News Online.... 07-03-2013 | ScienceTechnology

The video games publisher said that user names, email addresses and encrypted passwords had been "illegally accessed", but that subscribers' debit and credit card details remained safe as it did not store them.

The firm said it had 58 million people on its database at the time of attack.

It said it did not believe the attack was related to earlier breaches.

Last year the firm had to release an emergency patch after it discovered a security hole in its Uplay web browser add-on could have allowed cybercriminals to run malware on computers that had installed it.

Then in April it temporarily halted sales of PC video games after hackers discovered a way to download software from its online store without paying and stole a copy of a title it had yet to release.

'Strengthen measures'

"We are recommending all our users change their passwords," the firm said in a statement.

"We also recommend that you change your password on any other website or service where you use the same or a similar password.

"Ubisoft's security teams are exploring all available means to expand and strengthen our security measures in order to better protect our customers. Unfortunately, no company or organisation is completely immune to these kinds of criminal attacks."

France-based Ubisoft is best known for its Assassin's Creed, Just Dance, Splinter Cell and Far Cry franchises. Gamers buying its titles for PCs are often required to register an account with the firm as an anti-piracy measure, while console owners are encouraged to do so in order to log "achievements" which can be used to unlock bonus content.

The attack comes two years after the biggest video games industry breach to date - a hack attack on Sony's PlayStation network that resulted in millions of subscribers' passwords and credit card details being leaked online.

The Restore the Fourth movement - referring to the US constitution's fourth amendment - said it wants to end "unconstitutional surveillance".

Reddit, Mozilla and Wordpress are among the big web names backing the action, due to take place on Thursday.

Almost 100 events have been planned across the US.

An interactive map detailing their locations has been published.

The site quotes a line from the fourth amendment which pledges "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures".

As well as the "real-world" protests, many influential websites plan to display messages of protest on their homepages on Thursday, co-ordinated by a group called the Internet Defence League (IDL).

Petition

The action has taken inspiration from similar efforts that took place last year.

Wikipedia, Google and others went "dark", or put black boxes over parts of their pages, to show their disagreement with proposed anti-piracy measures being discussed by US lawmakers. In reaction to the revelations made by whistleblower Edward Snowden, Mozilla, maker of the widely used Firefox browser, launched stopwatching.us - a petition calling for full disclosure of the US's "spying" programmes.

At the time of writing, the site had amassed 536,559 signatures. Dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei is listed as being among the petition's backers.

The demand comes at a time when one top US intelligence official was forced to apologise for telling Congress in March that the NSA did not have a policy of gathering data on millions of Americans.

The team at Brigham and Women's Hospital, in the US, caution that it is far too soon to talk about a cure as the virus could return at any point. The findings were presented at the International Aids Society Conference. It is difficult to get rid of an HIV infection because it hides inside human DNA, forming untouchable "reservoirs" in body.

Anti-retroviral drugs keep the virus in check within the bloodstream - but when the drugs stop, the virus comes back. HIV gone? The two men, who have not been identified, had lived with HIV for about 30 years.

They both developed a cancer, lymphoma, which required a bone-marrow transplant.

Bone marrow is where new blood cells are made and it is thought to be a major reservoir for HIV.

After the transplant, there was no detectable HIV in the blood for two years in one patient and four in the other. The pair came off their anti-retroviral drugs earlier this year.

One has gone 15 weeks, and the other seven, since stopping treatment, and no signs of the virus have been detected so far.

Dr Timothy Henrich told the BBC the results were exciting. But he added: "We have not demonstrated cure, we're going to need longer follow-up.

"What we can say is if the virus does stay away for a year or even two years after we stopped the treatment, that the chances of the virus rebounding are going to be extremely low.

"It's much too early at this point to use the C-word [cure]."

It is thought that the transplanted bone marrow was initially protected from infection by the course of anti-retrovirals. Meanwhile the transplant also attacked the remaining bone marrow, which was harbouring the virus.

