Newspapers online 08-28-2013 | ScienceTechnology

The names and pictures of an estimated 150 million Facebook members were used in Sponsored Stories, but only those who responded to an email from the site earlier this year will be compensated.

Privacy organisations will also receive some of the $20m (£12.9m) settlement.

Facebook said it was "pleased" the settlement had been approved.

The payout was approved by a US court on Monday following a class action filed against Facebook in 2011 by five of its users.

The group said their details had been used to promote products and services through the site's Sponsored Stories programme, without paying them or giving them the choice to opt-out.

A Sponsored Story is a tailored advertisement that appears on members' Facebook pages, highlighting products a user's friends have endorsed or "liked" on the site.

No 'meaningful' harm

US District Judge Richard Seeborg acknowledged that the $15 payments were relatively small, but said it had not been established that Facebook had "undisputedly violated the law".

He added that the claimants could not prove they were "harmed in any meaningful way".

The court estimated that Facebook had made about $73m (£47m) in profit from the Sponsored Stories featuring details of the 150 million members.

The settlement also requires Facebook to make changes to its "Statement of Rights" and to give users more information and control over how their details are used in the future.

This move was estimated by the plaintiff's lawyers to cost Facebook $145m in advertising revenue.

Approximately 7,000 Facebook users opted out of the settlement altogether, allowing them to bring their own legal action against the social network.

The distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack was said to have targeted servers responsible for sites with a ".cn" domain name.

The country has not speculated on who may be responsible.

DDoS attacks, in which a target is flooded with traffic in an attempt to render it unreachable, are common.

The technique is typically employed by hacktivists looking to disrupt websites from operating correctly.

Enhanced capabilities

Notice of the attack was posted on the website of the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC).

It said that the DDoS had begun at 02:00 local time on Sunday - before intensifying at 04:00.

The CNNIC apologised to the affected users.

It said it would "enhance the service capabilities" of the network responsible for the affected domains.

China is often accused of being responsible for major attacks on Western countries, particularly the US.

In 2010 and 2011, the quiet farming town of Greenbrier, Arkansas, was rattled by a swarm of more than 1,000 minor earthquakes. The biggest, with a magnitude of 4.7, had its epicenter less than 1,500 feet from Davis's front porch. "This should not be happening in Greenbrier," Davis recalls thinking. He said the shaking damaged the support beams under an addition to his home.

Then came another surprise: University of Memphis and Arkansas Geological Survey scientists said the quakes were likely triggered by the disposal of wastewater from hydraulic fracturing - commonly known as fracking - into deep, underground wells. That finding prompted regulators from the Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission to order several wells in the area shut down, and the earthquakes soon subsided.

It also prompted Davis and more than a dozen of his neighbors to file five lawsuits in federal court against Chesapeake Operating Inc, as the owner in 2010 of two injection wells near Davis' home, and BHP Billiton, which purchased Chesapeake's shale gas assets in 2011.

Another company, Clarita Operating LLC, owned a third well that was shut down, but the company went bankrupt and was dropped from the litigation in 2011.

Chesapeake and BHP both declined to comment, citing policies not to discuss ongoing litigation. In court documents they denied they were responsible for the quakes and for any damage the quakes may have caused.

The litigation marks the first legal effort to link earthquakes to wastewater injection wells, according to a search of the Westlaw database and interviews with legal experts, and the first attempt to win compensation from drilling companies for quake damage.

If any of the earthquake cases make it to a jury and the plaintiffs prevail, the outcome could spark additional litigation, since wastewater injection wells are used not only in fracking, but in other kinds of oil and gas drilling and geothermal energy production.

With twitchy financial markets nervous about the prospect of fresh political instability in Italy, the Milan stock market fell for a second day and government borrowing costs rose ahead of a closely anticipated bond auction on Thursday.

Ministers are due to meet on Wednesday to decide what to do about the tax on main residences, which Berlusconi's center-right party insists must be scrapped if it is to continue supporting center-left premier Enrico Letta.

The housing tax has dogged Letta's unwieldy coalition of traditional rivals ever since it was formed after inconclusive elections in February left no party able to govern on its own.

Senior political leaders including Letta and President Giorgio Napolitano have warned that any threat to the left-right government's survival would risk a return to the kind of turmoil seen at the height of the euro zone debt crisis, when Italy, the bloc's third biggest economy, came close to a Greek-style meltdown.

But, despite some signs of progress including proposals to replace the tax with a new local services levy, there has been no firm agreement on where to find the 4 billion euros ($5.35 billion) a year it would take to abolish the tax.

"This is a fundamental policy issue," Renato Brunetta, a Berlusconi loyalist and lower house leader of his People of Freedom (PDL) party told RAI state radio.

