The European Commission has launched an investigation into Google after other search engines complained that the firm had abused its dominant position.
The body said it would look into whether the world's largest search engine lowered the ranking of competing services in its results.
The probe follows complaints by British price comparison site Foundem and French legal search engine ejustice.fr.
The EU will also investigate its online advertising platform.
"The European Commission has decided to open an antitrust investigation into allegations that Google has abused a dominant position in online search," the Commission said.
It said the action followed "complaints by search service providers about unfavourable treatment of their services in Google's unpaid and sponsored search results coupled with an alleged preferential placement of Google's own services."
Iran's president has said some of the centrifuges used in its uranium enrichment programme were sabotaged, raising suspicions that they were targeted by the Stuxnet computer worm.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the problems had been created by enemies of Iran, but had had only a limited effect.
Iran has repeatedly denied that Stuxnet had affected its nuclear programme.
The UN said last week that Iran had temporarily halted most of its uranium enrichment work earlier this month.
The West fears Iran's ultimate goal is to build nuclear weapons. Iran says its programme is aimed solely at peaceful energy use.
"They succeeded in creating problems for a limited number of our centrifuges with the software they had installed in electronic parts," Mr Ahmadinejad told a news conference.
"Our specialists stopped that and they will not be able to do it again," he added without elaborating on the software thought to have been used.
The Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency said in a report last week that a temporary stoppage had hit Iran's Natanz enrichment nuclear plant earlier this month.
Experts say the worm, which Iran said in September had attacked its computers, has been specially configured to damage motors commonly used in uranium-enrichment centrifuges by sending them spinning out of control.
The computer bug is a form of customised malware, written to attack a precise target.
Analysts say the complexity of the code suggests it was created by a "nation state" in the West, rather than an organised crime group.
Senior Iranian officials have said that the virus is evidence that an "electronic war" has been launched against the country.
Mr Ahmadinejad's comments about the cyber attack worm come on the day that a high-profile Iranian nuclear scientist was killed and another wounded in two separate but similar attacks in the capital.
The president accused Israel and the West of being behind the attacks.
Anyone trying to visit the seized pages was confronted by a screen saying that the domain had been taken over by ICE and which quoted US laws on copyright infringement and trafficking in counterfeit goods.
Domains seized included louis-vuitton-outlet-store.com, burberryoutletshop.com, rapgodfathers.com, mydreamwatches.com as well as BitTorrent search engine Torrent-Finder.com.
ICE's action involved gaining control of the domain name that sites were trading under. It did not involve removing any content from the sites affected or blocking the use of an IP address.
Many of the sites that lost their domains have moved to new names in a bid to keep running.
The seizures follows similar action earlier in 2010 against nine sites also believed to be involved in counterfeiting and pirating copyrighted material.
The action comes as the UK's Serious and Organised Crime Agency seeks similar powers over .uk domains it deems are involved in criminal activity.
Whistle-blowing website Wikileaks says it has come under attack from a computer-hacking operation, ahead of a release of secret US documents.
"We are currently under a mass distributed denial of service attack," it said on its Twitter feed earlier.
It added that several newspapers will go ahead and publish the documents released to them by Wikileaks even if the site goes down.
The US state department has said the release will put many lives at risk.
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has said the US authorities are afraid of being held to account.
Wikileaks has said the release of classified messages sent by US embassies will be bigger than past releases on Afghanistan and Iraq.
The newspapers set to publish details of the US embassy cables include Spain's El Pais, France's Le Monde, Germany's Spiegel, the UK's Guardian and the New York Times.
The latest leak is expected to include documents covering US dealings and diplomats' confidential views of countries including Australia, Britain, Canada, Israel, Russia and Turkey.
"The material that we are about to release covers essentially every major issue in every country in the world," Mr Assange told reporters by video link on Sunday.
A journalist with Britain's Guardian newspaper said the files include an unflattering US assessment of UK PM David Cameron.
Simon Hoggart told the BBC: "There is going to be some embarrassment certainly for Gordon Brown but even more so for David Cameron who was not very highly regarded by the Obama administration or by the US ambassador here."
No-one has been charged with passing the diplomatic files to the website but suspicion has fallen on US Army private Bradley Manning, an intelligence analyst arrested in Iraq in June and charged over an earlier leak of classified US documents to Mr Assange's organisation.
'Illegally obtained'
The US government has written to Mr Assange, urging him not release the documents.
The letter from the US state department's legal adviser Harold Koh said the release of classified state department documents was against US law and would put "countless" lives at risk.
Mr Assange is said to have asked which individuals would be put at risk by the leak and offered to negotiate over limited redactions.
In response, Mr Koh demanded that Wikileaks return official documents to the US government.
"We will not engage in a negotiation regarding the further release or dissemination of illegally obtained US government classified materials," he said in the letter.
Mr Koh's letter adds that the publication of the documents would endanger the lives of "countless" individuals - from journalists to human rights activists and bloggers - and put US military operations at risk.
Wikileaks earlier this week said that its next release of documents would be nearly seven times larger than the nearly 400,000 Pentagon documents relating to the Iraq war it published in October.
Wikileaks argues that the site's previous releases shed light on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. They included allegations of torture by Iraqi forces and reports that suggested 15,000 additional civilian deaths in Iraq.
Three founders of The Pirate Bay have lost an appeal against a conviction for illegally sharing copyrighted content.
The Swedish appeals court upheld the 2009 ruling against the site's founders which saw them sentenced to a year in jail and heavily fined.
The ruling reduces the sentences the men face but increases fines to 46m crowns (�4.1m).
Three of The Pirate Bay's four founders were in court for the verdict. The other was too ill to attend.
The original verdict on Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Carl Lundstrom was handed down in April 2009 following a lengthy trial.
Lawyers acting for music labels and movie studios alleged that via The Pirate Bay, the four men helped people circumvent copyright controls.
The founders defended themselves by saying that The Pirate Bay did not host any pirated material directly.
The appeal court ruling will see Mr Neij serve a 10 month sentence; Mr Sunde eight months and Mr Lundstrom four months. Once Mr Svartholm Warg is fit his "criminal liability" will be tested by the appeals court.
Throughout the legal action and appeal hearing The Pirate Bay website has continued to function.
"Today's judgment confirms the illegality of The Pirate Bay and the seriousness of the crimes of those involved," said the International Federation for the Phonographic Industry in a statement.
