Newspapers Online 08-21-2013 | ScienceTechno

Children's profiles will have default settings making less of their personal information publicly visible, with more prominent links to safety information.

Support requests from child members will also be dealt with separately.

The decision comes the day after the social-networking site for professionals launched University Pages, allowing higher education institutions to set up profiles.

Dr Bernie Hogan, of the Oxford Internet Institute, said the development, which takes effect on 12 September, would help children "differentiate between the public profile they want for employment [and] the personal profile they share on Facebook with their friends and family".

"I am personally opposed to employers intruding on Facebook pages while screening candidates," he said.

"The risk of unintended discrimination is very high."

But Dr Hogan also warned children could become a nuisance to Linkedin's 225 million existing members if they used the site to play games or set up profiles with false names.

"You can't get employed under a fake name," he said.

New York University, the University of Michigan and French business school Insead have already set up Linkedin profiles.

Communications regulator Ofcom is proposing to license a new satellite system for aircraft, ships and trains.

Earth Stations on Mobile Platforms (ESOMPs) can deliver connections up to 10 times faster than those currently available to travellers.

Britain's airlines have not indicated whether they would use the technology.

Ofcom began a consultation last week on the authorisation of the stabilised satellite dish system, which utilises high-frequency bands.

'Commercial decision'

Several commercial satellite operators are planning to launch networks that support the use of ESOMPs in the coming months.

An Ofcom representative said airlines would "have to make a commercial decision" on whether to utilise the new systems.

British Airways' in-flight entertainment and technology manager, Richard D'Cruze, said the airline was "closely monitoring developments in the connectivity market in both the satellite and direct air-to-ground technology areas". Ofcom says it has been working with its European counterparts for the past two years, including France, Germany and Luxembourg, who are in the process of putting together their own regulations.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the US has already authorised the use of ESOMPs.

Andrew Ferguson, editor of broadband information website thinkbroadband.com, told the BBC the "inevitable higher costs for new systems" may be passed on to data-hungry passengers, who would instead choose to rely on various 3G and 4G mobile options.

"The parts of the UK that might benefit the most are those train services in rural areas where 3G connectivity is currently very poor or non-existent," he added.

It announced the move at the Gamescom trade fair in Cologne as part of its ID@Xbox self-publishing programme.

The equivalent hardware for the Xbox 360 costs thousands of pounds.

One expert said the move might help address a perception that Sony was more "indie-friendly".

The PlayStation maker dedicated a large part of its presentation to independent developers at the E3 expo in June, while Microsoft only briefly mentioned the sector at the Los Angeles event.

"Microsoft needed to be stronger about its message about this side of the industry," said Ed Barton, director of digital media at research firm Strategy Analytics.

"It has always been good at supporting the big firms with 400-strong teams, but it needs to show it can go down the spectrum all the way to the one-man bands.

"No-one knows where the next Minecraft will come from. And even if this doesn't move the needle hugely in terms of video game sales it will get the firm good press. There's a part of the public that love [independent] games like Journey - they make the ecosystem more interesting."

Track record

Although Microsoft said that in time it intended to make it possible for software writers to create games using retail versions of the Xbox One, at launch the facility will be limited to special development editions of the machine. To qualify, it said, developers must have a proven track record of shipping games on a console, PC or mobile devices.

Teams which are approved will be given two of the development machines free of charge.

The teams must also have their programs certified by Microsoft's managers before they become available to the public, but they will be free to set their own wholesale price to which the console-maker will then add its own charge.

Microsoft added that it was taking steps to make sure gamers could easily discover self-published titles on its marketplace by:

Allowing the games to show up in the main Xbox One store rather putting them into a separate area, as was the case with the Xbox 360 Offering a view of what is "trending", based on what the gamers' friends and the wider community are playing Using an "editor picks" section to showcase indie titles In addition, it confirmed it would not charge developers to distribute software updates - the firm ended such fees for the Xbox 360 in April - and would not place a limit on how many updates they offered.

The storage tank breach of about 300 tons of water is separate from contaminated water leaks reported in recent weeks, plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co said on Tuesday.

The latest leak, which is continuing, is so contaminated that a person standing 50 centimeters (1.6 feet) away would, within an hour, receive a radiation dose five times the average annual global limit for nuclear workers.

After 10 hours, a worker in that proximity to the leak would develop radiation sickness with symptoms including nausea and a drop in white blood cells.

"That is a huge amount of radiation. The situation is getting worse," said Michiaki Furukawa, who is professor emeritus at Nagoya University and a nuclear chemist.

The embattled utility Tokyo Electric has struggled to keep the Fukushima site under control since an earthquake and tsunami caused three reactor meltdowns in March 2011.

Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority has classified the latest leak as a level 1 incident, the second lowest on an international scale for radiological releases, a spokesman told Reuters on Tuesday.

But it is the first time Japan has issued a so-called INES rating for Fukushima since the meltdowns. Following the quake and tsunami, Fukushima was assigned the highest rating of 7, when it was hit by explosions after a loss of power and cooling.

A Tokyo Electric official said that workers who were monitoring storage tanks appeared to have failed to detect the leak of water which pooled up around the tank.

"We failed to discover the leak at an early stage and we need to review not only the tanks but also our monitoring system," he said.

Continued contaminated water leaks from Fukushima has alarmed Japan's neighbors South Korea and China.

Tokyo Electric, also known as Tepco, has been criticized for its failure to prepare for the disaster and been accused of covering up the extent of the problems at the plant.

FLOODED BASEMENTS

Massive amounts of radioactive fluids are accumulating at the Fukushima plant as Tepco floods reactor cores via a jerry-rigged system to keep melted uranium fuel rods cool and stable.

The water in the improvised cooling system then flows into basements and trenches that have been leaking since the disaster.

Egypt is enduring its bloodiest week of internal strife since the monarchy was overthrown in 1952, with about 900 people killed, including 100 police and soldiers, after the authorities broke up Brotherhood protest camps in Cairo last Wednesday.

A spokesman for a pro-Brotherhood alliance said the death toll among supporters of ousted Islamist president Mohamed Mursi, deposed by the military on July 3, was at about 1,400.

The turmoil has alarmed the United States and the European Union, but Israel and some Gulf Arab states led by Saudi Arabia have urged the West not to punish Cairo's new rulers.

Mohamed Badie, 70, the Brotherhood's general guide, was taken from an apartment in Nasr City in northeast Cairo, the area where protesters demanding Mursi's reinstatement had staged a vigil for six weeks before they were violently dispersed.

He was charged in July with incitement to murder during protests before Mursi's overthrow and is due to stand trial on August 25 together with his two deputies.

Footage circulated on local media showed the bearded Brotherhood leader sitting grim-faced on a sofa in a grey robe, hands folded in his lap, while a man with a rifle stands by.

The release of the images seemed designed to humiliate the Brotherhood's most senior chief, whose arrest means the top echelon of the Islamist movement is now behind bars.

After decades as an outlawed movement, the Brotherhood emerged as the best-drilled political force after Hosni Mubarak's fall in pro-democracy protests in 2011.

Now the state accuses it of al Qaeda-style militancy and subversion, charges it vehemently denies.

This is the first time that the North's human rights record has been examined by an expert panel, although the North, now ruled by a third generation of the founding Kim family, denies that it abuses human rights. It refuses to recognize the commission and has denied access to investigators.

Harrowing accounts from defectors now living in South Korea related how guards chopped off a man's finger, forced inmates to eat frogs and a mother to kill her own baby.

"I had no idea at all ... I thought my whole hand was going to be cut off at the wrist, so I felt thankful and grateful that only my finger was cut off," said Shin Dong-hyuk, punished for dropping a sewing machine.

Born in a prison called Camp 14 and forced to watch the execution of his mother and brother whom he turned in for his own survival, Shin is North Korea's best-known defector and camp survivor. He said he believed the U.N. panel was the only way to improve human rights in the isolated and impoverished state.

"Because the North Korean people cannot stand up with guns like Libya and Syria ... I personally think this is the first and last hope left," Shin said. "There is a lot for them to cover up, even though they don't admit to anything."

There are a 150,000-200,000 people in North Korean prison camps, according to independent estimates, and defectors say many inmates are malnourished or worked to death.

After more than a year and a half ruling North Korea, Kim Jong Un, 30, has shown few signs of changing the rigid rule of his father, Kim Jong Il, and grandfather, state founder Kim Il Sung. Neither have there been signs of a thaw or loss of control inside the tightly controlled state.

Jee Heon-a, 34, told the Commission that from the first day of her incarceration in 1999, she discovered that salted frogs were one of the few things to eat.

"Everyone's eyes were sunken. They all looked like animals. Frogs were hung from the buttons of their clothes, put in a plastic bag and their skins peeled off," she said. "They ate salted frogs and so did I."

Speaking softly, she took a deep breath when describing in detail how a mother was forced to kill her own baby.

Miranda's lawyer Gwendolen Morgan said her client was seeking a judicial review of the legal basis for his detention at London's Heathrow airport on Sunday under anti-terrorism laws and wanted assurances from the authorities that property seized from him would not be examined before this.

"We've sought undertakings that there will be no inspection, copying, disclosure, transfer or interference in any other way with our client's data pending determination of his judicial review," Morgan told Reuters.

