MtGox finds 200,000 lost bitcoins

21 March 2014 Last updated at 03:17

Bankrupt Japanese firm MtGox said in a filing that it has found 200,000 lost bitcoins.

The firm said it found the bitcoins - worth around $116m (£70m) - in an old digital wallet from 2011.

That brings the total number of bitcoins the firm lost down to 650,000 from 850,000.

MtGox, formerly the world's largest bitcoin exchange, filed for bankruptcy in February, after it said it lost thousands of bitcoins to hackers.

"MtGox had certain old-format wallets which were used in the past and which, MtGox thought, no longer held any bitcoins," said Mt Gox chief executive Mark Karpeles in the filing.

However, "on March 7, 2014, MtGox confirmed that an old-format wallet which was used prior to June 2011 held a balance of approximately 200,000 bitcoins," he said.

Mr Karpeles said the firm moved the found bitcoins to offline wallets on 14 and 15 March so that they could not be targeted.

At the time of the MtGox theft, about 750,000 customer bitcoins were stolen as well as close to 100,000 of MtGox's own bitcoins.

That amounts to about 7% of all the bitcoins in existence.

MtGox recently won brief bankruptcy protection in the US as the firm's case works its way through Japanese courts.

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Broadband speed guarantee called for

21 March 2014 Last updated at 00:17

Broadband companies should give customers the speed and service that they pay for, the consumer group Which? has said.

A survey carried out on its behalf claimed that 45% of customers suffer slow download speeds.

Over half of those customers said they experienced slow speeds frequently or all the time.

Ofcom said measures were already in place for customers suffering with speed-related broadband problems.

"The internet is an essential part of modern life, yet millions of us are getting frustratingly slow speeds and having to wait days to get reconnected when things go wrong," said Which? executive director Richard Lloyd.

"It's less superfast broadband, more super-slow service from companies who are expecting people to pay for speeds they may never get."

Ofcom already has a voluntary code of practice on broadband speeds in place that it says ensures customers are protected.

Providers who have signed up to it must give customers a written estimate of their broadband speed at the start of a contract and must allow them to leave a contract without penalty if they receive speeds significantly below the estimate.

Slow downloads

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"Ensuring consumers receive a high quality of service from their broadband provider and are fairly treated are high priorities," said an Ofcom spokeswoman.

A mystery shopping exercise carried out by Ofcom revealed that the code was working effectively, she said. However, there were areas where it could be improved and a revised code of practice would be published in the coming months.

Which? said in practice it supported the code but it was voluntary, not compulsory and providers needed to go further. Rather than providing an estimated speed range that a customer could expect to receive, providers should pinpoint a more accurate speed that customers can expect at their home address and provide this in writing.

This written confirmation should be accompanied by information explaining what consumers can do at different speeds - what they could download and how long it would take - and how to test their speed, Which? said.

The customers who took part in the survey were asked if they had experienced buffering or slow downloads when using their broadband connection.

They were not asked if they had measured their own connection speed, which can be done using speed checking websites.

Nor were they asked in what circumstances the slow speeds were experienced - for example, whether several people were sharing the connection to download large files or whether a wired or wireless internet connection was being used.

According to the survey of 2,000 people, a quarter of those who had reported a loss in service said they had had to wait two days to get it fixed, with one in 10 waiting a week or more.

Twenty per cent said they had contacted their internet service provider at least three times when trying to resolve a problem with their broadband connection.

Which? is calling for broadband companies to fix connections as quickly as possible and refund customers for any loss of service.

"Broadband providers need to give customers the right information and take responsibility for resolving problems," said Mr Lloyd.

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Microsoft in email privacy storm

21 March 2014 Last updated at 04:38

Microsoft is caught up in a privacy storm after it admitted it read the Hotmail inbox of a blogger while pursuing a software leak investigation.

On Thursday, the firm acknowledged it read the anonymous blogger's emails in order to identify an employee it suspected of leaking information.

Microsoft owns Hotmail, a free email service now called Outlook.com.

John Frank, deputy general counsel for Microsoft, said it took "extraordinary actions in this case".