"It is now time for The Pirate Bay, whose operators have twice been convicted in court, to close. We now look to governments and ISPs to take note of this judgment, do the responsible thing and take the necessary steps to get The Pirate Bay shut down."
The police are seeking powers to shut down websites deemed to be engaged in "criminal" activity.
The Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) has tabled a plan for Nominet, which oversees .uk web addresses, to be given the domain closing power.
Nominet said the idea was only a proposal and invited people to join the debate on the form of the final policy.
IT lawyers said the proposal would be "worrying" if it led to websites going offline without judicial oversight.
"It's not policy at this stage," said Eleanor Bradley, director of operations at Nominet.
She said SOCA's proposal emerged from changes made to Nominet's policy development process earlier in 2010, as well as experiences with closing down a series of criminal sites in the last 12 months.
Ms Bradley SOCA's proposal was the "very beginning of the process" to update Nominet's policies.
"We now need to get a balanced group of stakeholders together to talk about the policy and its implications," she said.
Since SOCA's proposal was posted on the Nominet site, feedback had started to come in that was helping to define who should be invited to join a formal discussion of the plan, said Ms Bradley.
She invited those to whom the proposal was relevant to get in touch. "We want to make sure the stakeholder group is balanced," she said.
No timetable has been drawn up for when the proposal would be discussed or when any resulting policy would be adopted.
"If you are going to do this, then fine, but it needs judicial oversight," said barrister and IT lawyer David Harris, adding that that conferring these powers might be better done by updating the Computer Misuse Act.
Nick Lockett, a lawyer at DLL specialising in computer law, said he was "deeply concerned" about SOCA's proposal if it meant it could act before a conviction had been secured.
"In a world of online retailing, the ability for a police officer to seize any business, whether that is blocking a domain or seizing the servers - pre-conviction or certainly pre-warrant - would be a dramatic change in the relationship between the police and the internet community," he told BBC News.
He also said the police would have to be very careful about the sites they judged to be engaged in criminal activity. Mistakes that resulted in shutting down a legitimate site would leave them open to claims for "massive damages" he warned.
26 November 2010Last updated at 05:46 ETBy Jonathan AmosScience correspondent, BBC News
The first satellite dedicated to delivering broadband services to Europe is all set for launch.
The Hylas spacecraft is designed to fill so-called "not spots" - remote locations such as rural villages where it is currently not possible to get a fast internet connection.
The satellite will be carried into orbit on an Ariane 5 rocket.
The vehicle is expected to lift off from the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana at 1539 local time (1839 GMT).
Hylas (Highly Adaptable Satellite) is a commercial venture operated by start-up Avanti Communications of London, but the spacecraft itself incorporates technology developed with public funding through the European Space Agency (Esa).
The satellite's payload will automatically vary the amounts of power and bandwidth needed to match peaks and troughs in demand for net access across its European "footprint".
Hylas was prepared at the Portsmouth, UK, factory of EADS Astrium, Europe's largest space company, and Antrix, a commercial arm of the Indian space agency (Isro).
The 2.6-tonne spacecraft will operate in the Ka radio band and deliver broadband services to some 350,000 subscribers.
The UK government put �40m into the Hylas development programme.
It has a commitment that everyone in Britain should have access to a decent net connection by 2015.�That means a minimum of two megabits per second (Mbps).
Some three million UK homes currently fall below this standard; and across Europe, there are many millions more who cannot currently get an adequate connection through terrestrial technology.
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Hylas will be offering up to 10Mbps to its users.
"It is the first of what will be many satellites," explained Avanti CEO David Williams. "We've already got our second satellite under construction at the moment and that launches in about 15 months' time.
"That will put more capacity into the UK but also it puts new capacity into new areas in Africa and the Middle East. And then we are planning more satellites for Latin America, India and other parts of Asia."
In Europe, Avanti faces competition from the long-established Eutelsat space communications company, which is putting up its own net-dedicated Ka-band satellite for Europe, delivering 10Mbps through its Tooway service.
Eutelsat's KA-Sat is due for launch on a Russian Proton rocket on 20 December.
Astrium worked on both Hylas-1 and KA-Sat, and at one stage the two satellites were sitting inside the same Portsmouth cleanroom separated by a few metres.
Friday's Ariane will also be orbiting a telecommunications spacecraft for Intelsat. The US platform will deliver a wide range of services across Europe, the Middle East, Russia and Asia.
Intelsat-17 will be ejected by the Ariane upper-stage 27 minutes into the flight; Hylas will come out seven minutes later.
Talk Talk is launching trials of a controversial anti-malware system following intervention by the Information Commissioner (ICO).
The Virus Alert system keeps an eye on the websites customers visit to stop them accidentally going to places riddled with viruses.
The ICO admonished the ISP when the service was debuted because customers were not told it was going ahead.
Talk Talk said the trials would be with customers that have opted in to use it.
In a blog posting, Clive Dorsman, managing director of Talk Talk Technology, wrote that trials of the system with a limited number of customers would start in a "few weeks".
The malware watching service first came to light in early September following a Freedom of Information request to the Information Commissioner to see if it had been notified about the system.
In response, Information Commissioner Christopher Graham said he had been in touch with Talk Talk to express his concern that customers were not told they were being enrolled into the system.
Some compared the malware watching technology to the controversial ad system Phorm, which planned to target adverts based on a person's browsing habits.
Talk Talk defended the security system saying that it did not log browsing habits and only scanned pages people wanted to visit to ensure they did not stray onto sites booby-trapped with malware.
In its blog posting, Talk Talk said it talked with "relevant public bodies" over the service and had received a lot of feedback about its plans.
In a statement the ICO said: "We have advised Talk Talk on the safeguards which are necessary to comply with the Data Protection Act and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations."
It warned: "We expect them to make sure they are effective in practice."
The statement added that it would take seriously any complaints it received about the service but said it had not received any to date.
One fifth of Facebook users are exposed to malware contained in their news feeds, claim security researchers.
Security firm BitDefender said it had detected infections contained in the news feeds of around 20% of Facebook users.
By clicking on infected links in a news feed, users risk having viruses installed on their computer.
Facebook said it already had steps in place to identify and remove malware-containing links.
BitDefender arrived at its figures by analysing data from 14,000 Facebook users that had installed a security app, called safego, it makes for the social network site.
In the month since safego launched, it has analysed 17 million Facebook posts, said BitDefender.
The majority of infections were associated with apps written by independent developers, which promised enticements and rewards to trick users into installing the malware, BitDefender said.
