Facebook offers temporary log-ins

13 October 2010 Last updated at 10:37 ET

Facebook is launching one-time passwords in an effort to make it safer to log on to the social network from public computers.

It also claims the system will help prevent cyber-criminals accessing users' accounts.

Users need to text the words 'otp' to 32665 and they will be sent a temporary password that will expire after 20 minutes.

But security experts questioned whether the system was safe.

Sign out

"If someone else is able to gain access to your phone then that's an open door for mischief-makers to access your Facebook account," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at security firm Sophos.

It may also not be a foolproof method of avoiding Facebook hackers.

"A temporary password may stop keylogging spyware giving cybercriminals a permanent backdoor into your account, but it doesn't stop malware from spying upon your activities online and seeing what's happening on your screen," he said.

Users of the system must have a mobile phone number registered to their account, which could also open the system up to exploitation, thinks Mr Cluley.

"Do you know if you've registered your mobile phone number on Facebook? Would you notice if someone changed it? Imagine a scenario where some ''fraper' changes the mobile number of your account to one to which they have access. That may mean that anytime they like they could access your Facebook account," he said.

Facebook also launched another new feature which will allow people to sign out of Facebook remotely, aimed at those who log in to the social network via a friends phone or computer and then forget to sign out.

People will be able to keep a closer eye on the status of their accounts, Jake Brill wrote in the official Facebook blog.

"In the unlikely event that someone accesses your account without your permission, you can also shut down the unauthorised login before resetting your password," he wrote.

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UK services 'face cyber threat'

12 October 2010 Last updated at 19:00 ET

The UK's critical infrastructure - such as power grids and emergency services - faces a "real and credible" threat of cyber attack, the head of GCHQ says.

The intelligence agency's director Iain Lobban said the country's future economic prosperity rested on ensuring a defence against such assaults.

The internet created opportunities for hostile states and criminals, he said.

For example, 1,000 malicious e-mails a month are already being targeted at government computer networks, he said.

Speaking to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Mr Lobban said he did not want to go into detail about the threat to the UK's "critical national infrastructure".

But he said the threat posed by terrorists, organised criminals and hostile foreign governments was "real and credible" and he demanded a swifter response to match the speed with which "cyber events" happened.

Continue reading the main story

"Start Quote

Cyberspace is contested every day, every hour, every minute, every second"

End Quote Iain Lobban GCHQ

Critical national infrastructure also includes sectors such as financial services, government, mass communication, health, transport, and food and water - all of which are deemed necessary for delivering services upon which daily life in the UK depends.

With both the Strategic Defence and Security Review and the Comprehensive Spending Review due to be published next week, Mr Lobban said ministers would be looking at what capabilities the UK needs to develop further.

"Clearly they will also be deciding how they trade off against other spending priorities."

He added: "Just because I, as a national security official, am giving a speech about cyber, I don't want you to take away the impression that it is solely a national security or defence issue. It goes to the heart of our economic well-being and national interest."

Intellectual property theft

While GCHQ is more usually associated with electronic intelligence-gathering, Mr Lobban stressed that it also had a security role, referred to as "information assurance".

He said that they had already seen "significant disruption" to government computer systems caused by internet "worms" - both those that had been deliberately targeted and others picked up accidentally.

Each month there were more than 20,000 "malicious" e-mails on government networks, of which 1,000 were deliberately targeted at them, while intellectual property theft was taking place on a "massive scale" - some relating to national security.

And there was a "big challenge" with the government wanting to get more and more services online, he said.

"Cyberspace lowers the bar for entry to the espionage game, both for states and for criminal actors," he said.

"Cyberspace is contested every day, every hour, every minute, every second. I can vouch for that from the displays in our own operations centre of minute-by-minute cyber attempts to penetrate systems around the world."

While 80% of the threat to government systems could be dealt with through good information assurance practice - such as keeping security "patches" up to date - the remaining 20% was more complex and could not simply be solved by building "higher and higher" security walls.

Export expertise?

