Iran clerics 'must accept internet'

1 September 2014 Last updated at 16:02

President Hassan Rouhani has urged Iran's clerics to be more tolerant of the internet and new technologies.

In a speech broadcast on Iranian television, Mr Rouhani said it was vital that the younger generation had access to the internet.

The president, who was elected in 2013, has vowed to support greater media freedom but has faced opposition.

Last week, prominent Iranian cleric Ayatollah Makarem Shirazi said mobile internet was "immoral and unlawful".

Conservative clerics oppose introducing mobile broadband services, saying they allow immoral images to be shared freely and more easily.

In recent weeks the government has awarded 3G licences to three mobile broadband companies, but experts say the proportion of Iranians using the service is still low.

Speaking on Monday, President Rouhani insisted the internet was crucial to connect with the world of science, saying: "We cannot close the gates of the world to our younger generation".

"If we do not move towards the new generation of mobile today and resist it, we will have to do it tomorrow. If not, the day after tomorrow," he said.

Facebook ban

BBC Middle East analyst Sebastian Usher says President Rouhani's comments will resonate in Iran, but it is unclear if they will carry any real weight.

Iranians will be waiting to see if his latest statement of intent produces real change in the face of the usual resistance, our correspondent adds.

Iran's government cracked down on media freedom and internet access after widespread protests against the country's leaders in 2009, banning online services like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Since then, many Iranians have grown used to bypassing censorship controls by using proxy servers or other online tools.

23.43 | 0 komentar | Read More

Pupils begin 'tough' new curriculum

1 September 2014 Last updated at 09:14 By Hannah Richardson BBC News education reporter

Millions of children in England will begin a "tough" new national curriculum when they return to school this week.

Five-year-olds will learn fractions and computer coding, while those in early secondary school will have to study at least two Shakespeare plays.

The curriculum is being implemented for most year groups simultaneously.

Teachers' leaders say the timetable is unrealistic, but the Department for Education said its aim was to prepare children for "life in modern Britain".

A spokesman said the government wanted "all children to learn the core knowledge in key subjects - the ones universities and employers value the most".

Continue reading the main story

"Start Quote

Teachers are saying they haven't had enough information"

End Quote Jill Stokoe Association of Teachers and Lecturers

'Keep pace'

All local authority primary and secondary schools have to start teaching the new national curriculum from the start of term.

It is not compulsory for academies - which are now a majority of secondary schools.

The rewritten national curriculum, described by the prime minister as "rigorous, engaging and tough", sets out the framework for what children should be taught between the ages of five and 14.

Former education secretary Michael Gove has said changes were necessary for England to keep pace with the most successful education systems in the world.

Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play.

BBC News went to find out how adults would fare under the new curriculum

The new-look curriculum puts a stronger emphasis on skills such as "essay writing, problem-solving, mathematical modelling and computer programming".

In primary schools where the most significant changes are in maths, English and computing, pupils going into Years 2 and 6 this year will continue with the old curriculum in English, maths and science, so they can sit national tests at the end of the year.

Russell Hobby, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said teachers had worked hard to prepare for the new curriculum over the past year.

He said he was confident they would cope with its implementation but he warned there could be some difficulties with maths, where more advanced topics are to be taught at a younger age.

'A lot of cramming'

Continue reading the main story

"Start Quote

We are confident that all the reforms can be implemented within our planned timeframe."

End Quote Department for Education

"One of the mistakes in the implementation of the curriculum is that it's all being implemented at once," he said.

"In maths you need to learn the early concepts before you learn the later concepts, so there is a problem that there will be children who have not learned the earlier concepts before being expected to learn the more demanding ones."

Mr Hobby warned that there would have to be "a lot of cramming in maths this year" as whole classes are made to catch up with the new demands.

He added: "The worst thing you can do with maths is rush ahead."

The Association of Teachers and Lecturers has warned that many of its members feel their schools are not yet prepared to teach the new curriculum.

The association's education policy adviser, Jill Stokoe, said: "Teachers are saying they haven't had enough information and some people really haven't got to grips with the new curriculum. What we are saying to them is to use their judgement."

She added that there were particular problems with maths introducing some quite complex ideas for very young children.

