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Grand Theft Auto leak sparks apology

Written By Unknown on Rabu, 28 Agustus 2013 | 23.59

27 August 2013 Last updated at 06:19 ET

Sony has issued an apology to developer Rockstar after audio from forthcoming title Grand Theft Auto 5 was leaked online.

Customers who had pre-ordered the eagerly awaited game were allowed to download a "locked" version ahead of the game's release.

But some people were able to extract audio from the game - details of which were posted on forums.

Rockstar said it was "deeply disappointed" by the leaks.

"Unfortunately some people who downloaded the digital pre-order of Grand Theft Auto 5 through the PlayStation Store in Europe were able to access certain GTA5 assets leading to leaked information and media from the game appearing online.

"As you can imagine, we are deeply disappointed by leaks and spoilers being spread in advance of the game's launch.

"GTA5 represents years of hard work by many people across the world, and we all couldn't be more excited to finally share it with you properly this 17 September."

'Spoiling the ending'

The company warned that anyone posting plot details from the game ahead of its release would be temporarily banned from its community.

However, this was too late for some fans who said they were disappointed to learn of details which previously had been securely under wraps.

One user commenting on the Sony blog said: "Thanks a lot Sony for basically spoiling the ending of GTA5 before the game was even released."

In its statement, Sony said it had now removed the digital pre-order file from the European PlayStation store.

The Grand Theft Auto series has for several years been one of the highest-grossing titles across all gaming platforms. However it has often caused controversy, with calls made to ban it in several countries.

This latest release will feature an online mode, allowing 15 players to exist in the same game at once.


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Facebook pays $20m over privacy flaw

27 August 2013 Last updated at 07:29 ET By Joe Miller BBC News

Approximately 614,000 Facebook users whose personal details appeared in ads on the site without their permission will each receive a $15 (£9.65) payout.

The names and pictures of an estimated 150 million Facebook members were used in Sponsored Stories, but only those who responded to an email from the site earlier this year will be compensated.

Privacy organisations will also receive some of the $20m (£12.9m) settlement.

Facebook said it was "pleased" the settlement had been approved.

The payout was approved by a US court on Monday following a class action filed against Facebook in 2011 by five of its users.

The group said their details had been used to promote products and services through the site's Sponsored Stories programme, without paying them or giving them the choice to opt-out.

A Sponsored Story is a tailored advertisement that appears on members' Facebook pages, highlighting products a user's friends have endorsed or "liked" on the site.

No 'meaningful' harm

US District Judge Richard Seeborg acknowledged that the $15 payments were relatively small, but said it had not been established that Facebook had "undisputedly violated the law".

He added that the claimants could not prove they were "harmed in any meaningful way".

The court estimated that Facebook had made about $73m (£47m) in profit from the Sponsored Stories featuring details of the 150 million members.

The settlement also requires Facebook to make changes to its "Statement of Rights" and to give users more information and control over how their details are used in the future.

This move was estimated by the plaintiff's lawyers to cost Facebook $145m in advertising revenue.

Approximately 7,000 Facebook users opted out of the settlement altogether, allowing them to bring their own legal action against the social network.

A Facebook spokesperson said: "We are pleased that the settlement has received final approval."


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China hit by 'biggest' cyber-attack

27 August 2013 Last updated at 07:53 ET

China has said it has suffered its "biggest ever" cyber-attack, causing many websites based in the country to go temporarily offline.

The distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack was said to have targeted servers responsible for sites with a ".cn" domain name.

The country has not speculated on who may be responsible.

DDoS attacks, in which a target is flooded with traffic in an attempt to render it unreachable, are common.

The technique is typically employed by hacktivists looking to disrupt websites from operating correctly.

Enhanced capabilities

Notice of the attack was posted on the website of the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC).

It said that the DDoS had begun at 02:00 local time on Sunday - before intensifying at 04:00.

The CNNIC apologised to the affected users.

It said it would "enhance the service capabilities" of the network responsible for the affected domains.