While the search was technically legal, he added Microsoft would consult outside counsel in the future.

Legal actions

Microsoft's actions came to light this week as part of a legal case by US prosecutors against an ex-Microsoft employee, Alex Kibalko, who was a Russian native based in the company's Lebanon office.

In 2012, Microsoft had been alerted to the fact that the blogger, whose identity was kept anonymous in the court papers, had been given some stolen lines of code from the not-yet-released Windows 8 operating system.

The blogger then posted screenshots of the unreleased Windows operating system to his blog.

To figure out the source of the leak, Microsoft began an investigation and, as part of that search, looked into the blogger's accounts to find out the name of the employee.

The search was legal because it fell within Microsoft's terms of service which state that the company can access information in accounts that are stored on its "Communication Services", which includes email, chat areas, forums, and other communication facilities.

The terms of service add: "Microsoft reserves the right to review materials posted to the Communication Services and to remove any materials in its sole discretion."

Nonetheless, revelations of the search have led to renewed focus on the privacy violations of technology firms.

It has also left Microsoft in a difficult position, as the firm has often criticised rival Google for its automatic scanning of users' emails in order to serve them with advertising.

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Larry Page on Google's smart future

20 March 2014 Last updated at 00:04 By Jane Wakefield Technology reporter, Vancouver

Larry Page wants patients to hand over their data to researchers in order to save "100,000 lives".

It's just one of the ideas expressed in a wide-ranging interview at the Ted (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference in Vancouver.

Google's co-founder criticised the US government for its mass surveillance programs.

But he added that consumers need to accept that a new era of open data is inevitable.

Smarter computers

Interviewed on the Ted stage by US television host Charlie Rose, Mr Page was asked why Google bought the UK machine learning firm DeepMind.

"I was looking at search and trying to understand how to make computers less clunky and also thinking about how speech recognition is not very good," said Mr Page.

"We are still at the very early stages with search. Computers don't know where you are and what you are doing," he added.

He was drawn to DeepMind because it had helped make computers smarter - teaching them how to play computer games.

"It was really exciting, we have not been able to do this before. Imagine if that intelligence is thrown at your schedule," said Mr Page.

He said that Google was working on its own machine learning project, using YouTube to "teach" computers.

"It has learnt what cats are," he said.

Tremendous disservice

Mr Page was also asked about the Edward Snowden revelations, following a surprise appearance from the whistle-blower at Ted.

"It is disappointing that the government secretly did this stuff and didn't tell us about it," said Mr Page.

"It is not possible to have a democracy if we have to protect our users from the government. The government has done itself a tremendous disservice and we need to have a debate about it," he added.

Google has had its fair share of criticism for the way it collects users' data. It is currently embroiled in row with European regulators over its privacy policy.

Mr Page was in defiant mood and warned that people were at risk of "throwing out the baby with the bathwater" over plans to tighten privacy.

"We are not thinking about the tremendous good that can come with sharing information with the right people in the right ways," he said.

He said that anonymised medical records should be made available to researchers.

"It could save 100,000 lives this year," he said.

Health data has personal resonance with Mr Page who developed a hoarse voice after a cold 15 years ago from which he has never recovered. Sharing details about his condition helped him, he said.

"I was scared to share but Sergey [Brin] encouraged me and we got thousands of people with similar conditions," he said.

Gaining space

Mr Page also talked about some of his "crazy ideas", including Google Loon, a project to use balloons to provide internet access to parts of the world without any.

He revealed that he got the idea off the ground with a Google search.

"I found that 30 years ago someone had put up a balloon and it had gone round the world multiple times," he said.

He realised that a similar thing was possible to connect the two-thirds of the world that have no net access.

"We can build a world-wide mesh of balloons to cover the whole planet."

Google plans to launch its automated cars on the roads by 2017. The project has been a personal obsession for 18 years, he told the Ted audience.

"It started when I was at college in Michigan. I was waiting for the bus and it was cold and snowing," he said.

He believes that automated cars can help save lives - currently 20 million people are injured each ear in car accidents and in the US crashes are the biggest cause of death for the under 35s.