However Dr Henrich cautioned that the virus could be still be hiding inside brain tissue or the gastrointestinal track.

The PC maker's special committee told Dell's founder and chief executive a few days ago that he should raise his offer if he wants it to succeed, a person familiar with the matter said on Tuesday.

The special committee, which was formed to independently assess what the best option for Dell shareholders is, came to that conclusion based on its meetings with investors as well as concerns over a key upcoming recommendation by investment advisory firm ISS, the person said.

ISS is expected to publish its view on whether Michael Dell's offer, which is backed by equity financing from buyout firm Silver Lake, is in the interest of Dell's shareholders as early as next week. A July 18 shareholder vote on Dell's take-private plan will follow.

Despite being advised by the special committee that he should raise his offer to see the transaction through, Michael Dell was non-committal, the person added, confirming an earlier report by Bloomberg News.

Dell Inc and Silver Lake declined to comment.

The special committee's move came as Icahn and his affiliates disclosed on Tuesday they had provided $3.42 billion, or 66 percent, of the debt financing to back his bid for Dell.

Investment bank Jefferies & Co provided $1.6 billion, or 30 percent of the overall $5.2 billion in committed financing with the remainder of about $179 million coming from 14 institutional funds, including pension funds and insurance companies, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

"The fact that he could not get lending from other banks suggests they are not too friendly to this," said Steven Kaplan, a University of Chicago finance professor. "However, one must note that a few banks are locked up with the Silver Lake offer."

"On the positive side, Icahn is putting a lot of money where his mouth is," Kaplan added.

Other market participants evaluating the transaction said Icahn's move could indicate he may never have aimed to broadly distribute the deal in the first place.

Calls to Carl Icahn, who runs Icahn Enterprises LP, were not immediately returned.

Icahn and Southeastern Asset Management are preparing an offer that would see shareholders tender 1.1 billion shares at $14 apiece, rivaling Michael Dell's and Silver Lake's $24.4 billion buyout offer of $13.65 a share.

Over the past decade, the 33-year-old high-school dropout has moved into his own house, got a steady job and earned enough income with his longtime girlfriend, Rosimeire de Souza, to lead their two kids into Brazil's fast-rising middle class.

Now a public health worker in a sprawling suburb east of Rio de Janeiro, Tamandaré is the kind of citizen that Brazil's government thought was fulfilled. Instead, he is one of the more than one million people across Latin America's biggest country who have hit the streets in a wave of mass protests.

Brazilians are railing against poor public schools, hospitals and transport. They are protesting soaring prices, crime and corruption. They are lambasting a political class so self-satisfied that it failed to see, much less address, the mounting dissatisfaction that led to the protests.

Combined, the concerns reflect growing unease among Brazil's nearly 200 million people that the country's long-promised leap into the developed world has fallen short once again.

"All you need to do is walk around a little to see how undeveloped we still are," Tamandaré says, smoking a cigarette on a plastic stool next to his small square kitchen table. "Take a bus, go to the health clinic - it's all shabby, slow, dangerous and infuriating."

The demonstrations, sparked by protests against a rise in public transport fares, at first drew mostly educated youth from Brazil's traditional middle class, a minority that historically has had more in common with a wealthy elite than the nearly 100 million Brazilians who until recently formed the ranks of the poor.

The demonstrations took off, though, when Brazil's "new" middle class joined the fray. "This is the discontent of people for whom having enough rice and beans on the table no longer comes as a surprise," says Rodrigo Dutra, a documentary filmmaker in Duque de Caxias, another working-class Rio suburb, who is studying the differences between these protests and rioting that followed a 1962 food shortage.

Much has been made in recent years about Brazil's emerging middle class - most of all by the leftist Workers' Party, in power since 2003.

