The Telegraph reports how Apple has been accused of censoring the iPad book chart after four pornographic titles mysteriously disappeared from the bestseller list.

Four erotic titles for the iPad featured in the top 10 on Monday morning. However, these all disappeared simultaneously and have been replaced with less risqué books by the afternoon. Book chart analysts said it was unlikely that all the erotic titles could have dropped out of the list at the same moment without being deliberately removed.

It is not the first time that Apple has censored such material – the company embarked on a “great porn purge” in February, ridding its iPhone App Store of all “overtly sexual content”.

Steve Jobs, chief executive, announced in April that he wanted the newly-launched iPad to remain free of pornographic applications. The crackdown was labelled “political correctness gone mad” by some bloggers. Apple declined to comment on the disappearance of the pornographic novellas from the book chart yesterday.

Access the original article online at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/7911821/Apple-accused-of-censorship-after-porn-disappears-from-iPad-book-chart.html

‘Most people’s purchases influenced by social networks’

The Telegraph reports that the majority of consumers now consult ‘friends’ or ‘followers’ on social networks, such as Facebook, before choosing to purchase a new item, according to research firm Gartner.

The report, which polled nearly 4,000 consumers across 10 major global markets during Q4 2009, discovered that people play different roles when it comes to recommending products online to friends within their social network. People broadly fell into three categories: ‘Connectors’, ‘Mavens’ or ‘Salesmen’.

‘Connectors’, Gartner said are those who “perform a bridging function between disparate groups of people” and enjoy introducing people to each other”.

‘Mavens’ are “knowledge exchangers or information brokers”. They are experts in particular area and people go to them for advice. But they are not people who wish to convince people to buy certain items; they are more interested in acquiring new knowledge.

And finally there are ‘Salesmen’, who have “extensive social connections” and possess the personality trait that impels people around them to act on information in highly directed ways”.

“Our survey results showed that one-fifth of the consumer population is composed of ‘Salesmen,’ ‘Connectors’ and ‘Mavens.’ These are three roles that are key influencers in the purchasing activities of 74 per cent of the population,” said Nick Ingelbrecht, research director at Gartner.

“Salesmen’ and Connectors are the most effective social network influencers and the most important groups for targeted marketing based on social network analysis.”

Gartner, on the basis of the report, is now advising companies, with products to sell, to actively engage with these different people on social networks, as “social networks have become a critical but underutilised, aspect of the marketing process”.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/7910697/Most-peoples-purchases-influenced-by-social-networks.html

BlackBerrys pose ’security risk’ say UAE authorities

The BBC reports that the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has said that it could move to restrict or monitor BlackBerry mobile phones, as they pose a “national security risk”.

The region’s telecoms regulator said “BlackBerry operates beyond the jurisdiction of national legislation” as it stores its data offshore. It said it was concerned that misuse may have “serious social, judicial and national security repercussions”.

Critics branded the moves as “repressive”.

The media freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders told BBC News that while the UAE was playing a “technological leadership role in the Arab world” this was backed by “repressive laws” and a “general trend of intensified surveillance”.

“Last April, the daily Emarat al Yaoum reported on an interior ministry plan to check the identity of anyone using the internet in public places,” said the organisation’s Lucie Morillon. Many mobile phones are already monitored, she said.

The UAE’s Telecommunications Regulatory Authority has taken issue with the encrypted networks used by Research in Motion (RIM) – the makers of the Blackberry handset. These make it difficult for governments to monitor communications.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10761210

Sex, death and government oppression: how Channel 4 is re-inventing the educational video game

The Guardian reports on how three years ago the channel radically re-thought its approach to programming for teenage audiences – the results could be about to shock those who don’t realise where interactive educational content is going…

Three years ago Janey Walker, then head of education commissioning at Channel 4, came to an important realisation. At the time, the channel was broadcasting its education content as part of the morning schedule and most of it was going out during term time. Challenging and confrontational programmes like Crip on a Trip and Gay to Z were being aimed straight at teenagers – but the teenagers were at school missing it all.

Meanwhile, this fickle target audience was beginning to watch less broadcast television anyway. Alternative entertainment options like mobile phones, games and social networking were drawing young audiences away from terrestrial TV. Sticking out a few edgy documentaries during school time just wasn’t cutting it anymore.

So Walker decided to switch her budget to the online space, where she could reach teenagers whenever they were available. She also employed two multiplatform commissioners: Matt Locke, to handle digital TV projects, and Alice Taylor, previously Vice President of Digital Content for BBC Worldwide. Taylor is a keen gamer with an excellent blog on games theory, and her remit was to transfer a substantial part of the channel’s annual £6m budget to interactive and online projects.

