New MoD tech 'could save lives'

MoD considers shock-absorbing goo

The Ministry of Defence has lifted the lid on its Defence Technology Plan, the latest gadgets it hopes could help equip troops in the future.

Cameras that can see through dust and unmanned ground vehicles were among the devices on show on Thursday.

Although still in the early stages, experts say the kit could soon be "must have devices that may help save lives".

The Minister for Defence Equipment and Support, Quentin Davies, said new technology was key to the MoD's plans.

Damian Kemp, aviation editor for intelligence consultancy Jane's, told BBC News that work on unmanned ground vehicles (UGV) was in the same stage of development that unmanned air vehicles (UAV) was 20 years ago.

"Back then, UAVs were nice to have. Today they are something troops must have. The Americans see UGVs as very valuable in keeping soldiers out of harm's way.

"Soldiers are expensive and it's expensive if they get hurt, never mind the public image. These devices can save lives and I imagine British troops would be very keen to get issued UGVs."

Arms race

Mr Davies said technology was key to staying one step ahead of the enemy.

"It is more vital than ever before that we exploit new and emerging technologies because the threats our troops face are always evolving," he said.

The MoD spends nearly £2m on research and development in science and some of the devices on show today were winners of the MoD's Grand Challenge, a contest to identify promising battlefield robot technologies.

The Defence Technology Plan is spearheaded by the MoD's research and development team.

Their science and technology director, Paul Stein, said the showcase was the first time that the MoD has publicised some of the challenges facing their long-term defence plans.

"The development of new technology could lead to significant benefits for future combat forces," he said.

"The [Defence Technology Plan] sets out to encourage fresh thinking and engagement with new and existing defence technology suppliers."

One of the exhibitors at the event, Richard Palmer from D3O, told the BBC that his product - a soft plastic polymer that turns solid if impacted - was already used by sportsmen and women, but could also be used by the military.

"The gel is already used in ski race suits, especially slalom skiers. Getting hit by the gates at 60 miles per hour is like being hit with a baton, so this provides them with some protection.

"We're working with the MoD to see if it could be used inside the lining of helmets.

"It won't stop a bullet, but used in conjunction with body armour, it could help save a soldier's life".

The Tech Lab: Bruce Schneier

CCTV and face recognition is helping create 'wholesale surveillance'

Bruce Schneier is the chief security technology officer at BT and a celebrated writer and speaker on privacy, cryptography and security issues.

Welcome to the future, where everything about you is saved. A future where your actions are recorded, your movements are tracked, and your conversations are no longer ephemeral. A future brought to you not by some 1984-like dystopia, but by the natural tendencies of computers to produce data.

Data is the pollution of the information age. It's a natural by-product of every computer-mediated interaction. It stays around forever, unless it's disposed of. It is valuable when reused, but it must be done carefully. Otherwise, its after-effects are toxic.

And just as 100 years ago people ignored pollution in our rush to build the Industrial Age, today we're ignoring data in our rush to build the Information Age.

Increasingly, you leave a trail of digital footprints throughout your day. Once you walked into a bookstore and bought a book with cash. Now you visit Amazon, and all of your browsing and purchases are recorded. You used to buy a train ticket with coins; now your electronic fare card is tied to your bank account. Your store affinity cards give you discounts; merchants use the data on them to reveal detailed purchasing patterns.

Bruce Schneier has written widely on security, privacy and technology.

Data about you is collected when you make a phone call, send an e-mail message, use a credit card, or visit a website. A national ID card will only exacerbate this.

More computerised systems are watching you. Cameras are ubiquitous in some cities, and eventually face recognition technology will be able to identify individuals. Automatic licence plate scanners track vehicles in parking lots and cities. Colour printers, digital cameras, and some photocopy machines have embedded identification codes. Aerial surveillance is used by cities to find building permit violators and by marketers to learn about home and garden size.

As RFID chips become more common, they'll be tracked, too. Already you can be followed by your cellphone, even if you never make a call. This is wholesale surveillance; not "follow that car," but "follow every car".

Computers are mediating conversation as well. Face-to-face conversations are ephemeral. Years ago, telephone companies might have known who you called and how long you talked, but not what you said. Today you chat in e-mail, by text message, and on social networking sites. You blog and you Twitter. These conversations - with family, friends, and colleagues - can be recorded and stored.

It used to be too expensive to save this data, but computer memory is now cheaper. Computer processing power is cheaper, too; more data is cross-indexed and correlated, and then used for secondary purposes. What was once ephemeral is now permanent.

Who collects and uses this data depends on local laws. In the US, corporations collect, then buy and sell, much of this information for marketing purposes. In Europe, governments collect more of it than corporations. On both continents, law enforcement wants access to as much of it as possible for both investigation and data mining.

More and more people are scattering their personal data online

Regardless of country, more organisations are collecting, storing, and sharing more of it.

More is coming. Keyboard logging programs and devices can already record everything you type; recording everything you say on your cellphone is only a few years away.

A "life recorder" you can clip to your lapel that'll record everything you see and hear isn't far behind. It'll be sold as a security device, so that no-one can attack you without being recorded. When that happens, will not wearing a life recorder be used as evidence that someone is up to no good, just as prosecutors today use the fact that someone left his cellphone at home as evidence that he didn't want to be tracked?

You're living in a unique time in history: the technology is here, but it's not yet seamless. Identification checks are common, but you still have to show your ID. Soon it'll happen automatically, either by remotely querying a chip in your wallets or by recognising your face on camera.

And all those cameras, now visible, will shrink to the point where you won't even see them. Ephemeral conversation will all but disappear, and you'll think it normal. Already your children live much more of their lives in public than you do. Your future has no privacy, not because of some police-state governmental tendencies or corporate malfeasance, but because computers naturally produce data.

Cardinal Richelieu famously said: "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." When all your words and actions can be saved for later examination, different rules have to apply.

Society works precisely because conversation is ephemeral; because people forget, and because people don't have to justify every word they utter.

Conversation is not the same thing as correspondence. Words uttered in haste over morning coffee, whether spoken in a coffee shop or thumbed on a BlackBerry, are not official correspondence. A data pattern indicating "terrorist tendencies" is no substitute for a real investigation. Being constantly scrutinised undermines our social norms; furthermore, it's creepy. Privacy isn't just about having something to hide; it's a basic right that has enormous value to democracy, liberty, and our humanity.

We're not going to stop the march of technology, just as we cannot un-invent the automobile or the coal furnace. We spent the industrial age relying on fossil fuels that polluted our air and transformed our climate. Now we are working to address the consequences. (While still using said fossil fuels, of course.) This time around, maybe we can be a little more proactive.

Just as we look back at the beginning of the previous century and shake our heads at how people could ignore the pollution they caused, future generations will look back at us - living in the early decades of the information age - and judge our solutions to the proliferation of data.

We must, all of us together, start discussing this major societal change and what it means. And we must work out a way to create a future that our grandchildren will be proud of.

Facebook offers control to users

By Darren Waters Technology editor, BBC News website

Facebook has responded to criticism over the way it handles user data by handing over control to its users.

Members of the social network will have comment and voting rights over the firm's future policies regarding how the site is governed.

Founder Mark Zuckerberg said the aim was to "open up Facebook so that users can participate meaningfully in our policies and our future".

Privacy International's Simon Davies said the move was "unprecedented".

"No other company has made such a bold move towards transparency and democratisation," he said.

"The devil will be in the detail but, overall, we applaud these positive steps and think they foreshadow the future of web 2.0."

Mr Zuckerberg admitted that the recent changes to the website's terms and conditions had sparked a "firestorm".

