Amazon rekindles Twitter in China

2 November 2010 Last updated at 16:27 GMT Kindles have been selling on the grey market in China Amazon's Kindle devices are selling in China because the e-reader allows users to log on to banned sites such as Twitter and Facebook, reports say.

The device bypasses the infamous Great Firewall, making it popular on the so-called grey market according to the South China Morning Post.

Officially the Kindle is not available in mainland China.

But a quick search of Chinese auction site Taobao reveals hundreds of them on offer.

Facebook dream

The device sells for between 1200 (£112) and 3500 (£327) yuan.

Chinese bloggers told the paper they were surprised to get access to sites banned by the Chinese authorities.

"I still can't believe it. I casually tried getting to Twitter and what a surprise, I got there,"

"And then I quickly tried Facebook, and it perfectly presented itself. Am I dreaming? No, I pinched myself and it hurt," one blogger said.

Kindle software is primarily designed to allow users access to e-books and other digital media but also allows for web browsing.

Professor Lawrence Yeung Kwan of the University of Hong Kong's Electrical and Electronic Engineering department told BBC News that he was aware of people on the mainland using the Kindle to log on to banned sites.

He thinks that Amazon is likely to have a 3G partner in China.

"The Kindle software routes traffic directly to Amazon's servers," he said.

But it would not be a difficult job to stop it.

"If this doesn't have encryption the authorities just need to turn on the firewall to stop it but if there is encryption the government would have to talk to the carriers and order them to stop forwarding traffic without access to the encryption keys," he said.

He thinks use of Kindles to bypass the firewall is unlikely to be widespread.

"The Chinese government could easily block it and maybe the reason they haven't is because the device currently isn't available in China officially and there are no Chinese language books so people aren't that interested," he said.

There are ways for Chinese citizens to dodge the censors although none are automatic, in the way the Kindle is.

Some use free, open source, peer-to-peer software such as Tor to evade the censors although some estimates suggest only a minority of people use such technology.

But more people are realising that content is censored and looking at ways to bypass it.

"Ordinary people have found ways to scale the firewall and it is almost impossible to stop," said Professor Yeung Kwan.

Amazon did not offer comment on the story.

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Cow app wins African competition

8 October 2010 Last updated at 09:40 GMT The competition had entrants from Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania An application which tracks the fertility of cows has won the first ever Apps 4 Africa competition to find new talent as smartphones become increasingly popular in Africa.

Offering a prize fund of $5,000, the competition asked developers in Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania to come up with a mobile application that is widely accessible, easy to use and simple.

Continue reading the main story

I want to thank you for lending your innovate spirit and creativity to the enterprise of building a better future for your communities.”

End Quote Hillary Clinton US Secretary of State The competition, funded by the United States government, hoped to unite the brightest African developers with people who could benefit most from innovate mobile technology.

Launched back in July in Nairobi, the competition attracted 20 entrants - each offering a unique approach to improving life in the region.

Moo-bile innovation

The winner, announced this week, was iCow - an application that helps cow farmers maximise breeding potential by tracking the fertility cycle of their animals.

"It's a voice-based application, meaning they don't have to have a special smart-phone," explained Charles Kithika, the app's creator.

"[They] just need an ordinary phone and then dial in a toll-free number."

Mr Kithika said the rise in popularity of mobile apps in Africa is partly down to M-PESA, software which facilitates the transfer of money.

Runner-up in the competition was Kleptocracy Fighters, an app which helps users combat instances of government corruption.

Features include the ability to upload audio, video and text to the web quickly - acting as evidence of bribery or other wrong-doing.

Continue reading the main story Digital Planet is the weekly technology programme broadcast from the BBC World ServiceIt is broadcast on Tuesday at 1232GMT and repeated at 1632GMT, 2032GMT and on Wednesday at 0032GMTAll the competition entrants were praised by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who said that the apps "solved real problems".

"The ideas generated from this competition will help doctors monitor the growth and nutrition of young patients, will help expand trade by translating prices and quantities into local languages, will hold public officials accountable by reporting election violations and tracking public expenditures.

"I want to thank you for lending your innovative spirit and creativity to the enterprise of building a better future for your communities."

Google breached UK data laws in its collection of personal data via Street View cars, the UK's Information Commissioner says.

The island disputes of China, Russia and Japan

Yemenis reject 'terrorism taint' after parcel bomb plot

Striking images from around the world

Capturing the memories of family funerals

BBC Travel samples the therapeutic waters at five very different spas to find one that suits you

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Firms face fines for bogus bills

2 November 2010 Last updated at 11:12 GMT The firm has been told to "clean up its act" by Ofcom Two telecom firms, TalkTalk and Tiscali, have been threatened with fines for billing customers for services that had been cancelled.

The regulator Ofcom has received more than 1,000 complaints this year and says more customers may be affected.

The customers had typically complained about aggressive demands for the payment of bills they did not owe.

TalkTalk blamed a new billing system introduced after it bought Tiscali in June last year.

This is gradually bringing together a million former Tiscali customers on seven different billing systems and integrating them with TalkTalk's own customer database.

The regulator warned that "many thousands more" may have been wrongly charged.

But TalkTalk said no more errors of this sort were likely to be made, as the billing system had now been fixed to stop it generating any more spurious bills for customers who had left.

"TalkTalk Group has co-operated fully with Ofcom's investigation and we apologise for the inconvenience caused to this limited group of former customers," the company said.

Continue reading the main story

Our investigation into TalkTalk and Tiscali UK found that they had billed customers for cancelled services”

End Quote Claudio Pollack Ofcom 'Unacceptable' Ofcom has told TalkTalk to stop trying to collect any non-existent debts, including the use of debt collectors and threats of legal action.

People must be refunded if, since 1 January 2010, they have paid bills that should not have been levied.

And credit ratings agencies must be told to repair any damaged credit histories.

If the company fails to comply by 2 December it may be fined as much as 10% of its annual turnover.

"Ofcom is determined to stand up for consumers and take action against companies that break the rules," said Ofcom's director of consumer affairs, Claudio Pollack.

"Our investigation into TalkTalk and Tiscali UK found that they had billed customers for cancelled services; this is unacceptable which is why we have ordered them to clean up their act or face the consequences."

Slow to act

Mr Pollack said the problems were still going on and TalkTalk had been slow to do anything about them.

"It's been five months now since we drew TalkTalk's attention to this, it's been three months since we opened an investigation," he told the BBC.

"There are still complaints about customers receiving bills for services that were not delivered and there are even complaints about customers who have been referred to debt collection agencies," he added.

Robert Hammond at Consumer Focus said: "It is shocking that it has taken the intervention of the regulator for Talk Talk and Tiscali UK to play fair with their customers."

Ernest Doku at the price comparison website Uswitch said: "Anyone affected by this issue should first try to resolve it with their provider, but if they are not getting anywhere should go directly to one of the accredited dispute resolution bodies such as Otelo or CISAS."

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US midterms 2010: download the election results data

US midterms election results. Photograph: Pool/Getty Images

As midterm election results go, this was pretty dramatic as Barack Obama suffered one of the worst Democratic defeats in recent history.

The political momentum has swung to the rightwing Tea Party movement, which energised the Republican base and notched up a string of high-profile victories.

In midterm election races across America, Republicans pummelled their opponents, capturing the House of Representatives and a fistful of Senate seats. The Democrats, however, held control of the Senate – but with only a slim majority after losing six seats. The party won key races in West Virginia and Nevada, where the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, also pulled off a surprise victory against the Tea Party darling Sharron Angle in in one of the most bitterly fought contests of the campaign.

We've been updating our interactive map all night. And here is the data.

Download this data Columns where content =1 or 0 mean 1 for yes, 0 for no Download this data Columns where content =1 or 0 mean 1 for yes, 0 for no

• DATA: download the HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES full spreadsheet
• DATA: download the SENATE AND GOVERNORS full spreadsheet

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BBC Micro gets a new lease of life

25 August 2010 Last updated at 08:02 GMT By Mark Ward Technology correspondent, BBC News Ellie Gibson joined Ousedale School students learning how to program BBC Micros at the National Museum for Computing in Bletchley

In our regular series about makers, hackers and amateur technologists, BBC News meets the people giving the classic BBC Micro a new lease of life.

Computer history is cruel. It is a story of the old constantly being pushed aside for the newer, the faster, the smaller, the shinier.

Those old machines are rarely allowed a graceful retirement. Cast aside, they end their days in the dark ,fit only to be homes for spiders in lofts and cupboards.

But one lucky flock of BBC Micros is getting another lease of life by helping to educate students in the art of rigorous programming.

The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) at Bletchley Park has started letting a few lucky A-level students loose on the machines to hone their programming skills.