Trusted community
These apps would then either install malware used for spying on users or to send messages containing adverts to the users' contacts.
Facebook has a thriving community of independent developers who have built apps for the social network.
The vast majority enable users to tweak their Facebook pages, adding widgets, games or extra functions, such as delivering daily horoscope predictions.
Facebook said it had processes and checks in place to guard against the risk of malware.
"Once we detect a phony message, we delete all instances of that message across the site," the site said in a statement.
Crooks have targeted social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter because of their vast number of users, said Rik Ferguson, a security researcher for anti-virus maker Trend Micro.
"Because social networks are based on a community of people you trust, they're an attractive target for malware writers," said Ferguson. "You're more likely to click on a link from someone you trust."
A county council that faxed details of a child sex abuse case to a member of the public is to be fined �100,000 for breaching the Data Protection Act.
Hertfordshire County Council is one of two bodies fined by the Information Commissioner - both have apologised.
Sheffield-based A4e was fined �60,000 for losing an unencrypted laptop with the details of thousands of people.
The commissioner said the fines - the first he has issued - would "send a strong message" to those handling data.
Commissioner Christopher Graham was granted the authority to serve financial penalties for data protection breaches in April of this year.
Hertfordshire County Council was fined after two incidents where two faxes containing highly sensitive personal information involving a child sex abuse case and care proceedings were sent to the wrong recipients.
Fax mistakes
The breaches occurred in June, when employees in the council's childcare litigation unit accidentally sent two faxes to the wrong recipients on two separate occasions. The council reported both breaches to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).
The first misdirected fax was meant for a barristers' chambers but was sent instead to a member of the public.
These first monetary penalties send a strong message to all organisations handling personal information - get it wrong and you do substantial harm to individuals and the reputation of your business"
End QuoteChristopher GrahamInformation Commissioner
The council subsequently obtained a court injunction prohibiting any disclosure of the facts of the court case or circumstances of the data breach.
The second misdirected fax, sent 13 days later by another member of the council's childcare litigation unit, contained information relating to the care proceedings of three children, the previous convictions of two individuals, domestic violence records and care professionals' opinions on the cases.
The fax was intended for Watford County Court but was mistakenly sent to a barristers' chambers unconnected with the case.
The commissioner ruled that a penalty of �100,000 was appropriate, given that the council's procedures failed to stop two serious breaches taking place.
And after the first breach occurred, the council did not take sufficient steps to reduce the likelihood of another breach occurring, the ICO said.
Laptop theft
Mr Graham said: "It is difficult to imagine information more sensitive than that relating to a child sex abuse case. I am concerned at this breach - not least because the local authority allowed it to happen twice within two weeks."
A spokesman for Hertfordshire County Council said it accepted the commissioner's findings.
"We are sorry that these mistakes happened and have put processes in place to try and prevent any recurrence," he added.
The A4e data breach also occurred in June, after the company - a private sector company which provides information on employment and starting a business - issued an unencrypted laptop to an employee so they could work at home.
The computer contained personal information relating to 24,000 people who had used community legal advice centres in Hull and Leicester.
But it was later stolen from the employee's house and an unsuccessful attempt to access the data was made shortly afterwards.
Personal details recorded on the system included full names, dates of birth, postcodes, employment status, income level, information about alleged criminal activity and whether an individual had been a victim of violence.
A4e reported the incident to the ICO and the company subsequently notified the people whose data could have been accessed.
'Substantial harm'
The commissioner ruled that A4e did not take reasonable steps to avoid the loss of the data when it issued the employee with an unencrypted laptop, despite knowing the amount and type of data that would be on it.
Mr Graham said the theft of the laptop was "less shocking" than the council's security breaches.
But he said it "also warranted nothing less than a monetary penalty as thousands of people's privacy was potentially compromised by the company's failure to take the simple step of encrypting the data".
He added: "These first monetary penalties send a strong message to all organisations handling personal information - get it wrong and you do substantial harm to individuals and the reputation of your business. You could also be fined up to half a million pounds."
A4e chief executive Andrew Dutton said: "We acted very swiftly after the incident in June, including making a voluntary report to the ICO. We alerted all customers, partners and relevant authorities affected and continue to update them.
"This incident occurred as a result of a breach of our security procedures. It also came at a time when A4e was rolling out a new, robust, company-wide set of security controls and procedures.
"Our priority has always been, and remains, our customers and partners. We have apologised for any distress caused to those involved in this one-off incident in Hull and Leicester and we do so again."
Iran has denied that the Stuxnet virus has caused any delays in its nuclear power programme.
It issued the denials following speculation from a former UN nuclear inspector that Stuxnet had managed to damage key equipment.
But Iran said it had caught Stuxnet before it managed to reach its intended target - controllers for centrifuges.
The country accused the West of trying to sabotage what it called its "peaceful" nuclear power plans.
The denial came from Iranian Vice President Ali Akbar Salehi who oversees the country's nuclear project.
"From more than a year ago, Westerners tried to implant the virus into our nuclear facilities in order to disrupt our activities but our young scientists stopped the virus at the very same spot they wanted to penetrate," he said in comments reported on an Iranian state television website.
Stuxnet is the first malicious program that targets key parts of industrial plants. Analysis by security firm Symantec suggest that Stuxnet was intended to wreck the centrifuges used to concentrate uranium - a key part of the nuclear power generation process.
Reports suggest that Iran has taken thousands of centrifuges offline in recent months and its nuclear programme is known to have suffered significant delays.
Speculation about whether this was caused by Stuxnet came earlier this week from two sources - an unnamed official from the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency and Olli Heinonen deputy director at the IAEA until August.
The anonymous official told AP that Western intelligence gathering suggested that Stuxnet had infected control systems in Iran's nuclear plants.
Mr Heinonen confirmed that Iran had experienced problems with centrifuges and said they could have been caused by technical problems or Stuxnet, but added that there was no proof that the worm was responsible.
Botnets are typically networks of home computers that malicious hackers have managed to hijack by tricking their owners into opening a virus-laden e-mail or visiting a booby-trapped website.
They are then commonly used to pump out spam and attack websites.
It drew up its by analysing a pool of 170 million unique IP addresses culled from a spam trap that amassed more than 109 billion junk mail messages between 2005 and 2009.
With 80-90% of all spam being routed through hijacked PCs these IP addresses were a good guide to where infected machines were located, said Professor Michel Van Eeten from the Delft University of Technology who lead the OECD-backed research.
