Video game rewards fair players

5 November 2012 Last updated at 05:59 ET

A system that rewards good behaviour is helping make online game League of Legends (LoL) more pleasant to play.

The hugely popular battle game is known for its toxic chat channels and the abuse players heap upon each other.

To curb the worst excesses, LoL maker Riot Games asked social scientists and statisticians to design an in-game system that rewards fair play.

Early reports suggest the system has worked, leading to less bad behaviour and fewer insults being thrown.

League of Legends revolves around small teams of players battling to destroy strategic points on a game map. In October, market data suggested that more than 12 million people were playing it every day.

Called Honor, the LoL reward system gives players points they can use to reward those they have just played against if they exhibit any one of four traits: friendly, helpful, using teamwork or being an honourable opponent.

Soon after the Honor system was brought in statistics suggest it has been effective. In the first month it was active Riot saw a 35% drop in offensive language used in normal-rated games and a drop of 41% in verbal abuse in the same types of games.

Rewards scrutinised

Similar systems exist in other games but Jeffrey Lin, one of Riot's game developers, said the experts it had used to build the Honor system had designed it so players could not rig it in their favour. Friends who only played and rewarded each other would be found out, he said, and it would also spot players who exhibited "toxic" behaviour but were getting good votes from their friends.

Limits on the number of Honor points that can be given out helped with this, he said, as did the mechanics of the system which gave much more weight to Honor points given by strangers than those awarded by friends.

Writing about the Honor system on girl geek blog The Mary Sue, Becky Chambers said many players were happy that Honor had curbed abusive behaviour in LoL.

Some regular LoL players said they were "astonished" that the Honor system was working even though it gave no tangible rewards to those that played fair.

Ms Chambers said the system was perhaps working well because of the effect it had on the mass of players who were neither good nor bad.

"This approach addresses a trend I've seen throughout public multiplayer games," she wrote. "I have often had the impression that a lot of bad behaviour online — both in-game and otherwise — is based in social mimicry."

Giving people a good example encouraged neutral players to do likewise, she said. By contrast before now the only example of how to behave on LoL has been "the loudest, most dominant players are acting like jackasses without consequence".

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Apple slammed over Samsung notice

1 November 2012 Last updated at 10:39 ET

Apple has 48 hours to re-write a statement on its website relating to its design rights dispute with Samsung, UK judges have ruled.

Apple was forced on 18 October to publish a message making it clear that Samsung had not infringed the iPad's registered design.

However Samsung complained the statement Apple had posted did not comply with the court order.

Judges agreed and have told Apple it must be removed within 24 hours.

A new, compliant version must then be posted.

Michael Beloff QC, representing Apple, told judges that the company had thought that it had complied with the court order.

"It's not designed to punish," he said.

"It's not designed to make us grovel. The only purpose must be to dispel commercial uncertainty."

He asked that the company be given 14 days to post the replacement - but the request was firmly denied.

Lord Justice Longmore told Mr Beloff: "We are just amazed that you cannot put the right notice up at the same time as you take the other one down."

One of the other judges, Sir Robin Jacob, added: "I would like to see the head of Apple [Tim Cook] make an affidavit about why that is such a technical difficulty for the Apple company."

Apple told the BBC it did not want to comment further.

'Horse's mouth'

Samsung complained that the notice posted by Apple was "inaccurate and misleading" because it added comments about other rulings in Germany and the US that had gone in the iPad-maker's favour.

"This has received enormous publicity and has perpetuated confusion as to Samsung's entitlement to market the Galaxy tablet computers in issue," a Samsung lawyer said in a written statement to judges.

"It has created the impression that the UK court is out of step with other courts."

The UK's ruling applies to the whole of the EU.

The court order is the latest twist in an ongoing legal saga involving the two companies.

Apple brought the case to the UK courts, alleging that Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10 had infringed the design of its iPad.

But in July, Judge Colin Birss disagreed on the grounds that Samsung's product was not as "cool".

His ruling meant that Apple was denied the opportunity to impose a sales ban on Samsung's products.

Apple was unsuccessful in appealing the ruling, and was ordered to place a notice on its website, newspapers and magazines explaining that Samsung had not infringed its designs.

The intention, judges said, was not to make Apple "grovel", but to remove "commercial uncertainty" surrounding Samsung's products.

"A consumer might well think: 'I had better not buy a Samsung - maybe it's illegal and if I buy one it may not be supported'," Sir Robin said.

"Apple itself must (having created the confusion) make the position clear: that it acknowledges that the court has decided that that these Samsung products do not infringe its registered design.

"The acknowledgement must come from the horse's mouth."

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Huge fine for sharing pornography

2 November 2012 Last updated at 06:33 ET

An American man has been hit with a $1.5m (£932,000) fine for pirating 10 gay porn movies via BitTorrent.