He finished the interview with a call to firms to embrace new technologies.

"Most businesses fail because they miss the future," he said.

It is a mistake he has made himself, he added.

He said that he "felt guilty for wasting time" working on the Android operating system, which at the time was a side project for Google.

"That was stupid, it was the future," he said.

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Flappy Bird to return, says creator

20 March 2014 Last updated at 05:14

Addictive mobile game Flappy Bird will return to Apple's app store, creator Dong Nguyen has confirmed - although he declined to give a specific date.

On Twitter, a fan had asked if he was going to put the game back in the app store.

"Yes. But not soon," Mr Nguyen replied, later adding: "I don't work by plan. I will release it when it is done."

Mr Nguyen removed the popular game in February, saying its popularity had ruined his "simple life".

Ruined lives

Launched in May 2013, Flappy Bird was free to download and required players to tap the screen to keep the bird in flight.

Despite its simple graphics, Flappy Bird was a notoriously difficult game since many users could only keep the bird in the air for a few seconds before it hit an obstacle and fell.

The game went viral after being promoted almost entirely by social media users and was reviewed on a YouTube channel by more than 22 million subscribers.

It was downloaded 50 million times, and at the height of its popularity, Mr Nguyen was reportedly earning $50,000 (£30,450) a day from advertising

In an interview earlier this month with Rolling Stone, Mr Nguyen said he was moved to remove the popular mobile game from the App store after users wrote to him detailing how the game had destroyed their lives.

After the game was taken down, users started several passionate petitions to get the game reinstated.

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Hackers thwarted by net timekeepers

20 March 2014 Last updated at 11:45 By Mark Ward Technology correspondent, BBC News

A massive worldwide effort is under way to harden the net's clocks against hack attacks.

The last few months have seen an "explosion" in the number of attacks abusing unprotected time servers, said security company Arbor.

Unprotected network time servers can be used to swamp target computers with huge amounts of data.

About 93% of all the vulnerable servers are now believed to have been patched against attacks.

'Appropriate' use

The attack that paved the way for the rapid rise was carried out by the Derp Trolling hacker group and was aimed at servers for the popular online game League of Legends, said Darren Anstee, a network architect at net monitoring firm Arbor.

That attack took advantage of weaknesses in older versions of the software underlying the network time protocol (NTP). Known as an "NTP reflection" attack, it used several thousand poorly configured computers handling NTP requests to send data to the League of Legend servers.

Around the world about 1.6 million NTP servers were thought to be vulnerable to abuse by attackers, said Harlan Stenn from the Network Time Foundation that helped co-ordinate action to harden servers.

Precise timings are very important to the steady running of the net and many of the services, such as email and e-commerce, that sit on it.

Early 2014 saw the start of an Open NTP initiative that tried to alert people running time servers to the potential for abuse, Mr Stenn told the BBC.

Now, he said, more than 93% of those vulnerable servers had been updated. However, he said, this did leave more than 97,000 still open to abuse. Arbor estimates that it would take 5,000-7,000 NTP servers to mount an overwhelming attack.

The feature that attackers had exploited had been known for a long time in the net time community and was not a problem as long as those servers were used "appropriately", he said.

"This was before spammers, and well before the crackers started using viruses and malware to build bot armies for spamming, phishing, or DDoS attacks," he said.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are those that try to shut servers down by overwhelming them with data.

The success of the Derp Trolling attack prompted a lot of copycat activity, said Mr Anstee from Arbor.

"Since that event it's gone a bit nuts to an extent and that tends to happen in the attack world when one particular group succeeds," he said. "We've seen an explosion in NTP reflection activity."

NTP reflection attacks can generate hundreds of gigabits of traffic every second, said Mr Anstee, completely overwhelming any server they are aimed at.

The copycat attacks have fed into a spike in the number of "large events", mainly DDoS attacks, that Arbor sees hitting the net, he said.

"Historically we used to see a couple of hundred gigabit events every year," said Mr Anstee. "In February 2014 we tracked 43."

