Third of adults 'use smartphone' says Ofcom report. 4 August 2011Last updated at 00:26 More smartphone time is spent on Facebook than any other service according to Ofcom Nearly one in three adults in the UK now uses a smartphone, according to a report by the telecoms regulator Ofcom. Apple's iPhone was said to be the most popular brand. However, teenagers appeared to favour RIM's Blackberry devices. The report notes that the increased uptake of smartphones has led to a dramatic rise in mobile internet use. Facebook was the most visited website on handheld devices, with 43 million hours spent on it in December 2010.
Ofcom's annual Communications Market Report combines the regulator's own research with work carried out by other industry analysts. The 341-page document provides a comprehensive snapshot of the UK's TV, radio, internet and telecommunications consumption. On mobiles, it said that 58% of smartphone owners were male and 42% female. Trending online Ofcom's study also looked at how people use the internet via home fixed line connections. Why won't the police tell journalists what is going on? | Media. It's 10.40 on a Sunday night in Gateshead as a woman stands alone at a station waiting for a train. A young man steps out of the shadows, grabs her and sexually assaults her, before escaping into the night. The attacker is caught on CCTV and police soon have excellent pictures. So what do they do? Do they release the story to the media so they can warn other women to be on their guard – and help track down the suspect ?
No. They wait nearly two weeks before they tell journalists. The holding back of the details of one crime in the north-east may seem to be no great deal. Headlines about phone hacking and detectives allegedly leaking confidential information to journalists have conjured up images of a cosy and corrupt relationship between the police and the media. Investigations by the Oxford Mail, the Hull Daily Mail and the York Press have shown the same proportion of crimes go unreleased by their local forces. But does it matter if the police hold back information from journalists? Traffic from Facebook to Top Newspaper Sites Nearly Doubles Over Year in Europe.
In June 2011, Facebook accounted for at least 7.4 percent of traffic going to the top five Newspaper sites in Europe. The German publication Bild.de, which ranks as the third most popular newspaper site in Europe, saw the most incoming traffic from Facebook (14.0 percent). It also experienced the most growth over the previous year with an 11-percentage point increase in visitation from Facebook.
The British Mail Online, which ranks as the top newspaper site in Europe, saw 10.6 percent of visitors coming from Facebook in June 2011 – an increase of 6.9-percentage points over the previous year. Guardian.co.uk, which was the second most popular newspaper site in Europe with 13.5 million unique visitors, received 7.4 percent of its visitors from Facebook, growing by 2.7 percentage points over the past year. To learn more about visitation to the top newspaper sites in Europe, please see our latest release, ‘Newspaper Sites across Europe Demonstrate Growth in the Past Year.’
Democracies learn from Mubarak's example. For the past eight months, the world has watched, captivated, as from one country to the next, youth have manipulated the digital tools that have become part and parcel of their everyday lives to serve their activism. The world too has witnessed as, in each country, state actors have made various attempts to quash the use of such tools.
In each case, governments have learned from what came before. While Tunisia's Ben Ali sought to open up the internet, promising an end to censorship in a speech just one day before fleeing the country, Egypt's Mubarak took from his failure what not to do, preferring instead to clamp down on social media sites one by one, eventually shutting down the internet entirely.
But while it comes as no surprise that despots might find new weapons in the digital space, what's more troubling is the ways in which democratic governments have adapted to the use of digital tools for protest, seemingly taking lessons from their authoritarian counterparts. Greater Manchester Police Names & Shames Rioters on Twitter. In the name of swift and public justice, the Greater Manchester Police has begun tweeting the identities of people convicted of criminal damage and disorder during riots this week in Manchester and Salford. The department is also requesting the public's help in identifying suspects via photos and videos posted to its website and Flickr account. Wednesday, the Greater Manchester Police notified its Twitter followers that criminals were going through the courts and would soon be "named and shamed. " Thursday, the Twitter account began rattling off the names, births dates, addresses and sentences for those convicted.
"We promised we'd name all those convicted for their roles in the disorder - here we go …" the @gmpolice account tweeted. At least 12 convicted of riot-related crimes have been shamed via Twitter so far. The police force is seeing some push-back from Twitter followers who are questioning the decision to publicly out culprits. Some have rallied to defend the department. New: Three Reports on Circumvention Tool Usage, International Bloggers, and Internet Control. August 18, 2011 The Berkman Center is pleased to release three new publications as part of our circumvention project. Over the past two years, the Center has carried out a number of research activities designed to improve our understanding of the knowledge, usage, and effectiveness of circumvention tools as a means to promote access to information online in repressive online environments.
In addition to earlier papers on circumvention tool usage and the circumvention landscape, this research has resulted in three new publications: The Evolving Landscape of Internet Control by Hal Roberts, Ethan Zuckerman, Rob Faris, Jillian York, and John Palfrey This paper summarizes the results of the studies we have undertaken in order to better understand the control of the Internet in less open societies. We are grateful for the participation of Global Voices Online and for the work of those who translated our blogger survey into more than a dozen languages. Please Britain, don't let Mubarak inspire your response to unrest | Mona Eltahawy. Water cannon? Calling in the army? Shutting down or disrupting mobile phone messaging services and social networks in times of civil disorder?