• The history curriculum takes primary pupils through British history from the Stone Age to the Normans. They can also study a later era, such as the Victorians. "Significant individuals" to be studied include Elizabeth I, Neil Armstrong, Rosa Parks and suffragette Emily Davison. Secondary schools will teach British history from 1066 to 1901, followed by Britain, Europe and world events from 1901, including the Holocaust and Winston Churchill
• Maths will expect more at an earlier age. There will be a requirement for pupils to learn their 12 times table by the age of nine. Basic fractions, such as half or a quarter, will be taught to five-year-olds. By the end of Year 2, pupils should know the number bonds to 20 and be precise in using and understanding place value
• English will strengthen the importance of Shakespeare, with pupils between the ages of 11 and 14 expected to have studied two of his plays. Word lists for eight- and nine-year-olds include "medicine" and "knowledge", by 10 and 11 they should be spelling "accommodate" and "rhythm"
• Science will shift towards a stronger sense of hard facts and "scientific knowledge". In primary school, there will be new content on the solar system, speed and evolution. In secondary school, there will be a clearer sense of the separate subjects of physics, biology and chemistry. Climate change will also be included
• Design and technology is linked to innovation and digital industries. Pupils will learn about 3D printing and robotics
• Computing will teach pupils how to write code. Pupils aged five to seven will be expected to "understand what algorithms are" and to "create and debug simple programs". By the age of 11, pupils will have to "design, use and evaluate computational abstractions that model the state and behaviour of real-world problems and physical systems"

The Department for Education said the reforms reflected the government's desire to "ensure every child leaves school prepared for life in modern Britain".

"We believe it is right that changes are made as soon as possible to benefit the most young people," a spokesperson said.

"We are confident that all the reforms can be implemented within our planned timeframe which is a testament to the dedication of our high-quality teaching profession."

Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play.

Max: "My daily routine is eat, sleep, code, repeat."

23.43 | 0 komentar | Read More

2.6m historical pictures put online

29 August 2014 Last updated at 09:18 By Leo Kelion Technology desk editor

An American academic is creating a searchable database of 12 million historical copyright-free images.

Kalev Leetaru has already uploaded 2.6 million pictures to Flickr, which are searchable thanks to tags that have been automatically added.

The photos and drawings are sourced from more than 600 million library book pages scanned in by the Internet Archive organisation.

The images have been difficult to access until now.

Mr Leetaru said digitisation projects had so far focused on words and ignored pictures.

"For all these years all the libraries have been digitising their books, but they have been putting them up as PDFs or text searchable works," he told the BBC.

"They have been focusing on the books as a collection of words. This inverts that.

"Stretching half a millennium, it's amazing to see the total range of images and how the portrayals of things have changed over time.

"Most of the images that are in the books are not in any of the art galleries of the world - the original copies have long ago been lost."

The pictures range from 1500 to 1922, when copyright restrictions kick in.

Piggyback program

Mr Leetaru began work on the project while researching communications technology at Georgetown University in Washington DC as part of a fellowship sponsored by Yahoo, the owner of photo-sharing service Flickr.

To achieve his goal, Mr Leetaru wrote his own software to work around the way the books had originally been digitised.

The Internet Archive had used an optical character recognition (OCR) program to analyse each of its 600 million scanned pages in order to convert the image of each word into searchable text.

As part of the process, the software recognised which parts of a page were pictures in order to discard them.

Mr Leetaru's code used this information to go back to the original scans, extract the regions the OCR program had ignored, and then save each one as a separate file in the Jpeg picture format.

The software also copied the caption for each image and the text from the paragraphs immediately preceding and following it in the book.

Each Jpeg and its associated text was then posted to a new Flickr page, allowing the public to hunt through the vast catalogue using the site's search tool.

"I think one of the greatest things people will do is time travel through the images," Mr Leetaru said.

"Type in the telephone, for example, and you can see that all the initial pictures are of businesspeople, and mostly men.

"Then you see it morph into more of a tool to connect families.

"You see another progression with the railroad where in the first images it was all about innovation and progress that was going to change the world, then you see its evolution as it becomes part of everyday life."

'Hit and miss'

Archivists said they were impressed with the project.

"Finding images within texts and tagging large collections of images are notoriously difficult," said Dr Alison Pearn, a senior archivist from the University of Cambridge and associate director of the Darwin Correspondence Project.

"This is a clever way of providing both quantity and searchability, and it's great that it is freely available for anyone to use.

"The image identification has picked up things like library stamps and scribbles in the margins, and the tagging is a bit hit and miss, but research has always been at least in part about serendipity, and who knows what people will find to do with them."

