UK to Form a Cyber Army

Britain is going to recruit hundreds of computer experts to create a cyber-army. The unit is supposed to defend vital networks against virtual attacks and launch high-tech assaults of its own. The Ministry of Defense announced that the country is spending increasing amounts on defending the people from the threats they are unlikely to ever face.

Despite the fact that the United Kingdom is broke, it still has the 4th largest defense budget in the world. A large part of this cash is not being spent on cyber intelligence and surveillance. Back in 2012, cyber defenses blocked about 400,000 advanced malicious cyber threats against the government’s secure Internet alone. This shows that the threat is real.

However, the Ministry of Defense points out that building cyber defense is not sufficient, because the United Kingdom also has to deter attacks. The country said that it is going to build a dedicated capability to counterattack in cyberspace and, in case of necessity, to strike. The representatives of the Ministry added that clinical “cyber strikes” could disable enemy communications, nuclear and chemical weapons, planes, ships and other hardware.

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Electronic Gadgets Will Be Allowed During Flight Takeoff & Landing

Media reports confirm that a federal advisory committee has prepared a report for American Federal Aviation Administration, saying that flights can handle switched-on gadgets at all times, including takeoff and landing. This is true about the devices not connected to the web.

In case the suggestion is approved, the passengers will be able to enjoy their ebooks, music players and other devices during takeoff and landings. The above mentioned report, commissioned by the Federal Aviation Administration, recommends testing transmission tolerance on older aircraft. As for the newer aircraft types, they will be considered safe for electronic transmissions.

According to the industry officials, the suggestions could be approved as early as the end of 2013. The aircraft types able to tolerate electronic transmissions are already in use, some of them fitted out with picocells for in flight phone calls. In case a plane already has a picocell, it means that it has already been evaluated to have electronic devices for all phases of flight. Such aircrafts are Airbus 330 300s and Boeing 747 400s, for example.

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Google Pays Corporation Tax in the US instead of the UK

Google paid only £11 million in British corporation tax in 2012, despite revenues of £500 million. Indeed, the company made global profits of £6 billion last year, but says that it pays bulk of its tax where business originated – the United States. Its representatives argued that the company made a significant contribution to the United Kingdom through investment and jobs.

Back in 2011, Google paid £6 million while showing a £24 million loss on a £400 million turnover. The US company has been repeatedly accused of failing to pay its fair share of tax in the United Kingdom. In addition, the tech giant has been criticized for designating Ireland, and not the United Kingdom, as Google’s official European sales base in order to benefit from lower company tax rates.

Google’s former employee, who turned to be a whistle blower, handed over documents to HM Revenue and Customs to show how the company’s London sales staff would negotiate and sign contracts with UK customers, with cash paid into a British bank account. However, the deals were allegedly booked through Google’s Dublin office in order to minimize its liabilities.

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National Security Agency Maps Social Connections

According to the latest Snowden leak, for the last three years, the National Security Agency has been creating sophisticated graphs of the US citizens’ social connections.

Investigating the shedloads of information the agency has collected, NSA is now able to tell who your friends are, your locations at certain times, your travel companions and other personal data.

One of the slides from a leaked NSA presentation reveals the way it uses e-mail and phone information in order to analyze the relationships of foreign intelligence targets. Another file revealed that the NSA was told to carry out large-scale graph analysis on communications metadata “without having to check foreignness of every e-mail address, phone number or other identifier”.

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France Will Fine Google

The tech giant hoped that France would forget its sins and let it do what it wants with EU data having been dashed recently. Local press confirm that Google will get a fine after it failed to comply with an order to alter the way user data is stored and used in order to conform to French privacy laws.

The fine comes as a result of an investigation led by EU data protection authorities of a new privacy policy adopted by Google a year ago. Local privacy watchdog pointed out that Google was ordered to comply with data protection legislation within three months, but it just didn’t. It seems like Google just shrugged and refused. The company keeps insisting that local data protection laws can’t be applied to users of certain Google services in France.

Now the watchdog will designate a rapporteur to initiate a formal procedure for imposing sanctions. This is done under the provisions laid down in the country’s data protection legislation. The tech giant could be fined about $200,000 which seems not much. In addition, the company could in certain circumstances be ordered to refrain from processing personal information in certain ways for 3 months. The company responded that its privacy policy does respect European legislation. It also insisted that it had “engaged fully” with the watchdog within this process.

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Snowden Shortlisted for Human Rights Award in EU

As you know, the American government regards Edward Snowden as a traitor who exposed its abysmal treatment of its own people, while in the EU Edward has been shortlisted for the Sakharov prize.

Indeed, it turned out that Edward Snowden, the fugitive US former intelligence worker, has made the shortlist of three for the top human rights award in Europe. Media reports revealed that he was nominated by Green politicians in the EU Parliament for leaking details of NSA surveillance.

In the meantime, it seems that Snowden wasn’t suffering as much for his deeds as other nominees did. The other two nominees are Malala Yousafzai from Pakistan, a teenager who was shot in the head for demanding education for girls, and a group of Belarusian political dissidents who were jailed three years ago for protesting against the disputed re-election of President Lukashenko. For Snowden, this looks like tough competition from people who really suffered for their stands for human rights.