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IBM's Watson to help fight cancer

20 March 2014 Last updated at 13:05

IBM supercomputer Watson is to help determine the best treatments for a common type of brain cancer.

Watson will analyse glioblastoma patients' DNA and correlate the results with available relevant medical data.

New York Genome Center president Robert Darnell said tremendous progress had been made in understanding the genetic drivers of cancer in the past 10 years.

And the project would "improve outcomes for patients with deadly diseases by providing personalised treatment".

IBM Research director John E Kelly said: "It's like big data on steroids.

"Watson can do in seconds what would take people years. And we can get it down to a really personal level.

"This is the proverbial needle in the haystack and the haystack is enormous."

Watson uses artificial intelligence to examine huge amounts of data and can also understand human language. Rather than being programmed to spot patterns it "learns" about connections between different types of data. It is hoped that it will continue to "learn" as it processes new patient information and new medical research.

IBM Global Technology and Analytics vice-president Stephen Harvey said: "What we're really talking about is taking a process that takes three weeks to three months for research organisations to complete today and to boil that down, using Watson technology, in to less than three minutes."

Watson is already being used by doctors and nurses at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, in New York, to help make decisions about lung cancer treatment.

Watson has become smaller and faster over the years. What started as a system the size of an average bedroom is now the size of three stacked pizza boxes. It is also available via the cloud, meaning it can be accessed from anywhere.

It can process 500GB of information - equivalent to a million books - every second.

And it has proved its abilities. In 2011 it appeared on the Jeopardy game show answering general knowledge questions, without being connected to the internet.

Pitted against the two biggest winners of the trivia quiz show, despite a few stumbles it eventually walked away with the $1m (£605,000) prize.

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NSA may release transparency reports

20 March 2014 Last updated at 21:02 By Jane Wakefield Technology reporter, Vancouver

The National Security Agency may release transparency reports on the amount of surveillance it is doing, according to its deputy director.

Speaking at the Ted conference, where leaker Edward Snowden spoke earlier in the week, NSA deputy director Richard Ledgett said Mr Snowden had put people's lives at risk.

He said letting "the bad guys" know NSA's methods made them harder to find.

But he said the agency should do more to reassure people about its work.

He defended the Prism surveillance system, saying it was "hugely relevant" in disrupting terrorist plots.

Mr Ledgett was beamed in to the Ted (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference taking place in Vancouver via video link, in a similar manner to how Mr Snowden had appeared.

More transparency

He told the audience that he wanted to "inform the discussion with facts" rather than the "half-truths and distortions" he accused Mr Snowden of using.

But, he added, the ex-NSA agent's exposure of its programs and practices had opened up a global debate about the "balance between secrecy and transparency", that the agency wanted to fully engage with.

"There is a proposal to release transparency reports in the same way as the internet companies are doing," said Mr Ledgett.

He admitted that the NSA needed to be more transparent about its processes, authorities and oversight.

"We haven't done a good job on that," he said.

But he emphasised that all the work the agency does has been rubberstamped by the president, federal judges and Congress.

Of Mr Snowden he said: "It shows amazing arrogance that he knows better than the framework of the constitution."

His release of vast amounts of top secret documents outlining the work at the NSA had been hugely damaging, said Mr Ledgett.

"He put people's lives at risk.

"If our adversaries see our methods they will move away from using them. We have evidence that terrorists, smugglers and nation states have moved away. We are losing visibility into what our adversaries are doing," he said.

He said that the agency needed access to the global telecommunications system to monitor the activities of terrorists, traffickers and enemy states.

"It would be great if the bad guys used a corner of the internet. If they had a domain badguys.com, that would be awesome," he said.

"But we are all on the same network. I use the same email service as the terrorists. We need to be able to pick that apart to find what we need."

Along the way it is inevitable that agents will "encounter people going about their business" but the NSA uses what he called "minimisation procedures" to ensure little information is read.

And on the collection of meta-data, which shows when, where and who someone is communicating with, he said: "If you aren't connected to a meta-data target you are not of interest to us."

Possible deal?

