Barchart news. 06-26-2013 ScienceTechnology

The adviser backed the internet search giant's position that it cannot erase legal content from the internet even if it is harmful to an individual. But he rejected the view of many U.S. internet firms that they are not bound by EU privacy law.

"Requesting search engine service providers to suppress legitimate and legal information that has entered the public domain would entail an interference with the freedom of expression," the Luxembourg-based court said in a statement setting out Advocate General Niilo Jaaskinen's opinion.

While internet-based firms operating in the European Union must adhere to national data protection laws, that did not oblige them to remove personal content produced by third parties, the statement said.

"Search engine service providers are not responsible, on the basis of the (EU's) Data Protection Directive, for personal data appearing on web pages they process."

Lawyers agree that Google's search algorithms, which hunt and list weblinks based on how relevant they may be, would not be in a position to "know" whether data was personal or not.

"A search engine is just a tool," said Eduardo Ustaran, a London-based lawyer from Field Fisher Waterhouse. "The nature of that information is irrelevant. It is just ones and zeros."

A final judgment on the case is expected before the end of the year. Judges in the European Court of Justice are not bound by an advocate general's opinion, but follow such recommendations in the majority of cases.

The case stems from a complaint by a Spanish man that a public notice announcing that his home was up for auction after being repossessed infringed his privacy and should be deleted from Google's search results.

His case is one of 180 similar examples in Spain in which people have sought to have content deleted from Google searches. The other cases are on hold pending the EU court's decision.

The original auction announcement was from a Spanish newspaper, which said it was under a legal obligation to publish the notice.

Google welcomed the advocate general's opinion, saying it supported the company's view that deleting such content amounted to censorship.

Berkman, a Republican who ran for governor in 1994, admitted he told investors he had access to scarce pre-IPO shares of Facebook as well as LinkedIn Corp, Groupon Inc and Zynga Inc.

Instead, Berkman used investors' money to make payments to earlier investors - a classic Ponzi scheme - and to pay personal expenses, including $6 million in a personal bankruptcy case, Assistant U.S. Attorney John O'Donnell said at a hearing in federal court in New York.

Berkman pleaded guilty to one charge of securities fraud and one charge of wire fraud. Each carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

"I deeply regret my actions," a weeping Berkman, wearing beige jail scrubs, said at the hearing on Tuesday. "I've devastated my family." He apologized to his investors, saying some of them were "dear, dear friends."

"I'm very, very sorry," he said.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Kevin Nathaniel Fox set sentencing for October 1.

As part of a plea deal, Berkman agreed to forfeit $13.2 million he raised from more than 120 investors.

Berkman had long been active in Oregon politics and served for a time as the head of the state's Republican Party. He lost in the Republican primary for governor in 1994. He explored a bid for governor in 2002, according to the newspaper The Oregonian.

Berkman was arrested in March at his home in Odessa, Florida.

"RECIDIVIST HISTORY"

Berkman's scam was similar to one perpetrated by former Florida fund manager John Mattera, who defrauded investors of $13 million by telling them he could invest their money in pre-IPO shares of Facebook and Groupon. Mattera was sentenced to 11 years in prison on June 21.

Berkman's guilty plea culminates what the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission had called a "recidivist history."

In 2001, the Oregon Division of Finance and Securities issued a cease-and-desist order and a $50,000 fine against Berkman for offering and selling convertible promissory notes without a brokerage license, according to the SEC.

The top U.S. bookstore chain reported another quarter of dismal results on Tuesday, led by a 34 percent drop in sales of Nook devices and e-books business, and said it expects sales to continue to decline this fiscal year at its bookstores.

Shares were down 17.5 percent to $15.53 in afternoon trading.

Barnes & Noble will still make and design black-and-white readers like the Nook Simple Touch, which it says are more geared to serious readers, who are its customers, than to tablets.

But it is looking for a partner to make its Nooks, acknowledging that competition is too fierce to fight alone.

"We want to move away from taking on all that risk ourselves," Barnes & Noble Chief Executive William Lynch told investors on a call. "It was very capital intensive to build our own tablets."

In the fiscal year ended April 27, Barnes & Noble lost $475 million on the Nook business and it repeatedly had to slash prices on the Nook tablets and accept returns from retailers unable to sell the devices.

