Artists are 'buying virtual fans'

Words by Chi Chi Izundu and Declan Harvey
Newsbeat reporters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Stars explain what they think about artists buying virtual fans

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

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

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

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

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Meet the man who monitors artists suspected of buying virtual fans

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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More jobs in UK video games industry

18 March 2013 Last updated at 07:22 ET

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Esa seeks help with robot spacecraft

18 March 2013 Last updated at 07:40 ET

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

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

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

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

Fine control

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Net pioneers win engineering prize

18 March 2013 Last updated at 09:37 ET

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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SimCity players offered free EA game

18 March 2013 Last updated at 13:09 ET

Players who buy and register the latest version of SimCity before 26 March can choose a free game from a selection offered by Electronic Arts.

The free games, available as digital downloads, include recent releases Mass Effect 3, Plants vs Zombies and Bejeweled 3.

The move follows connection problems and glitches caused by EA's decision to make SimCity an online-only game.

Earlier EA admitted that the game was originally going to be single player.

However those proposals were shelved early in the development of the latest version.

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

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

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

Player control

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Players at risk from game store hack

19 March 2013 Last updated at 07:02 ET

More than 10 million people thought to have accounts with Electronic Arts's (EA) Origin game store are at risk from a hack attack that swaps games for malicious code, researchers say.

In lab experiments, the researchers exploited a loophole in the way Origin handles links to games users have downloaded and installed to make it run code that compromised a target machine.

There is no evidence the loophole has yet been used by malicious hackers.

EA is investigating the vulnerability.

Launched in 2011, Origin acts as a distribution system, where customers can buy, download and manage EA video games as well as chat with friends about them.

But Donato Ferrante and Luigi Auriemma, from security company ReVuln, found a weakness in the way games were started via Origin.

Like many other programs, Origin uses a web-like syntax to keep track of the places games are found on a computer so they can quickly be started when people want to play.

The two researchers found a way to subvert this syntax to make it point to malicious code instead of a game.

"An attacker can craft a malicious internet link to execute malicious code remotely on victim's system, which has Origin installed," wrote the researchers in a paper detailing their work.

Attackers needed to know some identifying information about players to make good use of the vulnerability, wrote the pair.

However, they said, it was easy for attackers to get around this hurdle because Origin did not prevent repeated attempts to guess identifying information.

A demonstration of the attack was given at the Black Hat Europe conference, in which a Windows PC running Crysis 3 and Origin was taken over by the pair's attack code.

In a statement given to the Ars Technica website, EA said it was investigating hypothetical attacks such as the one found by Mr Ferrante and Mr Auriemma as part of the work it did to improve security on Origin.

Mr Ferrante and Mr Auriemma said players could protect themselves against potential attack by stopping Origin launching games via desktop shortcuts.

But this would mean games would have to be started directly from Origin.

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Activists switch on net 'bat signal'

19 March 2013 Last updated at 08:37 ET

Activists have switched on an internet signalling system to help co-ordinate protests about a draft law in the US.

The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (Cispa) aims to aid investigation of web attacks.

But the activists say the law would erode privacy by exposing people's browsing habits and would be used to justify domestic surveillance.

The "bat signal" system tells followers to start displaying protest materials such as website banners and petitions.

Plans for the signalling system emerged in early 2012 following protests and website blackouts in opposition to two other draft laws in the US, the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act.

The web action was widely seen as influential in the campaign that saw both those laws shelved.

In a bid to harness the wave of activism those protests started, social news sites such as Reddit and Fark joined up with rights groups and many others to launch the Internet Defense League (IDL).

Rallying point

Instead of reacting on an incident-by-incident basis, the IDL monitors threats to online privacy and let supporters know when to ramp up protests.

The IDL also said it would create protest materials such as website banners, petitions and information about how to contact politicians, so people can voice their opposition in a co-ordinated manner.

In addition, some members have embedded code on the sites they control, so protest materials are shown automatically when the "bat signal" is activated.

Those behind the IDL want it to be a rallying point for action, just as the "bat signal" is used as a way to tell fictional superhero Batman he is needed.

The signal has been switched on as Cispa is debated in the US Senate for the second time.

Opposition to the law from US President Barack Obama's advisers, who said it lacked privacy safeguards, led to it being vetoed in late November 2011 on its first outing.

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US hacker jailed over AT&T attack

19 March 2013 Last updated at 10:03 ET

A US 'hacktivist' who broke into telecommunication giant AT&T's network and stole contact details for 120,000 iPad owners has been sentenced to 41 months in jail.

Andrew Auernheimer, aka Weev, stole the email addresses by exploiting a bug in the way AT&T set up its network.

Auernheimer passed the addresses to a journalist claiming the hack was done to highlight security failings.

But officials said Auernheimer knew he was breaking the law with the attack.

'No harm'

In a statement, US attorney Paul Fishman said Auernheimer "concocted" the story that the attack was done to make the internet more secure only after he got into trouble for the 2010 hack.

"The jury didn't buy it, and neither did the court in imposing sentence upon him today," said Mr Fishman.

In the hack attack Auernheimer worked with co-defendant Daniel Spitler to explore a bug in AT&T's network settings. They discovered that AT&T servers responded with email addresses for iPad owners when passed identifying numbers from Sim cards in the tablets.

Spitler, who pleaded guilty in June 2011, wrote software to crank through lots of different ID numbers which netted the pair more than 120,000 email addresses. AT&T has closed this loophole.

The list of addresses was passed to several journalists to publicise what the pair had found.

Lawyers for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which campaigns on digital rights, said the sentence was unjust.

"Weev is facing more than three years in prison because he pointed out that a company failed to protect its users' data, even though his actions didn't harm anyone," said Marcia Hofmann, an attorney at the EFF.

