Facebook U-turn after charities criticise decapitation videos

By Leo Kelion Technology reporter 
 Facebook has said it will delete videos of people being decapitated which had been spread on its site.
"We will remove instances of these videos that are reported to us while we evaluate our policy and approach to this type of content," it said.

Charities warn that watching the video clips
could cause long-lasting psychological damage

The news came less than two hours after the BBC revealed a member of Facebook's own safety advisory board had criticised its stance.
The social network had previously refused to ban the clips.

It had said people had a right to depict the "world in which we live".
But the US's Family Online Safety Institute (Fosi) said the violent nature of the material had "crossed a line".
"Personally and professionally I feel that Facebook has got this call wrong," said Stephen Balkam, the organisation's chief executive, ahead of the U-turn.
Charities in the UK had also called on the social network to reconsider its stance saying the material could cause long-term psychological damage.
Graphic violence The warnings came after a one-minute long video was uploaded to the site last week showing a woman being beheaded by a masked man.
A voice heard on the footage suggests that it was filmed in Mexico.
A second video clip showing the execution of two men has also been shared on the network after being posted last Wednesday. The victims say they are drug smugglers for a Mexican cartel before being attacked with a chainsaw and knife.
Ryan L, a student at Belfast University, contacted the BBC after one of the clips spread around his friends' news feeds.

"This is just wrong at every level” John Carr UK Council for Child Internet Safety

He said he had flagged the material with Facebook as being inappropriate, but was sent the following reply.

"Thanks for your report. We reviewed the video you reported, but found it doesn't violate Facebook's Community Standard on graphic violence, which includes depicting harm to someone or something, threats to the public's safety, or theft and vandalism."
Facebook initially confirmed it had opted to leave such material online.
In reference to the video showing the woman's murder, it issued the following statement:
"People are sharing this video on Facebook to condemn it. Just as TV news programmes often show upsetting images of atrocities, people can share upsetting videos on Facebook to raise awareness of actions or causes.
"While this video is shocking, our approach is designed to preserve people's rights to describe, depict and comment on the world in which we live."
Safety advisers 
For the past three years Facebook has consulted Fosi and four other organisations in North America and Europe to discuss its online safety policies.

Although the group was not scheduled to meet until September, Fosi's head said he planned to raise the issue during an "extraordinary" phone conference.
"Where it gets grey is: what is in the public interest? Is it in the public interest to know what is going on with the drug lords in Mexico?" asked Mr Balkam.
"But given that not only are teenagers accessing this, but consumer reports estimate that seven and a half million under-13s in the US are on Facebook, you've just got to consider: would this go out on daytime television news?
"I don't think it would, even with a warning saying this is something you may want to avoid. It crosses a line."

Mr Balkam said that Facebook had "got this call wrong"

He added that one of the videos had been shared among his daughter's schoolmates via Facebook earlier this week.
Psychological damage 
UK child safety campaigners had also condemned Facebook's policy.
"Facebook must have taken leave of their senses," said John Carr, who sits on the executive board of the UK government's Council on Child Internet Safety.
"I hate to think how an unsuspecting youngster might react if they saw it through their news feed or in any other way."
Decapitation videos can be accessed through sites found via search engines and other popular video clip sites.
However, Dr Arthur Cassidy - a former psychologist who runs a branch of the suicide prevention charity Yellow Ribbon - said Facebook's social nature made it particularly problematic.
He added that he had seen the videos in question and warned they could cause long-lasting psychological damage.
"We know from evidence that [watching] such material can influence self-esteem in a very negative way," he said.
"It can also cause flashbacks, nightmares and sleep disturbance. If that is prolonged it can transfer into many other negative effects in a child and adults as well such as anxiety-related disorders and panic attacks.
"The other problem is some people, in their innocence, might share this with friends to say how abhorrent it is, and we are concerned about the profound and uncontrollable impact this can have on an entire community."
Possible compromise 
 An online petition calling for Facebook to remove decapitation videos had attracted 289 "likes" at time of writing.

Facebook says it has more than one billion members

One person who supported the campaign wrote: "The video appeared twice on my news feed. I cannot imagine the impact it will have on a younger person. Facebook needs to create some kind of filter to block these images from appearing in the news feed."
Facebook confirmed that its current privacy tools allowed users to block posts by particular people, but not specific types of content.
Mr Balkam said that finding a way to block the spread of such clips to those who had not opted into receiving them was one idea that could be explored.
"If they are going to host this kind of graphic violence how then can we best prevent those videos getting into the hands of folks who really don't want to see these, including children?" he asked.


