World News. 06-08-2013 ScienceTechnology

The command, based at Fort Meade, Maryland, about 25 miles north of Washington, is rushing to add between 3,000 and 4,000 new cyber warriors under its wing by late 2015, more than quadrupling its size.

Most of Cyber Command's new troops will focus on defense, detecting and stopping computer penetrations of military and other critical networks by America's adversaries like China, Iran or North Korea.

But there is an increasing focus on offense as military commanders beef up plans to execute cyber strikes or switch to attack mode if the nation comes under electronic assault.

"We're going to train them to the highest standard we can," Army General Keith Alexander, head of Cyber Command, told the Reuters Cybersecurity Summit last month. "And not just on defense, but on both sides. You've got to have that."

Officials and experts have warned for years that U.S. computer networks are falling prey to espionage, intellectual property theft and disruption from nations such as China and Russia, as well as hackers and criminal groups. President Barack Obama will bring up allegations of Chinese hacking when he meets President Xi Jinping at a summit in California beginning on Friday - charges that Beijing has denied.

The Pentagon has accused China of using cyber espionage to modernize its military and a recent report said Chinese hackers had gained access to the designs of more than two dozen major U.S. weapons systems in recent years. Earlier this year, U.S. computer security company Mandiant said a secretive Chinese military unit was probably behind a series of hacking attacks that had stolen data from 100 U.S. companies.

Meeting at the luxurious Sunnylands estate near Palm Springs in California, Obama will seek Xi's assurance that he takes seriously accusations of growing Chinese cyberspying, including snooping on advanced U.S. weapons designs.

"All nations need to abide by international norms and affirm clear rules of the road," a U.S. official told reporters in previewing the summit. "That's the backdrop to the discussions that the two presidents will have."

Dispute over cybersecurity could test the two leader's ability to get along when they meet in the Californian desert in talks that are billed as an informal get-to-know-you encounter.

Obama intends to tell Xi that Washington considers Beijing responsible for any cyberattacks originating from its territory and that it must take action, U.S. officials said.

But in his first meeting with Obama since taking over China's presidency in March, Xi may not be in a conciliatory mood.

He is expected to voice discomfort over Washington's strategic "pivot" toward Asia, a military rebalancing of U.S. forces toward the Pacific that Beijing sees as an effort to hamper its economic and political expansion.

And Obama's protests about Chinese cyberspying might be blunted by news that the U.S. government has been quietly collecting the telephone records of millions of Americans as part of U.S. counterterrorism efforts.

Huawei, probably better known as a leading telecoms gear maker under fire from U.S. politicians over its potential links to the Chinese state, is looking to drive sales of its consumer devices, but is hobbled by not having effective consumer retail channels. Traditionally, it co-brands its devices with carriers.

In an interview on Friday, Guo told Reuters he sees this changing as Huawei shifts from focusing on the technology in its devices to better understanding consumers' tastes and perceptions.

"In some ways, (designing) a smartphone is in the middle of Silicon Valley and Hollywood," he said. "Silicon Valley represents technology - and smartphones need strong technology - and the Hollywood aspect is about experience and perception."

"It's like your beloved pet, you can't leave it. This is how we think about Huawei's consumer brand. It needs to be between Hollywood and Silicon Valley," he said on the sidelines of a business conference in Chengdu in southwestern China.

The consumer device push comes at a critical time for Huawei's telecommunication equipment business, which ranks behind Sweden's Ericsson in terms of market share and faces greater scrutiny from governments worldwide.

Just as Huawei tries to convince the West it's a safe company to do business with, a British parliamentary committee report on Thursday slammed the way in which ministers were not fully informed about a multi-billion pound deal for Huawei to supply equipment to BT Group Plc in 2005.

The ZenRobotics Recycler (ZRR) is an intelligent robot which separates construction materials on a conveyer belt, plucking out recyclable materials and depositing them in bins for collection. The robot is designed to replace manual sorting, which can be dangerous and frequently prohibitively expensive. Worldwide, the construction and demolition sector is thought to contribute over one third of all waste. The U.S. alone contributes a staggering 325 million tons of waste every year, and the UK produces another 120 million tons.

