UK government 'most transparent'

20 January 2015 Last updated at 05:38

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Sir Tim Berners-Lee talks to Mark Easton about the findings

The UK government is the most open and transparent in the world, according to global rankings looking at public access to official data.

But web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, whose organisation compiled the table, says the country has "a long way to go" before it has a fully open government.

Eighty-six countries were assessed for how easy their governments make it for state information to be analysed.

The US and Sweden come second and third in the rankings.

The World Wide Web Foundation, founded by Sir Tim in 2009, accuses many governments of failing to honour their promises to ensure official data is available. It says that in more than 90% of countries surveyed, data that could help beat corruption and improve government services remained locked away from public view.

"There are a lot of countries that have promised to put this basic data out there, really valuable information to cement trust between the government and citizens, but a lot of them haven't followed up," says Sir Tim.

Kenya has fallen 27 places in the overall rankings, from 22nd to 49th position. The foundation says many had hoped the high-profile launch of an open data portal in 2011 would be followed by continuing commitment and a policy framework for open data. "No such framework has come into force," it says.

Developed countries	Emerging market countries	Developing countries
1. UK	21. Brazil	36. Indonesia (tie)
2. US	22. Mexico	39. India
3. Sweden	33. Hungary (tie)	46. Ghana (tie)
4. New Zealand (tie)	33. Peru (tie)	46. Rwanda (tie)
4. France (tie)	36. Argentina (tie)	49. Kenya

Read the World Wide Web Foundation report

In contrast with the UK, the Republic of Ireland is in 31st position in the rankings, two places lower than last year and the lowest-placed European country. Mali, Haiti and Myanmar, also known as Burma, are at the bottom of the table.

Just dumping data is not the answer, it ticks a box but it doesn't do the job"

End Quote Meg Hillier Labour MP

"Despite coming top of the rankings, the UK has a long way to go. The release of map data is something where the UK has lagged behind, and you'd think postcodes would be part of the open structure of the UK, but they're not," Sir Tim points out.

"The Post Office holds them as being a proprietary format. So, ironically, just a list of places in the UK is not available openly, for free, on the web."

Central to the UK's place at the top of the ranking is the data.gov.uk website, launched by the Labour government in 2010. The coalition government expanded the government files released on the site, opening up £80bn of government expenditure to public scrutiny.

However, Parliament's Digital Democracy Commission has warned that transparency is not the same as true accountability.

"There's actually a big difference between dumping data that's not easily understandable and actually having open data that clever people can use to help you and me find out the information they want about the subject they want," says Meg Hillier, a Labour MP who sits on the Commission set up by the speaker of the House of Commons.

"One of the things that MPs are trying to get government to do is to make sure data is released in usable formats. Just dumping data is not the answer, it ticks a box but it doesn't do the job."

BBC Democracy Day

• Democracy Day takes place on Tuesday, 20 January, across BBC radio, TV and online
• A look at democracy past and present, encouraging debate on its role and future
• 2015 marks the 750th anniversary of the first parliament of elected representatives at Westminster
• It also sees the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta - a touchstone for democracy worldwide
• Go to the BBC News website's Democracy Day page, for analysis, backgrounders and explainers on the debate

Nevertheless, Britain can certainly claim to be far more open and transparent than many other countries. There are now hundreds of Whitehall civil servants whose jobs are linked to the digital revolution - social media managers and digital communications teams responsible for websites, Facebook and Twitter pages.

Many government services, including the rollout of universal credit, are designed to be "digital by default", prompting some to warn about a digital divide opening up between those online and the millions of UK adults who have never been on the internet.

"If you are saving money by doing things digitally, that does free up money and resources to support those who need old-fashioned systems," Meg Hillier points out. "Even in Estonia where everything is on digital they allow people to do anything they want on paper. We must always remember the digital divided and make sure they're not neglected."

For all its problems and challenges, Sir Tim believes the digital revolution should usher in a new age of open and accountable government.

"It has been this massive international collaboration of people that's been really exciting," he says. "People come out of the woodwork doing things because they're just excited about the final world that they're building. Those are the people that I'm proud of."

