Newspapers Online. 12-16-2013 | ScienceTechnology

The search giant will tell the high court on Monday that it should throw out claims that it secretly tracked the browsing habits of millions of iPhone users.

In the first group claim brought against Google in the UK, the internet firm has insisted that the lawsuit must be brought in California, where it is based, instead of a British courtroom.

Hundreds of internet users are preparing to sue Google if the test case gets the green light.

Google is accused by the claimants of secretly monitoring their behaviour by circumventing security settings on the iPhone, iPad and desktop versions of the Safari web browser.

Judith Vidal-Hall, one of the claimants suing Google, said: "Google is very much here in the UK. It has a UK specific site. It has staff here. It sells adverts here. It makes money here. It is ludicrous for it to claim that, despite all of this very commercial activity, it won't answer to our courts.

"If consumers are based in the UK and English laws are abused, the perpetrator must be held to account here, not in a jurisdiction that might suit them better. Google's approach that British consumers should travel all the way to California to seek redress for its wrongdoings is arrogant, immoral and a disgrace."

Google will argue on Monday that the case does not meet the standard required to be heard at the high court in London. Lawyers for the search firm are expected to tell the judge that a similar privacy claim was recently struck out in the US and that no European regulators are currently investigating this issue.

But lawyers for the claimants will argue that Google should answer to the British legal system for allegedly breaching the privacy of internet users on UK soil.

"British users have a right to privacy protected by English and European laws," said Dan Tench, a solicitor from the law firm Olswang, which represents the claimants.

"Google may weave complex legal arguments about why the case should not be heard here, but they have a legal and moral duty to users on this side of the Atlantic not to abuse their wishes. Google must be held to account here, even though it would prefer to ignore England."

The robotic vehicle rolled down a ramp lowered by the lander and on to the volcanic plain known as Sinus Iridum.

Earlier on Saturday, the landing module containing the rover fired its thrusters to perform the first soft landing on the Moon since 1976.

The touchdown in the Moon's northern hemisphere marks the latest step in China's ambitious space programme.

The lander will operate there for a year, while the rover is expected to work for some three months.

The Chang'e-3 mission landed some 12 days after being launched atop a Chinese-developed Long March 3B rocket from Xichang in the country's south. The official Xinhua news service reported that the craft began its descent just after 1300 GMT (2100 Beijing time), touching down in Sinus Iridum (the Bay of Rainbows) 11 minutes later.

"I was lucky enough to see a prototype rover in Shanghai a few years ago - it's a wonderful technological achievement to have landed," Prof Andrew Coates, from UCL's Mullard Space Science Laboratory, told BBC News.

Chang'e-3 is the third unmanned rover mission to touch down on the lunar surface, and the first to go there in more than 40 years. The last was an 840kg (1,900lb) Soviet vehicle known as Lunokhod-2, which was kept warm by polonium-210.

But the six-wheeled Chinese vehicle carries a more sophisticated payload, including ground-penetrating radar which will gather measurements of the lunar soil and crust. The 120kg (260lb) Jade Rabbit rover can reportedly climb slopes of up to 30 degrees and travel at 200m (660ft) per hour.

Its name - chosen in an online poll of 3.4 million voters - derives from an ancient Chinese myth about a rabbit living on the moon as the pet of the lunar goddess Chang'e.

The rover and lander are powered by solar panels but some sources suggest they also carry radioisotope heating units (RHUs), containing plutonium-238 to keep them warm during the cold lunar night.

Reports suggest the lander and rover will photograph each other at some point on Sunday.

According to Chinese space scientists, the mission is designed to test new technologies, gather scientific data and build intellectual expertise. It will also scout valuable mineral resources that could one day be mined.

"China's lunar programme is an important component of mankind's activities to explore [the] peaceful use of space," Sun Huixian, a space engineer with the Chinese lunar programme, told Xinhua.