Analysis of this huge corpus of data showed that about 50 ISPs were harbouring around half of all infected machines worldwide. Confirmation of this finding came from other non-spam sources - the 169 million IP addresses that were part of the Conficker botnet and 130 million IP addresses collected by net security watchdog SANS.
The numbers of machines on these networks varied widely, said Professor Van Eeten, but infected rates on individual networks were quite stable over time relative to each other.
What was also clear from the research, he said, was that ISPs were not going to be able to clean up the large numbers of infected machines without some kind of central aid. In Holland, ISPs have dramatically increased their efforts but are still only cleaning up about 10% of infected machines.
At the moment, he said, two bottlenecks were preventing ISPs doing more to clean up machines.
The first, he said, was the lack of comprehensive data about the numbers and location of infected machines.
An initiative by the Australian government to pool data on infections and provide it to the nation's ISPs showed how this could be overcome, said Prof Van Eeten.
"The second bottleneck is that it costs money to notify customers and get them to clean up their machine," he said.
"An incoming call is very costly especially as those kinds of calls need experts," he said. "ISPs can completely lose their profit margin on a customer like that."
South Korean and Germany had tackled this problem, he said, by setting up national call centres to which ISPs can refer infected customers where they can get advice about disinfecting their machine. The call centres are publicly funded - though Germany will only pay for its centres temporarily.
"Governments can be very helpful," he said.
Prof Van Eeten said the numbers and prevalence of botnets suggests we should perhaps see them as the modern-day equivalent of the epidemics that struck in Victorian times and prompted the creation of government-backed vaccination schemes.
A similar system delivering a digital vaccine might again be part of the solution, he said.
Papers published by World War II codebreaker Alan Turing are expected to fetch about �500,000 at auction later.
The Manchester University scientist, who killed himself in 1954, created a machine at Bletchley Park to crack messages in the German Enigma code.
Last year, the then prime minister Gordon Brown gave him a posthumous apology for the "appalling" treatment he received for being gay.
The documents will go under the hammer at Christie's in London later.
Turing, who has been called the "father of the computer", published only 18 papers in his short career.
He was prosecuted for having a sexual relationship with a man and two years later he committed suicide by biting into an apple which he had laced with cyanide.
He was found dead at his home in Wilmslow, Cheshire, where a plaque has been erected to pay tribute to him.
Since it was announced that the papers were going to be sold, IT journalist Gareth Halfacree has been trying to raise the cash to buy them and donate them to Bletchley Park Trust in Milton Keynes.
So far he has raised �85,000 having just received a �62,784 donation from Google.
"We are still a bit short of what we need but I still hope that Microsoft or Apple might donate at the last minute," Mr Halfacree said.
Bids for the collection, which contain his first published paper, his pioneering work on artificial intelligence and the very foundations of the digital computer, have to be submitted by 1030 GMT.
They will go under the hammer at 1400 GMT.
Mr Halfacree added: "If we do not raise enough, which is looking increasingly unlikely, I hope whoever buys it donates the papers to Bletchley Park so we can all benefit from them."
He said the money he has raised so far will still go to the trust whether it is used to buy the papers or not.
Mr Chambers and his lawyers have until 2 December to challenge the conviction.
His lawyers regard Mr Chambers' conviction as a test case, as it was the first time that the Communications Act was applied to an offence on a social network.
"We want to establish what constitutes a menacing communication, what should be the level of intent required for the offence to be committed, and whether or not Paul's message was sent by means of a public electronic communications network," said David Allen Green, his solicitor.
Doncaster Crown Court recently upheld his original conviction causing a wave of outrage on Twitter, with thousands of supporters retweeting Chambers' message, which read: "Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week to get your shit together, otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!"
The so-called "I'm Spartacus" campaign was inspired by the famous scene in the 1960s blockbuster, when slaves stood up one by one to claim "I'm Spartacus" in order to save their fellow gladiator from detection.
The Stuxnet worm might be partly responsible for delays in Iran's nuclear programme, says a former UN nuclear inspections official.
Olli Heinonen, deputy director at the UN's nuclear watchdog until August, said the virus might be behind Iran's problems with uranium enrichment.
Discovered in June, Stuxnet is the first worm to target control systems found in industrial plants.
Iran has denied that delays to its nuclear plans were caused by Stuxnet.
Technical problems
Interviewed by Reuters, Mr Heinonen said there were many reasons for the ongoing delays at Iran's Natanz uranium enrichment plant - a key part of the nuclear power generation process.
Uranium is typically enriched or concentrated by being spun in centrifuges at high speed.
Mr Heinonen said the technical complexity of creating centrifuges had also contributed to the delays in Iran's nuclear programme.
"One of the reasons is the basic design of this centrifuge... this is not that solid," said Mr Heinonen, a former deputy director at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Quizzed about whether Stuxnet could have contributed to the delays, he said: "Sure, this could be one of the reasons... there is no evidence that it was, but there has been quite a lot of malfunctioning centrifuges."
Symantec's research also suggests that Stuxnet was designed to hit motors controlling centrifuges and thus disrupt the creation of uranium fuel pellets.
Figures gathered by security firms show that 60% of all the infections caused by Stuxnet were on machines in Iran.
An IAEA report released in September shows that about 160 centrifuges in Iran's nuclear plants had been taken offline in only a couple of months. No reasons were given for the devices being shut down.
However, Iran has always denied that the Stuxnet worm had anything to do with the ongoing delays to its nuclear power programme. Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant is due to start generating power in Janaury 2011, two months later than originally planned.
19 November 2010Last updated at 07:07 ETBy Mark WardTechnology correspondent, BBC News
Detailed analysis of the code in the Stuxnet worm has narrowed the list of suspects who could have created it.
The sophisticated malware is among the first to target the industrial equipment used in power plants and other large scale installations.
New research suggests it was designed to disrupt centrifuges often used to enrich uranium.
Forensic analysis of the worm has revealed more about the team behind it and what it was supposed to do.
Code secrets
The close look at the code inside Stuxnet was carried out by Tom Parker from security firm Securicon who specialises in picking out the digital fingerprints hackers leave behind in malware.
His analysis of Stuxnet shows it is made of several distinct blocks. One part targets industrial control systems, another handles the worm's methods of spreading itself and another concerns the way its creators planned to communicate with and control it.
The most sophisticated part of Stuxnet targeted the Programmable Logic Controllers used in industrial plants to automate the operation of components such as motors or pumps.
