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Category: WORLDS

  • Apple launch: Bigger! Faster! Pricier! Innovative?

    Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Apple’s launch event is being held on Wednesday

    Apple has given the Oval Office a run for its money in the past few weeks – we’ve had an unprecedented number of leaks ahead of the firm’s annual product launch.

    So, barring any surprises – a Steve Jobs-esque “one more thing” – we have a pretty good idea of what to expect when Tim Cook heads out on stage on Wednesday. He’ll do it as the chief executive of the first US company to reach a value of $1tn (£768bn). To keep it that way, Apple will be building on past successes rather than introducing anything dramatically new.

    We’ll likely see three new iPhones, a revamped Apple Watch, and maybe some new iPads. Later in the year, rumour suggests a budget laptop may be on the way.

    What we won’t see, however, are some of the innovative leaps being promised by some of Apple’s competitors.

    Samsung plans a device with a flexible display by the end of the year. OnePlus said its next phone will have a fingerprint sensor built into the screen. Huawei, which recently overtook Apple in global smartphone sales, has said it is working on a flexible device of its own.

    How were the Apple leaks found?

    Several rumour sites compete for tidbits of information about Apple’s forthcoming products and often manage to share details before the tech giant would like them to be disclosed.

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    But at the end of last month, 9to5Mac’s publication of what appeared to be official marketing images of one of the new iPhones and a new Apple Watch was a real coup for the site.

    “To my memory, this is unprecedented,” wrote the veteran Apple commentator John Gruber.

    After much speculation about how he achieved his scoop, 9to5Mac’s Guilherme Rambo has now revealed the technique he used via his Twitter account.

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    He wrote that he had studied the web addresses that Apple had used to host images of products announced at its last “special event” and deduced what the equivalents might be this time round.

    He said he had not expected to find anything when he typed in the addresses, but was successful on his first attempt.

    “Looking at the naming for past events, sometimes they combine multiple things into one recap image, which makes them harder to guess,” he explained.

    “We managed to guess the iPhone and Watch ones because they are ‘hero’ shots.”

    “Apple took them down immediately after we published,” he added.

    The iPhone-maker is likely to keep its secrets more closely guarded next time round.

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    Follow Dave Lee on Twitter @DaveLeeBBC

    Do you have more information about this or any other technology story? You can reach Dave directly and securely through encrypted messaging app Signal on: +1 (628) 400-7370

  • Afghanistan attack: Nangarhar suicide blast toll soars

    A man who was injured in a twin suicide bomb blasts, that targeted girl's schools, receive medical attention at a hospital in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, 11 September 2018. Image copyright EPA Image caption The death toll from Tuesday’s suicide bombing soared overnight

    A suicide bombing in east Afghanistan has killed at least 68 people, officials say, in one of the deadliest insurgent attacks in recent months.

    The bomber struck in a crowd of people protesting against a local police chief in Nangarhar province near Pakistan.

    The death toll from Tuesday’s blast soared overnight. Another 165 people were injured – local hospitals struggled to cope with the casualties.

    Hundreds have died in a wave of recent attacks. Elections are due in October.

    No group has said it carried out the suicide bombing in the crowd of protesters in Nangarhar’s Momand Dara district, but Islamic State militants are active in the province.

    Earlier, five people were injured in two bomb attacks near a school in the same province.

    The violence follows recent diplomatic efforts to end the lengthy war between the Afghan government and the Taliban.

  • Social media faces EU fine if terror lingers for an hour

    ISIS fighter Image copyright Reuters Image caption Draft EU regulation is being planned to force social media to act more swiftly over terror content

    The European Commission is planning to order websites to delete extremist content on their sites within an hour to avoid the risk of being fined.

    The regulation would affect Twitter, Facebook and YouTube among others.

    The crackdown would lead to the EU abandoning its current approach – where the firms self-police – in favour of explicit rules.

    The shake-up comes in the wake of high-profile terror attacks across Europe over the past few years.

    Julian King, the EU’s commissioner for security, told the Financial Times that the EU would “take stronger action in order to protect our citizens”.

    The BBC has confirmed the details of the report.

    In March, the EU’s civil service published details of the current voluntary arrangement, which noted that “terrorist content is most harmful in the first hours of its appearance online”.

    At the time, it said there was “significant scope for more effective action”.

    The BBC understands the draft regulation is set to be published next month. It would need to be approved by the European Parliament and a majority of EU states before it could be put into action.