“We don’t do standard curriculum, we don’t do key stages, it’s a lot more zeitgeist-y than that,” she explains. “We generally look at what gets you from 14 to19 in one piece. So big themes that started in 2009 are things like privacy and security while online – and offline as well, actually. Financial management is going to be big next year. We look at careers, citizenship, I want to explore belief and death. It’s fun, broad themes.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2010/jul/26/educational-games-channel-4-privates

Some internet porn sites in China now accessible

The Independent reported on leaks from Twitter that internet porn that once was blocked by Chinese government censors was now openly available.

“Are they no longer cracking down on pornographic websites? A lot of porn sites and forums are accessible,” technology blogger William Long wrote on his feed.

Messages like that startled Chinese Web surfers, long accustomed to the authorities’ Internet blockades. The country had been in the midst of highly publicized anti-pornography sweeps, and there had been no announcement of any change in government policy.

Yet eight weeks later, the porn sites are still accessible. Still unanswered are questions about whether it’s an official change in policy, a technical glitch or some sort of test by the usually disapproving Chinese Internet police.

“This has never been done with the (Chinese) Internet before,” said Beijing-based Internet analyst Zhao Jing, who goes by the English name Michael Anti.

Whatever the reason, the change has thrown into sharper relief what many people see as the main mission of China’s aggressive Internet censors: blocking sites and content that might challenge the political authority of the communist government. Websites about human rights and dissidents are also routinely banned.

“Maybe they are thinking that if Internet users have some porn to look at, then they won’t pay so much attention to political matters,” Anti said.

The government has not said why the porn sites were unblocked. Repeated calls to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology went unanswered, and the Ministry of Public Security and State Council Information Office – all involved in Web monitoring – did not respond to faxed requests for comment.

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/some-internet-porn-sites-in-china-now-accessible-2033867.html

India unveils world’s cheapest laptop

The Guardian reports that India has developed the world’s cheapest laptop – a touchscreen device which resembles Apple’s wildly popular iPad but will cost just £23.

The prototype was unveiled today by Kapil Sibal, the country’s human resource development minister, who said 110 million Indian schoolchildren would be the first recipients.

Then, from next year, the device – designed to bridge the digital divide and boost India’s economy – will become available to students in higher education.

Sibal said: “The solutions for tomorrow will emerge from India. We have reached a stage that today, the motherboard, its chip, the processing, connectivity, all of them cumulatively cost around $35 [£23], including memory, display, everything.”

Past low-cost technologies produced by the country include the £1,450 Tata Nano car and a mobile phone costing less than £11. The iPad retails at about £429 in the UK – 18 times the cost of the Indian laptop.

The tablet computer, developed by researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi and the Indian Institute of Science in Bengalooru, will eventually be made available to the public. It will run on an open source Linux operating system with Open Office software and can be powered by solar panel or batteries as well as mains electricity. It will have no hard drive but users will have access to a USB port, 2GB of memory and a video-conferencing facility, internet browsing.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/23/india-unveils-cheapest-laptop

Be careful what you tweet

The BBC discusses how online tools and services such as Twitter and Facebook create a social space that encourages informality, rapid responses and the sort of conversation that typically takes place between friends in contexts that are either private or public-private, like the street, pub or cafe.

Unfortunately, online interaction has other characteristics which are very different from those of a casual conversation in a cafe.

Not least the fact that many services make comments visible to large numbers of people and search engines ensure that a permanent record is kept of every inane observation, spiteful aside or potentially libellous comment on a respected public figure.

This is something that TV nutritionist Gillian McKeith has just discovered the hard way, and her experience offers a salutary lesson for anyone who wants to use social media tools to enhance their reputation rather than expose themselves to public ridicule.

It all started last week when Twitter user @rachelemoody made a remark about Bad Science, Dr Ben Goldacre’s much admired book on the poor state of media coverage of medicine and science. The book includes a chapter that criticises Gillian McKeith’s work…

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10740954

The Guardian has posted an interesting article online about the geo-location app FourSquare.

