World news. 06-14-2013 ScienceTechnology

The social network wants to make it easier for users to find content already on Facebook, and functional hashtags are the first step. According to Facebook, many users already post hashtags anyway, so why not make them work? Hashtags will be both clickable and searchable, so, for example, topics like #NSALeaks or #NBAFinals will now exist.

Hashtags from other services, such as Instagram, are clickable as well. Users will also be able to compose posts directly from a hashtag feed and search results. That could make adding real-time content to specific streams easier than before.

Twitter user Chris Messina created in 2007 the hashtag as we know it today. Twitter eventually adopted the system of organizing tweets around a certain subject into its API and its broader ecosystem. Since then, the hashtag has been adopted by other services, including Flickr, Tumblr, Google+ and even Facebook-owned Instagram.

The world's largest software company, which already has a chain of 70 or so of its own Microsoft Stores and kiosks within shopping malls, said on Thursday the initiative would add more than 1,200 Best Buy Microsoft-trained sales associates to help customers.

Microsoft's new Windows 8 operating system has sold more than 100 million copies since launch in October, but sales of new tablets and PCs running the software, and its own Surface tablet, have not been as strong as it hoped. An updated version called Windows 8.1 is scheduled for release later this year.

Part of the problem has been that Microsoft has struggled to get the attention of shoppers at large retailers such as Best Buy due to the profusion and popularity of Apple Inc's iPad and tablets running Google Inc's Android system.

The new store-within-a-store approach "offers a large-scale, hands-on customer experience" of Microsoft products, said Tami Reller, head of marketing at Microsoft's Windows unit.

Microsoft's plan comes just two months after Samsung Electronics also unveiled plans to install its brand shops in more than 1,400 Best Buy stores this year.

The store-within-a-store effort is a key plank of Best Buy's turnaround plan, which includes dedicating more space to more-profitable products like tablets and mobile phones.

With just days until the June 14 election, a cyber-voting space is running a "virtual election." This campaign -- free from the Islamic regime's constraints -- is helping to provide a virtual space for voters inside Iran to "freely" choose their preferred candidate.

Russian chess legend Garry Kasparov is leading this effort, known as the "We Choose" campaign. He is joined by other internationally recognized former government officials, human rights advocates and technology experts.

"Democracy is both a political right and a human right," said Kasparov, chairman of the We Choose global committee.

"The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which Iran has also signed, declares that the will of the people shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections -- which are not the case in the current system of Iran, so if we want to understand the real opinion of the Iranian people, we need to give them an alternative platform to vote and to express their preferences," he said.

After the 2009 election many Iranians protested against Ahmadinejad's re-election alleging severe voting fraud. Soon after, the opposition was systematically crushed by regime forces, which left the massive movement for change in Iran shattered.

"Such 'parallel institutions' as We Choose give people space to express their will and grievances freely -- it's also what we called a 'low risk tactic' of dispersion as opposed to 'high risk tactic' of concentration, such as mass rallies and protests," said Srdja Popovic, a Serbian lawyer and political activist whose creative opposition tactics helped topple the government of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.

He adds that such tactics are suitable for societies with high levels of oppression and fear, "and Khamenei's Iran is unfortunately exactly like that."

Popovic is the founder of the Center for Applied Non-Violent Action and Strategies (CANVAS). According to the Atlantic, the young Iranians protesting against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's re-election in 2009 downloaded 17,000 copies of Popovic's guide to nonviolent action.

The country's Public Accounts Committee released a report focusing on Google's corporate taxes. It said whistleblowers had revealed inconsistencies in the technology company's corporate structure, which raised serious questions about whether it is acting lawfully on how it pays taxes in the country.

The committee said Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) generated $18 billion in revenue from the U.K. between 2006 and 2011 but paid a paltry $16 million in corporate tax over the same period. Google's argument that most sales of advertising space to U.K. clients take place through a subsidiary in Ireland, and therefore are not liable for U.K. tax, was "deeply unconvincing," it said.

