Funding sought for Elite remake

5 November 2012 Last updated at 19:01 ET

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Rory Cellan-Jones talks to Elite co-creator David Braban in his Cambridge offices

Classic video game Elite is getting a 21st Century makeover.

David Braben, one of the creators of the original, is seeking £1.25m ($2m) via Kickstarter to fund the updated version.

Called Elite: Dangerous it will involve the same mix of interstellar travel, trading, piracy and spaceships as the original 8-bit game.

Those who pledge cash to the project will also get a chance to shape the development of the updated version.

"Elite is a game that I've wanted to come back to for a very, very long time," Mr Braben told the BBC. "It's the sort of game that I would very much like to play today."

Funding squeeze

When Elite was first published in 1984 it instantly became a huge success. Its wire-frame 3D graphics and open-ended play across eight randomly generated galaxies was at odds with the narrow, 2D side-scrolling games that were the norm at the time.

"It changed the way that people looked at games very much for the better," said Mr Braben.

The updated version will keep the open-ended, space trading setting and will make use of modern PC power to create a vast interstellar territory that players can explore. Ships will be fitted with hyperspace drives to enable them to get around and the planets, stars, asteroid belts and other things found in deep space will be procedurally generated.

However, said Mr Braben, its exact final form will be partly down to those that pledge cash.

"The people who are involved in Kickstarter can be involved in the game," he said.

The finished PC game should be ready in March 2014 although some of the early development work has already been done at Mr Braben's game studio Frontier.

The underlying network technology to support the multi-player version of the game is almost done and stress tests are being carried out to ensure it can support large numbers of players. A single player version will also be available.

Continue reading the main story

Elite Dangerous is the seminal game reimagined for the 21st Century - but it will only be built if it finds an audience first"

End Quote

When it appears the game will face competition from both new and established titles. Space trading and piracy sim Eve Online has a dedicated following and more recent titles, such as FTL and Pioneer, are winning fans. On Kickstarter, veteran game designer Chris Roberts is seeking cash for Star Citizen which shares many of the traits of Elite. Finally, by the time Elite appears Markus Persson, creator of Minecraft, may have finished work on his space simulation game 0x10c.

Audience

Mr Braben said he had turned to Kickstarter to fund Elite because it was the type of game that would be hard to persuade a publisher to back.

"Publishers want to see the end result before they move forward and with a lot of games like this it's very important to balance the design of the game as you are going," he said.

As well as providing funding, Kickstarter also helped to ensure that there was an audience interested in the game.

"It also helps us at Frontier to validate that there is a market for this type of game out there," he said. "We then have the confidence that we know who we are making the game for."

Kickstarter has become a firm favourite among game makers keen to get backing for their projects. The launch of a UK-focused Kickstarter has also provoked projects from British game studios.

Games including Kung Fu Superstar, mmoAsteroids and Sir, You Are Being Hunted are all looking for cash via the crowdfunding site.

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US email voting scheme 'risky'

6 November 2012 Last updated at 06:45 ET

A decision to let US citizens displaced by storm Sandy vote by email has been dubbed "risky" by security experts.

New Jersey officials let people displaced from their homes by Sandy vote via email as if they were living overseas.

The hasty decision drew criticism and forced election officials to put in place a postal backup plan.

Other problems emerged as some voters report that email inboxes set up to gather votes are already full.

Horror show

Tweetsfrom some US voters reveal that email votes sent to inboxes in the Essex and Morris counties in New Jersey are being bounced back. Essex County is the third largest county in New Jersey.

"It's really maddening," Jason Tanz, an editor at tech news magazine Wired, who lives in Essex County, told Buzzfeed, adding that the state's officials had a duty to make sure the email voting plan worked.

Flood waters meant many had to abandon their homes, and others left because they had no electrical power. In addition public transport in New Jersey has been disrupted and roads are hard to navigate because of the storm.

New Jersey residents can take advantage of e-voting by emailing or faxing a request for an absentee ballot. These are more usually used by US military and diplomatic staff based overseas, expatriates and travellers who are out of the country on election day.

Massively expanding email voting and squeezing it into a tight timetable was a "risky" measure, said security expert Matt Blaze in a blogpost.

"The security implications of voting by email are, under normal conditions, more than sufficient to make any computer security specialist recoil in horror," he wrote. Email was not, by its very nature, "authenticated, reliable, or confidential", he said,

The big problem that was likely to catch out New Jersey officials was the sheer number of people that wanted to take up the option, he said.