Although cyberspace presented a potential security threat to the UK, Mr Lobban said that it also offered an opportunity if the UK could get its defences right.

"Fundamentally, getting cyber right enables the UK's continuing economic prosperity.

"There's a clear defensive angle. In order to flourish, a knowledge economy needs to protect from exploitation the intellectual property at the heart of the creative and high-tech industry sectors. It needs to maintain the integrity of its financial and commercial services."

But he added that the implications were wider than that.

"There is an opportunity which we can seize if government and the telecommunications sector, hardware and software vendors, and managed service providers can come together.

"It's an opportunity to develop a holistic approach to cyber security that makes UK networks intrinsically resilient in the face of cyber threats.

"That will lead to a competitive advantage for the UK. We can give enterprises the confidence that by basing themselves here they gain the advantages of access to a modern internet infrastructure while reducing their risks."

He said developing such expertise would also open up potential export opportunities, with the global market for cyber security products "growing faster than much of the rest of the global economy".

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Battle for TV screens heating-up

12 October 2010 Last updated at 04:58 ET By Maggie Shiels Technology reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley

The future of television is in flux as traditional manufacturers battle hi-tech companies to control the living room, say analysts.

The view comes as Sony prepares to unveil the first Google-powered TV.

Connecting the TV to the web has become a focus among manufacturers and set top box makers vying for market share.

Google's emergence has energised things said commentators as has Apple's renewed bid for domination with its TV converter.

"There are so many variables just now and no one clear winner," Paul Erickson, senior analyst with IMS Research told BBC News.

"Everybody is trying to own the living room experience. Google has definitely got everyone on their toes and all eyes are on Sony to see how it does with its Google TV offering."

Over five billion people watch TV which is more than the number of people who use mobile phones or computers.

'Jockeying for position'

Some in the business believe that in terms of the connected TV, it is a two horse race with Google and Apple pitched against one another.

Last Wednesday Logitech launched its Revue set top box as part of a partnership with Google to merge the TV and the internet.

A day later Apple's box went on sale aimed at connecting the TV to a wealth of internet-delivered TV shows, movies, pictures, podcasts and music.

"Everybody is jockeying for position but all eyes are on Google and Apple in this race," said Andrew Eisner content director for consumer site Retrevo.com.

"Google and Apple will be slugging it out to win consumers and own the TV operating system and put apps in the living room. I am a big believer that software sells hardware."

IMS Research's Mr Erickson disagrees.

"Neither one has proven that they have any strong traction in the TV arena yet. Apple has been on the market for a while with Apple TV and have yet to make it a hit. Despite their strong consumer brand identity and loyalty there is something about the product that is a fundamental miss.

"Google TV is still a new offering and still has to establish a brand in TV but I think if executed well, it could really change things," said Mr Erickson.

'Innovation'

Google unveiled its plans for the living room at its developer conference in San Francisco earlier in the year.

At the time the search giant called it an "adventure where TV meets web, apps, search and the world's creativity."

"We recognised that the pace of innovation in the TV space was not keeping up with the improvements in desktop and mobile computing," said Google spokesman Eitan Bencuya.

"Over the past few years consumers have been asking for a better way to find video content and more ways to find and access web video content, while developers have been looking for an open way to develop applications for TVs."

Apple boss Steve Jobs has famously referred to Apple TV as a "hobby". Its failure to catch on with consumers is something Mr Jobs acknowledged at a news conference in September.

""We've sold a lot of them, but it's never been a huge hit," he said.

The new version of the product has been reduced from $299 to $99 but will only allow people to rent content rather than buy it.

Initially, it will only offer TV shows from a small handful of providers such as Fox, ABC/Disney and the BBC.

"We think the rest of the studios will see the light and get on board pretty fast with us," said Mr Jobs.

Google also underscored the difficulty in getting content partners onside.

Continue reading the main story

"Start Quote

We have a lot of experimentation going on by content providers"

End Quote Van Baker Gartner

While the major networks, ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC will not take part several other internet companies and media outlets will. These included HBO, CNBC, Twitter, Netflix and Amazon.