A federal court in Illinois awarded the damages of $150,000 per movie to Flava Works - the creator of the pornographic films.

The figure is believed to the biggest awarded in a file-sharing case.

The award is thought to be so large because the accused, Kywan Fisher, did not defend himself against claims that he pirated the movies.

In court, Flava Works presented evidence which it said demonstrated that Mr Fisher was the person who put copies of its films on a BitTorrent site.

In its evidence, Flava revealed that it had embedded unique codes in the copies of its films that customers pay to view. Digital detective work connected the code in the pirated films back to Mr Fisher, who had earlier signed up as a customer of Flava and paid to view the movies.

Once shared via BitTorrent the films were downloaded or viewed 3,449 times, said Flava during its court statements.

Flava claimed Mr Fisher had exhibited "wilful copyright infringement" and violated the terms and conditions of the pay-to-view video service he signed up for.

US Judge John Lee noted Flava's evidence in his summary and said in light of that and the lack of any defence or objection by Mr Fisher, he had no choice but to issue a default judgement in favour of the adult movie maker.

It is not clear whether Mr Fisher will appeal against the judgement or whether he can pay the fine.

Mr Fisher was one of 15 people that Flava pursued for pirating its movies. However, the cases against all the others were dropped earlier this year for lack of evidence.

Many content creators, including movie studios and record labels, have pursued pirates in the courts using net, or IP, addresses as evidence.

However, many of these cases have been dropped as in May, a US federal judge ruled that an IP address was not sufficient evidence to accuse a person of being a pirate.

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UK government backs open IT rules

2 November 2012 Last updated at 07:44 ET

The UK government is drawing up a set of open technology standards all future IT projects must comply with.

The standards will dictate how data should be formatted and the ways that software should interoperate.

The push for open standards builds on earlier work to standardise the hardware on which government services are built.

The decision to mandate the open standards follows a four-month consultation exercise.

"For too long, government IT has been too expensive, over-specified and run in contract structures that encourage complexity, duplication and fragmented user services," said Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude in a speech announcing the strategy.

The standards the government wanted to adopt would favour smaller, innovative tech firms and would demand compliance with open data formats and protocols from every IT supplier, he said.

In the technology world, open standards stand in opposition to proprietary formats. As their name implies they let everyone that wants to look at how a program is built or data is formatted.

This openness helps to flush out bugs in software and makes it easier for data to travel and be re-used as programmers can easily see how it is structured.

'Lag behind'

From 1 November, said Mr Maude, government departments applying for cash to bankroll IT projects must refer to open standards when drawing up their proposals.

Departments and agencies could apply for an exemption, he said, but warned that the process of winning one would be "challenging".

Only by standardising the way that departments dealt with data would the government be able to significantly cut its IT bill, he said.

The lack of common ways of working with data held back the push to put more public services online, he said.

"At the moment we lag behind," said Mr Maude. "For example, 74% of people use the internet for car insurance, but only 51% buy car tax online."

He said this was "inefficient" as digital channels were "much cheaper than post, phone, or face to face interactions".

Some steps towards more open government technology had already been taken, said Mr Maude. The infrastructure underpinning official IT was being standardised and some services all departments use had been made available centrally.

To take this further, he said, work had begun on the guidebook that would detail the open standards that departments and suppliers would be expected to work to.

Only by becoming more open would departments "migrate away" from big, sclerotic contracts to the digital future, said Mr Maude.

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Facebook flaw bypasses passwords

2 November 2012 Last updated at 08:39 ET

Facebook has moved quickly to shut down a loophole which made some accounts accessible without a password.

The bug was exposed in a message posted to the Hacker News website.

The message contained a search string that, when used on Google, returned a list of links to 1.32 million Facebook accounts.

In some cases clicking on a link logged in to that account without the need for a password. All the links exposed the email addresses of Facebook users.

Throwaway account

The message posted to Hacker News used a search syntax that exposed a system used by Facebook that lets users quickly log back in to their account.

Email alerts about status updates and notifications often contain a link that lets a user of the social network respond quickly by clicking it to log in in to their account.

In a comment added to the Hacker News message, Facebook security engineer Matt Jones said the links were typically only sent to the email addresses of account holders. Links sent in this way can only be clicked once.

"For a search engine to come across these links, the content of the emails would need to have been posted online," he wrote. Mr Jones suspected this is what happened as many of the email addresses exposed were for throwaway mail sites or for services that did a bad job of protecting archived messages.

Most of the million or so links exposed would already have expired, said Mr Jones.

"Regardless, due to some of these links being disclosed, we've turned the feature off until we can better ensure its security for users whose email contents are publicly visible," he said.

