Bitcoin energy costs soaring

15 April 2013 Last updated at 08:31 ET

Bitcoin is facing fresh scrutiny after a report revealed the power requirements of the currency's miners.

Tracking website Blockchain logged 982 megawatt hours of electricity consumption over a 24-hour period by Bitcoin miners around the world.

According to Bloomberg, that is enough to power 31,000 homes in the US. Watchdog Ofgem claims the average UK household uses 3.3MwH per year.

Blockchain said the rough cost of that amount of power was $147,000 (£95,000).

However, it also suggested profits of $681,000 (£444,000) may have been made as a result of the mining.

Bitcoins are earned online by completing difficult computing tasks.

Mining involves solving a hard mathematical problem and miners typically use large numbers of computers to speed up the number-crunching involved.

The more mining takes place, the harder it becomes to mine new Bitcoins and the more power is required for the process.

Writer Mark Gimein described the energy requirements as "an environmental disaster" in a blog post for Bloomberg.

"Real-world mining of precious metals for currency was a resource-hungry and value-destroying process. Bitcoin mining is too," he wrote.

However, other analysts disagree.

Tim Worstall, a fellow at the Adam Smith Institute, dismissed the quantity of electricity being used for mining as "trivial" on the website Forbes.

"There are around 120 million or so households in the US. Therefore Bitcoin mining is consuming 0.025% of the US household electricity supply," he wrote.

"This is without even thinking about the energy requirements of business and industry. Do also note that that is the power consumed by global Bitcoin mining... I feel secure in stating that Bitcoin mining really isn't a real-world environmental disaster."

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Web games get fair trading scrutiny

11 April 2013 Last updated at 19:32 ET

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Cavendish Elithorn, OFT: "It's important parents understand... how much they're going to cost"

Web and phone games aimed at children that charge for extras are being investigated by the Office of Fair Trading.

The OFT wants to find out if the games put undue pressure on children to pay for additional content.

Many games ask players to pay to get coins, gems or other virtual items to speed their progress through levels.

The OFT wants to hear from parents who have seen firms aggressively pushing in-game content to children.

High cost

The investigation comes alongside media reports about children spending large sums on virtual items for smartphone and web games.

In March, five-year-old schoolboy Danny Kitchen, from Bristol, managed to rack up charges of more than £1,700 while playing the Zombies versus Ninjas game on his parents' iPad. The money has since been refunded by Apple.

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The BBC's Technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones explains some of the things you can do to prevent charges from web and phone games

In January this year, regulator PhonePayPlus revealed it had seen a 300% increase in complaints from consumers about the bills generated when they buy add-ons for games and other apps.

In its investigation, the OFT wants to find out if the games are "misleading, commercially aggressive or otherwise unfair" when they give people the chance to buy extras. It also wants to find out if children are being specifically targeted by such applications.

"We are concerned that children and their parents could be subject to unfair pressure to purchase when they are playing games they thought were free, but which can actually run up substantial costs," said Cavendish Elithorn, the OFT's senior director for goods and consumer.

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Makers of games that strongly encourage children to buy or pressure them to ask parents to buy on their behalf could be breaking laws on fair trading, said the OFT.

Mr Elithorn said the OFT did not want to ban in-game purchases, but wanted to be sure that games-makers are complying with relevant laws. Consumer groups or parents with evidence of games aggressively marketing in-game extras should contact the OFT, it said.

Figures gathered by the OFT reveal that the vast majority of the most popular smartphone games were free to install but raised cash for their creators via in-app purchases. Such extras were priced very differently, it said, with some costing only a few pence but the most high-priced were £70.

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Airport tech reveals hidden artwork

11 April 2013 Last updated at 20:41 ET By Jason Palmer BBC science reporter, New Orleans

A technique based on the same kind of technology used in airport scanners has revealed images beneath a fresco held at the Louvre museum in Paris.

Trois Hommes Armes de Lances was known to be a fresco forged by Giampetro Campana on a wall from Roman times.

The new research suggests that under that forgery lies a real Roman fresco.

The discovery was announced at the American Chemical Society meeting by Bianca Jackson of the University of Rochester in the US.

Terahertz waves are known for their ability to penetrate materials without damaging them, and have in recent years been added to the suite of tools used to examine items of cultural heritage.

These tools span much of the electromagnetic spectrum from X-rays to ultraviolet to the infrared - and of course microscopy with visible light.

