Hack attacks hit Bitcoin value

4 April 2013 Last updated at 07:28 ET

Online services and exchanges dealing in Bitcoins have been hit by hack attacks that led to a drop in the value of the virtual currency.

Trading on the MTGox exchange, which handles most trades in Bitcoins, was sluggish yesterday as the site fought off an attack.

The attack helped to force a swift fall in the price of Bitcoins.

In addition, the Instawallet website - where people store Bitcoins - is offline indefinitely after an attack.

Website bombarded

The value of Bitcoins surged to a new high this week with each one worth about $142 (£94). Barely a week ago, each virtual coin was worth only $90.

But Bitcoins dropped sharply in value as the MTGox exchange came under a sustained attack by hackers. The vast majority of trade in Bitcoins takes place via the site.

In a tweet on its Twitter feed, MTGox said it was fighting off a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, which involves a site being bombarded with huge amounts of data. The attack was one of several against the site this week,

The attacks, coupled with a spike in trading volumes, combined to cause delays in trades being confirmed and led the value of Bitcoins to drop sharply to about $120.

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The attacks could be the work of malicious hackers who were trying to 'game' the MTGox exchange"

End Quote

The attacks could be the work of malicious hackers who were trying to "game" the exchange and manipulate the value of Bitcoins so they could cash in, MTGox said in an interview with ComputerWorld. Attackers are thought to be working to a cycle in which they sell Bitcoins when values are high, then mount an attack that forces prices to crash, buy up the cheaper coins and then let the value climb again.

MTGox said it did not know when or if the attacks would cease but said Bitcoin owners should not panic and sell off as values fluctuated. A spokesman for the exchange added that it was in the middle of rebuilding its trading technology but the new system, which would do a better job of handling the high volume of trades, would not be ready until the end of this year.

In a separate development, Instawallet has shut down "indefinitely" after hackers "fraudulently accessed" its core database. In a statement posted on the Instawallet site it said it planned to open a claim process shortly so people could reclaim their Bitcoin balance.

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Anonymous 'hacks' North Korea pages

4 April 2013 Last updated at 07:33 ET

The hacking collective Anonymous has said it has been "hacking" and vandalising social networking profiles linked to North Korea.

The group has issued several warnings since the country's threats have intensified.

Uriminzokkiri, a news site, has been forced offline - while Twitter and Flickr accounts have been breached.

Anonymous also claimed to have accessed 15,000 usernames and passwords from a university database.

As part of action which the loosely organised collective has called "Operation Free Korea", the hackers have called for leader Kim Jong-un to step down, a democratic government to be put in place - and for North Koreans to get uncensored internet access.

Currently, only a select few in the country have access to the "internet" - which is more akin to a closed company intranet with only a select few websites that are government-run.

The country recently allowed foreigners to access mobile internet, but this service has since been shut off.

In a message posted online, members of Anonymous wrote: "To the citizens of North Korea we suggest to rise up and bring [this] oppressive government down!

"We are holding your back and your hand, while you take the journey to freedom, democracy and peace.

"You are not alone. Don't fear us, we are not terrorist, we are the good guys from the internet. AnonKorea and all the other Anons are here to set you free."

'Tango down'

Urminzokkiri's Twitter feed started displaying messages reading "hacked" at around 0700 BST. The account's avatar was changed to a picture of two people dancing, with the words "Tango down".

On Urminzokkiri's Flickr photo page, other images, including a "wanted" poster mocking Kim Jong-un, were also posted.

Anonymous has posted what it said was a sample of the hacked information.

However, some have questioned the reliability of the details as some of the email addresses were in fact Chinese.

Also unreachable on Thursday was the website of Air Koryo, the country's airline, which launched its online booking site late last year.

Like the main Urminzokkiri homepage, it is suspected the Air Koryo site has been hit with a Distributed Denial of Service attacked (DDoS) - a technique which involves flooding a website with too much traffic for it to handle.

Although a highly secretive nation, North Korea puts considerable effort in to having a strong presence online.

Various YouTube accounts attached to the regime post news items and propaganda videos on a regular basis.

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Hewlett-Packard chairman steps down

4 April 2013 Last updated at 18:18 ET

Hewlett-Packard has announced a boardroom shake-up that includes its chairman Raymond Lane stepping down.

Mr Lane was re-elected by only 58.8% of shareholder votes at last month's annual meeting.