China is often accused of being responsible for major attacks on Western countries, particularly the US.

A New York Times investigation claimed that China had targeted their systems over a four-month period - but the Chinese foreign ministry described the accusation as "groundless".


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Facebook details government requests

27 August 2013 Last updated at 12:34 ET By Dave Lee Technology reporter, BBC News

Governments around the world requested information on about 38,000 Facebook users in the first six months of 2013.

Facebook's Global Government Requests Report, released on Tuesday for the first time, offered details on official requests from 74 countries.

The US made by far the most requests, asking for information on between 20,000 and 21,000 users.

UK authorities requested Facebook hand over data on 2,337 users.

"We will continue to be aggressive advocates for greater disclosure," Facebook said.

"We hope this report will be useful to our users in the ongoing debate about the proper standards for government requests for user information in official investigations," wrote Facebook lawyer Colin Stretch.

"And while we view this compilation as an important first report - it will not be our last."

Unlike other countries, which had an exact figure, the US data was given as a range due to it being forbidden for companies to disclose how many requests they have had.

"In coming reports, we hope to be able to provide even more information about the requests we receive from law enforcement authorities," Mr Stretch added.

Compliance

The report covers the the first six months of 2013, ending 30 June, and is the first time Facebook has released data relating to these kind of requests.

The company said it hoped to publish similar reports every six months from now on, and hoped the report highlighted the "stringent processes" involved in the obtaining of user information.

The company did not give a break-down of why the requests were made, instead just dividing the data by country, outlining how many requests were made, and how many users were involved. Several users could be cited in one request.

Country Total requests Users/accounts requested % of requests where some data was produced

Source: Facebook - full list

United States

11,000 - 12,000

20,000 - 21,000

79%

India

3,245

4,144

50%

UK

1,975

2,337

68%

Germany

1,886

2,068

37%

Italy

1,705

2,306

53%

Facebook also gave a percentage of how often the requests were successful.

In the UK, Facebook complied with 68%, while US authorities were successful 79% of the time.

Of particular interest were figures for countries affected by civil unrest.

In Turkey, 96 requests were made, covering 173 users, of which 45 were complied with - but the firm insisted this was for claims related to "child endangerment and emergency law enforcement".

No requests made by the Egyptian authorities were complied with, according to the report.

'Terrifying reality'

Rights group Privacy International welcomed the publication but had wider concerns.

"Given Facebook's ever-growing presence in the lives of people around the world, we commend them for releasing this report today - a release that has been a long time coming," it said.

"However, we are left with a disturbingly hollow feeling regarding Facebook's gesture, and it has little to do with Facebook itself.

"Since documents leaked by Edward Snowden have been published and analysed, the veil has been lifted on what information governments actually collect about us.

"We are now aware of a terrifying reality - that governments don't necessarily need intermediaries like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft to get our data."

Facebook said it remained committed to releasing more detailed data in future with regularity.

Follow Dave Lee on Twitter @DaveLeeBBC


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Kobo flattens its premium e-reader

27 August 2013 Last updated at 19:18 ET

Kobo has updated its e-reader line-up, including its first e-ink device to have a "totally flat" front.

The new Aura's edge-to-edge display is designed to help it stand out from rivals which typically feature a recessed screen within a frame.

The device is being priced at a premium to Amazon's competing Kindle Paperwhite and Barnes & Noble's Nook Simple Touch.

Analysts have said the dedicated e-reader market is shrinking faster than predicted due to falling tablet prices.

Kobo does have a range of Android-powered multimedia tablets, which have also been revamped to take advantage of faster processors.

But the firm told the BBC that its e-ink devices still accounted for between 80% to 90% of all the machines it sold, indicating that the Aura will play a crucial role in attracting consumers to its ebook store.

Capacitive touchscreen

The global market in dedicated e-readers peaked in 2011 with 23 million devices sold, according to the research consultancy Gartner.

The firm said sales have since declined to the point that only 16 million such machines are forecast to be bought this year, with the number expected to fall to 10 million in 2017.

