What will drivers do in driverless cars

GENEVA: Brew an espresso, watch a movie on a large screen, surf the internet or simply sit and chat with friends?

As automakers and technology firms steer towards a future of driverless cars, a Swiss think tank is at the Geneva Motor Show this week showing off its vision of what vehicles might look like on the inside when people no longer have to focus on the road.

"Once I can drive autonomously, would I want to watch while my steering wheel turns happily from left to right?" asked Rinspeed founder and chief executive Frank Rinderknecht.

"No. I would like to do anything else but drive and watch the traffic. Eat, sleep, work, whatever you can imagine," he told AFP at the show, which opens its doors to the public Thursday.

Google is famously working on fully autonomous cars, and traditional carmakers are rapidly developing a range of autonomous technologies as well.

With analysts expecting sales of self-driving, if not completely driverless, cars to begin taking off by the end of this decade, Rinderknecht insists it's time to consider how the experience of riding in a car will could be radically redefined.

Patting his shiny Xchange concept car, Rinderknecht says he envisages a future where car passengers will want to do the same kinds of things we today do to kill time on trains an airplanes.

So Rinspeed has revamped the interior of Tesla's Model S electric car to show carmakers how they might turn standard-sized vehicles into entertainment centres, offices and meeting spots wrapped into one.

The seats can slide, swivel, and tilt into more than 20 positions, allowing passengers to turn to face each other or a 32-inch screen in the back.

Up front too, an entertainment system lines the entire length of the dashboard, and the steering wheel can be shifted to allow passengers a better view of the screens.

And of course there is an espresso machine. While brewing coffee, video conferencing and keeping an eye on your email at 120 kilometres an hour may sound like a fantasy today, Rinderknecht is convinced it could happen in the not too distanced future.

"We think this is what things could look like in a few years time," he said.

Driving, he said, is on the cusp of being redefined, allowing people to take the wheel for pleasure, for instance while going over an Alpine pass, but handing over control of the car on tedious stretches.

"If I have to go three hours from Geneva to Zurich and it's congested, I'm not doing anything... I want to be doing something else," he said.

Carmakers at the Geneva Motor Show seemed to agree that vehicles that drive themselves, at least to a certain extent, are on the horizon.

"Autonomous driving is an inevitability that we are approaching very rapidly," Hyundai Europe COO Allan Rushforth told AFP.

He stressed though that "full automation" was not a priority. Ford Europe chief Stephen Odelle also said the technology was speeding forward, but added that he believed "the technology will be ready before legislation and consumers are."

"How comfortable will consumers be with fully automated cars?" he asked, adding that legislating for liability would be quite tricky with no driver behind the wheel.

Rinderknecht acknowledged there are obstacles, but insisted "they can be overcome."

He pointed out that accident reduction is actually a major argument for automation, since once the technology is finalised the machines should be far more reliable than humans.

And while it will be an upward battle to redefine liability legislation, "I think it can be done, because laws must adapt to life, and life as we all know changes," he said.

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Nadella, Gates were against Microsoft-Nokia deal: Report

NEW DELHI: Microsoft's acquisition of Nokia is close to completion, but a new report says that this deal is one of the major reasons behind Steve Ballmer's early exit from the world's biggest software maker.

A report in Bloomberg Businessweek claims that Microsoft founder Bill Gates and new CEO Satya Nadella were against Nokia buyout, as was Skype founder Tony Bates and many other unnamed board members. Later, Nadella changed his stance and supported the deal; Bates remained firm against the acquisition.

Bill Gates and others were against moving into the smartphone business, as part of the bigger ongoing debate about its experience in the hardware business. Despite the market share of Xbox One, it is not a profitable division for Microsoft. Similarly, the Surface tablets have not attained much success in the tablet market.

Despite the Nokia deal getting the nod later, Ballmer lost the favour of the board. Bloomberg Businessweek says, "Concerns over Microsoft's direction had been mounting for months. For some directors, the question was whether Ballmer should still lead, according to people close to the board."

The report says that during a meeting in June, when told that the board would not back his plan to acquire Nokia, he shouted that he would not remain CEO unless he got his way. He was "so loud that day that his shouts could be heard outside the conference room."