The retreat raised fresh questions about Barnes & Noble's ability to sell its Nook Media subsidiary, created in early 2012 and made up of Nook and its college bookstore chain. The bookseller's ability to look at strategic alternatives and its position in the e-books market were also matters of concern.

Barclays Capital analyst Alan Rifkin said in a research note the losses "reduce the likelihood" Barnes & Noble will find a buyer for its digital business.

Last year, Microsoft Corp took a 17.6 percent stake in Nook Media, and British publisher Pearson Plc bought 5 percent. Barnes & Noble owns the rest.

Barnes & Noble shares shot up in May on unconfirmed reports that Microsoft wanted to buy Nook.

Barnes & Noble, the largest U.S. bookstore chain, launched the first version of the Nook e-reader in 2009 to take on Amazon.com Inc's market-leading Kindle and secure a place in the fast growing e-books market.

Samsung and Apple, the world's top two smartphone makers by volume and sales, are embroiled in patent disputes in at least 10 countries as they vie to dominate the lucrative and fast-growing mobile market and win customers with their latest gadgets.

The talks came after the European Commission, which acts as EU competition regulator, told Samsung in December that it was acting unfairly by seeking court injunctions against Apple over the use of its patents.

"Samsung has been involved in settlement discussions for several months now. Samsung wants to settle," said one of the sources, who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter.

The sources said it was still too early to say if the discussions would result in a settlement. That would mean no finding of wrongdoing for Samsung and no fine, which could otherwise reach as much as $17.3 billion if the South Korean firm is found to be in breach of EU laws.

Both the European Commission and Samsung declined to comment.

Samsung came under EU regulatory fire last year when it began seeking injunctions in various EU countries in 2011 against Apple's use of its patents for the 3G UMTS standard despite pledging to license them on fair terms to rivals.

Asked why Samsung was seeking to settle instead of fighting the charges, Mario Mariniello, an analyst at think-tank Bruegel and a former Commission economist, said it was possible the company thought the regulator had built up a strong enough case against it.

After finishing her studies at Sweden's Linkoping University, the 25-year-old accepted an unpaid, part-time position at Fair Travel, a non-profit group focused on human rights and tourism, hoping it would lead to a full-time job and a salary.

But no such luck.

When her contract ended in December, she declined the offer to stay on as an unpaid intern. Since then, dozens of applications and endless hours of networking have yielded just two interviews, despite a resume boasting a stellar academic record and a string of hard-to-obtain internships.

"I feel in some ways that I'm of no use anymore. It's like I'm posing nude in my cover letter, begging for approval, but I just keep on getting dumped," says Borjars, who lives a few train stops south of where young Swedes rioted last month, in part in an outcry against their miserable job prospects.

Borjars' situation is a reflection of the depth of the European economic crisis. It is not only unemployment but also underemployment - including workers who are overqualified, interns who are unpaid or low-paid and part-time employees who want full-time work - that has reached critical levels in many EU countries, and could leave a permanent financial and psychological mark on a generation.

The European Union's unemployment statistics do not account for university graduates who are employed to flip hamburgers, or part-time coffee shop baristas who want to work more hours.

But experts now argue that the number of people who are underemployed has become too great to ignore, and represents a huge loss of potential economic output.

OVERQUALIFIED AND UNDEREMPLOYED

To understand where underemployment fits in, it is worth looking at how the EU's statistics break down.

Last December, the most recent full figures available, 25 million of the EU's workforce of 240 million were unemployed and actively looking for jobs, producing an unemployment rate of 11 percent.

An additional 11 million were unemployed but had stopped looking or were not immediately available to start work, and were therefore not classified as unemployed. Adding them to the total would bump the jobless rate up to 15 percent.

Then there were more than 9 million part-time workers who wanted to work more hours but had no opportunity to do so - they were counted as employed but felt underemployed.

The companies, the majority of them in China, argue that a ban on trading of climate credits for the incineration of HFC-23 makes it no longer financially viable to destroy the gas, which is a byproduct of a substance used in air conditioners and refrigerators.

A warning by the Environmental Investigation Agency in a report to be released on Monday will raise the pressure on China to ban such gases and end economic incentives for their production in multilateral talks.