Mr Leetaru's own ambition is a tie-up with the internet's most famous encyclopaedia once his project is completed next year.

"What I want to see is... Wikipedia have a national day of going through this to illustrate Wikipedia articles," he said.

"Take a random page about a historical event and there's probably a good chance that you're going to find an image in here that bears in some way on that event or location.

"Being able to basically enrich [them] would be huge."

He added that he also planned to offer his code to others.

"Any library could repeat this process," he explained.

"That's actually my hope, that libraries around the world run this same process of their digitised books to constantly expand this universe of images."

23.43 | 0 komentar | Read More

MSN Messenger to end after 15 years

29 August 2014 Last updated at 18:48

Microsoft's Windows Live Messenger will be switched off in China in October, marking a final end to the 15-year-old service.

Originally known as MSN Messenger, it was launched in 1999 but was switched off for most users in 2013, after Microsoft bought rival Skype.

Users in China continued to use the old service but will now be transferred to Skype by 31 October.

Windows Live still had as many as 330 million users as recently as 2009.

But those numbers later declined, while users of Skype rose to nearly 300 million by 2012.

The service came to China in 2005, but later faced stiff competition from domestic rivals such as QQ messenger, built by Chinese firm Tencent.

A number of Chinese Windows Live users received emails from Microsoft on Thursday, Chinese newspapers reported, informing them of the planned closure.

The emails told users they would get free Skype credit when they migrated over to the new service, the newspaper said.

MSN Messenger began as a simple text chat service in 1999, a rival to AOL's AIM service and ICQ.

It later added features such as photo delivery, video calls and games as the technology developed.

But Microsoft's purchase of Skype for $8.5bn (£5.1bn) in 2012 spelled the beginning of the end for the service.

Obituary

MSN Messenger was a hard-working internet visionary which taught a generation to touch-type and lol, writes BBC technology reporter Dave Lee.

It touched the lives of millions of teenagers who, in an age before real social networking, were just getting accustomed to what it was like to live on the internet.

MSN Messenger heralded a new era: a time when chatting up a classmate no longer meant the terrifying prospect of actually having to say something to them.

It meant no longer would young teens have to endure the torture of ringing the landline number of their newest crush - knowing there was a high probability that dad would pick up.

But after all the "ASL?"s and "u there?"s, Messenger's loyal subjects became less dependent. "I'll brb", people said... but they never did.

Other sites, smarter and better looking, would see Messenger cast aside. In an age of exciting digital discovery, Messenger became the web's wooden toy.

After a long career, it spent its final year enjoying a comfortable retirement in China. Its less well-regarded relative, Windows Messenger, still battles on on work computers the world over.

"It's like MSN," office workers say, "…just not as fun."

MSN Messenger is survived by Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Snapchat, Skype, Google+ and Instagram.

23.43 | 0 komentar | Read More

Top school's lessons free on iTunes

1 September 2014 Last updated at 01:55 By Sean Coughlan BBC News education correspondent

A leading independent school is making dozens of its courses available free online, so lessons can be downloaded by pupils or teachers at other schools.

The ground-breaking initiative by Stephen Perse Foundation school in Cambridge will make A-level, IB and GCSE courses available online.

They can be downloaded free through Apple's iTunes U service.

Principal Tricia Kelleher says: "The digital world requires teachers, like everyone else, to work differently."

The Stephen Perse Foundation, one of the country's highest achieving schools, has been experimenting with digital learning, with every pupil having their own iPad.

Digital text-books

The school has been building digital support materials for each subject, including video, audio, written materials and links to online resources.

These digital text-books, produced by teachers for their specific lessons, form a library of materials for pupils to follow in class and for revision.

But from the new school year, these materials developed for this fee-paying school are being made available free online for students in the UK or anywhere else in the world.

In what will be one of the biggest such projects in the UK, there will be 87 course units on iTunes U, which is the non-charging academic version of iTunes. They include both exam subjects and lessons for pupils aged 11 to 14.

The iTunes U service has been associated with higher education, with many leading universities around the world making thousands of courses available.

There have been more than one billion downloads, with the current chart-topping collection being Philosophy for Beginners from Oxford University.

But the Stephen Perse Foundation has used iTunes U to offer a set of courses specifically for school-level subjects.

'Amazing step'

Simon Armitage, a senior teacher at the school who has used the digital resources with geography classes, said: "I think we are just at the beginning of the transformation of the way in which we teach in schools.