"The fact that the government has so far failed to present a solid proposal has created a lot of doubt, it's not serious to proceed in this way," he said.

U.S. forces in the region are "ready to go", Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said, as Washington and its European and Middle Eastern partners honed plans to punish Assad for a major poison gas attack last week that killed hundreds of civilians.

Several sources who attended a meeting in Istanbul on Monday between Syrian opposition leaders and diplomats from Washington and other governments told Reuters that the rebels were told to expect military action and to get ready to negotiate a peace.

"The opposition was told in clear terms that action to deter further use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime could come as early as in the next few days, and that they should still prepare for peace talks at Geneva," one of the sources said.

Ahmad Jarba, president of the Syrian National Coalition, met envoys from 11 states in the Friends of Syria group, including Robert Ford, the U.S. ambassador to Syria, at an Istanbul hotel.

United Nations chemical weapons investigators, who finally crossed the frontline to take samples on Monday, put off a second trip to rebel-held suburbs of Damascus. Washington said it already held Assad responsible for a "moral obscenity" and President Barack Obama would hold him to account for it.

However, with Russian and Chinese opposition complicating efforts to satisfy international law - and Western voters wary of new, far-off wars - Western leaders may not pull the trigger just yet. British Prime Minister David Cameron called parliament back from its summer recess for a session on Syria on Thursday.

He and Obama, as well as French President Francois Hollande, face tough questions about how an intervention, likely to be limited to air strikes, will end - and whether they risk handing power to anti-Western Islamist rebels if Assad is overthrown.

In France, which took a vocal lead in helping Libyan rebels topple Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, Hollande was about to address ambassadors. A French diplomatic source said Paris had no doubt Assad's forces carried out the gas attack and would "not shirk its responsibilities" in responding.

In an indication of support from Arab states that may help Western powers argue the case for war against likely U.N. vetoes from Moscow and Beijing, the Arab League issued a statement holding Assad's government responsible for the chemical attack.

Vladislav Baumgertner, chief executive of the world's largest potash producer, was detained on Monday at the airport of the Belarusian capital Minsk after being invited to secret talks with Prime Minister Mikhail Myasnikovich.

Television footage released by the Belarusian Investigative Committee, the former Soviet republic's top crime-fighting agency, showed Baumgertner being searched, his legs spread and hands against a wall. He was later pictured handcuffed.

President Alexander Lukashenko appears to have taken it as a personal affront when Uralkali quit a cartel last month with a Belarusian state firm producing potash, a fertilizer ingredient.

The main owner of Uralkali, which controls 20 percent of the world market, is Suleiman Kerimov, a billionaire with close ties to President Vladimir Putin's Kremlin administration.

Russia's Foreign Ministry summoned the Belarusian ambassador to issue a rebuke, warning of unspecified consequences for bilateral ties. The two countries allow passport-free travel and are members of a free-trade zone.

"It is impermissible to detain a person on his way home after he came for talks at the invitation of the Belarusian government," Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin told news agency Interfax.

Russia's ambassador to Minsk asked prosecutors on Tuesday afternoon to release Baumgertner. Officials said they would review the case, but stressed they were dealing with a crime that had inflicted severe economic damage on Belarus.

"We hope our partners will consider this question in the spirit of the law, not on the basis of emotions and political connections," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Andrei Savinykh.

Lukashenko, in power since 1994, has a history of maneuvering between Russia and Europe to shore up his isolated leadership and Soviet-style economy.

"Lukashenko loves trading hostages; he trades political hostages with the West and economic hostages with Russia," said Dmitry Oreshkin, an independent Russian political analyst.

Baumgertner, who faces up to 10 years in jail on charges of abusing his powers, could in effect be ransomed by Belarus in return for economic concessions by Russia, analysts speculated.

Five days after a glitch that paralyzed Nasdaq-listed stocks for three hours on all U.S. markets, Nasdaq and NYSE have a different understanding of what happened in the period preceding and during the blackout, with each side blaming the other for the outage, according to the sources.

At the center of the disagreement is the role of Arca, NYSE's fully electronic stock market. The blackout, which saw trading in about 3,200 Nasdaq-listed stocks such as Apple Inc (AAPL.O), Google Inc (GOOG.O) and Facebook Inc (FB.O) grind to a halt, was preceded by connectivity problems between Arca and the Nasdaq-operated Securities Information Processor (SIP). The SIP consolidates stock prices and distributes them to the market.

What's not clear is whether the problem at the SIP was caused by issues at Arca or technical flaws at the processor.