Users had complained that it appeared Facebook was claiming ownership of their data - even if they delete their accounts.

The founder said: "We do not own user data, they [users] own it. We never intended to give that impression and feel really bad that we did."

Facebook has announced a new set of governing principles and rights and responsibilities.

Under the changes, users will be able to first comment and then potentially vote on future changes to the documents.

Facebook will enact a vote on changes to its governance when more than 7,000 comments have been made by users on a topic.

Mr Zuckerberg told BBC News: "We think that is pretty reasonable.

"We have designed the votes so a small minority of users cannot create a binding election."

Facebook is the largest social network in the world, with more than 175 million users. The controversy over Facebook's use of personal data is not the first time it has had a run in with users.

It angered some members in the past when it introduced a new advertising system, called Beacon, which delivered adverts to users on external websites based on their Facebook profile and habits. Beacon was quickly changed in order to give users an opt-in or opt-out button from the service.

Included in the new Facebook principles are specific details regarding the ownership of data.

It states: "People should own their information. They should have the freedom to share it with anyone they want and take it with them anywhere they want, including removing it from the Facebook Service."

Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook had undertaken to carry out all of its business within the framework of the new governance documents.

"We trust our users. We are making this so that we can't put in place a new terms of service without users' permission."

He said he hoped the new policy would "strengthen the community and the bonds between us and the users".

He told BBC News that he believed that opening up decisions about the future policies of the social network was not incompatible with doing business.

He said: "The important thing to keep in mind is that we are strengthening the trust people have in us.

"We believe that good dialogue we will get us to the right place... where everyone is more involved and happy."

Net TV plans get Trust scrutiny

Plans to take iPlayer-type services to TV sets are being scrutinised by the BBC Trust.

The BBC-backed proposals want to produce set-top boxes that can go online to access on-demand TV services such as the iPlayer and ITVplayer.

The device is aimed at the majority of UK homes that have not signed up for on-demand subscription TV services and do not have a Personal Video Recorder.

Setting up such services rests on getting approval from the BBC Trust.

Public views

In its submission to the Trust laying out its plans for the Project Canvas scheme, the BBC wrote: "the 53% of UK households that do not subscribe to pay television services risk falling behind".

"Freeview is already failing to offer the full range of BBC licence fee funded television and radio services," it added.

This situation would only worsen as the internet became the main way that TV programmes are distributed to viewers.

Project Canvas aims to bring together many broadcasters as well as ISPs and web firms such as YouTube to back a common technology that will make all the content accessible via the TV set-top box.

The initial devices are expected to be set-top boxes, with a net connection, that could cost up to £200.

The public - and any other interested parties - are being invited by the BBC Trust to contribute to its two-stage consultation process.

The first stage closes on 17 April. By 8 June, the BBC Trust will publish its preliminary conclusions, at which point the second stage of the consultation will commence.

This next stage closes on 22 June and the Trust said it would aim to deliver its findings by 24 July at the latest.

Subject to approval, Project Canvas is due to launch in 2010.

The consultation comes in the wake of a decision by the UK Competition Commission to block the creation of an on-demand video service, known as Project Kangaroo.

The service proposed to make available current TV shows from Channel 4 and ITV as well as archived material from the BBC.

Declaring that Project Kangaroo "has to be stopped", the Competition Commission said viewers would be better served by having the three broadcasters as "close competitors" rather than collaborators.

Google users hit by mail blackout

Google has apologised for the outage that hit business and consumer users of its popular e-mail service.

The GMail service went offline at 0930 GMT and, Google claims, was unavailable to all for "approximately two and a half hours".

But anecdotal evidence suggests it was out of action for many users for about four hours - one of the longest downtimes ever suffered by Google.

More than 113 million people use Google mail worldwide, according to comScore.

In a statement posted on its official Google blog it said: "We're really sorry about this, and we did do everything to restore access as soon as we could.".

It said its engineers were still investigating the "root cause" of the problem.

"We know how important GMail is to our users so we take this very seriously," it added.

It said that those getting back into their e-mail may have to fill in a captcha form that asks people to decipher and re-type some scrambled letters before getting access to messages.

According to comScore, Google has the world's third most popular web mail service behind Hotmail with 283 million users and Yahoo with 274 million e-mail users.

Professional suite

More than a million business around the world use Google's professional suite of applications, including e-mail. Google itself relies on the service and press spokespeople for the firm were unable to e-mail journalists with statements regarding the problem.

Professional users are covered by a service level agreement that promises to be 99.9% operational in any calendar month.

The "premier edition" of the Apps service costs $50 (£34) per user for a year.

According to Google, its e-mail service suffered an average of 10 to 15 minutes of downtime per month in 2008.

The last outage of note was in August 2008 when users were unable to use Google Mail for "a couple of hours".

After the incident Todd Jackson, product manager for Google Mail, said in a blog post: "We're conducting a full review of what went wrong and moving quickly to update our internal systems and procedures accordingly."

On its support page for Google Mail, the firm said "A number of users have had difficulty accessing GMail today.

"The majority are now able to access their e-mail accounts again and we're hoping to have service restored for the remainder very soon."

Quake boosts browser video games

Classic game Quake III will be re-released for the web browser on Tuesday, highlighting the rapid development in web games.

It runs inside browsers after the installation of a software plug-in.

"It is a significant step which proves browser games can be sophisticated," said Michael French, editor of games industry magazine Develop.

Quake Live is a version of a PC game which was first launched in 1999.

The game is being released free of charge for browsers by id Software, and is supported by advertising. It opens to the public as a beta later on Tuesday.

Mr French said: "A lot of the foundations of the mechanics of modern shooters were established by Quake.

All kinds of people could now be exposed to games for the first time Michael French, Develop Magazine

"It makes a lot of sense for id to be trying new avenues for their intellectual property.

"One of the things id has always been known for is being cutting edge in graphics but also for finding new ways to get their games to gamers."

Id Software is not the first company to offer browser versions of games that were once synonymous with physical formats: Garage Games offers web versions of games like Fallen Empire and Marble Blast Online, while there are also a number of online multiplayer titles such as PMOG.

High profile

But Quake is the most high-profile PC franchise to branch out into the browser space.

Mr French said: "It proves that consumers are willing to try these things. All kinds of people could now be exposed to games for the first time.

"There is no console or hardware in the way. This is gaming for people who are more used to using Facebook."

Mr French said browser-based games had already surpassed the graphical sophistication of titles that used to rely on console hardware such as the original PlayStation.

"You won't play this and be put off thinking it is old fashioned or ugly. It is very playable and watchable," Mr French said.

However, he said browser games were not yet a substitute for a dedicated piece of gaming hardware.

The games industry will be watching id software's browser developments very closely.

"The Massively Multiplayer Online space is certainly the area most likely to move to browser. Some well-known role playing game franchises could also move to the browser and are probably already in development."

The struggle among the stars

By Flora Graham BBC News

It's a credit crunch nightmare.

The chief executive of the world's biggest corporation gets a phone call in the middle of the night. Thanks to industrial espionage, the company has been bankrupted, assets stripped, bank accounts emptied. When trading starts the next day, even the company name will be gone.

If this were real life, the executive might consider jumping out the window. But in the online game of EVE Online, it's all part of the fun.

"It is another challenge," said Par Molen, the leader of the "corporation" Band of Brothers (BoB), who got the late-night call.

"That's what we live for."

Mr Molen and his online colleagues had spent four years building BoB into the dominant force in a game where 200,000 players battle it out in an online galaxy of spaceships and planets.