The execution of Jan Song Thaek, considered the second most powerful man in the secretive country, showed why China, United States and other countries must work together to limit North Korea's nuclear weapons development, Kerry said in the interview on ABC's "This Week" program aired on Sunday.

North Korean state media on Friday reported the execution of Jang. North Korea said earlier it had stripped Jang of his power and positions and accused him of criminal acts including mismanagement of the state financial system, womanizing and alcohol abuse.

North Korean politics are virtually impenetrable from outside and Jang also could have been purged over a falling out with Kim or other personal reasons.

"It tells us a lot about, first of all, how ruthless and reckless he is," Kerry said of Kim. "And it also tells us a lot about how insecure he is, to a certain degree.

"The insights that we have tell us that he is spontaneous, erratic, still worried about his place in the power structure, and maneuvering to eliminate any potential kind of adversary or competitor and does so obviously ruthlessly."

The top U.S. diplomat, in some of the most detailed remarks of a U.S. official since the news on Friday, said the execution was not the first under Kim's rule and pointed to the urgency of addressing the North Korean nuclear state.

"It tells us a significant amount about the instability internally of the regime, with the numbers of executions," Kerry said. "It's an ominous sign of the instability and of the danger that does exist."

The young Kim, believed to be about 30, has carried out two long-range missile tests and a nuclear weapons test in defiance of U.N. sanctions since he took control two years ago after the death of his father, Kim Jong Il.

The Obama administration is working with China, the closest thing Pyongyang has to an ally, in seeking help to prevent any internal upheaval in North Korea from destabilizing the Korean peninsula, U.S. officials say.

Kerry, in the interview, said the nature of "this ruthless, horrendous dictatorship" and Kim's insecurities raised the stakes for China, Russia, Japan, South Korea and the United States to "stay on the same page" and push ahead on denuclearization.

Healthcare.gov underwent what officials at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the agency running the healthcare overhaul, called "extended maintenance" beginning at midnight Saturday EST. The work was scheduled to last through approximately noon on Sunday, during which time people in the 36 states served by HealthCare.gov could not fill out applications or enroll in a health insurance plan.

The site was instead up and running at 8:30 a.m. on Sunday morning, CMS said in a statement.

The downtime affected not only customers in the 36 states but also those in the 14 states and District of Columbia running their own insurance marketplaces.

In addition to the marketplace where people shop for and enroll in a health plans, the federal data services hub was unavailable. The hub determines whether people are eligible for subsidies to defray the cost of insurance, regardless of what state they live in.

"Take anything I tell you with a grain of salt," he told me recently at his office near Geneva, Switzerland, paraphrasing the presentation. "I know nothing about the future." It's a bold statement coming from someone who has spent decades collaborating on new technologies and inventive ways of solving problems. To explore the universe's past, Incandela has been thinking at the edge of the future.

Incandela leads the team for the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, one of two towering wonders of modern engineering that detected an important particle called the Higgs boson. Known to the general public as "the God particle," the Higgs boson helps explain why matter has mass, and therefore why we're here at all.

Physicist Leon Lederman's book "The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?" gave it that nickname, which scientists actually hate. Lederman wrote that while "Goddamn Particle" might have been a more appropriate title, the publisher wouldn't allow it.

The experiments that found it -- ATLAS and CMS -- lie at opposite ends of the most powerful particle accelerator on Earth. CERN's $10 billion Large Hadron Collider sits in a 17-mile circular tunnel under the French-Swiss border, and will smash protons at energies of 13 trillion electron volts in 2015, after upgrades. The machine was designed to recreate conditions around the time of the birth of the universe, to look for evidence of our origins, including the Higgs boson.

Francois Englert and Peter Higgs received a Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for coming up with theories about the all-important particle. Incandela sported a tux for the banquet and snapped a photo with Higgs.

Attending the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm was one of many thrills of Incandela's tenure as CMS spokesperson, a position akin to CEO of the experiment. He steps down at the end of this month, and will leave Switzerland in August to return to the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is a professor of physics.

