End date for analogue TV is set

13 October 2011 Last updated at 19:03 ET

The UK's analogue TV signals will be officially turned off on 24 October 2012.

The last region to enjoy the old style TV broadcasting system will be Northern Ireland and its analogue transmitters will be shut down on that date.

The switch-off brings the curtain down on a transmission technology that lasted for 80 years.

Once free of TV signals, the spectrum currently used for them will be used to support high speed mobile networks.

TV broadcasting began in August 1932 with a series of experimental analogue transmissions to test out the novel technology. The BBC began broadcasting TV to a schedule in 1936.

Freed spectrum

The UK's conversion from analogue to digital TV began in 2008, and early tests of the impact of the switch-off were held in the Cumbrian town of Whitehaven, which was also the first to receive digital-only signals.

Since the official conversion programme began most UK regions have had their analogue signals swapped for digital.

People, who do not subscribe to satellite or cable services have had to buy new televisions or set-top boxes to continue watching programmes.

About five regions, including London and Tyne Tees, remain to switch. Northern Ireland will be the last to swap to digital technology.

Digital is taking the place of analogue so viewers can be offered more channels and higher quality pictures.

The spectrum freed by the turn off of analogue signals will be re-used for a future mobile technology called Long Term Evolution. Ofcom is due to run an auction in late 2012 that will see the radio spectrum sold to operators to use for the service.

Switch-over fund

Ofcom is currently carrying out a consultation exercise to see how many people will suffer interference when LTE is turned on. It estimated that about 3% of UK viewers, about 760,000 people, will see poorer quality TV pictures when LTE is in wide use.

Filters that strip out the interfering signals are expected to solve the problem for most people but others may have to find other ways to watch digital TV.

The government set aside millions of pounds to help vulnerable people make the changes needed for the switchover. Much of that has now been subsumed into the fund to bring next-generation broadband to rural areas.

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Unix creator Dennis Ritchie dies

13 October 2011 Last updated at 10:22 ET

Pioneering computer scientist Dennis Ritchie has died after a long illness.

Mr Ritchie was one of the creators of the hugely influential Unix operating system and the equally pioneering C programming language.

A vast number of modern technologies depend on the work he and fellow programmers did on Unix and C in the early days of the computer revolution.

Those paying respects said he was a "titan" of the industry whose influence was largely unknown.

The first news of Mr Ritchie's death came via Rob Pike, a former colleague who worked with him at Bell Labs. Mr Ritchie's passing was then confirmed in a statement from Alcatel Lucent which now owns Bell Labs.

Jeong Kim, president of Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, said Mr Ritchie would be "greatly missed".

"He was truly an inspiration to all of us, not just for his many accomplishments, but because of who he was as a friend, an inventor, and a humble and gracious man," said Mr Kim.

Along with Ken Thompson, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna, Mr Ritchie was one of the key creators of the Unix operating system at Bell Labs during the 1960s and 70s.

Unix's influence has been felt in many ways. It established many software engineering principles that persist until today; it was the OS of choice for the internet; it kicked off the open source movement and has been translated to run on many different types of hardware.

It was also at Bell that Mr Ritchie created C, one of the most widely used programming languages in the world. It is familiar to almost every modern-day developer.

In 1999, Mr Ritchie's influence and accomplishments won official notice when he was awarded the US National Medal of Technology - the highest honour America can bestow on a technologist.

Mr Pike said that with his passing, the world had lost a "truly great mind."

Paying tribute on his blog, Google programmer Tim Bray said it was impossible to overstate the debt his profession owed to Dennis Ritchie.

"I've been living in a world he helped invent for over thirty years," he wrote.

On Twitter, developer James Grimmelman said: "Ritchie's influence rivals Jobs's; it's just less visible."

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Blackberry service 'is improving'

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Stephen Bates, RIM UK: "The back-up system did not operate in the way we would expect"

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Blackberry's owner RIM said that its services "have improved significantly", following a three-day global blackout.