Safe application

Terahertz light - which lies between infrared light like that used by remote controls and the microwaves in the appliance of the same name - has become popular in scanning technology at airports and museums' back rooms because it can extract information without risk of damage.

"It's very desirable for cultural heritage conservation because with a lot of other techniques like X-ray or ultraviolet, there is some molecular breakdown in the materials," Dr Jackson told the meeting.

"So even though you're using the equipment to get information to conserve it, you're at the same time risking some deterioration of the object."

Giampetro Campana was a renowned collector from the mid-19th Century who specialised in Roman artefacts. But late in his career he took to restoring - or outright creating - Roman-style works and passing them off as genuine.

Previous studies of Trois Hommes Armes de Lances had used X-ray fluorescence - which yields a list of all the atoms within an object - but showed that there were atoms present in the work that were not present on the surface.

Dr Jackson and her colleagues were called in to apply terahertz imaging to find out what lay beneath.

"After quite a bit of data processing, we were able to pull out some signs that there is a figure beneath… what looked like two eyes, eyebrows, nose, mouth, a shadow for a chin," she said.

It remains to be proven that the image beneath is of Roman origin, but the collector's history seems to suggest it. The original may simply have been of poor quality.

"If you go on Ebay and you can get a Roman coin from 200BC for 25 cents, there's a reason - it's not high quality," Dr Jackson told BBC News.

"So he probably painted over it because he could get more credit if he had a nice painting."

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Twitter move hints at music service

12 April 2013 Last updated at 04:53 ET

Micro-blogging site Twitter is rumoured to be launching a new music service after buying the music discovery site We Are Hunted.

We Are Hunted confirmed the deal, adding "there's no question that Twitter and music go well together" - and said it was shutting down.

The hashtag #music is also featured on the newly-launched music.twitter.com.

Reports suggest the new service will offer personalised recommendations on music through its own dedicated app.

US celebrity host Ryan Seacrest confirmed the existence of Twitter's new app on Thursday via a tweet: "playing with @twitter's new music app (yes it's real!)... there's a serious dance party happening at idol right now".

The music app could be announced as soon as Friday.

The We Are Hunted acquisition actually happened in 2012, according to reports, suggesting that the music service has long been in the works.

In seven years, Twitter has accumulated 200 million users worldwide, who now send an average of 400 million short messages - or tweets - every day.

Twitter's latest move comes as music streaming - where the songs are hosted on servers by companies such as Spotify rather than bought and kept on consumers' computers - has taken off amid a boom in digital downloading.

The streaming market is now worth £49m to record labels in the UK, the trade body BPI has said.

It comes as iPhone-maker Apple is reported to have agreed a deal with the biggest music label Universal to create an internet radio service similar to Pandora using its iTunes platform.

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Cyber thieves target bitcoin owners

12 April 2013 Last updated at 06:01 ET

The bitcoin virtual currency has had a volatile 24 hours that saw values plummet, hack attacks, trading shutdowns and bitcoin-stealing malware.

From the high of $260 (£169) for each bitcoin on 10 April, bitcoins are now worth less than $100 (£65) each.

The main bitcoin exchange shut down for 12 hours to install hardware to help it cope with trading volumes.

In addition, malicious software is emerging that seeks out and empties the virtual wallets of bitcoin owners.

MTGox, on which most bitcoin trading takes place, was overwhelmed earlier this week by the amount of people who joined the exchange to trade the virtual cash. The computer problems prompted a round of panic selling that forced values to plunge.

The exchange went offline to beef up its hardware to cope with trading volumes and stem the fall in value. However, soon after trading resumed the site came under a sustained hack attack which saw it bombarded with data. In a tweet, MTGox said the it was being hit by a "stronger than usual" attack.

It went offline again to avoid the attack and when it re-started, bitcoins continued to fall in value. Early on 12 April each bitcoin was worth about $90 (£58).

'Litecoins'

Owners of bitcoins have also become the target of cyber thieves keen to cash in on the boom in the digital currency.

A phishing gang posted a message to the discussion forum of a website used by many bitcoin traders saying MTGox was about to start trading "litecoins" - an alternative to bitcoins. In the message was a link that supposedly connected to an official MTGox chat site.

In fact, the site that people were taken to if they clicked on the link was fake and, via a booby-trapped update file, installed malicious software that then emptied digital wallets of bitcoins. At least one trader was hit in the attack and lost 34 bitcoins as a result.