"The computing A-level is about how computers work and if you ask anyone how it works they will not be able to tell you," said Doug Abrams, an ICT teacher from Ousedale School in Newport Pagnell, who was one of the first to use the machines in lessons.

The BBC Micro has an unforgiving interface

For Mr Abrams the old machines have two cardinal virtues; their sluggishness and the direct connection they have with the user.

In one of the first lessons held at TNMOC the lucky Ousedale students programmed a venerable PDP-8 machine by flicking the switches set on its front panel to set the binary values in its memory. And an interface does not get more direct than that.

"Modern computers go too fast," said Mr Abrams. "You can see the instructions happening for real with these machines. They need to have that understanding for the A-level."

Cranking code

The second time the students got to use the BBC Micros they were given three hours to create a simple 8-bit game. Tech Know was there to record what happened.

Prior to the lesson Mr Abrams had produced 100 lines of code that created a rough version of the game pitting a battleship against a bomber. The students' task was to refine the game by introducing a scoring system, improving its looks and introducing new elements such as a hunter-killer submarine.

Two students tackled the bugs and refinements, two the graphics and sounds and the remaining student got to work typing the program onto other machines so testing could get going.

The five soon discovered that just because a program was simple did not mean the underlying code was straight-forward. To make matters more testing, the BBC Micro offers a very unforgiving programming environment.

Micro Live focussed on computing issues with the BBC Micro, Spectrum, Olivetti and other machines. This episode is from 17th October 1986.

For much of their A-level, the students had been using Visual Basic - a breeze by comparison.

"Because there's no copy and paste, if you do something wrong it takes time to go back and fix it," said Joe Gritton. "You cannot take out sections and move them around."

Be the machine

Perry Gemmell lamented the lack of friendly interface on the BBC Micro, which presents users with a screen full of text.

"It's easier to find bugs in Visual Basic," he said. "It helps you as you go along."

Visual Basic suggests words while a coder types, highlights syntax errors and makes bug hunts easier by jumping straight to the problematic code - even when the error is one of logic rather than letters.

By contrast, the BBC Micro is a study in imperious indifference. Get something wrong and the program will crash and perhaps throw up an error message. Worse are the cases when it works but not in the way expected leaving the programmer to scratch their head and try to work out why.

The machines also enforced a parsimonious programming style. A memory of only 32K is a shoebox in comparison to the Lordly halls of memory available on the average 21st-Century desktop.

Continue reading the main story Designed and built by Acorn Computers for the BBC Computer Literacy ProjectUsed alongside TV series The Computer ProgrammeFirst released in 1981; discontinued in 1994Cost £235 at launchFirst version had just 16 KB of RAMMore than 1.5m soldThe simple program that the students were working on threw up some real problems.

Mr Gritton and partner Callum Adams were given the task of adding a submarine. But, they realised, the introduction of the torpedo-firing sub would spell the end of the game, as the ship had no way to avoid it.

Changing one element in the simple game kicked off the need to solve lots of separate problems - it was a real exercise in creative coding. The students had their eyes on the screen and their hands in the bits.

"We're learning a lot," said Callum Adams. "It makes you realise how difficult it is making real video games."

The day of study had begun with what must be the ultimate hands-on technology experience: Mr Abrams got the students to be a computer.

They each took on the role of a different part of the machine - CPU, accumulator, RAM and program counter - and simulated the passage of instructions through the hardware.

The five shuffled data around, wrote it to memory, carried out computations and inserted them into the right places in the store.

It was a noisy, confusing and funny simulation and, once everyone knew what they were doing, managed to reach a maximum clock speed of about one instruction per minute.

And even the BBC Micro, for all its age, can beat that.

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TalkAndroid InfoByte: Episode 12 – 11/8/10

TalkAndroid InfoByte – 11/8/10

Welcome to the new TalkAndroid InfoByte, our weekly Monday Podcast that gets you caught up on the week’s news.

You can either stream it to your browser (above), or you can download it here. We should note that, if you click the stream link above (play button next to the link) from your mobile browser, it should open up in your Android media player.

The RSS feed for the podcast is available here.

Did you enjoy this post? Subscribe to our RSS Feed! or visit the Android Forum!

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RockMelt: Social browsing done right?

Two years in the making, and with a staff of some 30 people, the latest "social browser" today makes its way onto the web.

Dubbed the "Facebook browser", RockMelt is making a big splash. The new browser integrates familiar social features – chiefly Facebook – and naturally plans to reinvent how people use the internet.

But haven't we been here before?

Built atop Google Chromium, RockMelt looks to boom where others – namely, Flock – have failed to take off.

As an interface, RockMelt trumps Flock, which moved from Firefox to Chrome four months ago. With a handful of small-scale embellishments, RockMelt moreorless stays true to Chrome.

RockMelt moves into private beta: Chrome with strings attached? Image: RockMelt

But the Facebook integration, with a left-hand panel of "top friends", would no doubt prove aggravating as updates – comments, wall posts, and the like – are piped through to the browser, appearing as an orangey-yellow blob whenever new content is available. Likewise on the right-hand side panel with RSS feeds, from where you can drag-and-drop content to share with Facebook friends.

The search box – why does it need a search box? – also loads results in a drop-down menu, saving approximately 0.3 seconds from the average search. It's not to everyone's taste. Over at Daring Fireball, John Gruber notes: "They solved the problem of Chrome having a nice, simple, minimalist interface."

RockMelt is perhaps better-placed to drive forward social browsing where others have faltered. Its lead investor, Andreessen Horowitz, is jointly run by Marc Andreessen, who co-founded Netscape Communications. Its co-founder, Tim Howes, also figured in The Great Browser Battle of Netscape-Microsoft. They've seen browsers come and go.

While we wait for our beta request to be approved, have you jumped onto RockMelt yet? Tell us in the comments below. If, that is, your attention remains undisturbed for long enough.

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The business of innovation

7 November 2010 Last updated at 23:04 GMT By Fiona Graham Technology of business reporter, BBC News Steven Johnson: "The lone genius is the exception rather than the rule."

Standing on the station platform, waiting for the Philadelphia train one night in the summer of 1902, Willis Carrier was about to have his 'eureka moment'.

As the fog rolled in across the track, he suddenly realised how he could fix the nascent air-cooling system he'd been working on, using water as a condensing surface.

This sudden moment of inspiration led to the invention of modern air-conditioning, a fortune for its inventor, and the foundation of a multi-billion dollar company.

The lone genius, beavering away in the seclusion of his lab is how most of us imagine the great moments of innovation have come into being. But is this really the whole story?

Not entirely, according to author Steven Johnson. He believes Willis Carrier is very much the exception rather than the rule.

"It's not that the individuals disappear in this, it's just that they need to be part of something larger than themselves to be able to do the work that they do."

This is not completely new ground for Mr Johnson. He has written seven books on how science, technology and human experience interact, including the best-selling Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter.

He is the co-founder of three websites - the now defunct Feed magazine, Plastic.com and his current project: hyperlocal aggregator outside.in. He also has nearly 1.5m followers on social media site Twitter.

Isolation v collaboration

His latest book, Where good ideas come from: The natural history of innovation, is his attempt to explain the phenomenon of inspiration.

"[Good ideas] come from crowds, they come from networks. You know we have this clichéd idea of the lone genius having the eureka moment.

Slow hunch: John Snow, who discovered how cholera was spread, had no 'Eureka' moment

"But in fact when you go back and you look at the history of innovation it turns out that so often there is this quiet collaborative process that goes on, either in people building on other peoples' ideas, but also in borrowing ideas, or tools or approaches to problems.

"The ultimate idea comes from this remixing of various different components. There still are smart people and there still are people that have moments where they see the world differently in a flash.

"But for the most part it's a slower and more networked process than we give them credit for."

The book spans a huge period in history, ranging from the invention of double entry accounting, and Gutenberg's printing press in the 15th century, through to Tim Berners Lee and the world wide web, and ultimately YouTube.com.

He had the idea for the book while writing The Ghost Map, about the cholera epidemic of 1854 in London, and the subsequent discovery of the origins of the disease. The story goes that a man named John Snow had had the idea to map cases of the disease, and using that map pinpointed the source of the outbreak - a water pump.

As he researched the story he realised that it simply wasn't true - that Snow had had the idea for some time before this and that he also had had a collaborator, a vicar named Henry Whitehead who was central to the investigation. This is what Mr Johnson calls the 'slow hunch'.

"I realised there was this theory about innovation, and the spaces that made innovation possible, that was lurking in the background of that story"

Innovation space The book starts with a young Charles Darwin on a sun-drenched tropical beach in the Keeling Islands, as he formulates his theory on the creation of these coral islands - not simply pushed up by volcanic forces, but the result of the work of millions and millions of tiny organisms - the coral itself.

