Web archive goes live but not online

19 December 2013 Last updated at 08:06 ET

A major archive of British websites has gone live - but not on the web.

Instead, the project can only be accessed in person from a terminal in one of the British Isles' six biggest libraries.

It follows a decade of legal wrangling between the British Library and publishers.

Restrictions imposed by the Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003 mean the archive can only be accessed in library reading rooms.

The British Library said that there had been "some discussions into the possibility that the Act might be changed in future so that the archived copies of websites might be made available via the web.

"Making archived copies of material available online, and also allowing it to be indexed by search engines, could potentially affect the volume of web user traffic to the rights owner's live website and harm their business model," the statement added.

The project was announced in April this year and has since been archiving the entire UK web domain, including blogs, public tweets and Facebook pages.

It has already amassed billions of web pages.

'Black hole'

Continue reading the main story

Ten years of foot-dragging and obstructionism by British publishers has resulted in a loss of countless millions of older web pages that are now probably gone forever"

End Quote Glyn Moody Web journalist

Anyone over 18 is able to get a free pass to the reading rooms and the collection can be viewed at the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, the National Library of Wales, the Bodleian Libraries, Cambridge University Library and Trinity College Library in Dublin.

Critics have attacked the decision and the length of time it has taken to get the archive available.

"What's particularly tragic here is that the 10 years of foot-dragging and obstructionism by British publishers has resulted in a loss of countless millions of older web pages that are now probably gone forever - and with them, a key part of the UK's early digital heritage," said Glyn Moody on tech news site Techdirt.

Speaking about the archive in April, Richard Gibby, of the British Library, admitted that a lot of material, including information after the London bombings in 2005, has already been lost in a "digital black hole".

Separate to the UK domain archive, the British Library also runs the UK web archive, which has collected more than 13,000 websites with the permission of rights holders. This is freely available online.

In the US, the Internet Archive charity has been copying the web since 1996. Its popular Wayback Machine is an archive of 364 billion web pages, designed to show people what sites looked like in past years.

Meanwhile, the National Library of Norway is planning to digitise all the books written in Norwegian by the mid-2020s.

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Crowd-funded Lego car powered by air

19 December 2013 Last updated at 11:06 ET

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A car made from Lego blocks and powered by air.

An air-powered car built of Lego, that can reach a top speed of around 20km/h (12mph) has hit the roads of Melbourne.

It was built by an Australian entrepreneur and a Romanian technologist who used more than 500,000 pieces of Lego to complete the car.

The crowd-funded project began with a tweet asking people to invest in an "awesome" start-up.

Four air-powered engines and 256 pistons, all built of Lego bricks, enable the car to move.

Everything bar the wheels is made from Lego.

Co-founder Steve Sammartino told the BBC that he was "neither a car enthusiast nor a Lego enthusiast".

"What I am is a technology enthusiast and I wanted to show what is possible when you crowd-fund an idea and use young talented people," he said.

"I met this crazy Romanian teenager on the web and we came up with the idea but I knew that I couldn't afford to fund it," he added.

So he sent out a late-night tweet which read: "Anyone interested in investing $500 - $1,000 in a project which is awesome and a world first tweet me. Need about 20 participants."

Forty Australians offered cash and the Super Awesome Micro project, as it is dubbed, was born.

It took 18 months and a lot more money to build, said Mr Sammartino.

Continue reading the main story

Using Stickle Bricks in the crumple zones would have made for much better crash performance"

End Quote Matt Saunders Deputy road test editor

The car was constructed in Romania by him and his business partner Raul Oaida and then shipped to Australia where large parts of it needed to be rebuilt.

"We drove it in a suburb of Melbourne. The engine is fragile and the biggest fear was a giant Lego explosion impaling passers-by," Mr Sammartino told the BBC.

For the time being he has no plans on expanding the fleet.

"I've been up to my neck in Lego for four weeks and my fingers are still sore so I'm not keen on building another one just at the moment," he told the BBC.

"This can't have been an easy thing to make, let alone to make move. The engine in particular must have required some innovative thinking," said Matt Saunders, deputy road test editor of Autocar magazine.

"It doesn't look too comfortable though, and I wouldn't want to drive it very far. Or into anything by accident. Using Stickle Bricks in the crumple zones would have made for much better crash performance," he added.

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Bitcoin sinks after Chinese action

18 December 2013 Last updated at 06:51 ET By Leo Kelion Technology reporter

Bitcoin has fallen to less than half the value it recently traded for, following reports of fresh action by Beijing to restrict trade in the virtual currency.