Ballmer's initial plan was to acquire Nokia's handset business as well as its mapping unit. In the end, though, Microsoft only acquired the mobile division, and only licensed the Here Maps from Nokia. The Microsoft Board reportedly rejected the first deal as too expensive and complex, including not only the handset division but also a mapping unit Microsoft didn't need.

In fact, the relationship between Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, who are long-time friends, soured so much that they refused to share the stage together in November's shareholder meeting. Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith had to intervene to get them to appear onstage together, says the report.

Ballmer's reason for emphasizing on the Nokia buyout was that the Finnish manufacturer had been "dropping hints it might start making devices to run on Google's Android platform. Ballmer needed a way to keep Nokia in Microsoft's world." Nokia makes nearly 80% of the devices running Microsoft's Windows Phone 8 operating system.

At the Mobile World Congress in February 2013, Ballmer approached Nokia's then-chairman Risto Siilasmaa about the acquisition. As talks progressed, Microsoft took a charge of $900 million over poor sales of Surface tablets, which underlined concerns about its prospects in the hardware business.

A few months later, Ballmer shocked everyone - including his leadership team - with the announcement of his early departure from Microsoft. A few minutes before making the announcement, he had called up Nokia's Siilasmaa and then-CEO Stephen Elop about his retirement to "reassure them Microsoft remained committed to the deal." They were the only two outsiders to be informed of this announcement.

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Hackers can attack your PC even without internet

One of the go-to strategies for securing a computer network when a machine is infected with malware is to remove that machine from the network. This effectively prevents the malware from spreading to other devices.

The technique is called "air-gapping" - network admins are building a "roadblock" quite literally made out of air to stop malicious computer code from propagating throughout a network. With no cables connecting the affected machine to the rest of the network, malware has no "road" by which to travel.

But air-gap malware has no need for a road. It travels through the air as sound waves to infect machines that it is physically near, no matter what network they may be a part of.

What is it and how does it work?
Air-gap malware is that which is able to jump the air-gap by "translating" malicious computer code into high-frequency sound, then transmitting that sound to infect nearby computers.

Engin Kirda, professor at Northeastern University and a co-founder of Lastline, a company specializing in advanced malware, said, "Recently, researchers have started to show proof-of-concept implementations of how malware could leak data from an air-gapped machine using peripheral devices such as microphones and sound cards."

That's right: sound as virus. Computer data can't travel over the air in its raw form, but your computer's sound card is more than enough to "broadcast" the malware as inaudible sound that interacts with other machines. It doesn't care what network a computer is on.

Kirda said that one can "think of it as a technique that is similar to how modems work and how machines communicate over phone lines."

The diagram below comes from a paper about air-gap malware by Michael Hanspach and Michael Goetz. Even if you remove a computer from a network, air-gap malware plays on the computers' shared physical environment to spread itself.

Where did it come from? There's not a good answer to this question, but the idea that sound can leak or reveal information from a machine is not a new one. It doesn't even have to be a modern computer. Research has shown that the sounds of a dot matrix printer can be used to reverse-engineer the content being printed.

Teaching computer malware to play on this technique, however, is new.

How worried should you be about air-gap malware?
For being such an effective method of crippling computers, air-gap malware thankfully doesn't pose much of a threat to casual computer users. Kirda said: "This is all not trivial...The attacker would probably have to be very sophisticated to be able to pull of something like this."

There's not really a way to proactively protect yourself from air-gap malware, but that's okay for now. The techniques that go into employing air-gap malware are complex and can only be orchestrated by a very skilled hacker.

Put another way, this isn't the type of malware you accidentally get from installing bum software. It's the kind you get when someone is coming for your network specifically.

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Samsung accuses Apple of leaking confidential documents

WASHINGTON: In a series of longstanding disputes among the two tech giants, Samsung has claimed that Apple leaked confidential information about the company in a licensing row. Earlier, Apple had claimed that Samsung had leaked the same information about itself, prompting court to fine the South Korean manufacturer.

According to The Verge, the dispute centred on a licensing agreement between Apple and Nokia that Samsung's lawyers accidentally leaked to the company's employees, for which the South Korean giant was found guilty of.

However, Samsung has now demanded that its fine should be reduced on the grounds that Apple apparently leaked those very same documents too.

