Medal of Honor game goes on sale

14 October 2010 Last updated at 19:00 ET By Daniel Emery Technology reporter, BBC News <!-- Embedding the video player --> <!-- This is the embedded player component -->

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Medal of Honor's prequel book author Chris Ryan on the game's realism

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The video game Medal of Honor (MoH) has gone on sale despite calls by the UK defence secretary to ban it.

The game follows the exploits of Special Forces troops battling insurgents in Afghanistan in 2002.

In August, Defence Secretary Dr Liam Fox called for the game to be banned after it emerged that users could fight as The Taliban.

Its developer EA said the game was meant to be realistic, but eventually renamed The Taliban "The Opposition".

This edition, the latest in EA's long running series of games bearing the MoH title, has dispensed with its World War II theme and opted to recreate modern combat in the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan.

But with 150,000 American, British and Allied troops fighting in Afghanistan, many felt taking on the role of the Taliban was a step too far.

Dr Fox described the game as "un-British" and said it was "shocking that someone would think it acceptable to recreate the acts of the Taliban against British soldiers".

The Canadian and Danish Defence Ministers also criticised the game.

EA weathered the storm for a few weeks, but in early October the firm bowed to pressure and took the term "Taliban" out of the multiplayer option.

Despite the change, the game is still banned from sale on military bases, although troops can purchase it elsewhere and play it on station.

'Ploy'

Johnny Minkley, a journalist with video gaming website Eurogamer, told BBC News that he thought EA's decision to allow users to play as the Taliban was a marketing ploy.

"I don't think EA was that naive," he said.

"They knew that this would be controversial, but they needed to do everything to get attention, especially when they are going up against Call of Duty: Modern Warfare - the biggest brand in the world."

The game itself has received mostly positive reviews, scoring an average of 75% according to the review aggregator site Metacritic. Computer and Video Games Magazine described it as "an accomplished, confident online shooter".

Mr Minkley agreed, saying the developers had done "a really good job" but added that the product was some way from being perfect.

"The campaign stands up well and it is a competent and exciting first person shooter.

"But I do have a problem with it, and that is that the single player mode is very short.

"A competent gamer could get through the entire game in under five hours."

Logging on

In the 1990s, single player games usually lasted for days, if not weeks. However, that changed with the 2001 release of Max Payne, which could be completed in under 12 hours.

"This is an ever growing trend - we saw it with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare - of having an exciting, but short, single player game," said Mr Minkley.

"Developers claim that the multi-player aspect - where players compete on line - extends the life of the game, but the fact remains many people cannot or do not want to play online," he added.

US developer Activision's last modern combat shooter - Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 - grossed over $1bn in sales, and the follow on title Call of Duty: Black Ops, due for release on 9 November this year, is expected to do as well, if not better.

EA's decision to switch the Medal of Honor theme from the Second World War to a modern day conflict has prompted some critics to accuse the US firm of imitation.

Mr Minkley agreed, but said the decision was a financial one and Medal of Honor was not a pale imitation.

"What they've tried to do is focus on the confusion and uncertainty of western forces in Afghanistan and it feels different from a Hollywood style shooter like Call of Duty.

"You also have to bear in mind there is a degree of WWII fatigue and, ultimately, games developers are there to make money," he said.

"This is a commercial decision to follow the success of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 but - other than The Taliban issue - is far less deliberately proactive than Call of Duty."

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Facebook and Skype in social deal

14 October 2010 Last updated at 17:19 ET By Maggie Shiels Technology reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley

Skype is integrating with Facebook to make it easier to call and video chat with friends and family on the social network.

The deal comes amid fevered rumours that Facebook plans to launch a phone of its own.

Meanwhile Skype is gearing up for a $100m (�62m) share issue.

"The essence of the Skype experience is communicating with the people you care about," said Rick Osterloh, Skype's head of consumer products.

The new Skype for Windows will include a Facebook tab. This means that for the first time Skype users can keep up-to-date and interact with their Facebook news feed including posting status updates, commenting and liking directly from Skype.

Added to that, the Facebook phonebook in Skype allows users to call and text Facebook friends directly on their mobile phones and landlines.

And if your Facebook friend is also a Skype contact, then users can make free Skype-to-Skype calls.

