According to the top US military officials in South Korea, a recent hack may have compromised the personal details of thousands of South Korean citizens employed by the US command. The commander of US forces in South Korea brought his apologies a few days ago for the “possible theft” from two databases of sensitive information of South Korean citizens. The allegedly leaked details included names, contact information and work history.



The hack affected around 16,000 current and former employees. Overwhelming majority of them is Korean nationals, as well as people who have sought jobs with the American military in South Korea. In the meantime, no classified military information had been compromised, because the databases were stored on a separate network.

Security experts admit that the South Korean government and local broadcasting and finance industry networks have often been targeted by the hackers. South Korea always blames North Korea, which denies the allegations. Some believe that the damage was done by the hackers who sought to profit from data theft. Representatives of the US forces said that an investigation was under way to find out who was responsible for the attacks.

At the moment, the United States keeps around 28

The research, carried out by eBay in cooperation with Berkeley and Chicago universities, found out that adverts in search engines have no measurable benefits. eBay provided the researchers with the ability to experiment with how and when it purchased search adverts.




The results showed that most search advertisements on most search terms had almost no affect on sales, which means that the medium may already be beyond the peak of its efficacy. A lot of companies purchase adverts on searches for their brand. For example, the auction site may buy ads on searches for the term “eBay” or “eBay shoes”. But the truth is that such adverts do nothing else than encourage users to click on the ad instead of the normal search result to the same website.

According to the research, virtually all of the forgone click traffic and sales attributed to it were captured by natural search. In other words, substitution between paid and unpaid traffic was almost complete. It turned out that shutting off paid search adverts closed just one (expensive) way to eBay, but diverted traffic to natural search. The latter is, of course, free to the company.

As for those who buy space on search results for so-called “generic terms”, like “memory” or “mobile phone”, they can relax – they don’t spend money on nothing. The research revealed that organic placement for non-branded terms varies widely. This means that a website won’t show up on the front page for a search term if it doesn’t pay for generic terms. However, the researchers tried to find out whether dropping off the front page would matter to sales.

When they stopped advertising eBay entirely on non-branded search terms to 30% of the United States for 2 months, they discovered that it had insignificant effect on sales. Indeed, on average, American consumers don’t shop more on eBay when the company pays for search ads.

In addition, the adverts had no effect on a subset of eBay users: those who had just signed up, or those who had made fewer than 3 purchases in a year. The others are likely to be familiar with the site’s offerings and value proposition, and are therefore unaffected by paid search ads, going directly to the site without searching for it.

The results of this research raise significant questions about the value of the search advertising market, where Google is the biggest supplier. Last year, it made $37 billion from its various sites – 2/3 of its gross revenue.

The European Court of Justice has handed down the ruling saying that users who just visit a website can’t be sued for copyright violation. A landmark ruling says that browsing and viewing articles in the web is legitimate and does not require permission from the copyright owners.





The European Court of Justice ruled that the on-screen copies and the cached copies made by Internet users when viewing a website are legitimate and may therefore be made without the authorization of the copyright holders.

When you browse the web, your computer makes a copy of the webpage you are visiting in order to display it on your screen. Experts in copyright law argue that the EU law known as “the temporary copying exception” is specifically intended to avoid people having to worry about this fact from a copyright perspective. They believe that the court ruling is a good thing, as it clarified that browsing legitimate content online doesn’t constitute a potential infringement and gives many users a peace of mind.

The body engaged in licensing companies to distribute reproductions of newspaper content argued that the fees PR companies pay for such reproductions should consider the copies made on the reader’s machines, and ultimately won on that point in the British high court.

Others believe that the temporary copying exception is intended to protect Internet service providers and telecoms companies when transmitting information from within networks. The PR spin put on the recent case was that if the ruling on question was allowed to stand, then Internet users would be criminalized for using a browser. They point out that the real question is should the worldwide web be one where browsing is permitted or where it's permissible.

One of the copyright attorneys argued that 2013's supreme court case, which the European Court of Justice concurred with, misapplied the temporary copying exemption. He believes that the exemption in question was designed to avoid a situation where the copies made, for instance, in a router when it passed information from one computer to another, appeared infringing. But now the Supreme Court’s judgment broadens those circumstances.

Although the first ruling saying that Internet users can’t make temporary copies of webpages was overturned, another one still stands – the one saying that headlines can be covered by copyright, even if they are just a link back to the original article.

It is official now: search engine’s web browser has officially overtaken Internet Explorer as the most popular web browser in the world and even in the US. The reports reveal that Google’s Chrome has 31.8% of the combined desktop and mobile online market – in other words, Google’s freeware is up 6% year-over-year. As for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which once ruled the known world, it now accounts for 30.9% only.




However, the statistics that have been made public are somewhat suspect, because the same report listed Apple’s Safari in the third place with a market share of 25%, while Mozilla’s Firefox held only 8% of the market – apparently, most users would think there was something wrong with these figures. But the report insists that such sharp decline was likely due to Firefox lack of mobile presence. Maybe, such results were obtained because the figures included mobile browsing and were focused on the United States where Apple is a king on the smartphone market. Its Safari browser has officially cornered the mobile market due to overwhelming popularity of Apple’s iPhone.