Source BBC

Read more »

Posted in: Facebook,Technology

PC sales worldwide have tumbled, data from IDC shows

Global sales of PCs fell 14% in the first three months this year, the biggest fall since research firm IDC started tracking the industry in 1994.

It was hoped that the launch Microsoft's
Window 8 would revitalise PC sales

IDC said 76.3 million units were shipped, a figure that underlines the appeal of tablets and smartphones as alternatives to PCs.

The firm said Microsoft's latest version of Windows had failed to revitalise the industry.

Recession had also led companies to put back renewal of their PCs, IDC said.

The firm's vice president, Bob O'Donnell, said: "Unfortunately, it seems clear that the Windows 8 launch not only didn't provide a positive boost to the PC market, but appears to have slowed the market."

Windows 8 is designed to work well with touch-sensitive screens, but the displays add to the cost of a PC. Together, the changes and higher prices ``have made PCs a less attractive alternative to dedicated tablets and other competitive devices,'' Mr O'Donnell said.

Microsoft was not immediately available for comment.

IDC also said that, traditionally, companies replaced PCs every three years, but that during the economic downturn this was more likely to be every five years.

"This is horrific news for PCs," said BGC financial analyst Colin Gillis. "It's all about mobile computing now."

Hewlett-Packard, the world's largest maker of PCs, saw a 24% fall in shipments in the first quarter compared with the same period a year ago.

China's Lenovo Group, number two in the market, is benefiting from sales to first-time buyers in China and other developing countries. Its sales held steady, IDC said.

Source: BBC

Read more »

Posted in: Computer,Technology

PlayStation data theft hits 70m gamers

Users trying to connect to the PlayStation Network are met with an error message

Sony has warned users of its PlayStation Network that their personal information, including credit card details, may have been stolen.

The company said that the data might have fallen into the hands of an "unauthorised person" following a hacking attack on its online service.
Access to the network was suspended last Wednesday, but Sony has only now revealed details of what happened.
Users are being warned to look out for attempted telephone and e-mail scams.
In a statement posted on the official PlayStation blog, Nick Caplin, the company's head of communications for Europe, said: "We have discovered that between April 17 and April 19 2011, certain PlayStation Network and Qriocity service user account information was compromised in connection with an illegal and unauthorized intrusion into our network".
The blog posting lists the personal information that Sony believes has been taken.

• Name
• Address (city, state/province, zip or postal code)
• Country
• E-mail address
• Date of birth
• PlayStation Network/Qriocity passwords and login
• Handle/PSN online ID

Mr Caplin added: "It is also possible that your profile data, including purchase history and billing address (city, state, zip), and your PlayStation Network/Qriocity password security answers may have been obtained.
"For your security, we encourage you to be especially aware of email, telephone, and postal mail scams that ask for personal or sensitive information."

Credit cards Sony admitted that credit card information, used to purchase games, films and music, may also have been stolen.
"While there is no evidence that credit card data was taken at this time, we cannot rule out the possibility," Mr Caplin said.
"If you have provided your credit card data through PlayStation Network or Qriocity, to be on the safe side we are advising you that your credit card number (excluding security code) and expiration date may also have been obtained."
Sony has not given any indication of how many PlayStation Network users may have had their information taken, but the service has around 70 million members worldwide.
'PR Disaster' The theft of so much detailed customer data would be seen as a "public relations disaster", according to Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at security firm Sophos.
"This is a big one," he told BBC News.
"The PlayStation Network is a real consumer product. It is in lots of homes all over the world.
"The impact of this could be much greater than your typical internet hack."
Mr Cluley warned that, even without credit card details, the information taken was enough to help criminals carry out further attacks on other services.
"Some people will use the same passwords on other sites. If I was a hacker right now, I would be taking those e-mail addresses and trying those passwords," he said.
User anger

Some streaming media services available on PlayStation have been affected by the outage

PlayStation users got their first indication that something was wrong with the service when it became unavailable on Wednesday 20 April.
In the following days, Sony issued three brief statements asking users to be patient while it investigated an "external intrusion", or hack.
However, the fact that it took almost seven days for the company to reveal that data had been taken has angered some gamers.
Commenting on the Sony blog, Tacotaskforce wrote: "You waited a week to tell us our personal information was compromised? That should have been said last Thursday."
Another user Sid4peeps wrote: "This update is about 6 days late. I think it is time to move to the other network, no regard for customers here."
But some PlayStation users appeared to be happy with Sony's handling of the matter. Ejsponge61 commented: "Wow, this is alot of info. Thanks, this is very much appreciated by all of us PlayStation fans."
The Sony PlayStation Network remains unavailable to users. The company has not said when service will be restored.