BTC China has said that local payment companies have been blocked from providing it with clearing services.

It means that the firm - the world's biggest Bitcoin exchange in terms of trading volumes - can no longer accept yuan-based deposits.

Prices tumbled following the news.

One bitcoin was trading for as low as 2,560 yuan ($421, £258), according to the South China Morning Post.

Continue reading the main story

Bitcoin is often referred to as a new kind of currency.

But it may be best to think of its units being virtual tokens rather than physical coins or notes.

However, like all currencies its value is determined by how much people are willing to exchange it for.

To process Bitcoin transactions, a procedure called "mining" must take place, which involves a computer solving a difficult mathematical problem with a 64-digit solution.

For each problem solved, one block of bitcoins is processed. In addition the miner is rewarded with new bitcoins.

This provides an incentive for people to provide computer processing power to solve the problems.

To compensate for the growing power of computer chips, the difficulty of the puzzles is adjusted to ensure a steady stream of about 3,600 new bitcoins a day.

There are currently about 11 million bitcoins in existence.

To receive a bitcoin a user must have a Bitcoin address - a string of 27-34 letters and numbers - which acts as a kind of virtual postbox to and from which the bitcoins are sent.

Since there is no registry of these addresses, people can use them to protect their anonymity when making a transaction.

These addresses are in turn stored in Bitcoin wallets which are used to manage savings.

They operate like privately run bank accounts - with the proviso that if the data is lost, so are the bitcoins owned.

That compares with an all-time high of 7,588 yuan ($1,250; £764) in late November.

Exchanges in other countries also reported drops, with Japan-based MtGox seeing the exchange rate for one bitcoin fall from $717 to as low as $480 in Wednesday's trade.

"A lot of people put Bitcoin's rise over recent months to China where interest in it has gone through the roof," said Emily Spaven, editor of digital currency news site CoinDesk told the BBC.

"People are getting frightened that with the new regulations the country could now drop out of the ecosystem. Going forward, it's certainly not the end of Bitcoin, but people have been panic selling."

Currency controls

Virtual currency exchanges in China are not licensed by the country's central bank to accept or pay out yuan to their customers, making them reliant on independent clearing houses to act as middlemen.

"We essentially got notice from our third-party provider today that they will discontinue accepting payments for us and new deposits," Bobby Lee, chief executive of BTC China, told SCMP.

"We're still operating a Bitcoin exchange in China legally, and we're still allowing people to deposit and withdraw Bitcoin, and withdraw renminbi [yuan]."

According to Yicai - a business news website with ties to the government - the news followed a meeting between officials from the People's Bank of China and 10 clearing houses on Monday in Beijing, at which the firms were told they had until the end of January to sever links to the country's Bitcoin exchanges.

This followed an earlier notice, issued by the regulators a fortnight ago, which banned local banks from handling transactions involving bitcoins.

The virtual currency is not backed by a central bank of its own, and is best thought of as being virtual tokens, rather than real-world coins, which derive their value from the ability to exchange them for cash or use them to buy goods.

One expert suggested the crackdown was the result of the Chinese government's fears that locals were using it as a way to bypass currency controls in order to move their savings out of the country.

"China is trying to grow its domestic economy and rebalance it from an export and investment-based model to a consumer driven one over the next decade, and to do that the authorities want to keep as much yuan within the country as possible," said Jinny Yan, an economist with Standard Chartered bank.

"They don't want to curtail any innovation in the financial sector. However, at the moment any unexpected growth and development in channels that allow by-passing of capital controls will cause anxiety."

Ms Spaven added that she believed Bitcoin would eventually bounce back.

"Underneath all the speculative trading is a robust technology that has intrinsic value as a payment network, offering cheaper and faster money transfer than any other options that exist currently," she said.

"If you look at our Bitcoin Price Index, you can see that prices dipped to below the current level this time last month and soon bounced back. I believe the same will happen this time around. It may take some time, but the price will rise again."

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Man handed £400,000 piracy fine

18 December 2013 Last updated at 08:32 ET

A 28-year-old man has been fined 4.3 million Swedish krona - just over £400,000 - for uploading one film to a torrent-sharing website.

He was also given a suspended jail sentence and 160 hours of community service for uploading 517 other titles.

Anti-piracy group Rights Alliance described him as Sweden's "worst ever" pirate.

Copyright reformists criticised the ruling, and said legislation was "outdated".

