Tech News
Tech giants scramble for lead on 'Internet of Things'
It's not just smartphones and tablets anymore. The world's tech giants are now battling over a wider array of connected devices, from refrigerators to cars to wristwatches. Announcements in recent days from Apple and Samsung made clear they are staking…
Scientists building 'neurotic' robots to help them make smarter, more human decisions
A group of researchers is exploring the possibility of programming robot brains to be more "neurotic" in order to help them make more human-like decisions. Discovery News reported on one team's findings which were presented this week at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Hong Kong.
Jeff Krichmar, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine, told Discovery, "We’re trying to make the robot brain more like human brain. The brain has incredibly flexibility and adaptability. If you look at any artificial system, it’s far more brittle than biology.”
Modern robots can solve math problems, play chess and even read and respond to some human emotions. However, when they try to perform other basic human tasks like walking, running, carrying on a conversation or recognizing basic objects in their environment, their abilities fall short.
Krichmar and his team are experimenting with robotic awareness and trying to teach mechanical brains to behave more like human and animal brains by programming traits that mimic obsessive-compulsive disorder or a fear of open spaces.
For instance, the team studied the actions of neurotransmitter chemicals serotonin and dopamine in mice as the animals solved a maze or reacted to an unfamiliar environment. Neurotransmitters are the chemicals that combine to constitute awareness and to contribute to our senses of pleasure and well-being.
The scientists then mimicked the actions of the brain chemicals by translating them into equations in the robots' cognitive software.
“Were mimicking the action of the chemicals with equations,” explained Krichmar. “We are doing mathematical models of brain or cognitive system, then putting that in software and it becomes the controller for the robot.”
“If you put a rodent in a room that is open and unfamiliar, it will hug the walls,” he said. “It will hide until it becomes comfortable, then it will move across the room. It will wait until if feels comfortable. We did that with a robot and made it so it was so anxious it would never cross the room.”
Teaching a robot to feel fear or anxiousness could contribute to its ability to adapt to changing conditions and instill in it a sense of self-preservation. A search-and-rescue robot, for example, could analyze weather conditions before attempting a mission.
Krichmar and his team have already developed a robot named "Carl's Junior" that looks like a colorfully striped turtle. The robot responds to verbal commands and other external signals. The robot is used as a therapeutic tool for children on the autism spectrum who are less comfortable interacting with humans than they are with inanimate -- but responsive -- objects.
Other teams at the conference are presenting robots that can learn like babies learn. Krichmar told Discover that he's excited about where the field is headed.
“You will see robots with these capabilities actually doing things in the home or for search and rescue,” he said. “The time is right and its moving.”
[image of contemplative robot via Shutterstock.com]
Actor Stephen Fry denounces UK government for not acting on Snowden revelations
Performer and Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger among speakers at conference marking first anniversary of NSA leaks
Stephen Fry has denounced the government's failure to act over the mass surveillance programme revealed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden, labelling its behaviour as "squalid and rancid".
Opening a day of debate to galvanise action against spying by the British and US intelligence agencies, Fry said that exploiting the fear of terrorism is a "duplicitous and deeply wrong means of excusing something as base as spying on the citizens of your own country".
The performer was speaking via a prerecorded interview at a London summit on Saturday marking the anniversary of the start of Snowden's revelations, which were first published in the Guardian and the Washington Post.
The day of action is billed as the biggest privacy event of 2014, with more than 500 people attending the event at Shoreditch Town Hall in east London.
In his video message, Fry, 56, said: "The idea of having your letters read by somebody, your telegrams, your faxes, your postcards intercepted, was always considered one of the meanest, most beastly things a human being could do, and for a government to do, without good cause. Using the fear of terrorism that we all have, the fear of the unknown that we all share, the fear of enemies that hate us, is a duplicitous and deeply wrong means of excusing something as base as spying on the citizens of your own country."
The broadcaster said GCHQ and NSA had cooperated to "read and intercept everything we send".
"It's enough that corporations know so much about us and our spending habits, our eating habits, our sexual preferences, everything else," he said.
"But that a government, something that we elect, something that should be looking out for our best interests, should presume without asking to take information that we swap, we hope privately, between ourselves is frankly disgraceful."
