Spy centre seeking code breakers

30 November 2011Last updated at 20:27 ET

UK intelligence agency GCHQ has launched a code cracking competition to help attract new talent.

The organisation has invited potential applicants to solve a visual code posted at an unbranded standalone website.
The challenge will also be "seeded" to social media sites, blogs and forums.
A spokesman said the campaign aimed to raise the profile of GCHQ to an audience that would otherwise be difficult to reach.
"The target audience for this particular campaign is one that may not typically be attracted to traditional advertising methods and may be unaware that GCHQ is recruiting for these kinds of roles," the spokesman said.
"Their skills may be ideally suited to our work and yet they may not understand how they could apply them to a working environment, particularly one where they have the opportunity to contribute so much."
GCHQ said that once the code was cracked individuals would be presented with a keyword to enter into a form field. They would then be redirected to the agency's recruitment website.
The organisation said it was not worried that the problem's answer might be spread around the internet.
It said it would still benefit because the resulting discussion would "generate future recruitment enquiries".
However, it added that anyone who had previously hacked illegally would be ineligible. The agency's website also states that applicants must be British citizens.
Concerns
The move was hinted at two months when Prime Minister David Cameron presented his government's response to the Intelligence and Security Committee's annual report.
The document noted the committee had concerns about GCHQ's "inability to retain a suitable cadre of internet specialists" to respond to cyber threats.
It said that the Cabinet Office supported "initiatives such as the Cyber Security Challenge, which promotes careers in cyber security via annual competitions and events".
Following this the government announced last week that it would set up a specialist department within GCHQ.
The Joint Cyber Unit will concentrate on tackling the growing threat of cyber attacks from organised criminals, terrorists, hostile states and hacktivists.
Innovative
GCHQ claimed that this was the first time this sort of challenge had ever been conducted by an organisation to target these sorts of skills.
However, the agency has used unusual recruitment methods in the past.
In 2009, it placed video content, themes and downloadable pictures on the Xbox Live network which appeared during Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed and other video games.
Two years earlier, it targeted gamers by placing digital posters in online titles including Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas and Splinter Cell Double Agent.

Spotify opens up to add-on apps

30 November 2011Last updated at 13:46 ET

The internet music service Spotify is opening itself up to third party apps.

Developers will be able to write programs to add functionality to the music player, such as the ability to see lyrics or buy concert tickets from artists being listened to.
Co-founder Daniel Ek said he believed the move would be "game-changing for music" adding that many subscribers had requested the feature.
Facebook has found success using a similar model.
Spotify teamed up with the social network earlier this year, allowing its users to reveal which songs they were listening to via its partner's website.
Spotify's decision poses a further challenge to Apple. Although the iPhone maker dominates MP3 sales, its social network feature Ping is not viewed as a success.
Mr Ek believes the introduction of apps will only attract more people to his firm's service.
"We are truly launching integrated apps inside Spotify from the best and the brightest," he said.
"They can access all Spotify's features through an easy-to-use Java script API [application programming interface]."
He added that the programs would be "seamlessly integrated" to the platform, both visually and in their functionality.
"The possibilities are truly endless," he said.
Partners
One of the apps unveiled at the New York press conference was the ability to read reviews from Rolling Stone.
The magazine said it was excited about the possibility of getting its content to music listeners as soon as it was published.
A spokesman for Tunewiki - an internet start-up which provides synchronised lyrics to music - also said he was "thrilled" to be part of the launch.
Other firms offering apps in beta include the tour date tracker Songkick, the music recommendation service Last.fm and the music criticism website Pitchfork.
Mr Ek said his firm would have final approval on which apps were made available. He said that all Spotify members would be able to access them for free, whether they paid for a subscription or used the free advertising-supported service.
However, some industry watchers were concerned by that decision.
"Developers are happy to mess around with these things but people want to see a return on the investment," said Stuart Miles, founder of the tech website Pocket-lint.
"If you can't charge for your app, that's going to put a lot of people off."
Controversy
Spotify says it now has about 10 million active users following its launch in the US in July.
However, some music industry players are concerned that the service discourages users from buying music and have complained that the amount of money Spotify pays out is too low.
Earlier this month ST Holdings - a distributor which represents more than 200 dance labels - removed its entire catalogue from the platform.
It released a statement saying: "Music loses its specialness by its exploitation as a low value/free commodity."
The British band Coldplay also drew attention when it decided not to make its latest album available to Spotify and other streaming services.
When asked about the firm's business model at the press conference, Mr Ek said: "We pay every time someone plays a song, we feel that is great value.
"We are paying out the vast majority of all the revenues and that is how I want to keep on going."