Subverting PLCs required detailed knowledge of one manufacturer's product line, the programming language written for it and insight into how it could be subverted. That meant, said Mr Parker, the list of suspects was pretty short.
"I do believe the PLC components were written in the West," he said. "It's western companies that are investing most heavily in automation of industrial processes, whether it's putting coke in cans or nuclear enrichment."
"However, the bits that drop it into a system and the command and control parts are not that advanced at all," said Mr Parker.
"I've compared this less advanced code to other malware and it does not score very highly," he said.
Dedicated hi-tech criminals would not have used such crude methods of distribution and control, he said, suggesting that it was put together by a nation rather than organised crime.
What this implies, he said, is that whichever country put Stuxnet together commissioned the creation of the PLC part from a Western nation, then added its own distribution and control code to it.
The analysis suggests that a team of 6-10 people were behind Stuxnet and were involved with it for some time. Whoever wrote it would also need information about and access to industrial plants in Iran if that was the actual target, said Mr Parker.
Motor control
More information has also emerged about how Stuxnet disrupts the industrial control systems it managed to compromise.
Research by security firm Symantec has shown that the likely target were frequency controllers that many PLCs are hooked up to in order to regulate a motor.
In particular, said Symantec, Stuxnet targeted those operating at frequencies between 807 and 1210Hz.
"There's a limited amount of equipment operating at that speed," said Orla Cox, security operations manager at Symantec. "It knew exactly what it was going after."
"Those operating at 600hz or above are regulated for export by the US because they can be used to control centrifuges for uranium enrichment," she said.
If Stuxnet did manage to infect a PLC connected to a centrifuge, it would seriously disrupt its working, said Ms Cox.
What is not clear, said Ms Cox, is whether Stuxnet hit its target. If it did not, she said, then the fact that the command and control system has been taken over by security firms has ended any chance of it being used again.
"Our expectation is that the attack is done at this point," she said. "We've not seen any more variants out there and I don't suspect we will."
Mr Parker said that whoever did write it failed in one respect because Stuxnet has not stayed live for as long as its creators hoped.
The control system set up needed to have been in place for years to have a seriously disruptive effect on its intended targets, he said.
"Someone has serious egg on their face because they are never going to be able to use this investment ever again," he said.
Lord Judge, who is the most senior judge in England and Wales, said it was too easy for campaigners to bombard Twitter with messages in a bid to put pressure on jurors who might be looking at it.
We cannot accept that the use of the internet, or rather its misuse, should be acknowledged and treated as an ineradicable fact of life, or that a Nelsonian blind eye should be turned to it or the possibility that it is happening"
End QuoteLord JudgeLord Chief Justice
He said: "We cannot stop people tweeting, but if jurors look at such material, the risks to the fairness of the trial will be very serious, and ultimately the openness of the trial process on which we all rely, would be damaged."
Lord Judge added: "We cannot accept that the use of the internet, or rather its misuse, should be acknowledged and treated as an ineradicable fact of life, or that a Nelsonian blind eye should be turned to it or the possibility that it is happening.
"If it is not addressed, the misuse of the internet represents a threat to the jury system which depends, and rightly depends, on evidence provided in court which the defendant can hear and if necessary challenge."
He said judges need to warn jurors in the strongest terms not to use the internet to research cases or to give details of cases they are deliberating on.
He wants the notice in jury rooms to be amended to include a warning that such research could amount to a contempt of court. He raised the prospect of sentencing jurors who use the internet for research.
Lord Judge even suggested sending text messages from court buildings should be banned.
The BBC's Legal Affairs Analyst, Clive Coleman, said: "This is the strongest and most detailed judicial consideration of the threat to the criminal justice system posed by jurors using modern technology. It raises major questions of how to police and stop internet use."
The UK's information commissioner has said that wi-fi data accidentally collected by Google's Street View cars will be deleted "as soon as possible".
Deputy information commissioner David Smith told the BBC that there would be no further enquiries into the matter.
He said there was no indication that any information collected "had fallen into the wrong hands".
It will not appease critics who called for the search giant to be fined.
There were no grounds for fining Google, Mr Smith told the BBC.
"We'd have had to find that there was substantial damage or distress to individuals from the collection of snippets of e-mails, URLs and passwords. We'd have to meet that criteria for a penalty to be imposed," he said.
Google admitted earlier this year that it had accidentally collected information from unsecured wireless networks around the world.
The incident came to light during a routine audit by the Hamburg data authority.
It led to dozens of enquiries with some - notably the Canadian data commissioner - offering detailed findings about the nature of the breaches.
The Canadian investigation found that Google captured personal information, including a list of names of people suffering from certain medical conditions.
Canadian privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart said thousands of Canadians had been affected.
The findings led her to conclude that the search giant "seriously violated" its privacy laws.
More training
Mr Smith admitted that the UK had conducted a much more basic investigation.
"We spent less time searching than others did. If we had searched for days and days we would have found more," Mr Smith said.
Following this audit, the ICO ruled that "no significant breach" had occurred.
But following publication of the Canadian data commissioner's findings, the ICO changed this to a "significant breach".
Mr Smith said that the ICO had intended all along to base its final judgement on the findings of its counterparts.
"It is not a good use of the data protection authority to duplicate more in-depth enquiries," he said.
"We have based our decision on the findings of other data authorities. It was exactly the same type of information found by them," he said.
Mr Smith revealed that the ICO is only able to audit companies that have given prior permission for such an investigation.
Jim Killock, executive director of digital advocacy The Open Rights Group, thinks this is a "shocking state of affairs".
"The ICO needs more powers and definitely needs more technical expertise," he said.
"To my mind people's privacy has been breached and they should be told about it. The ICO has a duty to let people know what has happened," he said.
Mr Killock believes that Google's data breach is more akin to unlawful interception, similar to opening someone's post without permission.
The UK currently has no public body to investigate interception breaches, a gap that that led the European Commission to launch legal action against it.
The Home Office is currently consulting on how to make sure it complies with European legislation on the interception of communications.
Following the ICO's ruling, Google has promised to offer privacy training to its staff.
Other data bodies and groups around the world are still investigating its capture of wi-fi data.
Mr Killock is hopeful there will be harsher punishments for Google down the line.
18 November 2010Last updated at 12:58 ETBy Jonathan FildesTechnology reporter, BBC News
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Ramesh Raskar explains how the camera can shoot around corners
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A camera that can shoot around corners has been developed by US scientists.