The inability of the two largest U.S. stock markets to come to a common understanding on what caused one of the worst market disruptions in recent memory underscores the complexity of the highly fragmented market and the difficulty of preventing future glitches. It could further damage investor confidence in markets, which have been roiled by a succession of high-profile technical glitches in recent years.

Much is at stake for the two exchange operators. Nasdaq and NYSE have a lock on the U.S. primary listings business and compete fiercely to woo companies to list on their respective markets. Major market debuts - Wall Street watchers have been tweeting about the possibility of a Twitter IPO for months - are huge public relations boons for exchanges.

MORE PRESSURE FROM RIVALS

The exchange operators are also coming under more pressure from rivals. On Monday, BATS Global Markets and Direct Edge said they would merge, in a deal that would vault the new company ahead of Nasdaq in U.S. stock trading. NYSE, which is being taken over by IntercontinentalExchange (ICE.N), is the No. 1 U.S. stock exchange operator.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has held several conference calls to get to the bottom of Thursday's glitch, with Chair Mary Jo White calling on Wall Street leaders to help ensure the "continuous and orderly" functioning of securities markets.

The agency asked Nasdaq and NYSE to come up with a timeline of events during one such conference call over the weekend, the sources said.

The so-called Rim Fire has charred more than 160,000 acres, which is larger than Chicago, most of that in the Stanislaus National Forest west of Yosemite.

But the blaze was expected to move east overnight and push deeper into Yosemite, as well as in areas to the north, said U.S. Forest Service spokesman Trevor Augustino.

On Monday the blaze "made a good run to the park," Augustino said. But firefighters had the blaze 20 percent contained toward the end of the day, up from 15 percent earlier Monday.

The weather on Tuesday was expected to remain hot with temperatures in the high 80s Fahrenheit and low 90s Fahrenheit (low 30s Celsius), with winds of 10 miles per hour to 15 miles per hour (16-24 km per hour) from the southwest, Augustino said.

The eastern flank of the fire on Monday burned to within a half mile of Yosemite's Hetch Hetchy reservoir on the Tuolumne River. It supplies 85 percent of the water consumed by 2.6 million people in San Francisco and several communities in three adjacent counties about 200 miles to the west.

With the flames so close, ash fell on the surface of the reservoir on Monday. But water samples from the supply were testing clean by the late afternoon, San Francisco Public Utilities Commission spokeswoman Suzanne Gautier said.

"There continues to be no change or impact to water quality or delivery from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir," the utilities commission said in a statement.

If fallout from the blaze were to foul the Hetch Hetchy, its water could be diverted to a smaller Bay Area reservoir for filtration at a local treatment plant before delivery to customers, Gautier said.

The Rim Fire, named for a Stanislaus National Forest lookout point called Rim of the World, has already damaged two of the three hydropower generating stations linked to the Hetch Hetchy reservoir that supply electricity for all of San Francisco's public facilities, such as hospitals and firehouses.

The city has drawn on reserve power stored for emergencies and purchasing additional electricity on the open market to make up for the difference.

The blaze has destroyed about a dozen homes, and some 4,500 dwellings remained threatened.

Most of the 1,200-square-mile Yosemite National Park has remained open to the public.

Users of Instagram, Netflix, Vine, Airbnb and several other services reported problems getting through to the services for several hours late on Sunday.

All of them rely on servers that are part of Amazon's cloud-based network.

The problems were traced to a data centre in northern Virginia that was struggling to keep up with demand.

Also caught up in the network problems were cloud software firm Heroku and web automation service IFTTT.

Instagram was the first to acknowledge that access to its services was intermittent via Twitter and other services put out warning messages soon after.

The problems for Americans began about 16:00 Eastern time (21:00 GMT) and continued for several hours. During this time access to the web services was intermittent with many people reporting that login pages were hard to reach or pages were taking a long time to update.

On the status page for its web services, Amazon said it was investigating a series of problems at the Virginia data centre. The problems hit databases, software that spreads queries across servers as well as the code controlling the core computers underlying the whole service.

After the problems were resolved, Amazon said the glitch was caused by the "partial failure of a networking device" but added no further details.

With climate scientists predicting that natural disasters will increase in both frequency and intensity in the coming decades, many designers have turned their attention to how they can help to alleviate their impact. Their work includes a broad range of devices designed to save lives by helping rescue workers or giving people caught up in the aftermath of a natural disaster a way to help themselves.

Mikal Hallstrup, chairman of the INDEX: Award jury, said he and his fellow jury members were looking for ideas that could deliver real change. "We're not a design award for designer chairs or more white teacups," he told CNN. "The world simply doesn't need more stuff, so our focus is on meaningfulness. ... No matter how well designed a solution, we're not after great design solving the wrong problems."