"It is quite clear to us that sales to U.K. clients are the primary purpose, responsibility and result of its U.K. operation, and that the processing of sales through Google Ireland has no purpose other than to avoid U.K. corporation tax," the report stated. The committee said Google's U.K. employees were responsible for generating between 60% and 70% of revenue in the country, and that Google Ireland's role was simply to conduct automated billing.

Governments and lawmakers in Europe are turning up the heat on multinationals for using aggressive tax avoidance schemes at a time when taxpayers are being squeezed by austerity measures.

Last month, the European Union agreed to share bank account data across all 27 member states in a bid to crack down on tax evasion and aggressive avoidance. It also pledged to push for an international standard on automatic exchange of information between tax authorities and transparency about who owns and controls companies, an effort U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron will promote at a G-8 summit next week.

Google, along with Amazon (AMZN, Fortune 500) and Starbucks (SBUX, Fortune 500), was first challenged over its tax affairs by the same committee last year. The search engine giant has repeatedly denied breaking any U.K. tax rules.

"It's clear from this report that the Public Accounts Committee wants to see international companies paying more tax where their customers are located, but that's not how the rules operate today," Google said in a statement.

The nine justices handed a partial victory to Salt Lake City, Utah-based biotechnology company Myriad Genetics Inc, which holds the patents in question. But the rights group that challenged the patents also found reason to be pleased.

The biotechnology industry had warned that an expansive ruling against Myriad could threaten billions of dollars of investment.

The contentious, uniquely 21st century question before the court was whether any human genes can ever be patented - meaning the holders have exclusive rights to their intellectual property for a defined period.

The court, in an opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas, ruled that a synthetically produced genetic material made by scientists, known as cDNA, can be patented but that genes extracted from the human body, known as isolated DNA, do not merit the same legal protections.

The compromise outcome, which was urged by the Obama administration, will have less impact on Myriad. The Myriad patents in dispute will all expire by 2015.

Myriad's shares jumped 10 percent to $37.47 after the ruling was issued.

The ruling means some of Myriad's patents involving cDNA will likely survive, but the parties disagreed on that point.

The case arose when a group of medical researchers, associations and patients - represented by the American Civil Liberties Union - filed suit in 2009, saying human genes, including synthetically produced material, should not be patented.

They challenged seven patents owned by or licensed to Myriad on two genes - called BRCA1 and BRCA2 - linked to breast and ovarian cancer. A federal judge said the patents were invalid. An appeals court overruled that decision, and the case landed at the Supreme Court.

"Today, the court struck down a major barrier to patient care and medical innovation," said Sandra Park of the ACLU Women's Rights Project. "Myriad did not invent the BRCA genes and should not control them. Because of this ruling, patients will have greater access to genetic testing and scientists can engage in research on these genes without fear of being sued."

Electronic cigarettes are the future, they argue. Cheaper, cleaner and cooler than smoking, "vaping" - using a vaporizer to inhale nicotine infused with exotic flavors ranging from pina colada to bubblegum - will spell the end of tobacco.

"After I first tried this, I left half a cigarette in the ashtray and never went back," says Zoltan Kore, who co-runs the newly opened London e-cigarette shop "Smoke No Smoke".

"I'm not a smoker now, I'm a vaper," says business partner Gabor Kovacs. "The awful morning coughing fits have gone, and the waking up in the night struggling to breathe has gone, too."

Such stories - and hopes of persuading the rest of the world's billion smokers to stub out their tar and toxin-loaded cigarettes, cutting a catalogue of chronic disease risks as they do - are tantalizing for public health experts.

And since "vaping" doesn't entail kicking the addiction - either to the stimulant nicotine or to the behavioral habits of smoking - some say it can help smokers quit much more effectively than nicotine gum or patches.

COOL ALTERNATIVE, OR DANGEROUS GATEWAY?