Oh the irony of ironies. Six months after my country's dictator, Hosni Mubarak, stepped down after 18 days of a popular uprising, British prime minister David Cameron, members of parliament and the security services were seriously discussing those draconian measures in response to days of riots. Forget nonsensical comparisons between the rioting and the Egyptian revolution. At a time when Egyptians are already boasting of how peaceful our protests were compared with those in the UK, to hear ordinary Brits join calls for their army to be deployed is a perfect moment to share some Egyptian revolutionary humour to combat the adulation of uniforms and "stability. " "What about importing some of #LondonRiots hooligans when we have a sit-in in #tahrir? I was born in Egypt and my family moved to London when I was seven.
Fight for your rights, UK, fight. Twitter blocking: the technical and legal issues. In the case of Facebook and Twitter, police intelligence gathering is already fairly advanced. These services are quasi-public communications media, with many messages viewable by anyone, and security firms lining up to provide authorities with software tools to make mass, real time monitoring easier. But not all rioters are stupid enough to arrange their mayhem in public, and matters become trickier around private messages.
The police have powers under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act to seize stored messages, but the process involves a mountain of paperwork and would presumably be next to useless in an ongoing crisis. The same applies to all BlackBerry Messenger conversations, none of which are public in the way that many Facebook and Twitter conversations are. So to find out who is plotting violence, disorder and criminality in time to stop them using such services during a riot, authorities must consider interception, more commonly known as wiretapping. Censoring mobiles and the net: how the West is clamping down. Some say riots can be prevented by blocking communications - but is this a step too far for Western democracies?
Photo: Getty Images Seemingly Orwellian moves by Western governments to crack down on the use of technology by citizens are being compared to repressive policies of regimes such as China. After British Prime Minister David Cameron floated the idea of restricting the use of services such as Facebook, Twitter and BlackBerry Messenger to prevent riots, transit authorities in San Francisco late last week shut down mobile phone reception in several underground stations to block would-be demonstrators. Leaders in Beijing, Tehran and elsewhere are awaiting our wrong-headed moves, which would allow them to claim an international license for dealing with their own protests. Politicians in Norway have discussed methods to limit online anonymity and combat web extremism in the wake of the recent massacre. Advertisement "I'm just shocked that they didn't think about the implications of this.
Journalists Not Evidence Gatherers | London Photographers' Branch. 7th August 2011. Police Evidence Gathering Team in Tottenham during disorder. © Jules Mattsson/LNP The disorder that swept England recently has calmed, leaving untold destruction, injury and a number of deaths in it’s wake. Lens-based journalists are often in the frontline of these situations to report, receiving aggression from all sides. Already a number of photographers have been injured and mugged while covering disturbances, radio cars burnt and TV networks have had to pull their crews out of entire areas. The risk to media workers in this sort of situation is massive, especially to those who have to work with visible equipment. The unpublished material we create in the process of news gathering must not be used as evidence by the police, as that not only means our presence is changing the outcome of a situation significantly, but also puts our collective safety at severe risk.
Other related articles: We Are Press Not Police Intelligence Protecting Journalistic Material. MI5 joins social messaging trawl for riot organisers | UK news. The security service MI5 and the electronic interception centre GCHQ have been asked by the government to join the hunt for people who organised last week's riots, the Guardian has learned. The agencies, the bulk of whose work normally involves catching terrorists inspired by al-Qaida, are helping the effort to catch people who used social messaging, especially BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), to mobilise looters. A key difficulty for law enforcers last week was cracking the high level of encryption on the BBM system. BBM is a pin-protected instant message system that is only accessible to BlackBerry users.
MI5 and GCHQ will also help the effort to try to get ahead of any further organisation of disturbances. The move represents a change as officially MI5 is tasked with ensuring the national security of the United Kingdom from terrorist threats, weapons of mass destruction, and espionage, with the police taking the lead on maintaining public order. The Evolving Landscape of Internet Control. Published August 18, 2011 Authored by Hal Roberts, Ethan Zuckerman, Rob Faris, Jillian York, John Palfrey Download PDF Over the past two years, we have undertaken several studies at the Berkman Center designed to better understand the control of the Internet in less open societies.
During the years we’ve been engaged in this research, we have seen many incidents that have highlighted the role of the Internet as a battleground for political control, including partial or total Internet shutdowns in China, Iran, Egypt, Libya, and Syria; many hundreds of documented DDoS, hacking, and other cyber attacks against political sites; continued growth in the number of countries that filter the Internet; and dozens of well documented cases of on- and offline persecution of online dissidents. New: Three Reports on Circumvention Tool Usage, International Bloggers, and Internet Control.
Secure chat solution needed. Help. New Hacking Tools Pose Bigger Threats to Wi-Fi Users. Analysis: UK social media controls point to wider info war.