He said that successful nominees would address a problem and present an affordable and scalable remedy. "New takes on old problems always get the jury excited," he added. "So do simple solutions to complex problems." And they don't come much more complex or big than a natural disaster.

On the front line of climate change: Five cities battling floods, heat and storms

A personal ark

The Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 was among the most devastating events of recent years. It led not only to increased interest and investment in early warning systems, but also to the development of personal survival devices for those in the path of an incoming tidal wave. Three of them are up for an INDEX: Award this year, including the Orange Saver, a stylish piece of furniture that unfurls into a life raft if the need arises. It's kept afloat by eight separate inflatable segments so that it will still be buoyant even if one is damaged.

The Noah miniature ark takes up a little more room than the Orange Saver but its designers intend it for the "average Japanese home". The bright yellow ball, four feet across, is made from fiber-reinforced plastic and will accommodate four adults. Once the hatch is sealed the pod is waterproof, buoyant and tough enough to fend of debris in the water. Vents in the roof allow in fresh air. The Noah is already in production and sells for about $5,500.

Ballmer's grand design - unveiled just six weeks before Friday's surprise announcement that he would retire within a year - calls for 'One Microsoft' to pull together and forge a future based on hardware and cloud-based services.

But poor sales of the new Surface tablet, on top of Microsoft's years-long failure to make money out of online search or smartphones, have cast doubt on that approach.

For years, investors have called on Microsoft to redirect cash spent on money-losing or peripheral projects to shareholders, while limiting its focus to the vastly profitable Windows, Office and server franchises.

Activist investor ValueAct Capital Management LP, whose recent lobbying of the company may have played a role in Ballmer's decision to retire earlier than he planned, is thought to favor such an approach.

In the last two years alone, Microsoft has lost almost $3 billion on its Bing search engine and other Internet projects, not counting a $6 billion write-off for its failed purchase of online advertising agency aQuantive. It took a $900 million charge for its poor-selling Surface tablet last quarter.

For now at least, Microsoft seems intent on pursuing Ballmer's vision. John Thompson, Microsoft's lead independent director who is also heading the committee to appoint a new CEO, said on Friday the board is "committed" to Ballmer's transformation plan.

The eventual choice of that committee - which has given itself a year to do its work - should provide a clue to how committed the board really is, and how open to outside advice.

"Taking an internal candidate like Satya Nadella - the guy nurturing servers - or some of the other people on the Windows team, that makes sense to keep a steady hand through this reorganization and strategic shift," said Norman Young, an analyst at Morningstar.

"But a strong case could be made that the company needs a breath of fresh air, someone who can execute on the strategy but also bring an outsider perspective," he added.

That could mean selling the Xbox and abandoning Bing, or cutting short efforts to make tablets or other computers.

SHAREHOLDERS CLAMOUR FOR MONEY, BALLMER'S HEAD

Throughout the last decade, as Microsoft's share price has remained flat, shareholders have called for bigger dividends and share buybacks to beef up their returns.

Visiting the plant crippled by an earthquake and tsunami in March 2011, Toshimitsu Motegi, the trade and industry minister, said on Monday he would set up a taskforce to take charge of the clean-up, and send officials to Fukushima to oversee operations.

"I strongly feel that the government should get fully involved," he told reporters after touring the Fukushima Daiichi facility, which is 220 km (137 miles) north of Tokyo.

Motegi ordered Tokyo Electric Power, or Tepco, to replace storage tanks that are at risk of leaking radioactive water. Tepco acknowledged last week that hundreds of tons of highly radioactive water had leaked from one of around 350 tanks that were assembled quickly after the 2011 nuclear meltdowns at the site. The tanks are used to store water pumped through the reactors to keep fuel in the melted cores from overheating.

Motegi said Tepco should have more frequent patrols around the tanks and better documentation of inspections. He said the utility should replace weaker bolted tanks with sturdier welded storage units. Tepco said it was setting up its own group of experts to oversee toxic water and storage tanks at the Fukushima site.

"For measures that require sophisticated technology, we will appropriately implement them as the government while collaborating with authorities on fiscal measures, including the use of a reserve fund," Motegi said.

Earlier on Monday, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said the situation at Fukushima was "deplorable", and signaled the government could use some of the 350 billion yen set aside in this year's budget as a reserve for natural disasters and other emergencies.

Tepco's revelation of the toxic leaks is the most serious problem in a series of recent mishaps, including power outages, contaminated workers and other leaks. Tepco also said last month - after repeated denials - that the Fukushima plant was leaking contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean from trenches between the reactor buildings and the shoreline.

Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority said last week it feared the disaster was "in some respects" beyond Tepco's ability to cope.