E-ink screens are easier to read in sunlight and are less likely to cause eyestrain than the LCD displays commonly used in tablets, but Gartner said that many consumers are unwilling to buy both devices.

"It is not that consumers have lost interest in e-books - rather, consumers have chosen instead to read e-books on other devices," Gartner analyst Hugues De La Vergne wrote in a report on the sector.

"Tablets can perform many functions, including supporting e-reader applications. Although many avid readers will still prefer a standalone reading device, most people will see no justification for the additional expense of buying a dedicated e-reader, unless it's significantly less costly than a tablet."

Kobo has made the latest Aura cheaper than its previous version, which was £140. It is now the same price as Sony's PRS-T2 Reader, but £11 more than Amazon's bestselling Kindle Paperwhite and £51 more than the equivalent Nook.

For the price, Kobo is promising "the most even front-light" of any such device, addressing criticism that other machines make parts of their screen brighter than other areas when viewed in a dark room.

It has also teamed up with the service Pocket to make it easy to save articles from the web so that they can be synched and read on the Aura later.

In addition the firm has switched to using a capacitive touchscreen. This takes advantage of the way a user's fingers disrupt an electrical field to provide more accurate feedback than the infrared tech used in Kobo's Glow e-readers.

"It gives the ability to pinch-and-zoom when you want to zoom in on a particular piece of text or image," the firm's general manager of devices Wayne White told the BBC.

The Kindle Paperwhite introduced the same technology last year.

Even so, one industry expert said the fact that the new Aura is lighter than its rival while offering a microSD card slot - which the Kindle lacks - should help it appeal to a niche audience.

"Amazon has something like 90% of the e-reader market in the UK, but having said that, Kobo's influence is growing," explained Lisa Campbell from the Bookseller, a trade magazine.

"Publishers report that digital sales on Kobo are rising and the firm is making in-roads into Amazon's marketshare.

"By offering the Aura in two colours [black and pink], putting contours on the back and offering higher specs the the firm is now trying to target the 'heavy' book-readers market while Amazon goes after the mass market."


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Mars gets social media feed in Latin

27 August 2013 Last updated at 19:21 ET By Zoe Kleinman Technology reporter, BBC News

Pictures of the surface of Mars, taken from Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), are to be captioned in Latin on social media outlets as part of an outreach project.

The Latin captions will be published from 28 August on Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook.

The photography project is known as HiRise (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) and has run since 2006.

The Latin translations are being done by 18 volunteers coordinated in the UK.

"We were inspired by the Pope's Latin feed," HiRise spokesman Ari Espinoza from the University of Arizona told the BBC.

The then Pope Benedict XVI sent his first tweet in the ancient language at the beginning of the year and also used Latin in his resignation speech.

"Some of the science greats - [Johannes] Kepler, [Isaac] Newton wrote in Latin - this is a tie to the past but we're looking at the future," Mr Espinoza added.

Continue reading the main story

One of the fascinating things for me has been discovering how many parts of Mars have been named in Latin"

End Quote Dr Lorna Robinson The Iris Project

Captions are already provided in 10 languages as well as English, including Hebrew, Icelandic and Russian.

While some modern scientific terms had challenged the Latin translators, more mundane phrases had also faced scrutiny, said Dr Lorna Robinson, director of the Iris Project, a UK-based Latin language outreach initiative, which is coordinating the team.

"There has been debate over whether to keep the Latin more simple or make it as close to classical Latin as possible," she said.

"We reached a compromise - wanted to keep it clear and accessible to outsiders without being wrong."

The word "possible" had divided opinion among the language experts because it had not been used in the same way as it was today, Dr Robinson said.

"We went for 'possibilis' - which means 'possible' but in terms of classical Latin it wasn't really used in the way we use it," she said.

The phrase under scrutiny was a structure described as "with possible ice" which would not have been a format familiar to traditional speakers, Dr Robinson added.

"One of the fascinating things for me has been discovering how many parts of Mars have been named in Latin," she said.