Overseeing the CMS experiment has kept Incandela, 57, too busy to notice the view of the Alps out his office window. Just this week, he's flown between Stockholm, Geneva and New York. No wonder he's waiting to settle back in the U.S. before getting a dog (he's picked the name Petabyte).

In Chile's first presidential showdown between two women, voters are expected to give overwhelming backing to Bachelet, who led the country from 2006 to 2010, impressed by her easy charm and plans to tackle deep income inequality.

Her right-wing rival, the sharp-tongued Evelyn Matthei, has been weakened by her family's ties to the 1973-1990 military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet and by her post in the unpopular government of outgoing President Sebastian Pinera.

In the first round of voting on November 17, Bachelet, a 62-year-old pediatrician by training, won nearly twice as many votes as Matthei, a 60-year-old economist and former labor minister. But Bachelet fell just short of the 50 percent needed to win outright, pushing the vote into a runoff.

The two women were playmates during their childhood on an air force base, though the bloody 1973 military coup later divided their families.

"This is not about choosing between 'two women', as the press likes to put it," Bachelet said in a closing campaign speech to hundreds of cheering supporters on Thursday.

"There are deep differences here. I think Chile is ready to face the transformations that will allow it to be the country we all want. We can turn Chile into a truly developed country."

Robust, copper-led economic growth has turned Chile into a Wall Street favorite, but many Chileans feel they have yet to see the fruits of the mining boom as wealth and power remain largely concentrated in the hands of a small elite.

Bachelet wants to hike corporate taxes to pay for a wide-ranging education reform, shred the dictatorship-era constitution, and legalize abortion under certain circumstances.

"I voted for Bachelet. I want changes for the people, for young students, more opportunities for those of us who are lower-middle class," said Maximiliano Valdes, a 25-year-old electrician. "The changes she's promised can be done."

There have been no major polls ahead of the run-off, mainly because Bachelet's victory has been taken for granted.

Minutes before the rally, EU enlargement chief Stefan Fuele said on Twitter he had told Ukraine he was suspending work on a trade and political deal, which should have been signed two weeks ago, saying Kiev's arguments to improve terms had "no grounds in reality".

Fuele's words suggested the European Union has lost patience with Kiev's demands for financial aid and was irritated at the way the bloc was being forced to take part in a 'bidding war' with Russia over Ukraine.

The focus was now on a visit Yanukovich is due to make to Moscow next Tuesday to tie up trade agreements with the Kremlin to help the distressed Ukrainian economy, but which the opposition fears will slam the door on integration with the European mainstream.

In particular, they fear he may take the first steps towards joining a Moscow-led customs union, together with Belarus and Kazakhstan, which they see as an attempt by Putin to re-create the Soviet Union.

"He might as well stay in Moscow and not come back to Kiev if a customs union agreement is signed," declared former economy minister Arseny Yatsenyuk, one of the opposition leaders. "We'll give him a really warm welcome if he sells out Ukraine."

"The Kremlin wants to take its revenge on Ukraine, divide Ukraine and drown it in blood," said far-right nationalist leader Oleh Tyahnybok. "We forbid this president to sign anything in Moscow that contradicts the interests of the Ukrainian state."

Yanukovich may be attempting to keep the attention of both Moscow and Brussels to strike as good a deal as possible to handle its huge debt and outstanding gas payments to Moscow. But it is a hazardous maneuver running the risk of alienating both parties.

Opposition leaders called for another mass rally on Tuesday to monitor Yanukovich's trip to Moscow and any deals made there.

'DESTINY IN EUROPE'

Earlier, U.S. Senator John McCain galvanized the 200,000 or so people on Kiev's Independence Square, telling them their destiny lay in Europe.

"We are here to support your just cause, the sovereign right of Ukraine to determine its own destiny freely and independently. And the destiny you seek lies in Europe," said McCain, a leading Republican voice on U.S. foreign policy.

