China has claimed the top spot on the list of the world's supercomputers.
The title has gone to China's Tianhe-1A supercomputer that is capable of carrying out more than 2.5 thousand trillion calculations a second.
To reach such high speeds the machine draws on more than 7,000 graphics processors and 14,000 Intel chips.
The claim to be the fastest machine on the planet has been ratified by the Top 500 Organisation which maintains a list of the most powerful machines.
High power
China's Tianhe-1A (Milky Way) has taken over the top spot from America's XT5 Jaguar at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee that can carry out only 1.75 petaflops per second. One petaflop is the equivalent of 1,000 trillion calculations per second.
The news about the machine broke just before the publication of the biennial Top 500 Supercomputer list which ranks the world's most powerful machines.
Prof Jack Dongarra from the University of Tennessee, one of the computer scientists who helps to compile the list, said China's claim was legitimate.
"This is all true," he told BBC News. "I was in China last week and talked with the designers, saw the system, and verified the results."
He added: "I would say it's 47% faster than the Oak Ridge National Laboratory's machine, 1.7 Pflops (ORNL system) to 2.5 Pflops (Chinese system)."
Tianhe-1A is unusual in that it unites thousands of Intel processors with thousands of graphics cards made by Nvidia.
The chips inside graphics cards are typically made up of small arithmetical units that can carry out simple sums very quickly. By contrast, Intel chips are typically used to carry out more complicated mathematical operations.
The machine houses its processors in more than 100 fridge-sized cabinets and together these weigh more than 155 tonnes.
Based in China's National Center for Supercomputing in the city of Tianjin, the computer has already started to do work for the local weather service and the National Offshore Oil Corporation.
The internet is worth �100bn a year to the UK economy, a study has concluded.
The research, which was commissioned by Google, found that the internet accounts for 7.2% of the UK's gross domestic product (GDP).
If the internet was an economic sector it would be the UK's fifth largest, said the report from the Boston Consulting Group (BCG).
This would make the sector larger than the construction, transport and utilities industries.
Central pillar
Some 60% of the �100bn a year figure is made up from internet consumption - the amount that users spend on online shopping and on the cost of their connections and devices to access the web.
The rest comes from investment in the UK's internet infrastructure, government IT spending and net exports.
The UK, according to the report, is the world's leading nation for e-commerce. For every �1 spent online to import goods, �2.80 is exported.
"This is the opposite of the trend seen in the offline economy, which exports 90p for every �1 imported," the report says.
Internet companies play a vital role in employment with an estimated 250,000 staff, the report finds.
Small businesses that actively use the internet report sales growth more than four times greater than that of less active companies.
The report also attempts to compare the UK to other countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Under its scoring system, the UK ranks sixth, above Germany, the US and France. The highest ranked country is Denmark.
"The internet is pervasive in the UK economy today, more so than in most advanced countries," said Paul Zwillenberg, partner with BCG.
"Several industries - including media, travel, insurance and fashion - are being transformed by it."
Matt Brittin, managing director of Google UK, said: "The internet is a central pillar of the UK's economy.
"The sector has come of age, and with great prospects for further growth the UK internet economy will be vital to the UK's future prosperity," he added.
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27 October 2010Last updated at 03:25 ETBy Jane WakefieldTechnology reporter
Virgin Media is set to turn up the dial on its cable network, offering users speeds of up to 100Mbps (megabits per second).
It aims to provide the service to over 50% of the UK by mid-2012, beginning in December with 200,000 homes in London, the Home Counties and West Yorkshire.
It is the latest move in the race to bring super-fast broadband services to the UK.
It will give new impetus to rival BT's super-fast broadband rollout.
Left behind
Neil Berkett, chief executive of Virgin Media described the service as "a significant milestone".
"The world of possibilities that broadband will enable is set to explode," he said.
The first towns earmarked for the super-fast service are Chelmsford, Farnborough and Heckmondwike in West Yorkshire.
The service will be available as part of a telephone or TV bundle for �35 a month or �45 for a standalone broadband product.
"It will be interesting to see whether the British public will be tempted away from their compulsion for cheap deals," said Michael Phillips, product director of comparison website broadbandchoices.
"So far only a small proportion of Virgin Media's four million broadband customers have signed up to its 50Mbps service," he added.
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Mr Berkett said Virgin Media had seen "a massive uptake" in the number of customers watching video-rich services and using bandwidth-hungry applications.
"We are now in a world where people want the best connectivity with whatever screen they are using and those service providers that aren't able to deliver this will simply be left behind," he said.