More than 500 people attended the event at east London's Shoreditch Town Hall, organised by the Don't Spy on Us Campaign, a coalition of privacy, free expression and digital rights organisations which is urging the UK government to end the mass surveillance of the web and mobile phone networks by the British eavesdropping centre, GCHQ.
Among the speakers was Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, who said: "The tide is beginning to turn as the public comes to understand just how broken the surveillance state is."
Other high-profile speakers included Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian editor-in-chief, who led the team that masterminded a series of remarkable disclosures from the files leaked by the National Security Agency whistleblower.
Before a packed audience, Rusbridger recounted the "frenetic" period last summer when the British government attempted to strong-arm the Guardian into not publishing further revelations, at one point forcing senior editors to destroy hard-drives holding some of the encrypted files leaked by Snowden. However, he said that the British government's heavy-handed reaction backfired.
"By forcing the reporting out of the UK to the USA, the British government lost any handle on this story at all. So, I hope that the British government will think about that in the future."
Rusbridger also lamented the UK's lack of an enshrined right to free speech, referring to the US constitution's first amendment and the "quasi-constitutional role" of that nation's press.
"We need to embody some of those rights here, we don't have rights in Britain. We tend to wait until things go wrong, so there is no really established right to privacy because there is no constitutional protection of free speech," he told the audience.
Rusbridger added that those keen to "shut down" the Snowden story tended to frame it as a question of privacy versus national security.
However, he said, Snowden's revelations opened up many fundamental more issues of public interest.
The Don't Spy on Us Campaign is calling for an inquiry that will report before next year's general election and investigate the extent to which current laws have failed to protect the privacy of the public. In addition, it is demanding new legislation that will make the security agencies properly accountable to MPs.
Other measures include the use of judges instead of the home secretary to decide when spying can be justified.
Blogger and activist Cory Doctorow said: "Freedom from surveillance is essential to freedom itself. The freedom to think, to speak and to have discourse without fear of reprisal or even judgment is at the core of democracy itself."
Emma Carr, acting director of Big Brother Watch, called on the government to publicly acknowledge that the UK's surveillance laws need to be reviewed.
"Without affirmative action, the government will certainly find that the general public's faith in politicians to properly monitor how the security agencies are using surveillance powers will diminish," she said.
Gos Hosein, executive director of Privacy International, added: "Secret surveillance is anathema to a democratic society, as no real debate can take place without an informed public."
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
Volcano coughs up new fuel cell catalyst
This one begins like a chapter from Jules Verne’s novel The Mysterious Island and ends up with a new fuel cell catalyst that could lead to cost-competitive fuel cell vehicles. The new catalyst is based on an enzyme called H2ase S–77, which was…
Elon Musk unimpressed by battery breakthroughs
It seems like every other day, some company somewhere is claiming some major breakthrough in battery technology. Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk is unimpressed and unfazed by these reports, though the upcoming Gigafactory will be ready should one of these…
From teledildonics to interactive porn: the future of sex in a digital age
Can you have sex with a computer? And would you want to? Sam Leith explores a brave new world of infinite possibilities
When 35-year-old Jane first signed up to the dating website she has used for about a year, she says it was "quite overwhelming". "I was inundated with winks, and messages, people trying to chat with me live online, all sorts. Some will send you detailed pictures of their penis, basically. What the hell? You've got a penis. Congratulations."
In due course, Jane found ways of negotiating the sexual barrage, and went on to meet 20 or more men; about three-quarters of those have turned into some sort of romantic or physical relationship. "They've all been mini-relationships. I've never had a one-night stand."
Online dating is not an unusual story, but Jane has been married for seven years. The site she uses is Ashley Madison, one of a growing number that caters to men and women seeking extra-marital affairs. Deeply unhappy in her marriage to a husband who "shows no interest in me sexually", she says Ashley Madison turned her life round. "I don't take antidepressants any more. And I can sleep properly. Mentally and physically, it has changed things. I'm getting on better with my husband."
She never thought of herself as a potential adulterer. "My dad cheated on my mum years ago, and I didn't speak to him for years after that. I was horrified. I thought it was the most immoral thing. But now I'm doing it, I'm seeing it from a different angle." While surface social mores haven't changed much in recent years – politicians still play on family values, and Ashley Madison is still banned from advertising on British television – in the private spaces of the web, things are moving fast.
