real world, they were places where malicious activity was more likely.

Of the 42,201 ISPs studied about 50% of all junk mail, phishing attacks and other malicious messages came from just 20 networks, he found. Many of these networks were concentrated in India, Vietnam and Brazil. On the net's most crime-ridden network - Spectranet in Nigeria - 62% of all the addresses controlled by that ISP were seen to be sending out spam.

Networks involved in malicious activity also tended to specialise in one particular sort of malicious message or attack, he discovered. For instance, the majority of phishing attacks came from ISPs based in the US. By contrast, spammers tend to favour Asian ISPs. Indian ISP BSNL topped the list of spam sources in the study.

Analysis tools

Mr Moreira Moura pointed out that malicious traffic coming from one network did not reveal its ultimate source. Many cybercriminals route spam and other traffic through hijacked PCs or send it across compromised corporate networks that join the net via an ISP.

The data gathered for the study is helping to create analysis tools that will do a better job of assessing whether traffic coming from sources never seen before is good or bad. In the same way that people avoid walking through parts of towns and cities known to be dangerous, security tools can start to filter traffic from ISPs known as historical sources of malicious messages.

"If security engineers want to reduce the incidence of attacks on the internet, they should start by tackling networks where attacks are more frequently originated," he wrote the in the research paper.

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Justgiving donations site crashes

15 March 2013 Last updated at 08:05 ET

Fund-raising website JustGiving has crashed just as Red Nose Day gets under way.

Some people raising cash for Comic Relief were planning on using the site to gather funds as they did stunts on the appeal's main day.

The site crashed about 10:00 GMT and, so far, it has not been possible to make any donations.

JustGiving said that the overall impact on Red Nose Day would be small as Comic Relief ran its own donations site.

The organisation said donating via text still worked and it was tying to get the site back in action.

A spokesperson for Just Giving said a problem at its hosting company took it and many other websites offline.

Although donations could not be made via Just Giving on Red Nose Day, it was unlikely that the main fund-raising effort of Comic Relief would suffer as a result, said the spokesperson. Just Giving was a "peripheral partner" for Comic Relief and only a few tens of thousands was raised for the cause via the site.

Comic Relief encourages backers to set up their own page via the charity's main site and most cash would arrive via that route, said the spokesperson.

People raising money for charity use JustGiving as an easy way for people to pledge cash to their project, stunt or event. Cash can be donated via individual pages set up on the site.

JustGiving used its Twitter account and Facebook page to apologise for the website being unreachable.

"Our tech team are on it & we hope to be back up asap," said the organisation in one tweet. Later it said the problem had been traced to "network problems" at its service provider which was also trying to get them fixed.

JustGiving reassured its users that money pledged to them was safe and the site had not been compromised. Those wanting to donate cash could still do so via text message, it said.

While the main site was offline, Just Giving set up a webpage that apologised for the problems and directed people to other ways of donating.

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Gamer hacks SimCity to run offline

15 March 2013 Last updated at 08:52 ET

SimCity has almost been turned into a single-player game by an enterprising hacker.

By modifying the game's code, the hacker has made it possible to play the game offline almost indefinitely.

The feat sits at odds with assertions by Electronic Arts (EA) that the game requires a permanent online link.

EA said the "always on" requirement contributed to big problems at launch as it tried to keep different players' cities co-ordinated.

Soon after SimCity was launched on 5 March, many people reported that they were having to wait up to 30 minutes or more to play the game.

Others reported sluggish performance and others bugs as they played. EA said these problems occurred because many aspects of the game were shared and the sheer number of people trying to play overwhelmed servers.

The ongoing problems led EA to apologise for the "dumb" way it set up the launch and led to it adding servers behind the scenes to spread the load.

However, claims that the title needs to be permanently connected so data can be shared have been whittled away by players. Some have unplugged their web connection and found that SimCity can last for 20 minutes before it needs to check in with back-end servers.

The always-online requirement won criticism from many players who said it was unnecessary and was more about preventing piracy than improving gameplay.

Now, a gamer going by the alias of AzzerUK has revealed on social news site Reddit how he turned off the requirement to be online all the time.

By rewriting the game's code during "debug mode" AzzerUK turned off the game's disconnect timer so it never checked whether it was online or offline. He also fiddled with other values to almost convert it to an offline, single-player game.

City saved

"Your PC can handle your entire city simulation without any help from the internet or EA's servers," he wrote in a detailed explanation posted to the Pastie website. Videos showing the game working offline were also posted to YouTube.

The work lent weight to claims made on the Rock Paper Shotgun website by an unnamed worker at SimCity Creator Maxis who said a permanent connection was not always needed.

However, added AzzerUK, there was no way as yet to save a copy of a city to a home PC. Instead the copy had to be downloaded from EA's servers.

"Local saves will not be possible with simple editing, but may be possible with some serious work and ingenuity," he said.

EA said it did not comment on "rumour and speculation" when asked about AzzerUK's hack by games news site Eurogamer.

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Reuters man on Anonymous hack charge

15 March 2013 Last updated at 09:11 ET

A Reuters social media editor has been charged in the US with conspiring with hacker group Anonymous to break into a website of a former employer, the Tribune Company.

The indictment says Matthew Keys gave members of Anonymous a login and password to the company server.

At least one hacker managed to change the web version of a Los Angeles Times news feature, the indictment says.

The alleged incident occurred before Mr Keys' employment with Reuters.

Mr Keys said he only found out about the charges from Twitter.

"Tonight I'm going to take a break. Tomorrow, business as usual," he tweeted.

A Reuters spokesman said in a statement: "Any legal violations, or failures to comply with the company's own strict set of principles and standards, can result in disciplinary action.

"We would also observe the indictment alleges the conduct occurred in December 2010; Mr Keys joined Reuters in 2012."

Court date set

The US Justice Department said Mr Keys had been charged in California with one count each of conspiracy to transmit information to damage a protected computer; transmitting information to damage a protected computer and attempted transmission of information to damage a protected computer.

Mr Keys worked for Sacramento-based TV station KTXL FOX 40 - owned by Tribune - as its web producer but his job was terminated in late October 2010, the indictment adds.

He is alleged to have identified himself on an internet chat forum as a former Tribune Company employee and then provided members of Anonymous with the login and password to the Tribune Company server.

The indictment alleges that Mr Keys had a conversation with the hacker who claimed credit for the defacement of the Los Angeles Times website.

The hacker allegedly told him that Tribune Company system administrators had locked him out.

Mr Keys allegedly tried to regain access for the hacker, and when he learned that the hacker had made changes to a page, Mr Keys is said to have responded: "Nice."

If convicted, Mr Keys faces up to 10 years in jail, three years of supervised release and a fine of $250,000 for each count.

He is scheduled to appear in the Sacramento federal court on 14 April.

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