While household and municipal waste has fallen in recent years across the developed world, Waste Watch -- a not-for-profit sustainability organization based in the UK -- suggests that over 80% of all human waste that potentially could be recycled currently goes into landfill.

ZenRobotics founder Jufo Peltomaa notes that the problem is equally severe across the EU: "In the EU alone there's 900 million tons of construction and demolition waste. If you were to convert that to the average sized car, the queue would go 45 times around the globe."

Peltomaa and his team at ZenRobotics constructed the ZRR to help deal with this problem. "It's a really difficult job for robots and machine learning systems to do," says Peltomaa. "There are currently no such systems in the world, so our system is the first."

The ZRR identifies different types of waste using a process called "sensor fusion." By analysing the data, the sensors sort through objects on a conveyor belt and distribute them into surrounding chutes. The sensor fusion system uses a range of technologies including weight measurement, 3-D scanning, tactile assessment and spectrometer analysis, which measures how much light reflects from various different materials.

ZenRobotics believes its creation will help ease the burden of the repetitive and dangerous job of waste filtration, which is currently done manually.

Once the smoke clears, Israel could find itself facing more trouble from multiple threats on its northern front.

On Thursday, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's forces beat back rebels who seized the Quneitra crossing on the Golan, a strategic plateau captured by Israel in a 1967 Middle East war. The battles sent U.N. peacekeepers to their bunkers and prompted Austria to announce it was pulling its men out of the mission.

Israel is now concerned the entire United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) is on the brink of unraveling - a scenario that could bring further escalation along what has been for decades a quiet frontier with Syria.

The peacekeepers, in place under a 1974 disengagement agreement after Israel and Syria fought a second war on the Golan, had mostly found their biggest enemy to be boredom.

But their quiet presence has been highly symbolic - an affirmation of a status quo under which the two countries, which last held peace talks 13 years ago, avoided direct conflict that could lead to all-out war.

"If there are no Austrians there is no UNDOF. They were the core force," an Israeli diplomatic source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said. "It will be very hard to find a replacement."

Russian President Vladimir Putin, an Assad ally, said on Friday that he was willing to send troops to fill in for the Austrians.

On high alert over escalating fighting between Assad's forces and his enemies in the Syrian-controlled parts of the Golan, Israel has started in recent months to adjust its deployment along the front. Shelling and machinegun fire have occasionally spilled over into Israeli-held territory.

The Israeli military has revived once-abandoned outposts on the Golan and sent up regular forces to take the place of reservists. Israeli leaders have spoken particularly of a future threat posed to peace on the Golan by jihadi fighters now battling against Assad's forces.

Israel has launched air strikes on Syria to prevent weapons transfers to arch-enemy Hezbollah, an Iran-backed Lebanese militant group fighting on Assad's behalf.

However, it has shown few other signs of preparing to intervene in the civil war and has avoided taking sides.

Unlike his Western allies, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has stopped short of calling for an end to Assad's rule.

The White House spent much of the day defending the National Security Agency's secret collection of telephone records from millions of Americans as a "critical tool" for preventing attacks, as critics called the program - first reported by Britain's Guardian newspaper - a heavy-handed move that raised new questions about the extent of the U.S. government's spying on its citizens.

At day's end, the flap over the NSA's mining of data from customers of a subsidiary of Verizon Communications was overtaken by a Washington Post report that described an even more aggressive program of government surveillance.

The Post reported that the NSA and the FBI have been tapping "directly" into the central servers of leading U.S. internet companies to gain access to emails, photographs, audio, video, documents, connection logs and other information that enable analysts to track a person's movements and contacts over time.

Some of the companies named in the article - Google, Apple, Yahoo and Facebook - immediately denied that the government had "direct access" to their central servers. Microsoft said it does not voluntarily participate in any government data collection and only complies "with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers.

James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said the report contained "numerous inaccuracies."

Washington Post spokeswoman Kristine Coratti said the paper stood by its report, which was based on an NSA document that it published online.

Taken together, the reports suggested that U.S. domestic surveillance, long acknowledged to have become more prevalent since the September 11, 2001 attacks, was far more extensive than the public knew.

The Post said that the secret program involving the internet companies, code-named PRISM and established under Republican President George W. Bush in 2007, had seen "exponential growth" during the past several years under Democratic President Barack Obama.