He is at the beginning of the 'slow hunch' that would result decades later in his theory of evolution. The coral reef also provides Mr Johnson with his analogy for the perfect innovation environment - a hugely diverse eco-system where despite the constant competition for resources, existence is dependent on collaboration.

This could be a city, a coffeehouse, an environment where ideas come into contact with each other - as Mr Johnson puts it, a liquid network.

"You know I think that there are two [perfect reefs] that really stand out. Clearly the web itself has been an amazing reef. Just the speed with which it's transformed itself over the last 15 years is just amazing.

"And so much of that is because it's wonderfully set up for other people to build on top of other people's ideas. In many cases without asking for permission.

"But I think that the other thing I want the book to be a reminder of is how much important innovation both in the commercial space and the private space comes out of the university system.

Charles Darwin, like most great thinkers, had a lot of hobbies

Universities, Mr Johnson argues, have in many ways exceeded the market in terms of the pace with which they generate ideas - despite the lack of the 'direct reward' found in the commercial arena.

"I think there's this abiding belief that markets drive innovation, corporations drive innovation, entrepreneurs driven by financial reward drive innovation, and while that's certainly true in many cases there's also this very rich long history of important world-changing ideas coming out of the more or less intellectual commons of the universities.

"The internet was not commercially useful to most ordinary consumers for 30 years really. It was in a sense a 30-year-hunch. It was providing other services in that time but in terms of the ordinary consumer and the payoff for investment it took a long time.

One of the other great preoccupations of the book is the concept of the 'adjacent possible', a phrase coined by the scientist Stuart Kaufman. In essence it means that invention is dependent on the right circumstances - as in a chess game, where there are a finite set of moves available at any given time.

"You can't invent a microwave oven in 1650, it's just beyond the bounds of possibility. There are too many intermediate steps on the way to something that complex.

"So the trick is to find the points of possibility in your own particular place and own particular space. And not jump too far ahead. It's kind of an argument for small modular steps using the ingredients available to you and not trying to reinvent everything.

Building your reef Jack Kilby invented the integrated circuit, but built on the ideas of others

So what should companies be doing to foster innovation in their workforces? Mr Johnson argues that creativity is a continuous process.

"Part of the problem is that one day a year they have a corporate retreat and they all go into the country, and they do brainstorming sessions and trustfalls and then they go back to work.

"But equally you don't want to have a non-stop creative process where nothing gets done.

"Corporations have an opportunity to cultivate hunches and hobbies and the sideprojects of their employees because those are such great generators of ideas."

Google is one company that has famously capitalised on giving space for workers to innovate, with its 20% time system. Employees are required to spend 20% of their time working on their own pet projects.

According to the company, about 50% of new features and products have resulted from it, including Adsense, Google suggest and social network Orkut.

"One of the lessons I've learned is that so many of these great innovators, Darwin is a great example of this, one shared characteristic they all seem to have is a lot of hobbies."

"I mean the web was a hobby for Tim Berners Lee, that's one of the wonderful things about it, it was a side project at his job at Cern."

Still from promotional YouTube clip mapping the ideas in the book

Mr Johnson's open, collaborative environment is the antithesis of the closed rooms of corporate Research & Development and the increasingly litigious world of the intellectual property lawyer. For some companies betting on the slow hunch that may pay off in 30 years may seem a risk too far.

But for those who yearn to find the spark within ourselves, Mr Johnson rounds off the book with this advice:

"Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down; but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies, frequent coffee houses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent."

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Viral Video Chart: Wayne Rooney rant and the Rent Is Too Damn High Party

Something's got Ian Holloway's goat. Boardroom pay leaping by 55% while almost everyone else feels the squeeze? Meh. The cap on housing benefit that could drive 200,000 people out of inner cities? Not a mention.

Instead it's the "frightening" direction of the business of football. "How wrong is the game?" the Blackpool manager rails in an extended diatribe, brought on by the apparent bullying of Manchester United by its star player's agents.

The founder of five-year-old US political outfit, Rent Is Too Damn High Party, rocketed into the viral stratosphere this week with his contribution to the New York governor candidates' debate on poverty, karate, gay marriage, and, well, rent. If you're here for a feline fill, take the next left at Non-embeddable-video Hill.

Finally, get ready to cry with a mixture of laughter and remorse. Here's two kittens, one ill-fated, and a lot of falling over.

Guardian Viral Video Chart. Compiled by Unruly Media and fiddled with by Josh

0 Fainting goat kittens
:-(

1 Cats playing Wing Chun Sticky Hands
Almost 4,000 shares in the last seven days – for a video posted 25 months ago! Embedding disabled. Grrr.

2 Back to the Mac in 104 seconds
Really great. Awesome. Isn't that great?

3 Presenting Jimmy McMillan, of The Rent Is Too Damn High Party
McMillan dominates a debate for the governership of New York.

4 Gordon Pinsent reads Bieber
I'll be honest. I'd never heard of Gordon Pinsent before this.

5 People are awesome
Hadouken. Remember them?

6 Argos advert 'Crooner'
Thee is a big part of me that hates Argos for this.

7 Audrina Patridge's mum delivers inspired monologue
Quite.

8 YouTube Play – live streamed from the Guggenheim
A taster of the projections on the facade of the New York museum.

9 WWE's Undertaker and Brock Lesnar exchange words following UFC 121
'The Undertaker' issues a personal challenge to rival after a wrestling bout.

10 Ian Holloway's outburst on Wayne Rooney
"They are so wrong this is frightening ... How wrong is the game?"

Source: Viral Video Chart. Compiled from data gathered at 19:30 on 28 October 2010. The Weekly Viral Video Chart is currently based on a count of the embedded videos and links on approximately two million blogs.

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Burma hit by massive net attack

4 November 2010 Last updated at 15:33 GMT Huge amounts of traffic easily overwhelmed Burma's links to the net An ongoing computer attack has knocked Burma off the internet, just days ahead of its first election in 20 years.

The attack started in late October but has grown in the last few days to overwhelm the nation's link to the net, said security firm Arbor Networks.

Reports from Burma say the disruption is ongoing.

The attack, which is believed to have started on 25 October, comes ahead of closely-watched national elections on 7 November.

International observers and foreign journalists are not being allowed into the country to cover the polls.

It will raise suspicions that Burma's military authorities could be trying to restrict the flow of information over the election period.

The ruling generals say the polls will mark a transition to democratic civilian rule.

But as the BBC's Sue Lloyd-Roberts reports from Burma, many believe the election is a sham designed to cement the military's grip on power.

In the last elections in 1990, Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) won a landslide victory but the junta ignored the result and have remained in power ever since.

Cyber attack

The Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, as it is known, works by flooding a target with too much data for it to handle.

Continue reading the main story First election in 20 yearsTotal of 37 parties contesting the polls29 million voters eligible to cast ballotsAbout 3,000 candidates of whom two-thirds are running for junta-linked parties1.5 million ethnic voters disenfranchised because areas deemed too dangerous for voting to take placeNo election observers, no foreign journalistsThe "distributed" element of it means that it involves PCs spread all over the world. These networks of enslaved computers - known as "botnets" - are typically hijacked home computers that have been compromised by a virus.

They are typically rented out by cyber criminals for various means, including web attacks. They can be called into action and controlled from across the internet.

Burma links to the wider net via cables and satellites that, at most, can support data transfers of 45 megabits of data per second.

At its height, the attack was pummelling Burma's connections to the wider net with about 10-15 gigabits of data every second.

Writing about the attack, Dr Craig Labovitz from Arbor Networks said the volume of traffic traffic was "several hundred times more than enough" to swamp these links.

The result, said Dr Labovitz, had disrupted network traffic in and out of the nation.

He said the attack was sophisticated in that it rolled together several different types of DDoS attacks and traffic was coming from many different sources.

At time of writing, attempts to contact IP addresses in the block owned by Burma and its telecoms firms timed out, suggesting the attack is still under way.

"Our technicians have been trying to prevent cyber attacks from other countries," a spokesperson from Yatanarpon Teleport told the AFP news agency.

"We still do not know whether access will be good on the election day."

Mr Labovitz said that he did not know the motivation for the attack but said that analysis of similar events in the past had found motives that ran the gamut "from politically motivated DDoS, government censorship, extortion and stock manipulation."

He also noted that the current wave of traffic was "significantly larger" than high-profile attacks against Georgia and Estonia in 2007.

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Caymans beat Wales to .cym domain

4 November 2010 Last updated at 07:22 GMT A four-year campaign to secure a ".cym" internet address for Wales has been lost to the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean.