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US Tech Giants Lose Money from NSA Spying

American corporations are losing billions of dollars, because foreign firms look closer to home in order to avoid NSA snooping. Today companies and politicians consider an opportunity to take business from the United States in the wake of Snowden’s allegations about NSA spying.

For example, 3 of Germany’s largest email providers, including partly state-owned Deutsche Telekom, decided to join their efforts and offer a new service, Email Made in Germany. The matter is that by encrypting email via national servers and using German strict privacy legislation, American authorities won’t be able to snoop that easily.

Email Made in Germany is currently reporting over 100,000 people have already signed up. Media reports say that foreign governments were seeking to use data-privacy legislation as a competitive advantage to boost domestic companies against such international giants as Google and Microsoft. However, it would be much more expensive for the Germans to use such a service and requires ignorance about the way the worldwide web works.

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3,000,000 Adobe Accounts Cracked

The company had to admit that more than 3 million of its customer accounts were recently hacked. As a result, the intruders stole customer names, encrypted credit and debit card numbers and expiration dates. Adobe claimed that it was the target of a major security hack.

The senior director of security for Adobe products and services revealed that customer data and unauthorized access to source codes for many Adobe products were stolen in the hack. For instance, source code for Acrobat, ColdFusion, and the ColdFusion Builder was lifted, but the company claimed there was no risk to customers. What does pose risk to customers is that the intruders have nicked 3 million of Adobe customer IDs and encrypted passwords, while experts don’t think the hackers removed decrypted credit or debit card numbers from the systems.

At the moment, the company is resetting the passwords on breached customer IDs, so users will get emails telling them they can be affected. Adobe promised to tell people whose credit or debit card data was compromised and offer them an option of enrolling in a 1-year complimentary credit monitoring membership.

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Facebook Will Build Its Kingdom

The social network is considering building its own town so its employees never have to leave work. The campus in Menlo Park will include a $120 million, 394-unit housing community within walking distance of its offices. Dubbed Anton Menlo, the 630,000 square-foot rental property is supposed to include a sports bar and a day care for pet dogs.

Media reports admit that the move towards a 24-hour work lifestyle is new, even for Silicon Valley. The social network insists that employee retention is not a major factor in the plan. Instead, it is a great idea to have more housing options closer to campus. Facebook believes that people will want to live there because they believe in the company’s mission.

The sources revealed that there will be many amenities on the site, including cafes, a store, a sports pub, bike repair shop with onsite storage, pool, spas, and gyms. This move may fix some of the company’s accommodation problems for workers. Indeed, a housing shortage is reported in Menlo Park and some employees couldn’t find places to stay near the corporate campus.

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Microsoft Former Employee Doesn’t Trust the Company

An ex employee has warned that people should be very careful about trusting the software giant anywhere near their personal data. Microsoft ex privacy analyst, who left the company two years ago, claimed that he doesn’t trust Microsoft after Edward Snowden leaks about Internet government surveillance.

Analyst said that earlier he had some difficulty making anyone else in the European Union understand his concerns. He approached many of the EU authorities with his concerns, but they just shrugged. However, after the Snowden leaks proving him right, an ex employee suddenly found itself in demand as a pundit.

Microsoft and other tech giants are fighting a public backlash after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden proved they were handing over user information to an American surveillance program called PRISM.
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Google Will Offer Free Wi-Fi at Starbucks

The tech giant recently announced its plans to roll out faster, free Wi-Fi connections to all Starbucks stores in the US over the next year and half with speeds up to 10x faster than now. Google agreed that the Internet has become as vital to our lives as other utilities, being used by people to plan their day, stay connected with family and friends, stay informed, and a whole slew of important activities that everyone sometimes takes for granted. This is why Google believes that a fast and reliable connection is a constant cause for concern.

Apparently, the tech giant is continually doing its best to ensure that people are online more frequently in order to increase its advertising revenue. Now Google has realized that the easiest way to do so is to directly offer consumers cheap and fast Internet connections.

The company announced that coffee shop plus Internet is a pairing that many of people have come to rely on. Wireless access to the Internet makes work time, downtime and travel time more enjoyable. Now Google is teaming up with Starbucks to deliver faster, free Wi-Fi connections to all 7,000 stores in the US. The company promised that when 

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Bradley Manning to Face 136 Years in Jail

Pfc. Bradley Manning, known for handing 700,000 secret documents to whistleblower website WikiLeaks, has recently been cleared of “aiding the enemy” charges, but still faces a maximum sentence of 136 years in military custody.

A few days ago Manning was convicted for 19 of the 21 charges he was charged, including 5 counts of espionage and 5 of theft. In court, he was declared “guilty” over and over again with the charges being listed. In the meantime, the guilty verdicts included 7 out of 8 counts brought under the Espionage Act. Manning was accused of disclosing Afghanistan and Iraq war logs, files on Guantanamo, and embassy cables, with the government claiming that he had reason to believe such data could be used to the injury of the United States or the advantage of any foreign nation. The Manning is also known for disclosing a “Collateral Murder” video, which showed American military forces killing journalists and unarmed civilians in Iraq.

