Online Newspaper Articles 10-24-2013 | Scien

The new feature, called "supervised users", allows "managers" to set up profiles of the people they want to monitor.

Managers can view the supervised users' browsing history, block specific sites, and approve access requests.

The feature is available on Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems.

It is also available to Chromebook users.

But Google says the default setting is to allow a newly created supervised user to view all websites - managers have to specify what sites they want to block.

SafeSearch is activated automatically for supervised users, preventing most adult content from appearing in Google search results.

The move comes after growing concerns over inappropriate content children can be exposed to online.

Other browsers, including Microsoft's Internet Explorer, offer content controls that can be set by an administrator.

Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system enables users to set up a "Kid's Corner" section on the phone that only allows access to specified games, music, videos and apps. Kids are unable to access disallowed websites.

A recent survey found that many youngsters aged nine to 11 were engaging in risky behaviour online, such as sharing personal information and playing games rated for much older children, including the 18-rated Call of Duty series.

ISC2, an organisation which helps schools educate children about web safety, also found that 43% of youngsters went online every day and 46% spent more than two hours online every time they did so.

"Just sent a letter to Tim Cook. Full letter will be disclosed on my website, the Shareholders' Square Table, which will be launched tomorrow," he said on Twitter.

Icahn, who has said Apple could trade at $700 with a larger stock buyback, told Bloomberg TV on Wednesday that Apple needs a board that goes in and does a "huge buyback."

Apple did not respond to a message seeking comment.

Icahn, who is known for taking large positions in companies and pushing for management change, has said his stake in Apple is worth around $2 billion.

The investor had dinner last month with Cook and Apple Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer and described the meeting as "cordial."

In August, Icahn told Reuters that "Apple has the ability to do a $150 billion buyback now by borrowing funds at 3 percent.

A Reuters reporter who visited an HTC factory at the company's former headquarters in Taoyuan, about an hour's drive from Taipei, saw loading docks shuttered and a sign on a locked lobby door that read: "Lobby is temporarily closed for use. Thank you for your cooperation."

HTC launched its latest version of the flagship One series handsets this year but has struggled to gain traction in a market dominated by larger rivals Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd.

The company, whose woes have been exacerbated by supply chain constraints and internal turmoil, reported its first ever quarterly loss this month and its cash flow from operations dropped to a negative $707.27 million as of the end of June.

Despite lackluster sales, HTC devices usually receive rave reviews, and it has in recent months expanded its range to include smaller and larger models of the One phone and hinted at further products, including a tablet and a wearable device.

HTC initially denied it was shutting down any production, in Taiwan or elsewhere, and declined to comment on whether it was in discussions to outsource production.

"HTC in not shutting down nor has plans to sell any of its factory assets," the company said in an emailed response to queries from Reuters. "HTC has a very strong balance sheet and will provide the latest financials in our upcoming earnings call to investors and the broader community."

When asked about what Reuters had seen at the factory in a telephone interview, HTC Chief Marketing Officer Ben Ho declined to give details, but said: "Like any manufacturer, we do volume planning to optimize our lines, our manufacturing and production facilities.

"Whether we are operating those facilities depends on market demand and our own expectations. When you have less demand you work with less facilities to optimize your costs. When you have demand, or bigger growth, you definitely have to activate all these facilities."

In a strongly worded statement, the spokesman said Merkel had told Obama that if such surveillance had taken place it would represent a "grave breach of trust" between close allies.

"She made clear that she views such practices, if proven true, as completely unacceptable and condemns them unequivocally," the statement read.

White House spokesman Jay Carney, responding to the news in Washington, said Obama had assured Merkel that the United States "is not monitoring and will not monitor" the communications of the chancellor.

When pressed on whether spying may have occurred in the past, a White House official declined to elaborate on the statement.

"I'm not in a position to comment publicly on every specific alleged intelligence activity," the official said.

The news broke as Secretary of State John Kerry, on a visit to Rome, faced fresh questions about mass spying on European allies, based on revelations from Edward Snowden, the fugitive former U.S. intelligence operative granted asylum in Russia.

French President Francois Hollande is pressing for the U.S. spying issue to be put on the agenda of a summit of European leaders starting on Thursday.

He also called Obama earlier this week after French newspaper Le Monde reported that the National Security Agency (NSA) had collected tens of thousands of French phone records in a single month between December 2012 and January 2013.

The NSA appeared to be targeting people tied to French business and politics as well as individuals suspected of links to terrorism, the paper said.

Merkel is not the only foreign leader whose personal communications may have been monitored by the United States. Last month Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff called off plans for an October state visit to Washington because of similar revelations.

DIFFERENT ATMOSPHERE

On a June visit to Berlin, Obama defended U.S. anti-terrorism tactics, telling reporters at a joint news conference with Merkel that Washington was not spying on ordinary citizens.

