World news online. 06-15-2013 ScienceTechnology

The timing of the attack suggests the attacks are politically motivated, said Google's (GOOG, Fortune 500) Eric Gross, the vice president of security engineering, in a blog post.

Google has detected a significant jump in phishing activity in the region during the past three weeks. The messages appear to be sent from Google and provide a link where users can make changes to their account settings. If the user clicks on the link, they are presented with a fake Google sign-in page where the hacker can steal victims' usernames and passwords.

This phishing campaign does not appear to place any malware on the victims' systems or employ any sophisticated tactics. The search giant has also been able to disrupt a number of the email scams.

But it doesn't take much -- attackers could have unlocked a trove of information from their victims, accessing all of their emails, Google documents and Google chats. "Gmail credentials are the keys to the kingdom," said Roel Schouwenberg, a senior researcher at Kaspersky Labs.

The scam emails have been sent to tens of thousands of Iranian Google users and Schouwenberg said this number is "very substantial" for a targeted campaign like this one.

During election season,Iran has a history of censoring certain websites, such as Google, Facebook (FB) and Twitter. The country has also completely cut off its citizens' access to the Internet at times.

Prof Sugata Mitra was outlining details of the first "school in the cloud".

While there would be an online adult moderator at times, the pupils would largely organise themselves, he said.

Meanwhile, an MIT professor laid out his vision of bringing the very best university education to some of the poorest parts of the world.

Prof Anant Agarwai already has one million students enrolled in his online school, edX, an online platform offering courses from some of the highest-profile universities.

He started the non-profit website because he believed it was time for a radical shake-up of education.

"Education has not changed in 500 years - we still herd children like cats into classrooms at 9am."

Such a model might work to a certain extent in the developed world but for many parts of the world, another way of doing things is needed.

The edX platform now has 27 university partners, all offering online courses in a wide range of subjects.

"For the first time, learners are able to take course from some of the best professors in the world," said Prof Agarwai.

The cost of running the platform has been boosted with investments of $60m (£38m) from MIT and Harvard universities and the site is hoping to fund itself in the future by licensing some of the online courses back to universities to offer a more blended learning experience for all students.

'Cloud grannies'

At the main TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference in LA in February, Prof Sugata Mitra was awarded a $1m (£638,000) prize fund to set up a series of cloud schools.

At TEDGlobal he laid out how he intended to spend the money and what a cloud school would be like.

"A school in the cloud is basically a school without physical teachers. We need this because in many places you can't get teachers or the teachers are very bad," he said.

Initially he intends to set up five cloud schools, three in India and two in the UK, near the University of Newcastle where he teaches.

The remotest of the locations is Korakati, a village in eastern India, where he hopes to build a school in the next four months. It will be very different from a conventional school - a glass pod filled with computers and with one large screen to allow moderators to Skype in and play a role in the education of the children.

The moderators will be drawn from Prof Mitra's "cloud granny" programme, which is already up and running in the UK and India.

Microsoft Corp, Sony Corp, Electronic Arts and other industry giants whipped up the crowd of gamers and developers at the event into a frenzy, with displays of high-powered new consoles and previews of popular genre games.

For an industry accustomed to dwindling revenue in recent years, the pervasive visual pyrotechnics offered something to look forward to after years of subsisting on franchise-oriented games such as "Call of Duty" and "Halo" that run off aging technology.

This fall will usher in the Xbox One and Sony PlayStation 4, which apart from being more powerful than their predecessors, now support cloud-based game play and mobile integration.

It remains to be seen whether these will avoid the fate of Nintendo Co Ltd's Wii U, whose disappointing sales since its late 2012 launch have forced the Japanese company to sharply curtail revenue forecasts.

The Xbox One will sell for $499 and the PlayStation 4 for $399 - a hefty bit of change in an era when free-to-play Internet and smartphone games from "Angry Birds" to "Clash of Clans" are attracting budget-conscious gamers and millions in investment.

"The graphics capabilities of console games are going through the roof, but mobile games are becoming more and more sophisticated too," said Mike Cuff, vice president of content at Wikipad, which launched a portable gaming tablet at E3.