Ashley Madison is the brainchild of 43-year-old former sports lawyer Noel Biderman. What he calls his "lightbulb moment" involved the confluence of two things: the discovery that up to 30% of people on internet dating sites were not single, and what he describes as "a lot of professional contact with infidelity". He worked with an NBA basketball player who had been sold to Milan, and who panicked when his wife announced a visit to Italy. "He said: 'My Italian wife isn't going to like it.' Oh my goodness!"
Biderman wears his self-styled monicker, "king of infidelity", as a badge of pride; behind his desk is a plaque proclaiming, "Life is short – have an affair". A married father of two, he claims not to follow his own advice. So does his wife, and that's germane. "Where we planted our flag was around female infidelity," he explains. "We believed that the internet was going to foster a whole new era in that regard." The site is organised like a ladies' night in a town-centre disco: women can join free, men need to pay to register. This spring it passed the 25 million member mark.
"If you and I were charting the history of female infidelity, we know that environment is a pretty massive factor. When did women first start having a multitude of affairs? It's when they entered the workplace. They now have interesting people to meet, they now have financial freedom so they aren't as concerned about relationships breaking down. They have business travel. So technology is really the second opportunity – whether it's a past lover on Facebook, or a future lover online, what you have is a way to satiate appetite which you didn't have. Technology has dramatically affected how we are approaching sex and intimacy."
But when you talk to the people who are using these sites, it becomes clear that this is something more complicated than no-strings nookie. "Almost an element of the relationship is that you're counselling each other," Jane says. "It is like a really random marriage guidance session, and then the next minute you're having sex. Most of the men I've met have just been incredibly lonely. One guy, I think we've slept together maybe twice in six months. But we meet frequently for meals, drinks, snogging in the car. He really misses being hugged, being kissed – those basics."
Jane's experience, says Biderman, is not uncommon: "What we were dealing with was an intimacy void – if you like, a passion void. And that brings together two things. It's not just sex: sex is a component of it. It's also understanding, like-mindedness, attention – all these things that are absent in their current relationships. People aren't running a husband and six lovers. I think they're trying to do the domestic situation, and one lover. And then after a point that need is filled, almost like filling up a car with petrol. It carries them forward, sometimes six more months, sometimes six years, sometimes they'll never need it again."
Ashley Madison and sites like it represent only one small aspect of the transformation the digital age is making to our sexual behaviour. Apocryphally, men think about sex every 15 seconds. Now, if they forget to, they can be reminded. A friend was interviewing the novelist Bret Easton Ellis on stage when Ellis's pocket beeped in a way he recognised. "You're on Grindr, while I'm interviewing you?" my friend said. He was not wrong. New hook-up apps and sites are born, embraced, rejected and superseded with a speed that recalls watching time-lapse photographs of wheat growing.
Grindr (and its heterosexual analogue Blendr, whose name also equates sex with kitchen equipment) are old news. Bang With Friends, selling itself as a fear-free way of finding Facebook fuckbuddies (only friends who have both confided to the app that they would sleep with the other get the nod) is a yellowing clipping. Even their bastard offspring, Tinder, is starting to look a bit 2013.
Can the awkwardness of modern dating be escaped by moving one step further into the virtual? Not sex with someone you know, or sex with someone you don't know – but sex with someone you will never know? A site called Red Light Center has anything up to two million users. It's a massive multiplayer online reality (an MMO), like Second Life or World Of Warcraft, only with blaring hair-rock and a 1990s Vegas vibe. It is pretty crude on first examination, but is clearly working for the many people who have signed up for an online presence here.
Red Light Center works on a freemium model: you can wander around for free, chatting to other users, or dancing in the nightclub (not advised). But if you want to be able to get your kit off and your freak on you need to pay for VIP membership. It also has an internal economy with its own currency, "Rays", which have a (pretty stable) real-world exchange value. Real and virtual goods and services are for sale. There's a Camgirl Alley, where you can steer your avatar for interactive pornography. You can buy clothes, shoes and imaginary property. And if you can't persuade another player to sleep with you, there are others who will have avatar sex with you for Rays.
"There are professional working girls and some of them make quite a good living," says Brian Shuster, CEO of the Red Light Center's parent company Utherverse. "Even if you're only charging two or three dollars a time for virtual sex, that can quite quickly add up." These working girls pay rent to Utherverse for a place in the virtual bordello.
