CW500: The rise of the machines – how devices are taking over the internet

Within a few years, the internet will be dominated by machines and sensors rather than people.

By 2020, IT supplier HP estimates there will be close to a trillion sensors sending data over the web.

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Cars, buildings, vending machines and heart monitors will soon be routinely reporting their status through the internet to other machines.                                      

The result will be an unprecedented growth in data that will need to be stored, analysed and assessed.

The growth of the internet of things opens up huge potential benefits for society, and lucrative business opportunities for those organisations able to harness it.

But as growing volumes of personal data are traded back and forth, there are growing concerns over the risks that machine to machine (M2M) communication poses to personal privacy.

“In the hands of the wrong people, this is massively valuable information,” Dan Wood, senior manager for software market development at HP, told IT leaders at Computer Weekly’s 500 Club. “Breaches will occur.”

Within seven years, according to HP's projections, the growth of internet-connected sensors will contribute a 50-fold growth in the volume of data on the planet.

Grappling with these volumes of data will test today's IT systems and security systems to the limit. The volume of data is expanding at a rate that is far outstripping the ability of humans to keep pace.

“We as human beings cannot see all the insight in this data. We need machines; we need the intelligent software to actually help us cope with this,” said Wood.

Mobile phone operators are investing millions in the mobile network technology that will make the internet of things a reality.

Mobile operator EE, formerly Everything Everywhere, believes that the next generation of mobile phone technology, 4G, will drive the internet of things.

The technology will open up the radio spectrum needed to allow sensors to communicate at high speed over the internet, said Marc Overton, vice-president of wholesale and machine to machine at EE.

“Data just eats spectrum. If you want to get into mobile-enabled connected devices, you need gallons and gallons of spectrum,” he said.

One of the first places the internet of things will make its presence felt is on the high street.

Shops will install interactive screens to tailor their displays to the shopper walking by – Minority Report style.

Some retailers, such as John Lewis, are equipping sales assistants with iPads fitted with payment devices, so customers do not have to go to the till to pay.

If the right product is not in stock, the assistant can order it for the customer over the internet, there and then.

In North America, for example, four million people have signed up to receive offers on their mobile phones whenever they enter Starbucks, said Overton.

“If you want, you can set it so that you walk into Starbucks and your coffee will be ready before you reach the counter,” he said.

Other projects underway are likely to result in the creation of intelligent vending machines that will use the smart grid to offer interactive advertising, devices that will cut the cost of motor insurance in return for monitoring drivers’ speed and position, and intelligent tags that could help businesses cut the volume of goods in the supply chain by half.

One of the most prominent examples of the internet of things is the smart grid. Over the next five years the UK will roll out 50 million smart electricity and gas meters.

They will be fitted with sensors that will allow utility companies to monitor power use in real time, and potentially make it easier for consumers and businesses to reduce their energy bills.

The project is seen as imperative, not only to offset rising energy costs, but also to reduce the load on the UK’s ageing power distribution infrastructure.

Rob McNamara is executive director of SmartGrid GB, the cross-industry group created to champion the smart grid in the UK.                                                                    

“A lot of network operators in the UK have kit that has been in the ground for 50 years – at the time it was put in, it had a shelf life of only 40 years,” he said.

Add to that a huge potential demand for electricity to power electric vehicles, and energy producers see a compelling business case to install smart meters to regulate demand.

Electricity North West, for example, has calculated that Manchester’s power demands would double if its population switched from petrol to electric-powered vehicles.

“That has a major impact on an ageing asset base,” he said.

The economic benefits of smart meters are claimed to be huge. SmartGrid GB commissioned research from Ernst & Young last year, which put the potential savings at £19bn between 2012 and 2050.

Investment in smart meter technology could also put the UK in a strong position to export smart meters to the rest of the world, Ernst & Young concluded, and potentially create 9,000 jobs.

There are also huge technical challenges to overcome, McNamara revealed. The technology standards for smart meters have yet to be agreed. And there is a “hell of a lot work” still to be done to agree standards for the associated technologies that will sit in people’s homes.

The biggest challenge of all is to win over consumers, said McNamara. Hard sell tactics used by energy suppliers in the past have left consumers wary.

So going around door to door to explain the benefits of a technology that will not offer consumers any short-term savings will not be easy, he said. “There is really poor trust.”

The Greater London Authority (GLA) set up the London Data Store, in 2009, as part of a project to make data collected by government more accessible.

The centre accesses 560 data streaming services across London’s boroughs, and makes the data available to developers to turn into applications to benefit the public.

About 95% of the data is transport related, including information on bus timetables and locations, rail and underground.

It has attracted some 5,000 registered developers, who have used the data to create, for example, real time bus-tracking applications for smartphones.

Smart meters are one thing, but Nick Bromley, programme manager at Transport for London (TfL), is looking to a much bigger scale – using sensors to create an intelligent city.

“We reckon there are about 50 million devices across London that potentially you could tap into with IP addresses,” he said.

They include stress gauges in buildings and GPS sensors on buses, trains and the underground, in addition to smart energy meters.

Bromley is responsible for managing the iCity project for the Greater London Authority (GLA), which aims to create mobile phone apps that will exploit data collected by the government and local authorities.

The €6bn programme, led out of Barcelona, aims to encourage small businesses to develop innovative applications for data in cities.

It will work hand in hand with the London Data Store, which is making transport and other government data freely available to developers.

“Essentially, we think data is going to become the new utility,” said Bromley, likening its impact to that of the electricity industry.

The GLA is working with Kings College, for example, to develop a simple mobile phone app for leisure centres. It will make it easier for leisure centres in the same area to co-ordinate their programmes, for example, so they can make sure they do not all schedule their women-only evenings for the same evening.

Another project aims to correlate transport data with air quality data, so that planners can monitor the effect of public transport on air quality and make changes to transport routes if necessary.

Other work is underway to create apps to improve cycling safety in London and to make it easier for disabled people to use public transport in the city.

Trying to turn the whole of London into a smart city is not practicable, but there are opportunities in London boroughs that are investing heavily in redevelopment.

The GLA is working closely with Croydon, for example, which plans to spend £5bn over the next five years to improve Croydon town centre.

The companies spending that money are not traditional IT companies such as IBM or Google, but property development companies such as Land Securities, which is using smart devices to improve the management of its properties.

Some apps may only be used by a few people, but they are strategically important, said Nick Bromley, portfolio manager at Transport for London (TfL).

One example is a mobile app that TfL is developing to help disabled people navigate London’s transport system.

Although TfL spends tens of millions of pounds a year to improve disabled access to stations, there are still many areas where disabled passengers need help.

The app will direct disabled people to the best position on platforms for disabled access, help them find wheelchair ramps and navigate themselves through a station interchange.

The challenges posed by the internet of things are enormous. For a start, no one yet agrees on the technical standards that should form the backbone of the internet of things, according to EE's Marc Overton.

“Standardisation is a real challenge for us as an industry,” he said. In practice, it may be the companies that get their technologies out there first which define the technical standard for everyone else.

For chief information officers, the challenge will be managing a volume of data that is growing faster than the ability of organisations to consume it.

The basic premise that IT departments will hold some of their IT equipment on-premises and some IT in the cloud will no longer hold true, said Wood.

“You are now in an enormously complicated environment, capturing all that data, linking into smart grids, capturing all that data,” he said.

IT departments will need to think about the growth rate and flexibility of their IT systems if they are going to capitalise on the growth of data, he said, and businesses will need entirely different management skills to manage an IT supply chain that extends outside of traditional company boundaries.

Some US companies, for example, are appointing chief data mongers to analyse gigabytes of data coming in from internet click streams.

“I think we are going to see data scientists, chief listening officers, data mongers, as very common job titles in 15 or 20 years' time,”  said Wood.

Connected cars

Smart wireless sensors are finding applications in motor vehicles, particularly as concerns rise about insurance costs, said Marc Overton, vice-president of wholesale and machine to machine (M2M) at mobile phone operator Everything Everywhere (EE).