Samsung said that Apple published the licensing agreement in a public docket back in October and left it there for about four months, during which, Apple is said to have published other confidential agreements, including some dealing with Google and Samsung itself.

The South Korean giant has written in a motion that Apple's repeated disclosure of confidential business information warranted some investigation.

Meanwhile, Apple has allegedly refused to provide information on its investigation into the matter and Samsung is now pressing the court to make it reveal more, the report added.

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Reliance Globalcom no longer up for sale

DUBAI: Reliance Globalcom, the international unit of India's Reliance Communications, is no longer up for sale and may raise debt or equity to fund its expansion plans, Globalcom's new chief executive said.

The sale had long been mooted to help reduce debts at Reliance Communications, India's No. 4 mobile operator, but Globalcom chief Bill Barney told Reuters: "There's no 'For Sale' sign up on the company."

Barney was appointed in January, one of a number of senior hires as part of its efforts to reshape the company, which says it has the world's largest privately owned submarine cable network.

"We'll go to capital markets when we need it, it may be in the form of debt, it may be equity," said Barney in an interview in Dubai, where he was attending a conference.

Barney's comments come nearly a year after the collapse of talks between Reliance Communications and Bahrain's Batelco over the potential sale of a stake in Globalcom.

At the time, the parent firm said it had instead began similar discussions with a private equity consortium.

Since then, executives including Reliance Communications chairman Anil Ambani have said there were talks with potential partners on the sale of a stake in Globalcom without naming any suitor, and as recently as February reiterated a sale was still on the agenda.

The talks had followed a botched Singapore stock market flotation of the undersea cable assets in 2012 and were seen as crucial to cut the parent's debts.

"The markets are great right now, if we could list it we probably would, but we have a lot of projects we want to do to make it look stronger and faster," said Barney, who before joining Globalcom was chief executive of Pacnet, an Asian telecom provider which owns about 46,420 kilometres of submarine cable infrastructure as well as data centres.

With $6.5 billion of net debt, or more than five times its annualized operating profit, Reliance Communications is the most leveraged among listed Indian telecommunications carriers and has in the past unsuccessfully attempted to raise money by selling its telecom tower assets.

Reliance Communications could not immediately be reached for comment on Barney's remarks and whether it is looking at other debt-cutting plans.

Barney said his remit was to better integrate Globalcom's three main business strands: the Flag submarine cable network, US-based web services provider Yipes and European virtual network operator Vanco.

Globalcom, which bought these units in 2003, 2007 and 2008 respectively, provides communications services to more than 2,100 businesses, 200 carriers and 2.5 million retail customers in 163 countries.

"In the next four to eight months we will bring the company together as a single company, focusing more on IP (internet)services (and) cloud services, in addition to our cables, which have been critical, but if you think where the internet is going, it's largely around fibre and cloud," said Barney.

"We'll expand quickly into new services and expand our footprint into key markets around the world."

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Steve Ballmer's big regret as Microsoft CEO

WASHINGTON: Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has admitted that he has had a few regrets at his previous company, but not too many to mention.

In his first public appearance after stepping down as the software giant's chief, Ballmer talked to students at the University of Oxford and reflected on Microsoft's missteps.

Ballmer said that the Microsoft might have had a strong position in the mobile market ten years ago, but he regretted that the company didn't put hardware and software together quicker, CNET reports.

However, he stressed that Microsoft remained in a strong position to catch the next wave of innovation.

He further offered students a piece of advice, saying that if one is going to really do something, then do it by heart, body and soul and really care, adding that one is either all in or all out.

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Nokia X coming to India this month

Nokia is all set to announce its new Nokia X range of Android-based smartphones in the Indian market, just weeks before its acquisition by Microsoft is completed and barely nine days after it was unveiled at Mobile World Congress in Spain.

The company has sent out invites for an event scheduled to take place on March 10, where it will announce the launch of the Nokia X smartphone that runs a forked version of Android, in the Indian market. Though it is not confirmed, the company is expected to announce Nokia X+ and XL smartphones too.

The three phones were unveiled by Nokia on February 24, during the MWC at Barcelona in Spain.