The site also hosts around 100 virtual weddings a month. "There's a justice of the peace, wedding planners, DJs, afterparties and so on," says Shuster. "These are third-party entrepreneurs. We have people that make $60,000-70,000 a year doing wedding dress design, DJ services or wedding planning services online."
Just like in the real world, you generally need to chat people up first. "A new user shows up and says: 'I want sex.' And the community will explain to this user that this is not appropriate behaviour here: we have our own set of standards and social mores, and if you don't adhere to those you're going to get ignored by everybody."
Are all these technological advances creating something authentically new, or simply let existing impulses flourish? The distinction may not be as clear as all that. Consider infidelity. For most people, having a partner use pornography in private probably wouldn't constitute infidelity. But where would you draw the line on interactive pornography? Is phone sex with a prerecorded chatline pornography, but phone sex with another person infidelity? If a virtual sex game – such as Thrixxx's 3D Sex Villa, where your avatar is going to have sex with a bot – isn't a problem, is the same true of something like Red Light Center, in which your avatar is having sex with an avatar controlled by another human being?
Then there's cybersex with someone who can bring you to orgasm by remote control: does that count as cheating? The remote-sex technologies sometimes called "teledildonics" are, in early crude forms, already with us. With names like Mojowijo, Lovepalz and RealTouch, these range from force-feedback vibrators plugged into your Nintendo, to self-lubricating artificial vaginas that – in sync with counterpart units on the other side of the world – will rub and squeeze to climax any penis you might be brave enough to put into them. Durex even briefly promoted his 'n' hers vibrating pants, or "funderwear", that could be controlled with a smartphone.
"We really are on the cusp of being able to have virtual sex that is damn close to the real thing," says Indiana University's Bryant Paul. And if anyone's in a position to know, it's him. Professor Paul teaches in the telecommunications department but his specialism is sex, media and new technology. "I go to parties and people are like, 'You're the porn professor!'" he laughs. "Everyone wants to talk to you. But in the final analysis you're studying something that goes right back to the beginning of the species, prior to the species. If you look at it in terms of understanding how we use media and technology to do something that we've always tried to do – get relationships, find mates – that's really very interesting. We are stone-age brains in the information age. Media sex is fast food for the stone-age brain."
Professor Paul has been married since 2001 and has daughters of eight and two. "People ask my wife: he's studying pornography – how do you deal with that? The way we always put it is: we like to eat. It's a job. I don't think people would look at my sex life or my media habits and think, wow, he consumes a lot of pornography. We would all be foolish to think that, while watching it clinically, you won't see things that are arousing – but it's possible to dissociate those things."
On the case in hand, he says: "If you look at interactive sex technology, there's a triple-A engine: affordability, accessibility and anonymity. Add to that that it augments what's possible: you can get more pleasure, more vibration, more thrust. A person who has a five inch penis can operate a 10 inch teledildonic device and see what that does to a person as they operate it. So that augmentation issue is very important: it offers the opportunity to improve, to augment the type of sex that people are having." He adds: "I've yet to meet a person that can vibrate at 120hz. And there's something to be said for that, you know? That the technology is potentially able to offer a level of pleasure that is higher than the real thing. That's going to have real ramifications for what people expect."
Serious work is being done on these augmentations. "The big condom companies are all getting into the vibration market," Paul says. "They're trying to find out the frequencies for optimal sexual response. I'm not at liberty to discuss the actual frequencies. [He is a consultant with Trojan on these experiments.] But, yes: there are frequencies that are more pleasurable than others. And it's not just about frequencies – it's about force amplitude. It matters about the size of the weight in the vibrator.
"What's cool is that we're figuring this stuff out. And these companies are now working, too, on the perfect substitute for skin. They're hiring researchers to say: how can we now make more perfect fake genitals? We're getting to a state where the science of sexual pleasure – synthetic sexual pleasure – is really taking off."
This sort of development, Paul points out, could have significant implications down the line for the way in which sex work is considered. "If you've got a woman or a man and you can go online and pay them to have sex with you over the internet, the spread of disease, and other harms, are gone. So how do you regulate that? Do you regulate that? Is there a need to?"
