Eye-tracking Samsung Galaxy unveiled

14 March 2013 Last updated at 20:52 ET By Dave Lee Technology reporter, BBC News

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The BBC's Michelle Fleury takes a look at the Galaxy S4, and asks whether it has more than just initial "wow factor"

Samsung has launched a smartphone which allows users to control its 5in (12.5cm) screen using only their eyes.

The Galaxy S4 follows on from last year's S3, a product that sold over 40 million units worldwide.

At a lavish, Broadway-themed event in New York, the company also demonstrated the phone's ability to take two different pictures at once.

Analysts widely regard Samsung to be the biggest challenger to Apple's dominance of mobile products.

The Galaxy S4 will be rolled out globally at the end of April.

Following the launch, shares in Samsung fell 1.7% in early trade in Seoul on Friday amid worries the market for phone upgrades was "flattening out".

The company's head of mobile communications, JK Shin said 327 mobile operators in 155 countries will carry the handset.

In the UK, Vodafone, Three, Orange, T-Mobile and EE have all announced plans to offer the device on their networks.

Through a series of role-playing scenes, the South Korean firm demonstrated the phone's key features.

Much was made of the device's ability to be controlled without touching it.

Using "Smart pause", the user can pause a video by looking away from the screen.

Additionally, the "Smart Scroll" software analyses the user's eyes and wrist to scroll through emails and other content.

'Gimmicky'

"The debut of nifty eye motion-sensitive controls to allow users to pause video and scroll through pages using eye movements alone is smart," said telecoms expert Ernest Doku from uSwitch.com.

"For commuters crammed in trains - or just those who love a bit of futuristic tech that makes their lives easier - this novel feature will really help the Galaxy S4 to stand out."

Continue reading the main story

The 5in display is the belle of the ball"

End Quote David Pierce The Verge

However, Charles Golvin from Forrester Research worried the swathes of new features may alienate some customers.

"The larger question is how much of this stuff can people actually use," he told the BBC.

"There's no question that there's a lot of powerful technology and innovative features - but whether people will care about them or use them I'm not sure.

"Including an image of yourself in a picture that you're taking for someone else - yes, I think that's a bit gimmicky.

"But on the video side, for a live chat where it's compositing you and your image to show both you and what you're seeing - that's not a gimmick."

Lighter and thinner

In another scene, depicting a backpacker in Shanghai, the phone was shown to translate English text into Chinese speech - before translating Chinese speech back into English text.

The dual camera feature makes use of the device's front and rear cameras simultaneously, blending the pictures together to make sure the picture taker is not "left out".

The rear has a 13 megapixel camera, while the user-facing camera captures pictures at 2 megapixels.

The phone weighs 130g, and is 7.9mm thick - making it slightly lighter and thinner than the S3.

The device uses Samsung's HD AMOLED technology, giving the S4's screen - which is marginally bigger than the S3's - a resolution of 441 pixels-per-inch.

As predicted by several industry experts before the event, most of the presentation focused on the phone's software rather than hardware.

As well as the "touchless" technology, the company also introduced the Samsung Hub - a multimedia storage facility that can be shared across multiple Samsung devices.

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Net's 'bad neighbourhoods' mapped

15 March 2013 Last updated at 07:14 ET

About 50% of all junk mail on the net emerges from just 20 internet service providers (ISPs), a study has found.

The survey of more than 42,000 ISPs tried to map the net's "bad neighbourhoods" to help pinpoint sources of malicious mail.

The survey by a researcher in the Netherlands found that, in many cases, ISPs specialise in particular threats such as spam and phishing.

Methods to thwart attacks and predict targets also emerged from the study.

The large-scale study was carried out to help fine-tune computer security tools that scrutinise the net addresses of email and other messages to help them work out if they are junk or legitimate. Such tools could make better choices if they were armed with historical information about the types of traffic that emerge from particular networks.

In his analysis Giovane Cesar Moreira Moura who studied at the University of Twente found that some networks could be classed as "bad neighbourhoods" because, just like in the real world, they were places where malicious activity was more likely.

Of the 42,201 ISPs studied about 50% of all junk mail, phishing attacks and other malicious messages came from just 20 networks, he found. Many of these networks were concentrated in India, Vietnam and Brazil. On the net's most crime-ridden network - Spectranet in Nigeria - 62% of all the addresses controlled by that ISP were seen to be sending out spam.