All the top tobacco companies are now placing bets on e-smokes, which some analysts predict may outsell conventional cigarettes in 10 years, raising the counter-intuitive prospect that Big Tobacco could actually help people quit smoking.

Celebrities like Bruno Mars and Courtney Love are also endorsing them, a further inducement to makers of iconic cigarette brands like Marlboro and Camel to invest.

Yet e-cigarettes are far from universally accepted as a public health tool; regulators are agonizing over whether to restrict them as "gateway" products to nicotine addiction and tobacco smoking, or embrace them as treatments for would-be quitters.

A big issue is the lack of long-term scientific evidence to support the safety and effectiveness of e-cigarettes, prompting critics like the British Medical Association (BMA) to warn of the dangers of their unregulated use.

"These devices may also undermine efforts to prevent or stop smoking by making cigarette use seem normal in public and at work," argues the BMA, which has called for vaping to be banned in public places in Britain, just as smoking is.

The World Health Organization (WHO) is equally wary, saying that until e-cigarettes have been endorsed as safe and effective by national regulators, "consumers should be strongly advised not to use any of these products".

In an interview in Hong Kong's South China Morning Post newspaper published on Thursday, Snowden said the NSA had been hacking computers in Hong Kong and mainland China since 2009. Among those institutions hacked, he said, was the Chinese University of Hong Kong, which houses the Hong Kong Internet Exchange.

Snowden did not mention the exchange, but his comments have raised concerns that it may have been one of the NSA's targets.

"The fact that the Chinese University was hacked was probably a good choice, if it happened it probably would have been a good choice," said Charles Mok, a member of Hong Kong's legislative council and an IT specialist.

"So the fact that the internet exchange with much of the local domestic traffic would have gone through was probably picked as a target."

Snowden's allegations have until now largely focused on the extent to which the NSA was eavesdropping on U.S. citizens. His most recent comments about China and Hong Kong - where he is believed to be in hiding - draw attention to NSA's role in conducting surveillance of foreign countries.

Snowden was quoted as saying he believed that the NSA had conducted more than 61,000 hacking operations globally. "We hack network backbones - like huge Internet routers, basically - that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one," the Post quoted him as saying.

The Hong Kong Internet Exchange is one of dozens of Internet Exchange Points, or IXPs, around the globe handling domestic traffic between local service providers and some regional traffic. Such exchanges remove the need for such traffic to take lengthy detours via overseas servers.

The exchange was set up in the mid 1990s and is still run by the university. The university said in a statement that it closely monitored the exchange and had not detected any form of hacking to the network.

Journalists visiting the facility on Thursday, however, were able to walk through an access-restricted door into a "central computer room" with racks of servers without being challenged.

Cathy Huang, an analyst at Frost and Sullivan in Singapore, said that Hong Kong may be especially vulnerable to eavesdropping since its laissez faire economy left it lagging countries like Japan and Australia in setting and enforcing regulations on internet security.

There are concerns that the rising political star from Florida, crucial to attracting Republican support for the legislation, may decide it doesn't do enough to bolster security on the U.S.-Mexico border - a priority for conservatives.

But another Cuban-American, Senator Robert Menendez, could be equally important to the bill's fate, even though the Democrat from New Jersey has kept a lower profile than Rubio as one of the eight Senate co-authors of the immigration bill.

Menendez' concern - the opposite of Rubio's - is that the bill could become so tough as to gut its centerpiece, a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants.

The only Latino Democrat in the Senate, Menendez has the trust of immigrant groups that have been critical to the bill's momentum. If he were to walk away, so might many Latino backers of the bill, along with other Democratic lawmakers.

"I don't envision" withdrawing support, Menendez said. But he would "reserve the right," he told Reuters. "What I am not going to sell to the (Latino) community is something that does not meet our collective core principles."