Journalist Leo Hickman reveals how easy it is to uncover the intimate details of a complete stranger’s life…

Louise is a complete stranger. Until 10 minutes ago when I discovered she was located within a mile of me, I didn’t even know of her existence. But equipped only with a smartphone and an increasingly popular social networking application called Foursquare, I have located her to within just a few square metres, accessed her Twitter account and conducted multiple cross-referenced Google searches using the personal details I have already managed to accrue about her from her online presence. In the short time it has taken me to walk to this pub in central London, I probably know more about her than if I’d spent an hour talking to her face-to-face. She doesn’t know it yet, but Louise is about to meet her new digital stalker.

Foursquare is the latest social networking tool to generate online buzz. The story has become very familiar in recent years: a bright young thing develops an internet app that connects people and allows them instantly to communicate with each other; within months, a million or more people around the planet are using it; investors queue up expressing an interest and speculation begins about how much Google, Yahoo!, Apple or Microsoft is willing to throw down to snap it up. (To date, the speculative figure in the media has reached $100m.)

Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and Bebo have all come before it, but Foursquare promises something new. After a decade of false dawns for the industry, it leads the way in a wave of new “geolocative” social networking tools. Unofficially, at least, 2010 has been labelled by many within the technology world as the “year of location”.

In addition to offering the communal connectivity of Twitter and Facebook, Foursquare also uses your smartphone’s global positioning system (GPS) to broadcast your precise location to your “friends” and, should you so wish, to the wider world. Users are encouraged to “check in” on their phone whenever they arrive at a point of interest – a shop, a cafe, a museum, a nightclub, an office – so that fellow users know where they are.

A great way supposedly to see if any of your friends are around and about. Glance down at your phone and – as I did with Louise – see the names of all the other users around you within a mile or so and, crucially, exactly where they are and which fellow users they are with. (I was drawn to Louise because she was in a cluster of Foursquare users – albeit still rare, even somewhere such as London – and she was the user allowing a stranger such as myself access to the most personal information – photograph, full name, Twitter feed etc.)

Visit somewhere a lot and you can even vie with other users to become its virtual “mayor”. If you feel so inclined, you can also leave a tip or review in the digital ether – “hey, order the bacon burger, it’s great!” – so others following can benefit from your experience.

Access the rest of the article online at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jul/23/foursquare

British newspaper helps trap online predator

The News of the World recently undertook an operation to trap a paedophile who was using the web to groom a 13 year old girl.

Sameer Jusab, 30, bombarded the girl with inappropriate and explicit messages in a chatroom called No Adults. Jusab thought he was speaking to Karene, a vulnerable schoolgirl, but it was actually an undercover reporter from the newspaper.

The evidence was passed straight to child protection officers and Jusab was hauled before the courts. A judge at the town’s crown court ordered he join a sex offenders’ re-education group as part of a three-year community order and banned him from using the internet or working with children under 16 for five years.

http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk/news/880300/News-of-the-World-victory-We-nail-pervert-on-web.html

China may shut porn fiction websites

China’s press watchdog has threatened to shut down more than 120 websites offering pornographic fiction, the official Xinhua News Agency reported on Thursday. An official with the General Administration of Press and Publication said websites which failed to remove the content would be taken offline.

The crackdown comes as China continues to tighten control over its booming Internet sector. Since the second half of last year, it has introduced new regulations on online pornography.

Late last year China cracked down on mobile websites offering pornography downloads and more recently it barred online game companies from using lewd marketing tactics to attract users.

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/china-may-shut-porn-fiction-websites-2028168.html

Using computers to teach children with no teachers

A 10-year experiment that started with Indian slum children being given access to computers has produced a new concept for education, a conference has heard.

Professor Sugata Mitra first introduced children in a Delhi slum to computers in 1999. He has watched the children teach themselves – and others – how to use the machines and gather information. Follow up experiments suggest children around the world can learn complex tasks quickly with little supervision.

“I think we have stumbled across a self-organising system with learning as an emergent behaviour,” he told the TED Global (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference.

Professor Mitra’s work began when he was working for a software company and decided to embed a computer in the wall of his office in Delhi that was facing a slum.

“The children barely went to school, they didn’t know any English, they had never seen a computer before and they didn’t know what the internet was.”

To his surprise, the children quickly figured out how to use the computers and access the internet. “I repeated the experiment across India and noticed that children will learn to do what they want to learn to do.”

He saw children teaching each other how to use the computer and picking up new skills. One group in Rajasthan, he said, learnt how to record and play music on the computer within four hours of it arriving in their village.

“At the end of it we concluded that groups of children can lean to use computers on their own irrespective of who or where they are,” he said. His experiments then become more ambitious and more global.

In Cambodia, for example, he left a simple maths game for children to play with.