Source BBC

Read more »

Posted in: Computer,Technology

US supports Vietnam’s higher technical education

American aid and educational organizations will work with three more Vietnamese universities to improve higher education and technological development in Vietnam, according to the American embassy in Vietnam.
The US Agency for International Development (USAID), Arizona State University (ASU), Fulton Schools of Engineering, Siemens, Intel and other industry partners will cooperate with a total of eight top technical universities and colleges in Vietnam to improve the quality of higher education curriculum and support a growing hi-tech industry, the release said.
The existing Higher Engineering Education Alliance Program (HEEAP) has been expanded through 2014 to facilitate this support.
“Competitive economies require a skilled workforce ready to perform efficiently in a global context,” said USAID country director Francis Donovan. “HEEAP is not only advancing engineering education in Vietnam today, it is fostering a long-term education-industry relationship.”
“HEEAP is an effective collaboration strategy that is yielding significant progress toward our goals for the educational system,” said Dr. Vu Dinh Thanh, rector of the Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology.
The US$2 million expansion of the program will enable alliance partners to add a vocational component using innovative instructional approaches and pedagogy implemented in the inaugural program. The modernization of vocational education programs, resources and instructional technology will prepare students for success in the global economy.

Source: Thanh Nien 

Read more »

Posted in: Society,Technology,USA,Vietnam

Ring Around the Hurricanes: Satellites Can Predict Storm Intensity

ScienceDaily  — Coastal residents and oil-rig workers may soon have longer warning when a storm headed in their direction is becoming a hurricane, thanks to a University of Illinois study demonstrating how to use existing satellites to monitor tropical storm dynamics and predict sudden surges in strength.
"It's a really critical piece of information that's really going to help society in coastal areas, not only in the U.S., but also globally," said atmospheric sciences professor Stephen Nesbitt. Nesbitt and graduate student Daniel Harnos published their findings in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Meteorologists have seen large advances in forecasting technology to track the potential path of tropical storms and hurricanes, but they've had little success in predicting storm intensity. One of the biggest forecast problems facing the tropical meteorology community is determining rapid intensification, when storms suddenly transform into much stronger cyclones or hurricanes.
"Rapid intensification means a moderate-strength tropical storm, something that may affect a region but not have a severe impact, blowing up in less than 24 hours to a category 2 or 3 hurricane," Harnos said. "This big, strong storm appears that wasn't anticipated, and the effects are going to be very negative. If you don't have the evacuations in place, people can't prepare for something of the magnitude that's going to come ashore."
For example, Hurricane Charlie, which hit southern Florida in 2004, was initially forecast as a category 1 storm. However, when it made landfall less than 24 hours later, it had strengthened to a category 4, causing major damage.
Rapid intensification is so hard to predict in part because it's driven by internal processes within the storm system, rather than the better-predicted, large-scale winds that determine the direction of the storms. The satellite imagery most commonly used for meteorology only looks at the clouds at the top of the storms, giving little insight as to what's going on inside the system.
Harnos and Nesbitt focused their study on passive microwave satellite imagery. Such satellites are used commonly for estimating precipitation, surface temperature and other data. The Illinois researchers were the first to use them systematically to observe hurricane structure and intensity changes.
"What makes it ideal for what we are doing is that it's transparent to clouds. It senses the amount of ice within the clouds, which tells us the strength of convection or the overturn of the atmosphere within the hurricane," Nesbitt said. "It's somewhat like trying to diagnose somebody with a broken arm by taking a picture of the arm, versus being able to X-ray it."
The researchers scoured data from passive microwave satellites from 1987 to 2008 to see how hurricanes behaved in the 24 hours before a storm underwent rapid intensification. Such a big-picture approach, in contrast to the case studies atmospheric scientists often perform, revealed clear patterns in storm dynamics. They found that, consistently, low-shear storm systems formed a symmetrical ring of thunderstorms around the center of the system about six hours before intensification began. As the system strengthened into a hurricane, the thunderstorms deepened and the ring became even more well-defined.
The study also looked at high-shear storms, a less common phenomenon involving atmospheric winds hanging with height.
Such storms showed a different structure when intensifying: They form a large, bull's-eye thunderstorm in the center of the system, rather than a ring around the center.
"Now we have an observational tool that uses existing data that can set off a red flag for forecasters, so that when they see this convective ring feature, there's a high probability that a storm may undergo rapid intensification," Nesbitt said. "This is really the first way that we can do this in real time rather than guessing with models or statistical predictions."
Since passive microwave satellites orbit every three to six hours, meteorologists can use them to track tropical storms and watch for the telltale rings to give forecasters about a 30-hour window before a storm hits its maximum strength.
Next, the researchers hope to even further increase their forecasting ability by modeling the internal dynamics of the storm systems as they intensify to pinpoint the causes of the structural changes they observed and find out what drives the intensification process.
"The satellite gives up as snapshot of what's taking place," Harnos said. "We know what's going on, but not how those changes are occurring to end up in the pattern that we're seeing. So what we're working on now is some computer modeling of hurricanes, both real storms and idealized storms, to see dynamically, structurally, what's taking place and what changes are occurring to produce these patterns that we see in the satellite data."
The NASA Hurricane Science Research Program supported this work.
Journal Reference:

1. Daniel S. Harnos, Stephen W. Nesbitt. Convective structure in rapidly intensifying tropical cyclones as depicted by passive microwave measurements. Geophysical Research Letters, 2011; 38 (7) DOI: 10.1029/2011GL047010

Read more »

Posted in: Science,Technology

'Time Machine' Made to Visually Explore Space and Time in Videos: Time-Lapse GigaPans Provide New Way to Access Big Data

Gigapan enables viewers to explore gigapixel-scale, high-resolution videos and image sequences by panning or zooming in and out of the images while simultaneously moving back and forth through time.

ScienceDaily — Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute have leveraged the latest browser technology to create GigaPan Time Machine, a system that enables viewers to explore gigapixel-scale, high-resolution videos and image sequences by panning or zooming in and out of the images while simultaneously moving back and forth through time.Viewers, for instance, can use the system to focus in on the details of a booth within a panorama of a carnival midway, but also reverse time to see how the booth was constructed. Or they can watch a group of plants sprout, grow and flower, shifting perspective to watch some plants move wildly as they grow while others get eaten by caterpillars. Or, they can view a computer simulation of the early universe, watching as gravity works across 600 million light-years to condense matter into filaments and finally into stars that can be seen by zooming in for a close up.
"With GigaPan Time Machine, you can simultaneously explore space and time at extremely high resolutions," said Illah Nourbakhsh, associate professor of robotics and head of the CREATE Lab. "Science has always been about narrowing your point of view -- selecting a particular experiment or observation that you think might provide insight. But this system enables what we call exhaustive science, capturing huge amounts of data that can then be explored in amazing ways."
The system is an extension of the GigaPan technology developed by the CREATE Lab and NASA, which can capture a mosaic of hundreds or thousands of digital pictures and stitch those frames into a panorama that be interactively explored via computer. To extend GigaPan into the time dimension, image mosaics are repeatedly captured at set intervals, and then stitched across both space and time to create a video in which each frame can be hundreds of millions, or even billions of pixels.
An enabling technology for time-lapse GigaPans is a feature of the HTML5 language that has been incorporated into such browsers as Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari. HTML5, the latest revision of the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) standard that is at the core of the Internet, makes browsers capable of presenting video content without use of plug-ins such as Adobe Flash or Quicktime.
Using HTML5, CREATE Lab computer scientists Randy Sargent, Chris Bartley and Paul Dille developed algorithms and software architecture that make it possible to shift seamlessly from one video portion to another as viewers zoom in and out of Time Machine imagery. To keep bandwidth manageable, the GigaPan site streams only those video fragments that pertain to the segment and/or time frame being viewed.
"We were crashing the browsers early on," Sargent recalled. "We're really pushing the browser technology to the limits."
Guidelines on how individuals can capture time-lapse images using GigaPan cameras are included on the site created for hosting the new imagery's large data files, http://timemachine.gigapan.org. Sargent explained the CREATE Lab is eager to work with people who want to capture Time Machine imagery with GigaPan, or use the visualization technology for other applications.
Once a Time Machine GigaPan has been created, viewers can annotate and save their explorations of it in the form of video "Time Warps."
Though the time-lapse mode is an extension of the original GigaPan concept, scientists already are applying the visualization techniques to other types of Big Data. Carnegie Mellon's Bruce and Astrid McWilliams Center for Cosmology, for instance, has used it to visualize a simulation of the early universe performed at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center by Tiziana Di Matteo, associate professor of physics.
"Simulations are a huge bunch of numbers, ugly numbers," Di Matteo said. "Visualizing even a portion of a simulation requires a huge amount of computing itself." Visualization of these large data sets is crucial to the science, however. "Discoveries often come from just looking at it," she explained.
Rupert Croft, associate professor of physics, said cosmological simulations are so massive that only a segment can be visualized at a time using usual techniques. Yet whatever is happening within that segment is being affected by forces elsewhere in the simulation that cannot be readily accessed. By converting the entire simulation into a time-lapse GigaPan, however, Croft and his Ph.D. student, Yu Feng, were able to create an image that provided both the big picture of what was happening in the early universe and the ability to look in detail at any region of interest.
Using a conventional GigaPan camera, Janet Steven, an assistant professor of biology at Sweet Briar College in Virginia, has created time-lapse imagery of rapid-growing brassicas, known as Wisconsin Fast Plants. "This is such an incredible tool for plant biology," she said. "It gives you the advantage of observing individual plants, groups of plants and parts of plants, all at once."
Steven, who has received GigaPan training through the Fine Outreach for Science program, said time-lapse photography has long been used in biology, but the GigaPan technology makes it possible to observe a number of plants in detail without having separate cameras for each plant. Even as one plant is studied in detail, it's possible to also see what neighboring plants are doing and how that might affect the subject plant, she added.
Steven said creating time-lapse GigaPans of entire landscapes could be a powerful tool for studying seasonal change in plants and ecosystems, an area of increasing interest for understanding climate change. Time-lapse GigaPan imagery of biological experiments also could be an educational tool, allowing students to make independent observations and develop their own hypotheses.
Google Inc. supported development of GigaPan Time Machine.