There are those who think we will one day be having sex not only through technology, but with technology itself. David Levy, author of Love And Sex With Robots, thinks that effectively functioning robots – crudely put, sexbots with sufficient artificial intelligence to manage pillow-talk and a fag afterwards – will be available within the next 30 or 40 years.
He thinks it unlikely that sex with robots will supplant the real thing, but says: "The simulation of something is very rarely quite as good as the something itself. I see the advantage of sexually empowered robots as being principally for those who find it difficult to make satisfactory sexual relations with other humans.
"To get to the stage where some people employ these products as their principal sexual partner or even only sexual partner – that will take longer. But as more and more people do it, the stigma will be reduced. To some extent it will be like the stigma that once attached to being gay. Until we got to the point in time where most people in society regard it as being a perfectly natural form of sexuality, the stigma attached was huge."
Could these robots change our sexual behaviour? "I think sexually empowered robots that are programmed with a lot of technique will be able to serve as teachers to those who want to and need to learn – and to help cure a lot of psychosexual problems, such as performance anxiety."
I ask Levy, a married man, what his wife would think if someone invented a sex robot and – out of academic interest – he wanted to sleep with it. "I don't think she would have a problem from the infidelity point of view," he says. "I do think she would think I was off my trolley."
For all the technology's utopian promises – that we can be in total control, that we can banish fear and shame, that we can reinvent ourselves as whoever we want to be – the real world and the online world continue to touch each other in complicated ways. Noel Biderman talks of the "digital lipstick" – "not lipstick on your collar, it's a text or a voice message" – that betrays the online cheater. The relationship therapist Andrew G Marshall described to me "an epidemic". "What the technology is selling people is an illusion: that it's possible to have a relationship online that doesn't touch your real world. I can't tell you how often I have people fighting in my room because someone's logged on to a dating site just to see what it is, and their partner has found them."
Sometimes those relationships can be healing and fulfilling. Sometimes they can be destructive and isolating. But the hope that new technology will open the door to a world of cost-free, shame-free polymorphous fulfilment is a hope that seems, day by day, to retreat beyond our grasp. Sex dwells in what the poet John Berryman called "the sweet switch of the body" – yet the virtual playgrounds of cyberspace transpose, dislocate and re-imagine our bodies for us. To be sexually intimate is to be properly known – and yet one of the most powerful drivers of online sexual activity is the promise of anonymity. The word that came up again and again, while I talked to people about a deeper, better connectedness, was "loneliness" •
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
Report: Apple preparing to make 3-5 million 'smart watches' per month beginning in October
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Apple Inc is preparing to sell its first wearable device this October, aiming to produce 3 million to 5 million smartwatches a month in its initial run, the Nikkei reported on Friday, citing an unidentified parts supplier and sources familiar with the matter.
Specifications are still being finalized, but the devices are likely to sport curved OLED (organic light-emitting diode) displays and sensors that collect health data from blood glucose and calorie consumption to sleep activity, the Japanese news service cited industry sources as saying.
The industry has long expected Apple to unveil some sort of smartwatch, following the release of Samsung Electronics' Galaxy Gear watches.
Wall Street is hoping to see a new Apple product this year to galvanize the former stock market darling's share price and end a years-long drought of ground-breaking devices. CEO Tim Cook has promised "new product categories" in 2014.
Apple declined to comment.
(Reporting by San Francisco newsroom. Editing by Andre Grenon)
[Image: The Apple logo is pictured at a retail store in the Marina neighborhood in San Francisco,California April 23, 2014. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith/Files]
Brazil World Cup to be kicked off by paraplegic in mind-controlled robotic exoskeleton
The ceremonial first kick of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil will be made by a paralyzed volunteer from the Association of Assistance to Disabled Children wearing a robotic exoskeleton that the user will be controlling with his or her mind.
The volunteer will wear electroencephalographic (EEG) headgear attached to a backpack computer that will translate their brainwave activity into commands that the robotic exoskeleton can understand. The exoskeleton will then send signals back to the computer and, through it, to the volunteer's brain, providing them with a restored sensation of walking.
The demonstration is not meant to present finished research or sell a particular company's technological innovation, but to introduce the world to the Walk Again Project, "a worldwide network of neuroscientists [who] intend to showcase the amazing power that a partnership between modern neuroscience and the leading edge of the computer industry could unleash in coming years." This consortium of over 150 neuroscientists and engineers hopes to use the world stage to "inspire" more research into brain machine interfaces (BMI).