"We're waiting to hear back this afternoon from both the defendants. Failing that we will be left with no option but to issue urgent proceedings in the High Court tomorrow."

"I couldn't live in my flat, even though I owned it," the Moscow hairdresser said, too scared to give her full name.

"For a year I rented, but then we ran out of money," she told Reuters at Moscow's only public shelter for battered women, Nadezhda ("Hope").

Fundamentally conservative and guided by the doctrines of a resurgent Orthodox Church, Russia has no legal protections for women like Yulia, believing that family disputes - even violent ones - should be resolved in the home, behind closed doors.

A new draft law would change that by making clear domestic violence is illegal and laying out the rights of victims in Russian law for the first time. Powerful sponsors include parliamentary deputies from United Russia, the party loyal to President Vladimir Putin that dominates the parliament.

But with Putin aiming to shore up support from conservative voters and the church - his political power base - in the face of popular protests, the draft's fate is uncertain.

"This is a cultural problem, a centuries-old mentality in which the man is the head of the family and others obey him or get punished," said Natalia Pazdnikova, a co-author of the draft law and director of Nadezhda. "Russian women are very patient and enduring, ready to suffer for their children and families."

The draft law would introduce the power to issue restraining orders, a common procedure in the West, and give law enforcement officials more training in dealing with abuse. It would also allow police to compel offenders to undergo counseling, require them to report to police up to four times a month, and provide victims with temporary accommodation.

Women's rights activists say that as the situation is now, police, prosecutors and judges in Russia too often advise women seeking help to go home and make peace with their husbands, opening the women up to more physical violence as well as threats and emotional blackmail to drop their complaints.

Two similar draft laws were watered down and then dropped after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Supporters are determined that won't happen this time and hopeful that the law could pass as soon as the end of the year.

Initial signs are not encouraging, however: committees in the lower house have been looking at the draft but there is no date fixed or even estimated for a plenary gathering to start moving forward.

NO DATA

The Colorado team made brilliant clouds of plasma emerge from a specially prepared solution and maintained them for nearly half a second.

In nature, ball lightning has been seen to float across land or through buildings and to even bounce down the aisles of aircraft.

But its rarity has made it extremely hard to study and to understand.

The US Air Force Academy team hopes its new approach can help science to better understand this strange spectacle.

Dr Mike Lindsay, who led the study published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry, said: "Ball lightning is used almost generically to describe phenomena seen in nature that aren't described by normal lightning, bead lightning or things like 'St Elmo's fire', or aurora. And likely it's not one thing but several things that have similar observables."

'Glow discharge'

According to some reports, the famous physicist and inventor Nikola Tesla was able to make ball lightning in his lab when he was based at Colorado Springs in 1899/1900. But if he did create it, he did not describe his methods in a way that has allowed anyone since to reproduce his work.

Eye-witness reports of ball lightning vary wildly in the size of the ball, how long it lasts, and how it moves.

Rhys Phillips, a lightning research engineer and science broadcaster, said: "To me at least, lightning is still not the word for what we're talking about here. We understand lightning to be a very fast discharge from one point to another - for example, a cloud to the Earth - (through a complex process admittedly) and the observations in [the current] paper don't describe that."

Dr Lindsay does not disagree with this assessment.

In the paper, he and his colleagues describe previous research that generated what they refer to as a "glow discharge" of plasma (a charged gas) above an electrolyte solution.

The new experiments re-use those earlier methods, but then manipulate the conditions to try to get the balls to last as long as possible.

Dr Lindsay explained: "I don't think what we've created is lightning, although the initial stages of the electrical discharge that produce this 'plasmoid' have many similarities to lightning. They're just electric arcs - in this case, electric arcs to the surface of this solution of electrolytes. And then what happens is this plasmoid emerges from it.

"So, I would agree that [going by] the general definition of lightning - no, this is not the same."

Extending time

Now the company has been elaborating on the claim in response to questions about why it couldn't just use an asymmetric key cryptography plug-in for email applications to secure communications between its users.

In short, it's all about the metadata.

"If the goal is simply to encrypt the body of the message there are services and products that accomplish this," explained Silent Circle's technical operations manager Louis Kowolowski in a blog post.

"If your goal is to not have metadata leakage in your otherwise secure communications, you may wish to avoid email altogether. Email leaks the information about who is communicating, and how often. This information may be just as damaging as the content of the email."

As examples, Kowolowski noted that companies wanting to protect their intellectual property or individuals sending tax returns may be happy to use traditional PGP/SMIME technology to encrypt the body of their messages, but that "a freedom fighter working on an oppressive country" would be just as concerned about the metadata.