Some 19 factories -- 11 in China -- making HCFC-22 have been receiving climate credits under the UN's Clean Development Mechanism for installing and operating incinerators to burn HFC-23 that is created during the manufacturing process, instead of venting it into the atmosphere. Facilities in developing countries can sell emission reduction credits to buyers in developed countries to allow the latter to meet their targets under the Kyoto protocol.

However, the European Emissions Trading Scheme, the world's largest carbon market, banned trading in those credits last month after finding that the financial incentive drove companies to produce more HFC-23 instead of curbing it. Other climate exchanges have said they will follow, causing substantial revenue streams for the producers to dry up.

The EIA said an investigation had shown that most of China's non-CDM facilities were emitting HFC-23 already. "If all of these facilities [under the CDM] join China's non-CDM and vent their HFC-23, they will set off a climate bomb emitting more than 2bn tonnes of CO2 equivalent emissions by 2020," it said.

People involved in the sector in China said this was likely to happen. "If there is no more funding, the CDM plants could start venting as well," Mei Shengfang, deputy secretary-general of the China Association of Fluorine and Silicone Industry, said. He added that authorities were considering offering support. An executive at China Fluoro Technology, one of the largest Chinese CDM plants, said: "Our company is still incinerating the HFC-23 now. If the money is used up, we can stop incineration. We can't go on doing this, we can't afford it and we have no duty to do it."

"Our national interest will be served only if this project does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution," he said in a speech on energy policy at Georgetown University. "The net effects of the pipeline's impact on our climate will be absolutely critical to determining whether this project is allowed to go forward."

In a 5-4 ruling with the court's conservatives in the majority, the justices ruled that Congress had used obsolete reasoning in continuing to force nine states, mainly in the South, to get federal approval for voting rule changes affecting blacks and other minorities.

The court ruled in favor of officials from Shelby County, Alabama, by declaring invalid a section of the law that set a formula that determines which states need federal approval to change voting laws.

President Barack Obama quickly called on Congress to pass a new law to ensure equal access to voting polls for all.

"I am deeply disappointed with the Supreme Court's decision today," Obama, the first black U.S. president, said in a statement, adding that the court's action "upsets decades of well-established practices that help make sure voting is fair, especially in places where voting discrimination has been historically prevalent."

The ruling upended important legal protections for minority voters that were a key achievement of the U.S. civil rights movement of the 1960s led by Martin Luther King Jr. The decision also placed the burden on Congress - sharply divided along party lines to the point of virtual gridlock - to pass any new voting rights law like the one sought by Obama.

Writing for the majority, conservative Chief Justice John Roberts said the coverage formula that Congress used when it most recently re-authorized the law in 2006 should have been updated.

"Congress did not use the record it compiled to shape a coverage formula grounded in current conditions," he wrote. "It instead re-enacted a formula based on 40-year-old facts having no logical relationship to the present day."

The coverage formula therefore violates the sovereignty of the affected states under the U.S. Constitution, Roberts said.

One of the most closely watched disputes of the court's current term, the case centers on the civil rights-era law that broadly prohibited poll taxes, literacy tests and other measures that prevented blacks from voting. In the 1960s, such laws existed throughout the country but were more prevalent in the South with its legacy of slavery.

The Shelby County challengers said the kind of systematic obstruction that once warranted treating the South differently is over and the screening provision should be struck down.

O3b will put a series of satellites 8,000km above the Earth to provide communications to those parts of the world that have poor fibre optic infrastructure.

With backing from blue chip companies such as Google, O3b believes its novel system can change the broadband experience for millions of people.

The network's first four satellites will launch from French Guiana.

They will ride a Soyuz rocket from the Sinnamary spaceport, with lift-off scheduled for 15:53 local time (18:53 GMT).

It will take just over two hours for the Soyuz's Fregat upper-stage to raise the satellites to their operational altitude.

O3b will handle primarily voice and data traffic for mobile phone operators and internet service providers. It will pick up this traffic as the spacecraft pass overhead and then relay it to ground stations, or teleports, for onward connection to global networks.

Although other satellites routinely do this, O3b is taking a markedly different approach.

By flying in a Medium-Earth Orbit of 8,000km, its satellites will be a quarter of the distance from Earth than is the case with traditional geostationary (GEO) telecommunications spacecraft, which sit some 36,000km above the planet.