    UK unveils extremism blocking tool Tax tech giants over extremism – minister How extremists and terror groups hijacked social media – BBC Three

    Mr King told the FT that the law would apply to small social media apps as well as the bigger players.

    “Platforms have differing capabilities to act against terrorist content and their policies for doing so are not always transparent,” he added.

    A study published last month by the not-for-profit Counter Extremism Project said that between March and June, 1,348 videos related to the Islamic State group were uploaded on to YouTube, via 278 separate accounts, garnering more than 163,000 views.

    The report said that 24% of the videos had remained online for more than two hours.

    The BBC has asked Google, Twitter and Facebook to comment.

    Google has previously said that more than half of the videos YouTube removes for containing violent extremism have had fewer than 10 views.

    In its latest ‘transparency report’, Twitter says that between July and December 2017, a total of 274,460 accounts were permanently suspended for violations related to the promotion of terrorism. The company says 74% of those accounts were suspended before their first tweet.

    If the EU’s proposed regulation is approved, it will be the first time the European Commission has explicitly targeted tech firms’ handling of illegal content.

  • Google, Facebook, Twitter face EU fines over extremist posts

    ISIS fighter Image copyright Reuters Image caption Draft EU regulation is being planned to force social media to act more swiftly over terror content

    Google, Facebook and Twitter must remove extremist content within an hour or face hefty fines, the European Commission’s president has said.

    In his annual State of the Union address to the European Parliament, Jean-Claude Juncker said an hour was a “decisive time window”.

    Net firms had been given three months in March to show they were acting faster to take down radical posts.

    But EU regulators said too little was being done.

    If authorities flag content that incites and advocates extremism, the content must be removed from the web within an hour, the proposal from the EU’s lead civil servant state. Net firms that fail to comply would face fines of up to four percent of their annual global turnover.

    The proposal will need backing from the countries that make up the EU as well as the European Parliament and internet platforms will be required to develop new tools to police content.

  • Profile: EU’s Jean-Claude Juncker

    Image copyright AP Image caption Mr Juncker has been a close ally of Germany’s Angela Merkel during the eurozone crisis

    He has not explained how an EU-US free trade deal might impact on EU social protection policies, which currently cost the EU many billions through support for farmers and projects to help poor communities.

    He claimed that such a deal would give each European an extra 545 euros (£443; $742) – an exaggeration, according to a fact check by Eurovision, which hosted the debate.

    He has also defended the Common Agricultural Policy, saying agriculture employs about 30 million Europeans. But the UK government is among the many critics who say the CAP is wasteful and want more of the EU budget spent on digital technologies, research and investment in small businesses.

    Mats Persson, director of the Open Europe think-tank, says Mr Juncker is associated with the EU of the 1980s and 1990s, echoing a criticism attributed to Prime Minister Cameron.

    After an election that saw a surge in support for Eurosceptic parties, that connection with past EU policies may be a disadvantage, Mr Persson told the BBC.

    However, Mr Juncker is not vague about the political risks of taking tough economic decisions. He once said, “We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it.”

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  • Juncker makes keynote EU speech

    Live Juncker makes keynote EU speech

  • Sergei Skripal and the Russian disinformation game

    CCTV of Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov Image copyright Met Police Image caption Police released CCTV showing the two men at Gatwick Airport

    When the UK authorities announced on Wednesday that they suspected two alleged Russian agents in the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, they released CCTV images of the suspects arriving at Gatwick airport.

    Two of the images, framed side by side, began to spread on social media, driven by pro-Russia conspiracy theorists and suspected troll accounts. They showed the alleged agents – Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov – passing through a non-return gate at the airport.

    The images had identical timestamps. How could two men be in exactly the same place at the same time, a flood of tweets asked.

    Speaking on state TV, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova claimed that either “the date and the exact time were superimposed on the image” or that Russian intelligence officers had “mastered the skill of walking simultaneously”.

    Her remarks were echoed by pro-Kremlin accounts on Twitter and on the messaging app Telegram, which is popular in Russia. Users suggested the CCTV images had been manipulated. They mocked the British authorities and alleged it was an MI6 operation.

    Image Copyright @marcelsardo @marcelsardo

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    Twitter post by @marcelsardo: #All - these pictures were distributed by Reuters. There is something fishy with the time stamps - unless there is an explanation | via @RusPerspective #SkripalHoax Image Copyright @marcelsardo @marcelsardo

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    Soon it would not necessarily matter that the background of the CCTV images were not identical; that the camera was at a different angle; that Google Maps shows that the non-return gates at Gatwick are a series of near-identical corridors that the two men could easily have passed down, adjacent to one another, at the same time.