EE is working with insurers to develop sensors that record the position and speed of vehicles, in return for the promise of lower premiums for safer drivers, he said.

“If you have a 17 or 18-year-old child, the average cost of insurance for a three or four-year-old Mini, will be £2,500. This connected solution takes at least 30% off, if not more,” he said, speaking to IT leaders at Computer Weekly’s 500 Club.

“It is also peace of mind for you as a parent to track your errant youngster, and also make sure that if something goes horribly wrong, you have got visibility of it as well,” he said.

Interactive vending machines

Internet-connected devices are also causing a revolution in the traditionally dull world of vending machines.

Shops and petrol stations that operate entirely without shop assistants are beginning to appear in Europe and North America. Customers can walk in, fill their cars with petrol, buy a drink from a vending machine and pay by scanning their phone on a mobile point-of-sale system. Customers are filmed on CCTV to ensure there is no cheating.

“It reduces cost of sales significantly,” said Overton.

EE is working on a number of projects to fit remote sensors to vending machines, providing the machine owners with real-time feedback on sales. The project will enable companies to manage restocking much more effectively.

“They can do dynamic offers, dynamic pricing. They can change their focus – on a hot day, go for cold drinks, and on a cold day, go for hot drinks,” he said.

The falling cost of 4G phone SIMs is making it commercially viable for vending machine owners to use the sides of their vending machines for digital advertising. EE has contracts to roll out these digitally enabled machines to several major supermarkets, said Overton.

In one case the technology convinced a soft drinks manufacturer on the brink of closing its estate of unprofitable vending to reconsider.

“Everyone can make money selling space. It is fundamentally transforming the business model," said Overton.

Smart logistics

The logistics industry is another industry that can also benefit from smart sensors.

EE is offering miniaturised GPS positioning sensors, with long battery lives, that at under $50 each are cheap enough to track the movement of individual products through the supply chain.

“They can track and trace anything anywhere,” said Overton.

In the past, retailers would typically have had 50% more goods than they needed in their supply chain to compensate for lost products or late delivery.

But smart sensors make over-stocking redundant and can bring huge savings, said Overton.

Why Small Businesses Need to Spring for Business-Class Internet Access

Google is being accused of violating the FCCs Open Internet Order as a result of its policy toward servers. Essentially, if you run a server from a Google Fiber Internet connection, you’re technically violating the terms of service, and you could find your Internet access shut down. Google stands by that policy, but the reality is that this is only one of many reasons that small businesses should not run a server from a consumer-grade Internet connection.

The issue with Google Fiber stems from a clause in the terms of service that reads, “Unless you have a written agreement with Google Fiber permitting you to do so, you should not host any type of server using your Google Fiber connection.”

Google has been a proponent of net neutrality, but some were quick to note that Google seems to have changed teams now that it’s also in the Internet provider business. Google’s response to the FCC includes this explanation: “The server policy has been established to account for the congestion management and network security needs of Google Fiber’s network architecture, particularly given that Google Fiber does not impose data caps on its users.”

Bottom line: Google believes it has a right to ban someone from hosting a server on it’s Google Fiber network because of the potential impact it could have on the bandwidth for all of the rest of the customers. That seems reasonable.

You don’t really want to host your business server on a consumer Internet service anyway. Granted, Google Fiber delivers a 1Gbps connection for a very low cost compared to any other consumer or business service. However, Google Fiber is only available in a few select cities, and there are other reasons to choose a business-class Internet provider.

First, Google states explicitly that it doesn’t impose a bandwidth cap, but many consumer Internet services do. Comcast used to have a 250GB per month cap, but switched to a tiered-pricing plan last year for heavy users. The cap is now 300GB, after which Comcast charges $10 extra per month for each additional 50GB.

Another benefit of business-class Internet service is that you generally have a dedicated, static IP address, which makes it much easier to host and manage a server. Consumer Internet services use DHCP to randomly assign IP addresses, so your website or FTP server might be on one address today, and a different one tomorrow.

Most consumer Internet services block various TCP ports—for example port 25. It’s blocked as a measure to guard against or limit spam, based on the assumption that no consumer customer is hosting an email server (because it would violate the TOS). You want to have full access to all of the ports for your Internet access—including TCP port 25, so business-class Internet is the way to go.

Tech support is also different. Calling the consumer tech support line when you’re having an issue is typically an exercise in futility and frustration. If your business depends on the Internet connection, it can be that much more stressful. The technical support for a business-class account is generally more knowledgeable and more expedient, so you can minimize down time and keep your business online.

The operative word in the term “small and medium business” is “business”. In other words, regardless of whether your company has one employee, one hundred, or one thousand, it’s still a business, and it still needs to act like one. That is particularly true when it comes to choosing an Internet provider. 

Wall Street Beat: Tech shares up as Internet stocks rise

Tech stocks had an upbeat week as industry watchers appear to be looking at the positive side of earnings from Internet, consumer electronics and networking companies.

IT industry bellwethers have reported mixed results for the quarter ending in June. This week, earnings season continued with reports from LinkedIn, Yelp and Sony, among other companies.

Tech shares led markets to close up Friday, even though several indexes were down earlier in the day after a tepid report on the U.S. jobs market. The Labor Department said that although the unemployment rate fell last month to 7.4 percent, its lowest since 2008, the country added just 162,000 jobs in July, below the average monthly 202,000 this year.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq gained 0.36 percent to close up by 3.34 points at 15,658.36. The Nasdaq Computer Index rose 0.56 percent to 1735.89.

This week, professional social network LinkedIn was the tech star, announcing second quarter revenue of US$363.7 million, an increase of 59 percent year over year, while net income rose from $2.8 million to $3.7 million. LinkedIn membership grew to 238 million, rising 37 percent year-over-year.

LinkedIn shares spiked Friday afternoon by $22.58 to close at $235.58.

"Decisions made two years ago to re-write LinkedIn's code base have enabled rapid product innovation, which is driving much higher member engagement, creating a foundation that helped fuel tremendous self-service ad sales," said Canaccord Genuity analyst Michael Graham in a research note.

Online user business reviews site Yelp also came out with strong results, reporting that net revenue jumped 69 percent year over year to $55 million. The company's loss shrank to $878,000 from $2 million. The average number of unique visitors per month rose 38 percent year over year to approximately 108 million, while active local business accounts increased 62 percent year over year to approximately 51,400.

Yelp shares jumped Friday by $5.52 to close at $57.02.

Though LinkedIn and Yelp revenues are minuscule compared to Facebook's, their rising user statistics appeared to fuel the general good feeling toward Internet stocks. Last week, Facebook said mobile ad sales stoked revenue, which jumped 53 percent year over year to $1.81 billion, while profit totaled $333 million compared to a net loss a year earlier.

Facebook this week finally succeeded in clawing its way back to its May 2012 initial public offering price of $38, on Friday closing at $38.05.

Consumer electronics giant Sony, meanwhile, reported a profit, pushing forward with a turnaround that was sparked previously by a sale of assets including its U.S. headquarters and a Tokyo office complex. This quarter, improved results came from a combination of solid smartphone sales and a favorable foreign exchange rate.

The company reported that net profit was ¥3.5 billion (US$35 million) in the quarter, compared to losses of ¥24.6 billion in the same quarter last year, while revenue increased 13 percent to ¥1.7 trillion.

Sony's mobile products and communications business reported revenue of ¥389 billion, a 36 percent increase year over year, underscoring the importance of mobile communications to the future of just about any company in the consumer electronics business.

"Semiconductors for smartphones will see healthy revenue growth as demand for increased speeds and additional features continue to drive high-end smartphone demand in developed countries and low-cost smartphones in developing countries," said Nina Turner, research manager for semiconductors at IDC in a report this week. PC chip sales will remain weak, but as smartphone sales surge, semiconductor revenue worldwide will increase this year by 6.9 percent, reaching $320 billion, IDC said in the report.