Analyst Van Baker of Gartner said what Google's offering is something of a half-way house.

"Their vision is a good vision but complete integration between the internet and TV experience I don't see happening because the partners they need to have lined up see it as too big a threat.

"The reality is that it's not about technology. It's about business models and right now the networks get about 90% of their revenue from TV service providers like the Time Warner's, Comcast's and Direct TV's of the world.

"The best Google can do is deliver what amounts to a side-by-side experience. On one side of the screen you get the standard TV user interface either over the air or from Time Warner or Comcast. In the other part of the screen you get access to the internet via Google," added Mr Baker.

'Empowering the TV'

Research shows that most people renew their TV sets every seven years.

For Logitech, best known for producing mouse and remote controls, this presents an opportunity in the market.

Its Revue set-top box with Google's software acting as the brains will let users browse the web, stream videos from sites like YouTube or Hulu, play Flash games, connect with friends on social networks and even show off photos on the biggest display in the house.

It will go on sale at the end of this month for $299.

"We are building the engine for Google TV - the box and the keyboard which will take Google TV to market," Rajiv Bansal, senior manager with Logitech's digital home group told the BBC.

"For people who have recently bought a new set we are empowering the TV again by bringing all this content to the television set, the best screen in the house, and making it centre stage."

Google is offering its software platform free to manufacturers, as it does with Android, in the hopes of broadening its advertising base from the Web to TVs.

While Logitech and Sony are the first to get on board, Google is planning to expand to a number of other manufacturers next year.

Other set-top boxes range from $60 for the newly released Roku to $200 for the Boxee, due to ship next month.

IMS Research's Mr Erickson said he thinks Sony's Google TV will make at impact at the expense of set top box manufacturers.

"The integrated experience is going to be much more powerful to sell to consumers than a separate box. The less steps you have to take to get this working the better - no extra wires, no extra remotes.

'Experimental work'

Google and Apple are not alone in trying to change how people watch TV and grab some market share.

A slew of manufacturers from Panasonic to LG and from Sharp to Toshiba are all offering all-in-one internet TV's.

Samsung, the biggest manufacturer in the space said it believed its plans for smart connected televisions will help it maintain its lead.

"We are in the transitional period where we are witnessing a shift in the TV paradigm and I do believe we are at a starting point of seeing companies try to control the living room," BK Yoon, the company's president of visual display business unit, told BBC News in September.

So far though there are no runaway winners according to Gartner's Mr Baker.

"We have a lot of experimentation going on by content providers. A lot of experimentation with the consumer electronic manufacturers and Apple and Google trying to be brokers in the mix.

"There is everything to play for. It's a huge market. Google would naturally love for this to succeed for them because it would give them the TV advertising market and that is a pot full of money that would make what they currently do look small," added Mr Baker.

For the consumer, the plethora of offerings now and in the future means they can afford to wait a while before deciding where to spend their cash.

Forrester research said it expected that the number of web connected TV's to go from about two million this year to 43 million in the US by 2015.

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Facebook makes copycats of us all

12 October 2010 Last updated at 20:16 ET

A study of the download rates of a set of apps for Facebook has shown how they follow an unusual "bandwagon effect".

Apps whose downloads were advertised to the Facebook community gained slowly in popularity, and rates had no evident connection to social pressures.

But at a certain popularity threshold, roughly the same across a wide range of apps, downloads began to skyrocket.

The authors of the research in PNAS say that in the offline world, no such "switch" is known to exist.

The data were gathered in mid-2007, when the site had 2,720 apps and 50 million users.

At that time, a Facebook user's apps were all visible to their friends, and the friends were notified when a new app was downloaded; Facebook has since stopped the practice.

Jukka-Pekka Onnela and Felix Reed-Tsochas examined anonymised data about the downloading of all the apps over a 50-day period.

They found that what they term "social influence" plays a role only for some of the apps on a given day.

"The surprising finding is that two qualitatively different behavioural patterns emerged," Dr Onnela told BBC News.

