Facebook friends join rich list

9 March 2011 Last updated at 17:46 ET

Mexico's Carlos Slim has topped the latest Forbes magazine rich list, as his wealth grew by more than a third.

The telecoms magnate's fortune rose by $20.5bn (�12.65bn) to $74bn, again beating Microsoft founder Bill Gates ($56bn) into second place.

More than 200 people joined the billionaires list as their numbers rose to a new record of 1,210, Forbes said.

Six billionaires connected with Facebook are now on the list including, Mark Zuckerberg and Sean Parker.

They are joined by Facebook investors Peter Thiel and Yuri Milner as well as co-founders Eduardo Saverin and Dustin Moskovitz, who is the youngest person on the list at 26.

Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad was the biggest loser, down $17bn to $6bn.

He fell from eleventh spot to 162 and was unusual amongst the billionaires in seeing his wealth decrease.

The collective wealth of the billionaires on the list also hit a new record of $4.5tn.

Russian rich

The world's largest economy, the US, continues to have the most billionaires, with 413.

Asia, for the first time in a decade, has more billionaires on the list then Europe, with 332 against 300.

China and Russia have 115 and 101 billionaires respectively, with Moscow now home to more billionaires than any other city in the world.

The city has 79 billionaires, and Russia has the most billionaires in Europe. Germany is in second place with 52.

Meanwhile, Europe acquired 50 new billionaires in 2011, taking it to 300 in total, with a collective worth of $1.3 trillion.

The UK has 32 billionaires on this year's list, three more than last year.

Despite the property slump, Gerald Cavendish Grosvenor and family remain the wealthiest Britons, with a net worth of $13bn, up $1bn on a year before.

Forbes list of world's richest people
Name	Wealth	Main business
Source: Forbes magazine
Carlos Slim	$74bn	America Movil, telecoms
Bill Gates	$56bn	Microsoft, software
Warren Buffett	$50bn	Berkshire Hathaway, investment
Bernard Arnault	$41bn	LVMH, luxury goods
Larry Ellison	$39.5bn	Oracle, software
Lakshmi Mittal	$31.1bn	ArcelorMittal, steel
Amancio Ortega	$31bn	Zara, fashion
Eike Batista	$30bn	Mining, oil
Mukesh Ambani	$27bn	Reliance Industries, Petrochemicals to oil
Christy Walton	$26.5bn	Wal-Mart, retail

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Google donates to Mandela archive

9 March 2011 Last updated at 07:26 ET

Google is to donate $1.25m (�770,000) to a project that aims to create an archive of Nelson Mandela's life.

The Nelson Mandela Foundation Centre of Memory is digitising photographs, letters and other documents relating to the former South African president.

A similar project, chronicling the life of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, will also receive $1.25m.

The money will be used to help collect documents and to ensure that poor, rural communities can access them.

In addition to the funding, Google will contribute expertise in document digitisation and archiving.

The company has spent the past seven years scanning millions of texts as part of its Google books initiative.

Community outreach

Sello Hatang from the Nelson Mandela Centre for Memory said that the grant did not oblige them to adopt Google's systems, but welcomed the search giant's involvement.

"We have been worried about the cost of helping people access the information.

"This will ensure we can mae it avaialble as cheaply as possible," said Mr Hatang.

As well as collating the documents, the foundation runs outreach programmes, helping communities that may not have internet connections to experience the Mandela archive.

When it is complete, the Memory project will include extracts from Mr Mandela's personal correspondence including letters sent during his 27 years in prison.

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Europe 'not ready' for cookie law

9 March 2011 Last updated at 02:55 ET

European rules aimed at giving consumers more control over how their web browsing is tracked will not be enforced come May, experts have said.

No European government has yet drawn up the guidelines for how the ePrivacy directive will be enforced.

It states that websites must seek consent from users before using tracking technologies.

Privacy campaigners say the solutions being put forward are "not fit for purpose".

Detrimental

Alex Hanff, of Privacy International, is shocked by how unprepared European governments are for the directive which comes into force on 25 May.

"This has been on the cards for three years and the industry and governments are simply not ready for it. It is very frustrating for campaigners," he said.

Behavioural advertising is a burgeoning industry for advertisers and, potentially, a very lucrative one.

But it relies heavily on being able to track online behaviour via cookies - small text files placed on a user's computer.

The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) said that the new law "is potentially detrimental to consumers, business and the UK digital economy".

"It raises significant implementation challenges right across Europe," said Nick Stringer, the IAB's director of regulatory affairs.

Browser solution

The IAB and the European Advertising Standards Authority have both argued for self-regulation, and have drawn up guidelines for cookie use on websites.

"They are pretty poor in our opinion, they are not very transparent," said Rob Reid, senior policy adviser for consumer watchdog Which?

But the other extreme - of making consumers consent to every cookie presented to them - is not feasible either, he said.

"Privacy groups have argued to have an opt in for every cookie but that would make browsing a complete nightmare," he said.

"The big challenge is how to obtain permission without affecting the consumer's experience," he added.

Mr Hanff denied that such a solution was unworkable.

"There are very few big players in this industry and it is nonsense that users will be having to click on multiple consent forms," he said.

In the UK, the responsibility of drawing up guidelines falls to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

A spokesman for DCMS told the BBC that while its guidelines will be available at the end of this month, the details of how companies should roll them out will not be ready for the May 25 deadline.