Unlike other multiplayer online games like the hugely popular World of Warcraft, which is split into smaller groups, the thousands of EVE players are in it together.

In one virtual galaxy, players build, fight, and trade, joining together to form "corporations" to gain control over sections of the huge starscape.

This creates a complex society where anything can happen, and often does. Rules are few, and all of the lying, cheating and stealing that occurs in real life can also happen in the game.

A player called "The Mittani" is the shadowy spymaster who runs dozens of agents for his corporation - GoonSwarm. He got the call of his career when a disgruntled BoB director contacted him to say that he was thinking of switching sides.

With the director's access to BoB's internal workings, the pair were able to disband the corporation and steal all the assets they could lay their hands on.

To add insult to injury, GoonSwarm then re-registered the Band of Brothers name for itself, leaving the former alliance nameless and broken.

It's a finale that has been compared to "Apple dissolving Microsoft", and led to some players calling for the game's developer, CCP, to "roll-back" the game to the previous day and cancel the change.

"Any one director should not have the power to destroy the work of so many people for so many months and years with two mouse clicks," wrote a player called David on an EVE-related blog.

But CCP is well-known for keeping its hands off action within the game. Since no rules were broken, the changes stood, and thousands of BoB members woke up to a very different world.

Scams in space

This is not the first time that rogue bankers and credit fraud have made EVE Online seem more like the financial pages than a space cowboy video game.

In January, a player absconded with over 80bn ISK, the game's virtual currency, from an in-game bank. Although the 80bn is only worth a few thousand pounds if exchanged for real money, it represents hours of in-game toil.

In an online echo of the real-world banking crisis, the bank's chairman issued a statement to calm a run on deposits, writing: "Dynasty Banking will get over these times and we will continue to strive to earn the public's faith as one of the leading banks of Eve Online".

Another scam on an epic scale beyond the fantasies of real conmen was perpetrated in 2006, when a player ran off with 700bn ISK from another EVE bank.

"Think of me as a space Robin Hood—steals from the rich and gives to himself," wrote the perpetrator in an EVE-related internet forum.

Such swindles left some players in awe of EVE's potential for realism, whilst others called for a stronger code of ethics in the game.

But spymaster Mittani scoffed at calls for in-game morals, noting that without dirty tricks, GoonSwarm would have had no chance of toppling a more established corporation like BoB.

He said: "We don't have any advantages, so we can't obey your stupid 'space bushido'. We're going to spy, we're going to use defectors, we're going to lie, cheat, steal and be bastards.

Sat-nav to aid disabled motorists

By Geoff Adams-Spink
Age & disability correspondent, BBC News website

A satellite navigation system made specifically to assist disabled drivers has been made by a UK company.

Gowrings Mobility - a specialist in adapted vehicles - is marketing the BB Nav, developed by Navevo.

The system contains a database of Blue Badge parking bays, accessible toilets, disabled-friendly petrol stations and accessible accommodation.

It covers 150 major towns and cities around the UK including all of the London boroughs.

"Many disabled travellers worry about the uncertainty of not knowing where to park... and consequently do not venture further afield than their own local area," said Janet Seward, sales and marketing director at Gowrings.

"We want to make disabled travellers' lives and journeys much smoother, easier and more spontaneous."

The BB Nav grades car parks according to their level of accessibility and also has the location of more than 10,000 on-street parking bays.

The device is also programmed with the varying parking regulations for Blue Badge holders as they move from one local authority area to another.

Other "points of interest" (POIs) include accessible beaches, shopping facilities, toilets and hotels.

Road test

In practice, the BB Nav delivers a lot less than it appears to promise.

The unit is small and slim - much like other in-car GPS systems.

But unlike other satnavs that rely on finger operation, the BB Nav has a telescopic stylus that is housed in the body of the device.

Something so small and fiddly can and probably would be easily lost in a car.

The on-screen keyboard is too small to allow it to be programmed by all but the most slender of fingers.

And the display fonts are so small that older motorists will be reaching for their reading glasses.

On the plus side, the display is large, the map easy to read and all side roads are helpfully named.

The default female voice is clear and crisp but does have a tendency to repeat itself too often.

When tested in the outer suburbs of North-West London, the BB Nav was disappointing and - at times - mystifying.

It failed to locate on-street parking bays on Bridge Street in Pinner.

When asked to find an accessible toilet in Ruislip, it found its way to a residential street of pre-war, detached houses with not a public convenience in sight - accessible or otherwise.

And when accessible accommodation in Harrow was requested, it located a Hilton hotel in Wembley but directed the car to industrial units close to the football stadium.

When Navevo - the makers of the BB Nav - were approached to comment upon the problems encountered, they referred the issue to The Pie Guide, the company that provides the data for the device.

Mike Hudson, data manager for Pie Guide, explained that the data on parking bays came from local authorities in a variety of formats, the quality of which was variable too.

Referring to the absence of the parking bay in Pinner, Mr Hudson said: "I suspect that the council has not provided the data to us - hopefully it will be picked up in a forthcoming update."

He said that the hard-to-locate accessible toilet in Ruislip was "troubling" and that it would require further investigation.

Data on accessible hotels was, he admitted, "not great".

The information comes from a variety of sources depending on the part of the UK being searched.

And not all hotel chains submit to the verification process which they would have to pay for.

"There is no one, single data source to which we can go and extract this information," said Mr Hudson.

Data updates are planned for the future but are still the subject of commercial negotiations between Navevo and Pie.

For a product costing just under £200, it seems a little rough around the edges to justify the price tag.

Given its shortcomings in terms of usability and accuracy, disabled motorists might be better off waiting for other satnav suppliers to install a set of disabled-friendly POIs.

Of those contacted, Garmin said providing useful information for disabled drivers was already being considered.

dot.life A blog about technology from BBC News

Speed Diary: Day Five

• Darren Waters
• 23 Feb 09, 14:50 GMT

A number of readers of this blog and my Twitter followers were kind enough to suggest different ways to test our 50Mbps cable broadband connection, as part of a Speed Diary I've been carrying out over the last week.

So here they are. I should also point out that I performed all of these tests over a wireless connection. They would have been faster over an Ethernet connection.

Try using a download manager and downloading a file from ftp.virginmedia.com then uploading it to /incoming

There are a number of game demo files sitting on the Virgin FTP (File Transfer Protocol) site and I was able to easily saturate the downstream speeds getting very close to the 50Mbps upper limit. Each of the five files I simultaneously downloaded was coming down at almost 1.0MB per second.

On the upload site I was getting around 1Mbps.

Two readers suggested downloading some TV programmes via BitTorrent and The Pirate Bay. One reader said: "In the name of journalistic research and only to watch Beeb programs of course."

Given the current court case against The Pirate Bay going on in the Swedish courts, it is probably not a good career move to be downloading any unauthorised content via The Pirate Bay, even material from my own employer without permission.

So I used LegalTorrents.com to download some video files covered under a Creative Commons license for free distribution.

A 900MB file being shared by 25 peers on BitTorrent came down the pipe at about 400 to 500KBps in about 40 minutes. In my experience the more seeders there are on BitTorrent sharing a file, the quicker it tends to arrive so a more popular file would have been downloaded faster.

A number of users suggested downloading files from news servers, such as Giganews and the Virgin Media news server

News servers pre-date the World Wide Web and are both text discussion boards and a method of distributing large files, often it has to be said copied movies, TV programmes and music. But there are also game demos, and copyright-free material to be found.

The advantage of news servers over tools like BitTorrent is speed. Most providers of news servers have incredibly quick connections and downloading files is often only limited by the speed of your own broadband connection.