"The punishments for computer crimes are seriously off-kilter, and congress needs to fix them," she added. The EFF would help Mr Auernheimer prepare an appeal against the sentence, she said.

Spitler is currently awaiting sentencing.

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Smartphone chip boss to retire

19 March 2013 Last updated at 10:18 ET

The chief executive of Arm Holdings, whose computer chip technology powers Apple and Samsung smartphones, is retiring after 12 years in the role.

Warren East, 51, is to step down on 1 July and will be replaced by Simon Segars, the current group president at the Cambridge-based company.

Mr East joined Arm in 1994 to establish its consulting business and became chief executive in 2001.

He said that now was the time for a change at the top.

Billions of chips

"Arm is a great company with a strong market position and a unique culture," he said.

"We take a very long-term view about our business, and we believe that now is the right time to bring in new leadership, to execute on the next phase of growth and to plan even further into the future."

Under Mr East's tenure Arm has become the provider of processor technology for nearly all mobile phones and many other consumer and industrial electronic devices in use today.

The company develops designs that are licensed to customers and receives royalty payments every time devices with its chips are made by its clients.

In the last 12 years it has received royalties for over 40 billion Arm chips and the company's share price has risen threefold.

Arm chairman John Buchanan said: "Warren has transformed Arm during his time as chief executive."

At the news of Mr East's departure shares in the FTSE 100 Index company fell by 3% to just under 900p.

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Internet fears over press regulation

19 March 2013 Last updated at 11:28 ET

Concerns have been raised that bloggers may face stiff libel fines under rules imposed by a new press watchdog.

Political blogger Iain Dale said he would "certainly" be covered by the regulator and the Huffington Post's Carla Buzasi said the body's remit relating to the internet was unclear.

But the government says the criteria that determines whether a publisher is liable protects "a single blogger".

Meanwhile, some newspapers are seeking legal advice on whether to co-operate.

The publishers of the Daily Mail, the Sun, the Times, the Telegraph, the Daily Star and the Daily Express said they would wait to make a decision.

The new press watchdog is to be established in England and Wales by royal charter and backed by legislation.

The new regulatory regime will replace the current system, under which the press is self-regulated voluntarily through the Press Complaints Commission.

The deal follows Lord Justice Leveson's inquiry into press ethics - called in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal.

The inquiry found journalists had hacked thousands of phones, and called for a new independent press watchdog, backed by legislation to ensure it was doing its job properly.

Continue reading the main story

There are not necessarily going to be newspapers in 10 years - the news brands will survive, but we are all bloggers now"

End Quote Harry Cole Guido Fawkes website

Party leaders said the new independent regulator - with powers to demand up-front apologies from UK publishers and impose £1m fines - would protect victims of press intrusion and preserve press freedom.

But the extent to which the new regulation applies to the internet is not yet clear.

Having read the royal charter, Mr Dale wrote: "I think my blog would certainly fall under the remit. And it stinks."

"If I don't sign up and I am successfully sued, a judge would award exemplary damages against me," he said, adding that he could not risk his family's financial future.

Three tests

"This is madness. All that will do is encourage people with a grudge to make a complaint in the full knowledge that they will never be held responsible for what they are doing," he said.

On Monday, Culture Secretary Maria Miller said that to be affected by the change, a "publisher would have to meet the three tests of whether the publication is publishing news-related material in the course of a business, whether their material is written by a range of authors - this would exclude a one-man band or a single blogger - and whether that material is subject to editorial control".

She said the new rules were designed to protect "small-scale bloggers" and to "ensure that the publishers of special interest, hobby and trade titles such as the Angling Times and the wine magazine Decanter are not caught in the regime".

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Newsnight's David Grossman tries to make sense of how a new press regulation regime will apply to the internet

Guidance issued by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) said all three of these tests would have to apply.

But "online-only edited 'press-like' content providers" - such as the Huffington Post and Holy Moly Gossip - would be relevant publishers.

"Ultimately, it is a matter for the court to decide on the definition of a relevant publisher based on assessment of the facts, in accordance with the three interlocking tests - course of business, range of authors and editorial control," said a DCMS spokeswoman.

Mrs Buzasi, editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post UK, said she was "concerned" there was confusion over who was covered, adding that she felt the agreement had been "rushed".

And Harry Cole, who writes for the Guido Fawkes political blog, said the regulatory changes had been implemented in a "chaotic fashion".

"They don't understand that [the internet] is the future. There are not necessarily going to be newspapers in 10 years," he said.

Earlier, a joint statement signed by Associated Newspapers, News International, the Telegraph Media group and Northern & Shell said no newspaper or magazine industry representative had been involved in the cross party talks on press regulation on Sunday and that they had only seen the royal charter on Monday.

'Crippling burden'

The Newspaper Society, representing local papers, said the proposals would place "a crippling burden on the UK's 1,100 local newspapers, inhibiting freedom of speech and the freedom to publish".

That was, in part, because of the "huge financial penalties for newspapers which choose to be outside the system and an arbitration service which would open the floodgates to compensation claimants", president Adrian Jeakings said.

Judges could award punitive damages against publications which refuse to sign up to a new watchdog, in the event of a court case if a complaint could have been resolved through arbitration.

Prime Minister David Cameron said he was convinced the system would work and endure: "I am confident that we've set up a system that is practical, that is workable, that protects the freedom of the press and it's a good strong self-regulatory system for victims."

He said a new system would ensure:

• upfront apologies from the press to victims
• fines of 1% of turnover for publishers, up to £1m
• a self-regulatory body with independent appointments and funding
• a robust standards code
• a free arbitration service for victims
• a speedy complaints system

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