Continue reading the main story

We are now seeing technology in schools enter a new era"

End Quote Tricia Kelleher Principal

"Having the iTunes U units available to the world is an amazing step to take. Teachers have taken information from the web for years. This is a chance to put something back which could be interesting and useful to other teachers, schools and students."

Ms Kelleher, the school's principal, said that the focus "shouldn't be on the technology, it should always be on the learning".

But she said teachers can be "frustrated by the static nature of traditional textbooks. They are often expensive and out of date almost as soon as they are published."

Developing the digital course materials, which pupils can use at school or at home, has been "very positive" and rather than reducing the role of the teacher, she says that it makes the teacher "more important than ever".

The "novelty value" stage of using technology in schools soon wears off, she says. But students and teachers are seeing the practical advantages of online, digital materials.

"We are now seeing technology in schools enter a new era."

The idea of using shared, customised digital materials on the iTunes U platform has been taken a step further in Texas in the United States.

There are 14 school districts in the US state which collectively produce and share online course materials, which are designed to support the local curriculum and testing system.

There are 58 teachers working on content development for the online service, focusing on maths, science, social studies and English.

23.43 | 0 komentar | Read More

BBC begins push to help kids code

1 September 2014 Last updated at 10:02 By Leo Kelion Technology desk editor

The BBC has published computer programming study guides, quizzes and other support materials on its Bitesize site to coincide with the new computing curriculum's introduction in England.

The broadcaster also revealed several programming-themed children's TV shows will be broadcast in the autumn.

The BBC described the move as an "early start" to a wider coding initiative planned for next year.

That will come 30 years on from its last major programming campaign.

The project's organiser stressed it would be based on a wide range of partnerships. That contrasts with the 1980s' BBC Computer Literacy Project.

The previous initiative centred on the BBC Microcomputer, which was developed by Acorn Computers - a tie-up that was criticised for being detrimental to rivals, including the ZX Spectrum.

"It's about giving the next generation a chance to shape their world, not just be consumers in it," said Jessica Cecil, controller of the BBC's coding and digital creative initiative.

"Clearly this is all about partnerships, this is not about us saying, 'This is the way you do it because the BBC says so'.

"Partnership is absolutely the watchword. We know there is a fantastic landscape out there and we want to play our part in it."

The pledge has been welcomed by existing organisations that teach children coding skills.

"It is the combined knowledge of these groups and individuals, uniquely gained through groundwork and making mistakes then learning, that will provide a strong bedrock upon which the BBC can roll out its year of code," said Emma Mulqueeny, founder of Rewired State.

"Partnerships bring strength and shared learning, prevents avoidable mistakes and unifies an active and committed community. I am hugely encouraged by this move by the BBC, and would counsel everyone to look at collaborative engagement."

Dick and Dom

The new materials on Bitesize cover 40 different elements tailored to the new curriculum, ranging from primary school level up to GCSE exams.

Topics for younger pupils include debugging programs, writing animation code and explaining how the internet works.

Coverage for older children includes algorithms, data representation and binary.

Tech-themed TV shows that will be broadcast later in the year include:

• Technobabble - an app and gadget-themed show made by the team behind Newsround, designed to encourage its audience to expand its computer skills
• Appsolute Genius - a spin-off of the existing CBBC show Absolute Genius - in which the hosts, Dick and Dom, interview prominent computer programmers, including the creators of Sonic the Hedgehog and Pac-Man. The show will also run a competition in which one child's idea for a video game will be picked and development of the title will be tracked over a 12-week period before it is released for free to PCs and mobile phones
• Nina and the Neurons: Go Digital - five episodes of the CBeebies show that will explore 3D printing, coding and driverless cars

Seeking relationships

Ms Cecil said her team hoped to have signed formal agreements with 10 to 20 third-party organisations by Christmas that would be involved in next year's effort.

There had already been talks with businesses including Microsoft, BT, Google and Samsung, and education groups including Code Club, CoderDojo, De:Coded and Codecademy among other organisations, she added.

Two members of the BBC have been tasked with checking these relationships do not become too close, to prevent them compromising the corporation's commitment to impartiality.

Ms Cecil said her team was "acutely aware" of the risk of being seen to have favourites, but said she hoped to avoid this by securing "a plethora" of partners.

Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play.

Max: "My daily routine is eat, sleep, code, repeat."