"Systems that work on a small scale almost never work without significant change at a large scale," he said, adding that he had doubts about whether email votes would be secured against "tampering and loss" either by corrupt officials or hackers.

Motivated attackers could also target email inboxes with attacks that bombarded them with data and made it impossible to send in a vote.

Mr Blaze's comments were echoed by Princeton computer scientist Prof Andrew Appel, who said net voting was "inherently insecure" and that email was the "most insecure form of internet voting". Prof Appel also said using email voting meant citizens had to surrender their right to make a choice anonymously.

Fears about the security of email voting led New York to abandon plans to use it.

In a bid to allay some fears about email voting, New Jersey officials said anyone who votes electronically must also send in a paper ballot recording their preference.

Pam Smith, of the Verified Voting Foundation, which opposes any use of e-voting that does not involve a follow-up paper vote, said there was a better option for those that could not get to their designated polling station.

"You can vote at any polling place in New Jersey and you won't lose privacy," she said.

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Google's UK share 'dips to 90%'

6 November 2012 Last updated at 09:02 ET

Search giant Google has dropped to its lowest percentage of the UK market share in five years, Experian Hitwise, a firm that monitors web traffic, says.

October figures released by the company suggest 89.33% of all web searches in the UK were made using Google.

Its main rival, Microsoft's Bing, now has 5% of the market share, with Yahoo's Ask in third place.

Microsoft's recently launched Windows 8 operating system has Bing installed by default instead of Google.

Analyst Luca Paderni, from Forrester Research, said: "In the UK, Bing has been using very aggressive tactics of promotion for last few months, in preparation for the Christmas season.

"But Google is still dominant, and we would need to see a trend over more months to call it a consistent decline."

Although Google is the leading search engine in many places around the world, alternative search engines have managed to get ahead of it in their home markets.

In China, Baidu is number one, and in Russia, the leader is Yandex, with Google in second place.

In Europe, Google's competitors would need to concentrate on services other than general purpose search to improve their chances of rivalling the search giant, said Mr Paderni.

Search habits

"There's increasingly more space for search services specialising in specific industries or topics," he said.

Hitwise told BBC News it had used data from various internet service providers in the UK to track the search habits of eight million people.

The firm's digital insight manager said web users were "demanding more of the engines they interact with everyday".

"The search engines that remain reliable, relevant and useful will be the ones that profit in the future."

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Windows Live Messenger to close

6 November 2012 Last updated at 15:15 ET

Microsoft has announced it intends to "retire" its instant message chat tool and replace it with Skype's messaging tool.

The news comes 18 months after the software giant announced it was paying $8.5bn (£5.3bn) for the communications software developer.

Microsoft said Windows Live Messenger (WLM) would be turned off by March 2013 worldwide, with the exception of China.

It reflects the firm's determination to focus its efforts on Skype.

WLM launched in 1999 when it was known as MSN Messenger. Over time, photo delivery, video calls and games were added to the package's text-based messages.

In 2009, the firm said it had 330 million active users.

Chat 'cannibalisation'

According to internet analysis firm Comscore, WLM still had more than double the number of Skype's instant messenger facility at the start of this year and was second only in popularity to Yahoo Messenger.

But the report suggested WLM's US audience had fallen to 8.3 million unique users, representing a 48% drop year-on-year. By contrast, the number of people using Skype to instant message each other grew over the period.

"When a company has competing products that can result in cannibalisation it's often better to focus on a single one," said Brian Blau from the consultancy Gartner.

"Skype's top-up services offer the chance to monetise its users and Microsoft is also looking towards opportunities in the living room.

"Messenger doesn't seem like an appropriate communications platform for TVs or the firm's Xbox console - but Skype does."

He also noted that the firm had opted to integrate Skype into its new Windows Phone 8 smartphone software, eclipsing the effort to integrate WLM into the message threads of the operating system' previous version.

To ease the changeover, Microsoft is offering a tool to migrate WLM messenger contacts over.

The risk is that the move encourages users to switch instead to rival platforms such as WhatsApp Messenger, AIM or Google Talk.

But Microsoft is at least partially protected by its tie-up with Facebook last year. Skype video calls are now offered as an extra to the social network's own instant messaging tool.