    What would matter would be that some people following the story would begin to question what was real and what wasn’t. Some might even begin to question the very idea that there was a real, reliable version of events at all.

    Image copyright Google Image caption A still from Google maps, showing the exit gates at Gatwick airport

    Russia denies any involvement in the Skripal case, and its embassy in London did not respond to a request for comment from the BBC, but analysts say the Russian state is now the chief exponent of a new kind of information warfare.

    A loosely-defined network of Russian state actors, state-controlled media, and armies of social media bots and trolls is said to work in unison to spread and amplify multiple narratives and conspiracies around cases like the Skripal poisoning. The goal is no longer to deny or disprove an official version of events, it is to flood the zone with so many competing versions that nothing seems to make sense.

    “What is really striking is that you no longer see the Russian machine pushing a single message, it pushes dozens of messages,” said Ben Nimmo, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who studies Russian disinformation. “The idea is to confuse people.”

    Other theories circulating on Wednesday included a claim that the suspects were British actors, stars of a (non-existent) KGB spy series broadcast on British television in the 2000s. Another suggested the attempted assassination in Salisbury, and the deaths of other Russian nationals in Britain, were part of an MI6 plot. “Why do all these horrible events only happen in Britain?” asked Andrei Klimov, a Russian member of parliament, on state TV.

    Salisbury: Russian nationals named as suspects On the trail of Novichok suspects What happened to Sergei and Yulia Skripal?

    “The more different theories you put out, the more different Google results you’re going to get,” said Mr Nimmo. “So instead of seeing two or three different versions of the story you’re seeing 20 or 30. And for someone who is not following the story regularly that becomes more and more confusing until they give up. And at that point, the Russian disinformation has had its effect.”

    Early evidence of the tactic can be traced back to the 2000s but it first drew serious international attention in 2014 when Malaysian Airlines flight MH-17 was shot down over Ukraine, killing 298 people. The evidence pointed to a Russian-supplied surface-to-air missile fired from rebel-held territory in east Ukraine.

    Russia had already been accused of deploying crude disinformation techniques around its actions in east Ukraine and its annexation of Crimea, but its response to being linked to the downing of MH-17 was on a different scale – the “tipping point where Russian information warfare kicked into high gear”, Mr Nimmo said.

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    Media captionSkripal poisoning: On the trail of Novichok suspects

    In the days and months after the aircraft was shot down, Russian state media and pro-Kremlin social accounts pushed out a raft of different and wildly contradictory theories: that a Ukrainian Su-25 combat aircraft had been picked up by radar near MH-17; that video evidence showed a missile being fired from government, not separatist, territory; that Ukrainian fighters had mistaken MH-17 for Vladimir Putin’s plane in an assassination attempt; that the CIA was behind it.

    “MH-17 is really the classic example,” said Samantha Bradshaw, a researcher on computational propaganda at the University of Oxford.

    “You saw a whole series of different conspiracies and competing narratives emerge, attached to various hashtags and social media campaigns. The goal was to confuse people, to polarise them, to push them further and further away from reality.”

    The technique expanded and evolved in the years after the MH-17 attack, with Russia linked to disinformation campaigns around its actions in Syria, the 2016 US election, the murder of Boris Nemtsov, and a UK inquiry into the murder of former Russian intelligence officer Alexander Litvinenko in London.

    Media playback is unsupported on your device

    Media captionSalisbury Novichok suspects: What does Russia’s media think?

    A key component in recent iterations of the tactic has been the use of humour and ridicule. When a UK inquiry found in 2016 that Russian president Vladimir Putin “probably approved” the murder of Litvinenko, a hashtag – #putinprobablyapproved – spread through Twitter, with tweets suggesting Mr Putin had “probably approved” the assassination of JFK, the invasion of Iraq, climate change and more.

    In the hours after the UK named the suspects in the Skripal case, a flood of near-identical tweets used pictures of comedians, historical figures and Hollywood spies – from Joseph Stalin to Jason Bourne – in place of the suspects, mocking the UK’s announcement.

    The official account of the Russian embassy in London even joined in, posting an image of the two Skripal suspects allegedly carrying the Novichok toxin alongside a picture of British police in biohazard suits, asking users to “spot the difference”. On Russian state news bulletins, anchors reported the news with a mixture of disbelief and sarcasm.