In a post about the theft posted to the Bitcointalk forum, the victim said he was "stupid" not to have taken more trouble to stay safe but added: "This is a serious loss for me, and unless this is handled correctly this can also badly affect the community."

It has also emerged that Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, who famously sued Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg claiming they had the original idea for the social network, have substantial bitcoin holdings. In an interview with the New York Times, the pair said they owned about $11m of the virtual coins - about 1% of the global supply.

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Rural mobile funds 'not being spent'

12 April 2013 Last updated at 06:40 ET

Funds set up to improve poor and rural access to mobile services worldwide are "inefficient and ineffective", according to a report.

More than $11bn (£7.2bn) has yet to be spent, according to the GSMA, which brings together global mobile operators, handset makers and internet providers. "Very few funds, if any, would appear to disburse all that they collect," it said.

Less than 12.5% of the funds are meeting their own targets.

Universal service funds (USF) are set up by levies on telecoms in individual countries, which are then used to increase consumer access based on criteria such as income distribution, rural and urban population ratios, literacy and geography.

But the GSMA report estimates that more than one-third of the 64 funds surveyed have yet to disburse any of the contributions they have collected.

"Our research shows that, despite the fact that there is an ever-increasing amount of money sitting unused in these funds, governments continue to collect still more from the mobile operators," said Tom Phillips, the chief regulatory officer at GSMA.

"The situation needs urgent government review and attention, as the money collected to date far exceeds the amount that is needed to ensure universal access."

Among the funds dubbed by the GSMA as "ineffective or severely constrained and/or legally challenged" are those set up in Brazil, the Czech Republic, Ecuador, France and Italy.

The Indian USF, for example, contains more than $4bn in unspent money but still imposes a 5% levy on operator revenues.

The USFs in Afghanistan, Bolivia, South Africa and the US have been accused of "poor or inefficient administration" of the money, the global body said.

But the GSMA cited Colombia as an example of the way USFs should be structured, with a reduction in levies and a transparent public bidding process.

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Google makes anti-trust concessions

12 April 2013 Last updated at 07:20 ET

Google has proposed a package of concessions as it seeks to end a long-running investigation into its European search business.

The suggested changes to its business were made following talks with European Commission competition regulators.

Since November 2010, Brussels has been looking into Google's search business following complaints from rivals.

Google said it was continuing to co-operate with the Commission investigation.

Test case

The anti-trust investigation was kicked off by rivals such as Microsoft, as well as mapping firms and web retailers which said the way Google ran its search business made it hard for them to compete fairly.

In a statement, Antoine Colombani, the Commission spokesman on competition policy, said it had completed its preliminary assessment a few weeks ago and had told Google of its concerns.

This, he said, had prompted Google to submit a formal proposal to the Commission about what it would do to change the way it operated. By making formal proposals, Google hopes to head off potentially huge fines.

Among the measures, Google is believed to have offered to label its services to make it more obvious to people what they are using and to make it easier for people to use rival advertising services, the Reuters news agency reports.

The proposals will now be subjected to a "market test" to gauge the response of rivals and to see if the suggested remedies meet the Commission's requirements.

Speaking in Washington, Joaquin Almunia, the EU competition commissioner, said any agreement reached with Google would be legally binding.

In January, the US Federal Trade Commission ended its anti-trust investigation and won a pledge from Google to end some practices, such as scraping data from websites to help target adverts, that had triggered the competition probe.

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Google chief wary of mini-drones

13 April 2013 Last updated at 06:17 ET

The influential head of Google, Eric Schmidt, has called for civilian drone technology to be regulated, warning about privacy and security concerns.

Cheap miniature versions of the unmanned aircraft used by the military could fall into the wrong hands, he told the UK's Guardian newspaper.

Quarrelling neighbours, he suggested, might end up buzzing each other with private surveillance drones.

He also warned of the risk of terrorists using the new technology.

Mr Schmidt is believed to have close relations with US President Barack Obama, whom he advises on matters of science and technology.

"You're having a dispute with your neighbour," he told The Guardian in an interview printed on Saturday.

"How would you feel if your neighbour went over and bought a commercial observation drone that they can launch from their backyard. It just flies over your house all day. How would you feel about it?"

Warning of mini-drones' potential as a terrorist weapon, he said: "I'm not going to pass judgment on whether armies should exist, but I would prefer to not spread and democratise the ability to fight war to every single human being."

"It's got to be regulated... It's one thing for governments, who have some legitimacy in what they're doing, but have other people doing it... it's not going to happen."

