Online Featured News Worldwide 0-14-2013 | Sc

Hostile computer activity from spies, saboteurs, competitors and criminals has spawned a growing industry of corporate defenders who can attract the best talent from government cyber units.

The U.S. military's Cyber Command is due to quadruple in size by 2015 with 4,000 new personnel while Britain announced a new Joint Cyber Reserve last month. From Brazil to Indonesia, similar forces have been set up.

But demand for specialists has far outpaced the number of those qualified to do the job, leading to a staffing crunch as talent is poached by competitors offering big salaries.

"As with anything, it really comes down to human capital and there simply isn't enough of it," says Chris Finan, White House director for cyber security from 2011-12, who is now a senior fellow at the Truman National Security Project and working for a start-up in Silicon Valley.

"They will choose where they work based on salary, lifestyle and the lack of an interfering bureaucracy and that makes it particularly hard to get them into government."

Cyber attacks can be expensive: one unidentified London-listed company incurred losses of 800 million pounds ($1.29 billion) in a cyber attack several years ago, according to the British security services.

Global losses are in the range of $80 billion to $400 billion a year, according to research by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies that was sponsored by Intel Corp's McAfee anti-virus division.

There is a whole range of attacks. Some involve simply transferring money, but more often clients' credit card details are stolen. There is also intellectual property theft or theft of commercially sensitive information for business advantage.

Victims can also suffer a "hacktivist" attack, such as a directed denial of service to bring a website down, which can cost a lot of money to fix.

Quantifying the exact damage is almost impossible, especially when secrets and money are not the only targets.

While no government has taken responsibility for the Stuxnet computer virus that destroyed centrifuges at Iran's Natanz uranium enrichment facility, it was widely reported to have been a U.S.-Israeli project.

Titles such as Taking My Drunk Daughter had been on sale.

Amazon and Barnes & Noble both say they are removing books found by technology news site The Kernel, but many others still remain, the BBC has found.

WHSmith and Kobo, which feature titles with similar themes, are yet to respond to requests for comment.

The BBC found that on Amazon's store, the search function automatically suggested explicit topics to users typing seemingly innocuous keywords - without age verification taking place.

Amazon has not responded to the BBC's request for comment on the issue, except to confirm that the specific books listed by The Kernel had been removed.

Barnes & Noble said in a statement the titles were "in violation" of its policy on content offered in the NOOK Bookstore and were in the process of being removed.

"When there are violations to the content policy that are brought to our attention, either through our internal process or from a customer or external source, we have a rapid response team in place to appropriately categorize or remove the content in accordance with our policy," it said.

Justice Minister Damian Green told the BBC "the government shares the public's concerns about the availability of harmful material."

Self-published

The titles can be found in the self-published section of the retailers' sites - an area where authors can offer their own work. The companies take a percentage of the sales made through their stores.

One lawyer told the BBC that the retailers could find themselves guilty of a criminal offence for allowing such content to be found without protection mechanisms.

"The directors of Amazon have a very difficult question to answer: why are they making profits from pornography which, on the face of it, seems to be criminal?" said Mark Stephens, former chairman of the Internet Watch Foundation, a body responsible for monitoring criminal content online.

However, many of the authors have taken measures to stay within the law, adding disclaimers to their descriptions, such as saying characters were "over 18" or "step-daughters".

On Amazon, guidelines for self-publishing state: "We don't accept pornography or offensive depictions of graphic sexual acts."

It adds: "What we deem offensive is probably about what you would expect."

The other retailers give similar guidance.

In July, Prime Minister David Cameron said the government intended to make it illegal in England and Wales to possess online pornography depicting rape.

After the policy takes effect Nov. 11, users who review a video on YouTube or a restaurant on Zagat.com could see their name, photo and comments show up in ads on any of the 2 million Web sites that are part of the company’s display advertising network. The controversial practice, announced Friday by Google, is part of an emerging trend on the Internet. Advertisers believe that consumers place enormous value on product endorsements that come from a friend or family member, and growing numbers of Web companies are trying to capture that social advertising in a systematic way.