“No child would play with it inside the classroom. If you leave it on the pavement and all the adults go away then they will show off to one another about what they can do,” said Prof Mitra, who now works at Newcastle University in the UK.

Access the rest of the article online at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10663353

After all the fuss about Chatroulette, the unrestricted video chat site, traffic numbers have apparently been dropping. US unique visitors to the site fell from 1.56 million in April to 1.33 million in May, according to ComScore.

This is the first time the site has seen its traffic decline and in order to combat the fall, its released some new features.

One of these new features is Localroulette, which will allow you to chat with people in the same country. Unfortunately this is about the only channel that isn’t related to sex or some kind of perversion, so the site hasn’t really done anything to revoke its X-rated nature.

Back in February, a documentary maker did some research into the Chatroulette user base. He categorised the users as 71% boys, 15% girls and 14% perverts. Clearly not a site suitable for children, despite the fact there are no restrictions on anyone that signs up for it.

One of the ChatRoulette features that seems to appeal to people is honesty, as  under the harsh scrutiny of a webcam there is nowhere to hide: what you see is what you get. However, the BBC has reported that researchers have found that if they pick the right video (no prizes for guessing that it was of an attractive woman) they can fool ChatRouletters into thinking they are talking to a real person…

“In a test, they were able to trick users into thinking they were actually chatting with a prerecorded video of a cute woman. They did this by making the video choppy, as if it came from a low-bandwidth network and using text-based chat, instead of audio chat. Only one of the 15 users who chatted with the video asked the researchers to prove that it was of a real, live person. Otherwise, the researchers were regularly able to get people to chat for an hour using this technique.”

So even if you appear to be able to see the person you are talking to, it might not be who you think…

Parents are advised to add www.chatroulette.com to the list of blocked sites in their parental control software and explain to their children the dangers it can pose.

The Guardian reports on SuperMe, a new online project from Channel 4’s consistently inventive education department, designed to reach disillusioned, depressed and unhappy teens. It helps them tackle problematic choices and difficult situations by building ‘emotional resilience’ in a game format that includes candid real-life video stories from various celebrities and sports stars.

SuperMe was produced by Somethin’ Else for Channel 4 in partnership with the creative studio Preloaded, and is based on principles of positive psychology. As well as videos, there are facts, quotes and probing questions to help players build life skills and deal more positively with bad experiences. Players earn points for connection, influence, wisdom and ability through a number of different games including Proximity, where players have to use teamwork to fly through a series of gates, and the navigation game Swerveball, which challenges the user to accurately recall how well they performed.

“The winning strategies for SuperMe are the winning strategies for life,” says the blurb. “As with life, it just takes a little practice…”

Know someone who might benefit from visiting the site? Direct them to http://www.playsuperme.com/.

Access the original article online at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/jul/12/channel4-education-superme

Education journalist and broadcaster Mike Baker has written an interesting article for the education section of the BBC website.

He questions if the “government’s attitude to computer technology in schools taking us back to a “dark age” of chalk-and-talk…”

That is the fear of many in education who think the coalition government’s actions are turning back the clock on recent developments in the use of computers for learning.

First there was the decision to abolish Becta, the agency that advises schools on Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Then there were speeches on the curriculum given by the new Education Secretary, Michael Gove, which focused entirely on traditional subjects and were silent about ICT.

Then the government scrapped the Rose Review recommendations for primary schools, which had proposed putting ICT at the core of the curriculum. And just this week, the Schools Minister, Nick Gibb, in a major speech on the curriculum, did not mention ICT at all.

But for many the straw that broke the camel’s back was an announcement slipped out quietly as part of the government’s “free schools” policy.

This said that to provide capital for these new parent-run schools, the government was taking £50m from the Harnessing Technology Fund for schools. This fund provides money to improve schools’ broadband connectivity, computer hardware and software and the sums involved represent a quarter of the total investment fund.

This came as a nasty shock to Mike Prince, head of Staveley CE primary school in Cumbria. He regards a fast broadband connection as essential not only to children’s learning, but also for keeping in touch with parents in a rural area. He says “to have the rug pulled on us mid-year leads me to think it’s either being done unwittingly or, more sinisterly, because the government has decided that these things are no longer important”.

After the recent push for parental engagement and rural schools connectivity, he says, it “feels like we are on the edge of the dark age”. Others too have detected more to this than simply the need to make financial savings.

Before the election, Merlin John – a journalist who specialises in technology and learning – tried to get details of the Conservatives’ policy on ICT. However, after a series of e-mail exchanges over almost two years, he failed to receive anything concrete from Conservative Party headquarters.