Booming commodity exports, a consumer binge and ambitious social welfare programs together fueled a decade of steady economic growth that lifted 35 million Brazilians from poverty. But now, as the economy cools, many among the new middle class say their much-vaunted ascent leaves a lot to be desired.

The move raised questions about the future of other provisions of the law, including the mandate for individuals to obtain health coverage in 2014, and followed widespread complaints from businesses and their lobbyists about reporting requirements for employers with 50 or more full-time workers.

Retailers and other business interests welcomed the change, which analysts said could stymie a main avenue of attack on Obama's signature domestic policy achievement as campaigning for the 2014 midterm congressional election gets under way later this year.

Republicans called it evidence that Obama's plan was a failure, while Democrats termed it a demonstration of flexibility.

Whether that flexibility opens the door to further changes in the healthcare law is now a matter of debate. The law, known as "Obamacare," was passed in 2010 and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court a year ago.

"If this is negotiable, it seems like anything is negotiable," said Malcolm Slee, a tax lawyer working with businesses on healthcare implementation.

Companies would have had to pay the Internal Revenue Service $2,000 for each full-time employee who did not get health coverage, beginning January 1, when the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is scheduled to come into full effect.

"This is designed to meet two goals," Mark Mazur, the Treasury Department's assistant secretary for tax policy, said in a government blog. "It will allow us to consider ways to simplify the new reporting requirements consistent with the 2010 law. Second, it will provide time to adapt health coverage and reporting systems while employers are moving toward making health coverage affordable and accessible."

He said the administration would publish formal guidance describing the changes within the next week.

'PRACTICE YEAR'

Edward Lenz, senior counsel of the American Staffing Association, an employment and recruiting industry group, said administration officials briefed his organization on Tuesday afternoon, portraying the delay as a "practice year" for businesses.

"In our conversation this afternoon with representatives from the administration, they are expecting employers to voluntarily go forward with these rules," he said.

Its new report says more national temperature records were reported broken than in previous decades.

There was an increase in deaths from heatwaves over that decade.

This was particularly pronounced during the extreme summers in Europe in 2003 and in the Russian Federation during 2010.

But despite the decade being the second wettest since 1901 (with 2010 the wettest year recorded) fewer people died from floods than in the previous decade.

Better warning systems and increased preparedness take much of the credit for the reduced deaths. The WMO says smarter climate information will be needed as the climate continues to change.

Its report, The Global Climate 2001-2010, A Decade of Climate Extremes, analysed global and regional trends, as well as extreme events such as Hurricane Katrina, floods in Pakistan and droughts in the Amazon, Australia and East Africa.

The decade was the warmest for both hemispheres and for both land and ocean surface temperatures. The record warmth was accompanied by a rapid decline in Arctic sea ice, and accelerating loss of mass from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and from glaciers.

Global mean sea levels rose about 3mm per year - about double the observed 20th century trend of 1.6mm per year. Global sea level averaged over the decade was about 20cm higher than in 1880. The report notes that the high temperatures in the decade were achieved without a strong episode of the El Nino current which typically warms the world. It says that a strong El Nino episode would probably have driven temperatures even higher.

Although overall temperature rise has slowed down since the 1990s, the WMO says temperatures are still rising because of greenhouse gases from human society. The WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud said: “Natural climate variability, caused in part by interactions between our atmosphere and oceans means that some years are cooler than others. On an annual basis, the global temperature curve is not a smooth one. On a long-term basis the underlying trend is clearly in an upward direction, more so in recent times.” But climate change doubters emphasise the lack of movement in temperatures throughout the decade.

Military chiefs, vowing to restore order in a country racked by demonstrations over Mursi's Islamist policies, issued a call to battle in a statement headlined "The Final Hours". They said they were willing to shed blood against "terrorists and fools" after Mursi refused to give up his elected office.

The armed forces general command was holding a crisis meeting, a military source said, less than five hours before an ultimatum was due to expire for Mursi to either agree to share power or make way for an army-imposed solution.

