Saturday 5 October 2013

Anger as Apple axes China anti-firewall app

Anger as Apple axes China anti-firewall app

OpenDoor on FacebookOpenDoor's app helps users bypass firewalls to access restricted web sites


The developers of the free app, OpenDoor, reportedly wrote to Apple protesting against the move.
China blocks users from accessing many websites and strictly polices internet access and censors web users.
The BBC contacted Apple for its response to the report and has yet to receive a reply.
Apple asks iPhone app developers to ensure that their apps "comply with all legal requirements in any location where they are made available to users".
It says that "developers have an obligation to understand and conform to all local laws".
But Zhou Shuguang, a prominent Chinese blogger and citizen journalist, told US-based Radio Free Asia that Apple had taken away one of the tools which internet users in China relied on to circumvent the country's great firewall.
Chinese internet users were disappointed by the move by Apple.
One said: "It was so bad that this was taken away. I can't now jump over the firewall."
Another user wrote: "Apple is determined to have a share of the huge cake which is the Chinese internet market. Without strict self-censorship, it cannot enter the Chinese market."
Many Chinese social media users have only just become aware that the app has been unavailable since July.
The developers of OpenDoor - who wish to remain anonymous - toldRadio Netherlands that Apple removed the app because it "includes content that is illegal in China".
A woman holds her iPhone 4 in Hangzou, China 13 January 2012Apple says developers must conform to local laws
The station reported that the email from OpenDoor to Apple said the removal of the app was inconsistent.
"It is unclear to us how a simple browser app could include illegal contents, since it's the user's own choosing of what websites to view," the email says.
"Using the same definition, wouldn't all browser apps, including Apple's own Safari and Google's Chrome, include illegal contents?"
OpenDoor is not the first app to have been removed from Apple's App Store in China.
It has previously removed a news app by a US-based television broadcaster founded by the outlawed Falun Gong group.
Another app, which enables users to access books banned in China, was also withdrawn.
China has 591 million internet users, according to the latest official figures from China Internet Network Information Centre.
Among them, 464 million accessed the net via smart phones or other wireless devices.

Dell's latest Venue tablets shun Windows RT system

Dell's latest Venue tablets shun Windows RT system

Dell Venue Pro 11
Dell's latest hardware supports the full Windows 8.1 operating system




Dell has opted not to release a Windows RT device among its latest line-up of tablets and laptops.
The US manufacturer had been the last to support the operating system other than its creator, Microsoft.
Dell said the software had failed to "resonate" with its customers because it did not support legacy software available to the full Windows 8 OS.
The firm is in the process of being taken over by a group led by its founder, Michael Dell.
He plans to stop its shares being publicly traded and refocus Dell's operations on business-targeted software and services rather than consumer-focused hardware.
However, the company said it would continue to sell devices in order to provide its customers with an "end-to-end solution".
"We're not going to put all our eggs into different baskets - what we have to do is focus on our strengths," Adam Griffin, Dell's global product manager for commercial tablets, told the BBC.
"We've focused our attention on the Windows 8.1 operating system because that's where the majority of the applications are [in the] segment that we're after, which is the commercial consumer environment.
"RT, even by Microsoft's admission, is a little bit limited in terms of the amount of applications you can get."
Mr Griffin added that there had been resistance from corporate IT departments to the idea of supporting what was effectively another operating system on top of the various releases of the main Windows OS.
Missing programs
Windows RT was launched just under a year ago.