Meanwhile, the wireless infrastructure segment of Alcatel-Lucent's business remained stable in the second quarter as the company continues efforts to focus on IP networking and ultra-broadband equipment. Revenue rose 1.9 percent to €3.61 million, driven by strong growth in sales of IP networking equipment, the company said. However, the company reported a net loss of €885 million (US$1.15 billion) for the quarter, weighed down by a charge of €552 million following a re-evaluation of assets, and restructuring charges of €194 million.

A strong week for tech stocks bodes well for confidence in the tech sector, as investors seem to be accentuating the positive aspects of what has been by most accounts a mixed quarter. But potential pitfalls remain.

Continued global macroeconomic uncertainty from a slowdown in China, the eurozone debt crisis and recession, Japan recession and the U.S. government spending cutbacks as a result of political compromise could all be factors weighing down IT, particularly spending that affects sales of components, IDC said in its report.

UK's PM warns Internet companies to ban child abuse search terms

The British government wants Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to block Internet searches that are likely to lead to child abuse images. Internet search providers have until October to commit to banning lists of keywords deemed abusive or the government will consider legislation to force them, the U.K.'s Prime Minister David Cameron said Monday in a speech.

Some people are putting "simply appalling" terms into search engines in order to find illegal images of child abuse and they're getting results, Cameron said Sunday in an interview broadcast by the BBC.

The U.K. government needs to have a "very, very strong conversation" with Internet search providers and tell them that they shouldn't provide results for terms that are "depraved and disgusting," he said.

The interview was in advance of a speech the Prime Minister gave Monday that focused on removing child abuse content from the Internet and preventing children from accessing pornography.

"Put simply - there needs to be a list of terms -- a black list -- which offer up no direct search returns," Cameron said, according to a draft version of the speech text published on his office's website. "I have a very clear message for Google, Bing, Yahoo and the rest: You have a duty to act on this -- and it is a moral duty."

Arguments that a ban on searches that clearly reflect the "sick and malevolent intent of the searcher" would violate freedom of speech will not be accepted, he said.

Cameron said that more general search queries like "child sex" should return options like: "Do you mean child sex education?" or "Do you mean child gender?" In addition, "abhorrent" combinations of search keywords that are clearly related to child abuse should return no result at all, Cameron said.

Internet search providers have until October to answer whether they are willing to commit to censor results for search terms on a blacklist compiled by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP Center), a law enforcement organization affiliated with the U.K.'s Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) that is dedicated to fighting the sexual abuse of children.

If the answer given by the companies in October is not satisfactory, or their progress is slow or non-existent, the government might take a regulatory approach.

"I can tell you we are already looking at the legislative options we have to force action," Cameron said.

The Prime Minister expects companies to set their "greatest brains" to work on any implementation issues and technical obstacles.

"You hold hackathons for people to solve impossible Internet conundrums," Cameron said. "Well -- hold a hackathon for child safety."

"We have a zero tolerance attitude to child sexual abuse imagery," a Google representative said Monday via email. "We use our own systems and work with child safety experts to find it, remove and report it. We recently donated 5 million U.S. dollars to groups working to combat this problem and are committed to continuing the dialogue with the Government on these issues."

"We will support the work of third parties in running education and deterrence campaigns on our platforms and are already actively engaged in discussions with CEOP and others about their proposals," a Yahoo representative said via email.

"Microsoft will support education and deterrence campaigns to target those seeking to access indecent and illegal images of children," a Microsoft representative said in an emailed statement. "Our PhotoDNA technology is already widely used across the industry to help prevent the proliferation of known illegal images and we remain completely committed to helping tackle the scourge of online child abuse content."

The Open Rights Group (ORG), an U.K.-based digital rights watchdog organization doesn't believe that banning certain search terms would be an effective approach.

"Most child abuse images are circulated in private networks, or are sold by criminal gangs," said ORG Executive Director Jim Killock in a blog post Sunday. "Banning search terms seems unlikely to combat the serious activity, which is independent of search engines."

Furthermore, even if some identifiable search terms would indeed bring up illegal images, banning those terms will likely lead to people looking for such content inventing new terms to find it, Killock said.

"Cameron invites a game of cat and mouse which is likely to have very limited impact," he said. "The terms used may hide themselves into search terms that cannot be banned because they are innocuous."

Such a ban might also affect the ability of organizations like the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) to identify child abuse images using search engines and report them to the proper authorities, Killock said.

Cameron said in his speech that search engine providers already block abusive images reported by the IWF, but mentioned that the organization is too small to identify all of them because it relies almost entirely on members of the public reporting abusive content they've seen online.

The IWF did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether such a ban would impact its ability to identify child abuse images.

"Cameron's announcement is symptomatic of the way the Internet is viewed and treated by policy makers," Killock said. "The technical challenges and consequences of policies are viewed as less important than the moral purpose justifying calls for action."

How Scientology changed the internet

 The Church of Scientology has made several moves to have its secret scriptures removed from the internet What do Wikipedia, Wikileaks, Anonymous and copyright law have in common? The answer is they have all been influenced by the Church of Scientology International (CSI), as it took on ex-members and critics who took their protests on to the internet. As the Church successfully removes another website, just how big an influence has Scientology had on the internet we all use?


Last month digital rights activists at the influential Electronic Frontiers Foundation (EFF) placed the Church of Scientology into their hall of shame over what it says were repeated acts against internet freedoms.
It was just the latest twist in the Church's long-running feud with "negative" Scientology content online, one that has lasted almost two decades.

Back in May 1994, at a time when most major organisations were yet to figure out how exactly to deal with the relatively unknown power of the internet, the Church's Elaine Siegel had a few ideas, outlined in a leaked email to "all Scientologists on the internet".

"I would like to ask your assistance in getting each one of you to post positive messages on the internet (at least once a week, more if you like), about Scientology," she wrote.
"If you imagine 40-50 Scientologists posting on the internet every few days, we'll just run the SP's [ex-members] right off the system.

"It will be quite simple, actually."
Or perhaps not.
'Censorship innovators' Unsurprisingly, the Church of today is keen to distance itself from Ms Siegel's email.

"It is ancient history in terms of internet development," spokeswoman Karin Pouw told that in a series of emails about the Church's relationship with the internet.
Continue reading the main story 

Scientology was founded in Los Angeles in the 1950s by a science fiction author, L Ron Hubbard (above).
He said human beings contained the souls of Thetans - immortal creatures responsible for making the Universe.

However, the world has been invaded by dark forces - the Engrams - and individuals can be cleansed and enlightened only through intense therapy called Dianetics.

It is a costly process and the Scientologists expect their adherents to donate considerable sums.
In the US, where Scientology has attracted a number of Hollywood celebrities, it enjoys the full rights of a recognised religion.

But in Europe, several governments - including the UK - have denied Scientology tax exemptions enjoyed by other churches.

"The email in no way reflects or represents the Church's current relationships with IT professionals or our use of the internet to provide information about Scientology to anyone who seeks it."
She's right - the Church has moved on, instead seeking new ways to have "negative" content removed from the web.

"They're kind of innovators in finding ways to censor the internet," said Dr Martin Poulter from the University of Bristol.

Dr Poulter is a lead trainer for Wikimedia UK, the British arm of the non-profit organisation that looks after Wikipedia, and often edits its Scientology pages - something the Church is no longer able to do.
"Scientology was the first organisation to be officially banned from Wikipedia," he says, referring to the landmark decision in 2009.

"There were several different accounts making very similar contributions and advancing pro-Scientology lines, or deleting anti-Scientology stuff."

Dr Poulter's first experience with the Church's actions online came in the early 90s when he was browsing a newsgroup called alt.religion.scientology, a place where critics and ex-members were posting information on the Church.

"The reaction from the Church of Scientology was that it went really berserk," recalls Dr Poulter.
With the help of local authorities, houses belonging to newsgroup users across the US were raided, with computer equipment being seized for weeks on end.

"The days of the internet as a cosy, private, intellectual cocktail party are over," technology magazine Wired prophetically declared in 1995.

'Encourage tolerance' Scientology officials remember those early days with a slightly different perspective.
"The Church at that time had been a pioneer in religious website development," said Ms Pouw, but she admitted to the BBC that there had been concern about hate speech.