"I spend my life chasing the storms that emanate from the hundreds of billions of cells that inhabit our brains," one of the founders of the Walk Again Project, Dr. Miguel Nicolelis, told The Verge. "What we want to do is listen to these brain symphonies and try to extract them from the messages they carry."
In 2000, Dr. Nicolelis and his team at the Center for Neuroengineering at Duke University taught primates to control robotic arms using only their thoughts. They also wired the brain of a monkey with microelectrodes and had it walk on a treadmill. They sent the recorded signals emanating from the monkey's brain to a robot in Japan, thereby allowing it to also walk on a treadmill.
The problems faced by researchers at the Walk Again Project is that invasive surgery was required to wire these primates' brain, and that they were not paralyzed during the experiments. The monkey on the treadmill actually walked on the treadmill, so the signals being recorded were based on lived experience. In patients who are paralyzed, the subconscious routines required for bipedal locomotion had atrophied -- in effect, they did not "remember" how to walk.
So the researchers immersed the volunteers in a virtual reality that allowed them to reacquire their sense of their own body -- the so-called "sixth" sense, proprioception.
"The brain is a remarkable instrument," Dr. Craig Henriquez told The Verge. "It has the ability to rewire itself, to create new connections. That’s what gives the BMI paradigm its power. You are not limited just by what you can physically engineer, because the brain evolves to better suit the interface."
The Walk Again Project has not released the identity of the volunteer who will make the ceremonial first kick, but only because they have not decided which of the eight test subjects is most comfortable in the suit yet. When asked, Dr. Nicolelis joked that the final decision will probably be made when the exoskeleton is completed, about "thirty minutes before" the opening kick.
Watch a demonstration of how the technology works via The Verge below.
[Image via Miguel Nicolelis and the Walk Again Project on Facebook]
6,000-year-old ignitor world's oldest solar device: author
Originally published on Green Building Elements.By John Perlin Special thanks to author John Perlin for this contribution about what is believed to be the world’s oldest solar device – a solar ignitor, or yang-sui . The material comes from Perlin…
Vodafone exposes secret worldwide network of government wiretaps
Wires allow agencies to listen to or record live conversations, in what privacy campaigners are calling a 'nightmare scenario'
Vodafone, one of the world's largest mobile phone groups, has revealed the existence of secret wires that allow government agencies to listen to all conversations on its networks, saying they are widely used in some of the 29 countries in which it operates in Europe and beyond.
The company has broken its silence on government surveillance in order to push back against the increasingly widespread use of phone and broadband networks to spy on citizens, and will publish its first Law Enforcement Disclosure Report on Friday. At 40,000 words, it is the most comprehensive survey yet of how governments monitor the conversations and whereabouts of their people.
The company said wires had been connected directly to its network and those of other telecoms groups, allowing agencies to listen to or record live conversations and, in certain cases, track the whereabouts of a customer. Privacy campaigners said the revelations were a "nightmare scenario" that confirmed their worst fears on the extent of snooping.
In Albania, Egypt, Hungary, India, Malta, Qatar, Romania, South Africa and Turkey, it is unlawful to disclose any information related to wiretapping or interception of the content of phone calls and messages including whether such capabilities exist.
"For governments to access phone calls at the flick of a switch is unprecedented and terrifying," said the Liberty director, Shami Chakrabarti. "[Edward] Snowden revealed the internet was already treated as fair game. Bluster that all is well is wearing pretty thin – our analogue laws need a digital overhaul."
In about six of the countries in which Vodafone operates, the law either obliges telecoms operators to install direct access pipes, or allows governments to do so. The company, which owns mobile and fixed broadband networks, including the former Cable & Wireless business, has not named the countries involved because certain regimes could retaliate by imprisoning its staff.
Direct-access systems do not require warrants, and companies have no information about the identity or the number of customers targeted. Mass surveillance can happen on any telecoms network without agencies having to justify their intrusion to the companies involved.
Industry sources say that in some cases, the direct-access wire, or pipe, is essentially equipment in a locked room in a network's central data centre or in one of its local exchanges or "switches".