Menendez' words are taken seriously. He pulled his support from an immigration bill in 2007 when he thought it broke with his principles and the interests of the Latino community.

Rubio and Menendez, along with six other Republicans and Democrats, form the bi-partisan Gang of Eight, which is steering the legislation's passage. The possibility of a gang implosion hangs over the debate now underway in the Senate.

The bill that the gang rolled out in April would provide a 13-year path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants.

But to garner Republican votes, it exacts a price: it toughens border security and imposes a series of burdens on illegal immigrants, including fees and fines.

If the Senate makes the pathway too easy, it would lose Republicans and its prospects would become even more challenging in the Republican-led House of Representatives. But if the bill makes the path too arduous, it could lose Menendez and Democrats, who control the U.S. Senate.

PUSH AND SHOVE

The push-and-shove has begun, and Rubio and Menendez are in the middle of it.

Global cyber crime in the financial sector has become a more pressing worry, underlined by a series of cases this year.

U.S. prosecutors last month laid out details of a crime ring they say stole $45 million from two Middle Eastern banks by hacking into credit card processing firms and withdrawing money from cash machines in 27 countries.

Andrew Haldane, the BoE's director of financial stability, met with five of Britain's top banks six months ago and four told him that a cyber attack was their biggest threat.

It was surprising the fifth bank did not have this risk on their list but it does now, Haldane told parliament's Treasury Select Committee.

"You can see why the financial sector would be a particularly good target for someone wanting to wreak havoc through the cyber route," he added.

"Understanding and management of this risk was still at a somewhat early stage," Haldane said.

Earlier meetings with bank chiefs had pointed to the "usual suspects" of the euro zone crisis or a slump in the economy at the top risk, Haldane said.

The focus on credit, market and liquidity risk over the past five years may have distracted attention from operational, and in particular cyber risks, at banks or in infrastructure like payment systems, Haldane said.

Haldane was being quizzed by lawmakers on his reappointment to the BoE's Financial Policy Committee (FPC)

During a press event Monday night at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, Sony hammered home key points about its new gaming system: Sharing games will be free. If people want to sell used games, that's fine. And a near-constant Internet connection, meant to monitor game usage, won't be required.

In other words, the PS4 will do many things the new XBox apparently cannot. Oh, and the PlayStation 4 will sell for $399 -- $100 less than the Xbox One. Both consoles are expected this fall in time for the holiday shopping season, setting up a battle for the hearts, minds and wallets of the gaming community.

A big point of contention among gamers is that Microsoft's new Xbox will require an online check-in every 24 hours (less than the "always-on" mode gamers expected) and will only allow games to be resold at selected retailers. Games may be shared only among a limited number of friends and family members.

Microsoft's daily check-in is designed, in part, to make sure users haven't resold, traded in or given away a game they've already downloaded on their consoles. The idea is to prevent more than one person from effectively owning a game that was purchased only once.

After rolling out a list of new games, Jack Tretton, president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment America, essentially went down a laundry list of complaints about the new Xbox, which had been showcased earlier Monday, and promised the opposite.

"In addition to creating an amazing library of new titles on PlayStation 4, we're equally focused on delivering what gamers want most without imposing restrictions or devaluing their PS4 purchases," Tretton said. "For instance, PlayStation 4 won't impose any new restrictions on the use of pre-owned games."

That announcement got a loud and sustained round of applause from an E3 crowd not always easy to impress.

"I guess that's a good thing," a smiling Tretton replied. In game-console terms, digital-rights management is a code that allows users to access a game's content. It's designed to assure developers and publishers that only the person who paid for the game, and close family and friends, can play it.

Sony and Microsoft aren't the ones that would benefit from DRM, or used-game restrictions. Game publishers want to make sure they are getting paid for their work, and that includes the secondhand market.

In the weeks leading up to E3, Microsoft had sought to calm gamers' concerns with a series of blog posts that some felt nibbled around the edges of rights-management issues but never offered definitive answers.