So, the question that is worrying many in education is whether the government is making these cuts reluctantly in order to avoid hitting core school budgets or whether it is indifferent, or even hostile, to ICT in education?

Access the rest of this article at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/10495726.stm

The BBC reports that hi-tech criminals are “escalating” attacks on an unpatched bug in the Windows XP help and support system. Microsoft said it had seen more than 10,000 machines hit by the attack that, so far, it has not found a fix for.

Windows PCs falling victim will have control of that machine handed over to attackers. Microsoft said the attacks had gone from theoretical to real very quickly and urged users to take steps to protect themselves.

Microsoft revealed the upturn in attacks in a blog post saying that it had been monitoring activity around the loophole since it was first revealed on 10 June. Found by Google engineer Travis Ormandy, the loophole revolves around the Help and Support system built into XP. Mr Ormandy found that it was possible to exploit its ability to give remote aid and apply fixes to ailing machines.

Initially, said Microsoft, it only saw “innocuous” attacks by researchers attempting to replicate what Mr Ormandy had found. Real exploits turned up on 15 June and these have been enthusiastically adopted by hi-tech criminals.

Writing on the Microsoft Security Centre blog, Holly Stewart said it had started seeing “seemingly-automated, randomly-generated” web pages that host the exploit. A variety of trojans, spam tools and viruses are being downloaded to compromised machines, she said.

Statistics gathered by Microsoft suggest Portugal was taking the brunt of the attacks but users in Russia and Croatia were also being hit. More than 10,000 machines had been hit at least once by the attack, it found.

To avoid falling victim, Microsoft advised users to turn off the part of the Help and Support system that is vulnerable. It has produced an automated tool that can do this for users.

“It is important to ensure that your security software is capable of identifying and blocking malicious websites,” said a security expert, “as you can be sure that the criminals behind this will be constantly updating their malicious files to try and avoid traditional security.”

Microsoft said it was working on a lasting fix for the loophole.

Access the original article online at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/10473495.stm

An article on The Telegraph website discusses how the internet is affecting the way we think – and in particular, the minds of young people. Some argue that the internet provides us with a whole host of tempting distractions that render us unable to complete a whole task properly.

For example, critics say that the virtual lives we now lead have shortened children’s attention spans, taking away their the ability to read a whole book, or finish learning a piece of music.

Researchers Jake Vigdor and Helen Lad at Duke University, North Carolina, conducted a study spanning five years and involving more than 100,000 children. They discovered a correlation between declining test scores in both mathematics and reading and the spread of home computers and broadband. The cut-off year for the study was 2005, when socialising was more primitive. Since then, Facebook and Twitter have become enormously powerful consumers of young people’s time. Vigdor and Ladd concluded that the educational value of home computing was best realised when youngsters were actively supervised by parents.

This tendency to skim is compounded by the temptation of new media users to “multi-task”. Watch a youngster on a computer and he could be Facebook‑ing while burning a CD and Tweeting on his mobile phone. Modern management tends to laud multi‑tasking as an expression of increased efficiency. Science, on the other hand, does not. The human brain is, it seems, not at all good at multi‑tasking – unless it involves a highly developed skill like driving.

The net is also supposed to consume the lives of young people; yet the only reliable studies about the time spent online, collated by the World Health Organization, suggest children spend between two and four hours in front of screens, including television screens, and not six or seven, as often suggested. Moreover, there is evidence that youngsters who use sites like Facebook and MySpace have more rewarding offline social lives than those who do not.

The Byron Review on children and new technology, commissioned by the last government, included a “study of studies” by Prof David Buckingham of the University of London’s Institute of Education. He concluded: “Broadly speaking, the evidence about effects [of new media] is weak and inconclusive – and this applies both to positive and negative effects.

“Of course, this does not in itself mean that such effects do not exist. However, it is fair to conclude that directly harmful effects are significantly less powerful and less frequent than they are often assumed to be, at least by some of the most vocal participants in the public debate.”

Certainly, the tired old media do not seem to be doing that badly. An annual survey conducted by Nielsen BookScan shows that sales of children’s books in 2009 were 4.9 per cent greater than in 2008, with more than 60 million sold. The damage, if any, done by excessive computer time may not be so much to do with what is being done online as what is being missed – time spent with family or playing in trees with friends.

Access the original article online at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/7858189/Are-Twitter-and-Facebook-affecting-how-we-think.html