The Post said an NSA report had found that the agency "increasingly relies on PRISM" as its leading source of raw material, accounting for nearly 1 in 7 intelligence reports.

It was, according several former insiders, a short conversation. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke was battling resolutely to restore growth, hiring and financial stability, and little serious consideration was given to an alternative.

Furthermore, Obama's most trusted adviser on financial matters, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who had formerly led the New York Fed, had a deep relationship with Bernanke and was a strong advocate for not changing horses in mid-stream.

Four years later, continuity will again be a big factor as the White House begins to think about who should succeed Bernanke if, as widely expected, he steps down when his second term as chairman expires at the end of January.

The stakes are huge. The U.S. recovery remains fragile, and financial markets are anxious about how long the Fed intends to continue its massive and unconventional stimulus: $85 billion a month of bond purchases that have helped propel stock markets to record highs and driven interest rates to historic lows.

Bernanke has said nothing publicly about his plans. But the former Princeton professor has not torpedoed the notion he does not want a third term, a view that gained traction with his plan to skip the Fed's big annual economic summit in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in August, the first Fed chair to miss it in 25 years.

The White House has also declined to comment on the Fed choice, widely expected by September. Were Obama to look beyond Bernanke, he could weigh several criteria: policy continuity and market credibility; Senate confirmability; crisis management credentials; and trust.

Following is an assessment of how the likely short list - Fed Vice Chair Janet Yellen, former Obama and Clinton aide Lawrence Summers, Geithner and former Fed vice chairs Donald Kohn and Roger Ferguson - stacks up against those requirements.

CONTINUITY AND STREET CRED

Financial markets could react poorly to a candidate perceived as poised to discontinue the Fed's stimulative bias, particularly with the rest of Washington now favoring austerity.

In time, though, it is likely the Fed will face different challenges - perhaps an inflation shock as it unwinds its $3.3 trillion balance sheet. The next chair may need to be ready to school those corners of the market prone to test the Fed, the so-called bond vigilantes, and to prevail in that standoff.

The United States added 175,000 jobs last month after adding only 149,000 in April, the Labor Department said on Friday.

The pickup in hiring came despite tax hikes and sweeping budget cuts enacted earlier in the year. The unemployment rate ticked a tenth of a point higher to 7.6 percent, but only because more Americans began to hunt for jobs.

"The labor market continues to trudge forward," said Jim Baird, an investment officer for Plante Moran Financial Advisors in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Even so, the jobless rate remains well above pre-recession levels and May marked the third straight month that U.S. payrolls increased by less than 200,000.

The report showed an economy still in need of the Fed's pedal-to-the-metal support, but which could be strong enough by September for the U.S. central bank to ease up on its bond-buying stimulus, many economists said.

"It's constructive enough to support the notion that bond buying should be curtailed as we go into the late third (or) early fourth quarter," said Ian Lyngen, a bond strategist at CRT Capital Group in Stamford, Connecticut.

Officials at the U.S. central bank have intimated they could be close to reducing the $85 billion in monthly bond purchases despite modest economic growth. The recovery is not expected to pick up steam until late in the year when the sting from government spending cuts begins to fade.

The May job growth figure was just above the median forecast in a Reuters poll of economists, and U.S. stock prices rose sharply on the report, while the dollar firmed. Yields on U.S. government bonds climbed modestly on the view the Fed, which next meets on June 18-19, could begin easing up on its support for the economy this year.

LASTING DAMAGE

After expanding at a 2.4 percent annual rate in the first three months of the year, many analysts expect the economy to throttle back to a growth pace of just around 1.5 percent in the second quarter due to Washington's austerity drive.

Budget cuts have led to hiring freezes at many government agencies, and attrition could be slowly reducing payrolls. Government payrolls declined by 3,000 in May.

The admission came after Britain's Guardian newspaper published on Wednesday a secret court order related to the records of millions of Verizon Communications customers. The surveillance appears to have involved the phone records of millions of Americans.

Privacy advocates blasted the order as unconstitutional government surveillance and called for a review.

A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, did not specifically confirm the report, but noted the published court order pertains only to data such as a telephone number or the length of a call, and not the subscribers' identities or the content of the telephone calls.