Group video calling is available in beta form as a free trial.

"We're working with companies such as Skype to make it easier to find your friends anytime you want to connect," said Ethan Beard, director of Facebook's developer network.

'New market'

The move is seen as a natural one for the world's biggest social network, which is aiming to be the central communications and messaging platform for its users across a range of media.

Commentator Ben Popper of business technology blog BNET.com told BBC News it is a win-win for both firms.

"For Skype they are getting built right into the conversation. For Facebook, which has the bulk of its users in the US, this is good in terms of expansion because a chunk of Skype users are in Europe and the rest of the world."

Mr Popper also said he believed this points towards "a possible new market".

"The deal makes this space a lot more interesting and indicates a different direction of where communications could go.

"Right now phones are owned by the cellular networks. This partnership is big enough and deep enough, it could point towards a different kind of telco [telecommunications company] in the future."

Skype has around 560 million registered users and 8.1 million paying users. The Luxembourg-based company said that people spend an average of 520 million minutes every day talking to one another on the service.

Facebook has more than 500 million users, helping the two companies close in on around one billion users, though there will be some overlap.

The research company ComScore reported that in August Facebook users spent more than 40 million minutes on the social networking giant.

The new Skype version 5.0 for Windows is available now. There has been no announcement about when Mac or Linux versions will follow.

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Call to define rules of cyber war

14 October 2010 Last updated at 12:24 ET

Nations need to define the rules of engagement for acts of cyber terror.

The call for clarity was issued by Michael Chertoff, former head of the US Department of Homeland Security, at the RSA security conference in London.

He said the lack of direction was giving the initiative to criminals and hampering co-ordinated responses to the growing number of hi-tech attacks.

Countries should be able to defend themselves, he suggested, if an attack posed imminent danger to human lives.

"It's the least understood threat and the one where our doctrine is least developed," said Mr Chertoff.

Graded response

The need for such a doctrine was as pressing now as it was in 1950s, he said, when the emergence of nuclear weapons rendered irrelevant earlier policies governing when and why conflicts were fought.

That vacuum was filled by the policy of deterrence which defined what response could be expected from the US depending on how its territory or citizens were threatened.

"It was very clear to an adversary the consequences of an attack," he said.

In a similar way, said Mr Chertoff, a nation's cyber defence doctrine would lay out a range of responses depending on the severity of the attack.

Continue reading the main story

"Start Quote

The greatest stress you can have on security is when there is uncertainty - we are now in a state of uncertainty"

End Quote Michael Chertoff

"We have to treat espionage as different from attack or massive fraud or theft of information," he said.

Theft and espionage could be dealt with through the legal system, he said, with the strongest responses being reserved for the most serious cases.

"If you cause imminent danger of loss of life by attacking a network that's a different story," he said. "Theft is bad but murder is worse."

International laws of self-defence would allow a nation to respond to remove the threat posed by an imminent or unfolding attack, he said.

He admitted that such serious attacks on national infrastructure, such as rolling blackouts that led to deaths in hospitals, had not happened yet, but added: "I would not like to experience the first one."

"There seem to be very few entities that are perfectly immune from these types of attacks," said Mr Chertoff who now heads the Chertoff Group, which advises nations and governments on risks and security.

By defining a doctrine, he suggested, all nations would be encouraged to police domestic networks better to avoid incurring a strong response.

"The greatest stress you can have on security is when there is uncertainty," he said. "We are now in a state of uncertainty."

The need to develop response scenarios and an over-arching doctrine was becoming pressing, he said, as those involved in hacking for money carried out ever more attacks.

"It's a real problem and it's growing," he said, "If we do not address it then we are going to be confronted by an event that's so catastrophic that it cannot be shrugged off."

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Plan to build &#39;steam-powered PC&#39;

14 October 2010 Last updated at 08:23 ET By Jonathan Fildes Technology reporter, BBC News

A UK campaign to build a truck-sized, prototype computer first envisaged in 1837 is gathering steam.

More than 1,600 people have pledged money and support to build Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine.

Although elements of the engine have been built over the last 173 years, a complete working model of the steam-powered machine has never been made.