Revelations before the trip of a covert U.S. Internet surveillance program, code-named Prism, caused outrage in a country where memories of the eavesdropping East German Stasi secret police are still fresh.

Obama administration officials held a closed-door briefing for Democrats in the House of Representatives and a private session with insurance company executives to discuss efforts to fix the Healthcare.gov website.

Republican critics in Congress demanded a delay in a requirement of the healthcare law that uninsured Americans must purchase insurance or face a tax penalty and said they would intensify their investigations into the launch of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, known as "Obamacare."

"It is our job to hold them accountable, and when it comes to Obamacare clearly there is a lot to hold accountable," House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner told reporters on Wednesday.

The administration is trying to preserve Democratic Party unity on the issue, which showed signs of fraying. The head of the Democratic National Committee, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, told MSNBC the administration should be willing to extend the open-enrollment period for people to sign up for insurance. It ends on March 31.

Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina, the third-ranking House Democrat, criticized the website for forcing consumers to provide private information before deciding what kind of health insurance plan they want to buy.

"I've talked to too many people who tell me before they ever get around to figuring out what it is they want to buy, they're having to answer questions that they don't feel they should be answering," Clyburn said.

Max Baucus, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said in a statement that he hopes to meet with other committee members in the coming weeks, but said he would wait until after the website is repaired.

Republicans are not waiting. The House Energy and Commerce Committee on Thursday will hear from the top contractors responsible for the program, including website developer CGI Federal.

'WORKING HARD TO FIX THE PROBLEMS'

Online exchanges, or marketplaces, were designed to be the main way for millions of uninsured Americans to research and buy health insurance plans under the law, but the October 1 debut has been marred by technical glitches that have kept many from signing on and making purchases. Those unable to sign up online can call a toll-free telephone number as an alternative.

The galaxy is about 30 billion light-years away and is helping scientists shed light on the period that immediately followed the Big Bang.

It was found using the Hubble Space Telescope and its distance was then confirmed with the ground-based Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

The study is published in the journal Nature.

Because it takes light so long to travel from the outer edge of the Universe to us, the galaxy appears as it was 13.1 billion years ago.

Lead researcher Steven Finkelstein, from the University of Texas at Austin, US, said: "This is the most distant galaxy we've confirmed. We are seeing this galaxy as it was 700 million years after the Big Bang."

The far-off galaxy goes by the catchy name of z8_GND_5296.

Astronomers were able to measure how far it was from Earth by analysing its colour.

Because the Universe is expanding and everything is moving away from us, light waves are stretched. This makes objects look redder than they actually are.

Astronomers rate this apparent colour-change on a scale that is called redshift.

They found that this galaxy has a redshift of 7.51, beating the previous record-holder, which had a redshift of 7.21.

This makes it the most distant galaxy ever found. The system is small: about 1-2% the mass of the Milky Way and is rich in heavier elements.

But it has a surprising feature: it is turning gas and dust into new stars at a remarkable rate, churning them out hundreds of times faster than our own galaxy can.

It is the second far-flung galaxy known that has been found to have a high star-production rate.

Prof Finkelstein said: "One very interesting way to learn about the Universe is to study these outliers and that tells us something about what sort of physical processes are dominating galaxy formation and galaxy evolution.

"What was great about this galaxy is not only is it so distant, it is also pretty exceptional."

He added that in the coming years, astronomers are likely to discover even more distant galaxies when Nasa's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is launched and other ground-based telescopes come online.

Commenting on the research, Dr Marek Kukula, Public Astronomer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich, told BBC News: "This, along with some other evidence, shows that there are already quite surprisingly evolved galaxies in the very early Universe.

The U.S. automaker appears to be gaining confidence that it doesn't need the help of France's PSA Peugeot Citroen (PEUP.PA) or any other partner to stem more than $18 billion in European losses over the past 13 years.

Underpinning that confidence is an ongoing initiative to overhaul and consolidate GM's global vehicle platforms, according to GM executives and U.S. suppliers familiar with the company's plans. That program, the suppliers said, will enable GM to develop and build most future Opel products on its own.

PSA confirmed Wednesday the partners were scaling back a wide-ranging alliance announced in early 2012, with GM likely pulling out of a program to build its next-generation Opel Corsa subcompact on a shared PSA platform.

GM said Wednesday that planned replacements for two Opel compact vans, the Meriva and the Zafira, both due in 2017, would remain on jointly developed PSA platforms, but declined to comment on the future Corsa.

When the PSA-GM alliance was announced 20 months ago, it was "a head-scratcher," said Guggenheim Securities analyst Matthew Stover, who has a "neutral" rating on GM shares. "This deal made no sense for GM," Stover said Wednesday. "It can't keep looking for solutions in others."