It is designed for machines powered by ARM-based processors rather than the x86 chip architecture used by Intel and AMD.
ARM's designs tend to deliver longer battery life at a cheaper price, but its chips need Windows programs to be recompiled to be able to run them.
Dell Venue Pro 11
                   Dell's new Windows 8 tablets feature either an 8in (20.3cm) or 10.8in (27.4cm) screen
New software can only be added to Windows RT devices via Microsoft's own online store or via special enterprise software made available to companies.
That has meant there has been no way to install high-profile programs such as the iTunes media library, the Chrome and Firefox browsers, and the fully equipped version of Photoshop.
Samsung, Lenovo, Acer and Asus were among the other companies to initially back the platform but later switch efforts elsewhere.
Dell continues to offer the XPS 10 tablet - which uses Windows RT - in some markets, but said it would only do so until its factories had used up all the relevant components.
'Fizzled out'
That leaves Microsoft as the only manufacturer to have released a Windows RT device in recent months.
It launched the Surface 2 in September having previously posted a $900m (£560m) write-down after acknowledging it had made more of the first-generation machine than it could sell.
According to market research company IDC, Windows RT only accounted for a 0.5% share of global tablet shipments in the April-to-June quarter.
Windows 8 itself had a 4% share. By contrast, Google's Android system had a 62.6% share and Apple's iOS 32.5%.
"The Windows RT concept seems to have fizzled out," said Benedict Evans, a tech specialist at consultants Enders Analysis.
"It lacks even the redeeming features of a Windows 8 tablet which can run all the legacy apps.
"There remains a lot of appeal to being able to take existing Windows applications out with you on a mobile device.
"If you are an insurance firm and you've got proprietary software coded for Windows - which a huge amount of companies do - it can be tough to make that work on an iPad and easier to put it onto a Windows 8 tablet.
"But that's one use case. The broader question is why not spend a little bit more and buy a touchscreen laptop."

Surface 2
                       Microsoft is the only manufacturer still committed to the Windows RT platform
Intel's efforts to develop more power-efficient chips have led some to speculate that Microsoft might ultimately cull Windows RT, leaving Windows Phone as its only ARM-powered platform.
But one tech consultant said it was too soon to say RT was doomed.
"Microsoft seems to believe that there will be more devices running RT in the future - I don't think it's dead yet," said Tony Cripps, principal analyst at tech advisers Ovum.
"RT leaves open the door to lower-cost tablets running the Windows platform and there are good reasons in the long run for Microsoft to maintain a position there."
Dell itself is leaving the door open to returning to the system at a later stage.
"If customers start to demand that product then we certainly may come out with future designs," said Mr Griffin.

Google buys human-gesture recognition start-up Flutter

Flutter
Flutter said it was "thrilled" to be able to continue its research into gesture recognition at Google




Google has bought a start-up that develops gesture-recognition software.
Flutter, founded three years ago in San Francisco, detects simple hand signals via webcam, using them to control apps such as iTunes and Netflix.
The acquisition has caused speculation that Google will integrate the technology, used by some of its rivals, into its ranges of Chromebook laptops and Nexus handheld devices.
The search giant has not released any details of the deal.

Start QuoteGesture-recognition technology is widely used in gaming consoles, such as Nintendo's Wii and Microsoft's Xbox Kinect.

It is also used in some smart TVs, and Samsung recently introduced gesture recognition for its Galaxy S4 smartphone.
The phone's Air Gesture technology allows users to scroll through web pages, accept calls, and control music by waving their hands.
Widespread use
An expert told the BBC that despite Google's acquisition, it remained to be seen whether gesture recognition would become a mainstream technology.
"The more interface styles we can develop the better, but whether gesture recognition becomes the norm depends on how well it can be personalised and whether people embrace it," said Richard Picking, of Glyndwr University.
"It could be particularly useful as a tool for older people, or those with disabilities," he added.
Flutter was initially funded through Y Combinator, a company that nurtures start-ups.

'Rocket fuel'
Co-founder Navneet Dalal, who used to work at Google, announced the deal on Flutter's website.
Kinect
                        Microsoft's Kinect technology uses gesture-recognition sensors for gaming
"Today, we are thrilled to announce that we will be continuing our research at Google," the statement read.
"We're excited to add their rocket fuel to our journey."
Flutter said it would continue to support its current app.

Silk Road: How FBI closed in on suspect Ross Ulbricht

Silk Road: How FBI closed in on suspect Ross Ulbricht


FBIA lengthy investigation into internet communications led the FBI to their suspect


US authorities believe that 29-year-old Ross William Ulbricht, arrested on Wednesday, is Dread Pirate Roberts (DPR) - the administrator of the notorious Silk Road online marketplace.
It was an underground website where people from all over the world were able to buy drugs.
In the months leading up to Mr Ulbricht's arrest, investigators undertook a painstaking process of piecing together the suspect's digital footprint, going back years into his history of communicating with others online.
The detail of how the FBI has built its case was outlined in a court complaint document published on Wednesday.
The search started with work from Agent-1, the codename given to the expert cited in the court documents, who undertook an "extensive search of the internet" that sifted through pages dating back to January 2011.
The trail began with a post made on a web forum where users discussed the use of magic mushrooms.
In a post titled "Anonymous market online?", a user nicknamed Altoid started publicising the site.