DotCYM project leaders in Aberystwyth said it was disappointing, but they still plan to bid for a Welsh version of the .com or .co.uk domain.

They are appealing for new suggestions and said .cymru could be used instead.

An internet expert said it was "more complex" for nations like Wales to secure their own domain names.

The Cayman Islands already has its own internet domain, .ky, but it is also registered to use .cym.

DotCYM was set up in 2006 to campaign for a Welsh internet address name and claims the support of businesses, local authorities and public bodies.

The group has the support of the Welsh Assembly Government, which awarded it a £20,000 grant in 2008.

The Welsh bid follows the successful .cat application from the Catalan linguistic and cultural community.

Following the set back, DotCYM managing director Siôn Jobbins, from Aberystwyth, has asked supporters to come up with new suggestions and has appealed for their views.

Mr Jobbins said the Welsh domain bid would be presented at the "earliest possible opportunity" to Icann, the organisation controlling names on the internet.

"It looks increasingly likely that Icann will open the application process in 2011 so we need to decide on the Welsh domain by the end of this year," he added.

"We'd like to hear the views of people on which domain they'd like to use, for instance .cymru .cwl (Cymru Wales) or .wales.

"We are still going ahead with the bid and that isn't affected. Not being able to use .cym is a shame, but it's not a problem."

Mr Jobbins said after submitting the bid his group would have to wait for up to six months for approval and it could be a year before the domain goes live.

Haydn Blackey, of the University of Glamorgan, who lectures about the internet said: "It's easier for nations recognised by the United Nations to secure these domains, rather than nations, like Wales, which are part of larger countries.

"For Wales to make its own claim (for a domain) makes it's more complex."

He said Icann was likely to process a bid from a country which already had a "distinctive national identity" a lot quicker.

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Navy website suffers hack attack

8 November 2010 Last updated at 13:04 GMT The Royal Navy website has been suspended while security teams investigate 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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'Fair trade' language learning

17 September 2010 Last updated at 11:01 GMT By Dave Lee BBC World Service Gareth Mitchell learns French using Glovico, a language learning service They say the best way to learn a language is to get stuck in, immersing yourself in a culture in a way that means you have no choice other than to adapt.

Human interactions, with all the real life quirks which make language so interesting, are essential if you are to become fluent.

Continue reading the main story

I think these kinds of virtual environments are really great, really good. Kids in school respond very well to these sorts of approaches.”

End Quote Linda Parker Association for Language Learning In the past, you would have to fly out to various corners of the world to achieve such a level of immersion.

But now, in our ever-shrinking, networked world, the chance to learn new languages direct from the communities that speak it naturally is just a few clicks away.

Glovico.org calls itself a "fair-trade" language learning website, empowering people in the developing world to offer language learning opportunities to students in developed countries.

Supported by the Sainsbury Management Fellows' Society, Glovico signs up language teachers in places such as Peru and the Ivory Coast, and uses Skype to bring pupil and teacher together.

For an hourly fee of around 8 euros, the language-learner gets a one-on-one video tuition session. Glovico is a non-profit organisation, thus takes only a small amount - 2 euros - of the fee to maintain administration and infrastructure costs.

The rest is sent straight to the teacher by international money transfer. Glovico says the money earned from lessons is a big contribution to a teacher's monthly income.

"This is a fantastic opportunity for fair trade," said Phil Westcott, who represents the site in the UK and North America.

"As they build up a reputation and their ratings from the students improve, it will give an open market opportunity for these people to increase the amount that they charge for their lessons."

The rating system allows the site to crowd-source feedback to benefit potential students looking for a teacher. The tutors are rated on such factors as timeliness, competence and accent - as well as connection quality.

To ensure the quality of the teaching can be trusted, Glovico uses representatives in the respective countries to vet the teachers.

"We currently have operations in Senegal and Ivory Coast for French teachers and also in Guatemala, Peru and El Salvador for the Spanish teachers," explained Mr Westcott.

Virtual learners

Glovico is not the first to bring language learning to the web.

Language Lab is an online English-learning website which launched in 2005. Built on the once hugely-hyped Second Life platform, it aims to place students in a virtual environment which emulates real-life.

In Language Lab, learners enter a virtual English city

"Our teachers are all usually English teachers in normal schools who are picking up wages by coming home at night and doing a class," said Michael Lee, head of marketing for the site.

"People are immersed in a completely English city - there's everything from airports, to hospitals, to emergency scenarios. You can utilise and learn English in a way you'd previously never realised."

One particular scenario involved students being inside a burning building, and having to work together - using English - to evacuate and deal with the problem.

The site currently has around 600 active, paying members. But they say they expect this to grow massively as they are now taking on corporate clients - businesses and authorities who need to quickly teach English to a large group of employees, but can not afford to send people to lessons or for trips abroad.

Linda Parker, director of the Association for Language Learning, is enthusiastic about the possibilities of learning languages online.

Continue reading the main story Digital Planet is the weekly technology programme broadcast from the BBC World ServiceIt is broadcast on Tuesday at 1232GMT and repeated at 1632GMT, 2032GMT and on Wednesday at 0032GMT"There are lots of different ways of learning languages.

"Different people learn in different ways. I think these kinds of virtual environments are really great, really good. Kids in school respond very well to these sorts of approaches."

She says that if a language is to be truly mastered it has be studied the old-fashioned way, but for learning enough to visit and enjoy other countries, learning online is great - particularly for people who are perhaps not keen on an intimidating classroom environment.

"It takes away some of that anxiety about language learning that people can sometimes experience in when they're in classroom.

"Anything that brings language alive, whether that's in the real world or the virtual world, is a good thing."

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Google turns off GMail data feed

8 November 2010 Last updated at 10:50 GMT Google is keen to get at the wealth of information inside Facebook. GMail contacts will no longer be automatically handed over to other websites and services, says Google.

The search firm will now only share user information if the site wanting access provides reciprocal data feeds to others.

The policy switch was primarily aimed at Facebook, said Google, complaining that the social network left users in a "data dead end".

Google said the policy switch would be implemented over the next few weeks.

Like many other web firms, Google lets others get at the data it holds on users of its many services via what is known as an Application Programming Interface (API).

Before the policy switch sites such as Facebook used Google's API to let their users automatically import GMail contacts so they could rapidly fill out their profile and find others that use the service.

Now Google will only give automatic access to GMail contacts to those sites and services that let others mine the data they hold.

In a statement shared with the Reuters newswire, Google singled out Facebook for criticism.

"We have decided to change our approach slightly to reflect the fact that users often aren't aware that once they have imported their contacts into sites like Facebook, they are effectively trapped," said Google.

Facebook has yet to comment on the row.

Gartner analyst Ray Valdes told Reuters that Google's decision is tied into its business ambitions.

"Google needs to evolve to become a big player in the social Web and it hasn't been able to do that," he said.

Analysts also suspect that Google's decision is related to the deal struck between Facebook and Microsoft that allows user data to power the Bing search engine.

Although Google has stopped the automatic siphoning of GMail data it is still possible for users to download their contacts and then can be shared with any web service.

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Close to the wind

4 November 2010 Last updated at 18:22 GMT By John Maguire Reporter, BBC News John Maguire takes a look at Team Bristol's wind-powered car

On a deserted runway near the Wiltshire, Berkshire border a car emerges from an aircraft hangar.

It may look like a go-kart with huge Mickey Mouse ears made from giant desk fans, but its designers say this vehicle is highly innovative.

For the past year, a team of engineering students from the University of Bristol has designed, built and tested the wind-powered car.

When you see the vehicle in action you have to pinch yourself. As the wind blows, the double turbines begin to spin, the wheels turn and the car moves.

Progress is slow, steady, but above all surprising. And that's because the vehicle travels not with the wind, but against it. It's may appear counter-intuitive, but it works.

For propulsion, it needs a good stiff breeze, preferably well above 10mph (18km/h). The wind blows over the turbine blades and just like the familiar wind farms, they start to turn.

The higher the speed, the faster the blades spin. As they do so, through a system of cogs and gears and a drive shaft attached to the wheels, the car moves forward.

"We're not pretending we'll all be driving around in wind powered cars in the future", says Doctor David Drury, the academic in charge of the project.

"But it gives the students a brilliant opportunity to get their hands on and to put their theories to the test."

Head turner

To put the car through its paces the team took it out to the annual Aeolus Wind Turbine Race, held at an airfield in Western Denmark.

The event attracts teams of students from across Northern Europe.

The teams compete over a 500m course

The favourites from the University of Amsterdam won in 2009 and had decided to re-enter their winning design alongside a brand new car.