The staff working in that room can be employed by the telecoms firm, but have state security clearance and are usually unable to discuss any aspect of their work with the rest of the company. Vodafone says it requires all employees to follow its code of conduct, but secrecy means that it cannot always verify that they do so.
Government agencies can also intercept traffic on its way into a data centre, combing through conversations before routing them on to the operator.
"These are the nightmare scenarios that we were imagining," said Gus Hosein, executive director of Privacy International, which has brought legal action against the British government over mass surveillance.
"I never thought the telcos [telecommunications companies] would be so complicit. It's a brave step by Vodafone and hopefully the other telcos will become more brave with disclosure, but what we need is for them to be braver about fighting back against the illegal requests and the laws themselves."
Vodafone's group privacy officer, Stephen Deadman, said: "These pipes exist, the direct access model exists.
"We are making a call to end direct access as a means of government agencies obtaining people's communication data. Without an official warrant, there is no external visibility. If we receive a demand we can push back against the agency. The fact that a government has to issue a piece of paper is an important constraint on how powers are used."
Vodafone is calling for all direct-access pipes to be disconnected, and for the laws that make them legal to be amended. It says governments should "discourage agencies and authorities from seeking direct access to an operator's communications infrastructure without a lawful mandate".
All states should publish annual data on the number of warrants issued, the company argues. There are two types – those for the content of calls and messages, and those for the metadata, which can cover the location of a target's device, the times and dates of communications, and the people with whom they communicated.
For brevity, the Guardian has also used the term metadata to cover warrants for customer information such as name and address. The information published in our table covers 2013 or the most recent year available. A single warrant can target hundreds of individuals and devices, and several warrants can target just one individual. Governments count warrants in different ways and New Zealand, for example, excludes those concerning national security. While software companies like Apple and Microsoft have jumped to publish the number of warrants they receive since the activities of America's NSA and Britain's GCHQ came to light, telecoms companies, which need government licences to operate, have been slower to respond.
In America, Verizon and AT&T have published data, but only on their domestic operations. Deutsche Telekom in Germany and Telstra in Australia have also broken ground at home. Vodafone is the first to produce a global survey.
It shows that Malta is one of the most spied on nations in Europe. The former British protectorate has a tiny population of 420,000, but last year Vodafone alone processed 3,773 requests for metadata.
In Italy, where the mafia's presence requires a high level of police intrusion, Vodafone received 606,000 metadata requests, more than any other country in which it runs networks. The number of warrants across all operators is potentially many times that number, but the government does not publish a national figure for metadata.
Italy's parliament does disclose content warrants, however, and it issued 141,000 in 2012, compared with just 2,760 in the United Kingdom. In contrast to the UK, terrorism concerns mean Ireland does not allow any information on the number of content warrants to be made public.
Spain, which has suffered terrorist strikes from Islamists and Basque separatists, allowed Vodafone to disclose that it had received over 24,000 content warrants. Agencies in the Czech Republic made nearly 8,000 content requests from the network. After Italy, the Czech Republic is the biggest user of metadata, issuing 196,000 warrants nationally in the most recent year for which information has been published. Tanzania, one of several African countries in which Vodafone operates, made 99,000 metadata requests from the company.
Peter Micek, policy counsel at the campaign group Access, said: "In a sector that has historically been quiet about how it facilitates government access to user data, Vodafone has for the first time shone a bright light on the challenges of a global telecom giant, giving users a greater understanding of the demands governments make of telcos. Vodafone's report also highlights how few governments issue any transparency reports, with little to no information about the number of wiretaps, cell site tower dumps, and other invasive surveillance practices."
On the question of whether the UK uses direct-access pipes, Vodafone's Deadman said such a system would be illegal because Britain did not permit agencies to obtain information without a warrant. The law does, however, allow indiscriminate collection of information on an unidentified number of targets. "We need to debate how we are balancing the needs of law enforcement with the fundamental rights and freedoms of the citizens. The ideal is we get a much more informed debate going, and we do all of that without putting our colleagues in danger."
Snowden, the National Security Agency whistleblower, joined Google, Reddit, Mozilla and other tech firms and privacy groups on Thursday to call for a strengthening of privacy rights online in a "Reset the net" campaign.