Mr Jones added that Facebook had taken steps to secure the accounts of people who had been exposed by the flaw. Many of the exposed accounts were in Russia and China.

In an official statement, Facebook said the links were sent "directly to private email addresses to help people easily access their accounts, and we never made them publicly available or crawlable."

However, it said, the links were then posted elsewhere online which led to them being indexed on search engines.

It said: "While we have always had protections on these private links to provide an additional layer of security, we have since disabled their functionality completely and are remediating the accounts of anyone who recently used this feature."

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Teenager launches top selling app

2 November 2012 Last updated at 08:45 ET

A smartphone app which provides summaries of news stories soared to number nine in Apple's app store just two hours after its release in the US.

The app, called Summly, was designed by 17-year-old Londoner Nick D'Aloisio, and has received more than $1m in funding from investors.

High-profile supporters include Stephen Fry, Tech City CEO Joanna Shields and Newscorp owner Rupert Murdoch.

However some early reviewers have described the app as "confusing".

"Navigation unclear," wrote Oliver Devereux on the app store's review page, while another described it as "quite unintuitive".

But the app is still rating an average score of four out of five possible stars from users overall.

Mr D'Aloisio took time off school to develop his idea for a smartphone application that offers summaries of existing news stories published on the net.

The free-to-download app uses algorithms to process news stories into summaries which users can then swipe to see in full if they wish.

"We worked hard on an interface that looks like nothing else on iPhone," he told the BBC.

"We merged algorithm with beautiful design. It's summarising thousands of articles every minute."

'Big visions'

Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play.

Nick D'Aloisio talks to Jane Wakefield about the app in December 2011

Mr D'Aloisio, who celebrated his 17th birthday on Thursday, has appointed Bart Swanson, who oversaw the roll-out of retailer Amazon in Europe, to chair the company behind Summly.

"I see big visions for the company longer term," the teenager said.

"We can really become the de-facto format for news on mobile. People are not scrolling through 1,000-word articles - they want snack-sized information."

In the longer term Mr D'Aloisio would like to see users make micro-payments to read some stories in full should they choose to view the entire article.

"Traditionally publishers have been confined to a paywall system," he said. "You can either give away the headline or the full article. But we can really sell the summary level."

Mr D'Aloisio now intends to finish his education and go to university - but he also wants to remain involved in the company.

"I'm going to do my best to stay, I'm the founder and it's my vision and I want to see that through," he said.

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Apple paid only 2% tax outside US

4 November 2012 Last updated at 09:08 ET

Apple paid less than 2% corporation tax on its profits outside the US, its filing with US regulators has shown.

The company paid $713m (£445m) in the year to 29 September on foreign pre-tax profits of $36.8bn, a rate of 1.9%.

It is the latest company to be identified as paying low rates of overseas tax, following Starbucks, Facebook and Google in recent weeks.

It has not been suggested that any of their tax avoidance schemes are illegal.

All of the companies pay considerable amounts of other taxes in the UK, such as National Insurance, and raise large sums of VAT.

Apple's figures for foreign tax appear on page 61 of its form 10-K filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The form is used to summarise the performance of public companies.

It had paid a rate of 2.5% the previous year.

Apple channels much of its business in Europe through a subsidiary in the Republic of Ireland, which has lower corporation tax than Britain.

But even Ireland charges 12.5%, compared with Britain's 24%.

Many multinational companies manage to pay substantially below the official corporation tax rates by using tax havens such as Caribbean islands.

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Legion encourages online silence

4 November 2012 Last updated at 23:35 ET

The Royal British Legion says it is to be the first UK organisation to use a social media tool to encourage people to mark the two-minute silence.

It will use Thunderclap to allow Twitter and Facebook users to simultaneously send the same message.

The message: "I'll be remembering the fallen at 11 o'clock #2MinuteSilence #LestWeForget," will be sent at 09:00 GMT on Remembrance Sunday.

Thunderclap has been used by the UN to support World Humanitarian Day.

The charity hopes thousands of the UK's estimated 10 million Twitter and 33 million Facebook users will take part in The Royal British Legion's Two Minute Silence Thunderclap.

Continue reading the main story

We hope to create the largest ever show of online remembrance"

End Quote Helen Hill, Royal British Legion

Ultimate sacrifice

Helen Hill, head of remembrance at The Royal British Legion, said: "We hope to create the largest ever show of online remembrance by using the communicative power of social media to remind millions of Britons that they have a very personal opportunity to honour the men and women who paid the ultimate sacrifice."

Thunderclap describes itself as the "first-ever crowdspeaking platform that helps users be heard by saying something together" and has been used by a number of international charities and causes.

Hashem Bajwa, spokesman for Thunderclap, said: "Twitter is a wonderful way to say something, but it's difficult to be heard.