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iZettle and the modernisation of money

6 November 2012 Last updated at 21:59 ET

Wednesday could see another important step towards the modernisation of money. iZettle, a device that allows small traders to take credit card payments, is arriving in the UK after a successful rollout in other markets. But a failure by big payment firms to agree common standards on how we use these mobile money systems could mean the whole idea fails to fly.

iZettle is a small card-reader that plugs into iPhones, iPads and a number of Android smartphones or tablets. It is designed for use by any small trader who can't afford the infrastructure needed to take credit card payments. You hand over your card to the stallholder - or plumber or window-cleaner - it is swiped through the device, and then you sign for your purchase. The merchant pays a commission of 2.75% a transaction, and the consumer gets to use their plastic rather than cash in new places.

I tried it out at a launch event and it worked pretty smoothly. A scented candle manufacturer told me she had been using a trial device for some months, and had found it was an excellent way of taking payments at craft fairs.

iZettle was launched in Sweden a year ago, and according to the co-founder Jacob de Geer, it is now used by more than 75,000 small businesses and individuals in six countries. In Sweden, he told journalists at the launch, 700 blacksmiths are using the device. "It's bringing new merchants to the table. My ambition is to democratise card payments."

The big question in the UK, though, is whether consumers will fancy the idea of having their cards swiped into this device. And here there's a hitch. There are big names backing iZettle including the mobile operator EE, and the payments firms Mastercard and American Express.

But the other major force in the card industry, Visa, is an investor in a much bigger player in the mobile payments area. Square, started by the Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, is making rapid progress in the United States market and is now valued at something over $3bn.

And what people couldn't help noticing at the iZettle launch event was that paying with Visa was a lot harder than with other cards. Whereas with Mastercard or American Express the consumer just presents their card and signs, Visa users had to hand over their phone numbers and tap in security details on their own phones.

It seems that Visa is not too keen on the "chip 'n' signature" security that iZettle uses, even though the Swedish company says it has a lower fraud rate than for chip and pin transactions. When I asked Visa about the issue, the company sent me this statement: "We're continuing to work with iZettle to develop a fully Visa Europe compliant mobile point of sale solution."

The trouble is that any kind of friction in a mobile payments system is annoying and will lead many to conclude they are better off sticking with cash.

There are now lots of different mobile payment technologies from all sorts of companies, but they all seem to have different ways of verifying who customers are. But with little evidence of any great enthusiasm for mobile money - unless it makes life easier - surely it is time for the payments industry to get its act together and agree some common standards.

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Comet staff offered Dixons jobs

7 November 2012 Last updated at 05:21 ET

The electrical chain Dixons is offering Christmas jobs to hundreds of Comet staff who face redundancy because their firm is insolvent.

Comet's administrators, appointed last week, are keeping its stores open in the hope of finding a buyer.

But the outlook for the 7,000 staff is bleak and they all face potential redundancy.

Sebastian James, chief executive of Dixons Retail, said 500 Comet staff had already approached his firm.

"We are taking on a total of 3,000 people -2,000 in the stores," he told the BBC.

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"We have delayed our recruitment so that Comet colleagues who want to join our stores can get a chance to do so.

"We are hoping we will get as many as possible of the Comet colleagues to join us," he added.

Mr James explained that the Comet staff were attractive to Dixons because they already know about its business - which includes Currys and PC World - its customers, and the products it sells.

However he said that Dixons would not be trying to buy any Comet stores from the administrators.

"As we look across the country we are pretty much on all the same parks they are, so it doesn't really make sense for us to do that," he said.

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Satellites aid location searches

7 November 2012 Last updated at 05:56 ET

Satellite data, road and transport timetables are helping to make travel-time searches more accurate.

Most search engines plot travel times "as the crow flies", which can produce unrealistic estimates of how far it will take to reach a location.

Two British projects are changing that by basing estimates on timetables, road data and more accurate maps.

But the efforts of both have been hampered by bad data sets that made it tricky to combine information.

Local hero

"About 40% of all web searches are for geographic information," said Charlie Davies, founder of mapping firm iGeolise. That percentage rose to more than 50% when people searched from a mobile, he said.

Before now, he said, most results were derived by the straight-line distance between two points.

IGeolise, and others such as Mapumental, were starting to produce results that were more humanly relevant, said Mr Davies. These no longer ignored important human factors such as the position of bus stops and stations, the frequency of trains, buses and trams and key details of UK roads such as the distance between junctions.