But critics say tactics that further exploit the data people leave online amount to a bait-and-switch. People signed up for Google’s services because they were free and convenient. They probably never thought their words and identities would be put in front of strangers to sell a product.

Users who casually endorse a product or song on Facebook or Google “may be exposed to unwanted, and possibly misunderstood, implications,” said Eric Goldman, a professor of Internet law at Santa Clara University law school.

Google said the launch of “shared endorsements” will help consumers make better choices. “We want to give you — and your friends and connections — the most useful information. Recommendations from people you know can really help,” the company wrote in its announcement.

It added that users can opt out of the ads and that it will automatically exclude anyone under the age of 18.

The announcement follows a similar advertising feature by Facebook called “sponsored stories,” which turns a recommendation made through the social network’s “like” button into an advertising endorsement on a friend’s Facebook page. The company has said its users cannot opt out of the practice. About 1.2 billion people are on Facebook.

Last month, the Federal Trade Commission said it would review whether Facebook’s push into sponsored stories violated the company’s 2011 privacy settlement with the federal government. That agreement required Facebook to give adequate notice of changes in privacy policies and to make sure users aren’t misled about how their data is being used.

Nobody knows the true scale of potential losses at Europe's banks, but the International Monetary Fund hinted at the enormity of the problem this month, saying that Spanish and Italian banks face 230 billion euros ($310 billion) of losses alone on credit to companies in the next two years.

Yet five years after the United States demanded its big banks take on new capital to reassure investors, Europe is still struggling to impose order on its financial system, having given emergency aid to five countries.

Finance ministers from the 17-nation currency area meeting in Luxembourg will tackle the issue of plugging holes expected to be revealed by the European Central Bank's health checks next year.

The president of the European Central Bank underscored the need for action in Washington at the meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

"The effectiveness of this exercise will depend on the availability of necessary arrangements for recapitalizing banks ... including through the provision of a public backstop," Mario Draghi said on Friday. "These arrangements must be in place before we conclude our assessment," he said.

But the ministers' talks face an additional hindrance because Germany's finance minister, Wolfgang Schaeuble, is not expected to attend the two-day Luxembourg meeting. Germany, Europe's biggest economy, in talks to form a new government.

During the region's debt turmoil, the European Union conducted two bank stress tests, considered flops for blunders such as giving a clean bill of health to Irish banks months before they pushed the country to the brink of bankruptcy.

The ECB's new checks are seen as the last chance to come clean for the euro zone as the bloc tries to set up a single banking framework, known as banking union.

The debate opens amid ebbing political enthusiasm for banking union - originally planned as a three-stage process involving ECB bank supervision, alongside an agency to shut failing banks and a system of deposit guarantees. It would be the boldest step in European integration since the crisis.

"I'm a diabetic, so I do want to make sure I'm covered," Jones said. Jones says he isn't the only person he knows in Lexington's LGBT community shopping for health insurance. Many have turned to Jones, who used to work in public health, for casual advice. "A lot of what I've found with these exchanges is confusing, and I've got a Ph.D. -- and experience with insurance," Jones said. "There are many individuals who don't have a lot of education, and these terms are completely new to them. It's daunting."

As a whole the LGBT community has less experience with insurance than the general population. A survey done by the Center for American Progress found that about a third of respondents were uninsured. It's estimated some 16.3% of the general population is uninsured.

In honor of National Coming Out Day on Friday, Out2Enroll's "Be Out. Be Healthy. Get Covered" campaign has launched a new LGBT-friendly website with advice about how to navigate the insurance marketplace. Kellan Baker, who heads the program, did focus groups and surveys with several hundred LGBT people and heard serious concerns about the current health care system. "We've heard from people that health care is fundamental," Baker said. "Yet we wanted to make sure we weren't steering the community to something that wouldn't work for them. We wanted to make sure the policies in place will be inclusive of the community."

While the community is not monolithic, it does struggle with some particular health challenges that become much more deadly if a lack of health insurance keeps them from regular checkups. For instance, studies show lesbians are less likely than other women to get routine screenings that could detect cervical and breast cancer. A woman's chances of surviving go up significantly if the cancers are caught early.