Small drones, such as flying cameras, are already available worldwide, and non-military surveillance were recently introduced to track poachers in the remote Indian state of Assam.

The US and Israel have led the way in recent years in using drones as weapons of war as well as for surveillance.

America's Federal Aviation Administration is currently exploring how commercial drones, or unmanned aircraft systems, can be safely introduced into US airspace.

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Wordpress attacked by giant botnet

15 April 2013 Last updated at 06:06 ET

Wordpress has been attacked by a botnet of "tens of thousands" of individual computers since last week, according to server hosters Cloudflare and Hostgator.

The botnet targets Wordpress users with the username "admin", trying thousands of possible passwords.

The attack began a week after Wordpress beefed up its security with an optional two-step authentication log-in option.

The site currently powers 64m websites read by 371m people each month.

According to survey website W3Techs, around 17% of the world's websites are powered by Wordpress.

"Here's what I would recommend: If you still use 'admin' as a username on your blog, change it, use a strong password," wrote Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg on his blog.

Continue reading the main story

• Bot - one of the individual computers in a botnet; bots are also called drones or zombies
• Botnet - a network of hijacked home computers, typically controlled by a criminal gang
• Malware - an abbreviation for malicious software ie a virus, trojan or worm that infects a PC
• DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) - an attack that knocks out a computer by overwhelming it with data; thousands of PCs can take part, hence the "distributed"
• Drive-by download - a virus or trojan that starts to install as soon as a user visits a particular website
• IP address - the numerical identifier every machine connected to the net needs to ensure data goes to the right place

He also advised adopting two-step authentication, which involves a personalised "secret number" allocated to users in addition to a username and password, and ensuring that the latest version of Wordpress is installed.

"Most other advice isn't great - supposedly this botnet has more than 90,000 IP addresses, so an IP-limiting or login-throttling plugin isn't going to be great (they could try from a different IP [address] a second for 24 hours)," Mr Mullenweg added.

Matthew Prince, Chief Executive and co-founder of Cloudflare, said that the aim of the attack may have been to build a stronger botnet.

"One of the concerns of an attack like this is that the attacker is using a relatively weak botnet of home PCs in order to build a much larger botnet of beefy servers in preparation for a future attack," he wrote in a blog post.

"These larger machines can cause much more damage in DDoS [Distributed Denial of Service] attacks because the servers have large network connections and are capable of generating significant amounts of traffic," he added.

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Porn sites hit back at malware claim

15 April 2013 Last updated at 08:32 ET

Pornography websites identified as potentially putting their visitors at risk of downloading malicious software have hit back at the claims.

Last week, the BBC reported on figures that suggested two popular sites posed high levels of risk.

The research, conducted by security expert Conrad Longmore, referenced data compiled by Google.

One of the sites named, Pornhub, said the numbers quoted "grossly exaggerate" the threat.

Another, xHamster, admitted it did suffer problems "in the past", but that rigorous systems were now in place.

"We had an issue with malware in the past and we totally stopped working with that advertising agency because of that problem," a spokesman said in an email.

"Now our reliable partners are checking new advertisers very strictly, so it's almost impossible to put a new site with malware on xHamster.

"The problem is that even reliable advertisers sometimes can be hacked. For example, in the past we had such issues with one of the top five porn paysites in the world.

"Their ad system was hacked and used for malware."

'Clearly a problem'

Mr Longmore - who published the study on his blog - called the response a "non-denial denial".

"The data is open to interpretation, but there was clearly a problem just one week ago, there may not be a problem today," he said.

"There might be a problem tomorrow, of course."

Continue reading the main story

Pornhub prides itself on providing the optimal user experience"

End Quote Pornhub spokeswoman

The research was based on statistics from Google's diagnostic service which crawls web pages for harmful content and posts a 90-day review of what it finds.

For xHamster, Google's figures indicated that "suspicious" content was found on the site as recently as 6 April.

The most recent instance of "suspicious" content found on Pornhub was on 28 January, according to the figures.

But Manwin, the company that owns Pornhub, told the BBC the risk was "minute".

"On average, the website serves over 15.5 billion ads every month," a spokeswoman said.

"Isolated incidents of malware are immediately caught, and minute when considering the mammoth amount of traffic our site receives.

"Pornhub prides itself on providing the optimal user experience, in an environment safe from the threat of infection from third-party malvertisements."

She added that according to Pornhub's own figures, only 0.003% of advertising displayed on its site in a three-month period was potentially harmful.

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