Twelve months after revelations about the scale of the US government's surveillance programs were first published in the Guardian and the Washington Post, Snowden said: "One year ago, we learned that the internet is under surveillance, and our activities are being monitored to create permanent records of our private lives – no matter how innocent or ordinary those lives might be. Today, we can begin the work of effectively shutting down the collection of our online communications, even if the U.S. Congress fails to do the same."
© Guardian News and Media 2014
[Image: "Young Man Talking On Mobile Phone," via Shutterstock]
Calif. lawmakers propose incentives for Tesla Motors battery factory
By Jennifer Chaussee
SACRAMENTO Calif. (Reuters) - California lawmakers proposed financial incentives for electric car maker Tesla Motors Inc on Thursday in a bid to entice the company to build a large battery factory in the most populous U.S. state.
Palo Alto, California-based Tesla is preparing to choose a location for a proposed $5 billion lithium-ion battery plant dubbed the "gigafactory." The project is expected to employ 6,500 workers.
"California has set the example for the world in battling climate change and promoting innovative technology to lower carbon emissions," said California Democratic state Senate leader Darrell Steinberg, who introduced the bill to create the incentives along with Republican state Senator Ted Gaines.
"This factory would help us achieve the dual goals of strengthening our economy and fostering more clean technology and renewable energy," Steinberg added.
The bill, which needs a two-thirds majority vote from both houses of the legislature, aims to expedite approval processes for breaking ground on the factory and offer Tesla a series of tax cuts. The bill does not yet have language detailing the specific incentives.
It was introduced after Tesla CEO Elon Musk criticized California's business regulations in a call with investors on Tuesday, describing the state's approval process for building green technology sites as complex and lengthy, and saying other states have a "more streamlined approach."
"Everything is on the table – tax credits, investment credits, hiring credits," Gaines said. "We need to show Tesla that we'll cut through the knot of red tape that frustrates companies in this state and prove that California is open for business."
Fears that Tesla might take its business outside California to avoid state regulations spurred a bipartisan partnership between Steinberg and Gaines. Both of their districts are in and around Sacramento County. They are aiming to lure Tesla into building its factory on a former military base in the county.
"California will have to meet the same criteria as other locations in terms of speed to implementation. Speed is of the essence," said Shanna Hendriks, a spokeswoman for Tesla.
(Additional reporting by Rory Carroll in San Francisco; Editing by Cynthia Johnston)
[Image: California Senate President Pro Tempore Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) speaks to reporters after Governor Jerry Brown delivered his State of the State address at the Capitol in Sacramento, California, Jan. 22, 2014. By Max Whittaker for Reuters]
New bugs found in software that caused 'Heartbleed' cyber threat
By Jim Finkle
BOSTON (Reuters) - Security researchers have uncovered new bugs in the Web encryption software that caused the pernicious “Heartbleed” Internet threat that surfaced in April.
Experts said the newly discovered vulnerabilities in OpenSSL, which could allow hackers to spy on communications, do not appear to be as serious a threat as "Heartbleed."
The new bugs were disclosed on Thursday as the group responsible for developing that software released an OpenSSL update that contains seven security fixes.
Experts said that websites and technology firms that use OpenSSL technology should install the update on their systems as quickly as possible. Still, they said that could take several days or weeks because companies need to first test systems to make sure they are compatible with the update.
"They are going to have to patch. This will take some time," said Lee Weiner, senior vice president with cybersecurity software maker Rapid7.
OpenSSL technology is used on about two-thirds of all websites, including ones run by Amazon.com Inc , Facebook Inc , Google Inc and Yahoo Inc . It is also incorporated into thousands of technology products from companies, including Cisco Systems Inc , Hewlett-Packard Co , IBM , Intel Corp and Oracle Corp .
The widespread "Heartbleed" bug surfaced in April when it was disclosed that the flaw potentially exposed users of those websites and technologies to attack by hackers who could steal large quantities of data without leaving a trace. That prompted fear that attackers may have compromised large numbers of networks without their knowledge.
Security experts said on Thursday that the newly discovered bugs are more difficult to exploit than "Heartbleed," making those vulnerabilities less of a threat.
Still, until users of the technology update their systems, "there is a window of opportunity" for sophisticated hackers to launch attacks and exploit the newly uncovered vulnerabilities, said Tal Klein, vice president of strategy with cloud security firm Adallom.
(Editing by Jonathan Oatis)
[Image: 'Computer security,' via Shutterstock]
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