Millions of customers worldwide had their messaging and email service disrupted with many turning to Twitter to express their anger.

RIM put the ongoing problems down to "backlog issues", following a system failure.

Users began to report loss of services mid-morning on 10 October and the problems spread around the world.

On Thursday, RIM issued a statement saying services across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and India "have improved significantly".

"We continue to monitor the situation 24x7 to ensure ongoing stability," the update on its website said.

The firm is keen to be seen as sorting the problems swiftly, following confusion earlier in the week when it said services were back to normal, only to be contradicted by frustrated customers.

Robin Bienfait, chief information officer of RIM, the Canada-based owner of Blackberry, issued an apology for the ongoing issues.

"You've depended on us for reliable, real-time communications, and right now we're letting you down. We are taking this very seriously and have people around the world working around the clock to address this situation," he said.

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"We believe we understand why this happened and we are working to restore normal service levels in all markets as quickly as we can."

It blamed the ongoing issues on a backlog of emails to Europe from Asia and the Americas, following a "core switch failure" in its infrastructure.

"Clearly we have a backlog in Europe... as you can imagine, with the global reach of Blackberry and people using it to contact others around the world, there's a lot of messages to Europe from Asia and the Americas," RIM software vice president David Yach told a press conference in Ottawa, Canada.

"Over time that backlog has built up and affected our other systems."

'Data backlog'

Many tweeters called on the phone firm to "sort out" the problems and get the network running again.

RIM eventually explained what had caused the problems in the first place.

"The messaging and browsing delays... in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India, Brazil, Chile and Argentina were caused by a core switch failure within RIM's infrastructure," a company statement said.

"Although the system is designed to failover to a back-up switch, the failover did not function as previously tested.

"As a result, a large backlog of data was generated and we are now working to clear that backlog and restore normal service as quickly as possible."

The server problems are believed to have originated at RIM's UK data centre in Slough.

The "issues" left many Blackberry owners only able to text and make calls.

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BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones: "Blackberry has so many high profile users who are complaining about the crash"

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Such a major failure will come as unwelcome news to RIM, which has been losing market share to smartphone rivals - in particular Apple's iPhone.

Many corporate clients have switched to the device after Apple made a concerted effort to improve its support for secure business email systems.

Malik Saadi, principal analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media, said the timing of the outages was bad for RIM.

"The current situation with the Blackberry outages couldn't come at a worse time for RIM, following some harsh criticism in recent months," he said.

Such crashes may lead RIM and others to "re-evaluate their reliance on centralised servers and instead look to investing in more corporately controlled servers", he added.

But he thinks customers will stick with the firm despite current frustrations.

"It will take more than just a couple of collapses to persuade loyal consumers of Blackberry services to look for alternatives," he said.

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Arrest made in LA hacking probe

12 October 2011 Last updated at 16:18 ET

The FBI has arrested and charged a Florida man in a probe of email hacking that targeted Hollywood celebrities, US law enforcement officials say.

Christopher Chaney, 35, of Jacksonville, was arrested on Wednesday on charges stemming from a year-long probe known as Operation Hackerazzi.

He is accused of hacking into more than 50 email accounts.

According to an FBI statement, Mr Chaney offered up photos from the accounts to celebrity blog sites.

He is also alleged to have stolen financial information and film scripts through hacking email accounts.

"Unfortunately, Mr Chaney was able to access nude photos of some of the celebrities and some of them were uploaded on the internet," US Attorney Andre Birotte Jr said.

Mr Birotte confirmed that a recently circulated nude photo of film star Scarlett Johansson is part of the investigation.

Mr Chaney is charged with hacking Google, Apple and Yahoo email accounts.

He set up each account to forward a copy of every email received to himself, according to the charge sheet issues by a Los Angeles grand jury.

He faces up to 121 years in prison if convicted on all 26 charges, including accessing and damaging computers, wire tapping and identity theft.

The Florida man allegedly used several online aliases, including "anonygrrl" and "jaxjaguars911".

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