The Nobel peace laureate, who was held in apartheid prisons for 27 years before emerging to preach forgiveness and reconciliation, was laid to rest at his ancestral home in Qunu after a send-off combining military pomp with the traditional rites of his Xhosa abaThembu clan.

As the coffin was lowered into the wreath-ringed grave, three army helicopters flew over bearing the South African flag on weighted cables, a poignant echo of the anti-apartheid leader's inauguration as the nation's first black president nearly two decades ago.

A battery fired a 21-gun salute, the booms reverberating around the rolling hills of the Eastern Cape, before five fighter jets flying low in formation roared over the valley.

"Yours was truly a long walk to freedom, and now you have achieved the ultimate freedom in the bosom of your maker," armed forces Chaplain General Monwabisi Jamangile said at the grave site, where three of Mandela's children already lie.

Among the 450 mourners at the private burial ceremony were relatives, political leaders and foreign guests including Britain's Prince Charles, American civil rights activist Reverend Jesse Jackson and talk show host Oprah Winfrey.

Mandela died aged 95 in Johannesburg on December 5, plunging his 52 million countrymen and women and millions more around the world into grief, and triggering more than a week of official memorials to one of the towering figures of the 20th century.

Over 100,000 people paid their respects in person at Mandela's lying in state at Pretoria's Union Buildings, where he was sworn in as president in 1994, an event that brought the curtain down on more than three centuries of white domination.

When his body arrived on Saturday in Qunu, 700 km (450 miles) south of Johannesburg, it was greeted by ululating locals overjoyed that Madiba, the clan name by which he was affectionately known, had "come home".

"After his long life and illness he can now rest," said grandmother Victoria Ntsingo. "His work is done."

"GREATEST SON"

Before the burial, 4,500 family, friends and dignitaries attended the state funeral service in a huge domed tent, its interior draped in black, in a field near Mandela's homestead.

The flag-covered casket was carried in by military chiefs, with Mandela's grandson and heir, Mandla, and South African President Jacob Zuma following in their footsteps.

The humbling reversal on one of the most sensitive policy issues facing the social network came as Twitter encountered user revolt for the first time as a public company.

Under the short-lived change on Thursday, a blocked Twitter user could view or tweet at the person who blocked him or her, but that activity would have been rendered invisible to the victim as if the offending account did not exist.

Under the re-instated policy, users could prevent their harassers from following them or interacting with their tweets. Users are also explicitly notified if they are blocked.

Before it backtracked, Twitter had said Thursday that the change was meant to protect victims of harassment who wanted to filter out abusive messages but feared that the act of blocking a user would prompt retaliation.

"We have decided to revert the change after receiving feedback from many users - we never want to introduce features at the cost of users feeling less safe," vice president of product Michael Sippey wrote in a blog post.

Chief Executive Dick Costolo initially sought to address the mounting criticism by saying on Twitter that the new features were widely requested by victims of abuse.

But many were not convinced. Within hours, the service was flooded with angry users, including many who did not understand the nuances of the new policy, and hundreds had signed an online petition to reverse the change.

"New @twitter block policy is like a home security system that instead of keeping people out puts a blindfold on YOU when they come in," said user @edcasey.

"'Just ignore them & they'll stop' is a dangerous thing to say to bullied kids & a dangerous thing to say to stalked/harassed Twitter users," wrote @red3blog, another user.

Keeping abuse in check is a key issue for the company, which needs to keep hold of existing users and attract hundreds of millions of new ones to justify the stratospheric valuation that investors have placed on its stock.

Twitter shares have risen 35 percent to $55.33 the past two weeks on investor expectations that the company can sustain its growth for years and mature into an internet powerhouse.

The changes were announced Thursday after the market close.

The company's swift about-face similarly drew an outpouring of relief.

"The people have spoken and Twitter listened, thanks," said user @samar_ismail.

The Iridis4 has 12,200 processors, each of which can perform a trillion calculations per second - a measurement referred to as a "teraflop".

The IBM machine also has a million gigabytes of disk space and 50 terabytes of memory.