The debate about mass surveillance has proved a hit at Ted, with packed audiences for both the Edward Snowden and NSA interviews.

Mr Ledgett received a standing ovation from some but far more stood up at the end of Mr Snowden's interview.

While most of delegates saw the leaks made by Mr Snowden as a positive thing, some questioned making him into a hero.

"By doing that we encourage other young Americans to steal secrets," said one delegate.

Astronaut Chris Hadfield, also a speaker at Ted, tweeted after the debate: "Thought-provoking" while Google co-founder Sergey Brin was seen in deep conversation with Mr Snowden, via the video screen, after his appearance.

As to the fate of Mr Snowden, who said that he has been offered a deal by the US government, Mr Ledgett suggested this may be possible.

"There is a tradition in American jurisprudence of having discussions with people who have committed crimes. There is always room for discussion."

The tagline of Ted is "ideas worth spreading". At the end of the interview, Ted curator Chris Anderson asked Mr Ledgett what his would be.

"Look at the data," replied Mr Ledgett.

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Twitter website 'blocked' in Turkey

21 March 2014 Last updated at 00:10

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The BBC's James Reynolds tries to access the site

Twitter users in Turkey report that the social media site has been blocked in the country.

Some users trying to open the twitter.com website are apparently being redirected to a statement by Turkey's telecommunications regulator.

It cites a court order to apply "protection measures" on the website.

This comes after PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed to "wipe out Twitter" following damaging allegations of corruption in his inner circle.

The BBC's James Reynolds in Istanbul reports that he is unable to access Twitter.

"I don't care what the international community says at all. Everyone will see the power of the Turkish Republic," Mr Erdogan said earlier on Thursday.

He spoke after some users had posted documents reportedly showing evidence of corruption relating to the prime minister - a claim he denies.

His office said that Twitter had not responded to Turkey's court rulings to remove some links, forcing Ankara to act.

Twitter has so far made no public comment on the issue.

There are about 10m Twitter users across Turkey.

In 2010, the country lifted its ban on YouTube - two years after it blocked access to the website because of videos deemed insulting to the country's founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

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Netflix boss hits out at ISP fees

21 March 2014 Last updated at 13:21

The head of video-streaming service Netflix has hit out at internet service providers (ISPs) for demanding a fee to maintain video streaming quality.

The company recently "reluctantly" made a deal with US ISP Comcast to make sure its videos were streamed faster and more smoothly.

ISPs argue that data-heavy services should share the cost of providing capacity on the networks.

But campaigners argue that this approach stifles innovation.

Influential figures, including the likes of web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, call for what has been termed "net neutrality" - the principle that all data sent and received using the internet should be treated equally.

Some ISPs said that, for services that put a strain on their infrastructure, content providers should be charged.

Net neutrality supporters say that without rules in place, small or start-up organisations will find it harder to break into the market if they cannot afford to pay for priority service.

'Fight goes on'

This was a point of view supported strongly by Reed Hastings, Netflix's chief executive.

"Some big ISPs are extracting a toll because they can - they effectively control access to millions of consumers and are willing to sacrifice the interests of their own customers to press Netflix and others to pay," he wrote in a blog post.

Amid concerns that it would pave the way for other ISPs to demand the same, he defended his company's decision to strike a deal with Comcast.

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Reed Hastings, Netflix chief executive: "We are at the very beginning of internet television"

"Netflix believes strong net neutrality is critical, but in the near term we will, in cases, pay the toll to the powerful ISPs to protect our consumer experience."

But he added: "We will continue to fight for the internet the world needs and deserves."

As well as the Comcast deal, Netflix is also in talks with another major US provider, Verizon.

Verizon - backed by several other ISPs - recently won a a court appeal against new rules from the US Federal Communication Commission (FCC) that aimed to ensure net neutrality in the US.

The company said: "The court's decision will allow more room for innovation, and consumers will have more choices to determine for themselves how they access and experience the internet."

The FCC said it would still press for a new law, to "ensure that these networks on which the internet depends continue to provide a free and open platform for innovation and expressions".

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