In an emotional, rambling midnight television address, the president said he was democratically elected and would stay in office to uphold the constitutional order, declaring: "The price of preserving legitimacy is my life."

Liberal opponents said it showed he had "lost his mind".

The official spokesman of his Muslim Brotherhood movement said his supporters were willing to become martyrs to defend Mursi.

"There is only one thing we can do: we will stand in between the tanks and the president," Gehad El-Haddad told Reuters at the movement's protest encampment in a Cairo suburb that houses many military installations and is near the presidential palace.

"We will not allow the will of the Egyptian people to be bullied again by the military machine."

The state-run Al-Ahram newspaper said Mursi was expected to either step down or be removed from office and that the army would set up a three-member presidential council to be chaired by the head of the Supreme Constitutional Court.

A military source said he expected the army to first call political, social and economic figures and youth activists for talks on its draft roadmap for the country's future.

REVOLUTION SAVED?

A mass of revelers on Cairo's Tahrir Square feted the army overnight for, in their eyes, saving the revolutionary democracy won there two years ago when an uprising toppled autocratic President Hosni Mubarak in 2011.

But Mursi's backers denounced the army's intervention as a "coup". At least 16 people, mostly supporters of the president, were killed and about 200 wounded when gunmen opened fire on pro-Mursi demonstrators at Cairo University campus.

The Muslim Brotherhood accused uniformed police of the shooting. The Interior Ministry said it was investigating.

Apple and other technology companies such as Amazon.com Inc and Microsoft Corp, that build and run computer server farms have come under criticism for their high consumption of electricity and other resources.

These data centers cater to an explosion in Internet traffic, streaming content through mobile devices and hosting of services to corporations.

The new solar farm will provide power to Sierra Pacific Power Co's electric grid that serves Apple's data center and when completed will generate about hours 43.5 million kilowatt of clean energy a year, Apple said in a statement.

The contact-lens-and-spectacles combination magnifies scene details by 2.8 times.

Polarising filters in the spectacles allow wearers to switch between normal and telescopic vision.

The telescopic sight system has been developed to help people suffering age-related blindness.

Age-related macular degeneration is one of the most common forms of blindness and damages the part of the eye, the macula, that handles fine detail. As this area degenerates, sufferers lose the ability to recognise faces and perform tasks, such as driving and reading, that rely on picking up details.

Precise control

The contact lens created by the researchers has a central region that lets light through for normal vision. The telescopic element sits in a ring around this central region. Tiny aluminium mirrors scored with a specific pattern act as a magnifier as they bounce the light around four times within the ring before directing it towards the retina.

In ordinary use, the magnified image is not seen as it is blocked by polarising filters set in a companion pair of spectacles. Wearers can switch it on by changing the filters on the spectacles so the only light falling on their retina comes from the magnified stream.

For their filtering system, the researchers, led by Joseph Ford at UC San Diego and Eric Tremblay at Switzerland's EPFL, adapted a pair of glasses that Samsung produces for some of its 3D TV sets. In normal use, these spectacles create a 3D effect by alternately blocking the right or left lens.

The prototype contact lens produced by the team is 8mm in diameter, 1mm thick at its centre and 1.17mm thick in its magnifying ring.

"The most difficult part of the project was making the lens breathable," Dr Tremblay told the BBC. "If you want to wear the lens for more than 30 minutes you need to make it breathable." Gases have to be able to penetrate the lens to keep the parts of the eye covered by the contact, especially the cornea, supplied with oxygen, he said.

The team has solved this problem by producing lenses riddled with tiny channels that let oxygen flow through.

However, said Dr Tremblay, this made manufacturing the lenses much more difficult.

"The fabrication tolerances are quite challenging because everything has to be so precise," he said.

The benchmark Nikkei .N225 ended 246.24 points higher at 14,098.74, advancing for a fourth day in a row and marking its longest winning streak since mid-May.