I downloaded a 350MB file from both GigaNews and the news server operated by Virgin Media. The file downloaded via GigaNews came down the pipe at between 4MB per second 4.2MB per second, which is pretty much the top end of my connection speed.

The Virgin Media news server was a little bit slower - with a minimum of 1MB per second and a maximum of 3.9MB per second.

How about a download of a large game/demo on a console?

So how quickly can you download files from a service like Xbox Live? I selected the demo of strategy game Halo Wars to download, a file over 1GB in size.

The demo was downloaded and playing on my Xbox 360 in under eight minutes.

What are the speeds like when e-mailing high resolution images, such as 50MB photos?

It is very difficult to find a mail service that will accept files as big as 50MB, and it is probably more advisable to use FTP, BitTorrent or a file transfer service like YouSendIt, or SendThisFile.

Google Mail accepts attachments up to 20MB in size. I sent two JPGs of about 8MB in size each using Google's mail service. The files left my outbox within five minutes.

How about streaming video on 2-3 clients simultaneously? Can it cope?

I wrote about this last week. To recap: I streamed the BBC's iPlayer across three machines with little difficulty but as soon as I threw in some background downloads of large files then the picture started to stutter on one of the machines.

Try Xbox 360 racing games, not FPS. Try hosting Forza 2 session with maximum racers.

Last week I used the connection to play some First Person Shooter games with some mixed results. I don't have a copy of Forza 2 but I do have a copy of Project Gotham Racing 4. I hosted a number of races and all of the gamers in my session reported the session was lag free.

Schedule daily speed tests and record the results over time to see if, as the success of the service increases the quality does not decrease (something that has often been seen in cable broadband).

Virgin says there is no bandwidth throttling on the connection of users of its 50Mbps service - something that is not true of its other connection speeds.

I took readings of the connection speed from a number of different measurement tools across the week and found there was a slight variance in the speed.

On wired connections, the tests revealed that the speeds varied from 36Mbps to 48Mbps over the period.

On wireless connections - once I had fixed my router issues - the speeds varied between 25Mbps and 46Mbps during the week.

There was one reader request that I was not able to help with, however.

Could you download the internet for me and put it on a CD please?

I think I draw the line at that test.

Finally, having the luxury of a 50Mbps service has reminded me how much has changed in term of connection speeds in the last 25 years that I have been online.

I stumbled across my first ever modem recently - a Commodore 64 Communications modem that I used to connect to Compunet when I was a teenager.

This was a 1200/75 baud modem which means, if I've got my calculations right, that the maximum downstream speed I could have reached was about 1Kbps.

That means that I had been using that modem today and tried to download the Halo Wars demo - it would have taken about 97 days to download, rather than the eight minutes on the 50Mbps connection.

The Sun and global warming

The Earth’s ozone layer absorbs ultraviolet light from the Sun and prevents it from reaching the surface. This protects living things from its harmful effects.

Greenhouse gases such as methane, water vapour and carbon dioxide absorb infrared radiation emitted from the Earth. This increases the temperature of the planet. The concentration of greenhouse gases is increasing, leading to global warming.

Carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere by photosynthesis, but returned by respiration and the combustion of fuels. Processes like these form the carbon cycle.

The ozone layer

The Earth is surrounded by a deep layer of gas called the atmosphere. The atmosphere is a mixture of gases, including nitrogen, oxygen, argon and carbon dioxide.

Oxygen

Plants use the energy in sunlight to make their own food by photosynthesis:

carbon dioxide + water → glucose + oxygen

Photosynthesis releases oxygen into the atmosphere, and removes carbon dioxide. This reverses the effect of respiration.

Ozone

Ultraviolet light from the Sun provides the energy needed to make ozone, O₃, from atmospheric oxygen, O₂. Ozone absorbs ultraviolet radiation. This prevents it from reaching the ground and harming living organisms, especially animals.

Ozone layer

The ozone layer is the part of the atmosphere where most ozone is found - between about 15km and 40km above the Earth’s surface. The concentration of ozone there is still only around eight parts per million.

Absorbing ultraviolet light - higher

Ozone molecule formation

The greenhouse effect

Greenhouse gases such as methane, water vapour and carbon dioxide absorb infrared radiation emitted from the Earth. This is called the greenhouse effect keeps the Earth warmer than it would otherwise be.

Greenhouse effect

1. Sun’s rays enter the Earth’s atmosphere.
2. Heat is emitted back from the Earth’s surface
3. Some heat passes back out into space.
4. But some heat is absorbed by carbon dioxide (greenhouse gas) and becomes trapped within the Earth’s atmosphere. The Earth becomes hotter as a result.

Remember the Moon and Earth are the same distance from the Sun. The Moon has no atmosphere and an average surface temperature of -18ºC, while the Earth has an average surface temperature of 14°C. So you can see that greenhouse gases are not a bad thing in themselves.

Global warming

The concentration of greenhouse gases is increasing. This is increasing the greenhouse effect and is leading to global warming.

The carbon cycle

Carbon dioxide is one of the greenhouse gases. It is present in the atmosphere in small concentrations, about 0.038%. Carbon dioxide is recycled constantly through various processes that form the carbon cycle.

The slideshow should help you to understand how the carbon cycle works.

Global warming

For thousands of years, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere remained much the same. But during the past 200 years it has increased steadily.

The rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide has been caused largely by:

• burning increasing amounts of fossil fuels as an energy source
• burning forests to clear land

Burning forests has two unfortunate effects:

• the burning wood releases carbon dioxide
• there are fewer trees left to photosynthesise and remove carbon dioxide from the air

As the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased, so have mean global temperatures. This is called global warming.

Effects of global warming

Global warming could cause:

• climate change
• extreme weather conditions in some areas
• rising sea levels

Climate change may make it impossible to grow certain food crops in some regions. Melting polar ice and the thermal expansion of seawater could cause rising sea levels and the flooding of low-lying land.

Global warming is 'irreversible'

A team of environmental researchers in the US has warned many effects of climate change are irreversible.

The scientists concluded global temperatures could remain high for 1,000 years, even if carbon emissions can somehow be halted.

The report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Colorado comes as President Obama announces a review of vehicle emission standards.

It appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The scientists have been researching global warming and the consequences for policymakers.

The team warned that, if carbon levels in the atmosphere continued to rise, there would be less rainfall in already dry areas of southern Europe, North America, parts of Africa and Australia.

The scientists say the oceans are currently slowing down global warming by absorbing heat, but they will eventually release that heat back into the air.

They say politicians must now offset environmental damage already done by man-made pollution.

"People have imagined that if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide the climate would go back to normal in 100 years, 200 year - that's not true," said researcher Susan Solomon, the lead author of the report, quoted by AP news agency.

Their conclusions come as President Obama ordered the US Environmental Protection Agency to review rules on carbon emissions from passenger vehicles.

Workers 'stealing company data'

By Maggie Shiels Technology reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley

Six out of every 10 employees stole company data when they left their job last year, said a study of US workers.

The survey, conducted by the Ponemon Institute, said that so-called malicious insiders use the information to get a new job, start their own business or for revenge.

"They are making these judgements based out of fear and anxiety," the Institute's Mike Spinney told BBC News.

"People are worried about their jobs and want to hedge their bets," he said.

"Our study showed that 59% of people will say 'I'm going to take something of value with me when I go'."

The Ponemon Institute, a privacy and management research firm, surveyed 945 adults in the United States who were laid-off, fired or changed jobs in the last 12 months.

Everyone that took part had access to proprietary information such as customer data, contact lists, employee records, financial reports, confidential business documents, software tools or other intellectual property.