Combining these data sources with average walking speeds and driving speeds produced much more accurate results, he said.

It would mean that instead of just searching for locations within a mile of a person's house, they could be much more specific with their search parameters. They could, he said, seek locations that were 45 minutes away by car or could be reached in a 45-minute commute given that a person set off at 07:00 every morning.

In early November, iGeolise won a European Satellite Navigation Competition for its mapping work.

However, said Mr Davies, getting at the data that could help produce these types of results had not been easy. While many public authorities and agencies make their data available it was far from easy to combine it, he said.

"There's a lot of data and it's all in different formats," he said. Data from different sources even when it was about the same kind of thing, such as bus times, was rarely preserved in a file in the same way. Before it could be used, he said, it had to be cleaned up and standardised.

Tom Steinberg, head of the MySociety project that is behind Mapumental, said it was often public transport data sets that was not well preserved or presented.

"The data that is put out has often not been collected without much or any thought that it would be used by third parties," he said. "Typically this leads to the data containing ambiguities or apparently internal contradictions that take a lot of time to clean up." Mapumental would soon be letting the public play with its mapping system, said Mr Steinberg.

"We're very grateful to have the data," he said, "but it is clearly early days."

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Megaupload sequel's Gabon setback

7 November 2012 Last updated at 06:49 ET

Efforts to create a follow-up file-sharing service to Megaupload have been dealt a blow after Gabon blocked access to its intended web address.

The West African nation said it was worried the Me.ga site would host copyright infringing files.

Kim Dotcom - the tech entrepreneur behind the scheme - said the move was a result of a "bad faith witch hunt" being carried out by the US government.

The 38-year-old faces charges of money laundering and fraud, which he denies.

He is currently living in New Zealand and engaged in a legal battle to prevent his extradition to the US, where he faces a jail sentence of up to 20 years if found guilty of earning about $175m (£109m) through illegal means.

Defending publishers

Mr Dotcom detailed his plans to launch a Gabon-based service last week.

He said the product would be launched on 20 January, a year to the day since he was arrested alongside others who had worked at Megaupload.

He said that uploads to the site would be encrypted to ensure their contents remained "confidential", and had suggested that basing the site at Gabon's .ga domain, rather than in the US, would "avoid another takedown".

However Gabon's Communication Minister, Blaise Louembe, said he had acted to block the site before the service launched in order to "protect intellectual property rights".

"Gabon cannot serve as a platform for committing acts aimed at violating copyrights, nor be used by unscrupulous people," he said.

Back-up plan

Mr Dotcom suggested the decision had been taken as a consequence of pressure from the US and the media group Vivendi.

"Don't worry. We have an alternative domain," he posted on Twitter.

In a later tweet, he ridiculed the move, saying: "Gabon Minister used time machine to analyze legality of the future Mega. Verdict: Cyber crime! Gets 5$ award from the FBI."

Although the Me.ga site is now offline, Mr Dotcom is still providing information about his plans at an alternative site, at which he appeals for hosting companies in other countries who might support the service to get in touch.

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Obama posts record-breaking tweet

7 November 2012 Last updated at 07:54 ET By Dave Lee Technology reporter, BBC News

The words "four more years", coupled with a photo of Barack and Michelle Obama embraced in a hug, have become the most retweeted Twitter post ever.

The US president tweeted the message at 0416 GMT, and it has since been retweeted over half a million times.

It underlined the now pivotal role social media plays in informing and persuading potential voters.

As news of Mr Obama's re-election broke, there were 327,452 related tweets posted every minute.

The same picture of Mr and Mrs Obama was also uploaded to Facebook, where it also broke records by becoming the most 'liked' photo ever posted to the site.

Throughout the campaign, both candidates invested heavily in co-ordinated social networking campaigns.

This approach climaxed on results night with the Democrat using email and Twitter to announce his victory to supporters - even before he had made his speech.

Other world leaders, such as David Cameron, took to the service to offer their congratulations.

"Warm congratulations to my friend @BarackObama," the UK prime minister wrote in a message that was retweeted more than 1,500 times. "Look forward to continuing to work together."

Others, like businessman Donald Trump - who last month used YouTube to challenge Mr Obama to release college applications - were less congratulatory.