"I came across this website called Silk Road," Altoid wrote. "Let me know what you think."
The post contained a link to a site hosted by the popular blogging platform Wordpress. This provided another link to the Silk Road's location on the so-called "dark web".
Records obtained by Agent-1 from Wordpress discovered, unsurprisingly, that the blog had been set up by an anonymous user who had hidden their location.
But then Altoid appeared in another place: a discussion site about virtual currency, bitcointalk.org.
Altoid - who the FBI claimed is Mr Ulbricht - was using "common online marketing" tactics. In other words, he was trying to make Silk Road go viral.
Months later, in October, Altoid appeared again - but made a slip-up, granting investigators a major lead.
In a post asking seeking to find an IT expert with knowledge of Bitcoin, he asked people to contact him via rossulbricht@gmail.com.
With a Gmail address to hand, Agent-1 linked this address to accounts on the Google+ social network and YouTube video site. There he discovered some of Mr Ulbricht's interests.
Among them, according to the viewing history, was economics. In particular, Mr Ulbricht's account had "favourited" several clips from the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a renowned Austrian school of economics.
Years later, on the Silk Road discussion forums, Dread Pirate Roberts would make several references to the Mises Institute and its work.
Covering tracks
According to the court complaint document, it was the discovery of the rossulbricht@gmail.com email address that gave investigators a major boost in their search.
Through records "obtained from Google", details of IP addresses - and therefore locations - used to log into Mr Ulbricht's account focused the search on San Francisco, specifically an internet cafe on Laguna Street.
Furthermore, detailed analysis of Silk Road's source code highlighted a function that restricted who was able to log in to control the site, locking it down to just one IP address.
As would be expected, Dread Pirate Roberts was using a VPN - virtual private network - to generate a "false" IP address, designed to cover his tracks.
Google Streetview image of Hickory Street, San FranciscoMr Ulbricht said to have been running Silk Road from Hickory Street in San Francisco
However, the provider of the VPN was subpoenaed by the FBI.
While efforts had been made by DPR to delete data, the VPN server's records showed a user logged in from an internet cafe just 500 yards from an address on Hickory Street, known to be the home of a close friend of Mr Ulbricht's, and a location that had also been used to log in to the Gmail account.
At this point in the investigation, these clues, investigators concluded, were enough to suggest that Mr Ulbricht and DPR - if not the same person - were at the very least in the same location at the same time.
Fake IDs
The court complaint went into detail about further leads that followed.
In July of this year, by coincidence, a routine border check of a package from Canada discovered forged documents for several fake identities all containing photographs of the same person.



It was headed to San Francisco's 15th Street. Homeland security visited the address, and found the man in the photographs - Mr Ulbricht.
He told officers that the people he lived with knew him simply as Josh - one housemate described him as being "always home in his room on the computer".
Around the same time, investigators working on the Silk Road case later discovered, DPR had been communicating with users privately to ask for advice on obtaining fake IDs - needed in order to purchase more servers.
Further activity attributed to Mr Ulbricht took place on Stack Overflow - a question-and-answer website for programmers - where a user named Frosty asked questions about intricate coding that later became part of the source code of Silk Road.
In another apparent slip-up, one of Frosty's messages initially identified itself as being written by Ross Ulbricht - before being quickly corrected.
"I believe that Ulbricht changed his username to 'frosty' in order to conceal his association with the message he had posted one minute before," lead prosecutor Christopher Tarbell wrote in court documents.

What was the Silk Road?

Silk Road took its name from the historic trade routes spanning Europe, Asia and parts of Africa.
News reports and other internet chatter helped it become notorious. However, most users would not have been able to stumble upon the site as the service could only be accessed through a service called Tor - a facility that routes traffic through many separate encrypted layers of the net to hide data identifiers.
Tor was invented by the US Naval Research Laboratory and has subsequently been used by journalists and free speech campaigners, among others, to safeguard people's anonymity.
But it has also been used as a means to hide illegal activities, leading it to be dubbed "the dark web".
Payments for goods on Silk Road were made with the virtual currency Bitcoin, which can be hard to monitor.
Court documents from the FBI said the site had just under a million registered users, but investigators said they did not know how many were active.
Earlier this year Carnegie Mellon University estimated that over $1.22m (£786,000) worth of trading took place on the Silk Road every month.