Last month, GM executives privately confirmed that a significantly revamped Corsa, still based on an old Fiat platform, would be introduced in Europe late next year. The replacement for that car, due in late 2018, was to have shared a new PSA-designed platform designated EMP1 with the next-generation Peugeot 208 and Citroen C3.

Now, it appears the redesigned Corsa in 2018 will be built on a version of GM's own small-car platform, dubbed Global Gamma or G2XX, the supplier sources said.

The same platform is expected to underpin the future replacements for the Chevrolet Sonic, the Buick Encore and the Opel Mokka, the suppliers said.

Other future Opel models for Europe are expected to share their GM-developed underpinnings with a new generation of Buick vehicles for the United States and China, suppliers and GM executives told Reuters last month.

Prince William, whose mother Diana was hounded by paparazzi and died in a car crash in Paris in 1997, and his wife Kate invited only very close family and godparents to the ceremony in the 16th century St. James's Palace in central London.

Television pictures gave the public the first glimpse of the baby - third-in-line to the throne - since his parents carried him out of the London hospital where he was born on July 22.

In the arms of his mother as she left the palace's Chapel Royal, George was dressed in a long cream satin robe that was a replica of an 1841 gown made for the christening of Queen Victoria's eldest daughter.

Kate, a style icon whose outfits often increase sales of similar garments, wore an off-white, ruffled skirt-suit, made by British fashion house Alexander McQueen, and pillbox hat by British milliner Jane Taylor.

Queen Elizabeth, her husband Prince Philip, heir apparent Prince Charles, his wife Camilla, and William's brother Harry attended the service in which Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby baptised the prince with water from the River Jordan.

"George is being brought up in a world very different from Prince William's childhood but the royal couple really is obsessed by privacy and I hope that does not impinge too much on their lives," said Ingrid Seward, editor-in-chief of Majesty magazine and author of "A Century of Royal Children".

FANS AND FAMILY

The parents named six friends and William's cousin Zara Tindall as godparents, breaking with the tradition of choosing mostly royal dignitaries, a decision that continued their effort to portray a more informal, modern image to austerity-hit Britons.

Kate's parents, Michael and Carole Middleton, and her sister Pippa were among the guests. A friend of Princess Diana, Julia Samuel, was one of the godmothers alongside Kate's schoolfriend Emilia Jardine-Paterson.

Apple revealed the surprise offer, available to all users of MacBooks and Mac computers, on Tuesday at the same time as it unveiled a slimmer, faster iPad Air and a new line-up of Macs in time for the holidays.

Its Mac operating system and iWork software suite, which compete with Microsoft's Excel, Word and other applications, will now be offered free to all users.

By giving away its Mac operating system Apple is taking on Microsoft's predominant Windows platform, installed on an estimated eight to nine out of 10 of the world's computers and one of its most profitable cash cows.

"We are turning the industry on its ear, but this is not why we're doing it," Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook told media and technology executives at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center. "We want our customers to have our latest software."

Apple may be trying to safeguard its grip on mobile software as Microsoft begins to make inroads into tablet computing with its Windows-powered Surface Pro. The advantage of those devices, especially to enterprise customers, is their ability to run Microsoft applications, such as Word or Excel.

Apple is going after the entire tablet computing market, trying to appeal to both consumer and enterprises, and is likely wary of Microsoft making a play for the high-end of that market with its Surface Pro than cheaper devices that run on Google Inc's Android software.

"In the tablet PC market, they do think Microsoft is a bigger threat than Android," said Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi. "The iPad Air will compete with Surface Pro, not some rinky-dink Android tablet."

Apple's new iPad Air - its full-size tablet - is about 20 percent thinner than the previous generation of tablets, weighs one pound and starts at $499. But the new tablets would face stiff competition, with Microsoft, Nokia and Amazon.com Inc all plugging rival devices in coming months.

PRESSURE

Apple, which jumpstarted the tablet computing market in 2010 with the first iPad, has already come under increasing pressure from cheaper devices ranging from Amazon's Kindle Fire to Samsung Electronics Co Ltd's Note.

The alert states: "Warning! This video contains extremely graphic content and may be upsetting."

The move follows its decision to allow the clips to be posted to its site following a temporary ban on the material, introduced in May.

The prime minister and Facebook's own advisors had criticised the decision.

The social network said that it wished to allow its users - who can be as young as 13 - to share and condemn the material. It added that it would continue to block clips if the original poster glorified or celebrated the violence shown.

On Monday the firm said it might, in time, add warnings or other controls, but initially allowed a recently uploaded decapitation clip to appear unaltered.

This prompted David Cameron to tweet: "It's irresponsible of Facebook to post beheading videos, especially without a warning. They must explain their actions to worried parents."