In an HP statement, Mr Lane said he had taken the decision "after reflecting on the stockholder vote last month".

He is the most prominent casualty of the acquisition of British software company Autonomy, much of the value of which has now been written off.

The computer giant's board has been criticised by shareholders for paying $11bn (£7.2bn) for Autonomy. Critics complain not enough due diligence was done before the company was bought.

But HP claims that Autonomy took steps to inflate its own value, which Autonomy's former management denies.

The allegations are currently being looked into by the US Department of Justice, the UK's Serious Fraud Office and the UK accounting regulator.

Mr Lane will remain on the board, but two other directors, John Hammergren and G Kennedy Thompson are to leave.

Ralph Whitworth, a veteran shareholder activist, has been appointed interim chairman.

He told shareholders at the annual meeting that they should prepare for an "evolution" of the board.

HP is in the process of cutting jobs and changing strategy as its PC and printer business declines.

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Vodafone and China Mobile team up

4 April 2013 Last updated at 20:58 ET

The two biggest telecommunications companies in the world have created a consortium to bid for mobile licences in Burma.

The licence, which is expected to be awarded in June, is to operate a nationwide network for 15 years.

The country has taken steps to reform its economy, but mobile phones remain too expensive for most people.

There is only 10% mobile penetration in Burma, which has a population of more than 60 million, according to Vodafone.

The government has said it wants to boost coverage to 80% by 2016.

That has led to a stream of companies hoping to take advantage of this newly-opened market.

"Myanmar will be an important new market for the global mobile industry," Vodafone and China Mobile said in their statement.

A separate consortium also indicated its interest. Billionaire George Soros' Quantum Strategic Partner has joined forces with Digicel and Serge Pun, a businessman in Burma, to bid for licences as well, they said in a statement.

Other companies bidding for licences include Singapore's SingTel, Qatar Telecom and Norway's Telenor.

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Samsung expects 53% jump in profit

5 April 2013 Last updated at 01:08 ET

Samsung Electronics has forecast a 53% jump in profit for the first three months of the year, boosted mainly by growing smartphone sales.

It expects to make an operating profit of 8.7tn won ($7.7bn; £5bn) for the period, up from 5.7tn won a year ago.

Samsung has enjoyed massive success with its Galaxy range of smartphones and displaced Apple as the world's biggest smartphone maker last year.

Analysts expect its profits to rise further in the coming months.

They have forecast robust sales for Samsung's latest smartphone model, the Galaxy S4, which is set to hit the stores later this month.

The smartphone, launched earlier this year, allows users to control its screen using only their eyes and has the ability to take two different pictures at once.

Analysts widely regard the phone to be a serious competitor to Apple's iPhone5.

"We expect some 22 million Galaxy S4 smartphones to be sold in the second quarter alone," said Seo Won-seok, an analyst with Korea Investment & Securities.

Mr Seo said that he expected Samsung's earnings to hit the 10tn won mark in the April to June quarter, boosted by GalaxyS4 sales as well as improving conditions in the memory chip market.

Samsung, which is also the world's biggest maker of memory chips, will release it final quarterly results on 26 April.

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Privacy fears over Facebook home

5 April 2013 Last updated at 05:46 ET

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Mark Zuckerberg: 'The home screen is really the soul of your phone'

Facebook's "home" software for Android phones could "destroy" privacy, warn industry watchers and analysts.

Unveiled on 4 April, home is a "wrapper" for Android and puts Facebook feeds on a phone's main screen.

But the detailed data that could be mined from home users could intrude on private life, commentators warned.

Many took issue with the claim that home put people, not apps, at the heart of the mobile experience, saying it would help Facebook sell ads.

Handset home

Home was shown off in a presentation given at Facebook's campus by the social network's founder Mark Zuckerberg. He said it was an attempt to do away with app-centred systems that were a legacy of the computer world in which people clicked on an icon to start a program.

Once installed on a phone, home takes over the lock screen and main display turning it into a live feed of information, notifications and images Facebook users are sharing.

The "always on" nature of home bothered industry watcher Om Malik from tech news website GigaOm who said it could be a route to gathering data about users that would otherwise be hard to find.

"This application erodes any idea of privacy," he wrote. "If you install this, then it is very likely that Facebook is going to be able to track your every move, and every little action."

Users of home could see their privacy "destroyed", he warned.