How bitcoins work

Bitcoin is often referred to as a new kind of currency.
But it may be better to think of its units as being virtual tokens that have value because enough people believe they do and there is a finite number of them.
Each of the 11 million Bitcoins currently in existence is represented by a unique online registration number.
These numbers are created through a process called "mining", which involves a computer solving a difficult mathematical problem.
Each time a problem is solved the computer's owner is rewarded with 25 Bitcoins.
To receive a Bitcoin, a user must also have a Bitcoin address - a randomly generated string of 27 to 34 letters and numbers - which acts as a kind of virtual postbox to and from which the Bitcoins are sent.
Since there is no registry of these addresses, people can use them to protect their anonymity when making a transaction.
These addresses are in turn stored in Bitcoin wallets, which are used to manage savings. They operate like privately run bank accounts - with the proviso that if the data is lost, so are the Bitcoins contained.


Kenya military names Westgate mall attack suspects

Kenya military names Westgate mall attack suspects


New CCTV footage shows armed men carrying weapons and searching areas leading off a storeroom

Click to watch Video
Four men believed to have been involved in the deadly shopping centre attack in Nairobi last month have been named.
The Kenyan military said Abu Baara al-Sudani, Omar Nabhan, Khattab al-Kene and Umayr - shown in new CCTV footage - were killed during the standoff.
Kenya said previously 10-15 militants had been involved, but the police chief says the figure may now be four to six.
The al-Shabab group said it carried out the attack on the Westgate mall on 21 September, leaving at least 67 dead.
The al-Qaeda-linked group said the attack was in retaliation for Kenya's military involvement in Somalia.
Too early?
The naming of the men came as CCTV footage was aired showing four attackers calmly walking through a room in the mall holding machine guns.
Kenya Defence Forces spokesman Maj Emmanuel Chirchir told Reuters news agency: "I confirm these were the terrorists; they all died in the raid."

Kenya: Major attacks

  • 1998: US embassy in Nairobi bombed, killing 224 people - one of al-Qaeda's first international attacks
  • 2002: Attack on Israeli-owned hotel near Mombasa kills 10 Kenyans; simultaneous rocket attack on an Israeli airliner fails
  • 2011: Suspected al-Shabab militants raid Kenyan coastal resorts and a refugee camp, targeting and kidnapping foreigners
  • 2011: Kenya sends troops into Somalia to tackle al-Shabab
  • 2011-13: Numerous grenade attacks near Somali border and in Nairobi
Reuters quoted Maj Chirchir as saying that al-Sudani was an "experienced fighter" from Sudan and was believed to be the leader of the group.
Maj Chirchir said Nabhan was a Kenyan of Arab origin and al-Kene a Somali linked to al-Shabab. Further details about Umayr had not yet been verified, he said.
Kenyan police chief David Kimaiyo told Kenya's KTN television station it was now believed that four to six gunmen had carried out the attack, not 10-15.
"None of them managed to escape from the building after the attack," he said.
Kenya had earlier said five attackers were killed in the security operation and that nine people were in custody.
The BBC's Gabriel Gatehouse in Nairobi says the latest CCTV footage is from a limited part of the complex and, with some eyewitnesses reporting a two-pronged attack, it is too early to say definitively how many gunmen were in the building.
In addition to the 67 people killed in the attack, a further 39 are still missing, according to the Kenyan Red Cross.
Al-Shabab is banned as a terrorist group by both the US and the UK and is believed to have between 7,000 and 9,000 fighters.
Its members are fighting to create an Islamic state in Somalia.
About 4,000 Kenyan troops were sent to Somalia in October 2011 to help pro-government forces end two decades of violence, with clan-based warlords and Islamist militants all battling for control of the country.
On Saturday, Islamist fighters in southern Somalia said Western forces had launched a night-time raid on one of their bases.
No-one has admitted the attack. US and French special forces have carried out raids in Somalia in recent years.
It is not clear whether the raid was linked to Westgate.
Graphic: Final phase

Gul Ahmed Ideas Winter Collection 2013 for Women







Resham Ghar New & Stylish Dresses Prints Collection For Eid-Ul-Adha 2013