So much so, the Church took internet service providers such as Netcom to court over users who were posting copyrighted works online in order to attack Scientology.

Netcom retaliated, saying it could not be expected to screen everything its users were posting - a defence now frequently utilised by large sites like YouTube.

 Scientology provokes protests around the world, but some countries recognise it as a legitimate religion That row was one of several which led to the creation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a US law that gives copyright holders the power to ask for the removal of content to which they own the rights.

The DMCA is now widely used by the entertainment industry to have content removed from the internet.
For the Church, it was a tool that allowed them to go after ex-members and others who had posted "secret scriptures" online.

One such site, Operation Clambake, was a particular thorn. Set up by Andreas Heldal-Lund, the site not only hosted previously private Scientology documents but large amounts of criticism of the Church too. Because it had been set up in Norway, Xenu.net was beyond the DMCA's reach.

Google 'meeting' So the Church did the next best thing: it made a DMCA request to Google for the site to be wiped from search results. Google complied, sparking strong criticism.

Faced with the backlash, Google came to what founder Sergey Brin would later describe as the "right compromise", removing the listings, but replacing them with links to another website - chillingeffects.org - which lists the details of DMCA requests.

Meanwhile, anti-Scientologists linked to Xenu.net from their own sites, thus pushing it up Google's rankings until it appeared ahead of the Church's official site.
Continue reading the main story 

In 2008, a leaked video of Tom Cruise showed the actor and prominent Scientologist energetically enthusing about the Church.

The Church moved swiftly to have it removed from YouTube, and in doing so helped inspire a new, as-yet unknown foe: Anonymous.

Until this point, Anonymous had been made up of mischievous frequenters of message boards like 4Chan, intent mainly on pranks.

But with Scientology in its sights, the group embarked on Project Chanology - a co-ordinated effort to use various hacking techniques to disrupt the Church in any way it could.

Chanology was the first "op" that mobilised the hacktivists in this way, recalls Wikipedia's Dr Poulter.
"Scientology gave them a target to organise around, and brought them off the internet and into real life.
"You wouldn't have people in streets around the world in V for Vendetta masks if it wasn't for Scientology."
Former high-ranking Scientologist Geir Isene, who left the Church in 2009, told that the Church was so concerned about this that it put pressure on Mr Brin at a conference in the hope he would alter search results to down-rank, or remove, anti-Scientology material.

 
The Church denies any discussions took place, while Google told that it had no record of a meeting - but added that Mr Brin and other Google bosses would often meet webmasters and discuss matters relating to search at industry events.

The company strongly denies any suggestion it would have considered changing its search algorithms.
Mr Isene said his IT expertise was used by the Church to get under the skin of Mr Heldal-Lund, by posing online as a girl asking for advice after being brutalised by Jehovah's Witnesses.

Years later, when the Church asked Mr Isene how to combat their "Google problem" he told officials they could never pressure the company into change.

"They thought that was the most stupid thing Google could think - because obviously Scientology was going to save the world and Google was just a simple search engine."

When asked about the meeting, the Church of Scientology played down Mr Isene's contribution.
"He has joined a small group of former Scientologists who are trying to generate media stories about their former faith through exaggerated claims of their own importance," spokeswoman Ms Pouw said.
"He was one of many IT professionals we consulted at the time. Nothing more."

As the years progressed, Scientology's run-ins with the internet community would come thick and fast - mostly notably from the likes of Wikileaks, which in 2008 was still in "beta". It posted more scriptures, provoking the first significant legal challenge to the site's owner, Julian Assange. He ignored the Church's threat.

Superbowl stats Today, the Church takes pride in its presence on social media and says it works with Google "almost daily" on web ad campaigns.

"The teamwork has resulted in exciting technology and user experience milestones like our rich media YouTube channel as well as the YouTube homepage interactive experience seen by 61,771,958 people in a single day in February of this year."

 There have been some pro-Scientology protests in parts of Europe But that impressive traffic day, it must be noted, was largely thanks to a Superbowl advertisement costing several millions of dollars.

So while it may have embraced the internet for its own purposes, organisations like the Church of Scientology still face the internet's disregard for secrecy as a constant threat.

According to some measures, the Church is suffering from declining membership. Many who leave the Church are now more able to speak out - particularly with the help of blogs and social media, a threat that even the most intensive use of copyright laws struggles to touch.

"Founder L Ron Hubbard told them how to do everything in life," reflects Dr Poulter from Wikipedia.
"But he didn't leave any instructions on how to handle the internet."

Bad Internet data requests led to 6 wrongly held or accused in UK

Six British citizens were wrongly detained or accused of crimes as a result of mistakes made by authorities when requesting access to Internet data, the U.K. Interception of Communications Commissioner said.
A report detailing law enforcement's errors in the UK was published as interest in surveillance of ordinary citizens' online activities runs high, in the wake of disclosures about the U.S. National Security Agency's secret surveillance programs.

In 2012, U.K. public authorities submitted 570,135 notices and authorizations for communications data, according to the report published on Thursday. The principal users of this communications data are still the intelligence agencies, police forces and other law enforcement agencies, wrote Paul Kennedy who served as the Interception of Communications Commissioner through last year.

However, because public authorities often make many requests for communications data in the course of a single investigation, the total figure does not indicate the number of individuals or addresses targeted, Kennedy said, adding that those numbers are not readily available, but would be much smaller.
While the use of intercepted communications data helped authorities when investigating drug trafficking, investigating activities at a major illegal waste site and helped catching a swindler, numerous errors were also made, the report showed.

"During the reporting year, 979 communications data errors were reported to my office by public authorities," it said.

In the vast majority of these cases the mistake was realized by the public authority that reported the error after which the wrongly acquired data was destroyed. "Regretfully in six separate cases this year, the mistake was not realized and action was taken by the police forces / law enforcement agencies," the report said.

All of these cases were requests for Internet data and regrettably five of these errors had very significant consequences for six members of the public who were wrongly detained or accused of crimes as a result of the errors, the report said. In the remaining case the error caused an intrusion into the privacy of an individual, as an address was mistakenly visited by police looking for a child who had threatened to commit self harm.

Liberty, a U.K. rights organization, is concerned about the findings in the commissioner's report. "Cardinal Richelieu promised to be able to hang most honest men with just 'six lines' written by their hand. Imagine how easy it is with thousands of text messages, emails and web-site visits to make each and every one of us look like a criminal. So much for the innocent having nothing to hide and so-called 'communications data' not being an intrusion on our privacy," Shami Chakrabarti, Director of Liberty, said in an emailed statement on Friday.

Measures have been taken to prevent such errors from happening again, the report stated. They include ensuring that all details are double checked. A reminder was issued to relevant staff outlining the procedure to be followed and reiterating the checking process and potential consequences of errors.

Moreover, some of the public authorities have also put procedures in place to ensure the applicant also provides the source documentation with their application to resolve an IP address. This will enable those responsible to double-check the IP address, date, time of access and any time-zone conversions.

"I am satisfied with the measures put in place by these public authorities," Kennedy wrote, adding that this will hopefully prevent recurrence. "Fortunately errors with such severe consequences are rare," he said.

F.C.C. Backs Plan to Update a Fund That Helps Connect Schools to the Internet

WASHINGTON — The Federal Communications Commission voted on Friday to overhaul and possibly expand its E-Rate program, a $2.3 billion effort to provide schools and libraries with up-to-date telecommunications service and equipment, including high-speed Internet connections.


A proposal approved by the commission, which will be made available for public comment before a final version is completed, calls for funds to be moved away from outdated uses like paying for paging service and long-distance phone calls and into areas that will accelerate digital literacy, like Wi-Fi connections within a school or library.


The proposal also calls for measures that would drive down the cost of services, like adoption of purchasing consortiums, and the streamlining of administrative requirements — among them, shifting much of the required paperwork for applicants to electronic filings. “One of the biggest obstacles to seizing the opportunities of digital learning in America is inadequate bandwidth at our schools and libraries,” Mignon L. Clyburn, the F.C.C. chairwoman, said before voting. “Simply put, they need faster high-capacity connections and they need them now.”