BT is Virgin Media's chief rival in the super-fast broadband race and is planning to offer fibre optic broadband to around 70% of the UK by 2012.
It questions Virgin's prices.
"Thier new service is more than twice the price of BT's fibre product and we are surprised by the high price when most family budgets are tight," said a statement from BT.
It also questioned why Virgin Media has not been required to open its network to other operators in the same way as Ofcom requires of BT.
The majority of BT's next-generation broadband roll-out consists of so-called fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC), which is initially delivering top speeds of around 40Mbps (megabits per second).
The faster fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) technology, which can offer speeds to compete with Virgin's network, will only be available to a quarter of the total.
Experts argue that FTTH is a more future-proofed technology because it offers much faster upload speeds for services such as high-definition video conferencing which are becoming more popular.
Virgin's 100Mbps service will offer upload speeds of 10Mbps.
"This will be of particular interest to those who are sharing content online, and may help drive wider use of cloud-based applications," said Sebastien Lahtinen, co-founder of broadband news site ThinkBroadband.
League table
Prime minister David Cameron welcomed the Virgin Media roll-out.
"We want to see superfast broadband brought to peoples' homes and businesses right across the country and this exciting news takes us a step closer towards reaching that goal," he said.
Despite the government's determination to make the UK the fastest broadband nation in Europe by 2015, Britain is currently ranked 18th in the global broadband ratings.
It has also failed to make it on to super-fast broadband rankings released by the Fibre to the Home Council for Europe at this week's World Broadband Forum in Paris.
The league tables show that some 18 million homes in Europe can get FTTH, with Eastern European countries dominating the rankings.
In many cases this is because of poor existing infrastructure meaning fibre optics make good economic sense while the high proportion of people living in flats mean more homes can be reached via such technology.
We expect the government to continue to make lots of positive noise and encouragement for the private sector, without actually reaching for their chequebook"
End QuoteCharlie PonsonbySimplifydigital
Chris Holden, president of the FTTH Council for Europe said Eastern Europe could become a more attractive place to do business.
"Businesses will go where the bandwidth is. It is disappointing that countries such as Italy and France are at the bottom of the rankings while the UK, Germany and Spain aren't even on it," he said.
He said that despite a flurry of recent activity it would be "very difficult" for the UK to catch up.
No money
The European Union wants to see half of Europe's homes benefitting from 100Mbps broadband by 2020. By the same date it wants 100% of homes to have broadband speeds of at least 30Mbps.
Charlie Ponsonby, chief executive of broadband comparison service Simplifydigital, said it was hard to see where the money will come from for such an ambitious roll-out.
"The UK's broadband infrastructure is much like the railway infrastructure - getting better, but by no means up there with the world leaders. The trouble is, it is likely to cost about �2.5bn to bring us in line with the best in the world," he said.
"We expect the government to continue to make lots of positive noise and encouragement for the private sector, without actually reaching for their chequebook," he added.
Last week the government annnounced that the BBC would fund super-fast broadband roll-outs in rural areas.
At the World Broadband Forum, companies have been busy showing off their net wares, including a glut of companies offering cheaper solutions to fibre optics.
Some firms are offering ethernet solutions for the so-called last mile of connection between the telephone exchange and peoples' homes which would offer 100Mbps at a fraction of the cost of FTTH.
Network firm Adtran has ongoing trials of its Ultra Broadband Ethernet technology and is on the verge of signing deals with several European telcos.
At the other end of the scale, a device to boost the speeds of broadband in rural areas was also being shown off.
The WiBE gadget connects to the 3G network, creating a web hotspot where phones and dongles have no signals.
Although its average speed is just 2.8Mbps it could be a lifeline for remote areas languishing on dial-up speeds.
The gadget goes on sale in the UK from next week.
The UK government has put back the timetable to offer a minimum 2Mbps broadband connection to every home from 2012 to 2015.
Dutch police have taken the unusual step of tapping into hijacked computers to tell users that their machines had been taken over.
It is the culmination of an operation to close 143 servers commanding an army of 30 million hijacked computers around the globe.
The infected machines formed a huge botnet, giving criminals access to sensitive information.
Experts have questioned whether it puts the Dutch police in breach of the law.
It is believed to be the first time a police force has used such an approach.
"Technically, what the Dutch police did could be considered to breaking the law in some countries, by making unauthorised changes to another user's computer," said Graham Cluley, a senior consultant at security firm Sophos.
"I think it's unlikely that anyone would believe legal action against the police would be appropriate in this circumstance. They're trying to make the best of a bad situation," he added.