"It will be interesting for people to see these connections. Terra [is Latin for] terrain, for example - most people will be able to work that out."

The HiRise camera was designed for continuous use until the fuel on the MRO runs out in 2023, and sends back over 12 images each day, said Mr Espinoza.

"So far we have 30,000 images. Beautiful dunes, defrosting carbon dioxide ice, gulleys and impact craters - it's Mars," he said.

"The [translation] group we have created has done a lot of talking. You just don't learn about impact craters or carbon dioxide ice in Latin at school."


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Most phone malware 'targets Android'

28 August 2013 Last updated at 07:00 ET

Some 79% of malicious attacks on mobiles in 2012 occurred on devices running Google's Android operating system, US authorities have said.

Public information website Public Intelligence published the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation memo to US police and emergency medical personnel.

Nokia's Symbian system, on the Finnish company's basic-feature handsets, had had the second-most malware attacks.

Apple's iOS had had 0.7% of attacks.

Android is the world's most popular mobile operating system, and the memo blamed its high share of attacks on its "market share and open-source architecture".

Text trojans - fake messages that trick users into clicking on premium-rate numbers - accounted for half of the Android attacks.

The memo also cited fake sites that appeared to be like Google's Play marketplace and "rootkits" that allowed hackers to track a user's keystrokes and passwords.

It said 44% of Android users were still using older versions of the operating system - specifically 2.3.3 through 2.3.7, dubbed Gingerbread and released in 2011.

These have a "number of security vulnerabilities that were fixed in later versions", the memo added.

"The growing use of mobile devices by federal, state, and local authorities makes it more important than ever to keep mobile OS patched and up-to-date," it said.

'Master key' exploit

Apple has said that more than 93% of the 600 million iPhones and iPads sold run iOS 6, the latest version of the operating system.

The next version is expected to be released to the public next month.

This is the not the first time the open nature of Google's popular phone software has been questioned.

Security firm Symantec noted last month that a "master key" bug - which allows attackers to take control of Android phones - was being exploited in China.

The bug exploited a vulnerability in all Android apps, which contain an encrypted signature that the operating system uses to check the program is legitimate and has not been tampered with.


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Syrian hacking fallout continues

28 August 2013 Last updated at 07:05 ET By Dave Lee Technology reporter, BBC News

The websites of the New York Times and Twitter are still suffering problems related to a damaging hack carried out on Tuesday.

The newspaper and social network were hit after their domain name details were maliciously edited by hackers.

The Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), a group supporting Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, says it carried out the attack.

It is the most severe attack so far carried out by the group.

In recent months, the hackers have targeted major media companies including the Financial Times, Washington Post, CNN and BBC.

But in this latest attack, the SEA was able to cause more sustained damage with a technique which also saw news and comment site the Huffington Post hit.

The attacked domains were managed by hosting company Melbourne IT, which has said it is looking at "additional layers of security" for protecting domain details.

DNS changes

The attack focused on editing DNS - Domain Name System - information.

The DNS is used to direct web traffic to a specific server containing the website a user wants to visit.

In simple terms, it means we can browse the web using easy-to-remember addresses like bbc.com, rather than by IP addresses - a string of numbers separated by dots.

Continue reading the main story

Media attacks seem to be escalating and moving away from annoying, simple denial-of-service attacks and toward full domain compromise"

End Quote Ken Westin Security researcher

The SEA was able to gain access to Melbourne IT's system, where Twitter and the New York Times registered their respective domains.

It meant that the hackers could change DNS details so that instead of, for example, "nytimes.com" taking you to the Times' servers, the domain was instead pointed to a website hosted by the SEA.

In Twitter's case, the SEA targeted twimg.com - a separate domain that the social network used to store image data, as well as styling code.

While Twitter itself remained active, the disruption to twimg.com meant many pages displayed incorrectly.

In a statement, Twitter said that no user data had been affected.

The SEA used its Twitter account to publicise the attacks on both sites, posting images of its work.