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EE customers to share £1m refund

19 January 2015 Last updated at 11:57 By Dave Lee Technology reporter, BBC News

A "small" number of EE customers will share a refund of roughly £1m after they were wrongly charged VAT.

Customers who went outside of the EU and used internet data between October 2012 and October 2014 are affected - about 0.5% of EE's total customers.

The company told the BBC the money "was never EE's" and that the overcharge, blamed on a system-configuration error, went directly to Revenue & Customs.

Refunds will range from about £2 to £80 per customer.

"Due to a configuration error in our billing system, made following a system change, a small number of customers were wrongly charged VAT on the Data Roaming bundle outside of Europe," spokesman David Nieberg said.

"This was a mistake, and we are now refunding these charges and contacting affected customers to apologise for the error."

He added: "We've claimed that money back from HMRC, and then it goes back to the customers."

Good news text

EE has about 28 million customers, making it the largest mobile provider in the UK.

Customers affected by the error are being contacted via text message and told the amount they are owed.

EE would not be offering a cash refund, it said, but would instead give customers credit on their accounts.

Former customers who believe they may be eligible have been told to contact customer services.

The mistake had been discovered after a customer complained, the company said.

In December it was announced that BT was in talks with EE over a possible £12.5bn takeover.

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Uber promises 50,000 jobs in Europe

18 January 2015 Last updated at 21:30

The chief executive of the online taxi-sharing firm Uber has said he wants to make 2015 a year of rapid expansion in Europe.

Travis Kalanick told a conference in Munich that Uber could create 50,000 jobs as part of a "new partnership" with European cities.

Fast-expanding Uber has drawn criticism across the world from regulators and established taxi operators.

Mr Kalanick's comments were seen as a bid to build bridges with critics.

Uber, which helps users summon taxi-like services on their smartphones, started four years ago and now operates in 250 cities worldwide.

The San Francisco start-up is valued at $40bn (£25.5bn), based on the latest fundraising from investors.

But critics have accused Uber of flouting competition rules and of not carrying out sufficient safety checks on drivers and their vehicles.

Uber has been hit with court injunctions in Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain, and has faced protests from taxi firms in major cities, including London.

A woman in India who was allegedly raped by an Uber taxi driver is suing the company in the US courts.

Some of the criticisms of Uber have provoked a combative response from the company, with Mr Kalanick a frequent critic of the red-tape and regulation that he says cities use to protect the interests of entrenched taxi firms.

Too flippant

But Mr Kalanick told the DLD conference for the media and tech industry: "Uber is committed to establishing new partnerships with Europe's cities to ensure innovation, harness powerful economic benefits and promote core city functions."

He acknowledged the need for rules and safety checks for drivers, saying it had been "easy to say something flippantly negative about every law" in the past.

Uber is working with governments on new rules to ensure public safety is protected, choice and competition thrive and economic growth and tax revenue rise, the chief executive said.

He said that Uber is developing new technology tools that improve safety and do background checks, and "improve communication with local officials and law enforcement.

And he said that city authorities that free up Uber's service would see the creation of thousands of jobs and higher tax revenues.

"At the end of 2015, if we can make these partnerships happen, we create 50,000 new EU jobs," Mr Kalanick said.

"Uber wants to partner closely with tax authorities to increase transportation providers' compliance and overall tax revenue for cities and countries across Europe," he added.

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AI Mario character plays his own game

Sometimes when you're playing a game it can feel like the character you're controlling has a mind of its own.

Now, thanks to a team of German researchers, gaming's most famous plumber can actually think for himself.

The Mario AI Project has developed an artificially intelligent Mario which is aware of himself and his environment and responds to spoken instructions.

The character will also make decisions on what to do based on what he has learned.

The Cognitive Modelling Group at Germany's University of Tubingen has released a video showing how the artificial intelligence has been applied.

Mario can be taught that jumping on a Goomba (one of his recurring enemies) will definitely kill it.

The character will also respond to how he is "feeling" - having been programmed with "internal emotive states".