Networks involved in malicious activity also tended to specialise in one particular sort of malicious message or attack, he discovered. For instance, the majority of phishing attacks came from ISPs based in the US. By contrast, spammers tend to favour Asian ISPs. Indian ISP BSNL topped the list of spam sources in the study.

Analysis tools

Mr Moreira Moura pointed out that malicious traffic coming from one network did not reveal its ultimate source. Many cybercriminals route spam and other traffic through hijacked PCs or send it across compromised corporate networks that join the net via an ISP.

The data gathered for the study is helping to create analysis tools that will do a better job of assessing whether traffic coming from sources never seen before is good or bad. In the same way that people avoid walking through parts of towns and cities known to be dangerous, security tools can start to filter traffic from ISPs known as historical sources of malicious messages.

"If security engineers want to reduce the incidence of attacks on the internet, they should start by tackling networks where attacks are more frequently originated," he wrote the in the research paper.

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Justgiving donations site crashes

15 March 2013 Last updated at 08:05 ET

Fund-raising website JustGiving has crashed just as Red Nose Day gets under way.

Some people raising cash for Comic Relief were planning on using the site to gather funds as they did stunts on the appeal's main day.

The site crashed about 10:00 GMT and, so far, it has not been possible to make any donations.

JustGiving said that the overall impact on Red Nose Day would be small as Comic Relief ran its own donations site.

The organisation said donating via text still worked and it was tying to get the site back in action.

A spokesperson for Just Giving said a problem at its hosting company took it and many other websites offline.

Although donations could not be made via Just Giving on Red Nose Day, it was unlikely that the main fund-raising effort of Comic Relief would suffer as a result, said the spokesperson. Just Giving was a "peripheral partner" for Comic Relief and only a few tens of thousands was raised for the cause via the site.

Comic Relief encourages backers to set up their own page via the charity's main site and most cash would arrive via that route, said the spokesperson.

People raising money for charity use JustGiving as an easy way for people to pledge cash to their project, stunt or event. Cash can be donated via individual pages set up on the site.

JustGiving used its Twitter account and Facebook page to apologise for the website being unreachable.

"Our tech team are on it & we hope to be back up asap," said the organisation in one tweet. Later it said the problem had been traced to "network problems" at its service provider which was also trying to get them fixed.

JustGiving reassured its users that money pledged to them was safe and the site had not been compromised. Those wanting to donate cash could still do so via text message, it said.

While the main site was offline, Just Giving set up a webpage that apologised for the problems and directed people to other ways of donating.

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Gamer hacks SimCity to run offline

15 March 2013 Last updated at 08:52 ET

SimCity has almost been turned into a single-player game by an enterprising hacker.

By modifying the game's code, the hacker has made it possible to play the game offline almost indefinitely.

The feat sits at odds with assertions by Electronic Arts (EA) that the game requires a permanent online link.

EA said the "always on" requirement contributed to big problems at launch as it tried to keep different players' cities co-ordinated.

Soon after SimCity was launched on 5 March, many people reported that they were having to wait up to 30 minutes or more to play the game.

Others reported sluggish performance and others bugs as they played. EA said these problems occurred because many aspects of the game were shared and the sheer number of people trying to play overwhelmed servers.

The ongoing problems led EA to apologise for the "dumb" way it set up the launch and led to it adding servers behind the scenes to spread the load.

However, claims that the title needs to be permanently connected so data can be shared have been whittled away by players. Some have unplugged their web connection and found that SimCity can last for 20 minutes before it needs to check in with back-end servers.

The always-online requirement won criticism from many players who said it was unnecessary and was more about preventing piracy than improving gameplay.

Now, a gamer going by the alias of AzzerUK has revealed on social news site Reddit how he turned off the requirement to be online all the time.

By rewriting the game's code during "debug mode" AzzerUK turned off the game's disconnect timer so it never checked whether it was online or offline. He also fiddled with other values to almost convert it to an offline, single-player game.

City saved

"Your PC can handle your entire city simulation without any help from the internet or EA's servers," he wrote in a detailed explanation posted to the Pastie website. Videos showing the game working offline were also posted to YouTube.