'Surging wave'

In the report, entitled Jobs at Risk = Data at Risk, the Institute showed that such data breaches put a company's financial health in jeopardy.

That view is backed in part by another recent study by security firm McAfee. It estimated total global economic losses due to data theft and security breaches by organised crime, hackers and inside jobs reached $1 trillion last year.

Kevin Rowney , from the data loss prevention arm of security firm Symantec, the sponsors of the study, told the BBC there would be a "surging wave" of these insider attacks.

"It is conceivable that a company can lose its corporate life through a large scale data breach," warned Mr Rowney.

He added: "The intellectual property of a company can represent the crown jewels and are almost worth more than the building. This is the core asset of a company and any breach or loss can be very expensive."

Relaxed attitude

The Ponemon Institute revealed that part of the problem rests with companies themselves and their relaxed attitude towards security.

It found that only 15% of respondents' companies reviewed or audited the paper documents or electronic files employees were walking out of work with.

The report also said that if businesses did conduct a review, it was very poor with 45% not being completed and 29% being fairly superficial.

"Many firms believe insider data breaches are the cost of doing business," said Mr Spinney.

"They believe this is just something they have to live with. Our sense is that a lot of companies have really just given up, but this study shows these are preventable events."

During the economic downturn, security experts have predicted that the number of insider attacks will rise.

Last week, Microsoft told BBC News that "with 1.5 million predicted job losses in the US alone, there's an increased risk and exposure to these attacks".

Mr Rowney said one way to limit such breaches was to boost security but also to change focus.

"The industry has concentrated on the protection of the containers where the data is stored like firewalls, access, controls and end point security systems.

"The end result is that most security teams are protecting the containers not the data itself. And that is a core flaw in the security methodology of many practitioners today," claimed Mr Rowney.

Warning of infected auction tool

Auctiva has more than 500,000 users

A third-party add-on for eBay used by thousands of sellers is being flagged by Google as potentially malicious, after it became infected with a trojan.

Auctiva provides tools for sellers on the popular auction website.

The company confirmed a virus had attached itself to files on its servers but remedied the problem soon after.

However, Google continues to warn users searching for the site that it "may potentially harm your computer".

The trojan, called Adclicker, is classed by security specialist Symantec as a "very low risk". It is designed to "artificially generate traffic to certain web sites" and is used by malicious hackers to boost clicks to online banner adverts or to inflate web statistics.

On its community forum Auctiva said that it had "initiated a request with Google to have our site cleared from being reported as a malicious site".

Google works in partnership with the StopBadware.org organisation to warn users about potentially malicious websites that are infected with viruses and trojans.

Users warned

More than 186,265 websites have been reported to StopBadware for hosting malicious programs or web scripts, which can damage a a computer or, in extreme cases, hijack a machine.

Users first flagged the problem with the Auctiva site last week after anti-virus software began to warn there could be a problem with the service.

Some users reported they were also receiving warnings on auction listings inside eBay.

The firm said it had removed servers in China that had become infected with the trojan and that it was "currently safe to navigate the Auctiva website".

However, until the website is cleared by the StopBadware organisation users will continue to get warnings from Google when clicking on the site following a search.

A spokesman for Google said the site was to be reviewed by StopBadware soon.

Global warming 'underestimated'

The severity of global warming over the next century will be much worse than previously believed, a leading climate scientist has warned.

Professor Chris Field, an author of a 2007 landmark report on climate change, said future temperatures "will be beyond anything" predicted.

Prof Field said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report had underestimated the rate of change.

He said warming is likely to cause more environmental damage than forecast.

Speaking at the American Science conference in Chicago, Prof Field said fresh data showed greenhouse gas emissions between 2000 and 2007 increased far more rapidly than expected.

"We are basically looking now at a future climate that is beyond anything that we've considered seriously in climate policy," he said.

Prof Field said the 2007 report, which predicted temperature rises between 1.1C and 6.4C over the next century, seriously underestimated the scale of the problem.

He said the increases in carbon dioxide have been caused, principally, by the burning of coal for electric power in India and China.

Wildfires

Prof Field said the impact on temperatures is as yet unknown, but warming is likely to accelerate at a much faster pace and cause more environmental damage than had been predicted.

He says that a warming planet will dry out forests in tropical areas making them much more likely to suffer from wildfires.

The rising temperatures could also speed up the melting of the permafrost, vastly increasing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, Prof Field warns.

"Without effective action, climate change is going to be larger and more difficult to deal with than we thought," he said.

Global Warming - an Overview

by Helen Willetts BBC Broadcast Meteorologist Helen Willetts explains global warming - what the problem is and how we've contributed to it. Like our day-to-day weather, climate change is a very complex subject. The media provide us with reports about global warming but it can be difficult to form an objective opinion when scientists put forward what look like opposing views. As in any scientific discipline there is a degree of uncertainty and these conflicting arguments reflect this ongoing debate. However, the consensus is that the world is warming, and a majority of scientists believe that man is contributing to that with increasing levels of carbon dioxide (CO2). Limiting CO2 emissions is so important because of its long life cycle. Carbon dioxide produced today will remain in the atmosphere for around 100 years and we are already committed to a certain level of warming. But how this will affect us in the future is difficult to quantify and the focus of research is now turning to adaptation and mitigation. All climate projections show the world will warm to some degree, but by how much depends on many factors. Despite the underlying warming trend, our weather will continue to vary from day to day and from year to year. This natural variability ensures we have cold and warm years. Our climate is the average conditions recorded over a longer period of time and it is this that, in many scientists' opinion, is changing at an unprecedented rate. When we talk about global warming, we talk about the 'greenhouse effect'. This is actually a natural and essential feature of our atmosphere, without which our planet would be uninhabitable. This process works by the principle that certain atmospheric gases (so-called greenhouse gases) allow short-wave radiation from the sun to pass through them unabsorbed, while at the same time absorbing some of the long-wave radiation which tries to escape back to space. The net result is that more heat is received from the sun than is lost back to space, keeping the Earth's surface some 30 to 35 °C warmer than it would otherwise be.

Hackers target Xbox Live players

Xbox Live is being targeted by malicious hackers selling services that kick players off the network.

The booting services are proving popular with players who want a way to get revenge on those who beat them in an Xbox Live game.

The attackers are employing data flooding tools that have been used against websites for many years.

Microsoft is "investigating" the use of the tools and said those caught using them would be banned from Xbox Live.

"There's been a definite increase in the amount of people talking about and distributing these things over the last three to four weeks," said Chris Boyd, director of malware research at Facetime Communications.

Attack tool

"The smart thing about these Xbox tools is that they do not attack the Xbox Live network itself," he said.

He said the tools work by exploiting the way that the Xbox Live network is set up. Game consoles connecting to the Xbox network send data via the net, and for that it needs an IP address.

Even better, said Mr Boyd, games played via Xbox Live are not hosted on private servers.

"Instead," he said, "a lot of games on Xbox Live are hosted by players."

If hackers can discover the IP address of whoever is hosting a game they can employ many of the attacks that have been used for years against websites, said Mr Boyd.

One of the most popular for the Xbox Live specialists is the Denial of Service attack which floods an IP address with vast amounts of data.

The flood of data is generated by a group of hijacked home computers, a botnet, that have fallen under the control of a malicious hacking group.

When turned against a website this flood of traffic can overwhelm it or make it unresponsive to legitimate visitors.

When turned against an Xbox owner, it can mean they cannot connect to the Live network and effectively throws them out of the game.

"They get your IP address, put it in the booter tool and they attempt to flood the port that uses Xbox traffic," said Mr Boyd. "Flooding that port prevents any traffic getting out."