Men who have sex with men -- the clinical term for gay men -- account for 63% of the estimated new HIV infections in 2010, according to the CDC. Regular HIV testing could help stop the spread of the virus.

Cyclone Phailin was expected to dissipate within 36 hours, losing momentum as it headed inland after making landfall on Saturday from the Bay of Bengal, bringing winds of more than 200 kph (125 mph) to rip up homes and tear down trees.

Authorities in the state of Odisha said the death toll stood at seven people, all killed as winds whipped the coast before the storm slammed in, four by falling trees and one when the walls of her mud house collapsed.

The cyclone was one of three major storms over Asia on Sunday. The smaller Typhoon Nari was approaching Vietnam and Typhoon Wipha loomed over the Pacific.

At least 873,000 people in Odisha and adjacent Andhra Pradesh spent the night in shelters, some of which had been built after a 1999 storm killed 10,000 in the same area. Others sought safety in schools or temples, in an exercise disaster management officials called one of India's largest evacuations.

"We saved lives by putting them in shelters in time," said Odisha's special relief commissioner, J.K. Mohapatra.

There had been concern for 18 fishermen out at sea when the cyclone bore down, but police said on Sunday that all returned safe.

Further northeast, port officials said they feared a Panama-registered cargo ship, the MV Bingo, carrying 8,000 metric tons of iron ore with a crew of 17 Chinese and an Indonesian, had sunk on Saturday as the storm churned across the Bay of Bengal.

"The crew left the ship in a lifeboat around 4 p.m. on Saturday but have not been traced yet," I. Jeyakumar, deputy chairman of the Kolkata Port Trust, told Reuters.

But they were probably alive, he added, as radio contacts had been maintained until early on Sunday morning.

On land, truck driver Jayaram Yadav, transporting cars halfway across India, huddled in the cab of his 28-ton vehicle on Saturday night as the wind howled around him.

"I was just thinking: it's going to topple over - and then it did," said Yadav, who survived unscathed as his cargo of eight vehicles was scattered across a coastal highway.

Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman, effectively the State Department's third-ranking diplomat, will lead the U.S. delegation to negotiations between Iran and six major powers in Geneva on Tuesday and Wednesday, the State Department said.

The central issue at the talks, which will involve Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia, the United States and Iran, will be to explore what, if any, steps Iran might take to curb its nuclear program and what, if any, sanctions relief the major powers may offer in return.

Western powers are concerned that Iran is seeking to develop atomic bombs. Iran denies that, saying its nuclear program is solely for peaceful purposes.

The U.S. delegation will include Adam Szubin, the director of the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, and among the U.S. government's foremost experts on sanctions.

Szubin has led OFAC since 2006 and is responsible for administering and enforcing the U.S. government's economic sanctions programs to advance foreign policy and national security objectives.

Scientists from Stanford University have shown that iron metal will flow through rocks 1,000km beneath our feet.

Using sophisticated X-ray imaging, they watched molten metal moving through rocks, squeezed to huge pressures between the tips of pairs of diamonds.

Their results suggest that Earth's core did not form in a single step, but grew in a complicated sequence over time.

The depths of Earth are complex and multi-layered.

At the surface, the rocks forming the foundations of our cities, the stones that we build our lives upon, also provide the raw materials for society - metals, fuel, water and nutrients.

These are no more than a thin geological veneer on the planet. In many respects, the deep Earth remains as much of a mystery as Jupiter or Mars.

But new research in the journal Nature Geosciences gives new clues about how Earth may have taken shape and built its core.

A group of scientists, led by Stanford's Prof Wendy Mao, have shown how metallic iron may be squeezed out of rocky silicates more than 1,000km beneath the surface to form a metallic core.

Ceramic mantle

If you were to follow Jules Verne on a journey to the centre of the Earth, you would find a chemistry dominated by just three elements, until you got almost half the way to the centre - that's the first 3,000km of your journey.

Oxygen, silicon and magnesium (plus a little bit of iron) make up more than 90% of Earth's blanketing "ceramic" mantle.