Their arch rivals from Utrecht arrived with a spectacular looking car and even more impressive team uniforms that included individually named jump-suits.

The team from Stuttgart had also tasted victory before. Their bright red car boasted sleek aerodynamic lines and showed early promise.

But Bristol's car, with its double turbines and electric transmission, was turning heads.

"We've thrown the vehicle together, literally, in a handful of months," James Baker, one of the team, said.

"The other teams, looking at their vehicles, have spent an awful lot more time than we have."

Record beater

The race rules dictate that the cars including the blades must be no wider than 2m (7ft) with a maximum height of 3.5m.

The car used parts designed for an electric bicycle

"No one said anything about the number of turbines though," said Mr Baker.

Using an electrical controller the driver can yaw the blades until they catch the wind.

During the course of the three-day event, the best teams set new records, well above half of wind speed. It was impressive to see the wind blowing hard in one direction and the cars travelling the opposite way.

And the Bristol team completed the 500m course in a modest 29 minutes and 46 seconds.

The overall winners, Amsterdam, made it across the line in a fraction of that time.

But for Dr David Drury the competition was about more than just crossing the finishing line.

"We've gained valuable experience," he beams, "and ideas about how we can crush the competition next year."

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iPhone DST alarm bug lives on to bite Americans

Photo by kodomut on Flickr. Some rights reserved

The iPhone DST bug is making its way around the world and has hit the US - where people found that they slept through for an hour after the end of daylight savings time there on Sunday morning.

Contrary to my mistaken impression, Apple did not rollout the iOS 4.2 update which fixes the bug - meaning that many people slept through if they had set a repeating alarm to wake them on Monday. (And of course expressed their annoyance on Twitter.)

Apple's support document about the problem remains curiously imprecise about the cause, while noting that "In some regions, shortly before or after the daylight saving time (DST) change, repeating alarms created in the Clock app may work incorrectly." We don't know which regions it would work correctly in: everywhere from New Zealand to, so far, Hawaii has been affected. If anyone knows of anywhere else that hasn't been affected by this bug, do tell.

The bug seems to be caused by the repeating alarms being tied to the local time at creation rather than the local time at use. It also seems to have been introduced with Apple's iOS 4.x update.

And just to remind you of the solution: "To resolve this behavior for existing alarms, set the repeat interval to Never. You will need to reset these alarms for each day you need them. After November 7th, 2010, you can set your alarms to repeat again." Except that you need to delete the alarms and recreate them. Not ideal. We'll have to wonder what things are going to be like in iOS's second leap year, 2012, by which time we'll probably be on iOS 5.x. Things didn't go well for the Zune then. Perhaps Apple can top it.

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Pothole-spotting app could make it a busy winter for councils | Ben Thomas

CTC, in collaboration with construction company Aggregate Industries, has produced a downloadable free software app for the Apple iPhone. By using the iPhone's built-in camera and GPS locator, together with the large display screen, users can report potholes and other road defects right from the roadside. Photograph: www.fillthathole.org.uk.

Like buses, three excellent free cycling apps have come along almost at once. There's cyclestreets, reviewed a month ago; the similarly useful (and chart-busting) Bike Hub, soon to be reviewed; and now the free Fill That Hole.

"You spot it ... You log it ... They sort it" is how the FillThatHole.org.uk website describes its own role.

The initiative, established in 2007, allows you to provide details of bike-threatening roadway hazards, and the CTC does the job of passing them on to the relevant highway authority – usually a local council. The organisation also does a lot of number-crunching, and presents useful figures about the number of hazards reported and the councils that are best at responding. These are the kinds of jobs that might be done by the Department for Transport in an ideal world, but as it is, the cost is being met by the CTC and a maker of road-surfacing materials (go figure).

Like BikeHub and Cyclestreets, this smartphone app makes desktop web-browing look a bit old fashioned, because the tasks of taking a picture and logging a location are far easier than they would be on a computer. This meant I expected the process to take about two minutes.

Finding a pothole, of course, took a matter of seconds. It was more of a pot-trench in fact, with a pothole posse hanging around it trying to look hard. Job one was logging the location, which should be virtually automatic with GPS. Unfortunately my iPhone located me and my trench three miles north of where we were, meaning lots of screen scrubbing to get the pin in the right place on the map. But CTC tells me that one of their first tweaks to the software is doing much to resolve this issue.

Task two was saving the picture, which was quick, easy and almost fun. Task three was selecting the "hazard type". My trench most closely resembled "Rut or gully" on the list. Task four, slightly superfluously I felt, as the traffic roared by, was writing some more about it. Picture, exact location, pothole type ... does the local authority really need to know more? But the server wouldn't accept the form without a bit of prose in the relevant box, so I briefly waxed lyrical. Really dedicated pothole-spotters can turn on the "additional information" switch and get busy with a tape measure, entering depth, distance from the kerb, and other details – but that wasn't for me.

So, job done, eight minutes later - could be quicker, but not bad. Add to this the fact that, about 10 days later, my trench was filled, freeing local pedestrians and cyclists (and minor planets) from the threat of disappearance.

CTC tell me that an Android version is a possibility, but they (rightly) want to make sure they have the resources for user support on the wide range of phones this would entail.

They add that this time of year is when pothole reporting traditionally starts to take off, peaking in January and February – and they're expecting that fact, combined with the app's popularity, to make this a record winter for pothole-spotting. Let's hope local authorities have the budgets to keep up.

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Motorola FLIPSIDE now available from AT&T for $99 with new 2-year contract

AT&T made the Motorola FLIPSIDE available for purchase today for $99.99 with a new 2-year contract, or for $399.99 outright. This slideout QWERTY device features Android 2.1, a 720 MHz TI OMAP 3410 chip, a 3MP camera, 1170 mAh battery, 802.11 b/g and Bluetooth 2.1.

This phone is now available online from AT&T, and you can also likely head down to your local brick and mortar if you want to pick one up in person.

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Russia's Mail.ru sees shares jump

5 November 2010 Last updated at 19:02 GMT Shares in Russia's Mail.ru have surged more than 30% on their London debut, after the internet group raised $912m (£563m) in a stock market flotation.

Strong demand helped the group, an owner of a 2.38% stake in Facebook, price its shares at $27.7 each, the top of the firm's range.

The shares are now being traded conditionally, ahead of the formal start of trade on 11 November.

The initial public offering (IPO) values Mail.ru at $5.71bn.

Mail.ru is one of the few chances for investors to hold some indirect stake Facebook, the world's largest and still rapidly growing social networking site.

The London listing makes Mail.ru Europe's largest listed internet business.

"Mail.ru has certainly hit a sweet spot," said Chris Weafer, a Uralsib analyst.

During the past few years the company, formerly known as DST, invested about $1bn in many Russian and foreign internet companies.

It controls the huge Russian freemail service Mail.ru, Russian social network Odnoklassniki and instant messenger ICQ.

Among other investments, it has stakes in Zynga, the maker of the FarmVille and FrontierVille games; deals website Groupon; Russian social network VKontakte and payment processing company Qiwi.

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Creative Technology jumps into the tablet market... too late, too slowly?

Detail of Creative ZiiO 7 tablet: note the non-English script on the return button, bottom right. Photo by charlesarthur on Flickr. Some rights reserved

Creative Technology - the Singaporean company which five years ago vowed to go after Apple over a patent it had which it reckoned the iPod infringed - has come into the tablet market with a range of tablets, including 2 3.2-inch, 7-inch, and 10-inch models, running the Android OS.

And what does it bring to the tablet party that's different from what everyone else is doing? Wellll... that's hard to say. It has built its own processors to run the devices (designed at 3D Labs, which Creative Technology owns), and written its own audio drivers which it says means that you'll get far higher audio quality while listening or streaming (via Bluetooth) to compatible devices.

But in many other ways, Creative's output looks to be lagging behind many other tablet companies. To begin with, they're all running Android 2.1 - and none of them has 3G. This means that they won't automatically be able to access the Android Marketplace (because Android is a phone OS, and devices which don't have 3G or other phone stuff inside them can't be phones, so they can't access the marketplace for phone apps).

Update: Factoring in the prices, though, suggests that these are priced to sell - and so could give rivals quite a run for their money if Creative can get past the Marketplace hassles.

However Mac Aw Kuw Weng, director of corporate marketing, told us that there will be an over-the-air update (via Wi-Fi) to the devices to Android 2.2, which will be available as soon as Google has finished its trials of them - sometimes in late December... early January? Once that's done, then users will have access to the Marketplace. Otherwise they'll have to sideload apps via their computer.

Oh, and on the Wi-Fi issue: it's the ZiiOs (the 7" and 10") are only 802.11g&b, not 11n, which might be slightly limiting. The 3.2-inch Zen, mystifyingly, is 802.11b/g/n.