If he is hungry, he will find and collect coins, or if he is curious he will happily explore the Mushroom Kingdom.

A logic and grammar tree allows Mario to respond to commands and take action based on what he has learned

Perhaps most usefully from a gaming point of view, Mario can calculate how many moves he needs to make to reach a certain position.

Students at the University of Tubingen have used Mario as part of their efforts to find out how the human brain works.

The cognitive modelling unit claim their project has generated "a fully functional program" and "an alive and somewhat intelligent artificial agent".

It's not Mario's first venture into the world of artificial intelligence, a competition has been running for several years using the character as a platform.

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Dating apps 'expose' location data

19 January 2015 Last updated at 13:08

Many mobile dating apps can be hacked to expose the exact location of users, warn security experts.

The vulnerability might leave users open to stalking, harassment or persecution, said the researchers.

By spoofing requests to the servers behind the apps, researchers were able to track people as they moved around during the day.

One app maker has fixed the loopholes in some nations but most users are still at risk, they warned.

Core function

The location-leaking vulnerabilities were found by Colby Moore and Patrick Wardle from cybersecurity firm Synack. The pair focused most of their attention on gay dating app Grindr but said other dating apps were vulnerable in the same way.

They found that they could exploit a feature of Grindr that tells users how far away they are from other people who have signed up to use the service and share where they are. The app calls on several different sources of data to provide very precise measurements of this distance.

To exploit the loophole the researchers sent several requests to servers behind Grindr, each one appearing to come from a different location. This let them get multiple estimates of a target's distance from these separate places. This made it possible to calculate a person's exact location by triangulation.

In a presentation at the Shmoocon conference, Mr Colby showed how he was able to use the loophole to map all Grindr users in San Francisco's Bay Area and those at the Sochi winter Olympics. Correlating this location data with information from social media sites would make it easy to find out someone's identity, he said.

While exploiting the loophole was not straightforward, said the researchers, there was evidence that it was being abused in Egypt to harass some dating app users.

He said Synack had told Grindr about the vulnerability which prompted the firm to update versions of its app available in nations where homosexuality is illegal or which have a history of violence against gay people.

It added that it had made it easy for people to stop sharing their location if they were worried about how it could be abused.

In a blogpost published soon after it was told about the problem, Grindr said that it had no plans to change the location finding system in nations where it was used because it was a "core function" of the service rather than a security flaw.

As a result, Mr Moore told tech news site Ars Technica, the problem still existed for Grindr users outside nations where location sharing was turned off.

"We were able to replicate this attack multiple times on willing participants without fail," he said.

He said Grindr could make it much harder to exploit the bug by checking where people were making location requests from and stopping those that were obviously spoofed. In addition, he said, the firm could make the location data less precise to help obscure people's locations.

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Micro-machines journey inside animal

19 January 2015 Last updated at 11:55 By Paul Rincon Science editor, BBC News website

In a case of science fiction meeting reality, microscopic "machines" have journeyed inside a living animal for the first time.

The tiny devices delivered a cargo of nano-particles into the stomach lining of a mouse.

The research by scientists at the University of California is published in the journal ACS Nano.

Medical applications for micro-machines include the release of drugs into specific locations within the body.

But until now, they have only been tested in laboratory cell samples.

A team led by Professors Liangfang Zhang and Joseph Wang from UC, San Diego, fed the tiny motors to mice.

The machines, made of polymer tubes coated with zinc, are just 20 micrometres long - the width of a strand of human hair.

In stomach acid, the zinc reacts to produce bubbles of hydrogen, which propel the machines into the lining of the stomach, where they attach.

As the machines dissolve, they deliver their cargoes into the stomach tissue.

The researchers say the method may offer an efficient way to deliver drugs into the stomach, to treat peptic ulcers and other illnesses.

In their paper, they suggest that further work is needed to "further evaluate the performance and functionalities of various man-made micro-motors in living organisms. This study represents the very first step toward such a goal".

The idea of surgery on a tiny scale can be traced back to a lecture by celebrated physicist Richard Feynman in 1959 called There is Plenty of Room at the Bottom.