Firms told to delist fake sites

30 November 2011Last updated at 07:38 ET

A US Judge has ordered Google, Yahoo, Twitter and Facebook, among others, to delist domain names linked to websites selling counterfeit goods.

It represents a significant step in the ongoing battle against the sale of fake items online.
The case was brought by luxury goods maker Chanel against 600 sites which it had identified as trading in counterfeits.
Many experts were surprised at the scope of the Nevada judge's ruling.
US firm GoDaddy, which manages around 45 million domain names, has been given control of the web addresses of the 600 firms. It has been told to ensure that none of the sites can be accessed.
Judge Dawson also ordered:

• Google, Bing, Yahoo, Facebook, Google+ and Twitter to remove the domain name from any search results pages.
• The defendants to stop using Chanel's name and images, and to stop selling any Chanel products.
• GoDaddy to link the web addresses involved to a site outlining the case.

Whack-a-mole
Chanel's counterfeit investigative team identified the websites by ordering goods from them which it then determined to be fakes.
Writing about the case in his blog, laywer Eric Goldman said: "Wow, I'm sympathetic to the "whack-a-mole" problem rights owner face, but this relief is just extraordinarily broad and is on shaky procedural grounds."
Others have questioned how much jurisdiction the court would have over domains that had been registered outside of the US.
"One of the problems is that the internet is a global phenomenon and you would need similar judgements in all jurisdictions," said Rachel Barber, assistant at law firm Wiggin.
She linked the case to the L'Oreal versus eBay judgement earlier this year.
In July the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that eBay and others should play a more active role in stopping their sellers from trading in counterfeit L'Oreal goods.
The court said that websites such as eBay might be liable for trademark infringements if they played an "active role" in promoting fake goods.
"It is acknowledged that third party intermediaries are best placed to tackle online infringement and that when intermediaries have knowledge of this based on good evidence that can't just sit on their hands," said Ms Barber.
Google said that it had no comment to make at this stage because it was yet to be served with the judgement. Facebook said was looking into the matter.

3D printer helps grow new bones

30 November 2011 Last updated at 09:10 ET

A 3D printer is being used to create "bone-like" material which researchers claim can be used to repair injuries.

The engineers say the substance can be added to damaged natural bone where it acts as a scaffold for new cells to grow.

It ultimately dissolves with "no apparent ill-effects", the team adds.

The researchers say doctors should be able to use the process to custom-order replacement bone tissue in a few years time.

Prof Susmita Bose helped carry out the work at Washington State University and co-authored a report in the Dental Materials journal.

"You can use the bone-like ceramic powder as a feed material and it can make whatever you draw on the computer," she says.

"It is mostly [suitable for] low load bearing applications. However, what we are trying to develop is the controlled degradation... of these scaffolds where as the scaffold dissolves in the body the bone tissue grows over it."

Binder

Prof Bose's team have spent four years developing the bone-like substance.

Their breakthrough came when they discovered a way to double the strength of the main ceramic powder - calcium phosphate - by adding silica and zinc oxide.

To create the scaffold shapes they customised a printer which had originally been designed to make three-dimensional metal objects.

It sprayed a plastic binder over the loose powder in layers half as thick as the width of a human hair.

The process was repeated layer by layer until completed, at which point the scaffold was dried, cleaned and then baked for two hours at 1250C (2282F).

Repairs

Tests carried on immature foetal bone cells in the laboratory found that new bone cells started growing over the scaffold within the first week of it being attached.

The team say they have also had promising results from tests involving live rabbits and rats.