"The technical solutions simply aren't ready yet. It is a highly complex area and needs a huge amount of work," he said.

But he said that the DCMS is "leading the way" in Europe.

One of the solutions it is considering is browser-based consent.

Microsoft's IE 9 browser already offers a setting to protect users from services which collect and harvest browser data and both Mozilla's Firefox browser and Google's Chrome are working at integrating so-called 'Do Not Track' technologies.

But such a solution is "simply not fit for purpose", according to Mr Hanff.

"That would water down the legislation hugely. It doesn't take account of other ways people go online, such as via mobile or tablet apps," he said.

"The advertising market is good at circumventing technology-specific laws," he added.

Valuable data

As governments around Europe grapple with the best way to implement the directive, consumers wanting more transparency on how advertisers are using their data are likely to be disappointed, thinks Mr Reid.

"Come May 25th, consumers are unlikely to notice any major changes to their browsing experience," he said.

Neither will the UK government be acting on complaints from members of public, at least in the short term.

"We don't think it is appropriate for enforcement action to be taken while solutions are being developed," said a spokesman for DCMS.

Once the government has published its guidelines, enforcement will be the responsibility of the Information Commissioner's Office.

It too plans a very light touch when the regulation comes into force.

"We are not saying that we won't take action. We expect firms to be working towards solutions," said a spokeswoman for the ICO.

According to studies conducted by Which? consumer awareness of behavioural advertising and online marketing is very low, but that does not mean people would not consent to being tracked.

Some advertising firms are taking the bull by the horns, making their use of peoples' data explicit and rewarding them for allowing them to use it.

"People are realising that their data is valuable and handing it over in return for preferential deals," said Mr Reid.

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UK 'over-reliant' on GPS signals

7 March 2011 Last updated at 19:06 ET By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News

The UK may have become dangerously over-reliant on satellite-navigation signals, according to a report from the Royal Academy of Engineering.

Use of space-borne positioning and timing data is now widespread, in everything from freight movement to synchronisation of computer networks.

The academy fears that too many applications have little or no back-up were these signals to go down.

Receivers need to be capable of using a variety of data sources, it says.

Dr Martyn Thomas, who chaired the group that wrote the report, told BBC News: "We're not saying that the sky is about to fall in; we're not saying there's a calamity around the corner.

"What we're saying is that there is a growing interdependence between systems that people think are backing each other up. And it might well be that if a number these systems fail simultaneously, it will cause commercial damage or just conceivably loss of life. This is wholly avoidable."

Economic value

Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) such as the US-operated Global Positioning System (GPS) are hugely popular and are finding more and more uses daily.

As well as the car dashboard device that provides directions, sat-nav systems are used by cellular and data networks, financial systems, shipping and air transport, agriculture, railways and the emergency services.

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It is not just the excellent positioning that GNSS affords but the very precise timing information these systems deliver that has made them so popular.

The European Commission, in a recent update on its forthcoming Galileo sat-nav network, estimated that about 6-7% of Europe's GDP, approximately 800bn euros (�690bn) annually, was now dependent in some way on GNSS data.

The RAEng report claims to be the first assessment of just how many applications in the UK now use GPS signals and their like, and their probable vulnerability to an outage of some kind.

It says sat-nav signals are relatively weak - equivalent to receiving the light from a bright bulb at a distance of 20,000km - and this leaves them open to interference or corruption.

Team-work

Possible sources include man-made ones, such as deliberate jamming, and natural hazards, such as solar activity. Both can introduce errors into the data or simply take it out altogether.

"The key thing for us is the concept of cascade failures," said report co-author Prof Jim Norton, the president-elect of BCS - the Chartered Institute for IT.

"This is what we characterise as accidental systems - systems that exist, but people don't recognise they exist because they don't understand the interdependencies. There will be a single common point of vulnerability and failure, but it's not obvious."

Dr Thomas added: "We concluded that the UK was already dangerously dependent on GPS as a single source of position, navigation and timing (PNT) data.

"[We concluded] that the back-up systems are often inadequate or un-tested; that the jammers are far too easily available and that the risks from them are increasing; that no-one has a full picture of the dependencies on GPS and similar systems; and that these risks could be managed and reduced if government and industry worked together."

Jamming ban

The report makes 10 recommendations. Three relate to raising awareness of the problems and getting users to assess their own particular vulnerabilities and possible back-up solutions.

Two cover hardware solutions, including the suggestion of a government-sponsored R&D programme to seek better antenna and receiver technologies to enhance the resilience of systems. The report also lauds the land-based eLoran radio navigation system as a very worthy back-up technology.

And five recommendations fall into the policy domain. Chief among these is the urgent suggestion that mere possession of jamming equipment be made illegal.

Criminal gangs use this equipment to hide their activity, for example blocking the GPS tracking systems in the lorries or high-performance cars they seek to steal.

These jammers can be bought off the internet for as little �20. Some are capable of swamping all receivers over a wide area.

"It's already illegal to put GNSS jamming equipment on the market in the UK," said Prof Jim Norton. "The problem is it's not necessarily illegal to hold it, to import or even to advertise it. It doesn't require legislation; it just requires [the telecoms regulator] Ofcom to place a banning order, and we would strongly recommend they do that."

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How does sat-nav work? Professor Cathryn Mitchell from the University of Bath explains

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Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk

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