"Hi @Twitter," the group said in one tweet, "look at your domain, its owned by #SEA :)"

'Through the front door'

Melbourne IT blamed the breach on a reseller - a third party that sells domains through the company's system.

Melbourne IT said the reseller's log-in credentials had been obtained, and that with them the SEA could enter through the "front door" and carry out the attack.

"If you've got a valid user name and password," chief executive Theo Hnarakis told ABC (Australia), "the assumption from our systems is that you are the authorised owner and user of that domain name."

In a further statement, the company said: "We are currently reviewing our logs to see if we can obtain information on the identity of the party that has used the reseller credentials, and we will share this information with the reseller and any relevant law enforcement bodies."

The company advised those wanting to make sure their domains were fully protected to use "additional registry lock features" that they offered.

Perseverance

During its downtime, the New York Times has been publishing new articles on its Facebook page as well as a mirror site.

Meanwhile, Mark Frons, the company's chief information officer, cautioned staff to "be careful when sending email communications until this situation is resolved".

Ken Westin, a security researcher for Tripwire, an online security company, told the BBC: "Media attacks seem to be escalating and moving away from annoying, simple denial-of-service attacks and toward full domain compromise which, if successful, puts millions of NYT website users at risk."

In January, the New York Times said hackers had accessed its website and stolen the passwords of 53 employees after it published a report on the wealth of then Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao's family.

As it did after that NYT disruption, competitor Wall Street Journal took down its paywall on Tuesday and offered its content free to all visitors.

Michael Fey, chief technology officer at cybersecurity firm McAfee, said that as long as media organisations played a crucial role in reporting news and influencing debate, they would continue to be targets of cyber-attacks.

"Regardless of technology or tactics deployed, we should expect to see more of these attacks,'' he said.

Follow Dave Lee on Twitter @DaveLeeBBC


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'Revenge porn' law debated in US

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Turning the tables on cold callers

28 August 2013 Last updated at 11:34 ET By Joe Kent Producer, You and Yours

A man targeted by marketing companies is making money from cold calls with his own premium-rate phone number.

In November 2011 Lee Beaumont paid £10 plus VAT to set up his personal 0871 line - so to call him now costs 10p, from which he receives 7p.

The Leeds businessman told BBC Radio 4's You and Yours programme that the premium line had so far made £300.

Phone Pay Plus, which regulates premium numbers said it strongly discouraged people from adopting the idea.

Mr Beaumont came up with the plan when he grew sick of calls offering to help him reclaim payment protection insurance (PPI), or install solar panels.

He said: "I don't use my normal Leeds number for anyone but my friends and family."

Continue reading the main story

I'm, getting annoyed with PPI phone calls when I'm trying to watch Coronation Street. "

End Quote Lee Beaumont Businessman

Once he had set up the 0871 line, every time a bank, gas or electricity supplier asked him for his details online, he submitted it as his contact number.

He added he was "very honest" and the companies did ask why he had a premium number.

He told the programme he replied: "Because I'm, getting annoyed with PPI phone calls when I'm trying to watch Coronation Street so I'd rather make 10p a minute."

He said almost all of the companies he dealt with were happy to use it and if they refused he asked them to email.

The number of calls received by Mr Beaumont has fallen from between 20 and 30 a month to just 13 last month.

Because he works from home, Mr Beaumont has been able to increase his revenue by keeping cold callers talking - asking for more details about their services.

He admitted, the scheme had changed his attitude, saying: "I want cold calls", and that he had moved on to encouraging companies to make contact.

After a recent problem with his online shopping, he declined to call an 0845 number but posted his number on Twitter in the knowledge that the number could be picked up by marketing companies.

But the premium number regulator Phone Pay Plus says the public should think twice before setting up their own lines.

They say phone line providers must meet consumer protection standards, which include transparency, fairness and complaint handling, which would mean clearly setting out the cost of each call to any organisation that rang.

They told You and Yours: "Premium-rate numbers are not designed to be used in this way and we would strongly discourage any listeners from adopting this idea, as they will be liable under our code for any breaches and subsequent fines that result."


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