Skill set

The hard part, he said, was discovering a particular gamer's IP address but many malicious hackers had honed the skills needed to find them.

Some interconnect their PC and Xbox and use packet sniffing software to hunt through the traffic flowing in and out of the console for IP addresses.

Others simply use con tricks to get the target to reveal their net address.

The technical knowledge needed to hunt down IP addresses was quite high, said Mr Boyd, but many of those who had the skills were selling their expertise to those keen to hit back at their rivals on the Xbox Live network.

For $20 (£13) some Xbox Live hackers will remotely access a customer's PC and set up the whole system so it can be run any time they need it.

Some offer low rates to add compromised machines to a botnet and increase the amount of data flooding a particular IP address.

Defending against the attack could be tricky, said Mr Boyd: "There's no real easy solution to this one."

Although IP addresses regularly change, people could find it takes hours or days for their ISP to move them on to a new one.

In response to the rise in attacks, Microsoft said: "We are investigating reports involving the use of malicious software tools that an attacker could use to try and disrupt an Xbox LIVE player's internet connection."

It added: "This problem is not related to the Xbox Live service, but to the player's internet connection. The attacker could also attempt [to] disrupt other internet activities, such as streaming video or web browsing, using the same tools.

In its statement Microsoft warned: "This malicious activity violates the Xbox Live Terms of Use, and will result in a ban from Xbox Live and other appropriate action.

It urged anyone falling victim to such an attack to contact their ISP to report it and get help fixing it.

In January 2009 Microsoft announced that Xbox Live had more than 17m members.

Charities demand child porn block

Children's charities have expressed "serious concerns" many UK households still have access to images showing child sex abuse via their computers.

The government had asked all internet service providers (ISPs) to block illegal websites by the end of 2007.

But firms providing 5% of broadband connections have still failed to act.

One of them, Zen Internet, said in a statement: "We have not yet implemented the IWF's recommended system because we have concerns over its effectiveness."

It is understood other ISPs have cited the cost of blocking the illegal material as a reason not to participate in the scheme.

But the NSPCC's Zoe Hilton said: "Allowing this loophole helps feed the appalling trade in images featuring real children being seriously sexually assaulted."

The blocked websites come from a list supplied by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), but some smaller providers refuse to use the list.

Easy access

The Children's Charities Coalition on Internet Safety (CCCIS) says self-regulation is not working and it is calling for firmer action by the government.

Ms Hilton said: "Over 700,000 households in the UK can still get uninterrupted and easy access to illegal child abuse image sites.

"We now need decisive action from the government to ensure the ISPs that are still refusing to block this foul material are forced to fall into line.

"Self-regulation on this issue is obviously failing - and in a seriously damaging way for children."

Home Office Minister Alan Campbell said: "In 2006 the government stated that they wished to see 100% of consumer broadband connections covered by blocking, which includes child pornography, by the end of 2007.

"Currently in the UK, 95% of consumer broadband connections are covered by blocking. The government is currently looking at ways to progress the final 5%.

Earth is Destined Towards Water Bankruptcy

The acute droughts in Kenya, Argentina and the U.S. state of California are among the latest phenomena to illustrate that the global environment has been dangerously degraded. And participants in the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, heard that the planet could be destined towards "water bankruptcy".

It might surprise many to learn, then, that water issues are not directly included in the Kyoto protocol, the main international agreement on tackling climate change. Ensuring that this omission is not replicated in a follow-up accord scheduled to be finalised at talks in Copenhagen, Denmark, near the end of 2009, was one of the main topics addressed at a conference in Brussels Feb. 12 and 13. According to Maude Barlow, an adviser on water to the United Nations general assembly, the underlying assumptions made by many decision-makers have been misguided. Whereas they have tended to view water shortage as a consequence of climate change, the unsustainable exploitation of water is in fact "one of the major causes of climate change."

Pollution, the overstretching of rivers, and the mining of groundwater supplies are all contributing to this ecological and social calamity. So, too, is the way of life to which people in the wealthier parts of the world have become accustomed. Millions of roses sold in Europe to celebrate Valentine's Day this year have originated in Africa's Rift Valley. The habitat of the hippopotamus, an endangered species, its water supplies have been heavily drained by agri- business companies involved in the flower trade. While private entrepreneurs have profited handsomely from this situation, Africa contains some of the worst incidences of water-related diseases on earth. More children die from such diseases than the next three causes of death combined.

Data by the World Health Organisation suggests that 80 percent of infectious diseases in the world could be caused by dirty water. Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet president, said that the conventional model of economic development being followed in much of the world is in crisis. "The unsustainability of this model is reflected by the water problem," he added. "A recent report by the UN Development Programme said that at least 700 million people - until recently it was 1 billion - face a shortage of water. At the same time, demand for water is growing all the time."

During 2008 the UN's Human Rights Council decided to carry out a three- year investigation into how access to water relates to basic rights. About 1 billion people worldwide do not have access to an adequate supply of drinking water, and 2.5 billion are not guaranteed the amount of water they need for sanitation. Despite the underlying issues of justice, water has been increasingly viewed by policymakers as an economic good, rather than as a universal right over the past few decades. The bottled water industry, for example, registered global sales of 200 billion litres in plastic containers last year. Almost 90 percent of these bottles were dumped, rather than recycled.

"We need to re-commit to public water," said Barlow. "We must make it uncool to go around with a bottle of commercial water on our hips."

Next month, the key players in the private water industry will gather in Istanbul. Danielle Mitterrand, widow of the late French president François Mitterrand and a human rights campaigner in her own right, said that the 100 euro (129 dollars) per day admission fee for the event illustrated its elitist nature. "Managing water is not an industrial challenge," she said. "It is a democratic challenge." Luigi Infanti, a Catholic bishop in Chile, noted that a constitution introduced in his country in 1980 by the military dictator Augusto Pinochet promoted the privatisation of water. "Eighty percent of water was handed over to private hands," he said. "It was handed over for free and forever. In Chile, we have been fighting for years for human rights. We should fight with the same intensity for human rights relating to the environment." The European Union has been eager to promote privatisation in poor countries by negotiating free trade agreements with them. One such accord signed between the EU and the Caribbean region earlier this year, for example, is designed to give western firms the possibility of having a greater role in the provision of basic services. Oxfam is among the anti-poverty organisations to have expressed concern about how water could fall into private hands as a result. But Karl Falkenberg, director-general for environment in the European Commission and a former top-level EU trade negotiator, said: "We all agree that access to high quality water at a price affordable to all is important." A policy paper that his institution hopes to publish in late March will "begin to focus on the concrete actions necessary" to address global water issues, he added. Tony Allan, a scientist working in King's College in London, said that the world has enough water to meet the needs of its current population of 6 billion and the 9 billion to which it has been projected to rise by the middle of this century.

The problem, however, is that access to safe water is frequently tied to income. "Only poor people are short of water," he said. "Rich people can always access water for domestic uses, for their jobs and for their food.

Unfortunately!!! Most Wars Occur In Earth's Richest Biological Regions

A new study published by in the journal Conservation Biology found that more than 80 percent of the world's major armed conflicts from 1950-2000 occurred in regions identified as the most biologically diverse and threatened places on Earth.

The study by leading international conservation scientists compared major conflict zones with the Earth's 34 biodiversity hotspots identified by Conservation International (CI). The hotspots are considered top conservation priorities because they contain the entire populations of more than half of all plant species and at least 42 percent of all vertebrates, and are highly threatened.