The models that we tried were all a little unfinished, at least in software terms: though there is an orientation sensor in the devices, the software didn't pick up on it. The keyboard though was pretty nice, and the limited tests I did suggested that the settings were well laid out. But there were a few crashes, and lack of responsiveness to touch, especially when trying to swipe through a selection of films.

The 3.2" Zen device comes with optional GPS, which would mean you could use it as a navigation device; the larger devices don't, because (Weng suggested) you wouldn't really want to try using them to do turn-by-turn navigation. (Though I thought: might be good to be able to view the maps at a more usable size.)

The tough question: what does it think people will want - the 10" or the 7" version? "That will be based on the feedback from the buyers in stores [not customers, but the retailers who order stock]," said Phil O'Shaughnessy, in charge of worldwide corporate communications. "We believe there will be a huge trend in the holidays for buying tablets."

That might be so, but if Creative doesn't get its factories sorted out, then it's going to have serious supply problems - making 7" or 10" machines isn't like turning a tap on and off. Look at the problems that Apple had trying to meet demand - and that's a company which normally has its finger right on the pulse of the supply chain. Creative looked a little shambolic in this, to be honest: started late, late to get the product through testing, and without access to the Marketplace, which a lot of its rivals do have.

Plus it's using a resistive rather than capacitive touchscreen, which is generally reckoned to be a less pleasant experience, and less robust, than the capacitive ones (used by Apple and Samsung among others).

The prices are pretty competitive with other Android tablets, but the lack of a Marketplace will probably mean disappointment for many would-be ordinary users who'll be expecting something like the Apple app experience. Although it does come with Angry Birds already installed - so at least that's one way to while away the time until Google gives the thumbs-up to 2.2.

I did ask whether Google had given its blessing to the idea of a 10" tablet running Android; Weng sort-of implied that it had, or at least that it hadn't frowned on it. Perhaps we'll see through watching how long it takes for the 10" version to be approved.

Update: But the prices are competitive. Here's the listing:
• ZiiO 7" Pure Wireless Entertainment Tablet 8GB: £199.99
• ZiiO 7" Pure Wireless Entertainment Tablet 16GB: £219.99 (only via creative.com/shop)
• ZiiO 10" Pure Wireless Entertainment Tablet 8GB: £249.99
• ZiiO 10" Pure Wireless Entertainment Tablet 16GB: £269.99 (only via creative.com/shop)

• ZEN Touch 2 Wireless Entertainment Device (without GPS) 8GB: £149.99
• ZEN Touch 2 Wireless Entertainment Device (without GPS) 16GB: £159.99 (only via creative.com/shop)
• ZEN Touch 2 Wireless Entertainment Device (with GPS) 8GB: £159.99 (only via creative.com/shop)

Creative says these are the suggested retail prices, though I do wonder whether they include VAT. But even if they do, then the 10" 16GB version comes out at £320 - substantially below the 16GB iPad at £430.

Also on show were plenty of Bluetooth streaming systems, including some nice-looking satellite speakers (more here). Why Bluetooth when the Kleer system could give even better audio? Because Bluetooth is more prevalent, Creative said - though Weng revealed that the company is talking to Apple about incorporating Apple's AirPlay system for streaming audio over Wi-Fi: that might be coming soon.

And while Creative may not have managed (even a bit) to displace Apple in the iPod market, it did score one notable success: it won a patent case against Apple over the use of menus in the iPod - meaning Apple had to pay it a license fee for every classic iPod sold.

Meanwhile, here are some pictures of the Creative tablets. Excuse quality, but they should give you the idea.

iPad beside Creative ZiiO 10. Photo by Charles Arthur on Flickr. Some rights reserved

Creative ZiiO 7 beside ZiiO 10. Photo by charlesarthur on Flickr. Some rights reserved

Creative ZiiO 7: OK... Photo by charlesarthur on Flickr. Some rights reserved

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Verizon to offer the LG Vortex free with new 2-year contract

It appears as if Verizon’s upcoming LG Vortex is going to be offered free of charge, well, as long as you buy into a new 2-year contract that is. Ok, so it’s not EXACTLY free. You still have to shell out $100 up  front, but you’ll receive a $100 mail-in rebate debit card in exchange for your cold hard cash (or plastic) up front.

This certainly isn’t a shabby free device if you need to renew your contract, but don’t want to spend anything extra. Having Android 2.2 pre-installed is also a pretty sweet element here. The one downside here is the Bingified default search engine, but if you can live with it, The LG Vortex can be yours for the whopping price of $0.

[via Engadget]

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The dawn on universal translation

Linguist Takafumi Shimizu explains how to get around Japan using just one word

With a global economy and flights that can take you all over the world in hours, why is it that we still struggle with a language barrier that technology is finding hard to break down?

Turn on a TV in a Tokyo hotel room and you will get, if you do not speak the language, a jumble of incomprehensible symbols.

And from the moment you touch down in Japan, chances are you will be faced with a world that is difficult to decode.

Some of the world's most untranslatable words are Japanese. For instance, the word "naa", used in the Kansai area of Japan to emphasise statements or agree with someone, is placed third in a list of the most difficult words to translate - so what can be done when confronted by information that you are unable to process?

Translators are expensive and while useful in getting out of sticky situations, they are often out of the reach of the regular tourist.

So a gadget that was the perfect translation tool would be ideal. If only it were that simple.

Science fiction has always circumnavigated the problem of language with clever devices which act as universal translators - Doctor Who's Tardis, the Babel fish in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - but in reality it has been a lot trickier.

Because of different fonts, written text can be very difficult to translate

There is already a clutch of reading aids on the web - most notably, and now in over 50 languages, Google Translate. For access to websites beyond your mother tongue, just enter the web page address and the tool does all the hard work.

The problem is that, so far, it is quite literal with its translations and lacks the nuance of someone who speaks the language. Google itself says "while we are working on the problem, it may be some time before anyone can offer human quality translations".

Another site called dotSUB lets members add their own subtitles or translations to videos - think YouTube meets Wikipedia - and the free version allows people to translate through 400 languages, though there is no formal quality control.

Kanji understand?

Japanese is particularly challenging as there are three different types of writing.

One alphabet is especially for foreign words and if that was not complicated enough there are also over 50,000 symbols - Kanji - which are actually pictures of whole words.

You need about 2,000 of them to get through daily life in Japan.

An iPhone app called WishoTouch lets you enter Kanji by hand then gives you a dictionary definition. But you will need to know the stroke order - although the add-on lets you photograph your mystery Kanji, one character at a time.

The translation device used by the US military costs thousands of dollars

So faced with the thought of dinner, and a whole load of symbols in a row, you are going to wish for a quicker and less painful way to help you find out what is on the menu.

One translation tool that deals with written text is called a Quicktionary and it is a character reader. It looks similar to a pen and when swiped across text it will give you a translation. At least, that is the idea.

This device is impressive but only works with two typefaces - a problem shared by most text readers.

And perhaps the most comprehensive gadget on a market is a 126-language cross translator made by Ectaco.

"It all started 20 years ago with the Russian market," says Greg Stetson, product manager of Ectaco.

"In Russia there were a lot of immigrants coming into America and [our product] started off as a Russian electronic dictionary - after that it evolved from electronic dictionaries to more language learning products - and from Russian it had to expand into different languages."

Artificial intelligence

Even soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq have used mobile translation when talking to local people. Voxtec's Phraselator has been the choice of the US military for years but, with a price tag of thousands of dollars, this is unlikely to transfer into success in the mass market.

Even if a machine can eventually translate speech in real time across hundreds of languages, it would still need some artificial intelligence to work out what people are actually implying - as everyone knows, no matter what country we are in, we do not always say what we mean.

Japan's three types of writing make the language especially hard to translate

"The Japanese prefer to speak in a roundabout way," says linguist Takafumi Shimizu, of Sophia University Tokyo.

"So if a taxi driver said to you it's difficult to get there in 10 minutes, he actually means it's impossible. Likewise when Japanese people want to refuse a request or invitation, they would say I'll think about it but do not expect a preferable answer later because the actual meaning is 'I'm refusing'."

And even if you get the right words, you might get them in the wrong order - luckily if you're speaking to Professor Shimizu, he will probably understand you anyway.

"In English, the basic word order is subject, verb, object," he says.

"In Japanese the best word order is subject, object and then verb. So for example 'I bought tea leaves at Harrods yesterday' would be, in Japanese, 'yesterday Harrods at I tea leaves bought'."

In Star Trek, their universal translation device was not invented until the latter half of the 22nd Century and even then it was not flawless. Let's just hope we do not have to wait that long for something similar in real life.