In the talk to the American Physical Society (APS), he explained: "Although it is a very wild idea, it would be interesting in surgery if you could swallow the surgeon.

"You put the mechanical surgeon inside the blood vessel and it goes into the heart and 'looks' around. It finds out which valve is the faulty one and takes a little knife and slices it out."

The basic idea has found its way into science fiction, including the 1966 cult film classic Fantastic Voyage. Although in this case, miniaturised humans journeyed inside the body rather than tiny machines.

Follow Paul on Twitter.

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US 'tapped N Korea computers in 2010'

19 January 2015 Last updated at 19:57

The US knew North Korea was behind the Sony Pictures hack because it had secretly infiltrated the country's computer networks in 2010, according to the New York Times and Der Spiegel.

The newspapers cited US officials and leaked documents from the National Security Agency.

The New York Times said hidden software had alerted US intelligence services to North Korean hacking activity.

North Korea has consistently denied involvement in the security breach.

American investigators believe the hackers spent two months building up a map of Sony's systems before the hack took place, the papers say.

November's attack on the company saw the leak of sensitive documents including salary details and confidential emails between executives.

It also resulted in Sony film The Interview, a comedy about an assassination attempt on North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, being briefly shelved and then released online.

The US Office of the Director of National Intelligence said the intelligence community was fully aware of North Korean attempts to infiltrate US commercial networks, tracking them routinely.

"While no two situations are the same, it is our shared goal to prevent bad actors from exploiting, disrupting or damaging US commercial networks and cyber infrastructure," said spokesman Brian Hale.

When it becomes clear that cyber criminals have the ability and intent to do damage, we work cooperatively to defend networks."

Damage control

Cyber-security expert Dr Steven Murdoch, from University College London, said it was likely that the NSA had at least tried to access North Korean networks before.

"I'm almost certain they were doing it long before 2010," he told the BBC.

"North Korea has been a target for the US for quite some time."

Dr Murdoch said that if the NSA had been aware of the hack before it had happened, it may have chosen not to warn Sony for its own security reasons.

"One possibility is that they didn't know how damaging the attack was going to be, and didn't want to risk revealing their sources by mentioning it to Sony," he added.

"Or maybe they did know [how harmful it was] but it wasn't that damaging by intelligence community priorities - this was very damaging to Sony but in terms of national security it's not as significant."

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Shoe retailer warned on data breach

20 January 2015 Last updated at 11:50

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has warned High Street and online shoe retailer Office to clean up its act after a data breach exposed more than one million customer details.

The breach in May left the personal data of customers exposed, although no financial information was compromised.

Office has promised to ensure the issues that led to the data breach are resolved.

But it raises questions about how and why retailers store data.

In May, the ICO was informed that a member of the public had hacked into an unencrypted historical Office database that was being stored on a server outside the core infrastructure of the retailer's current website.

From there, the individual gained access to the personal data of more than one million Office customers, including contact details and website passwords.

Same password

"The breach has highlighted two hugely important areas of data protection - the unnecessary storage of older personal data and the lack of security to protect data," said ICO enforcement group manager Sally-Anne Poole.

"All data is vulnerable even when in the process of being deleted, and Office should have had stringent measures in place regardless of the server or system used.

"The need and purpose for retaining personal data should also be assessed regularly, to ensure the information is not being kept for longer than required."

There is no evidence that the information accessed has been further disclosed or otherwise used.

But the hack highlights the potential problems involved in having the same password for all online accounts.

"This one incident could potentially have given the hacker access to numerous accounts that the clients held with other organisations, as passwords were included on the database in question," said Ms Poole.

"It's important to use a unique, strong password for each separate account; preferably a combination of numbers and letters - not a name or dictionary word."

Brian McCluskey, chief executive of Office Holdings, has agreed to a series of measures including:

• frequent testing of the systems it uses

• new data protection policies

• formal data protection training for all employees

• ensuring that data is only retained for as long as necessary in relation to the purposes of processing

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Xbox, Sony hackers hit by hack attack

20 January 2015 Last updated at 12:24

Hacking group Lizard Squad has been hit by an embarrassing attack that exposed the entire database of people who signed up to use its services.