    “The strategy is optimised for the internet, it’s meant to go viral,” said Mr Nimmo. “That’s why mockery and sarcasm and attempts at funny memes are so much a part of this … It is disinformation for the information age.”

    Image Copyright @RussianEmbassy @RussianEmbassy

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    Twitter post by @RussianEmbassy: Men Image Copyright @RussianEmbassy @RussianEmbassy

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    In 2015, the European Union was sufficiently alarmed by Russian disinformation that it created a task force – the East Stratcom team – directed solely at counteracting the perceived threat. The small team attempts to debunk fake stories in real time, but it is reportedly vastly outmatched by the amount of material coming its way.

    Peter Wilson, the UK ambassador to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, said earlier this year the OPCW had counted more than 30 different Russian theories swirling around the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal.

    The effectiveness and reach of this type of disinformation operation in the West is debatable. A YouGov poll conducted earlier this year found that 75% of Britons believed that the Russian state was behind the Skripal poisoning, while just 5% said they thought Russia was innocent. But the sheer volume of Russian disinformation being exported abroad remained a major cause for concern, said one EU official who works on the issue but was not authorised to speak about it publicly.

    “Some people like to think this tactic was used around Brexit and it went away, or it was used around Skripal and went away, but it’s happening 24/7,” he said. “Others also use disinformation, of course … But this aggression, this exporting of information narratives abroad, this is really something where Russia is number one in the world.”

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  • Libya’s Tripoli airport diverts flights after rocket attack

    Mitiga was closed until recently amid militia clashes in Tripoli Image copyright AFP Image caption Mitiga was closed until recently amid militia clashes in Tripoli

    The only working airport in Libya’s capital, Tripoli, has diverted flights after it came under rocket fire.

    There were no immediate reports of damage or casualties at Mitiga International Airport after the attack on Tuesday night.

    The airport had only reopened on Friday following clashes between rival militias.

    A UN-backed government is nominally in power in Tripoli but militias occupy much of the rest of the country.

    Why is Libya so lawless? Is it possible to hold elections in Libya? Libya and migration crisis

    The rocket attack forced a Libyan Airlines flight from Alexandria in Egypt to divert to Misrata, some 200km (120 miles) east of the capital.

    Other flights would also be diverted and a source told Agence France-Presse that plans were under way to move other planes at Tripoli to Misrata.

    Libyan Airlines is the only operator, running internal flights and international ones to a limited number of countries. It is barred from EU airports on security grounds.

  • Skripal poisoning: Suspects ‘civilians, not criminals’ says Putin

    Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia Image copyright Rex Features Image caption Sergei Skripal (right) and his daughter Yulia

    Russian President Vladimir Putin says there is “nothing criminal” about the men named by UK authorities over the poisoning of ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter.

    UK authorities have named the men as Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, thought to be officers of Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU.

    But Mr Putin said they were civilians and would tell their story soon.

    Mr Skripal and Yulia were poisoned in the city of Salisbury in March.

    “We know who they are, we have found them,” Mr Putin said in the far eastern city of Vladivostok.

    “I hope they will turn up themselves and tell everything. This would be best for everyone. There is nothing special there, nothing criminal, I assure you. We’ll see in the near future,” he added.

  • Marie Colvin: Reporter’s last days retold for cinema

    Paul Conroy and Marie Colvin Image copyright Dogwoof Image caption Paul Conroy and the “notoriously difficult” Marie Colvin

    In 2012, in the besieged city of Homs, photojournalist Paul Conroy was lucky to escape alive when a makeshift media centre came under fire from Syrian government forces. His colleagues Marie Colvin and Remi Ochlik were killed. A new documentary Under the Wire tells the story – the first of two films this year to feature Colvin and Conroy.

    Despite the violent way she died, there are times when Conroy can only smile at the memory of the war correspondent Colvin.

    “I met Marie about 15 years ago. We were both trying to get into northern Iraq from Syria. I’d built a boat to cross the Tigris river out of lorry inner tubes and bits of wood and basically string.

    “But I got captured and was sent back and in the journalists’ bar no one would speak to me because they all thought I’d spoiled their chances of getting in. Then Marie walked in and she said – who and where is the ‘Boatman’? I put my hand up and she said, ‘Boatman, can I buy you a whiskey?’ That was the start of it.”

    After that Conroy bumped into the Sunday Times’ US-born correspondent several times. As a resourceful photo-journalist with a similar taste for the field of battle, he was aware of her reputation.

    Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Paul Conroy was trusted by Marie Colvin

    “She was notoriously difficult and some photographers she worked with found her scary. And she would just dump them if they didn’t fit.

    “Marie and I worked together in Libya for the Sunday Times and once there was a guy who was to fill in for me for a couple of days. But almost at once Marie was on the phone saying get back here now – she’d already sent this guy off 300 miles and she never spoke to him again.”

    Under the Wire, directed by film-maker Chris Martin, doesn’t try to portray Colvin as an easy colleague.

    He remembers he was filming in the Caribbean when he heard of her death. “And I saw material on YouTube of Paul trapped in Syria. I saw that the people I was working with were really concerned about his fate and I knew at once there was a story to be told.”

    Martin’s documentary shows what happens after Colvin and Conroy arrive in Homs through a 3km storm drain.

    Conroy says the city was the obvious fulcrum of the story. The government of President Bashar al-Assad saw Homs as the major centre of revolt and was ready to crush dissent there.

    Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Edith Bouvier is flown home to France after escaping to Lebanon

    Conroy says just getting in was difficult. “We spent a week or two in Beirut making contacts. From there we went up into the mountains between Lebanon and Syria, where we met with members of the Free Syrian Army (a loose anti-Assad coalition). They took us over the border at night time through minefields, dodging army checkpoints. They then handed us over to another unit of the Free Syrian Army.

    “It took about three days to go 30 kilometres. But the only way into Baba Amr – the part of Homs really getting hammered – was by this storm drain about 4ft high. We went through it bent double and carrying all our kit. We were pulled out of the tunnel, thrown in the back of a truck and ran the gauntlet of Syrian forces.

    Conroy says the few journalists around Homs were aware of the risks. “I was told by a Lebanese source that Syrian government policy was to kill any journalists and then drop the bodies on the battlefield. It was a horrible situation and the film makes that very clear.”

    Martin makes no apologies for having filled in pictorial gaps in the narrative. “We went to extraordinary lengths to find video material. A lot of it was just the odd five seconds taken in Homs by activists; it took a massive amount of tracking down, not just in the Middle East. We found things like a Skype call made from the journalists’ base in Homs at the moment the rockets hit.”

    Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Marie Colvin at a service for journalists, cameramen and support staff to have died in war zones

    But he says some 15 minutes of the running time consists of reconstructions of what happened to Colville and Conroy and to the other four journalists with them before the fatal attack – Edith Bouvier, Remi Ochlik and William Daniels, who were all French, and the Spanish journalist Javier Espinosa.

    Martin acknowledges this is not a the film like this might have been made only a few years ago.

    “We had just three or four minutes of material which Paul had shot – everything else was destroyed when the rockets came in. But we did find some footage of the tunnel and even of Paul and Marie in Homs working on what turned out to be Marie’s last piece of journalism.

    “So we pieced together that archive with our interview with Paul and with the testament of Edith Bouvier and William Daniels – and of Wael their brave translator. That was the spine of the film.”

    But Martin says the documentary market is changing and as a result he decided he needed to shoot high-quality extra material to knit the story together.

    Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Rosamund Pike is to play Colvin in a feature film called a Private War

    The production team decamped to northern Morocco to stage a version of the storm drain sequence. Additional interiors were shot in London. The craft skills on display mean the documentary often has the feel of a well-produced feature film.

    “Documentaries like Under the Wire are now mainly going to be seen first on theatrical release,” he says. “They’re not just for TV. And if you’re in cinemas you’re competing with feature films which might cost $100m (£77m) or more. So we have to engage the viewer. We can’t expect audiences to come and find the story on our terms.”

    The American director Matthew Heineman has also been at work on the life of Colvin. A Private War, which in part tells the same story, is due for release this year. But Heineman has made a feature film, starring Rosamund Pike as Colvin and with Jamie Dornan as Conroy.

    In real life Conroy only realised back in London how badly he’d been hurt in the attack, which killed Colvin and Ochlik.

    “Obviously I knew I had a huge hole in the back of my leg. But in London I found out I also had a great big piece of shrapnel wedged under my kidneys. I had 23 operations on my leg and others on my abdomen and back. I was in hospital for five months.

    “There’s still a story to be told in Syria. I can’t even begin to say how deeply I regret Marie and Remi dying. But do I regret going in and trying to do our job? Absolutely not.”

    Under the Wire is on release.

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