The work lent weight to claims made on the Rock Paper Shotgun website by an unnamed worker at SimCity Creator Maxis who said a permanent connection was not always needed.

However, added AzzerUK, there was no way as yet to save a copy of a city to a home PC. Instead the copy had to be downloaded from EA's servers.

"Local saves will not be possible with simple editing, but may be possible with some serious work and ingenuity," he said.

EA said it did not comment on "rumour and speculation" when asked about AzzerUK's hack by games news site Eurogamer.

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CO2 rules 'will save drivers cash'

17 March 2013 Last updated at 21:28 ET By Roger Harrabin Environment analyst

Drivers will save £3,300 (€3,800) over the lifetime of their cars if the EU imposes strict new standards on manufacturers, a report claims.

It says if CO2 emissions from the average car were limited to 95g per km, fuel use would be cut by a quarter.

The innovations to the vehicle would add about £860 (€1,000) to the price of the average car in 2020.

But that extra cost would be offset in less than three years through fuel savings of around £350 (€400) per year.

The joint report from consultancies Cambridge Econometrics and Ricardo-AEA says that once all EU cars and vans meet the standard, Europe's vehicle fleet will be €35bn cheaper to run each year.

The report is timed to coincide with the first of a series of votes in the European Parliament on car standards.

The 95g limit is proposed by the Commission. It argues that strict standards are essential to sustain the competitiveness of Europe's car makers and help the EU meet its targets of reducing transport CO2 emissions 60% by 2050.

Price point

The technology is available: cars like the Ford Focus ECOnetic are already achieving the proposed 2020 standard.

The plans may be contentious in Parliament, though, with some German MEPs fearing their impact on manufacturers building bigger, heavier cars.

Monday's report was commissioned by a group of organisations which believe that Europe's car makers need to ratchet up efficiency to compete with US manufacturers facing President Obama's demand of 93g/km in 2025 – a demanding target for US car makers starting from a low base.

The new report estimates that increased spending on vehicle technology will create 350,000-450,000 net additional jobs if the 95g limit is imposed in Europe. This figure will doubtless be contested.

The study was funded by a group including Nissan, the European Association of Automotive Suppliers, GE, the union body IndustriAll and the European Climate Foundation. It focuses only on traditional-engine cars.

Improvements are likely to come from many innovations, including building cars from aluminium – much lighter than steel – and installing universal stop-start technology which turns off the engine at traffic lights.

Volkswagen has already committed itself to the 95g target.

In the run-up to the Geneva Motor Show, Volkswagen's Martin Winterkorn said the firm intended to become the world's most environmentally sustainable car maker: "This is a Herculean task calling for the best efforts of all our 40,000 developers. We can do it."

The European car makers' association ACEA told me the rules would harm some manufacturers.

A spokesman warned: "Price is the number-one factor motivating a customer's purchasing decision. In a sector where margins are narrow and consumers have a wide range of choice, even a slight relative price rise can make a manufacturer's range uncompetitive."

The authors of Monday's study point out that this argument underlines the need for new standards to ensure a level playing field for all car makers.

But ACEA continued: "The fact that a car may be cheaper to run once on the road is not relevant if the consumer cannot afford the new technology and instead opts for a used car, with higher emissions – or for keeping his old vehicle, again with higher emissions."

The campaign group Transport and Environment says this is an old argument from an industry which has been forced by previous standards to improve efficiency and reduce fuel bills. The group argued that the EU needed long-range standards to 2025 to drive further innovation.

It also warns that manufacturers are becoming adept at manipulating tests to make cars appear more efficient than they really are.

The Commission will need to ensure that the move towards diesel vehicles to improve efficiency does not lead to increased local air pollution from particulates.

Follow Roger on Twitter

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Artists are 'buying virtual fans'

Words by Chi Chi Izundu and Declan Harvey
Newsbeat reporters

Some music artists are buying social networking statistics to get into the charts, a Newsbeat investigation has found.

The statistics, which can be bought, include YouTube views, Twitter followers and Facebook likes.

Newsbeat has found that you can buy 10,000 YouTube views for as little as £30.

There is also a market for buying comments to attribute to the views to help authenticate them.

A data monitoring company based in America says that it has a list of artists who they believe are buying statistics to increase their popularity with record labels and radio bosses.

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Jordan Allen explains what he things of buying hits for online videos

Next Big Sound says it plans to release the information on which artists are doing it later this year in a report.

