Zero hour for Call of Duty sequel

8 November 2010 Last updated at 07:29 ET By Daniel Emery Technology reporter, BBC News <!-- Embedding the video player --> <!-- This is the embedded player component -->

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Radio 1 Newsbeat goes behind the scenes at a video games warehouse

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The eagerly anticipated sequel to the biggest selling video game in history goes on sale tonight.

Thousands of gamers are expected to queue at over 400 stores in the UK to get their hands on a copy of Call of Duty: Black Ops.

The title goes on sale at midnight, with special events being held in cities across the globe.

Its predecessor, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, generated more than $1 billion (�618) in sales.

That puts it in an elite club of billion-dollar entertainment giants such as James Cameron's Titanic and Michael Jackson's Thriller.

Call of Duty: Black Ops is the seventh game in the series and the third to be developed by US based developer Treyarch.

Piers Harding-Rolls, an analyst with Screen Digest, told BBC News that he thought Black Ops would do as well, if not better, that Modern Warfare 2.

"We're looking up to 18 million units sold worldwide, putting it in the same league as Modern Warfare 2," he said.

"This edition also has a [Nintendo] Wii version and while the average Wii owner probably won't be that interested, it does mean that the potential market is a bit bigger than before," he added.

Gamers play as a CIA operative or Special Forces agent; members of a clandestine agency tasked with uncovering a Soviet chemical weapon code named Nova-6 during the Cold War.

In addition to standard ground combat, Treyarch have added a mission in which users control a Russian Hind helicopter, as well as flying US spy planes.

There is also a bonus multi player level where users have to defend Washington from waves of flesh-eating zombies.

Stocking fillers

Call of Duty: Black Ops is the last of the big first-person-shooter titles to be released in the run up Christmas.

Halo Reach - the exclusive XBox 360 title released in September - sold more than 300,000 copies on its launch day, according to the games industry magazine MCV.

Medal of Honor, Call of Duty's traditional rival, has also recently had a refresh.

The latest edition courted controversy by allowing gamers to take on the role of the Taliban, prompting calls from soldiers and politicians for the game to be banned. Its publisher Electronic Arts eventually renamed the enemy forces "the Opposition".

Recent figures suggest that, despite the publicity, Medal of Honour sold less than 350,000 units in the UK. By comparison, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 sold an 1.23 million units, according to industry body Elspa.

"Medal of Honour didn't review particularly well and its still the case that those who don't have an average score [in the games press] in the 80 and 90s don't sell as well," said Mr Harding-Rolls.

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Nokia reabsorbs Symbian software

8 November 2010 Last updated at 12:40 ET

Nokia has taken back control of the Symbian operating system, 18 months after it set up a non-profit foundation to oversee its development.

Nokia will control the future direction of the the world's most popular smartphone software from April 2011.

Analysts said the move was inevitable as firms abandoned Symbian for rival software such as Google's Android.

The Symbian Foundation - a consortium of firms that oversees the software - will become a licensing body.

"There has since been a seismic change in the mobile market but also more generally in the economy, which has led to a change in focus for some of our funding board members," said Tim Holbrow, executive director of the Symbian Foundation.

"The result of this is that the current governance structure for the Symbian platform - the foundation - is no longer appropriate."

He said that as of April 2011 it was "unlikely" that the foundation would need "any employees".

The decision comes less than two years after Nokia paid 264m euros (�227m) to buy out the other shareholders in Symbian.

The Finnish phone giant then teamed up with others, such as AT&T, LG, Motorola, NTT Docomo, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone to set up the Symbian Foundation.

The organisation was set the task of "open-sourcing" the code underlying the software.

Earlier this year, that was completed meaning that any organisation or individual could use and modify the platform's underlying source code "for any purpose".

During that time the phone market significantly changed.

Figures from research firm Canalys show that in the third quarter of this year the smart phone market grew by 95% over the same quarter a year.

However, Symbian's portion of that market has consistently shrunk.

"With the benefit of hindsight, it looks like the decision to go with the open source approach was the wrong one," Ben Woods of analysts CCS Insight told BBC News.

"The delays caused by the open source approach has undoubtedly led to Nokia losing its competitive edge."

Recently, the Symbian foundation lost its executive director and firms such as Samsung and Sony Ericsson withdrew their support for the software.

"The question is, is it too late to have a meaningful impact on the future direction of the operating system," said Mr Woods.