READ ALSO: Nokia X series of Android smartphones unveiled

Nokia had also announced the European pricing for the phones with the Nokia X being priced at 89 euros, and X+ and XL for 99 and 109 euros, respectively. Nokia X has already been listed online by phone retailer The Mobile Store at a price of Rs 8,500, with March 15 mentioned as the date of the phone's availability.

Nokia XL, the biggest of the three smartphones, sports a 5-inch screen, 768MB RAM, 5MP auto-focus camera with LED flash on the back and 2MP front camera.

Meanwhile, Nokia X and X+ have 4-inch screens and 3MP fixed-focus cameras. Nokia X has 512MB RAM, whereas the X+ features 768MB of RAM.

All the three devices are powered by a 1GHz dual-core Snapdragon processor and have dual-sim functionality, access to 3G networks and a display resolution of 800x480p. Nokia offers a 4GB microSD card free with X+ and XL smartphones, but not with the entry-level Nokia X.

All three Android phones run on a 'customized' version of Android and will not allow access to the Play Store.

Nokia has preloaded X, X+ and XL smartphones with Microsoft's cloud services like SkyDrive and One Drive, instead of Google's software, which may prove a dampener for some. The company is offering 10GB of One Drive storage for free, along with one month of free unlimited Skype calls to landlines and mobiles.

Nokia has positioned the X-series phones between its Asha and Lumia lineup, but the mediocre hardware specifications and the fact that the phones are based on an old version of Android devoid of even Play Store, are big dampeners. We're also skeptical if Microsoft would continue with the X-series once it gains full control of Nokia.

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Cyber attacks get bigger, more damaging

LONDON: Crashing websites and overwhelming data centres, a new generation of cyber attacks is costing millions and straining the structure of the Internet.

While some attackers are diehard activists, criminal gangs or nation states looking for a covert way to hit enemies, others are just teenage hackers looking for kicks.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have always been among the most common on the Internet, using hijacked and virus-infected computers to target websites until they can no longer cope with the scale of data requested, but recent weeks have seen a string of particularly serious attacks.

On February 10, internet security firm Cloudflare says it protected one of its customers from what might be the largest DDoS documented so far.

At its height, the near 400 gigabyte per second (gbps) assault was about 30% larger than the largest attack documented in 2013, an attempt to knock down antispam website Spamhaus, which is also protected by Cloudflare.

The following day, a DDoS attack on virtual currency Bitcoin briefly took down its ability to process payments.

On February 20, Internet registration firm Namecheap said it was temporarily overwhelmed by a simultaneous attack on 300 of the websites it registers, and bit.ly, which creates shortened addresses for websites like Twitter, says it was also knocked out briefly in February.

In a dramatic case of extortion, social networking site Meetup.com said on Monday it was fighting a sustained battle against hackers who brought down the site for several days and were demanding $300 to stop. It would not pay, Meetup CEO Scott Heiferman told Reuters.

DDoS attacks were at the heart of attacks blamed on Russian hackers against Estonia in 2007 and Georgia during its brief war with Russia in 2008. It is unclear if they played a role in the current stand-off between Moscow and Ukraine in which communications were disrupted and at least one major government website knocked out for up to 72 hours.

A report this month by security firm Prolexic said attacks were up 32% in 2013, and a December study by the cyber-security-focused Ponemon Institute showed them now responsible for 18% of outages at U.S.-based data centres from just 2% in 2010.

The average cost of a single outage was $630,000, it said.

"It's really a game of cat and mouse," said Jag Bains, chief technology officer of Seattle-based DOSarrest, a firm that helps government and private-sector clients protect their sites.

"I'd like to say we are ahead, but I just don't think it's true."

As well as growing in volume, he said attacks were becoming much more sophisticated in targeting the most vulnerable parts of websites, making even a small attack much more effective.

The aims of attackers include extortion, political activism, providing distraction from data theft and, for "hobbyist" hackers, just testing and showcasing their skills, security experts say.

Other victims in recent months have included the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Royal Bank of Scotland and several major U.S. banks, which analysts believe were targeted by Iran in response to sanctions. Iran denies the charge.

Hijacking printers, smartphones
Many attacks, however, appear to be homegrown. The most popular point of origin for DDoS attacks in the last three months of 2013, Prolexic said, appeared to be the United States, followed by China, Thailand, Britain and South Korea.