He went into more depth about how encrypted emails can still yield plenty of valuable metadata for interested parties, providing more context for Silent Circle's decision to shut down Silent Mail days after one of its peers, Lavabit, also closed.

"In the past, securing the body of the message was sufficient. The tools and techniques used for snooping were not on a large enough scale to allow the metadata to be useful," wrote Kowolowski.

"With the tapping of backbone internet providers, interested parties can now see all traffic on the internet. The days where it was possible for two people to have a truly private conversation over email, if they ever existed, are long over."

His words may serve as a warning for anyone thinking of switching to other non-US-based secure email services like Hushmail, Neomailbox and Countermail, although as Kowolowski made clear, email may remain a suitable form of communication for people and companies who care more about encrypting the body of their messages than the metadata around it.

It said it would view all reports within 24 hours, make the report button more visible, and include bullying and harassment as a category for a report.

It said some of the changes would be live on the site by September.

The father of Hannah Smith, 14, who is believed to have killed herself after she was bullied on the site, said he welcomed the changes.

"I think it's too late, but it's not too little," Dave Smith said. "They're actually taking a step forward and they're making things safer for children on the internet.

'New laws needed'

Mr Smith said Ask.fm did not need to be shut down, since it had shown it was ready to make its site safer. But he called on the government to do more.

"The government needs to bring in new regulations so that people are safe on the internet," he said. "We also need to bring new laws in so that if somebody is abusive on the internet they can actually get prosecuted for it."

Hannah was found hanged at her home in Lutterworth, Leicestershire, on 2 August.

Ask.fm said it would:

Hire more staff, including a safety officer, to moderate comments on the site Create a "bullying/harassment" category for reported comments, alongside "spam or scam", "hate speech", "violence" and "pornographic content"

Raise the visibility of a function to opt out of receiving anonymous questions Limit the number of features unregistered users were able to access, and require an email address upon sign-up for registered users John Carr, secretary of the UK's Children's Charities' Coalition on Internet Safety, who is an adviser to the UK government on child safety, said: "The number of moderators they employ will be crucial as well as how fast they can be trained.

"But the measures they've announced definitely show they got the message and are moving in the right direction."

Report abuse

The UK Safer Internet Centre, which promotes the safe use of technology, said it was "delighted" by Ask.fm's proposed changes, and added the increased visibility of the "anonymous opt-out option" was an important development.

"We strongly advise users, especially children, to switch off anonymous questions, and to report any abuse they see on the site," the group said.

"We will continue to offer advice to Ask.fm about their processes, to ensure users have a positive and safe experience."

In July, 1.4 million people in the UK visited Ask.fm, according to the latest figures from internet research firm Comscore.

After her death, Hannah's father said that he had found bullying posts on his daughter's Ask.fm page from people telling her to die.

Three policemen were also wounded in the grenade and machinegun attack near the north Sinai town of Rafah on the border with Israel, medical and security sources said.

The attack underlined the challenges facing Egypt's new rulers, locked in a struggle with Mursi's Muslim Brotherhood in which at least 850 people have been killed since the security forces opened fire at pro-Mursi protest camps last week.

The authorities portray their campaign as a fight against terrorism. The Brotherhood renounced violence decades ago and denies any links with armed militants, including those in Sinai who gained strength since autocrat Hosni Mubarak fell in 2011.

Mounting insecurity in Sinai also worries the United States because the area lies next to Israel and the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, as well as the Suez Canal.

At least 36 Islamists died in government custody on Sunday, in an incident that the Brotherhood described as "murder" and the authorities said was a thwarted jailbreak.

"The murders show the violations and abuses that political detainees who oppose the July 3 coup get subjected to," said the Brotherhood.

The Interior Ministry said 36 Brotherhood detainees had been suffocated by tear gas during an attempted prison breakout near Cairo. A legal source said 38 men had died from asphyxiation in the back of a crammed police van.

Egypt's descent into the bloodiest internal conflict in its modern history is causing global jitters, but no consensus on how to respond has emerged in the West or the Arab world.

European Union diplomats were due to meet in Brussels to review how best to leverage some 5 billion euros ($6.7 billion) of promised grants and loans, looking to apply pressure on Cairo's army-backed government to find a compromise.

DISCORD OVER AID

A senior EU official who asked not to be identified said the United States, Europe and Gulf Arab states had only limited influence on the generals now calling the shots in Egypt.

The United States, an ally of Egypt since it made peace with Israel in 1979, has postponed delivery of four F-16 fighters and scrapped a joint military exercise, but has not halted its $1.55 billion in annual aid, spent mostly on U.S.-made arms supplies.

However, Republican and Democrat U.S. lawmakers, some of them reversing the stances they had espoused before last week's crackdown in Egypt, said on Sunday the aid should be suspended.