At this year's E3, which will end late on Thursday, the debate raged around how Microsoft and Sony will treat used games, a segment that is growing quickly because the Facebook and iPhone generation seem to be moving away from the traditional practice of shelling out for newly released, highly marketed franchise titles.

"Sony and Microsoft still have work to do in order to convince a broad consumer base that they need to spend $400 or $500 on new hardware, in addition to $60 for each new piece of software," R.W. Baird analyst Colin Sebastian said.

Eddy Cue said he was not surprised when publishers increased prices for new and best-selling titles after Apple entered the e-books market in 2010, but he disputed that Apple caused prices industry-wide to increase.

"I didn't raise prices," he testified in federal court.

Apple is the sole remaining defendant in a lawsuit in which it is accused of working with five major U.S. publishers to fix e-book prices and undo Amazon.com Inc's market control. The publishers all reached settlements with the U.S. government.

Cue, a 24-year veteran of Apple, was the primary negotiator with major U.S. publishers in December 2009 and January 2010 before Apple launched its iBookstore and, according to a Justice Department lawyer, the "chief ringleader" of the alleged conspiracy.

During Thursday's proceedings, Cue, 48, said he had felt "tremendous" pressure to get a deal done with the publishers quickly after former CEO Steve Jobs gave him approval in late 2009 to pursue an iBookstore for the then-under wraps iPad.

Jobs, who died in 2011, was "near the end of his life" as the January 2010 unveiling of the iPad neared, Cue said. Not getting a deal done would have meant debuting the iPad without the bookstore, he said later.

"I wanted to get it done in time for that as I wanted to get it done for him," Cue said.

At the time of the negotiations, Amazon controlled up to 90 percent of the market by 2009, court filings show. Amazon, which had entered the market with its Kindle in 2007, was pricing new and bestselling e-books at $9.99, often below cost.

Cue testified initially Apple intended to adopt a wholesale model like Amazon, buying titles from the publishers and then setting the prices itself.

But after talking with publishers, Apple instead went with a so-called agency model, in which publishers set the price and Apple received a 30 percent commission on sales.

Publishers subsequently pushed Amazon to also adopt the agency model, a shift the government contends Apple encouraged through a contract clause that would allow it to reduce prices on its bookstore if other retailers sold e-books cheaper.

The changes have been made by Electronic Arts (EA), which took over the running of the app from Scrabble brand owner Mattel at the end of May.

Players are angry that their player histories have been wiped, the dictionary has changed and the board no longer refreshes itself after a turn.

Mattel apologised but added that the update had also attracted new players.

The firm said new features included the ability to play the game in six languages, customise the board, and pay for an ad-free version.

The game also uses the Collins dictionary rather than the traditional Chambers edition.

The app's official page on Facebook has more than 3.6m "likes" but most of these were amassed before the update and almost all of the recent comments are from players asking for the old version to be returned.

A Facebook group set up by players called "please bring back the Scrabble we love" has more than 2,000 members.

Lost history

"Who wants to play it in six languages?" player Helen Hawkins, from Kent, asked the BBC.

"I've been playing for over four years, I had 5,000 games on my statistics, I'd won 71% of them, I had my best scores recorded - and now it's all lost."

Mattel confirmed that players' previous data could not be restored.

"As part of the transition [to EA Mobile], we were unable to carry over ongoing games and statistics, the timer mode and the manual match-making function. The new version will have the same robust statistics moving forward," it said in a statement.

Ms Hawkins said the ability to play quick games, in which each player had to make a move within two or five minutes, had also been lost in the upgrade, and that people who played regularly together but were not Facebook friends could no longer contact each other.

"I haven't played it since the upgrade," she said.

"A lot of people have stopped, the new version is just hopeless. You have to refresh the board every time you play, it's hopeless compared with the old version."

A spokeswoman for Mattel told the BBC the firm was sorry for any upset caused.

"We are sorry we weren't able to please everybody," she said.

"The number of people playing has also increased significantly since the update.

"The offer could come as soon as next week," the person said on Friday.

Vodafone declined to comment.