Read more »

Posted in: Computer,Science,Technology

Motorola Solutions and Huawei Settle Claims Over Intellectual Property

A worker at Huawei Technologies in Shenzhen, China, a telecommunications equipment maker.

SHANGHAI — Motorola Solutions and the Chinese company Huawei Technologies said Wednesday that they had agreed to settle a pair of lawsuits over intellectual property. 
The agreement is expected to clear the way for Motorola Solutions to complete the sale of its networking division to Nokia Siemens Networks. Analysts say that deal has been delayed partly because of the legal disputes.
Separately, in a filing Wednesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Motorola Solutions and Nokia Siemens said they expected to close the sale by April 29, pending approval by Chinese regulators.
The companies also said the price Nokia Siemens would pay for Motorola Solutions’ networking unit had been reduced to $975 million from $1.2 billion. The companies did not explain why the price had been reduced.
Motorola Solutions and Huawei issued a joint statement late Wednesday in Beijing. Motorola Solutions said it had agreed to drop a lawsuit filed last year in an Illinois court accusing Huawei of conspiring with several Motorola workers to steal trade secrets.
Motorola Solutions, which focuses on business customers, split off from Motorola in January.
For its part, Huawei said it had agreed to drop its lawsuit, filed early this year in Illinois, trying to block Motorola Solutions from proceeding with the sale of its networking unit because the deal involved some of Huawei’s technology.
Both sides expressed satisfaction with the agreement announced Wednesday.
“This puts us in a better position to close the transaction,” Nicholas Sweers, a Motorola Solutions spokesman, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday.
As part of the settlement, Motorola Solutions, which is based in Schaumburg, Ill., said it had agreed to pay an undisclosed amount of money to Huawei to compensate the company for the technology that would be part of the sale to Nokia Siemens, a joint venture between Nokia and Siemens.
Robert Haslam, a lawyer working with Huawei, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday, “We believe the payment is a vindication of Huawei’s intellectual property rights and a recognition of its value.”
Huawei, based in Shenzhen, China, is one of China’s biggest and most dynamic young companies. But it has been dogged for years by claims that it had close ties to the Chinese military and that it gained some of its telecommunications know-how by theft.
Wednesday’s settlement may bolster Huawei’s assertion that it has been developing its own intellectual property. Some years ago, the company also settled a lawsuit in which Cisco Systems had accused the company of stealing trade secrets.
Huawei is now the world’s second-largest telecommunication equipment supplier. Only the Swedish company Ericsson is bigger. But despite Huawei’s strong presence in Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America, it has struggled to enter the United States market, largely because of concerns about national security and intellectual property rights.
Huawei executives insist the company has no ties to the Chinese military and say they respect intellectual property rights. They also say opponents — and perhaps competitors — are spreading rumors to prevent the company from gaining even more global market share.

source: nytimes

Read more »

Posted in: Technology