The prototype uses an ultra-short high-intensity burst of laser light to illuminate a scene.
The device constructs a basic image of its surroundings - including objects hidden around the corner - by collecting the tiny amounts of light that bounce around the scene.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology team believe it has uses in search and rescue and robot vision.
"It's like having x-ray vision without the x-rays," said Professor Ramesh Raskar, head of the Camera Culture group at the MIT Media Lab and one of the team behind the system.
"But we're going around the problem rather than going through it."
Professor Shree Nayar of Columbia University, an expert in light scattering and computer vision, was very complimentary about the work and said it was a new and "very interesting research direction".
"What is not entirely clear is what complexities of invisible scenes are computable at this point," he told BBC News.
"They have not yet shown recovery of an entire [real-world] scene, for instance."
Flash trick
Professor Raskar said that when he started research on the camera three years ago, senior people told him it was "impossible".
The heart of the room-sized camera is a femtosecond laser, a high-intensity light source which can fire ultra-short bursts of laser light that last just one quadrillionth of a second (that's 0.000000000000001 seconds).
The light sources are more commonly used by chemists to image reactions at the atomic or molecular scale.
For the femtosecond transient imaging system, as the camera is known, the laser is used to fire a pulse of light onto a scene.
The light particles scatter and reflect off all surfaces including the walls and the floor.
If there is a corner, some of the light will be reflected around it. It will then continue to bounce around the scene, reflecting off objects - or people - hidden around the bend.
Some of these particles will again be reflected back around the corner to the camera's sensor.
Here, the work is all about timing.
Following the initial pulse of laser light, its shutter remains closed to stop the precise sensors being overwhelmed with the first high-intensity reflections.
You could generate a map before you go into a dangerous place like a building fire, or a robotic car could use the system to compute the path it should take around a corner before it takes it"
End QuoteProf Ramesh Raskar
This method - known as "time-gating" - is commonly used by cameras in military surveillance aircraft to peer through dense foliage.
In these systems, the shutter remains closed until after the first reflections off the tops of the trees. It then opens to collect resections of hidden vehicles or machinery beneath the canopy.
Similarly, the experimental camera shutter opens once the first reflected light has passed, allowing it to mop up the ever-decreasing amounts of reflected light - or "echoes" as Prof Raskar calls them - from the scene.
Unlike a standard camera that just measures the intensity and position of the light particles as it hits the sensor, the experimental set up also measures the arrival time of the particles at each pixel.
This is the central idea used in so-called "time-of-flight cameras" or Lidar (Light Detection And Ranging) that can map objects in the "line of sight" of the camera.
Lidar is commonly used in military applications and has been put to use by Google's Street View cars to create 3D models of buildings.
Professor Raskar calls his set-up a "time-of-flight camera on steroids".
Both use the speed of light and the arrival time of each particle to calculate the so-called "path length" - or distance travelled - of the light.
To build a picture of a scene, the experimental set up must repeat the process of firing the laser and collecting the reflections several times. Each pulse is done at a slightly different point and takes just billionths of a second to complete.
"We need to do it at least a dozen times," said Professor Raskar. "But the more the better."
It then use complex algorithms - similar to those used in medical CAT scans - to construct a probable 3D model of the surrounding area - including objects that may be hidden around the corner.
"In the same way that a CAT scan can reveal what is inside the body by taking multiple photographs using an x-ray source in different positions, we can recover what is beyond the line of sight by shining the laser at different points on a reflective surface," he said.
Look ahead
At the moment, the set-up only works in controlled laboratory conditions and can get confused by complex scenes.
"It looks like they are very far from handling regular scenes," said Prof Nayar.
In everyday situations, he said, the system may compute "multiple solutions" for an image, largely because it relied on such small amounts of light and it was therefore difficult to extrapolate the exact path of the particle as it bounced around a room.
"However, it's a very interesting first step," he said.
It would now be interesting to see how far the idea could be pushed, he added.
Professor Raskar said there are "lots of interesting things you can do with it.
"You could generate a map before you go into a dangerous place like a building fire, or a robotic car could use the system to compute the path it should take around a corner before it takes it."
However, he said, the team initially aim to use the system to build an advanced endoscope.
"It's an easy application to target," he said. "It's a nice, dark environment."
If the team get good results from their trials, he said, they could have a working endoscope prototype within two years.
"That would be something that is room-sized," he said. "Building something portable could take longer."
18 November 2010Last updated at 17:25 ETBy Maggie ShielsTechnology reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley
The once dominant MySpace has turned to the company that stole its crown, Facebook for help to drive users to its ailing site.
The two launched Mashup with Facebook, to let MySpace users log into their Facebook accounts through their MySpace page.
This means users can port over their likes and interests listed on Facebook.
In turn users will get a stream of entertainment content based on these preferences.
"We feel this is a complimentary service to Facebook," said Mike Jones, MySpace chief executive officer.
"This new feature is a great illustration of our strategy around social entertainment and enabling the real-time stream."
MySpace is among more than a million websites letting Facebook members extend their social graph on the world's biggest social network to other parts of the web.
Facebook's vice president of partnerships Dan Rose said the sharing of information is a strategy that "makes a lot of sense."
"Sharing entertainment and music interests is part of many of our friendships, online and off.
"MySpace is giving people an easy way to bring their favourite bands, celebrities and movies from Facebook to create a personalised experience on MySpace from the start," added Mr Rose.
Wins and loses
Is this partnership an illustration that MySpace has conceded supremacy to Facebook?
Industry analyst Augie Ray of Forrester Research told BBC News there were gains for both companies with this deal.
"People have come to think of MySpace in a certain way and while I don't think this deal will help them attract a lot of users it is necessary that those people on the site enjoy the MySpace experience and I think this helps.
"This is also a good opportunity for Facebook to demonstrate that the information you have about yourself and about your friends belongs to you. In many respects this is about Facebook changing attitudes over ownership of data than anything else."
Adam Ostrow of social media news site Mashable.com said he believed the arrangement underlines who rules this world.
"It's official acknowledgement on the part of MySpace that Facebook has indeed become top dog in the social networking space, and its better to be with them than against them at this point."
MySpace which is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp has an estimated 130 million users while Facebook has over 500 million.
Facebook's demise ?
And what of Facebook's future?
According to one internet expert, the world's biggest social network only has five years left before it starts to see users drift off the way they did with MySpace and other social site Bebo.