Justin Bieber was discovered after clocking up millions of views with his YouTube videos and Conor Maynard was discovered by singer Ne-Yo because of the performances he had posted on the video-sharing website.

Nineteen-year-old Jordan Allen is an unsigned singer/songwriter who lives in Leeds. Newsbeat asked him his opinion on artists buying their social networking statistics in the video above.

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Stars explain what they think about artists buying virtual fans

On a recent tour in the UK, singer Ne-Yo signed a British singer/songwriter, Sonna Rele, to his Universal Motown Records label after discovering her on YouTube.

Ne-Yo says being active on social networking platforms is important, but having high numbers isn't an issue for him when he's talent searching.

Alex White is the CEO and co-founder of Next Big Sound, which gathers information on daily physical music and online consumption around the world.

He wouldn't name which artists he suspected had been purchasing its data, but said sometimes it was obvious to see that they had.

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Meet the man who monitors artists suspected of buying virtual fans

Martin V is based in Ottawa in Canada and runs a company where people can buy tens of thousands of YouTube views and comments for less than £100.

Twitter says using a company or a computer programme to increase your online activity on Twitter is against its rules.

In a statement it told Newsbeat: "Twitter reserves the right to immediately terminate your account without further notice [if] you violate these rules."

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Man says he's helped artists buy hits on online music videos

Facebook told Newsbeat that gaining "likes" from people who aren't interested in that page is "no good to anyone".

They advised: "If you run a Facebook page and someone offers you a boost in your fan count in return for money; walk away.

"Not least because it is against our rules and there is a good chance those Likes will be deleted by our automatic systems."

YouTube agreed that purchasing views or any other channel data was against its rules and said if it found out it had been done they could go as far as terminating your account.

Follow @BBCNewsbeat on Twitter

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Single-player SimCity 'rejected'

18 March 2013 Last updated at 06:33 ET

Electronics Arts has said plans to turn SimCity into a single-player game were rejected early in the development of the latest version.

The admission comes as players are finding ways to get round the game's need to be constantly connected.

Lucy Bradshaw, head of SimCity creator Maxis, said an offline, single-player mode did not fit with its "vision" for the urban-planning game.

She said many players preferred the multiplayer version of the game.

Player control

In a blogpost, Ms Bradshaw said Maxis could have built a "subset offline mode" for the game that did away with the need to be constantly connected.

Since SimCity was launched on 5 March, many players have blamed the "always online" requirement for causing bugs, in-game glitches and long waits to play the game.

To get around the always-on requirement, some players have tinkered with the game's computer code to trick it into thinking it is connected when it is being played offline. Others have called on Maxis to produce a stand-alone version of the game.

But Ms Bradshaw said the always-on requirement was "fundamental" to what the company wanted to do with SimCity and it was "designed" with multiplayer in mind.

The decision to do this had not come from "corporate and it isn't a clandestine strategy to control players", wrote Ms Bradshaw.

Maxis had gone down the multiplayer road to make the simulation more realistic by letting cities in the same virtual landscapes share elements such as pollution, crime and resources such as coal, she said.

The multiplayer element was also essential for other aspects of the game, including the building of historic buildings and landmarks and to help players cope with world events and challenges.

There were undoubtedly some players that wanted to build a "single city in isolation" as in older games but just as many were "loving the always-connected functionality", she said.

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More jobs in UK video games industry

18 March 2013 Last updated at 07:22 ET

A new report by video games industry trade association Tiga has found that both employment and investment in the UK sector increased in 2012.

By the end of the year there were 118 more studios and 336 more creative staff than there had been in 2011. Studios also invested £427m in games.

The rise in employment figures followed a three-year period of decline in staff numbers, said the report.

Tiga said the rise of mobiles and tablets had provided a boost.

"The sector's return to growth has been driven by three factors," said Tiga chief executive Richard Wilson.

"Firstly, the increasing prevalence of mobile and tablet devices have created a growing market for games: studios are setting up to meet this demand. Secondly, the closure of big console-based studios has been followed by an explosion of small start-up companies.

"Thirdly, the advent of games tax relief, which Tiga was instrumental in achieving, is already stimulating growth."

The games tax relief initiative was introduced in the March 2012 budget and is due to be implemented next month.