"Thunderclap lets people be heard by saying something together."

The act of observing a two-minute silence began in 1919 following the Armistice at 11am on 11 November 1918 at the end of World War I.

The Royal British Legion is the UK's leading armed forces charity and it ensures those who gave their lives in wars and conflicts are remembered.

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Hackers set up Guy Fawkes protest

5 November 2012 Last updated at 07:59 ET

A series of website hacks over the past 24 hours has been attributed to the online hacktivist group Anonymous.

The websites of US broadcaster NBC, pop singer Lady Gaga and the Australian government have all been attacked.

Some of the hacked websites displayed a rhyme about 5 November, when Guy Fawkes's attempt to destroy Parliament in 1605 is marked in the UK.

Paypal and security firm Symantec said they were investigating whether they had also been compromised.

Both companies have been linked to the latest attacks, in various online reports.

Paypal said it had "no evidence" of a security breach, but a list of nearly 28,000 passwords claiming to belong to Paypal accounts was posted online overnight.

"Paypal hacked by Anonymous as part of our November 5th protest," read a tweet by the collective, along with a link to the passwords, which has now been taken down.

Symantec said it took "each and every claim" of an attack on its systems seriously.

"Our first priority is to make sure that any customer information remains protected," it said in a statement.

Continue reading the main story

• Guy Fawkes was among a group of disaffected Catholics who, in 1605, plotted to blow up the House of Lords in a bid to kill King James I
• Although born into a Protestant family, Fawkes later converted and by 21 was in Europe fighting for Catholic Spain in the Eighty Years War
• In 1603, petitioned Spain's King Philip III to support a rebellion against the "heretic" English king - but was turned down
• Fawkes was later approached to join the Gunpowder Plot - his role was to source and ignite the barrels
• The plot was foiled when Fawkes was arrested under the Lords on 4 November 1605. He was tortured for two days and later executed

Source: BBC History

Surveillance theme

A video posted to YouTube called on Anonymous members and activists around the world to "act now against overall surveillance systems".

It argued that systems like Trapwire and Indect, which use CCTV data and number plate readers to identify individuals and try to predict criminal activity, are a breach of privacy.

UK privacy and civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch has previously described such projects as demonstrating "a dangerously heavy-handed attitude towards the public".

Members of the online group wear distinctive Guy Fawkes masks, like the one used in the film V for Vendetta, when demonstrating in public.

It is thought that most Anonymous members are unknown even to each other.

Anonymous has pursued the Australian government before over its proposals to introduce a country-wide internet filter it says will block pornographic and criminal material.

At time of writing the Australian government website is operating normally, but new-age website ascensionaustralia.com.au carries a message from Anonymous suggesting the government is compromising the online privacy of its citizens.

"When will governments learn that the internet will never be controlled and we will not allow governments to trample on our civil liberties and our basic digital privacy rights?" reads the statement on the front page of the site.

Many of the websites hacked so far are currently operating normally again.

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China hack 'targeted' Coca-Cola

5 November 2012 Last updated at 09:48 ET

Chinese hackers have been blamed for infiltrating confidential systems within Coca-Cola for more than a month, Bloomberg has reported.

The fizzy drink firm was breached in 2009 when a malicious link was emailed to a senior executive.

Hackers were able to spend a month operating undetected, logging commercially sensitive information.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said Coca-Cola did not publicly disclose the attack.

Last year the SEC outlined guidelines for companies who had been hit by cyber-attacks, saying that transparency on the issue was in the interest of investors and other stakeholders.

However, companies have so far been reluctant to do so - fearing for reputational loss and negative impact on stock price.

"Investors have no idea what is happening today," Jacob Olcott, a former cyber policy adviser to the US Congress told the financial news agency.

"Companies currently provide little information about material events that occur on their networks."

Collapsed deal

In Coca-Cola's case, hackers masqueraded as Coca-Cola's chief executive, sending an email to Paul Etchells, Coca-Cola's deputy president for the Pacific region.

The email contained a malicious link which was clicked on - allowing for hackers to install keyloggers and other forms of malware on Mr Etchells' machine.

In the days that followed, hackers took emails and stole passwords to give themselves administrative privileges on the network.

The infiltration was - according to internal documents seen by Bloomberg - blamed on state-backed Chinese attackers.

The hack came at a time when Coca-Cola was looking to acquire the China Huiyuan Juice Group for about $2.4bn. Had the takeover happened, it would have been the largest foreign takeover of a Chinese company.

However, the deal collapsed three days after the cyber-attack, Bloomberg said, citing internal sources.

Coca-Cola told the BBC in a statement: "Our company's security team manages security risks in conjunction with the appropriate security and law enforcement organisations around the world.

"As a matter of practice, we do not comment on security matters."

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