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EFF Claimed War on Patent Trolls

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has recently issued a statement, saying that it was leading a group of entities and law schools to start a new online resource called Trolling Effects. The idea is to crowdsource information, including demand letters, in order to help people fight patent trolls.

According to EFF activist Adi Kamdar, patent trolls should no longer manage to hide under a cloak of legal darkness. The new service is expected to shine a light on entities which abuse the patent system to shake down innovators. The problem is that patent trolls use the threat of expensive and lengthy patent litigation in order to extort settlements from innovators of any size. However, most of these threats never evolve into lawsuits, so most of the threatening letters never show up in public dockets.

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No Google Glass behind the Wheel in Britain

Unsurprisingly, the UK Department of Transport revealed that it favors a ban on Google Glass behind the wheel. Its representative claimed that drivers need to give their full attention to the road, so they can’t behave in a way which may stop them from observing what is happening on the road.

The UK Department of Transport is aware of the impending rollout of Google Glass and is currently in discussion with the police forces to make sure that people don’t use it while driving. The authority views Google Glass as something from the category of “careless or distracted driving”.

In the meantime, lawmakers across the pond are pondering the same problem. Nevertheless, since the United States cares about personal freedoms, banning normally doesn’t go down well with the public, particularly in parts of the country where you are able to purchase a confederate flag at any petrol station.

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UN Accused Facebook of Helping Pirates

Facebook normally has no troubles with anti-piracy outfits, as it doesn’t allow streaming of copyrighted content like other networks. But now it is not about digital piracy. The United Nations wants social network to walk the plank for refusing to answer questions about Somali pirates. The UN believes that Long John Silver and his ilk have been coordinating their raids on maritime shipping through Facebook.

A UN commission on sanctions stated in its report to the UN Security Council that Somali pirates have been supported by a network of accomplices, which involves bankers, businessmen, politicians and aid workers. Investigations confirmed that all those facilitators 

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Cameron’s Adult Content Filter Officially Failed

David Cameron had to admit that his campaign against online porn proved ineffective. Media reports reveal that Cameron is getting much mockery over his plan to save kids from the perils of porn. However, he is still intended to press ahead with it anyway.

Cameron’s plan was build on the idea that Internet service providers had agreed to introduce family-friendly filters which automatically blocked porn unless clients chose to opt out. It was no surprise that the ISPs didn’t do so, with some of them lobbying the government to tell it to sling its hook.

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Google Will Improve Machine Vision

Google engineers have developed a machine vision technique able to bring high power visual recognition to ordinary desktop and even mobile computers. It is claimed that the system is able to recognize 100,000 object types within a picture in a few minutes.

The tech giant seems to have improved the fairly standard method of applying convolutional filters to a photo to pick out objects of interest. This appeared tricky, as the filters must need a sample of at least one per object type, i.e. if you are scanning Facebook for cats you will need a filter which identifies cats. In other words, the technique is limited to a small number of categories, or you will need a huge database.

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Hacking Is Not That Dangerous

It turned out that Intel subsidiary McAfee has exaggerated the cost of hacking in its fundamental study which was used to form the basis for American government cyber security policy. A study was conducted back in 2009 by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies and claimed that hacking cost the world economy $1 trillion.

Now US President keeps quoting this figure, as well as intelligence officials and members of Congress, in order to press for legislation on cybercrime protection. However, it recently turned out that $1 trillion was a huge exaggeration by McAfee. This was revealed by another study that was carried out by CSIS. The outfit discovered multiple flaws in the methodology of McAfee’s study and made a conclusion that a specific number would be much more difficult to calculate. According to the new research, the proper number could be $100 billion to $500 billion – although it’s a pretty high figure, it is hardly a trillion.

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Google Accounts for 25% of all American Traffic

A survey by online monitoring company Deepfield revealed that Google takes a quarter of American Internet traffic. Over 60% all web-enabled devices exchange traffic with Google’s servers on a daily basis. In other words, the tech giant is bigger than Facebook, Netflix, and Twitter altogether. 

Experts of the monitoring firm explained that based on measurements of end device and user audience share, 60% of all web end devices and users exchange traffic with Google servers every day. The survey covers computers, mobile devices, game consoles, home media appliances, and other embedded devices. In the meantime, it isn’t just Google’s 

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Largest Patent Troll Finally Vanquished

Industry observers point out that key patents at the centre of the Internet will now be safe from patent troll Eolas in the largest trademark payouts ever. Indeed, the Eolas patents have been so threatening to the Internet that Sir Tim Berners-Lee showed up in court in order to take on the trolls a year ago.

The case was the result of Michael Doyle’s effort to levy a vast patent tax, and its outcome was a major disappointment for the latter, because the court invalidated his patents and an appeals court agreed.

20 years ago, Michael Doyle was the director of a computer laboratory at the University of California-San Francisco and oversaw the creation of software enabling doctors to view embryos online. At the time, Doyle claimed it was the first “interactive” use of the Internet and patented the idea in 1994.

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