At a marketing conference in Sydney, Australia this week, Dr Jeffrey Cole claimed that Facebook will not fare any better at holding onto its audience than these sites have in recent years. Appearing at the same Ninemsn Digital Marketing Summit four years earlier, Dr Cole predicted the demise of MySpace.
"The same thing will happen to Facebook but it's going to take a lot longer," said Dr Cole a director of the World Internet project which tracks how the internet affects media consumption.
"And it's not going to be replaced by one big social networking community but it's going to fragment."
Ofcom's chief exeuctive Ed Richards has laid out the timetable which will pave the way for next-generation mobile services in the UK.
The airwaves that will enable 4G networks will be auctioned off in the first half of 2012, Mr Richards said.
It means the spectrum will become available from 2013.
The auction was originally earmarked for 2009 but was delayed because of legal action by mobile firms.
Mr Richards announced the timetable at the FT World Telecoms Conference.
Level playing field
He warned that "further litigation against the government or regulator will jeopardise this timetable".
Mobile operators have been arguing over the distribution of existing spectrum.
Ofcom had originally planned to redistribute spectrum allocated to O2 and Vodafone, prompting the two operators to launch legal action against the regulator.
Historically the 900MHz slice of spectrum has belonged exclusively to O2 and Vodafone because they were the only two mobile operators on the market when it was handed out.
Ofcom dropped its plans to share out its spectrum, following the merger between T-Mobile and Orange.
"In the light of the merger, there was not such an unlevel playing field," said Ovum analyst Matthew Howett.
It prompted Vodafone and O2 to drop their legal action, paving the way for the auctions to go ahead.
"There is still the threat of legal action but operators are more interested in getting this over and done with," said Mr Howett.
More capacity
The auction will see two chunks of the spectrum - the 800MHz and 2.6GHz bands - sold off.
Both have great value to operators.
The 800MHz slice - which has been freed up by the switchover to digital TV - allows mobile signals to travel over greater distances, making it invaluable in the search to find ways of bringing broadband to rural areas.
The higher capacity 2.6GHz band will be more useful in towns and cities where lots of users require services.
The delay in the sale of spectrum means that the UK will be behind other countries in offering services. Germany has already auctioned off its digital dividend spectrum and others are planning to do so soon.
For consumers 4G or LTE (Long Term Evolution) services will mean more capacity on the networks.
"They will have a more enjoyable experince using mobile broadband," said Mr Howett.
The popularity of smartphones has meant an explosion in demand for mobile data.
It could mean even next-generation networks run out of capAcity, thinks Stephen Rayment, chief technology officer of BelAir Networks.
"Mobile data traffic is already on track to exceed the capacity that will be available in forthcoming LTE and 4G networks. Consequently, buying new spectrum is no longer a speculative move for mobile operators, it's an absolute necessity," he said.
Despite the demand for new networks, Mr Howett predicts the spectrum will sell for a lot less than its 3G equivalent which raised �22bn for the Treasury when it was sold in 2000.
Culture minister Ed Vaizey has backed a "two-speed" internet, letting service providers charge content makers and customers for "fast lane" access.
It paves the way for an end to "net neutrality" - with heavy bandwidth users like Google and the BBC likely to face a bill for the pipes they use.
Mr Vaizey said ISPs must be free to experiment with new charges to help pay for the expansion in internet services.
But critics warn the move could harm free speech and stifle innovation.
'Fast lane'
Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are supposed to treat all web traffic equally - serving only as a one-size-fits-all pipe for whatever data is passing from content providers to end users.
But a debate has been raging around the world over how much they should be allowed to control the size of their pipes, and thus the internet speed that users get from the site.
In the US, President Barack Obama has backed net neutrality - treating all traffic equally - and regulators have threatened possible legal action against ISPs that block or restrict access to sites.
In order for the internet to continue as the open, innovative force for good that it has been over the past 20 years it is essential that all elements continue to prosper"
End QuoteEd VaizeyCulture minister
But some traffic management, where traffic from one source is favoured over another, is likely to be allowed, with a ruling due next year, Mr Vaizey suggests.
The EU has also backed traffic management but with greater transparency to ensure the internet remains "open" - something that will soon be enshrined in UK law.
Mr Vaizey argues that most ISPs already carried out traffic management "to ensure the smooth running of their networks" without any impact on competition or consumer rights.
In his speech, he argues that the continued quality of internet services in the UK is under threat due to the rapid expansion of mobile and wireless networks and the "massive investment" it needed.
As a result, ISPs had to be free to experiment with new ways of raising revenue - provided customers were clear about what they were buying.
He says: "We have got to continue to encourage the market to innovate and experiment with different business models and ways of providing consumers with what they want.
"This could include the evolution of a two-sided market where consumers and content providers could choose to pay for differing levels of quality of service."
He also suggests that content makers could be charged for the first time for the use of the ISP's networks - provided they too were clear about what they were getting.
"Content and application providers should be able to know exactly what level of service they are getting especially if they are paying for it," he says.
'Appalling'
He added that the government did not want to introduce new laws on top of those already being adopted from the EU to guarantee an "open" internet, arguing that light touch regulation was better.
He also argued that, that unlike in the US where some areas only had the choice of one service provider, there was enough rivalry between providers to ensure consumers' rights were protected.
"The essential competition we enjoy in Europe and especially in the UK, will be an essential safeguard against unfair discrimination," he argues.
He said ISPs must also guarantee that net users can continue to access any legal website or content.
"In order for the internet to continue as the open, innovative force for good that it has been over the past 20 years it is essential that all elements continue to prosper.
"This means ensuring that content providers and applications have open access to consumers and vice versa.
"But it also means allowing ISPs and networks to innovate and experiment with new ways of delivering what consumers want so we can ensure continued investment in the infrastructure that delivers the content and applications we all use."
But Jim Killock, of net freedom campaigners the Open Rights Group, said the proposals could have "appalling" consequences for free speech and commercial innovation.
"Ed Vaizey is wrong to assume that there is no problem if BT or Virgin restrict people's internet access for their commercial advantage. Removing 'net neutrality' will reduce innovation and reduce people's ability to exercise their freedom of speech.
"This is why ORG will campaign against any market abuse, should Ed Vaizey allow it to happen."
By Dan Whitworth Newsbeat technology reporter
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After years in development and millions of pounds spent on it, Gran Turismo 5 has finally been given a release date.
Developers Polyphony Digital, a subsidiary of Sony Computer Entertainment, says the game will hit shelves in the UK and around the world on Wednesday 24 November.