The campaign hopes to gather donations from 50,000 supporters to kick-start the project.

"It's an inspirational piece of equipment," said John Graham-Cumming, author of the Geek Atlas, who has championed the idea.

"A hundred years ago, before computers were available, [Babbage] had envisaged this machine."

Computer historian Dr Doron Swade said that rebuilding the machine could answer "profound historical questions".

"Could there have been an information age in Victorian times? That is a very interesting question," he told BBC News.

Number cruncher

The analytical engine was designed on paper by mathematician and engineer Charles Babbage. It was envisaged that it would be built out of brass and iron.

"What you realise when you read Babbage's papers is that this was the first real computer," said Mr Graham-Cumming. "It had expandable memory, a CPU, microcode, a printer, a plotter and was programmable with punch cards.

"It was the size of a small lorry and powered by steam but it was recognisable as a computer."

Although other mechanical machines may predate the Analytical Engine, it is regarded as the first design for a "general purpose computer" that could be reprogrammed to carry out different tasks.

It was the successor to his Difference Engine, a huge brass number-cruncher.

"The Difference Engine is a calculator," said Dr Swade, who was part of a team that spent 17 years painstakingly building a replica. "It is not a computer in the general sense of the word."

He said that it would be "astounding" if the Anaytical Engine could also be built.

"The Difference Engine is already a legendary model, but it is dinky compared to the Analytical Engine," he said.

He said Babbage's many designs for the device suggested that it would be "bigger than a steam locomotive."

"That is with just 100 variables," he said. "He talked about machines with 1,000 variables, which would be an inconceivably large machine."

No one has built an entire Analytical engine, although various people, including Babbage's son and Dr Swade, have created elements of it.

Dr Swade said the most complex - although incomplete - recreations of elements of the machine have been built using Meccano by Briton Tim Robinson.

Confidence boost

Mr Graham-Cumming aims to recreate a design known as Plan 28 if his campaign is successful. However, he said, there would be a lot of work to do before then, including digitising Babbage's papers that are held at the Science Museum in London.

Dr Swade said that a researcher would also be needed to decipher Babbage's drawings and nomenclature.

"We would then need to build a 3D simulation of the engine [on a computer]," said Mr Graham-Cummings. "We can then debug it and it would make it available to everyone around the world."

Dr Swade, agreed that this was the correct approach and said a virtual recreation of the machine could solve "95% of problems" and allow them to use computer to design the thousands of individual parts needed to make the behemoth.

"Building a virtual engine is the only route of certainty to see the engine built in our lifetimes," he said.

When he built the Difference Engine, this route was not available he said.

First, however, Mr Graham-Cumming needs to raise the money to set up the non-profit Plan 28 organisation to oversee the work.

"I was a little worried whether enough people would care about a steam-powered computer, with 1k of memory that was 13,000 times slower than a [Sinclair] ZX81," he said.

However, he told BBC News, an earlier online campaign had helped persuade him that it was possible.

Last year he launched a petition on the No 10 website calling on the government to make a posthumous apology to World War II code-breaker and computer pioneer Alan Turing for his treatment by the authorities for being gay.

In August 2009, then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown wrote a letter in the Daily Telegraph saying that he was sorry for what had happened.

"That gave me the confidence that there are enough people that care about computing to get this kind of thing done," he said.

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Bing deepens ties with Facebook

14 October 2010 Last updated at 06:29 ET

Microsoft's Bing search engine has begun showing US users which sites and products their Facebook friends like.

The move is an attempt to make web search results more personal.

It is part of a four-year alliance between the two companies and marks another step in Microsoft's attempt to displace market leader Google.

The function is optional and only works when users are logged into Facebook or have "cookies" on their PC that store Facebook data.

"This is just the beginning; there is going to be a whole lot more to come over time," Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said at the launch.

Killer feature?

The service makes use of a Facebook feature that allows third-party websites to embed a "Like" button on their pages. When users click these buttons, it creates a connection with their profile.

These connections are then used to create personalised results, which show up in a separate box alongside traditional links.

At the launch, the firms showed an example of searching for a restaurant with results that included eateries Facebook friends liked.

"This is the long-awaited 'social search' that I've been talking about and waiting for years," wrote analyst Charlene Li of the Altimeter Group.