Electrically and thermally insulating, the mantle is like a rock-wool blanket around the core. The minerals of the mantle are the stony part of the planet. But as you delve deeper on this "thought field trip", things suddenly and drastically change.

With more than half your journey ahead of you, you cross a boundary from the stony mantle into the metallic core. It is initially liquid in its upper stretches, and then solid right the way to the centre of the Earth.

The chemistry changes too, with iron forming almost all of the core, segregated into Earth's dense inner sphere.

The boundary between the metallic core and rocky mantle is a place of extremes. Physically, Earth's metallic liquid outer core is as different to the rocky mantle that overlies it as the seas are from the ocean floor here near Earth's surface. One might (just about) imagine an inverted world of storms and currents of flowing red-hot metal in the molten outer core, pulsing through channels and inverted "ocean" floors at the base of the mantle.

But that goal remains some way off. Sony's CEO, installed last year with a brief to turn the serial loss maker around, said on Friday that for now, Sony has no big plans for the world's two largest smartphone markets, China and the United States.

Instead, Hirai said Sony, which aims to rise to third position from its current ranking of seventh, will focus on Europe and its home market in Japan, which collectively account for 60 percent of its smartphone sales.

"Those two are the most important areas for us and we'll put substantial resources there. But not yet for the U.S. and China," Hirai told a gathering of journalists.

"It's not realistic to try to do everything at once. In the U.S. we'll start gradually."

In the U.S., only the fourth-largest carrier T-Mobile US Inc offers Sony smartphones. Meanwhile, Sony has been unable to compete in China with homegrown brands from ZTE to CoolPad despite contracts with the three largest carriers.

Sony is not among the top five smartphone brands in either of those markets, according to research firm IDC. Its global share of the smartphone market was a modest 2.2 percent in the second quarter of this year, according to research firm Gartner, trailing the likes of LG Electronics Inc and Lenovo Group Ltd as well as Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics.

Hirai has positioned mobile devices as one of the three pillars for a turnaround of the company's electronics unit, which relied on help from a weak yen to post a profit in the latest quarter - its first quarterly profit in two years.

The other two key divisions are games, where the PlayStation 4 console due for launch next month has drawn strong pre-orders, and digital imaging, where Sony dominates the production of image sensors for smartphone cameras.

Norwegian start-up Elliptic Labs is in talks with Asian handset manufacturers to get the chip embedded in devices.

The technology works via an ultrasound chip that uses sound waves to interpret hand movements.

The move towards gesture control has gathered pace and there are now many such products on the market.

Big gestures

What sets Elliptic's gesture-control system apart from others is its wide field of use, up to a metre away from the phone. It means it can identify mid-air gestures accurately.

Because it uses sound rather than sight, the sensor can recognise gestures from a 180-degree field. It also consumes less power and works in the dark.

By contrast Samsung's Galaxy S4 uses an infrared sensor that can only interpret hand movements within a very small zone.

"The user needs to learn the exact spot to gesture to instead of having a large interactive space around the device," said Erik Forsstrom, the user interface designer for Elliptic Labs. Allowing users more freedom in how they gesture is vital if such products are to become mainstream, he thinks.

"With a small screen such as a phone or a tablet, the normal body language is not that precise. You need a large zone in which to gesture."

If consumers can quickly see the effects their gestures have on screen, he thinks, "it is quite likely that this is the next step within mobile".

The technology was recently shown off at Japanese tech show Ceatec.

In the demonstration, an Android smartphone was housed in a case containing the ultrasound transmitters.

But Elliptic Labs said it had formed partnerships with a number of Asian handset manufacturers who are looking at building the ultrasound chip into devices, as early as next year. Mass market Increasingly firms are experimenting with gesture control.

PrimeSense, the company that developed gesture control for Microsoft's Kinect console, has also made strides towards bringing the technology to mobile.

By shrinking down the sensor used in the Kinect, the firm showed it working with a Nexus 10 at a Google developers' conference in May.

Meanwhile Disney is testing technology that allows users to "feel" the texture of objects on a flat touchscreen.