The Swedish Pirate Party told news site TorrentFreak that "the only way forward is a radical reform of copyright law that allows for the sharing of culture".

In line with typical practice in Sweden, the court requested that media did not publish the man's name.

Good will losses

Film studio Nordisk Film AS - which owns the rights to the title the man uploaded - calculated what it felt was the financial loss of it being shared illegally online. It had asked for double the awarded amount.

Publishers for the other 517 titles - which had been shared on now-closed Swebits.org - did not make an estimation of losses, and so no further damages were awarded.

Swedish anti-piracy group Rights Alliance said in a statement: "The biggest part refers to compensation and should equalise what the man would have paid if he had bought a licence to distribute the movie for free downloads.

"The man is also to pay damages for other losses such as disturbance on the market and goodwill losses."

The Rights Alliance said it planned to bring more cases to trial in the near future.

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Porn filters cut sex education sites

18 December 2013 Last updated at 17:00 ET By Mike Deri Smith BBC Newsnight

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Jim Reed reports for Newsnight on some of the problems with the filters

Pornography filters used by major internet service providers are blocking websites offering sex education and advice on sexual health and porn addiction, the BBC has learned.

The four major internet companies have started to roll out so-called porn filters to their users.

BT launched its filter this week, Virgin has a pilot programme ahead of a full launch early in 2014, and Sky's was turned on a month ago.

TalkTalk's filter started in May 2011.

Last month, Prime Minister David Cameron welcomed "family-friendly" filters and said they were important to stop children "stumbling across hardcore legal pornography".

But BBC's Newsnight has discovered all the major ISPs that have launched full default filters are also failing to block hardcore porn-hosting sites.

All new customers will be prompted to decide whether to opt in or out, while existing customers of major ISPs will be presented with an "unavoidable choice" about whether to sign up.

Among the sites TalkTalk blocked as "pornographic" was BishUK.com, an award-winning British sex education site, which receives more than a million visits each year.

TalkTalk also lists Edinburgh Women's Rape and Sexual Abuse Centre website as "pornographic."

The company also blocked a programme run by sex education experts, and taught to 81,000 American children, that has been in development for more than 20 years.

TalkTalk's filter is endorsed by Mr Cameron but it failed to block 7% of the 68 pornographic websites tested by Newsnight.

Sky's filter fared much better, blocking 99% of sites, but it did block six porn-addiction sites.

Advertising campaign

BT blocked sites including Sexual Health Scotland, Doncaster Domestic Abuse Helpline, and Reducing The Risk, a site which tackles domestic abuse.

In the new year the four major ISPs will fund a £25m advertising campaign to explain the filters and other aspects of children's safety online.

The filters were brought in following increased parental awareness of the ease with which children can access pornography online.

Victoria Shotbolt, chief executive of the Parent Zone, said: "It's great that the four ISPs have got together and are doing an awareness-raising campaign. But it isn't even starting to be enough.

Continue reading the main story

It's really frustrating because I'm trying to provide a sex education site for young people and it's hard enough directing young people to good quality information on the internet"

End Quote Justin Hancock BishUK

"We're focusing so heavily on filters and all of the ISPs having them and public wi-fi having filters that the message getting through to parents is that those filters will do the job."

Justin Hancock runs BishUK and was not aware his site was being blocked by some filters until he was alerted by Newsnight.

He said: "It's really frustrating because I'm trying to provide a sex education site for young people and it's hard enough directing young people to good quality information on the internet.

Over-blocking problem

"They might fix my site in the short-term but what about all the other sites that are out there for young people, not just sex education sites… who are TalkTalk to say what is allowed and isn't?"

The UK Council for Child Internet Safety has a working group to discuss over-blocking.

A TalkTalk spokesman said: " Sadly there is no silver bullet when it comes to internet safety and we have always been clear that no solution can ever be 100%. We continue to develop HomeSafe and welcome feedback to help us continually improve the service."

A Sky spokesman said: "We know that no one single technology currently provides all the answers. That's why we have a quick and easy way for misclassified sites to be unblocked. Any Sky home has the ability to fully customise their filters."

A BT spokesman said: "Categorisations are constantly updated to keep pace with changing content on the internet and we will investigate any concerns and make changes as necessary. BT Parental Controls can be customised to suit each individual family's needs."

Find out more about this issue on Newsnight on BBC2 at 22:30 GMT on Wednesday 18 December.

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App developers must respect privacy

18 December 2013 Last updated at 19:01 ET By Carolyn Rice Technology reporter, BBC News

App developers should ensure they do not misuse customers' data, says the Information Commissioner's Office in new guidance.