The billionnaire tweeted: "We can't let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty. Our nation is totally divided!"

At the time of writing, Republican candidate Mitt Romney had not tweeted since the result. His last message read: "With your help, we will turn our country around and get America back on the path to prosperity."

'Not bad!'

While the majority of the $2bn (£1.25bn) spent by both Mr Obama and Republican opponent Mr Romney went on television advertising and events, the internet was seen as a key battle ground for campaigning, particularly in securing the support of younger voters.

One of the stand-out moments from Mr Obama's campaign was his appearance on social news website Reddit.

The president spent around 30 minutes answering questions from the site's millions of users. Mr Obama's credibility was enhanced when he told users the Q&A sessions were "Not bad!" - an apparent reference to an image-based meme featuring himself.

Mr Obama later returned to Reddit ahead of polls closing to urge more people to go out and vote - as did Mr Romney on Twitter.

On polling day, social media also publicised a few problems.

One voter - also a prolific Reddit user - posted a video which he said showed how a faulty voting machine would place a tick next to Mr Romney's name when pressing the key to vote for Mr Obama.

The machine was later taken out of service and fixed, a election official later clarified.

Vote buying

Well over half a million users of image-sharing social network Instagram posted images of themselves voting.

However, US law experts were quick to warn voters that in some states it is in fact illegal to take and share such images.

The legislation is designed, among other things, to prevent the possibility of vote buying.

"Display of a marked ballot to voters waiting in the queue can be used as a form of pressure to vote similarly, or to confuse voters who have difficulty reading English as to how to mark their own ballots," wrote Jeffrey Hermes from the Citizen Media Law Project.

"Similarly, those who might attempt to buy votes will generally require proof that the voter has in fact been bought, possibly through display of a marked ballot."

According to radio station based in North Carolina, one voter who had used his smartphone to make notes about his chosen candidates was told he would not be allowed to take the device into the voting booth - an experienced shared by several others in the area.

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Apple faces Facetime patent fine

7 November 2012 Last updated at 09:11 ET

A US court has ruled that Apple should pay damages to a Connecticut-based company because its Facetime video chat tool infringed the firm's patents.

VirnetX was awarded $368.2m (£231m).

The sum is about half the amount VirnetX had originally demanded and will only cause a small dent in the iPhone-maker's strong balance sheet.

But the ruling could have more serious consequences if VirnetX carries out a threat to block the further use of its innovations in Apple's products.

Apple said it had no comment to make on the case. It still has the right to appeal against the judgement.

Sales ban

VirnetX had alleged that four of its patents - registered between 2002 and 2011 - had been infringed by Apple's desktop, laptop, tablet and smartphone computers, all of which run Facetime and its instant messenger service iMessage. It said Apple would have needed to have paid a licence fee to have legally made use of the technologies.

These included a method of establishing a secure communication link between different types of computers using a protocol referred to as TARP (Tunneled Agile Routing Protocol).

VirnetX had previously secured a $200m settlement from Microsoft over similar claims and has made related allegations against Cisco, Siemens and others.

"Apple says they don't infringe, but Apple developers testified that they didn't pay any attention to anyone's patents when developing their system," a lawyer for VirnetX was quoted as saying by the Bloomberg news agency.

Apple had denied infringement saying that VirnetX's patented techniques had only played a small role in its systems.

But the verdict will boost a related claim filed by VirnetX with the US's International Trade Commission which could theoretically lead to a sales ban on Apple products that infringe its technology.

More lawsuits

The ruling marks Apple's second patent loss in a week, after a judge dismissed a case it brought against Google's Motorola unit on Monday.

A defeat last month in the UK has seen it ordered to run a notice on its homepage acknowledging that Samsung's tablets had not infringed its European iPad design rights.

In September a German court also rejected Apple's claims that competitors had infringed its multi-touch inventions.

In a sign of further problems to come, Ars Techica has reported that a judge overseeing a US case - in which Apple claims its App Store trademark has been breached by Amazon - had expressed scepticism that consumers would indeed be confused.

But in its favour Apple can cite its massive $1.05bn software and design damages award against Samsung in August.

A judge will review the ruling next month - and consider Apple's claim that several of its rival's handsets be banned.

In the meantime, Apple has just filed a further claim against the South Korean manufacturer based on the allegation that version 4.1 of the Android system, which is installed on several Samsung devices, infringes its own software patents.

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