Just last month in a visit to a North Carolina middle school, President Obama set a goal of connecting 99 percent of school students to the Internet through high-speed broadband and high-speed wireless within five years.


“To get there, we have to build connected classrooms that support modern teaching — investments we know our international competitors are already making,” Mr. Obama said on Friday.


The E-Rate fund has financed Internet connections to more than 95 percent of American public school classrooms, while only 14 percent were connected when E-Rate was established in 1997.


In 2010, however, an F.C.C. study found that more than half of the schools and libraries reported that their Internet connections were too slow to meet their needs. For the coming school year, libraries and schools requested more than $4.9 billion to pay for connections and equipment, more than twice the size of the fund.

“We fail our students if we expect digital-age learning to take place at near dial-up speeds,” said Jessica Rosenworcel, an F.C.C. commissioner. “Contrast this with efforts under way in some of our world neighbors. They are pouring resources into these subjects, into schools and connectivity.”

The E-Rate program has been faulted for inadequately allocating money in the fund, which is provided through a tax on consumers’ phone bills, a monthly charge between 50 cents and $1.


Commissioner Ajit Pai, the lone Republican on the five-member commission (where two seats are vacant), criticized allocations of the fund, saying an average of only $1.8 billion had been spent in each of the last 10 years, leaving more than $5 billion unused in the E-Rate account.


Mr. Pai also complained that the program placed greater emphasis on the wrong services.


“E-Rate today prioritizes long-distance telephone calls and getting phone service to a school’s bus garage over wiring up a classroom,” Mr. Pai said in a speech this week at the American Enterprise Institute. “How can it be that E-Rate in the last few years committed about $600 million, more than one-quarter of its annual budget, to support voice telephone services while at the same time denying eight out of 10 applicants’ funding for connecting classrooms?”


At a Senate Commerce Committee hearing this week, both Republicans and Democrats spoke favorably of the fund, although some quoted Mr. Pai’s observations in a warning of reckless spending. 

Internet traffic jams, meet your robot nemesis

On an 80-core computer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, scientists have built a tool that might make networks significantly faster just by coming up with better algorithms.

The system, called Remy, generates its own algorithms for implementing TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), the framework used to prevent congestion on most networks. The algorithms are different from anything human developers have written, and so far they seem to work much better, according to the researchers. On one simulated network, they doubled the throughput.

Remy is not designed to run on individual PCs and servers, but someday it may be used to develop better algorithms to run on those systems, said Hari Balakrishnan, the Fujitsu professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. For now, it's churning out millions of possible algorithms and testing them against simulated networks to find the best possible one for a given objective.

IP (Internet Protocol) networks don't dictate how fast each attached computer sends out packets or whether they keep transmitting after the network has become congested. Instead, each system makes its own decisions using some implementation of the TCP framework. Each version of TCP uses its own algorithm to determine how best to act in different conditions.

These implementations of TCP have been refined many times over the past 30 years and sometimes fine-tuned for particular networks and applications. For example, a Web browser may put a priority on moving bits across the network quickly, while a VoIP application may call for less delay. Today, there are 30 to 50 "plausibly good" TCP schemes and five to eight that are commonly used, Balakrishnan said.

But up to now, those algorithms have all been developed by human engineers, he said. Remy could change that.

"The problem, on the face of it, is actually intractably hard for computers," Balakrishnan said. Because there are so many variables involved and network conditions constantly change, coming up with the most efficient algorithm requires more than "naive" brute-force computing, he said.

Figuring out how to share a network requires strategic choices not unlike those that cyclists have to make in bike races, such as whether to race ahead and take the lead or cooperate with another racer, said Balakrishnan's colleague, graduate student Keith Winstein.

"There's a lot of different computers, and they all want to let their users browse the Web, and yet they have to cooperate to share the network," Winstein said.

However, Remy can do things that human algorithm developers haven't been able to achieve, Balakrishnan said. For one thing, current TCP algorithms use only a handful of rules for how a computer should respond to performance issues. Those might include things like slowing the transmission rate when the percentage of dropped packets passes some threshold. Remy can create algorithms with more than 150 rules, according to the researchers.

To create a new algorithm using Remy, Balakrishnan and Winstein put in a set of requirements and then let Remy create candidates and try them against software that simulates a wide range of network conditions. The system uses elements of machine learning to determine which potential algorithm best does the job. As it tests the algorithms, Remy focuses on situations where a small change in network conditions can lead to a big change in performance, rather than on situations where the network is more predictable.

After about four to 12 hours, Remy delivers the best algorithm it's found. The results have been impressive, according to the researchers. In a test that simulated a fast wired network with consistent transmission rates across physical links, Remy's algorithms produced about twice the throughput of the most commonly used versions of TCP and cut delay by two-thirds, they said. On a simulation of Verizon's mobile data network, Remy's algorithms gave 20 percent to 30 percent better throughput and 25 percent to 40 percent lower delay.

But don't expect blazing page loads just yet. Balakrishnan and Winstein cautioned that Remy is still an academic research project.

For one thing, it hasn't yet been tested on the actual Internet. Though Remy's algorithms would probably work fairly well out there, it's hard to be sure because they were developed in simulations that didn't include all of the Internet's unknown variables, according to Balakrishnan. For example, it may be hard to tell how many people are active on a particular part of the Internet, he said.

If machine-developed TCP algorithms do end up going live, it will probably happen first on private networks. For example, companies such as Google already fine-tune TCP for the requirements of their own data centers, Balakrishnan said. Those kinds of companies might turn to a system like Remy to develop better ones.

But even if Remy never makes it into the real world, it may have a lot to teach the engineers who write TCP algorithms, Balakrishnan said. For example, Remy uses a different way of thinking about whether there is congestion than TCP does today, he said.

Though the researchers understand certain tools that Remy uses, they still want to figure out how that combination of tools can create such good algorithms.

"Empirically, they work very well," Winstein said. "We get higher throughput, lower delay and more fairness than in all the human designs to date. But we cannot explain why they work."

"At this point, our real aspiration is that other researchers and engineers pick it up and start using it as a tool," Balakrishnan said. "Even if the ultimate impact of our work is ... more about changing the way people think about the problem, for us, that is a huge win."

Japan, South Korea continue to lead in fiber Internet

The number of fiber Internet subscriptions rose 12.7 percent in the countries that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the Paris-based group said Thursday.

Just under 49 million fiber Internet connections existed across the 34 countries, according to the data. That represented about 15 percent of all fixed Internet lines, but in several nations the percentage of fiber connections is much higher.

Japan and South Korea lead the pack with fiber penetration of over 60 percent. Sweden, Estonia and Slovakia rounded out the top five with penetration in the 30 percent range. The other nations with above average fiber penetration were Norway, Iceland, Slovenia, Denmark, the Czech Republic and Portugal. Hungary was ranked just slightly below the average.

Penetration rates in the remaining countries, which included the U.S., U.K., France and Germany, were all under 10 percent.

While fiber continued to gain on rival technologies, it remained half as popular as cable Internet, which accounted for 31 percent of all fixed Internet connections. Both technologies continued to trail DSL, which accounted for just over half of all fixed Internet lines.

The OECD said there were 327 million fixed Internet connections in its member states at the end of 2012.
On the wireless Internet front, broadband connections rose 14 percent in 2012 and conventional mobile phone connections dominated. They accounted for 662 million lines, or 85 percent of the estimated 781 million broadband Internet connections in OECD countries at the end of 2012. Almost all of the rest were dedicated mobile terminals, such as 3G modems. Satellite and terrestrial wireless systems accounted for less than 1 percent.

Four countries—Finland, Sweden, Australia and South Korea—had mobile broadband penetration rates above one subscription per person.


The OECD includes most major European nations, the U.S., Canada, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and Chile. 

Why the internet is forcing retailers to rethink their supply chains

The idea of multi-channel retail is not new. Retailers have been dealing with the complexities of selling to consumers through online channels and traditional bricks and mortar stores for over 15 years now. Multi-channel retail adds a significant amount of complexity to retailer operations and that complexity just keeps on rising as more consumers use smartphones and tablets for their online shopping.