Fans will be able to choose from dozens of circuits, including the Top Gear test track.
More than 1,000 cars also feature in the game for the PlayStation 3.
Among them are the Lamborghini Murciélago LP 670-4 SuperVeloce, the Lexus LFA and the McLaren MP4-12C.
Gran Turismo is the world's most popular video racing game series.
So far it's sold more than 56 million units but this latest edition has suffered serious delays.
'Technological leap'
It was originally scheduled for release last year but that got put back to 2010.
I can only apologize to everyone for making you wait so long, and I hope that when you try out the wealth of driving experiences available in Gran Turismo 5, you will not be disappointed
Kazunori YamauchiPresident of Polyphony Digital
Since then it's been delayed again twice.
Kazunori Yamauchi, president of Polyphony Digital said: "With the technological leap on to PlayStation 3, our objective with Gran Turismo 5 was to create another great revolution which would not only satisfy our own high expectations, but would meet or even exceed the anticipation of the fans.
"Satisfying the loyal Gran Turismo followers is at the heart of all of our efforts, which is why it was such a difficult decision to delay the release of the game, and one which we did not take lightly.
"I can only apologize to everyone for making you wait so long, and I hope that when you try out the wealth of driving experiences available in Gran Turismo 5, you will not be disappointed."
As with increasing numbers of video games GT5 will also be released in 3D.
The traffic to some highly sensitive US websites was briefly rerouted via China, according to Reuters.
The incident, which happened for 18 minutes last April, is published in a report by the US-China Economic and Security review commission.
It found that China Telecom sent incorrect routing information, but it is not clear whether it was intentional.
It comes amid continuing discussions in the US and the UK about cyber-security.
Among traffic rerouted via China was that destined for the US Senate website, the Office of the Secretary of Defence, Nasa and the Commerce Department, the report said.
"Evidence related to this incident does not clearly indicate whether it was perpetrated intentionally and, if so, to what ends," according to the draft report obtained by Reuters.
"However, computer security researchers have noted that the capability could enable severe malicious activities," it added.
The danger of cyber-attacks has been high on global agendas recently.
This week, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates warned that cyber-attacks posed a huge future threat and urged more joined-up efforts between the US military and civilian agencies.
MPs in the UK have also been hearing about the risks of cyber-attacks.
In evidence given to the Science and Technology Committee, experts said that a concerted cyber-attack capable of damaging key infrastructure could currently only be launched by an enemy state.
Stuxnet fears
"The risk of a concerted attack which has fundamental effect on infrastructure would have to be at state level and therefore politically unlikely," said Dr Hayes, a senior fellow at the Microsoft Institute for Advanced Technology in Governments.
But he said the tools were there for either politically-motivated hackers or organised criminals to launch an attack.
"If I see a nuclear weapon, I need plutonium, but cyber-weapons are just a sequence of ones and zeros. We have concerns that Stuxnet could be copied," he said.
"The risk of that is high and could have localised effect on critical infrastructure," he told MPs.
The recent Stuxnet malware, which appeared to be targeted at Iran's nuclear power plant, has caused alarm in governments around the world about a new wave of state-sponsored cyber-attacks.
Dalai Lama
Dr Ross Anderson, from the University of Cambridge, told MPs that Stuxnet was a sophisticated piece of malware.
"We can surmise it was from someone who didn't like the Iranians refining uranium. It took six people five months to write. It appears whoever commissioned it had access to people whose business was writing malware, as well as people clearly expert in industrial control systems.
It was an effort funded to the order of �1m or thereabouts," he said.
Experts have surmised that its complexity means it could only have been written by a nation state.
Mr Anderson told MPs that he had personal involvement into state-sponsored malware attacks.
"A couple of years ago, a student of mine helped the Dalai Lama's office clear up malware clearly from the Chinese government," he said.
Currently, though, the biggest risk to UK computer systems was still the prospect of internal system failures as upgrades to the net addressing system began, he said.
"The most likely cause of disruption to the internet comes from software failure associated with transition to IPV6," he said.
But he warned that the threat of external attacks was likely to get worse over time, as more and more systems became computerised.
Experts needed
Mr Anderson said that government needed to become more "IT-aware".
"Regulators such as Ofgem and Ofcom should have people on their staff who understand IT and the risk we could be sleepwalking into," he said.
He warned that the government needed to do more.
"We have never put enough into combating cyber-crime. The Metropolitan police have difficulty sustaining e-crime units, because they are forever being closed down or merged," he said.
He aid that the situation was not helped because the culture of the UK's security body GCHQ was non-collaborative, unlike that of the US's National Security Agency.
"Currently there are two separate communities, the civil community and the defence community. Outside of the defence community there is no source of expertise," he said.
"Bodies like the Information Commissioner's Office and the Metropolitan police don't have their own engineering staff, so are beholden to Cheltenham [the base for GCHQ] for advice."
He was not convinced that GCHQ was the right body for the job.
"It may take a cyber-attack to convince the prime minister that GCHQ is incompetent and things need to be changed," he said.
China's Tianhe-1A supercomputer has been confirmed as the most powerful in the world.
Confirmation came with the publication of the latest list of the Top 500 supercomputers on the planet.
Tianhe-1A has a peak speed of 2.57 petaflops, far higher than the US XT5 Jaguar that can manage 1.76 petaflops.
The list also reveals significant changes in the technology used to power the machines and the nations hosting the most powerful ones.
Unconfirmed reports that Tianhe-1A would take the top spot on the list emerged in late October. Since then no other more powerful computers machines have emerged to knock it off the number one position.
Located at China's National Supercomputer Centre in Tianjin much of the machine's processing power comes from chips more typically found in graphics cards. It is expected to be doing simulations to help Chinese weather forecasts and to help with work to locate undersea oil fields.
Of the top four machines on the list, three are now largely built around graphics processors. By contrast the US Jaguar supercomputer that Tianhe-1A has pushed into second place is built around more traditional CPUs typically used in desktop computers.
The top seven supercomputers on the list can now all carry out at least one petaflop which is the equivalent of 1,000 trillion calculations per second.
The latest Top 500 list also reveals that the US is slipping down the rankings of supercomputer superpowers. Only five of the top ten machines are in the US, a change from other years in which American supercomputers have typically dominated the upper regions of the Top 500 list.
The US maintains its spot as the nation with the most supercomputers in the Top 500 list and China is now second. However, it has a long way to go to catch up as the US has 275 machines in the top 500 and China has only 42.
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