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Navy website suffers hack attack

8 November 2010 Last updated at 08:04 ET

The Royal Navy's website has been hacked by a suspected Romanian hacker known as TinKode.

The hacker gained access to the website on 5 November using a common attack method known as SQL injection.

TinKode published details of the information he recovered, which included user names and passwords of the site's administrators.

A Royal Navy spokesperson confirmed the site had been compromised and said: "There has been no malicious damage."

They added that as a precaution the site has been "temporarily suspended" and that security teams were investigating how the hacker got access. They said no confidential information had been disclosed.

The Royal Navy website currently shows a static image on which is a black box bearing the text: "Unfortunately the Royal Navy website is undergoing essential maintenance. Please visit again soon."

TinKode first mentioned the attack on his Twitter stream and added a web link to a page that contained more details about what he had found.

This text file contained the names of the site's administrators and many regular users.

The attack used to get the information compromises the database used to run a site by sending malformed queries and analysing the responses this generates.

Graham Cluley, senior security analyst at Sophos, said the incident was "immensely embarrassing, particularly in the wake of the recent security review where hacking and cybercrime attacks were given the top priority.

"Now we have the Royal Navy with egg on its face."

Mr Cluley said the hacker had apparently gained access to the Navy's blog, Jackspeak, and to an area called Global Ops.

"He's obviously more of a show-off type of hacker rather than malicious," said Mr Cluley.

"But if he'd wanted to he could have inserted links which would have taken the website's readers to malicious sites."

Tinkode has apparently carried out 52 separate defacements of websites in the last 12 months, according to website ZoneH.

Targets included everything from small businesses to adult websites. He has also uncover vulnerabilities in high-profile sites such as Youtube.

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UK space earnings now at �7.5bn

8 November 2010 Last updated at 02:43 ET By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News

UK space companies have defied the recession, growing by an average of 10% a year from 2007.

So says a report from the Oxford Economics consultancy, which predicts the growth will continue in 2010.

The space business is now said to have a turnover worth some �7.5bn, with employment rising at about 15% a year.

The best performing areas are in so-called downstream activities - services such as satellite broadcasting and telecommunications.

But even the upstream sector - such as satellite manufacturing - recorded a very healthy performance, averaging annual growth of 3% over the period 2006/07 to 2008/09.

The latest "Size and Health" report was commissioned by the UK Space Agency and is based on a survey of the activities of 260 leading companies.

"We had good anecdotal evidence through the recession that we were doing well but now we have the hard numbers; and it's very positive," said Richard Peckham from EADS Astrium and chair of UK Space, an umbrella group representing the industry.

The sector recently set out a 20-year vision for itself called the Space Innovation and Growth Strategy (S-IGS).

It identified what it thought were the emerging market trends and the approaches that needed to be adopted to exploit them.

It covered areas as diverse as space tourism and the delivery of broadband internet by satellite.

The vision called on industry to intensify its R&D spending, but also for government to increase its investment.

Continue reading the main story

UPSTREAM AND DOWNSTREAM

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• Upstream provides space technology - satellites, their components, ground control systems; research, etc
• Downstream uses space technology - satellite TV, satellite telecommunications, sat-nav devices, etc
• Major players include companies such as BSkyB, Inmarsat, Pace, EADS Astrium, Qinetiq, Logica, SciSys, Fugro

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If that happened, the S-IGS said, the UK space sector could create up to 100,000 new UK jobs in space-related activity and grow revenues to �40bn a year.

Mr Peckham said the government could help underpin the success story.

The space sector is currently championing the potential of a privately financed, national Earth-observation (EO) service to acquire imagery for the MoD and other government departments, while selling other data on the open market.

The satellites would be built and operated by the private sector, but to stand a chance of success the project would need a long-term commitment from the government to purchase its products.

"Government has a huge influence through procurement; it's what they buy," Mr Peckham told BBC News.

"We think one of the biggest markets going forward is Earth observation. We're not asking for hundreds of millions of pounds from government, but if they will just aggregate all their requirements then we can build something and go and export it."

Other examples of smart government investments include the Hylas-1 spacecraft. Due to launch on 25 November, it will become Europe's first broadband dedicated satellite, providing internet connections to rural areas poorly served by terrestrial technology.

Hylas will be operated by start-up Avanti Communications, but the spacecraft's core technology came out of a European Space Agency R&D programme funded by the British government.

Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk

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