Vodafone sent a letter to Kabel Deutschland last week announcing its interest and indicating a price of 81 euros per share, three people familiar with the matter have told Reuters.

Vodafone has confirmed that it made an offer to buy Kabel Deutschland but has not provided details.

The world's second-biggest mobile operator has long been looking for its most important European market to meet growing demand from customers for television, broadband, mobile and fixed-line services - so-called "quad play" - from one provider.

Any deal, which would be Vodafone's largest since 2007, could help it better compete against mobile operators, which are cutting prices, and against the pan-European cable group Liberty Global (LBTYA.O), which has been on an acquisition spree.

Vodafone had 32 million customers in Germany at the end of March, making it the biggest mobile operator in the country. Kabel Deutschland is Germany's largest cable operator with about 15 million of the 28 million homes passed by cable.

The visit comes nearly 50 years to the day after President John F. Kennedy landed in a divided Berlin at the depth of the Cold War and, in a powerful message of American solidarity, told encircled westerners in the city: "Ich bin ein Berliner"

Kennedy is the U.S. leader Obama was most often compared with during his run for the presidency, when supporters chanted "Yes we can" at campaign rallies. Young, charismatic and inspirational, he represented hope, renewal and the clean break from George W. Bush that Europeans craved.

"Germany meets the superstar" was the headline on the cover of Der Spiegel weekly before his visit during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign. His speech in Berlin's Tiergarten park attracted 200,000 fans who cheered wildly as he acknowledged policy mistakes under Bush and declared: "America has no better partner than Europe".

This week's Der Spiegel cover on the Obama visit was headlined "The Lost Friend".

Obama remains popular with Germans: a poll last week showed that 82 percent of them believe he has done a good job.

But the magic has gone, replaced by questions about Obama's failure to close the Guantanamo Bay military prison, his use of drones to kill al Qaeda militants and, above all, the "big brother" scanning of the Internet and communications that Europeans thought had ended with the Bush era.

Many Germans still recall blanket surveillance under the communist Stasi secret police, and when news of Washington's covert spying program PRISM broke last week, the newspaper headline of choice was "Yes we scan".

"He is still popular but not like he was," said Henning Riecke, who heads the transatlantic relations program at the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin.

"There's disappointment in Germany that he hasn't been able to close Guantanamo and there are concerns about his tactics in fighting terrorism. People have realized he's not a saint and he's not all-powerful."

ELECTION BOOST

The 50 million eligible voters had a choice between six candidates to replace incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but none is seen as challenging the Islamic Republic's 34-year-old system of clerical rule.

The first presidential poll since a disputed 2009 contest led to months of unrest is unlikely to change rocky ties between the West and the OPEC nation of 75 million, but it may bring a softening of the antagonistic style favored by Ahmadinejad.

World powers in talks with Iran over its nuclear program are looking for any signs of a recalibration of its negotiating stance after eight years of intransigence under Ahmadinejad.

Voting in the capital Tehran, Khamenei called on Iranians to vote in large numbers and derided Western misgivings about the credibility of the vote.

"I recently heard that someone at the U.S. National Security Council said 'we do not accept this election in Iran'," he said.

"We don't give a damn," he added.

On May 24, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry questioned the credibility of the election, criticizing the disqualification of candidates and accusing Tehran of disrupting Internet access.

All the remaining contenders except current chief nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili have criticized the conduct of diplomacy that has left Iran increasingly isolated and under painful economic sanctions.

After casting his vote, Jalili said: "Everyone should respect the name that comes out of the ballot boxes and the person people choose," according to ISNA news agency.

Hossein, a 27-year-old voter in Tehran who belongs to the Basij hardline volunteer militia, said he would vote for Jalili, 47, Khamenei's national security adviser and a former Revolutionary Guard who lost a leg in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.

"He is the only one I can trust to respect the values of the revolution ... He feels and cares for the needy," Hossein said.

In Dubai, Iranian expatriate Zahra, 20, a first time voter, said she cast her ballot for Khamenei's diplomatic adviser Ali Akbar Velayati because of his expertise on world affairs.

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