To support this added complexity many retailers have undertaken process re-engineering and technology initiatives. The goal of these efforts was to achieve consistency of customer experience and information across multiple channels. One example of this is that items purchased online should be able to be returned, replaced or exchanged at any of a retailer's stores nationwide.

But as the percentage of online sales continues to grow the investment focus is shifting beyond customer service and sales into functions such as supply chain and logistics. Forrester Research predicts that the UK online retail market will grow by 10% per year from £40bn in 2012 to £64bn in 2016. And, as the percentage of online sales has grown, so has the level of competition.

One of the key factors that influence online shopping behaviour is delivery times. In the early days of e-commerce, consumers were conditioned to wait for days for an online order to arrive via Royal Mail. However, now most shoppers don’t want to wait longer than a day, ideally no more than a few hours, to receive their purchase.

Therefore it follows that the retailer that can offer the fastest delivery speeds is going to be best positioned to win the most business. In the hope of gaining competitive advantage, many retailers have begun to re-engineer their order fulfilment and logistics processes to accelerate shipping timeframes.

Some retailers are pursuing mergers and acquisitions with hopes of leapfrogging the competition. For example, Amazon.com acquired a maker of robotics systems, Kiva Systems, for its distribution centres. These robots speed through giant warehouses moving inventory from shelves to workers to accelerate order flow.

Google acquired BufferBox, a Canadian operator of lockers in major metropolitan areas throughout North America. Services such as Google's enable retailers to reduce shipping times by delivering to lockers located in convenient spots throughout major cities in the US, ready for customers to pick up.

The competition to offer more aggressive delivery schedules or pricing options is fierce. For example, Argos now offers a 90-minute delivery via a shuttle service. Next offers delivery the following day for orders placed by 10pm. Ocado offers shoppers to specify grocery delivery windows of within one hour. Amazon.com offers unlimited shipping to its Prime customers for £49 per year.

In the early days of e-commerce, retailers would carry inventory for each product listed on their website. However, in today's model many retailers never physically touch the products they sell online. Instead, online orders for these products are routed to a third party for fulfilment. Both third-party logistics providers and niche e-commerce fulfilment houses offer services in which they will pack and ship items on behalf of retailers.

Another popular option is “drop shipping”. When a consumer places an order with an online store, the retailer splits the contents of their shopping cart into multiple separate orders. Each order is relayed via electronic data interchange (EDI) to the supplier of the product. The supplier then ships the item directly to the consumer's address using packaging materials supplied by the retailer. Orders fulfilled via drop ship are usually processed more quickly as there are no concerns about out-of-stocks and back-orders at the retailer.

While drop ship models simplify the order fulfilment process for retailers, these approaches introduce quite a bit of complexity for the supplier. Suppliers have traditionally concerned themselves with shipping full truckloads of goods to their retail customers' distribution centres.

A typical truckload for a particular item might contain 5,000 units. When shipped to a distribution centre there is one truck to manage, one purchase order and one invoice to issue. But if, say, 10% of these 5,000 units are now sold online, there are now 501 (500 online + 1 store) shipments to track, 501 purchase orders to receive, and 501 invoices to be created. The shift from tracking one shipment to 501 is an exponential increase in complexity for the supplier.

Retailers are not absolved of responsibility for tracking deliveries even when they outsource fulfilment to a supplier or other third party. Retailers continue to own the consumer relationship, so any errors or delays in the shipment will affect the retailer’s relationship with the consumer, potentially affecting loyalty.

Retailers must therefore be able to track the status of each order sent for drop ship (or third-party fulfilment). More importantly, they need to be able to identify orders which are delayed or only partially shipped. Retailers also need to know which merchandise was returned so that the appropriate credits can be applied.

An innovative approach to the online retail supply chain involves leveraging a network of physical stores. These real estate assets were once viewed as a liability during the dot com era. But now having a large footprint of stores across the country can offer a competitive advantage.

For example, many traditional retailers offer a click-and-collect service that allows consumers to place orders online to be shipped to their preferred store location, often available for collection within hours of an order being placed. More than half of all UK consumers indicate that they have already tried a click-and-collect model for online purchases.

The third-party fulfilment, drop ship and ship-from-the-store models described above can each lower costs for the retailers. With these models the retailer does not need to hold buffer stocks in its distribution centres to respond to demand and as a result can offer lower prices.

The race for faster delivery timeframes is introducing significant amounts of complexity for retailers. They must be able to sell products in a store, over the phone, on a website, via a smartphone or a tablet device. They must be able to have the products delivered to the customer's home, office, nearby store or locker facility.

They must be able to ship products from their own distribution centre, their own store, a supplier's warehouse or a third-party fulfilment centre. And they must to be able to provide customer service in person or via phone, email, chat, website or various social media sites. No wonder it’s becoming ever more complex.

Alert! Study finds Internet users heed browser warnings

Security warnings displayed by Web browsers are far more effective at deterring risky Internet behavior than was previously believed, according to a new study.

The study looked at how users reacted to warnings displayed by Mozilla's Firefox and Google's Chrome browsers, which warn of phishing attempts, malware attacks and invalid SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificates.

It was widely thought that most users ignored the warnings, based on several studies released between 2002 and 2009. However, in the past four years, browser warnings have been redesigned, but the effect of the new designs on users had not been studied.

For example, toolbars that warned of possible phishing attacks have been replaced with full-page warnings that may have influenced people's behavior, the researchers who conducted the study wrote.

More than 25 million warning impressions displayed by Chrome and Firefox in May and June were analyzed. The data was collected from telemetry programs used by Mozilla and Google, which collect what the researchers term 'pseudonymous' data from the browsers of consenting users.

In the case of both browsers, less than 25 percent of users opted to bypass malware and phishing warnings, and only a third of users cruised through the SSL warnings displayed by Firefox.

"This demonstrates that security warnings can be effective in practice; security experts and system architects should not dismiss the goal of communicating security information to end users," according to the paper, which was submitted to the Usenix Annual Technical Conference 2013 in San Jose, California, late last month.

The analysis uncovered other interesting details. It appears that more technical users bypassed security warnings more often. The researchers considered technical users as those who used Linux and pre-release browsers.

"Technically advanced users might feel more confident in the security of their computers, be more curious about blocked websites or feel patronized by warnings," the paper said.

Despite the positive influence of the warnings, the researchers found users clicked through more than 70 percent of Google's SSL warnings. By contrast, Firefox users clicked through them just 33 percent of the time.

There are a few thoughts why Chrome's SSL click-through rate is higher. Users can bypass Chrome's warning with a single click, whereas Firefox requires three clicks. Firefox displays a more stern warning, showing an image of a policeman and using the word "untrusted" to describe the site.

There may also be other mitigating factors, the researchers said. Nevertheless, Chrome's high SSL click-through rate "is undesirable," they wrote. "Our positive findings for the other warnings demonstrate that this warning has the potential for improvement."

The study was written by Devdatta Akhawe of the University of California, Berkeley, and Adrienne Porter Felt, a research scientist at Google.

Utah Internet Firm Defies State's Warrantless Subpoena Law

Pete Ashdown is founder and CEO of XMission, Utah's oldest Internet service provider.

Utah's oldest Internet service provider, XMission, has refused to give up customer information to law enforcement, reports The Salt Lake Tribune. Specifically, the company says it won't comply with administrative subpoenas.

People tend to confuse these with warrants, but unlike warrants, administrative subpoenas don't require police officials to show they have "probable cause" of a crime. They also don't need approval from a judge — and that's the real problem, says company founder Pete Ashdown, a two-time unsuccessful candidate for the U.S. Senate and outspoken Democrat in an overwhelmingly Republican state. The Tribune reports:

"It's not that he wants to enable suspects of child pornography or exploitation, vowing he would gladly comply when presented with a warrant. But the president and founder of XMission calls the subpoenas 'unconstitutional' — an invasion of the Fourth Amendment guarantee against unreasonable search and seizure — because they bypass the courts."