The technique involves sending tiny vibrations through the display that let people "feel" the shallow bumps, ridges and edges of an object.

He said it could shift the "whole landscape of e-commerce" if it bought, for example, eBay.

He said it should ignore the wishes of activist investor Carl Icahn, who wants the company to buy back stock.

"Apple's about building great products, building and shaping markets," Mr Sculley said.

"Carl Icahn has suggested to [Apple chief executive] Tim Cook, 'Why don't you buy more stock back or make a bigger dividend?'

"I'd rather see Apple continue to invest in building... even make big acquisitions that were strategic, as opposed to buying more stock back, or giving more dividends."

Change of strategy

Traditionally, Apple has not acquired large scale companies - instead buying smaller companies with specific technologies, and folding them into the business.

One recent example of this is Siri, a company Apple acquired in 2010 when it wanted to provide an integrated personal assistant on its iPhone and iPad products.

Mr Sculley said that while he had "no insider knowledge" of the firm he left in 1993, he said he now wonders if it is time for Apple to change its growth strategy. "Apple's never been an acquirer of big companies before, and when you look at the [Apple digital ticket system] Passbook, and fingerprint recognition - what would it mean if Apple went out and bought eBay? And they had PayPal, and integrated that?

"My guess is you'd suddenly see the whole landscape of e-commerce shift.

"You have Amazon, which is on the fast-track to dominate every aspect of e-commerce - suddenly the game, the landscape, would change."

Sensor hopes

Mr Sculley was in London ahead of the UK launch of the latest product he is working on - the Misfit Shine, a wearable device that monitors various aspects of a person's health.

"The future of wearable products has the potential to have a huge impact on healthcare," he said.

He also, at the age of 74, offers his services as a mentor to up and coming Silicon Valley chief executives - something he said he wished he had while at Apple.

"When you're dealing in industries where there's such a thin line between success and failure, having another set of trusted eyes can be a real nice advantage."

Mr Sculley also offered warm words for the soon-to-be-departing Microsoft boss, Steve Ballmer.

"Here's a man who has spent 33 years at Microsoft, loves the company," he said. "He really did not get enough credit for what he did accomplish.

"I can't name a CEO who didn't make some mistakes in the hi-tech industry.

"I think Ballmer has a lot he ought to be proud of. So he didn't get everything right - not many people do."

The filing did not indicate whether the pair was planning to join or to present an alternative to a tentative $9-a-share bid by a group led by Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd. Fairfax, which is headed by financier Prem Watsa, has not yet identified other members of the group.

Lazaridis and Fregin together control some 8 percent of BlackBerry, the filing said. That compares with roughly 10 percent controlled by Fairfax.

Excluding Fregin's shares, Lazaridis controls 5.7 percent of BlackBerry, or about 60,000 shares more than he did at the end of 2012, according to Thomson Reuters data.

Lazaridis, who until early last year was one of BlackBerry's co-chief executives and co-chairmen, appears to be considering "the widest range of options possible," BGC Partners technology analyst Colin Gillis said.

"He's going to talk to people by himself; he's going to talk to Prem; he's going to talk to everybody," said Gillis.

Fairfax declined to comment on the Lazaridis filing, which noted that while Lazaridis and Fregin could make an offer, they could opt to take other steps, including selling their shares.

BlackBerry declined to comment specifically on the news, repeating an earlier statement that it is conducting a robust review of alternatives and would only say more if a deal is done or the strategic review is otherwise ended.

Investors have been skeptical the Fairfax offer will garner the financing needed, and Gillis noted that Lazaridis' interest faces the same challenge because the founders, for now, do not have any funding lined up.

Analysts believe both parties could look to secure financial backing from one or more of Canada's deep-pocketed pension funds. A foreign buyer for Blackberry faces a stringent review under the national security clause of the Investment Canada Act, as BlackBerry's secure servers handle millions of confidential corporate and government emails every day.

Industry executives, lawyers and analysts say that could limit the pool of foreign entities that may be allowed to acquire all, or at least certain parts of the company.