Home computers generally have between 500GB and 2TB of disc space and about 4GB to 6GB of memory.

There are 1,024 gigabytes in a terabyte.

The university said the new machine would allow academics to work on more projects at faster speeds.

'Top 10' Pro vice-chancellor Prof Philip Nelson said: "Staying ahead of the game in high performance computing [HPC] is vital to help the university stay competitive.

"Simulation and computation enabled by HPC are recognised globally as the third pillar of modern research and this investment will ensure we remain world leaders in this field."

Iridis4 will be used for a range of research, including engineering, archaeology and medicine, as well as computer science.

The world's most powerful computer is China's Tianhe-2, which can perform 33,860 trillion calculations per second.

The university said its new computer ranked among the top 10 in the UK.

The most powerful is at the Science and Technology Facilities Council in Warrington.

Blue Origin protested to the US Government Accountability Office about the process Nasa uses to decide which companies can use the launch pad, either exclusively or sharing it.

The GAO rejected the protest and said Nasa had not shown a preference for one approach over another.

Blue Origin has not commented on the ruling.

Nasa is hoping to lease out Launch Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, which has not been used since the US shuttle fleet was retired in 2011. It was the launch pad from which Apollo 11 lifted off for the first manned Moon landing.

A spokesman for Nasa said: "Given today's GAO ruling, Nasa is looking forward in the near future to selecting an industry partner for negotiations to lease and operate the launch pad."

'Open to sharing' Another company, SpaceX, owned by Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla Motors, is also bidding to use the facility. SpaceX had originally wanted to use the site exclusively but later said it was open to sharing the site. Blue Origin's plans were to share the site. Blue Origin suggested that Nasa's proposal for seeking companies to use the site preferred an option where the site was shared.

But after Nasa administrator Charles Bolden made a comment that Blue Origin said showed the agency favoured an exclusive contract instead of a shared approach, the company filed a protest.

The GAO disagreed with the protest and in its ruling said: "There currently is nothing in the record beyond the protester's arguments to show that either approach necessarily is better in terms of meeting the agency's objective of achieving the fullest commercial use of space.

"We conclude that nothing in the language of the [announcement for proposal] favours one approach over the other."

SpaceX has made no comment on the ruling.

SpaceX already launches rockets from Cape Canaveral and last year became the first company to dock a commercial craft at the International Space Station,

IBM lobbied Congress hard to pass a law letting it share personal data of customers in China and elsewhere with the U.S. National Security Agency in a bid to protect its intellectual property rights, according to a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan.

The plaintiff in the complaint, Louisiana Sheriffs' Pension & Relief Fund, said this threatened IBM hardware sales in China, particularly given a program known as Prism that let the NSA spy on that country through technology companies such as IBM.

The Baton Rouge pension fund said the revelation of Prism and related disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden caused Chinese businesses and China's government to abruptly cut ties with the world's largest technology services provider.

It said this led IBM on October 16 to post disappointing third-quarter results, including drops in China of 22 percent in sales and 40 percent in hardware sales.

While quarterly profit rose 6 percent, revenue dropped 4 percent and fell well below analyst forecasts.

IBM shares fell 6.4 percent on October 17, wiping out $12.9 billion of the Armonk, New York-based company's market value.

The lawsuit names IBM, Chief Executive Virginia Rometty and Chief Financial Officer Mark Loughridge as defendants, and says they should be held liable for the company's failure to reveal sooner the risks of its lobbying and its NSA ties.

"These allegations are ludicrous and irresponsible and IBM will vigorously defend itself in court," IBM spokesman Doug Shelton said in an e-mail.

The Louisiana fund is represented by Bernstein, Litowitz, Berger & Grossmann, a prominent class-action specialist law firm. It seeks class-action status on behalf of shareholders from June 25 to October 16, 2013, and damages for shareholder losses.

Loughridge is retiring as CFO this month at age 60, which IBM calls its traditional retirement age. Martin Schroeter, who has been IBM's head of global finance, is replacing him.