The courts tend to disagree. These administrative subpoenas are for connection data, not content. In other words, investigators are looking for evidence that person X connected to website Y at time Z. Courts have held that this kind of information is akin to the address written on the outside of an envelope; people don't have an expectation of privacy about connection data, and so it doesn't enjoy the protection of the Fourth Amendment.

But the courts may change their minds, especially now, as powerful analytics tools have made it possible to use connection data to draw a detailed portrait of a person's private life. That kind of analysis is the business model for much of Silicon Valley. Now police are getting into the act. The tech-savvy agencies have learned to use connection data earlier in their investigations — not just to prove the case against a suspect, but also to identify suspects to begin with.

A lot of privacy advocates want to see a good test case of whether a subpoena is really enough. Ashdown's company seems to be begging for a showdown, as it lists the subpoenas it has refused. But so far, Ashdown says, no dice.

"I've been kind of hoping that they would challenge [the policy], that we would go to court, and we could get a proper warrant for that information, or they would challenge my challenge and we could find out whether this law was constitutional at all," Ashdown told a legislative committee last month. "But it never happens."

There may be a tactical reason the subpoena-refuseniks haven't been dragged into court. Over the years, prosecutors have told me that they worry that a judge might rule against them and that the case could become precedent — which would deprive them of a powerful investigative tool. As long as the vast majority of ISPs continue to comply with the subpoenas for connection data, it may be smarter for law enforcement not to risk creating a case that could go up the ladder to the Supreme Court, which signaled in 2012 that it has serious reservations about warrantless electronic surveillance.

Internet Explorer will get critical update next week

Microsoft's monthly patch release for July will cover seven security issues, six of which could be remotely exploited by an attacker.

The company publishes an advisory in advance of its patch date, which is the second Tuesday of the month, so administrators knows what products will be affected. It does not describe the vulnerabilities, however, until the security fixes are released.

The critical vulnerabilities are in the Windows OS, .NET Framework, Silverlight, Office, Visual Studio, Lync, and Internet Explorer (IE). A seventh bulletin, ranked as "important," affects Microsoft's Windows Defender security software.

The most important bulletin addresses IE, wrote Wolfgang Kandek, CTO for Qualys. It affects IE versions six through 10 on Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, Server 2003, Server 2008, and RT.

Microsoft will also fix a zero-day vulnerability revealed by security researcher Tavis Ormandy, Kandek wrote. The problem concerns a memory management problem that is essentially a zero-day vulnerability after an exploit was added to the Metasploit penetration testing tool, he wrote.

The company described the vulnerability, CVE-2013-3660, as a "a publicly known issue in the kernel-mode drivers component of Windows."

Kandek wrote that the patch day will be a bit of work for desktop and server administrators. "All in all, a normally sized Patch Tuesday, but with a large number of critical issues," he wrote.

The bulletins will be released at 10 a.m. PDT on July 9.

Follow me on Twitter @sajilpl

Internet fills gap as some TV stations shut down in Egypt

The Internet held up in Egypt as the military deposed the country's president Wednesday, with both the former president's aides and the opposition using Twitter and Facebook extensively to communicate with followers in Egypt and the rest of the world.

"Egypt remains online. So far no repeat of 2011," said Internet monitoring company Renesys in a Twitter message late Wednesday. It said it was continuing to monitor.

In January 2011, the government of former president Hosni Mubarak ordered service providers to shut down all international connections to the Internet in the wake of widespread unrest in the country.

This time, Egyptians on both sides used social media services using hashtags like #WeAreWithMorsi and #EgyptRevolutionNotMilitaryCoup, as the military cut off many TV channels and news sources, according to reports.

Recognizing that its service would be important during the army takeover on Wednesday, Twitter decided to test a translation service from Arabic to English for Twitter messages for most-followed accounts in the country.

The Twitter handle for the Egyptian presidency appeared to continue to be managed by ousted president Muhammad Morsi or his aides who were still posting messages. "Pres. Morsy urges civilians and military members to uphold the law & the Constitution not to accept that coup which turns Egypt backwards," it said in one message, while a subsequent message urged everyone to "adhere to peacefulness and avoid shedding blood of fellow countrymen."

An aide of Morsi used the Facebook page of the "Office of the Assistant to President of Egypt on Foreign Relations" to convey to the people that what had happened in Egypt was in his view a military coup. "As I write these lines I am fully aware that these may be the last lines I get to post on this page," he said.

"For the sake of Egypt and for historical accuracy, let's call what is happening by its real name: Military coup," he added.

Blocked from state-owned media like television, and with many TV channels supporting Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood party shut down, the supporters of the former president appeared to have taken resort to social networks to get their message out.

But others too in Egypt were active on social networks. "It's a people coup against the undemocratic elected president who was allied with terrorists like Hamas !," tweeted Amr Bakly from Cairo. User Haidy Anwar tweeted: "Dear NonEgyptians, U either talk about Egypt well (&by well i mean the greatest country of all) or shut up."

US regulator shuts down 1,677 Internet pharmacies

More than 1,600 websites selling pharmaceutical products, including some spoofing CVS and Walgreens pharmacies, were shut down this week in a sting involving 99 countries, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said Thursday.

 

Close to 8,000 more were warned against selling unapproved drugs or those without a prescription. The FDA said many of the websites were part of an organized criminal network that runs sites under the "Canadian Pharmacy" banner.

 

Called "Operation Pangea VI," the enforcement action ran for a one-week period through Tuesday, and investigators seized US$41 million worth of illegal medicine, the FDA said.

 

At least of the two of the websites purported to belong to the CVS pharmacy chain and Walgreens, using slight spelling and punctuation variations of those brands in domain names.

 

The targeted websites displayed bogus licenses and certifications in order to convince U.S. shoppers that their products were approved by the FDA.

 

In one instance, the FDA said a pharmacy marketed drugs for erectile dysfunction called "Levitra Super Force" and "Viagra Super Force," which both are modified names of FDA-approved drugs. But the medicines were claimed to contain dapoxetine, which is not approved by the FDA.

 

In 2009, the FDA shut down 90 Web sites hosted in the U.S. that sold unlicensed or misbranded drugs while also warning other ISPs, website operators and domain-name registrars.

 

Since 2007, the website LegitScript has vetted more than 300,000 health-related websites and those selling drugs. Of more than 34,000 online pharmacies, only 270 are considered legitimate with another 1,492 "potentially legitimate."

 

Follow me on Twitter: @sajilpl

 

 

Report: NSA collected US email records, Internet use for years

The U.S. National Security Agency collected the email and Internet use records of some U.S. residents for about a decade following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, according to documents published Thursday by the U.K. newspaper the Guardian.

 

The NSA's collection of email and Internet use metadata was authorized by former President George W. Bush after 9/11 and continued for two years under President Barack Obama, according to the Guardian's report.

 

The Guardian published two secret documents on the so-called Stellar Wind collection program, a March 2009 NSA inspector general's report on the program and a November 2007 U.S. Department of Justice memo defending the collection.

 

The inspector general's report says the White House, including members of then-Vice President Dick Cheney's staff, pushed the NSA to collect more information on U.S. residents in the days following the terrorist attacks. When General Michael Hayden, the NSA's director at the time, said he didn't believe the NSA had the authority to collect U.S. communications, the White House granted the NSA additional authority.

 

Shawn Turner, spokesman for the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said the program stopped in 2011. "The Internet metadata collection program authorized by the FISA court was discontinued in 2011 for operational and resource reasons and has not been restarted," he said by email. "The program was discontinued by the executive branch as the result of an interagency review."

 

The new revelations of NSA surveillance on U.S. residents follow news reports earlier this month that the NSA is currently collecting all telephone records from Verizon Communications. The agency is also collecting email and Internet communications from nine Web companies, including Google, Microsoft and Apple, with some U.S. communications swept up along with foreign targets, according to news reports.