She said that the deal "hits Google right between the eyes".

"Google has recently been making noises that it wants access to Facebook's social graph, calling for the company to be more open.

"That's because Google realizes that unless it can harness social graph data, it will be relegated to traditional algorithmic search based primarily on the information on the web page itself and scraping what social data it can".

Bing is currently the third most popular search engine behind Google and Yahoo.

However, Microsoft's search engine has been slowly increasing its market share.

The new feature takes advantage of a 2007 deal between Microsoft and Facebook that saw the software firm pay $240m for a 1.6% stake in the social network. That gave it "privileged access" to social data that other firms do not have.

However, Danny Sullivan of respected blog SearchEngineLand, said that he believed that the data used by Bing was currently "far from a killer feature".

"Should it turn out to be, I'd expect Google to ramp up the pressure so that the data should be fully 'freed' to them and others - and perhaps strike a paid deal for access to it, in the way Google pays Twitter for its data."

The two firms also announced a feature that allows people to search for Facebook contacts using Bing.

Facebook, which has come under repeated criticism for its privacy policies, stressed that no private data was shared in either feature.

"This is all information that is public about you anyway," said Mr Zuckerberg.

In related news, reports suggest that Yahoo is being targeted by private equity companies, two years after an attempted takeover by Microsoft.

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Two million US PCs hijacked

13 October 2010 Last updated at 05:56 ET

The US leads the world in numbers of Windows PCs that are part of botnets, reveals a report.

More than 2.2 million US PCs were found to be part of botnets, networks of hijacked home computers, in the first six months of 2010, it said.

Compiled by Microsoft, the research revealed that Brazil had the second highest level of infections at 550,000.

Infections were highest in South Korea where 14.6 out of every 1000 machines were found to be enrolled in botnets.

The 240-page Microsoft report took an in-depth look at botnets which, said Cliff Evans, head of security and identity at Microsoft UK, now sat at the centre of many cybercrime operations.

The research was undertaken, he said, to alert people to the growing danger from the malicious networks.

Malicious herder

"Most people have this idea of a virus and how it used to announce itself," he said. "Few people know about botnets."

Hi-tech criminals use botnets to send out spam, phishing e-mails and launch attacks on websites. Owners of botnets also scour infected machines for information that can be sold on the underground auction sites and markets found online.

Botnets start when a virus infects a computer, either through spam or an infected web page. The virus puts the Windows machine under the control of a botnet herder.

"Once they have control of the machine they have the potential to put any kind of malicious code on there," said Mr Evans. "It becomes a distributed computing resource they then sell on to others."

Some, he said, were being worked very hard by their owners.

Continue reading the main story

"Start Quote

With the significant number of holes identified on the same day, businesses will be racing against time to fix them all,"

End Quote Alan Bentley senior vice-president, Lumension

Microsoft's research revealed that a botnet called Lethic sent out 56% of all botnet spam sent between March and June even though it was only on 8.3% of all known botnet IP addresses.

"It's phenomenal the amount of grip that thing has," said Mr Evans.

Evidence of how botnets were growing, he said, could be found in the number of infected machines Microsoft was freeing from the clutches of botnets.

In the three months between April and June 2010, Microsoft cleaned up more than 6.5 million infections, he said, which is twice as much as the same period in 2009.

The statistics in the report were gathered from the 600 million machines that are enrolled in Microsoft's various update services or use its Essentials and Defender security packages.

Despite the large number of people being caught out, Mr Evans said that defending against malware was straightforward.

He said people should sign up for automatic updates, make sure the applications they use are regularly patched, use anti-virus software and run a firewall.

Microsoft has just issued its largest ever list of fixes for flaws in Windows, Internet Explorer and a range of other software.

This month's update issued patches for 49 vulnerabilities, including one that plugs a hole exploited by Stuxnet, the first-known worm designed to target real-world infrastructure such as power stations, water plants and industrial units.

"With the significant number of holes identified on the same day, businesses will be racing against time to fix them all," said Alan Bentley, senior vice president at security firm Lumension.

"Not only is this Microsoft's largest patch load on record, but 23 of the vulnerabilities are rated at the most severe level," he added.

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