Chrome was already recognized as a market leader worldwide, with industry experts estimating its usage at 43%. Technology analysts also admit that the results are likely due to the increased reliance of the mobile OS. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer had long held onto its dominance by being the default browser on desktop computers. The problem is that mobile devices aren’t relying on IE as a web portal, as they normally run or embed Chrome or Safari by default.

Chances are that Google’s Chrome will become the default browser on all Android devices in the nearest future, and it has enjoyed even more success outside of the United States where it took over the market share lead in 2013.

The software giant that withdrew support of Windows XP last month has recently warned against using a hack that allows the outdated OS to continue to receive security updates. The hack makes update servers apply security patches to Windows XP – a tiny modification within the OS makes it look like other versions that are still supported until 2019.



Microsoft warned that people who still use Windows may face problems if they decide to use the hack and install the updates, because those were developed for Windows Embedded and Windows Server 2003 and cannot fully protect Windows XP. Besides, users also run a huge risk of functionality issues with their computers if they do install those updates, because they weren’t even tested against Windows XP.

Instead, Microsoft offers to upgrade the operating system to something like Windows 7 or switch browsers at the very least. However, the British government chose the third option and paid £5.5 million to extend support for Windows XP for another year in the hope that the public sector will take its time to migrate to supported software. The United Kingdom was not the only country to choose this way: the Netherlands, for instance, also negotiated a similar deal with Microsoft.

An Internet Explorer security bug was all over the news recently, as it was actively being used by hackers to obtain control of computers running Windows OS just days after the software maker ceased security support updates for Windows XP. This issue underlined the importance of continued security updates for popular software – and the statistics say that almost half of all machines in the world still run Windows XP.

As a result, Microsoft had to renege on its support withdrawal and issue a fix to the bug in IE on Windows XP – for free and for everyone. Security specialists warned that this problem was the first but not the last one, and that Windows XP users are strongly recommended to upgrade their software to any currently supported system. If they can’t do so due to the outdated hardware, they are still recommended to at least switch to another browser, like Google’s Chrome or Firefox that are actively supported.

According to the provided statistics, about 430 million computers worldwide were still running Windows XP at the day when Microsoft withdrew support. As for the United Kingdom, which paid for extended support, the OS was still used on 17% of machines in the beginning of May.

Microsoft just unveiled a new service for Skype that can understand voice and translate the words into another language, speaking them back almost in real time. The new service dubbed Skype Translator is expected to be released for Windows 8 before the end of 2014, following 15 years of research. Microsoft is also planning to make it available to other platforms. At the moment, Skype has 300 million monthly users on desktops, tablets and smartphones.




The technology was demonstrated at the Code conference in California a few days ago, with the developers showing real-time translation of a Skype video call with a German colleague. The developer was speaking English, and the translation system then converted his speech into spoken German in real time, and vice versa.

Surprisingly enough, the system only made a few minor mistakes in the conversation, which demonstrated great improvements in word, meaning and order recognition since the technology was first shown translating English to Chinese 2 years ago.

The developers explain that Skype Translator can open up lots of possibilities to make meaningful connections in education, diplomacy, multilingual families and in business. Microsoft’s machine translator research began 15 years ago – first it was a text-based translation, later – voice recognition and dictation technologies, based on a neural network. The latter is a computer system that is able to “learn” to recognize inputs and generate outputs just like a group of nerves in human brain. The technology is developing as a brain, almost independently of the scientists and programmers. The developers admit that “transfer learning” is the most fascinating aspect – that is when you teach it English, but the system also becomes better at other languages.

Microsoft purchased UK-based Skype three years ago for $8.5bn – it still remains its largest purchase. The service provides the most used voice and video chat around the globe, but faces constant pressure from other messaging services, like Facebook’s WhatsApp, Google’s Hangouts and Apple’s FaceTime. The new feature, Skype Translate, could set the service apart and maintain its competitive edge. The only thing that remains unclear is whether the feature will be free or a paid addition


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The company is trying to figure out the way to allow children under 13 years old join the social network. It turned out that Facebook has designs for a system that allows children under 13 to be supervised by parents, as the US legislation prohibits children under 13 from using any online services that collect information without explicit “verifiable parental consent”. At the moment, the social network doesn't allow users under 13 to join.




Facebook is now trying to address this problem, and the company filed a patent application based on 2-year-old research, but it is not a predictor of future work in this area. According to the patent, the company developed a system of parental supervision. First of all, the parent would have to verify their own identity before allowing the child to create an account. Then parents get access to parental controls tools that would allow to restrict access to specific content, friends and 3rd-party apps like Facebook games. The chances are that a system proving the identity of a parent and their consent would have to be approved by the US Federal Trade Commission.

Despite the fact that the social network prohibits children under 13 from using the website, they still do it. The problem is that verifying a person’s age is very difficult to do online, particularly for people without official government-issued identity papers or other age-related identities.

Security experts explain that the matter is that children are already using Facebook, with or without parental supervision, and they are unlikely to stop getting on there, regardless of Facebook avoiding accepting preteen members. The social network is actively trying to remove underage children – for instance, about 800,000 preteens have been removed from Facebook in 2012 alone. In the meantime, it was also estimated that 5.6 million underage accounts remained active on Facebook, many of them having been created with the help of parents.

The social network claimed that it has nothing to announce thus far in regard to allowing children under 13 to join Facebook, and that the patent application was filed in response to research being conducted in the area, which is not necessarily indicative of future work.


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