But it may not have convinced everyone.
"Some users may not believe the warning and may think it's one of the commonly seen fake security warnings that tries to trick users into taking a dangerous action," he said.
The botnet closed down by Dutch police was created using the so-called Bredolab trojan, malicious code which allowed criminals to capture bank details and other sensitive information from infected machines.
In a statement the Dutch hi-tech crime squad said that Armenian police had arrested "the probable mastermind" behind the Bredolab botnet at Yerevan airport in Armenia.
It said that it had decided to let users know their machines were part of the botnet.
"More than 100,000 computer users have been warned that their computers are part of the botnet," the statement read.
It said had received 55 responses from users whose computers were compromised.
Although the decision to use a botnet for innocent purposes might be a first in the police force, it is not the only time a botnet has been taken over.
The BBC programme Click took control of over 22,000 home computers last year as part of an investigation into hi-tech crime.
An injunction issued by the US district court in New York has effectively shut down LimeWire, one of the internet's biggest file-sharing sites.
It ends four years of wrangling between the privately-owned Lime Group and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
The injunction compels Lime Group to disable its searching, downloading, uploading and file trading features.
The firm plans to launch new services that adhere to copyright laws soon.
Visitors to the LimeWire website are confronted with a legal notice that reads: "This is an offical notice that LimeWire is under a court ordered injunction to stop distributing and supporting its file-sharing software."
It adds that "downloading or sharing copyrighted content without authorisation is illegal".
The RIAA told the AP news agency that it was pleased by the judge's decision.
"It will start to unwind the massive piracy machine that LimeWire... used to enrich themselves immensely," said RIAA spokesman Jonathan Lamy.
LimeGroup appeared to acknowledge defeat.
"We are out of the file-sharing business, but you can make it known that other aspects of our business remain ongoing," Lime Group spokeswoman Tiffany Guarnaccia told AP.
The firm is working on developing new software that will adhere to copyright laws.
Microsoft must think beyond the PC if it is to weather the changes due to hit in the next five years.
The warning was given by Microsoft's chief software architect Ray Ozzie in a memo penned soon after he announced he was leaving the company.
In it, Mr Ozzie said that the last five years had been "breathtaking" and expected the next five to be the same.
But, he said, the strengths that had helped Microsoft grow in the past now risked holding it back.
The memo, called "Dawn of a New Day" mirrors one Mr Ozzie wrote soon after taking over from Bill Gates as the man in charge of charting the development direction of Microsoft's portfolio of programs.
That first memo imagined a world of seamless computing and kicked off Microsoft's attempts to get its many different programs working together across lots of different devices.
In Dawn of a New Day, Mr Ozzie praised the work Microsoft had done towards that end, but said rivals had done even better.
"...their execution has surpassed our own in mobile experiences, in the seamless fusion of hardware and software and services, and in social networking and myriad new forms of internet-centric social interaction."
The reason for this, he suggested, was Microsoft's legacy of being intimately tied to the PC.
Those who can envision a plausible future that's brighter than today will earn the opportunity to lead. "
End QuoteRay OzzieMicrosoft chief software architect
"For the most part, we've grown to perceive of "computing" as being equated with specific familiar "artifacts" such as the "computer", the "program" that's installed on a computer, and the "files" that are stored on that computer's "desktop".
Such thinking, he said, was becoming less and less relevant as the way people used computers and what they did changed.
"...the early adopters among us have decidedly begun to move away from mentally associating our computing activities with the hardware/software artifacts of our past such as PC's, CD-installed programs, desktops, folders & files," he wrote.
Connections rather than computers were more important, he suggested, and devices were becoming almost disposable.
"They're instantly usable, interchangeable, and trivially replaceable without loss," he said.
To prosper and stay relevant, he said, Microsoft must embrace this change and get to grips with a world that cares about "continuous services" rather than computers.
"Close our eyes and form a realistic picture of what a post-PC world might actually look like, if it were to ever truly occur," he wrote. "Those who can envision a plausible future that's brighter than today will earn the opportunity to lead."
Britain's privacy watchdog is to look again at what personal information internet giant Google gathered from private wi-fi networks.
The Information Commissioner's Office had investigated a sample earlier this year after it was revealed that Google had collected personal data during its Street View project.
At the time, it said no "significant" personal details were collected.
But Google has since admitted that e-mails and passwords were copied.
We want to delete this data as soon as possible, and I would like to apologise again for the fact that we collected it in the first place."
End QuoteAlan EustaceGoogle
On its official Google blog, senior vice president Alan Eustace wrote that the company was "mortified" to discover, after the initial investigation in May, that personal information had been collected.