Russell A. Mittermeier, president of Conservation International (CI) and an author of the study, said, "This astounding conclusion – that the richest storehouses of life on Earth are also the regions of the most human conflict – tells us that these areas are essential for both biodiversity conservation and human well-being. Millions of the world's poorest people live in hotspots and depend on healthy ecosystems for their survival, so there is a moral obligation – as well as political and social responsibility - to protect these places and all the resources and services they provide."

The study found that more than 90 percent of major armed conflicts – defined as those resulting in more than 1,000 deaths – occurred in countries that contain one of the 34 biodiversity hotspots, while 81 percent took place within specific hotspots. A total of 23 hotspots experienced warfare over the half-century studied.

Examples of the nature-conflict connection include the Vietnam War, when poisonous Agent Orange destroyed forest cover and coastal mangroves, and timber harvesting that funded war chests in Liberia, Cambodia and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In those and countless other cases, the collateral damage of war harmed both the biological wealth of the region and the ability of people to live off of it.

In addition, war refugees must hunt, gather firewood or build encampments to survive, increasing the pressure on local resources. More weapons means increased hunting for bush meat and widespread poaching that can decimate wildlife populations – such as 95 percent of the hippopotamus slaughtered in DRC's Virunga National Park.

In total, the hotspots are home to a majority of the world's 1.2 billion poorest people who rely on the resources and services provided by natural ecosystems for their daily survival. Environmental concerns tend to recede or collapse in times of social disruption, and conservation activities often get suspended during active conflicts. At the same time, war provides occasional conservation opportunities, such as the creation of "Peace Parks" along contested borders.

The study concluded that international conservation groups – and indeed the broader international community – must develop and maintain programs in war-torn regions if they are to be effective in conserving global biodiversity and keeping ecosystems healthy. It also called for integrating conservation strategies and principles into military, reconstruction and humanitarian programs in the world's conflict zones.

Code-cracking and computers

By Mark Ward Technology correspondent, BBC News

By the end of WWII, 11 Colossus machines were in use

Bletchley Park is best known for the work done on cracking the German codes and helping to bring World War II to a close far sooner than might have happened without those code breakers.

But many believe Bletchley should be celebrated not just for what it ended but also for what it started - namely the computer age.

The pioneering machines at Bletchley were created to help codebreakers cope with the enormous volume of enciphered material the Allies managed to intercept.

The machine that arguably had the greatest influence in those early days of computing was Colossus - a re-built version of which now resides in the National Museum of Computing which is also on the Bletchley site.

Men and machine

The Enigma machines were used by the field units of the German Army, Navy and Airforce. But the communications between Hitler and his generals were protected by different machines: The Lorenz SZ40 and SZ42.

The German High Command used the Lorenz machine because it was so much faster than the Enigma, making it much easier to send large amounts of text.

"For about 500 words Enigma was reasonable but for a whole report it was hopeless," said Jack Copeland, professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, director of the Turing Archive and a man with a passionate interest in the Bletchley Park computers.

Bletchley employed thousands of code breakers during wartime

The Allies first picked up the stream of enciphered traffic, dubbed Tunny, in 1940. The importance of the material it contained soon became apparent.

Like Enigma, the Lorenz machines enciphered text by mixing it with characters generated by a series of pinwheels.

"We broke wheel patterns for a whole year before Colossus came in," said Captain Jerry Roberts, one of the codebreakers who deciphered Tunny traffic at Bletchley.

"Because of the rapid expansion in the use of Tunny, our efforts were no longer enough and we had to have the machines in to do a better job."

The man who made Colossus was Post Office engineer Tommy Flowers, who had instantly impressed Alan Turing when asked by the maverick mathematician to design a machine to help him in his war work.

But, said Capt Roberts, Flowers could not have built his machine without the astonishing work of Cambridge mathematician Bill Tutte.

"I remember seeing him staring into the middle distance and twiddling his pencil and I wondered if he was earning his corn," said Capt Roberts.

But it soon became apparent that he was.

"He figured out how the Lorenz machine worked without ever having seen one and he worked out the algorithm that broke the traffic on a day-to-day basis," said Capt Roberts.

"If there had not been Bill Tutte, there would not have been any need for Tommy Flowers," he said. "The computer would have happened later. Much later."

Valve trouble

Prof Copeland said Tommy Flowers faced scepticism from Bletchley Park staff and others that his idea for a high-speed computer employing thousands of valves would ever work.

Colossus kept valves lit to ensure they kept on working

"Flowers was very much swimming against the current as valves were only being used in small units," he said. "But the idea of using large numbers of valves reliably was Tommy Flowers' big thing. He'd experimented and knew how to control the parameters."

And work it did.

The close co-operation between the human translators and the machines meant that the Allies got a close look at the intimate thoughts of the German High Command.

Information gleaned from Tunny was passed to the Russians and was instrumental in helping it defeat the Germans at Kursk - widely seen as one of the turning points of WWII.

The greater legacy is the influence of Colossus on the origins of the computer age.

"Tommy Flowers was the key figure for everything that happened subsequently in British computers," said Prof Copeland.

After the war Bletchley veterans Alan Turing and Max Newman separately did more work on computers using the basic designs and plans seen in Colossus.

Turing worked on the Automatic Computing Engine for the British government and Newman helped to bring to life the Manchester Small Scale Experimental Machine - widely acknowledged as the first stored program computer.

The work that went into Colossus also shaped the thinking of others such as Maurice Wilkes, Freddie Williams, Tom Kilburn and many others - essentially the whole cast of characters from whom early British computing arose.

Finding a fix for phone frustration

By Dan Simmons Reporter, BBC Click

Mobile phones may be great but few would claim that the gadgets have reached a state of perfection. Dan Simmons roamed the show floor at this year's Mobile World Congress to find solutions to many nagging problems.

The Barcelona conference is the highlight of the mobile industry calendar and is the place where phone makers show off their latest technologies.

APP POWER

The Snapdragon chipset by Qualcomm powers hi-res graphics

First on the list of common annoyances are underpowered smartphones that take too long to perform tasks or crash when more than two applications are open.

One potential answer could be Qualcomm's Snapdragon chipset which its makers claim is about 50% more powerful than those in current smartphones.

The first versions of the chipset run at 1Ghz and help to power hi-res graphics, new user interfaces, while running Windows Mobile.The Toshiba TG01 is the first handset to sport it.

Qualcomm is working on a version that runs at 1.5Ghz - which, it claims, will be broadly equivalent to the processors found in most netbooks.

Enrico Salvatori, vice president at Qualcomm, said the chipset's ability to support applications is what makes "the mobile internet user experience compelling".

"The Snapdragon is delivering high performance in terms of multimedia, video, high definition, encoding and decoding, and supporting of a camera", he said.

Qualcomm has also developed Mirasol screens that draw their inspiration from structures found in nature. The screens use tiny amounts of battery power and can be seen in bright daylight.

Reflective properties on the device's screen produce brighter images outdoors, according to Cheryl Goodman-Schwarzman from Qualcomm MEMS.

"Colour comes in to the display, and it reflects back out colour. The brighter the light, the clearer the display," she said.

TOUGH PHONE

The 810-F handset by i-mate survived being driven over by Dan

Putting your life in your handset is risky, especially if you kill it. But at the 2009 MWC, i-mate showed off a handset that can take much more punishment than most.

Named after a US military spec, the 810-F can be dropped from three metres (10 feet), works in temperatures ranging from sub-zero to 60 degrees Celsius, is dustproof, and water resistant.

Dan put its toughness to the test by driving over it in a car.

It stayed in one piece and even its touchscreen was still working.

If you prepared to splash out £600 on this handset when it comes out in April, then you too could impress your friends.