A similar scheme already exists in the UK film industry and is due to run until 2015.

British productions with a budget of £20m or less can apply for a 25% rebate on any expenses which are deemed eligible for tax relief.

The research, carried out for Tiga by Games Investor Consulting, also found that in 2012 the sector contributed £947m to the UK Gross Domestic Product, an increase of £35m year on year.

However Mr Wilson also warned about the vulnerability of start-ups, pointing out that 21% of small companies established in 2010 had not survived.

"Our challenge now is to help build sustainable independent games development and digital publishing businesses," said Mr Wilson.

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Esa seeks help with robot spacecraft

18 March 2013 Last updated at 07:40 ET

The European Space Agency is turning to owners of terrestrial robot aircraft to aid those that journey into space.

The agency has released software that makes use of the cameras on the Parrot drone to simulate docking with a virtual space station.

The Parrot drone quadcopter has proved popular with many iPhone owners as it can be controlled via the handset.

Data generated by the agency's app will be analysed to help fine tune navigation software for its own drones.

Fine control

Users of the European Space Agency's (Esa) app will designate a real-world feature to serve as their docking port.

An augmented-reality marker representing the port or airlock will then be overlaid on the image sent back to their handset by the drone's cameras.

Docking attempts will be scored by how fast the manoeuvre is completed without bumps, scrapes or crashes.

Extra points will be awarded for correctly orientating the drone and a slow final approach.

The Esa said it was not interested in the features drone owners designated as their virtual docking port - it wanted to gather data only about the way humans navigated the robot craft.

In particular it wanted to find out about the tiny corrections people made to keep a drone on course.

"People intuitively assess their position and motion in relation to their surroundings in various ways, based on what they see before them," said Esa research fellow Guido de Croon in a statement.

Data gathered via the app will be used to enable future robot spacecraft to cope with a wide variety of docking situations.

"We can obtain real-life data to train our algorithms in large amounts that would practically be impossible to get in any other way," said Leopold Summerer, head of the Esa lab that developed the app.

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Net pioneers win engineering prize

18 March 2013 Last updated at 09:37 ET

Pioneers of the internet are the first recipients of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering.

Sir Tim Berners Lee, Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf, Louis Pouzin and Marc Andreessen will share the £1m award.

The citation panel said the five men had all contributed to the revolution in communications that has taken place in recent decades.

The UK government initiated the QE Prize as a companion to the Nobels to raise the profile of engineering.

It is endowed by industry and administered by an independent trust chaired by Lord Browne, a former chief executive of BP.

The award was announced at the Royal Academy of Engineering in central London.

Sir Tim may be the best known of the winners, certainly in the UK. Working with others in the late 1980s, he helped develop the world wide web, which radically simplified the way information could be shared on the net.

Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf provided the engineering insights that actually made the internet work. Their TCP/IP protocols define the way data travels around the internet.

Louis Pouzin helped work out how data should be labelled so that it reached the right destination.

Marc Andreessen is the man who developed Mosaic, the first popular browser for the web.

"The prize recognises what has been a roller-coaster ride of wonderful international collaboration," said Sir Tim.

"Bob and Vint's work on building the internet was re-enforced by Louis' work on datagrams and that enabled me to invent the web.

"Marc's determined and perceptive work built on these platforms a product which became widely deployed across nations and computing platforms. I am honoured to receive this accolade and humbled to share it with them," he told BBC News.

The citation said the winners' contributions had not only changed the way we communicate but had spawned many new industries.

The men were commended for having the foresight to make their work freely available and without restriction. The internet and the WWW could not have taken off in the same way without this open approach.

It is said a third of the world's population now uses the internet. Some 330 petabytes of data are estimated to be carried across its servers each year - that's enough capacity to transfer every character ever written in every book ever published 20 times over, the citation said.

The chairman of the judges, Lord Broers, said: "The emergence of the internet and the web involved many teams of people from all over the world.

"However, these five visionary engineers, never before honoured together as a group, led the key developments that shaped the internet and the web as a coherent system and brought them into use."

Lord Browne said the group had "done an extraordinary service for humanity".

"I am delighted that the prize can honour the endeavours of these engineers, and make the story of their world-changing innovation known to the public," he added.

The Queen herself will present the winners with a trophy at Buckingham Palace in June.

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