This should reduce substantially the delay, or latency, of the signal as the voice or data traffic is routed via space.

"The network was designed to avoid much of the difficulty that satellite connectivity provides today which is this delay," said O3b CEO Steve Collar.

"We've all been on a satellite call and you have that 600 milliseconds delay, which doesn't sound like much but it's enough to make that connection almost unusable. It's just as much of a problem on data networks. If you are on the internet and are searching for a site, it affects your behaviour if you get slow responses. You'll stop using the service. We wanted to fix those problems and the only way to fix them is to bring the satellites closer to Earth."

O3b is promising round-trip transmission time of a little more than 100 milliseconds.

The satellites will operate in the high-frequency Ka-band and have the capability to deliver 10 beams, at 1.2Gbps per beam, to each of O3b's seven operational regions.

The company expects to start services at the end of the year, once it gets eight spacecraft in orbit, but the intention is to put up perhaps as many as 20 eventually.

Jake Davis, 20, was convicted of computer hacking for his role in the notorious group LulzSec.

He cannot contact anyone who associates themselves with the wider Anonymous hacktivist collective.

He told the BBC he planned to release a prison diary and to write a film about the internet.

Davis returned to Twitter on 22 June after finishing his 37-day term at Feltham young offender institution.

During that time he penned what he described as a "nerdy" diary, wrote using pen and paper, which he hopes to publish online once it has been subjected to legal checks.

He is forbidden from creating encrypted files, securely wiping any data or deleting his internet history.

In June 2012 he pleaded guilty to being part of LulzSec, an offshoot of Anonymous famed for attacking several high profile sites including Sony Pictures and the UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency.

Shortly after being released, he tweeted: "654 days on curfew and 37 days in Feltham. Up next: Another 365 days on licence (parole) and 1,825 days of intense monitoring. Free though!"

He had been sentenced to 24 months - but he had been wearing an electronic tag for 21 months which counted against his term.

Licking elbows Davis is now based in Islington, north London, where he said he was working on a number of projects.

He said he had begun an unspecified project with contemporary art firm Artangel - the company told the BBC it had had "several exploratory chats with Jake over the past six months", but would not go into further detail.

Longer term, he told the BBC he would write a fictional film about the internet, working with production company Fly Film, who could not be reached for comment on Monday.

Publically on Twitter, he has been sharing anecdotes about his time inside. In one post, he wrote: "I was sacked as a prison cleaner for mopping too near a computer. Those deadly, soapy mops are a serious threat to GCHQ, make no mistake!" As alter ego Topiary, Davis's last tweet before his arrest in July 2011 read: "You cannot arrest an idea."

On Sunday, in a nod to that sign off, Davis joked: "You can arrest an idea, you can imprison an idea, you can warp an idea, you can break an idea, but you still can't lick your own elbow."

While he wishes to distance himself from the hacking world, he has pledged support to Edward Snowden, the former US intelligence contractor who leaked secret documents regarding the monitoring of internet users.

Spanish researchers have found a way to mimic the shifting movement of a hamster inside a ball to get their Rosphere robot moving.

The electronics controlling the robot replace the hamster and act as a swinging weight to propel it forward.

Field trials have shown the Rosphere could help monitor soil conditions on arable land.

The Rosphere was developed by a four-strong team at the Technical University of Madrid (UPM) who tried to find a method of locomotion that would not be thwarted by uneven or difficult terrain. Wheeled and legged robots can struggle on shifting ground or places strewn with lots of large and small objects.

The rolling robot's control systems swing on a spindle that sits at the centre of the hollow spherical device. By shifting the position of the electronics package on the spindle it is possible to make the robot roll forward. Drive wheels at either end of the spindle twitch the package to get the robot moving. Operating just one drive wheel helps the robot steer.

As well as drive motors to set the control system swinging, the robot's electronics include a wireless communication system and it can be fitted with cameras and other sensors to monitor environmental conditions, such as moisture levels and temperature.

The robot can also be operated remotely so an operator can take over if it gets trapped or cannot find a way through a field of obstacles.

Early work with the Rosphere has involved rolling it along furrows between crops. Eventually its creators hope the robot will be able to travel regularly around fields to monitor conditions and tell farmers the best time to water or otherwise tend their crops.

Tapie, a member of France's business and sporting elite, says he ha