The formal name of 2015's initiative would be announced shortly, a spokesman added.

The BBC needs to be mindful about the scope of its project, given that another venture, BBC Jam, had to be scrapped in 2007 after complaints from the commercial sector that it posed unfair competition to education-themed businesses. The project had been intended to support the government's computer-based "digital curriculum" of the time.

But one tech industry leader is positive about the broadcaster's plans.

"I think it's a fantastic initiative - the BBC is getting back to its roots and advocating for computing education in the same way it did in the 1980s, but with all the advantages of doing it with a modern, internet-enabled platform," said Eben Upton, from the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

"The bits and pieces I've seen so far look very promising. Probably the biggest challenge is to reach people outside the traditional core tech audience. It's only then that coding initiatives will make a difference to the supply of engineers, and to social mobility."

23.43 | 0 komentar | Read More

Samsung phones to get Nokia maps

1 September 2014 Last updated at 11:23

Nokia's mapping service will soon be appearing on Samsung smartphones.

A deal between the two will see a test or beta version of an Android app for Nokia's Here maps included free on handsets and the Gear S smartwatch.

The move is widely seen as a way to help Samsung distinguish itself from Google which oversees Android.

Formerly known as Nokia maps, Here is also used by Yahoo, Amazon and Garmin and it provides map data for Microsoft's Bing search engine.

The map service covers 190 countries, offers turn-by-turn navigation, tourist information and public transport details. In addition, the maps can be downloaded to a device so they can be used offline.

A version of Nokia's mapping service is being specially prepared for Samsung's Gear S smartwatch. Called Here for Gear it will be a navigation system optimised to use the relatively small display on the wrist-worn gadget.

Writing on Ars Technica, Ron Amadeo said Nokia maps was just one of the apps Samsung was keen to stop relying on Google for. However, he said, Samsung's strategy had some disadvantages.

He said: "For end users it just means a confusing experience with a ridiculous amount of duplicated apps."

Nokia's maps division was one of the parts that Microsoft did not buy when it acquired the phone-making "devices and services" part of Nokia in 2013.

23.43 | 0 komentar | Read More

Google 'discourages' old browser use

1 September 2014 Last updated at 15:28

Google has started showing old versions of its search page to people using out-of-date versions of some web browsers.

At the weekend, many people reported in a Google forum they were seeing 2013 versions of the Google and image search homepages when using older browsers.

The problem was most pronounced among those using variants of Safari 5.1 and Opera 12.

A Google message posted to the forum said the change was made to "encourage" people to upgrade their browser.

'Heavy-handed'

In the forum dedicated to Google's search service, Safari and Opera users from all over the world reported they were suddenly seeing the 2013 version of the main Google search site that lacks some more modern features.

For those affected, search results appeared in a modern format but every search had to be done via the older page.

Many tried clearing cookies and disabling extensions and add-ons for their browser but this had no effect on the Google search homepage they saw.

For some the only way to get to the 2014 search page was to change their browser's basic configuration to make Google think it was more up-to-date than it actually was.

A Google engineer joined the discussion and explained that the change was not the result of a bug.

"It's working as intended," said a Google staffer called "nealem".

She added: "We're continually making improvements to Search, so we can only provide limited support for some outdated browsers."

Nealem also provided a link to the "What Browser" site which tells people which version they are using and provides links to the latest versions.

The move is a continuation of a policy begun in 2011 when Google announced that it was dropping GMail support for older browsers.

Many of the support forum decried the shift saying they wanted to stick with the older versions of the browsers because they had useful features missing from more up-to-date versions. Many criticised the decision saying it was "heavy-handed" and "ridiculous". Some threatened to start using rival search engine Bing if Google did not repeal the change.

Google confirmed an employee had taken part in the online discussion but said it had no other comment to make.

23.43 | 0 komentar | Read More

FBI probes 'Cloud' celebrity leaks

2 September 2014 Last updated at 10:09

Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play.

Tim Allman reports on the hacking allegations surrounding private photos of several celebrities, including actress Jennifer Lawrence.

The FBI is looking into allegations that intimate pictures of celebrities have been stolen and posted online.

About 20 personalities, including the US actress Jennifer Lawrence, have had images of themselves leaked over the Internet.

It is understood some of the images were obtained from services such as Apple iCloud that back up content from devices on to the internet.

Apple says it is investigating whether iCloud accounts have been hacked.