Privacy watchdogs in numerous countries, including France, Germany and Canada, had also investigated the information.
"It's clear from those [external] inspections that while most of the data is fragmentary, in some instances entire e-mails and URLs were captured, as well as passwords," Mr Eustace wrote.
"We want to delete this data as soon as possible and I would like to apologise again for the fact that we collected it in the first place.
"We are mortified by what happened, but confident that... changes to our processes and structure will significantly improve our internal privacy and security practices for the benefit of all our users."
A spokesman for the Information Commissioner's Office said it had kept an eye on international investigations since its own one concluded in July.
That investigation said that the information "did not include meaningful personal details that could be linked to an identifiable person".
Enforcement powers
However, Google's admission of more detailed data has prompted further action by the ICO.
"We will be making enquires to see whether this information relates to the data inadvertently captured in the UK, before deciding on the necessary course of action, including a consideration of the need to use our enforcement powers," a spokesman said.?
Information about the gathering of personal data came to light following a request by data protection authorities in Hamburg, Germany, for more information about the operation of Google's Street View technology which adds images of locations to maps.
This revealed that Google had "accidentally" grabbed data from unsecured hotspots for years as its Street View cars captured images of street scenes.
It led to many data protection authorities pressing Google for access to the mass of data it grabbed to see if laws on the protecting of personal information had been broken.
Taken together, people have been millions of pounds out of pocket as a result"
End QuoteEd RichardsOfcom
T-Mobile has now agreed to do so and Vodafone is now doing so for its direct debit customers.
Meanwhile Virgin Media and Virgin Mobile have agreed to do so from 1 December for sums greater than �1, and O2 will now automatically credit sums of more than �20.
But Ofcom said Sky, Talk Talk and Three are still insisting on customers contacting them first.
The regulator criticised this stance, saying everyone in the industry should refund customers with all the outstanding credit they were owed, without customers having to ask first.
"Consumers were telling us that they found it difficult to claim unused credit from their providers when they left their contracts," said Ofcom's chief executive, Ed Richards.
"Taken together, people have been millions of pounds out of pocket as a result.
"We hope that automated refund processes, clearer signposting by providers and our new consumer guide should help consumers claim back money that is rightfully theirs," he added.
China has launched an official online mapping service called Map World.
The web-based service gives people access to increasingly detailed satellite images of China and high-level images of other nations.
The flat maps can be viewed in 3D if visitors download and install a browser plug-in to convert the images.
China said the service was still in development and would be updated regularly. It said it could currently handle about 10 million visits per day.
Map World has been created by China's State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping from satellite images collected over the last four years. It said the information depicted would be updated every six months.
Within the nation's borders, images have a 2.5m resolution in rural areas and can go down to 0.6m resolution in 300 cities. Beyond its borders, images have a 500m resolution and many nations are blank when users zoom in.
Mapping services are tightly restricted in China and any company wanting to offer them must obtain a licence. This imposes strict conditions on what they can show and where the servers hosting the service can be located.
The Mapping bureau said about 80 companies, including Nokia, had bought mapping licences. Google is not thought to be one of them.
When China announced plans for the map licence scheme the search giant said it would consider its options before deciding whether to sign up. Google does have maps of China on its services but they are not as detailed as in many other nations.
One stumbling block could be the widely publicised shift of Google's servers out of mainland China to avoid official oversight of what its users were doing.
Almost 250,000 Germans have told Google to blur pictures of their homes on the Street View service.
The German government insisted that people get the chance to make the request as a condition of letting Google operate Street View.
It said personal privacy would be violated if people did not have an option to opt out.
When Street View is live in Germany, citizens will be able to use a webform to request their homes to be obscured.
Since April 2009, German home-owners and tenants have had the chance to write to Google to tell it to blur images of where they live. In August, Google supplemented this with an online tool through which these requests could also be made.
Now the window to make requests has closed, Google said a total of 244,237 requests had been made to have homes and property obscured.
However, said Google, it was not yet clear if all the requests to blur images could be carried out.
Street View has had a troubled time in Germany. It was requests from the Hamburg information commissioner which uncovered Google's mistaken collection of personal data from unsecured wi-fi networks.
Street View has hit problems in many other places too. In mid-October Canada's privacy commissioner said Google's accidental gathering of personal data while snapping images amounted to a "serious violation" of its privacy laws.
In September, the Czech government banned Google from taking any new photos for the service.
In August, authorities in South Korea raided Google's offices prior to the switch-on of a version for the nation.
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