The ICO says nearly half of all app users have decided not to download an app because of concerns over privacy.

It wants developers to be clear about what data is being accessed and why.

More than 320 million apps were downloaded on the busiest day of last year, Christmas Day, and that number is expected to increase this year.

"The app industry is one of the fastest growing in the UK, but our survey shows almost half of people have rejected an app due to privacy concerns," said Simon Rice, principal policy adviser for technology at the ICO.

"It is important that developers tackle this issue by making sure their apps look after personal information correctly."

Alienating users

The guidance from the ICO reminds developers that they must comply with the Data Protection Act and that users must be properly informed about what will happen to their personal data if they install and use an app.

The ICO suggests that users should be given effective control over their privacy settings. Also the layout of a privacy policy could be better tailored to suit mobile devices with users shown brief but important information first, with the option to click through to another screen for more detail.

Adam Joinson, a professor at the University of the West of England who has researched the link between privacy and new technology, said apps that had a privacy policy that was too generic risked alienating users.

"By asking for too much information they're putting people off using the app. If developers were more canny they'd have fewer issues," he said.

"Users could say, 'I'm happy for an app to have access to my photos but not my address book,' for example."

App designers could be losing out financially because of unsuitable privacy policies which put people off using their products, said Mr Rice.

Simon Lee, chief executive of app development firm Locassa, said the company tailored its data privacy depending on what the app did.

"When we look at how the data is used, we must look at it from a user perspective and ask ourselves, 'Would I be happy with this?' If the answer isn't a resounding 'yes' then there's a strong indication we shouldn't be doing it," he said.

"The bottom line is that users trust us when they install our apps on their devices. We must be careful not to abuse that trust."

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App offers award to crack encryption

19 December 2013 Last updated at 02:58 ET

Telegram, a secure messaging service app, has offered a reward to the first person who can crack its encryption.

The firm's founder has put up an award of $200,000 (£122,000) worth of Bitcoins for breaking the protocol.

To win the award, users will have to intercept a daily message between the founders Pavel and Nikolai Durov to find out a secret email address.

They have to send the decrypted text of the message to the email address to prove they have cracked the protocol.

Telegram, which says it is "the fastest and most secure messaging system in the world", said users would also have to give a detailed description of how they cracked the encryption.

The firm says it will publish encrypted Telegram traffic between the two founders on its website and users can view it in real time.

"To prove that the competition was fair, we will publish the participating keys necessary to decrypt the traffic as soon as a winner is announced," the firm said.

In case there is no winner by 1 March 2014, encryption keys will be published on that date.

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Hackers hit China's central bank

19 December 2013 Last updated at 06:27 ET

China's central bank has been hit by a hack attack that briefly made its website unreachable.

The attack is thought to have been in retaliation for government action to restrict trading in bitcoins.

The Chinese action meant bitcoins fell to less than half the value that they were recently being traded for.

Some online exchanges in China that let people buy and sell the virtual currency were also targeted.

The website of the People's Bank of China (PBoC) and some exchanges were hit by what is known as a Distributed Denial of Service attack. This attempts to overwhelm the servers behind websites by bombarding them with more data than they can handle.

The attacks took place late on Wednesday and meant that the PBoC website was only intermittently reachable. A spokesman for the bank said it was working to get the website running again.

Also hit were bitcoin exchanges such as BTC which said it coped better with the attack because it had been a regular target of DDoS attempts.

In a statement it "strongly condemned" the hackers that targeted the central bank site.

The attacks come after China took steps to limit trade in bitcoins - a virtual currency that many Chinese people are believed to be using to get around restrictions on how much money they can move across the country's borders.

On 5 December, China's central bank issued advice about bitcoin that banned the nation's banks from handling transactions carried out with them.

On 18 December, China took further action by stopping payment providers working with bitcoin exchanges. This led to a 60% fall in the value of bitcoins.

Trade in the digital cash has recovered and now one bitcoin is worth about $620 (£377). This is below the peak reached on 1 December when each bitcoin was worth more than $1,000.

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US spy agency urged to curb snooping

19 December 2013 Last updated at 09:15 ET

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Former NSA director Hayden analyses the panel's report in an interview with the BBC's Katty Kay

A White House panel has recommended significant curbs on the National Security Agency's sweeping electronic surveillance programmes.

Among its 46 recommendations, the five-member panel said the NSA should cease storing vast amounts of data on calls processed by US phone companies.