"The way I envision it is that 10 to 20 years down the line, physicians and surgeons should be able to use these bone scaffolds along with some bone growth factors, whether it is for jaw bone fixation or spinal fusion fixation," says Dr Bose.

This is not the first time that orthopaedic experts have investigated the use of 3D printers.

Earlier this year a surgical trainee at Scotland's Monklands hospital detailed a technique to produce bone replicas using the technology.

Mark Frame suggested using a CAT scanner to produce images of damaged bones.

He said the data could then be fed into a 3D printer to create a model to help doctors plan their surgery.

He said the process cost about a tenth of traditional techniques.

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United Nations agency 'hacked'

29 November 2011 Last updated at 14:37 ET

A group of hackers has posted more than 100 email addresses and login details which it claimed to have extracted from the United Nations.

Many of the emails involved appear to belong to members of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

The group, which identifies itself as Teampoison, attacks the UN's behaviour and calls it a "fraud".

A spokeswoman for the UNDP said the agency believed "an old server which contains old data" had been targeted.

"UNDP is taking action to close any vulnerabilities on our website," said Sausan Ghosheh.

"Please note that UNDP.org was not compromised."

'Leak'

The details were posted on the website Pastebin under the Teampoison logo.

The message preceding the login details accused the UN of acting to "facilitate the introduction of a New World Order" and asked "United Nations, why didn't you expect us?"

Many of the email addresses given end in undp.org, but others appear to belong to members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the UK's Office for National Statistics (ONS).

The poster noted that several of the accounts had "no passwords".

The message ended with the taunt: "The question now is how? We will let the so called 'security experts' over at the UN figure that out... Have a Nice Day."

Credit card attacks

The security company Sophos noted that Teampoison hackers had previously attacked the maker of the Blackberry smartphone's website and had published private information about former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair.

"Teampoison recently announced they were joining forces with Anonymous on a new initiative dubbed 'Operation Robin Hood', targeting banks and financial institutions," the firm's senior technology consultant, Graham Cluley wrote on Sophos's blog.

The groups said at the time that their operation aimed to take money from credit cards and donate it to individuals and charities.

They said people would not be harmed as the banks had to refund fraudulent charges.

Teampoison added a "shoutout" to Anonymous in its UN attack posting, adding a link to a Youtube video with more information about its banking attack plan.

These latest moves serve as a reminder that so-called hacktivists are skilled and willing to collaborate to take down their targets, according to Professor Alan Woodward from the University of Surrey's department of computing.

"One of the big problems is that there is so much data around that people forget about their older systems that still have valuable data on them," he said.

"The lesson here is that anything that holds any data of any value must be protected."

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Osborne announces broadband money

29 November 2011 Last updated at 09:07 ET

Better broadband networks in 10 cities across the UK are being promised by the government.

In his autumn statement, Chancellor George Osborne announced �5bn of spending on infrastructure projects such as roads, railways and broadband networks.

�100m of that is set to boost broadband coverage in London, Belfast, Edinburgh and Cardiff.

A further six cities will be identified later.

"For the first time we are identifying over 500 infrastructure projects we want to see built over the next decade and beyond. Roads, railways, airport capacity, power stations, waste facilities, broadband networks," the chancellor told the House of Commons.

"It means creating new superfast digital networks for companies across our country. These do not exist today. See what countries like China or Brazil are building, and you'll also see why we risk falling behind the rest of the world," he said.

"Our great cities are at the heart of our regional economies. And we will help bring world leading, superfast broadband and wi-fi connections to 10 of them - including the capitals of all four nations.

The plan is to create a hub of super-fast cities with broadband speeds of between 80 to 100Mbps (megabits per second) and city-wide high-speed mobile connectivity.

The current average broadband speed in the UK is 6.8Mbps.

Firms including BT and Virgin will be able to bid for the money, which they can use to fill in urban notspots or increase wi-fi coverage, a spokesman for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport told the BBC.

BT welcomed the news.

"This is a positive initiative that will help ensure our major cities have the best available super-fast broadband. BT is already upgrading large parts of these cities under its commercial rollout plan and these funds could help us go further. We look forward to working closely with the selected cities to see what can be achieved," said a spokesman for the firm.