Ms Lawrence, who stars in The Hunger Games films, has requested an investigation after a hacker apparently obtained photographs, with graphic content, from the mobile phones of numerous celebrities.

A spokeswoman for the actress said the internet posts were "a flagrant violation of privacy".

An FBI spokesman told the Associated Press news agency that it was "aware of the allegations" and was "addressing the matter".

Apple spokeswoman Nat Kerris was quoted by Reuters as saying in an email: "We take user privacy very seriously and are actively investigating this report."

Experts have raised concerns over the security of "cloud" storage sites.

"It is important for celebrities and the general public to remember that images and data no longer just reside on the device that captured it," said Ken Westin, security analyst at Tripwire.

"Although many cloud providers may encrypt the data communications between the device and the cloud, it does not mean that the image and data is encrypted when the data is at rest.

"If you can view the image in the cloud service, so can a hacker."

'Creepy effort'

Images of the celebrities were leaked on image posting website 4Chan.

The user posting them - who defined him or herself as a "collector" rather than "hacker" - said more images of different celebrities would soon be posted.

Copies of the images spread to other services, including Reddit, Imgur and Twitter, from which they were subsequently deleted by administrators.

While some of the celebrities said the images were fake, others have confirmed their authenticity.

Actress Mary Elizabeth Winstead posted on Twitter: "To those of you looking at photos I took with my husband years ago in the privacy of our home, hope you feel great about yourselves.

"Knowing those photos were deleted long ago, I can only imagine the creepy effort that went into this."

Winstead's comments would suggest iCloud was not at play, as pictures on Apple's service are only viewable online for 30 days.

Raj Samani from Intel Security said: "Almost every service used online requires a password, and to ensure your passwords are secure, they must be complex."

But more often than not, it is human weaknesses that give hackers the simplest route to compromising accounts.

"Phishing" people - meaning to trick them into giving up their password - is considered perhaps the simplest and most targeted way hackers gain access to accounts.

23.43 | 0 komentar | Read More

Uber banned across Germany by court

2 September 2014 Last updated at 11:57 By Kevin Rawlinson BBC News

Car pick-up service Uber has been banned across Germany.

A court in Frankfurt ruled that the firm lacked the necessary legal permits to operate under German law.

It has emerged that the firm was told last week that its "low-cost" UberPop service could no longer take passengers and faced a fine if it continued.

But an Uber spokesman said it had decided not to suspend the service, adding that the ban was not enforceable while an appeal process was ongoing.

"Germany is one of the fastest growing markets for Uber in Europe," he said.

"We will continue to operate in Germany and will appeal the recent lawsuit filed by Taxi Deutschland in Frankfurt.

"You cannot put the brakes on progress. Uber will continue its operations and will offer UberPop ridesharing services via its app throughout Germany."

A check of the firm's software confirms that drivers continue to offer UberPop pick-ups in Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt and Dusseldorf.

UberPop was launched earlier this year and involves drivers - who are not directly employed by the company - over the age of 21 using their own cars to transport passengers.

Taxi Deutschland suggested that Uber could face up to a 250,000 euro ($327,840; £198,342) fine per trip if the American firm loses the case.

The body described its rival as a "form of locust share-economy" indulging in "anarchy capitalism" that could leave passengers exposed in the case of an accident.

"In Germany there's insurance that applies to private drivers," explained spokeswoman Anja Floetenmeyer.

"But if your insurer learns that you are driving for an app and you want to make money on that, they say this is a multiple risk and refuse to [pay] insurance on that.

"Uber doesn't care because security costs money. We don't believe it has the interests of [German] drivers and citizens at heart."

But Uber's spokesman in Germany, Fabien Nestmann, has previously blogged that safety is one of his firm's key concerns, adding that "all the rides - and thus all travellers - are insured by Uber".

European protests

The summary judgment follows a decision by London's transport authorities not to pursue a case against Uber in June this year.

The San Francisco-based firm allows passengers to summon cars using an app on their smartphones and calculates the fare en route. It is often significantly cheaper than rival taxi companies.

But taxi drivers argue that Uber has fewer regulatory burdens placed upon it than they do, and poses unfair competition.

The company - which is backed by Google and the bank Goldman Sachs, among others - has been the subject of protests by taxi drivers in many European cities, including Berlin, Paris and London.

Only last week, Uber said it was planning to rapidly expand its German operation.

23.43 | 0 komentar | Read More