Details of the snooping programme were leaked by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden, now a fugitive in Russia.

The review comes after a federal judge found the programme unconstitutional.

'Public trust' needed

In its 308-page report, the Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology recommended the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), a federal court that handles sensitive national security cases, only authorise the collection of phone data when it was related to a specific international terrorism investigation and was "reasonable" in scope and breadth.

The data should no longer be stored wholesale by the NSA, the panel recommended, instead remaining in the custody of the phone company or a third party.

It also suggested limits on national security letters, which are legal orders giving the government authority to demand financial and phone records without prior court approval. It recommended intelligence agencies obtain a prior "judicial finding" showing "reasonable grounds" that the information sought is relevant.

President Barack Obama convened the panel in August after Mr Snowden began releasing a trove of internal NSA documents to the news media, bringing highly sensitive electronic intelligence programmes to light for the first time and prompting an international outcry over alleged violations of privacy.

Among its recommendations:

• The NSA director should be confirmed by the US Senate, with civilians eligible for the role
• The president should give "serious consideration" to ensuring the next NSA director is a civilian and separate the position from US Cyber Command, a military unit
• Creation of a Public Interest Advocate to argue in favour of privacy and civil liberties interests before the FISC
• More transparency at FISC
• Halting spy agencies' efforts to undermine commercial encryption methods
• Limits on who can access information gained by the NSA
• The president should personally approve all methods used by the intelligence community, including spying on foreign leaders

It is unclear how many of the panel's suggestions, which intelligence officials are likely to oppose vigorously, will be accepted by the Obama administration.

Former NSA director Michael Hayden told the BBC the report's recommendations would complicate the task of intelligence collection.

"Making this more public will shave points off operational effectiveness," he said about the NSA programmes. "But... my personal formula in this is if we don't do that it won't matter because the American people won't let us do it in the first place."

'Respecting privacy'

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Lawyer David Rivkind and Glenn Greenwald, the former Guardian columnist, put their arguments forward to Newsnight's Jeremy Paxman

Mr Obama met the review panel earlier on Wednesday.

In a statement, the White House said Mr Obama told its members that "the United States use its intelligence collection capabilities in a way that optimally protects our national security while supporting our foreign policy, respecting privacy and civil liberties, maintaining the public trust, and reducing the risk of unauthorized disclosure".

The panel was comprised of Richard Clarke, a former White House counter-terrorism adviser; Michael Morell, the former deputy director of the CIA; University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone; former White House technical adviser Cass Sunstein; and Peter Swire, an expert in privacy law.

On Monday, a federal court in Washington DC found the NSA's mass collection of Americans' phone call information was unconstitutional, in a case expected to reach the US Supreme Court.

Judge Richard Leon called the surveillance programme "indiscriminate" and an "almost Orwellian technology that enables the government to store and analyze the phone metadata of every telephone user in the United States".

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40 million hit in Target card heist

19 December 2013 Last updated at 09:55 ET

Payment details from up to 40 million credit cards could have been stolen after they were used in the stores of US retail giant Target.

The retailer said it was investigating after discovering that thieves had gained access to its payment systems.

The data breach began around 29 November, known as Black Friday, one of the busiest shopping days of the year.

The attackers are believed to have been scooping up credit card details for almost three weeks.

"We take this matter very seriously and are working with law enforcement to bring those responsible to justice," said Target boss Gregg Steinhafel in a statement.

In addition, he said, the company was working with a data forensics firm to work out how the theft occurred.

Data-stealing code

Target said the thieves had taken credit card numbers, names, expiration dates and security codes for the cards.

It urged people who shopped at its stores in the vulnerable period to check credit card records and query unusual activity.

"We regret any inconvenience this may cause," said Mr Steinhafel.

Security researcher Brian Krebs, writing about the breach, said sources at credit card payment processing firms had told him the thieves had installed data-stealing code on to card-swipe machines at tills in all 1,797 Target stores.

It is not yet clear how the attackers managed to get their malicious program on to point-of-sale equipment in the stores.

The thieves stole data between Thanksgiving and 15 December, said Target.

The US Secret Service, which has official responsibility for investigating financial fraud, told Reuters it was looking into the breach.

The largest ever credit card breach at a US retailer took place in 2007 when cyber-thieves managed to steal information related to almost 46 million credit and debit cards from TJ Maxx and Marshalls.

The thieves amassed the huge cache of data over an 18 month period after penetrating the retailers' computer network.

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