As well as hijacking computers, Prolexic said attackers are increasingly targeting smartphones, particularly those using Google's Android operating system, which by the third quarter of 2013 accounted for more than 80 percent of new phones.

Even wireless printers, experts say, have sometimes been co-opted into attacks, packed together in botnet groups. That, they warn, can put previously unprecedented cyber firepower in the hands of relatively unskilled hackers, who increasingly include teenagers.

Last year, British police arrested a 16-year-old as part of their investigations into the attack on Spamhaus, while German police arrested an 18-year-old after a DDoS attack paralysed the Saxony government website.

DDoSarrest says some of the most recent attacks it has dealt with were on U.S. universities and largely blamed on students showing off or protesting against high tuition fees.

The sheer volume of attacks means many perpetrators are never traced, and some computer security experts complain law-enforcement authorities remain reluctant to prosecute the youngest offenders.

Until recently, DDoS attacks were seen less of a threat than attempts to steal customer data or intellectual property. That, however, is changing fast.

Slowing the internet
Last year's Spamhaus attack was described by some as slowing the entire global Internet, and most experts agree the largest attacks can slow access across entire regions. Cloudflare says there were anecdotal reports of slowness in Europe during the latest attack.

Crashing data centres can wreak havoc with other services based there, including phone systems and vital industrial facilities.

The Ponemon report showed DDoS attacks are now the third largest cause of outages after power system failure and human error, outstripping traditional causes such as weather events.

Even if attacks do not succeed, the cost of mitigating them is rising fast, providing many millions of dollars of business for firms such as Cloudflare and Prolexic, taken over last month by Akamai Technologies for about $370 million.

Namecheap, which aims to offer cut-price hosting for websites, said it had already spread its data centres across five countries and three continents to better handle constant attacks but was still overwhelmed by the roughly 100 Gbps incident.

Attacks on that scale, Prolexic says, now occur several times a month and are now frequently so complex and fast moving that automated systems can no longer tackle them.

Prolexic itself runs a permanently manned operation centre at its headquarters in Florida, allowing it to keep one step ahead and instantly move material between data centres.

"It's very hard to know what to do," said Alexander Klimburg, a cyber security expert at the Austrian Institute for International Affairs currently on exchange at Harvard Kennedy School of Government. "The tools to do this can be purchased online incredibly cheaply, while the damage they can do and the cost of mitigating it is exponentially higher."

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BlackBerry testing ads in BBM

WASHINGTON: In a bid to monetize its popular messaging platform, BlackBerry is reportedly adding two types of in-app ads to the service.

The update to the BBM app includes sponsored invites for BBM Channels and sponsored channel posts.

According to TechCrunch, the ads for BBM put either sponsored invitations to join a Channel in the "Invites" tab of the app, or put sponsored content right in the "Updates" tab.

Although, it is live for Android beta users, and is being planned for iOS and Windows Phone users, BlackBerry natives might be spared any ads, which means it is essentially just a tax levied on third-party users of BBM.

The report said that trying out ads gives the sinking smartphone manufacturer a revenue model to explore if it wants to run the service in-house over the long term.

Other monetization options include adding money-transfer services to BBM, which the company debuted last year in Indonesia and recently expressed interest in further exploring the possibilities, the report added.

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Global PC shipments to fall 6.1% in 2014: IDC

SAN FRANCISCO: Global shipments of personal computers fell 9.8% last year, the worst contraction on record, and are likely to decline by 6.1% in 2014 due to lackluster demand in developing countries, according to market research firm IDC.

IDC had expected PC shipments to fall 10.1% last year but it said that the fourth quarter benefited from a slight boost as old computers running Microsoft's XP operating system, which the software company is due to stop supporting in April, were replaced.

"Emerging markets used to be a core driver of the PC market, as rising penetration among large populations boosted overall growth," said IDC analyst Loren Loverde. "At the moment, however, we're seeing emerging regions more affected by a weak economic environment as well as significant shifts in technology buying priorities."

Long-term growth in PC shipments is expected to remain just below zero, with shipments in 2018 expected to decline 0.2%, IDC said. Last week, IDC said that strong demand for smartphones in China and other developing countries would drive a 19% increase in global shipments of smartphones in 2014.

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