The group claimed to have knocked the Xbox and PlayStation gaming networks offline over Christmas.

Soon after, it set up a website that let anyone who paid use its software to deluge other sites with data.

The attack that exposed the customer list is one of several aimed at the group and its tools.

Address list

Investigative journalist Brian Krebs broke the news that the database behind the Lizard Stresser tool had been compromised. The Stresser let those who paid use it to overwhelm websites or kick people offline by bombarding the sites they were using with data.

Mr Krebs did not name who got at the data but said he had acquired a dump of the entire roster of 14,241 people who signed up.

Anyone visiting the Stresser site was warned about the attack by text on the main page's login box which urged people to change the password they created when they registered.

In a blogpost, Mr Krebs said the Lizard Squad had not taken many precautions to protect the login and contact information surrendered by users.

"All registered usernames and passwords were stored in plain text," said Mr Krebs, adding that only a few hundred of those who signed up had paid to use it.

Tech news site Ars Technica also got hold of the database dump which was briefly posted on the Mega file-sharing system. It said most of those who used it were gamers keen to stop rivals playing a particular game. Minecraft servers were a favourite target of the Stresser users, it said.

Ars Technica said the dump of the database could spell problems for anyone who had used it because the IP addresses of many of them were poorly obscured and could, with a little work, be recovered.

The plundering of the database comes soon after other computer experts took apart the tools that Lizard Squad has been using. One exposed the source code of a program used to attack people on IRC chat networks,

In addition, soon after the Stresser site was created, computer science student Eric Zhang managed to enumerate the names of all the people who had signed up using a very simple script.

"That took just 10 minutes to do," he said.

He said he was not surprised that the entire database was plundered because when he looked at the site, public access to the server behind it had not been closed off.

"If you look at the site it's clearly run by someone who does not have much formal experience in software engineering," he said.

"Most of what they are doing is not really impressive," he said. "Anyone can do it. All it takes is time."

Mr Krebs said Lizard Squad was being targeted by security professionals irked by their sudden notoriety.

He said: "There seems to be a general sense in the security research community that these guys are in way over their heads, and that if we can't bring to justice a bunch of teenagers in Western nations who are rubbing it in everyone's faces, then that's a sad state of affairs."

However, he added, the time it took to carry out investigations and find members of the group had helped it survive. Recent arrests of Lizard Squad members seemed only to have scooped up some of its hangers-on but had let some of the core members remain at large.

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Apology over WeChat US flag 'glitch'

20 January 2015 Last updated at 15:52 By News from Elsewhere... ...media reports from around the world, found by BBC Monitoring

The Chinese technology company Tencent has apologised after a feature on its mobile messaging app flooded users' screens with American flags when the words "civil rights" were used.

WeChat, the Chinese equivalent of WhatsApp, sends icons cascading down the screen in response to certain key terms, so "Happy Birthday" prompts a flurry of cakes. But Chinese users of the app who discussed civil rights were surprised to see the stars and stripes appear, the Global Times website reports. Officials from one Communist Youth League committee pointed out the app doesn't have any special icons when users type "China" or "National Day". Tencent blames a technical glitch, saying it was "supposed to be only available for users in the US" to mark Martin Luther King Jr Day. "We apologize for the misunderstanding caused by the error," a company statement reads. Screen grabs show the flags appearing when the words were written in English; it's unclear whether it also happened when Chinese characters were used.

The story has divided opinion on social media, but some users on the Weibo social networking site are angry at the - apparently unintended - implication that civil rights are associated with the US, and not China. "Doesn't this country have civil rights?" asks one user. Others are more troubled by flags being used at all. "China has guidelines for using the flag, you can't just use it for a joke," says one popular comment on the Caixin Online page. "If it was the Chinese flag falling, I think we would become a disrespected country." But not everyone's upset, and some users think the whole thing has been overblown. "You haven't done anything wrong," says one user. "There's no need to apologise."

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