But critics said the money would have been better spent boosting rural broadband.

"�100m between ten cities is about �1.50 per person. If the government had put the money in rural project it would have boosted rural businesses. Broadband is already available in cities," said Andrew Ferguson, editor of broadband news site ThinkBroadband.

Public funding for new infrastructure projects will come in two chunks - �5bn in the period to 2014/15 and the remaining �5bn to cover longer-term projects over the five years from 2015/16.

The chancellor said that the government has also negotiated an agreement with two groups of British pension funds, to unlock an additional �20bn of private investment in modern infrastructure.

Rural broadband?

The government wants the UK to be the best place for broadband in Europe by 2015.

BT recently accelerated its superfast broadband rollout and now plans to offer fibre services to two-thirds of UK premises by the end of 2014.

Virgin Media has also turned up the speed dial on its services, which is available to half the homes in the UK.

Broadband rollouts in rural areas have been far slower with critics complaining that the �530m set aside by the government to encourage investment in these areas is insufficient.

Much of that money has been allocated to local councils identified as having broadband blackspots but few have yet got projects up and running.

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DIY search engine takes on Google

29 November 2011 Last updated at 04:56 ET

Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search sites have a new rival called YaCy.

Backed by free software activists, YaCy aims to literally put search into the hands of users by distributing its indexing engine around the net.

Anyone can download the YaCy software and help the search system improve and spread the load of queries.

Its creators also hope YaCy will be much harder to censor than existing systems that pipe queries through centralised servers.

Peer privacy

The YaCy search page was opened to the public on 28 November and currently has about 600 participants or peers that share the load of queries and the task of indexing information.

"Most of what we do on the internet involves search," said Michael Christen, YaCy's project leader in a statement. "It's the vital link between us and the information we're looking for."

"For such an essential function, we cannot rely on a few large companies, and compromise our privacy in the process," he said.

YaCy (pronounced "Ya See") is supported by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) which campaigns on digital rights and tries to help people control their own digital destiny.

FSFE said YaCy helps privacy by encrypting all queries and by letting peer owners build up and manage their own search profile.

"We are moving away from the idea that services need to be centrally controlled," said Karsten Gerloff, president of the FSFE. "Instead, we are realising how important it is to be independent, and to create infrastructure that doesn't have a single point of failure."

YaCy software is available for Windows, Linux and MacOS and users are being encouraged to download and run it for themselves.

The first version of YaCy has been used and refined on intranets for the FSFE and the Sciencenet search site.

On its opening day, the YaCy demo page struggled to handle all the queries coming its way.

The prospects for YaCy's success are mixed as there have many other pretenders to Google's crown. One of the most notable was a search engine called Cuil that was set up by two former Google workers.

Cuil launched in 2008 and struggled to win over significant numbers of users. It shut down in late September, 2010.

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200-year old press papers online

29 November 2011 Last updated at 00:18 ET

Four million pages of newspapers from the 18th and 19th centuries have been made available online by the British Library.

The public will now be able to scan the content of 200 titles from around the UK and Ireland.

These will include historic events such as the wedding of Victoria and Albert and the rise of the railways.

Ed King, the British Library's head of newspapers, said it opened up the collection "as never before".

The archive is free to search, but there is a charge for accessing the pages themselves.

Other stories contained within the scanned pages include reporting on the Charge of the Light Brigade.

Mr King said: "Rather than having to view the items on site at the Library, turning each page, people across the UK and around the world will be able to explore for themselves the goldmine of stories and information contained in these pages.

"The ability to search across millions of articles will yield results for each user that might previously have been the work of weeks or months, in a matter of seconds and the click of a mouse."

Included in the project are pages from the Aberdeen Journal, Belfast Newsletter, Western Mail and Manchester Evening News.

A team has spent a year at the British Library's newspaper library at Colindale, north London, digitising up to 8,000 pages a day.

They expect to scan up to 40m pages over the next 10 years.

Ed Vaizey, the Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries, said the archive was "a rich and hugely exciting resource".