Harry McCracken at Time pointed out that many other apps can grab data like home but said it would be "comforting" to get confirmation from Facebook that it had no plans to datamine the lives of its users.

Their worries were echoed by Natasha Lomas at TechCrunch who said "The Facebookification of the mobile web is a threat to openness, to choice, to privacy - but only if you care about those things".

Ms Lomas wrote that home would create many winners and losers and said it was a way for Facebook gradually to take over more and more functions on phones. Home will have monthly updates and Ms Lomas expected many of those to use Facebook as the core controls for a handset.

She also wondered if home would be a success or prove unpopular with users.

"Facebook thinks it's more important to people than it actually is," Charles Golvin, an analyst at Forrester Research, told Reuters.

"For the vast majority of people, Facebook just isn't the be-all and end-all of their mobile experience," he said. "It's just one part."

"I see a more apathetic response among Facebook users than Facebook might be expecting," he added.

Jan Dawson, senior telecoms analyst at Ovum, said home was the "next best thing" to creating a Facebook operating system for mobiles.

Mr Dawson added that the change would let Facebook track more of a user's behaviour on devices and to serve up ads.

"That presents the biggest obstacle to success for this experiment: Facebook's objectives and users' are once again in conflict," he said. "Users don't want more advertising or tracking, and Facebook wants to do more of both."

The software will be available via Google's Play Store as a download and will work only with phones running Android 4.0 or higher - this accounts for about 50% of all Android phones. Home will be available on 12 April in the US and soon after in other territories.

No information was given about whether home would be redeveloped to work with Apple or Microsoft phones.

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Libraries to store UK web content

5 April 2013 Last updated at 06:04 ET By David Sillito Arts Correspondent

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Richard Gibby from the British Library says there is a common belief that the average web page lasts just 75 days

Millions of tweets, Facebook status updates and even a blog about a bus shelter in Shetland are to be preserved for the nation.

The British Library and four other "legal deposit libraries'" have the right to collect and store everything that is published online in the UK.

It is estimated around a billion pages a year will be available for research.

It follows 10 years of planning and will also offer visitors access to material currently behind paywalls.

The other institutions involved are the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales, the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford, the University Library, Cambridge and the Library of Trinity College, Dublin.

The archive will cover 4.8 million websites and will include magazines, books and academic journals as well as alternative sources of literature, news and comment such as Mumsnet, the Beano online, Stephen Hawking's website, and the unofficial armed forces' bulletin board, ARRSE.

Ben Sanderson from the British Library said while people may think information on the web lasts forever, huge amounts of research material has already disappeared.

He added the public had already "lost a lot of the material that was posted by the public during the 7/7 bombings".

MP's blog sites have also been lost following a death or an election defeat.

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Many Facebook comments are public and people don't realise they're publishing to the world"

End Quote Jim Killock Open Rights Group

Top 100 websites

Mr Sanderson explained that with much of public life having migrated to the online world, material that is now published physically gives only a part of the story and debate within modern Britain.

He said: "It will be impossible to tell for instance the story of the 2015 general election without accessing what appears on the web".

The new databases will cover all areas of interest, for example the website Style Scout - a fashion blog documenting London Street Fashion - will give historians a snapshot of what people were wearing in 2013.

As part of the launch of the process, the British Library has commissioned a survey of the top 100 websites that ought to be preserved for historians and researchers.

Among the sites recommended to keep material from are eBay, Facebook, Twitter, Tripadvisor and Rightmove.

Some other lesser known ones include the Anarchist Federation, the Dracula Society and The Dreamcast Junkyard - a blog dedicated to the community of gamers who continue to play Dreamcast games online, despite the fact they were officially discontinued in 2002.

The British Library is also asking for advice from the public as to which websites should be preserved to give an accurate picture to future generations.

Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, told the BBC News website: "The idea of the British Library preserving published content from UK websites is a great one.

"My concern is that a lot of Facebook comments are public and people don't realise they're publishing to the world. That's Facebook's fault, not the British Library's - their user settings need to be changed in line with people's expectations.

"Twitter, on the other hand, is avowedly public - it's very clear you're publishing to the world."

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Smart bracelet protects aid workers

5 April 2013 Last updated at 07:09 ET

A hi-tech bracelet could soon be helping civil rights and aid workers at risk of being kidnapped or killed.

When triggered, the personal alarm uses phone and sat-nav technology to warn that its wearer is in danger.