US charity the Family Online Safety Institute - a member of the social network's Safety Advisory Board - also raised concern saying it had not been alerted to the change of policy despite previously stating such videos "crossed the line".

A spokeswoman for Facebook declined to comment about its latest move.

She had previously defended its decision to allow a video showing a woman being beheaded - believed to have been filmed in Mexico - to be shared despite the fact it bans images and videos showing a woman's "fully exposed breast". "Facebook has long been a place where people turn to share their experiences, particularly when they're connected to controversial events on the ground, such as human rights abuses, acts of terrorism and other violent events," she said.

"People are sharing this video on Facebook to condemn it. If the video were being celebrated, or the actions in it encouraged, our approach would be different."

A UK member of Facebook's Safety Advisory Board said he still had concerns despite the addition of the warnings.

"It's a step forward but it's still horrific content," said Will Gardner, chief executive of Childnet.

He added that he needed to look into the changes before commenting further.

Police concern Until Monday Facebook had also featured adverts alongside the video of the Mexican murder despite the fact several users had complained to it about the material.

The Finnish company is also going bigger with its smartphone line. It is releasing a new pair of colorful, big-screen smartphones: the 6-inch Windows Phone 9 Lumia 1520 and the lower-end 1320.

The Lumia 2520 tablet will cost $499 and run Windows RT 8.1, a limited variation of the Windows 8 operating system that uses that system's tile-based touchscreen feature. The tablet gets 4G LTE, has a 2.2 GHz Quad Core processor and includes a 6.7 megapixel back-facing camera. The company says it has upped the screen's peak brightness so it's extra visible outdoors in direct sunlight.

For its new smartphones, Nokia has chosen to continue its focus on the camera as the killer feature that can set its devices apart. Its Lumia 1020 smartphone's primary selling point was its impressive 40 megapixel camera. The new big-screen 1520 smartphone will have a smaller but still powerful 20 megapixel camera and cost $749 before any carrier subsides. The the cheaper 1320 has a more ordinary 5 megapixel camera and cost $399. The Nokia Camera app is getting an update across all Nokia devices.

Six inches is a hefty size for smartphones, but Ifi Majid, Nokia's head of product marketing for North America, said the size was key because it's the largest a phone can go and still be held with one hand. While they haven't yet taken off in the U.S., "phablet" devices are a bigger hit in developing markets where the larger size is considered a status symbol.

This is Nokia's first big product rollout since it was announced that Microsoft was going to purchase part of the company. The $7.2 billion deal, which will include Nokia's devices and services businesses, is still pending. It's unclear what kind of different direction Nokia's products will take when Microsoft is fully in charge, and where the new 2520 tablet will fit in with Windows own similar Surface line.

Apple is the leading tablet manufacturer in the world, followed by Samsung, but all the major manufacturers are eager to get in on the growing market. Though Microsoft has been pushing its own Surface tablets and touchscreen-ified operating system, Windows 8, it still trails far behind iOS and Android tablets.

The rules are the first attempt to create strong data-protection laws for Europe's 500 million citizens.

They include a clause to strengthen online privacy in the wake of whistleblower Edward Snowden's allegations about US spying.

They also set out ways citizens can erase their personal data - the so-called right to be forgotten.

Industry lobbying

Lawmakers have toughened the initial draft regulation, prepared by the European Commission, to make sure companies no longer share European citizens' data with authorities of another country, unless explicitly allowed by EU law or an international treaty.

This is a direct response to allegations from former intelligence analyst Edward Snowden about the US National Security Agency (NSA) snooping on European citizens' data.

Another clause seeks to limit user profiling, requiring companies to explain their use of personal data in detail to customers and to seek prior consent.

To ensure that the regulation is properly applied, most businesses would have to designate or hire data-protection officers.

After 18 months of fierce industry lobbying, the legislation was passed with a 49-3 committee vote, with one abstention.

The European Parliament still needs to hold another vote and seek agreement with the EU's 28 member states though — which is likely to result in some changes.

"Tonight's vote sends a clear signal - as of today, data protection is made in Europe," said EU justice commissioner Viviane Reding.

But French consumer group La Quadrature du Net was disappointed with the draft law.

"There are some big loopholes that could void the effectiveness of the whole legislation," said Jeremie Zimmermann, from the organisation.

He said vague wording such as "legitimate interest" could allow businesses to "exonerate themselves from the legislation".

"A business could say that it is a legitimate interest to collect data in order to provide a better service for consumers or to enable it to make money," he said.

He was also surprised that the rules around data profiling were not tougher.

"Machines that crunch data are used to make important decisions such as who can get a job, who can get a loan, who can get insurance," he said.

"This legislation allows firms to continue to collect and process more data and profile individuals."