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Will jetpacks ever take off?

8 November 2010 Last updated at 09:48 GMT Help

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Reading rights

4 November 2010 Last updated at 14:16 GMT Buy an e-book and all you get is a licence to look, says Bill Thompson.

Reading on screen has to get more like reading a book, says Bill Thompson

The recent rapid growth of the market for electronic editions of contemporary fiction, with some titles selling more in digital marketplaces than they do in printed form, seems unlikely to tail off. The latter part of 2010 may mark the point from which future historians date the transition to screen-based reading for literary fiction as well as reference works.

Amazon recently announced that during September it sold more Kindle books than print books for the top ten, hundred and even thousand bestselling books on its US website, and other retailers will no doubt see the same as Christmas approaches.

Page turner

Everyone involved in the book trade, as we will probably continue to call it for some years, is trying to decide how to respond to this change and anticipate the imminent arrival of the sort of creative destruction that has swept through the music industry, but few seem to have many good ideas.

Independent publishers like Faber & Faber and Canongate, both of whom I spend time talking to about the impact of digital publishing (though not for money), are trying hard to remain relevant, and initiatives like the new electronic publishing service, Faber Factory, are a sign that they understand the changing market.

However, even they are not yet willing to accept that the price of electronic texts is too high, and that readers will not pay the same for a bunch of bits as they will for a bound book, since the market knows that it costs less to send electrons over a network than it does to buy paper, make books out of it and ship the physical objects around the world.

Continue reading the main story

we should not allow the law to treat the products of creative expression in the same way as we do physical property”

End Quote Bill Thompson They also seem unprepared for the fundamental shift in the whole basis of their business that digital distribution brings about.

Something important happens when the text of a book is peeled away from the physical book, exposing the important distinction between the law as it applies to property and copyright law, and this has significant implications for how publishers make money - or even whether they will do so at all.

When you buy a book you take ownership of the wood pulp, ink and glue that makes up the object, and anyone taking it away from you without permission is stealing. But you do not own, and never have owned, the copyright.

If the author is still alive or died fewer than 70 years ago then that list of words and punctuation, in that precise order, may be protected in various ways, limiting your ability to reproduce some or all of the list.

When you buy an digital copy to read on your e-book reader, phone or laptop all you get is the copyrighted bit, and what you pay for is a licence to have a copy or copies of the text.

You don't "own" an object - all you have is an agreement, and the things you can do with it are limited both by copyright law and by the terms of the legal licence agreement you enter into when you make your purchase.

Kindle and iPad users are acutely aware of this, because the digital rights management system used to limit copying of purchased e-books makes it impossible to share one with a friend in the way that we are all accustomed to do with physical books, while the licence makes it impossible to sell our second-hand e-books to others and defray the cost of new purchases.

Lending list

Amazon recently announced that it will let Kindle owners "lend" books, but only for two weeks and only once per title. It clearly expects to get a lot of positive publicity for following the approach of other e-book readers like the Barnes and Noble "Nook", but all they have done is to highlight exactly what we are giving up as we move from buying books to licensing content for our digital devices.

Limits on lending rights could hit libraries

Perhaps the worst thing about the new feature is that Amazon will give publishers a veto over sharing their titles. For a company with a reputation for pushing publishers into distribution deals that they find very difficult to work with, Amazon seems very wary of doing anything that might upset the rights holders.

When the new Kindle shipped with a feature that let it read texts aloud in a synthesised voice it only took a few angry huffs and puffs from the US Author's Guild before the facility was made optional, to be turned off at the behest of the publisher.

And now Amazon is careful to announce the publisher-friendly aspects of its new feature, highlighting the fact that when you pay your money for a Kindle edition you aren't buying a book, and you certainly aren't buying an e-book that is in any way equivalent to a printed codex.

I'd be happy with a system that let me transfer my purchases rather than sharing them - I don't expect my one download of a copy of the new Jonathan Frantzen to provide for the reading needs of my entire extended family at the same time, but lending my Kindle - or in this case my iPad - means lending every book (and every other app), which is not the same as just lending one book.

There is one bright spot in all this, though. Amazon's business model offers us the clearest possible demonstration that we should not allow the law to treat the products of creative expression in the same way as we do physical property.

The idea of "intellectual property" deliberately conflates the two and allows politicians to pretend that laws about physical property should extend to digital downloads. We need to challenge this unjustifiable elision if we are to think seriously about copyright and business models in the age of electronics.

Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet. He is currently working with the BBC on its archive project.

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How to make Big Ben strike 13

4 November 2010 Last updated at 07:00 GMT Help

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Eye chip 'helps blind people see'

3 November 2010 Last updated at 00:49 GMT By Neil Bowdler Science reporter, BBC News Miikka Terho is given the task of reading letters which together misspell his own name

A man with an inherited form of blindness has been able to identify letters and a clock face using a pioneering implant, researchers say.

Miikka Terho, 46, from Finland, was fitted with an experimental chip behind his retina in Germany. Success was also reported in other patients.

The chip allows a patient to detect objects with their eyes, unlike a rival approach that uses an external camera.

Details of the work are in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Professor Eberhart Zrenner, of Germany's University of Tuebingen, and colleagues at private company Retina Implant AG initially tested their sub-retinal chip on 11 people.

Some noticed no improvement as their condition was too advanced to benefit from the implant, but a majority were able to pick out bright objects, Prof Zrenner told the BBC.

However, it was only when the chip was placed further behind the retina, in the central macular area in three people, that they achieved the best results.

Two of these had lost their vision because of the inherited condition retinitis pigmentosa, or RP, the other because of a related inherited condition called choroideraemia.

RP leads to the progressive degeneration of cells in the eye's retina, resulting in night blindness, tunnel vision and then usually permanent blindness. The symptoms can begin from early childhood.

The best results were achieved with Mr Terho, who was able to recognise cutlery and a mug on a table, a clock face and discern seven different shades of grey. He was also able to move around a room independently and approach people.

In further tests he read large letters set out before him, including his name, which had been deliberately misspelled. He soon noticed it had been spelt in the same way as the Finnish racing driver Mika Hakkinnen.

"Three or four days after the implantation, when everything was healed, I was like wow, there's activity," he told the BBC from his home in Finland.

"Right after that, if my eye hit the light, then I was able to see flashes, some activity which I hadn't had.

"Then day after day when we started working with it, practising, then I started seeing better and better all the time."

Soon Mr Terho was able to read letters by training his mind to bring the component lines that comprised the letters together.

The prototype implant has now been removed, but he has been promised an upgraded version soon. He says it can make a difference to his life.

"What I realised in those days was that it was such a great feeling to focus on something," he says.

"Even having a limited ability to see with the chip, it will be good for orientation, either walking somewhere or being able to see that something is before you even if you don't see all the tiny details of the object."

Electrical impulses

The chip works by converting light that enters the eye into electrical impulses which are fed into the optic nerve behind the eye.

It is externally powered and in the initial study was connected to a cable which protruded from the skin behind the ear to connect with a battery.

The team are now testing an upgrade in which the device is all contained beneath the skin, with power delivered though the skin via an external device that clips behind the ear.

This is by no means the only approach being taken by scientists to try to restore some visual ability to people with retinal dysfunction - what's called retinal dystrophy.

A rival chip by US-based Second Sight that sits on top of the retina has already been implanted in patients, but that technique requires the patient to be fitted with a camera fixed to a pair of glasses.

Charities gave the news of the latest work a cautious welcome.

David Head, of the British Retinitis Pigmentosa Society, said: "It's really fascinating work, but it doesn't restore vision. It rather gives people signals which help them to interpret."

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The Technology newsbucket: Gmail shuts out Facebook, the last Windows?, Android exploits and more

Photo by futureatlas.com on Flickr. Some rights reserved

A quick burst of 15 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team

Building the Simple Enterprise >> TechCrunch
Linked, because it's wrong in so many ways. It begins: "In the enterprise, simplicity simply doesn't sell. Complexity, on the other hand, justifies costly software licenses and a swat team of consultants and systems integrators." It reads like someone who has never considered that the needs of an enterprise - the laws to be obeyed, disclosures to be considered, procedures to be followed - are orders of magnitude more complex than an individual's. Enterprise software often stinks, but it's not because it's unnecessarily complex. It's because it's trying to deal with complexity in a limited time and budget.

Google points finger at Facebook hypocrisy, blocks Gmail import >> Ars Technica
"Facebook has long been a one-way valve. You put data in so you can connect with friends, and then you can't get it out and use it the way you would like to, even as the company is trying to corner the market on your identity.
"And Thursday night Google called out its rival on such data-portability hypocrisy: It banned the huge social network from allowing its users to connect their Gmail contacts to see who among them are also on Facebook to get the friending frenzy started."
The closing of diplomatic relations often presages war.