The order requires the government to turn over to the National Security Agency so-called "metadata" such as a list of numbers that called other U.S. or international numbers as well as other transactional information on the time and location of calls. The NSA is the main U.S. intelligence-gathering agency tasked with monitoring electronic communications.

"Information of the sort described in the Guardian article has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats to the United States, as it allows counterterrorism personnel to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States," the senior administration official said.

The revelation renewed concerns about the intelligence-gathering effort - criticized by human rights and privacy advocates - launched in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States and raised questions about its oversight.

It also drew fresh attention to President Barack Obama's handling of privacy and free speech issues. His administration already is under fire for searching Associated Press journalists' calling records and the emails of a Fox News Channel reporter as part of its inquiries into leaked government information.

Verizon has declined to comment. It remains unclear whether the practice extends to other carriers, though several security experts and at least one U.S. lawmaker said that was likely.

The Alibaba offering may come as early as the end of 2013 and is likely to rival last year's $16 billion IPO by Facebook Inc in terms of size.

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. has yet to officially announce that it will hold an IPO, but people familiar with the matter say the company has over the past few weeks intensified its meetings with investment banks.

In a sign of how much revenue is at stake, many banks have flown over top executives for the meetings - Citigroup Inc CEO Michael Corbat was recently in China to meet Alibaba executives, according to one person with knowledge of the visit.

Alibaba has yet to shortlist or formally mandate any bank for the IPO, but bankers expect the listing to take place in Hong Kong by the end of this year or early 2014.

Credit Suisse Group AG's transaction history with Alibaba has increased the bank's chances of a key role in any issue, the people familiar with the matter said, adding that Morgan Stanley is also likely to land a top role.

Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley and Alibaba declined to comment. "As a matter of policy we don't comment on rumor and speculation," Alibaba spokesman John Spelich said.

Last month, billionaire founder and Chairman Jack Ma told the Wall Street Journal the company was ready for an IPO.

The strategic partnership, announced on Thursday, means that WPP and its agencies such as GroupM and Kantar, will use Twitter's data trove to gain insight into customer behavior to pinpoint where to spend its ad dollars.

"Twitter's relevance continues to grow - not only as a social platform, but also as a window into consumer attitudes and behavior in real time," WPP CEO Martin Sorrell said in a statement.

With more than 200 million users, Twitter has made serious efforts in recent months to court Madison Avenue as a means to boost its revenue to better compete with rivals Facebook and Google.

The governmental agency banned the importation of Apple's older iPhones (before the 4S) and cellular iPads (before the third-generation iPad 4G) into the U.S. market. These devices were found to violate a Samsung patent necessary to connect with AT&T's cellular network. Simply put, if you're an AT&T customer, your phone is not a phone without a technology that Samsung owns.

Customs officers will hold any Apple shipments coming from China in 60 days if they contain those older products unless an appeals court sides with Apple or President Barack Obama vetoes the order.

The president has delegated this decision-making power to the U.S. trade representative, but obviously, he can still do what no U.S. president has done in decades.

However, he shouldn't get mired in this particular battle.

A veto would be consistent with a set of patent reform proposals the White House unveiled a few hours before the ITC's decision, which would make it harder to obtain such bans. But it would mean depriving Samsung of its most significant victory in a bitter legal spat with Apple and interfere in the intense two-horse race going on in the smartphone market.

A veto would also snub a major U.S. trading partner and geopolitical ally: South Korea, where Samsung accounts for about a fifth of the national economy. The South Koreans would certainly cry foul over "protectionism."

The good news for Apple is that most of the affected products are no longer on sale. The ones that are still being sold are Apple's lowest-priced entry-level offerings. As soon as Apple launches the iPhone 5S , the iPhone 5 will replace the 4S as the mid-priced product. The iPhone 4S, which is also safe, will then become the low-end iPhone.

Until this happens, we're talking about 1% of Apple's sales -- less, actually, because AT&T can buy as many iPhone 4 and iPad 2 units over the next 60 days as it wants and sell them afterward. And customers still have different models from which to choose.

But there's a bigger reason for concern.

What Samsung dropped on those older Apple products is the patent equivalent of a nuclear bomb, and a U.S. government agency with court-like powers said: "Yes, Samsung, you're in your right to use this lethal weapon, and we don't care that Apple claims it's been universally outlawed."