"There appeared to be a threshold of popularity, and users only seemed to be influenced by the choices of others for apps lying above this threshold.

Dr Onnela said the interesting thing about the data is that the millions of users were under no external influence, with the behaviour arising spontaneously as people made independent choices based on the evident choices of their friends and other Facebook users.

"Social influence is strongly present in online cultural consumption but, at least in this case, only for a subset of products," he said.

It remains to be seen if a similar threshold behaviour occurs in non-social network or indeed completely offline contexts. Dr Onnela said that the difficulty would be in replicating the rarefied conditions of a hands-off study of millions of "cultural consumers".

"Most 'real-world' studies focus only on the most prevalent products and behaviours," he explained.

"Had we done the same in our study, we would have only observed one behavioural pattern, not two."

"It is without doubt a very massive study," said Bernardo Huberman, a researcher for HP Labs whose recent work has shown the offline effects of tweets on the success of films.

"As to its conclusion, it reminds me of the 'tipping-point'-type transitions discussed by many social psychologists and popularised by Malcolm Gladwell," he told BBC News.

He points out that the paper also demonstrates a finding reflecting his own work, namely that the "present popularity of an item predicting its future popularity", mirroring his own work and, more recently, that of Yahoo researchers.

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Profits killing personal privacy

12 October 2010 Last updated at 09:23 ET By Mark Ward Technology correspondent, BBC News

Personal privacy is in danger of being killed off by the profit-making motives of firms which hold our data, security expert Bruce Schneier has warned.

BT's chief technology officer expressed his concerns at the RSA Security Europe Conference in London.

While the death of personal privacy had been predicted for a long time, rapid technological changes posed a mortal danger to it, he said.

Mr Schneier urged lawmakers to do more to help preserve and protect privacy.

The death of privacy had been predicted before with the emergence of many different technologies, he said. But before now that threat had been largely overblown.

"Just because the technology is there does not mean that privacy invasions must happen," he said.

'Unnatural state'

The difference now, he said, was that the falling cost of storage and processing power made it far easier to keep data such as e-mail conversations, Tweets or postings to a social network page than it was to spend the time managing and deleting the information.

The migration of human social interaction from ephemeral forms that took place face to face into data that never goes away and does not allow us to forget or leave behind our past actions was undoubtedly going to change society, he said.

"Forgetting is a very powerful social tool that helps us get by and get along," he said.

As lives are lived more and more online or via the phone it has led, said Mr Schneier, to a situation in which everyone has to be the guardian of their own privacy policy.

Continue reading the main story

"Start Quote

We are now seeing the death of privacy"

End Quote Bruce Schneier

"That's new and fundamentally unnatural," he said.

Deciding what data we are prepared to surrender would be fine if people were given a proper choice, he said.

Unfortunately, he said, users of social networking sites or any online service were being presented with choices defined by priorities they did not choose.

The choices are filtered through the law, which is being outstripped by technological change, leaving people with only what net firms give them or can get away with.

"The social rules are being set by businesses with a profit motive," he said.

Facebook has faced a barrage of criticism about its privacy settings and despite effort to address user concerns, has continued to worry privacy campaigners.

Google boss Eric Schmidt said, after the row about its StreetView service scooping up wi-fi data: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

Talking about privacy policies on web sites, Mr Schneier said they were hard to find and understand because it was in the interest of those sites to confuse people into disclosing more than they were comfortable with.

Natural by-product

The more data about their members that sites gathered the better they can serve advertisers or use the data for their own marketing purposes, he said.

"We are now seeing the death of privacy," he said. "Those CEOs are doing it and doing things to hasten its demise."

In some senses, he said, this was not their fault because the production of data was a natural by-product of the way that computers work.

But, he said, this did not mean that legal and technological protections were not needed. The law was currently abdicating its role and there was a pressing need for tools that could help people manage their online presences.

He said that how we deal with privacy now would define how future generations regard us in the same way that commentators now look critically on the pollution produced as a by-product of the industrial revolution.

"They are going to look back at us and look at the things we do to deal with the pollution problem of the information age and judge us," he said.

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