He added: "I searched for my own constituency of Wantage and within seconds had 42,000 results - an indication of the breadth and variety of material featured."

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Discounts aid online sales surge

28 November 2011 Last updated at 08:07 ET

Online sales rose faster than expected in the US on Black Friday, according to surveys.

Internet sales totalled $816m (�524m), a 26% gain on last year, said Comscore. IBM Coremetrics put the rise at 24%.

Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, is treated by many retailers as the start of the Christmas shopping season. They offer one-off discounts to mark the occasion.

Analysts said heavy promotional activity helped drive demand.

By comparison, a report by Shoppertrak suggested that in-store Black Friday sales were up by 7% on last year, at $11.4bn.

Beating the rush

Around 50 million Americans visited online retail sites on Friday, according to Comscore.

It said Amazon was the most popular destination, with 50% more visitors than any other retailer.

Walmart, Best Buy, Target and Apple were next in line, said the analytics company.

"Despite some analysts' predictions that the flurry of brick-and-mortar retailers opening their doors early for Black Friday would pull dollars from online retail, we still saw a banner day for e-commerce," said Comscore's chairman, Gian Fulgoni.

Mobile shopping

IBM Coremetrics also noted a trend towards shopping on smartphones and tablet computers.

It said Black Friday purchases made on mobile devices had accounted for 9.8% of all online sales, compared with 3.2% last year.

IBM described mobile shoppers as having had a "laser focus" since they had been more likely to view a single page on a retailer's site rather than browse what else was for sale.

IBM said Apple's iPhone and iPad had generated the most mobile internet visits to online stores, accounting for more than double the traffic originating from devices running Google's Android system.

The company also noted a jump in Black Friday related chatter on social networks. It recorded a 110% rise in discussion volumes after consumers had shared tips on how to secure products before they sold out and the best places to park.

Cyber Monday

Friday's internet sales are expected to be eclipsed today on what is referred to as Cyber Monday - which many experts believe will be the US's busiest online shopping day of the year.

Close to 123 million Americans plan to make an online purchase according to a survey commissioned by the US National Retail Federation, an industry lobby group. That would be a 15% increase on last year.

NRF said nearly eight in ten online retailers would run special promotions including "flash sales that last an hour" and "free shipping offers".

The federation also highlighted the shift to mobile devices, saying it expected 17.8 million Americans to use them to shop today, nearly five times the number in 2009.

"Retailers have invested heavily in mobile apps and related content as the appetite for Cyber Monday shopping through smartphones and tablets continues to rise," said Vicki Cantrell, executive director of the NRF's website shop.org.

Cyber confusion

UK internet retailers said it was less clear which day will be the UK's busiest online shopping day this year.

"Over the last couple of years we have seen a fortnight of peak activity over the period corresponding to both this and next week," said Andy Mulcahy, a spokesman for the industry body Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG).

"We expect �3.72bn will be spent online over the two week period."

Mr Mulcahy said that although some retailers are trying to generate interest in the idea of a cyber event in the UK, but they are split over which day to mark.

Visa Europe said it believed today will be the UK's busiest internet shopping day, with �303m spent online.

eBay has forecast that it would experience its peak in activity this Sunday with more than 5.5 million people expected to log onto the UK version of its auction website.

Amazon said it expected to experience more demand the following day.

"In recent years, the first Monday in December has been Amazon.co.uk's busiest day with orders for over 2.3 million items being placed on Monday 6th December last year," said Christopher North, the website's managing director.

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AUDIO: Should kids learn how computers work?

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Some of the biggest firms in hi-tech, including Google and Microsoft, are calling for major changes in how the UK teaches computing to give Britain the skills it needs to compete.

Technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones and Alex Hope, co-author of the Livingstone Hope Review discuss whether children need to learn how computers work, and not just how to use them.

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Get in touch with Today via <!-- S ILIN --> email <!-- E ILIN --> , <!-- S ILIN --> Twitter <!-- E ILIN --> or <!-- S ILIN --> Facebook <!-- E ILIN --> or text us on 84844.

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