Warnings are sent in the form of messages to Facebook and Twitter to rally support and ensure people do not disappear without trace.

The first bracelets are being given out this week and funding is being sought to make many more.

The bracelets have been developed by the Civil Rights Defenders campaign group in a bid to help workers in war zones and other areas of conflict.

The chunky bracelet has mobile phone technology buried within it that can send prepared messages when the gadget is triggered.

Alerts can be sent manually by a rights worker if they feel under threat or are triggered automatically if the bracelet is forcefully removed. The alarm sends out information about its owner and where they were when they were attacked. Other staff nearby will also be alerted so they can start to take action to help anyone in distress.

Civil Rights Defenders wants people to sign up to monitor the bracelets of individual rights workers via social media. It hopes the global involvement will act as a deterrent to anyone planning attacks on aid workers.

"Most of us, given the chance, would like to help others in danger," said Civil Rights Defenders' executive director Robert Hardh. "These civil rights defenders are risking their lives for others to have the right to vote, or to practise religion or free speech."

Those who monitor bracelets can also help bring pressure to bear on governments to find or release people abducted or jailed. In total, 55 bracelets will be given out by the end of 2014.

The rights group started work on the gadget in the wake of the kidnapping and murder of Chechen rights worker Natalia Estemirova in 2009. Ms Estemirova had been involved in documenting the alleged abuse of civilians by government-backed militias.

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Film studios seek takedown privacy

5 April 2013 Last updated at 07:22 ET

Two film studios have asked Google to take down links to messages sent by them requesting the removal of links connected to film piracy.

Google receives 20 million "takedown" requests, officially known as DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) notices, a month. They are all published online.

Recent submissions by Fox and Universal Studios include requests for the removal of previous takedown notices.

Google declined to comment.

The notices are requests for individual web addresses to be removed from Google's search engine results because they contain material uploaded without the permission of the copyright holders.

By making the notices available, Google is unintentionally highlighting the location of allegedly pirated material, say some experts.

"It would only take one skilled coder to index the URLs from the DMCA notices in order to create one of the largest pirate search engines available," wrote Torrent Freak editor Ernesto Van Der Sar on the site.

Similar notices have been received by the Lionsgate studio, makers of the Twilight movies and The Hunger Games, and tech giant Microsoft, according to Torrent Freak.

Mr Van Der Sar added, however, that the requests may well have been a "by-product of the automated tools that are used to find infringing URLs" and not deliberately included.

According to its transparency report, Google complied with 97% of the requests it received for links to material published outside copyright to be removed from its search engine between June and December 2011.

The website Chilling Effects, a collaboration between a number of US law schools and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, publishes the notices, and is still visible via Google Search.

David Petrarca, who directed a couple of episodes of HBO drama Game of Thrones, the most pirated TV series of 2012, was reported to have said at a literary festival in Australia that piracy gave the series a "cultural buzz" but has since denied that he is in favour of the activity.

"I am 100 per cent, completely and utterly against people illegally downloading anything," he told the Sydney Morning Herald.

"I think most people would be willing to pay for a show they love."

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Sky message switch resurrects emails

5 April 2013 Last updated at 10:30 ET

Many UK customers of Sky are being deluged with thousands of old and deleted messages as the company switches email providers.

In recent weeks Sky has stopped using Google to provide email services in favour of Yahoo.

But the change has caused trouble as many customers are reporting that formerly deleted messages have been delivered again and again.

Some have spent hours clearing the messages out of overflowing inboxes.

Discussion forums on Sky's support site have been filling up with messages from disgruntled customers complaining about the switch. The company, which has more than four million UK broadband customers, changed from Google to Yahoo this week.

The switch has seemingly resurrected many messages users formerly deleted with some reporting that they had to go through thousands of messages before deleting them for a second time. Some unlucky customers had to suffer thousands of deleted messages being re-delivered several times.

Many others said the switch had wiped out email settings, deleted aliases and re-set filters. Customers called on Sky to do a better job of responding to complaints and explaining why old messages were turning up.

On its support site, Sky acknowledged the problems the changeover had caused.

It said it was aware of the issue and had "an ongoing investigation and are working to resolve it". It pledged to provide an update late on 5 April about its efforts to fix the problem.

It said the problem emerged during migration as it was copying all customer emails to Yahoo's mail servers. The issue should recede as mail services were synchronised, it said.

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