One of its useful features is that your data can be protected if you lose it.

"If this device is lost or stolen, you can log in at any place and set a lock, an alarm, and even wipe the data located on the phone at any time," said Michael Cavey, sales director at i-mate. "And if it is damaged we'll replace it."

BACKUP AND RESCUE

Dianne Canham said new tech means "over the air" back ups

What makes smashing or losing a mobile phone such a pain is the fact that few phone owners sync or back up their contacts, images and songs stored on the gadget.

Some mobile stores now use transfer devices that allow customers to walk away with their contacts and media on a USB stick, or to transfer everything when upgrading.

But increasingly, mobile apps are able to do "over the air" back ups of contacts, diaries, and data to remote storage servers.

"That means that when you leave the store, all of your mobile content is automatically backed up," said Dianne Canham from mobile synchronization firm CelleBrite.

"The user doesn't actually have to instigate anything like going on the internet, or download anything, as this happens automatically," she said.

LOSING SIGNAL

Femtocells devices create a mobile phone signal via broadband

If you have trouble receiving calls at home or in the office, there is now technology that gives you a mobile signal in places without one.

Femtocells are mini phone masts which can piggy back on your broadband connection to send the call to a mobile operator.

Steve Lightley from NEC Europe reckons they are coming to your home soon.

"They've been deployed in Japan and trials are ongoing in UK and Europe," he said.

To use them a mobile does not need to have wi-fi and it is expected that some home routers will have the technology built in later this year.

Help for poor to access banking

Mobile phone banking has already taken off in some African nations

Bill Gates' charitable foundation has pledged $12.5m (£8.6m) to help the world's poor access banking services.

Working in conjunction with the mobile phone industry, the foundation aims to help provide a basic service that local banks are unable or unwilling to give.

It is thought that more than a billion people worldwide do not have a bank account but do have a mobile phone.

The foundation says that extending banking services to the world's poor is vital for economic progress.

There are commercial benefits for network operators, too.

Research by consultants McKinsey estimates that the mobile money market for people without a bank account could grow to $5bn over the next three years.

Rob Conway, chief executive of the mobile phone industry trade body, the GSMA, said the developing world was a growth area.

"This represents a huge opportunity and mobile operators are perfectly placed to bring mobile financial services to this largely untapped consumer base.

"We believe that mobile money for the unbanked has the potential to become a multi-billion market opportunity over the next three years."

Making the award, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation said it saw mobile technology as a means to help people "manage life's risks and build financial security".

The foundation, set up by the founder of Microsoft, has earmarked money for 20 projects in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Some experts have cited the success of the M-Pesa system in Kenya, set up by Vodafone and local communications firm Safaricom.

There, a network of more than 7,000 agents - mostly shopkeepers - was set up to take deposits and issue cash, with users authorising payments on their mobile phone using a Pin code.

Five million M-Pesa account holders transferred more than $50m in January. The money can be sent to non members who get a text message asking them to contact their local M-Pesa agent.

Eden Zoller, an analyst at research group Ovum, says the M-Pesa model could be emulated elsewhere.

"There is already strong evidence that mobile payments in emerging markets can be successful for all parties concerned," said Ms Zoller.

Vodafone is in the process of rolling out its M-Pesa system in other countries, including Tanzania and Afghanistan.

Investing in the next 'big thing'

By Maggie Shiels Technology reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley

YouNoodle wants to make backing start-ups less of a gamble

A San Francisco company has launched a tool to help investors decide where to put their money.

YouNoodle uses a scoring system that plans to turn the business of investment into more of a science.

The software measures the "buzz" surrounding a company via blogs and media reports along with a variety of factors including website traffic.

The scoring tool covers nearly 30,000 start-ups, ranging from biotechnology to gaming software.

"By watching the way the world responds to a start-up, we can give advance notice of what's hot and what's not," said co-founder Bob Goodson.

Researchers adjust the algorithm (the mathematical rating), based on more than 150,000 start-up related stories, every day. Those reports are then analysed in much the same way that Google ranks content on a web page.

Assessing the chatter on Twitter is one of the sources the score is based on

"While dollars are regarded as the best indicator of success, there are other good indicators out there before there is revenue," Mr Goodson told the BBC.

"Take something like Facebook, which is an example from Web 2.0. For two years there was rapid growth, rapid expansion, hiring, media coverage and so on without the revenue.

"So if you are in the business of needing to understand what's hot, then you need to know what is moving before the revenue numbers come through. For investors, getting in early is where the real money is made," explained Mr Goodson.

Early warning system

The algorithm behind the new scoring system was devised by New Zealander Dr Sean Gourley.

He has also worked on modelling the likelihood of terrorist attacks for the Pentagon and describes the start-up tool as "an early warning system" that highlights to people the potential of a company.

The public can check the health of a start up for free

"Maybe 20 years ago if you were a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, you knew everyone through your network and everyone came to you," said Dr Gourley, who is director of data tools.

"Today the world is a lot bigger and there is a lot of information out there. We wade through the noise and create value by making sense of it all and putting a spotlight on companies that could easily slip under the radar, because they don't come through the old boys' network."

While Dr Gourley talked of hoping to "create a meritocracy" for the start-up world, the reality is that venture capitalists have always relied on their trusted networks, personal referrals and their own gut instinct.

Ron Conway is a business "angel", who invests at an early stage of a company's life. Of the more than 500 start-ups he has put his money into, his successes include Google, PayPal, Digg and Ask Jeeves.

He is affectionately known as the Godfather of Silicon Valley for having placed more bets on internet start-ups than anyone else in the Valley.

He told the BBC he thought the scoring system "sounded like a useful tool that I think would be helpful to investors".

However he also said that for him, the personal connection was what counted.

"Most of my deal flow comes from the people in the more than 500 companies I have invested in. If the company is recommended to me by someone I have done business with in the past, then that will move it way up my list.

"For me, word of mouth and trust is even more important to me than a scoring system. But it might help as an add-on," said Mr Conway.

Best return

Investing in start-ups can seem like a risky way to make money given that there is no guarantee of a return and the belief is that most companies flame out within the first couple of years.

Mr Goodson said he believes this scoring system will take some of the gambling element out of the equation, as well as eventually boosting the $100bn (£71bn) being invested globally in the sector.

Bob Goodson believes the company will change the way start-ups are judged

"Everyone wants to see money go into places where it's going to yield the best return. That's good for entrepreneurs and its good for the economy and for investors and we believe our algorithms will make a difference.

"It's a disgrace that only $100bn is being invested in the most valuable companies on the planet - businesses tackling the big social and environmental problems, businesses that could one day be the next Google or Apple," said Mr Goodson.

Getting in on the ground floor of the next Google or Apple is what every investor dreams of doing.

Government agencies are no different. The United Kingdom's trade and investment arm spends hundreds of millions helping UK start-ups through its enterprise capital fund.

In England, that adds up to $315m (£225m) annually, which is matched by the private sector. Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales operate their own separate funds.

For the past few weeks, the British Consulate in San Francisco has been using the YouNoodle score to help determine which businesses it should take a closer look at.

"With start-ups, you want to find companies that are going to be competitive, have longevity and something else that no-one else is offering," said David Slater, regional director for UK Trade & Investment in California.

"The perennial problem is how to spot those companies and what YouNoodle is providing is a potential tool to help people like us make those value judgements."

While some may be sceptical, Mr Goodson believes his firm could be something of a game changer down the road.

"What gets us up in the morning and working late at night is the idea we can make this industry more efficient, bring more resources into the industry and be part of finding the next big thing.