 

The NSA inspector general's report says 92 percent of the targets in the collection program from 2001 to 2007 were email addresses and phone calls outside the U.S. There were just over 3,000 targets in the U.S. during that time frame, according to the report.

 

The 2007 DOJ memo, from Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Wainstein, defended the program, saying it doesn't violate the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment protecting U.S. residents against unreasonable searches and seizures.

 

"We conclude that a person has no such expectation, however, in dialing, routing, addressing, or signaling information that does not concern the substance, purport, or meaning of communications," Wainstein wrote. "We note that the analysis of information legally within the possession of the Government is likely neither a 'search' nor a 'seizure' within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment."

 

The NSA's collection of telephone and Internet communications metadata included "routing, addressing, and signaling information that does not concern the substance" of the underlying communications, wrote Wainstein, now in private practice.

 

Wainstein didn't immediately respond to a request for a comment on the memo he authored. The DOJ memo came in response to an NSA request seeking to clarify that it had authorization to collect Internet metadata from U.S. residents.

 

NSA critics have said that the collection of metadata, including the recipients of phone calls and email and the time of the calls and emails, can tell a great deal about a person and is a privacy violation.

 

The NSA U.S. collections are "pretty outrageous," digital rights activist Sina Khanifar said in an email. "Anyone who claims that the NSA's surveillance hasn't been in violation of our Fourth Amendment rights is going to have a much harder time making that argument in light of this news."

 

Khanifar helped launch the website StopWatching.us two weeks ago, and the site has collected more than 512,000 signatures of people calling on the U.S. government to stop spying on them.

 

Grant Gross covers technology and telecom policy in the U.S. government for The IDG News Service. Follow Grant on Twitter at GrantGross. Grant's e-mail address is grant_gross@idg.com.

 

Follow me on Twitter @sajilpl

Microsoft unwilling to kill one of its Internet Explorer twins

What's the point of having two versions of Internet Explorer 11 within Windows 8.1?

 

It’s a good question, and one that Microsoft executives say they haven’t completely solved. Dean Hachamovich, the corporate vice president in charge of Internet Explorer, said that the browser—which appears on both the desktop and Start screen, but in different forms—is bifurcated to satisfy two different sets of users.

 

“One IE engine does all this wicked-fast, cool stuff,” Hachamovich said Wednesday during Microsoft’s Build 2013 conference in San Francisco. “Why two? Some people live in the desktop for some activities, and we want to make sure when you’re in Windows you have good experiences,” he said.

“Why two? Some people live in the desktop for some activities, and we want to make sure when you’re in Windows you have good experiences."
Hachamovih said that IE11, the version of IE that ships with Windows 8.1, differs from both competing browsers and earlier IE versions in several key ways.
From a hardware-acceleration standpoint, IE11 is wicked fast because it can shift various workloads, including the JPEG rendering pipeline, to a PC’s graphics card. This reduces the load on a PC's CPU, allowing that chip to process other tasks. Microsoft presented SunSpider benchmarks to support its claim.
The new browser version is also more flexible in how it surfaces web content. Within Windows 7, IE9 bookmarks could be pinned to the taskbar. Within Windows 8, IE10 bookmarks could be pinned to the Start screen. But within IE11, those bookmarks can be pinned to Start and serve as live tiles or widgets, dynamically updating information, Hachamovich said.
Then there's a new, efficient approach to tabbing. Microsoft said 100 tabs can be used by IE11 at once, all without putting an undue strain on battery life. This is because IEthe new browser shifts resources away from older, unused tabs, yet it can bring back these tabs almost instantly. IE11 can also increase performance by prefetching an undisclosed number of links and pre-rendering—essentially preloading—two more links, before the user even clicks on them.

March HachmanMicrosoft used the SunSpider benchmark to prove the performance of Internet Explorer 11.
IE11 will also save sites, favorites, and other user data across devices, allowing users to pick up where they left off. One exception, unfortunately, is Reading List, a Windows Instapaper clone that works only on the “immersive” version of IE for the Modern interface, and not on the desktop version.
There’s a good chance that IE11 will be implemented inWindows 8, too, although Hachamovich declined to officially confirm that.
Shifting one’s content from place to place (and from device to device) is the mantra of SkyDrive, the cloud storage service that serves as the glue connecting all of Microsoft’s software and services.
In Windows 8, Microsoft released both a Windows 8 SkyDrive app as well as a “sync” app through which users can upload files to SkyDrive via a dedicated folder. With Windows 8.1, the sync and SkyDrive apps have been combined, says Dharmesh Mehta, the general manager in charge of SkyDrive and Outlook.com.
The sync app replicates the files stored on a local machine or machines with the collection of files stored in the cloud. For a desktop PC with a terabyte harddrive and just 100 GB in the cloud, this isn't a problem. But for a typical tablet with 16 or 32 GB of storage, it's physically impossible for 100 Gbytes of cloud files to be copied down to the tablet. That's the problem the latest Windows 8.1 version of SkyDrive was designed to solve.
In the new Windows 8.1 version, SkyDrive will only cache a portion of the file—a thumbnail of an image file, for example, or metadata that tells PowerPoint what presentation the file contains. If necessary, and if the user is connected, SkyDrive will download the total file so that the local application can access it. (Users can also select files to store offline, as before.) The bottom line is that SkyDrive now caches about 1 percent of a user’s data store, dramatically saving local storage.
Mehta wouldn’t say whether the same techniques would be applied to the SkyDrive data available to Windows Phone, but it’s a likely bet.
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Google-backed O3b launches satellites to offer Internet connectivity

O3b Networks, a company backed by Google and other investors, has launched its first satellites that aim to provide low-cost and high-speed connectivity to parts of the world that do not have fiber infrastructure.

 

The company's first four satellites, launched Tuesday aboard the Arianespace Soyuz launch vehicle from French Guiana, made first contact with O3b's gateway in Hawaii, O3b said. The launch was delayed by a day reportedly because of weather conditions.

 

The O3b system aims to combine the wide reach of satellite with the speed of a fiberoptic network, targeting customers and businesses in nearly 180 countries with lowcost, highspeed and low-latency Internet and mobile connectivity.

 

O3b uses MEO (medium earth orbit) satellites as an alternative to more expensive geostationary satellites. Satellites in geostationary orbit offer the logistical advantage of remaining at the same point over the Earth at all times, enabling a single satellite to continuously serve a large geographic region. But geostationary satellites require a high altitude of over 35,000 kilometers above the earth in order to maintain their stationary position, according to O3b documents. This distance decreases their ability to provide the low latency required by most business applications.

 

Operating in MEO, the O3b satellite constellation will provide full country coverage within 45 degrees of latitude north and south of the equator, with a round trip latency of less than 150 milliseconds, according to O3b.

 

The Jersey, Channel Islands company aims to provide IP trunking and mobile backhaul services to ISPs and mobile operators in the equatorial region. Its O3bCell service, for example, connects cell site towers and the core mobile network, with support for 2G, 3G and 4G-LTE voice and data services, offering seamless upgrade to packet switched networks.

 

A second group of four O3b satellites will be launched in September to complete the first phase constellation of satellites. The first O3b customers will be able to begin using the service early November.

 

O3b did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

 

A total of 12 O3b satellites are to be put into orbit by Arianespace in groups of four, with missions planned for later this year, and another in 2014, the commercial satellite launch company said.

 

O3b's many investors include satellite operator SES, Google, and Liberty Global. It raised US$1.3 billion to cover the cost of building and launching the first 12 satellites and running the business until it becomes operational and starts to generate revenue. O3b has already signed deals with telecom providers and ISPs including Malaysian telecommunications provider Maju Nusa and West Africa Telecom in Liberia. It has also tied with Royal Caribbean Cruises to provide broadband access service to passengers on its cruise ship.

 

Google announced recently its Loon project which involves the use of a network of balloons floating in the stratosphere, around 20 kilometers above the earth's surface, to provide Internet service "to connect people in rural and remote areas, help fill coverage gaps, and bring people back online after disasters." Project Loon started in June with a pilot in New Zealand. People will connect to the Internet using a special antenna on top of buildings.