They are offering new ways of transportation and carrying out vital conservation work.

But, warned one speaker, far stricter controls are needed over the use of such machines in war.

Sci-fi author Daniel Suarez called for international treaties to limit the use of autonomous combat drones that are increasingly being developed by nations such as the US and Israel.

"There are tonnes of great uses for unmanned drones but we need a framework for robotic weapons as it puts too much power into too few hands," he said.

"Increasingly combat drones are making lethal decisions about human beings."

In 2011 US drones created 300,000 hours of video surveillance, for example.

"This is outstripping the human ability to review it all so increasingly people will rely on visual intelligence software," said Mr Suarez.

He also warned of the threat of anonymous war, where terrorists or criminals could launch drone attacks which would be difficult to trace back. "Such a war would tilt the geo-political balance on its head," he said.

Delivering supplies

On a more positive note, delegates heard how drones can play a vital role in civilian life.

Andreas Raptopoulos is currently building a network of drones to provide vital supplies to hard-to-reach places.

"In sub-Saharan Africa 85% of the roads are unusable during the rainy season," he said.

"Imagine if you are in Mali with a newborn in urgent need of medication - it may take days to come."

To overcome the issue, he is using small flying vehicles known as octocopters, which can deliver goods such as medicine in a few hours.

The firm he has created, Matternet, grew out of a challenge set at the Singularity University in Silicon Valley to find solutions to global poverty.

Prototypes have been tested in Haiti, delivering supplies to camps set up in the wake of the 2010 earthquakes and the firm is now planning a wider trial of the technology.

The method is cheap. "To deliver 2kg [4.4lb] over 10km [6.2 miles] costs just 24 cents," he said, although currently a vehicle costs about $3,000 (£1,900).

Mr Raptopoulos hopes to bring costs down to around $750 (£480) per vehicle.

He thinks that the project has huge potential.

But often lost amid it all is a simple fact: This is the world we have made. Oh, maybe you didn't make it, and I didn't make it, but enough of us voted for it with our ballots and pocketbooks and Web surfing that it has come to pass regardless.

Like it or not, the online world today is one in which we're expected to participate. Whether because of peer pressure, sheer convenience or clear-eyed decision making, we join social media sites, order merchandise online, store things in the cloud and burnish our "digital brand."

Meanwhile, we don't read End Use License Agreements (bo-ring!), freely exchange personal information on Facebook and insults on Twitter, enjoy tailored recommendations on Amazon and swipe key tags to take advantage of targeted discounts at grocery stores -- places where we often take pleasure in tabloid covers revealing invasions into other people's privacy.

So you thought paparazzi-level scrutiny was only for celebrities? Syracuse University's Anthony Rotolo has news for you: Thanks to the Internet, we're all celebrities on some level now.

"In reality, we're all kind of on 'Big Brother' -- on a reality show," says Rotolo, a professor who runs the Starship NEXIS lab, focusing on social networking and new technologies. "Whenever I give a talk, whenever you give a talk, there's going to be someone live-tweeting it. There's going to be somebody posting a picture on Facebook. We are redefining celebrity in this age, and anybody at any time could be speaking publicly without realizing it."

At its most extreme level, our hunger for sociability can turn minor incidents into major media firestorms, thanks to the Web's viral capabilities. One minute you're leaving a crummy tip; the next your message is all over the Web. One minute you're a bullied bus monitor; the next someone is raising hundreds of thousands of dollars on your behalf.

But even small pebble drops into the vast pool of the Internet can leave big ripples. How often have you made a purchase on one site -- or even just done some online window-shopping -- to find that ads on dozens of other, unrelated sites were suddenly pitching you the same product? And what about that misunderstood text that turns into a local flame war? And never mind the seemingly narrow online sleuthing that becomes an online lynching.

"A lot of stuff (online) plays out in public," says Rotolo, who believes we're still learning how to deal with it all.