Generation Why? by Zadie Smith >> The New York Review of Books
"I can say (like everyone else on Harvard's campus in the fall of 2003) that "I was there" at Facebook's inception, and remember Facemash and the fuss it caused.." And now she examines The Social Network. A fantastic piece. Bring a long drink.

New browser RockMelt oozes into beta >> CNET News
"RockMelt is indeed a "Facebook browser," if only because Facebook is the social-media service that's best integrated into it at launch. It's clear that ultimately the browser's team plans to make it more customizable with other services. The ultimate goal, you could say, is revamping the traditional browser many of the Web-browsing behaviors that have popped up in the past few years--social-media sharing, Twitter clients, RSS alerts, and speedier search--and works them into an interface that aims for convenience rather than confusion."
Ohh, you mean like Flock.

The last Windows ever >> BankerVision
James Gardner, who writes this, is the chief technology officer at the Department of Work and Pensions. The DWP has just done a deal to get Windows 7 (it's presently "struggling along" on XP), but "Personally, I think it likely this is the last version of Windows anyone ever widely deploys, though."
Why? Because "I think they'll be fewer workloads that actually require a heavy deskop stack. Today, of course, we have all this legacy that's coupled to the desktop, but in a decade, I really doubt that will be the case. Most stuff will arrive via the browser."

Microsoft's Linux Patent Scare Trumps SCO - InternetNews:The Blog - Sean Michael Kerner
From March, but interesting: "Microsoft convinced Japanese hardware vendor I-O Data to sign up for Microsoft patent licensing to protect against Linux patent issues. Over the last three years Microsoft has been successful at getting multiple vendors including Amazon, Novell, Brother International Corp, Fuji Xerox Co. Ltd, Kyocera Mita Corp., LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and TomTom International BV to buy into their argument that they need protection from Linux patent infringement."

Researcher outs Android exploit code >> The Register
Relies on flaws in WebKit that have been fixed in Android 2.2, but only 36% of users have that. Its effects are limited to what the browser can read - thuogh that could include the phone's SD memory card.

Investors back #TechCity – Concentration of startups "will attract" capital >> TechCrunch Europe
I'm not sure that the headline is completely supported by the quotes that appear, though: there's a lot of doubt that governments can really create the hubs.

Xserve will no longer be available after January 31 >> Apple
Lots of people sang its praises, but Apple's servers never got the market traction: if you're savvy enough to set up a server, you're probably savvy enough to load it up with Linux instead. So that's the second time Apple has tried to get into the server market and given up.

HTML5 Testing >> W3C Blog
"..it seems that people are trying to draw conclusions from the tests or from the results, including whether one browser or another is better.
"An increase of 135 tests isn't meaningful. It's way far from making the results significant in fact. We'll need several dozens of thousands of tests to make those results indicative. Still, while working on the HTML5 specification, there is an advantage to figure out where we have interoperability issues already."
Is this the W3C version of "yes but no but yeah but no but.."? (Thanks @DerekJohnson for the link.)

Bank of America, Citigroup Said to Test IPhone for Mobile E-Mail >> Bloomberg
"The banks are testing software for the iPhone that's designed to make it secure enough for company messages." The two banks employ 524,000 people, though not all will shift away from BlackBerrys. Even so, I'd expect that BoA and Citigroup will be getting some earnest calls from RIM's top people in the near future...

Viral Spiral: most shared video ads of 2006-2010 >> Unruly Media
From the makers of the Viral Video chart: see who has been topping the video ads. (Flash required.)

Dell to Ditch 25,000 BlackBerrys in Bid to Promote Own Service [and WP7] >> WSJ.com
Big win for Windows Phone 7, which will run on the Dell Venue Pro that will do the replacing: "In a direct shot at BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd., Dell Inc. plans to move its 25,000 employees over to its own line of smartphones and then aggressively market a service to help other companies do the same."

How one company games Google News >> CNET News
Ever heard of Red Label News? Probably not: "Upon clicking on any of the Red Label News stories, it became instantly clear that all of the stories were pure spam: ads from Google's AdSense and Amazon's affiliate program wrapped around barely cohesive sentences of SEO-friendly keywords along with a few links to other stories about the news." Does Blekko do news yet?

First RS-232 to dock connector interface approved by Apple, controls telescope >> The Unofficial Apple Weblog
When iOS devices are being used to control hardware like this... things are getting interesting.

You can follow Guardian Technology's linkbucket on delicious

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Whitehall website 'a revolution'

8 November 2010 Last updated at 16:36 GMT David Cameron: "This is a complete revolution in how government operates"

David Cameron has launched a website where departments set out business plans and timetables to achieve them.

He said it was a "complete revolution in how government operates" and would allow people to check on the progress of policies on a month-by-month basis.

The PM said the old "target culture" had encouraged short-term thinking.

But Labour's Liam Byrne warned against "ripping up targets" without an alternative in place to guarantee public service standards.

The transparency website brings together a range of information - including basic details of ministers' meetings, hospitality, gifts and overseas travel, timetables for implementing policies, staffing structures and salary ranges for top civil servants, some of which was already publicly available but was published separately.

Other information - like how much individual police forces cost each taxpayer, how many under 18s get pregnant in different areas, what percentage of people released from prison commit another crime across different local authorities and how much it costs to produce and issue a passport - will be published over the course of 2011/2.

Mr Cameron launched the website surrounded by cabinet members and flanked by deputy PM Nick Clegg and the Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O'Donnell - the head of the civil service.

Continue reading the main story Norman Smith Chief political correspondent, BBC Radio 4

The government's business plans have been given an awfully big political build-up. In the prime minister's words they represent "a power shift" from government and "one of the biggest blows for people power".

But haven't we been here many times before? First, we had John Major's much mocked Citizen's Charter, then Labour's Public Service Agreements and only this summer the coalition launched a series of Structural Reform Plans.

Government sources say the difference between the coalition's approach and that of previous governments is targets.

The business plans don't contain targets. Instead they have timelines and milestones.

What's the difference? Government officials say milestones empower the public to assess what progress has been achieved. Targets are Whitehall-imposed.

Somehow, one suspects, it is a difference that may still elude many.

The PM said it would be a move towards greater transparency in Whitehall, part of a "power shift" giving people enough information to hold government to account.

Each department will have to produce a monthly progress report - and the secretary of state will have to account to the prime minister if they are not on track.

The departments' business plans show when they are due to start, due to end and what progress has been made.

It also shows that three projects are already overdue - two at the Cabinet Office relating to publishing details of big IT projects and guidance about the cost of IT projects, and a Ministry of Justice strategy to reduce re-offending and improve rehabilitation - which was due in October.

Mr Cameron acknowledged that the information might create "a rod for our own back" when people noticed missed targets but said the publication was "good management".

He said "bureaucratic accountability" under Labour had "bred bureaucracy", created inefficiency, crushed morale in the public sector and encouraged people to go for "short term wins".

"Instead of bureaucratic accountability to the government machine, these business plans aim to bring in a new system of democratic accountability, accountability to the people."

Targets vs milestones

"So reform will be driven not by the short term political calculations of the government but by the consistent long-term pressure of what people actually want and choose in their public services."

He said the website would strike a blow for "people power" by "shining a bright light of transparency on everything government does".

Announcing the plans in the Commons, Cabinet Office minister Oliver Letwin was mocked by Labour MPs amused at concept of a "horizon shift"- something Tory MP Edward Leigh also described as "Yes Minister" language - and the concept of the "milestones" as opposed to Labour's targets.

Continue reading the main story

The question hanging over today's launch though is whether the public are yet ready to abandon decades of habit which has led them to say "we elected you - so why's our school/hospital/police force so hopeless?' ”

End Quote Nick Robinson BBC political editor Seeking to explain the difference, Mr Letwin said: "A target is an effort by a government, of which there were many in the previous government, to determine what the whole of the public service, through micro-management, would achieve - they were often not met. What we are talking about is actions which lie under the direct control of government and it is absolutely right that we should manage ourselves."

But Labour's Liam Byrne, who broadly welcomed the plans to publish more details, called him the "minister for milestones".

He added: "There will be no power shift if he is going to destroy the power of NHS patients to be treated within 18 weeks, the power of parents to get one-to-one tuition for their children if they are falling behind at school, the power of citizens to summon police officers to talk about issues of local concern."

He asked Mr Letwin to "review the ending of basic rights to high quality public services" adding: "Because when it comes to public services, the public wants guarantees and all he has offered them this afternoon is an online gamble."

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