New Apple warning over iPhone in-app purchases

Apple now warns users about in-app purchases within apps.

The iOS 7.1 update to Apple’s iPhone and iPad software now warns users about subsequent in-app purchases after confirming purchase of an item via the App Store.

After making an in-app purchase, the alert cautions that additional purchases ranging from 69p to £69.99 can be made in any app for 15 minutes without requiring the re-entry of the password associated with the iTunes account.

The alert also offers users the option to change the settings to immediately require the password to be entered for any purchase, removing the 15-minute implemented in response to US regulatory and legal action over in-app purchases.

Thousands of dollars spent without permission

A class action lawsuit from 2011 against Apple over in-app purchases by children was settled for around $100m in February 2013. It alleged that “Apple failed to adequately disclose that third-party game apps, largely available for free and rated as containing content suitable for children, contained the ability to make in-app purchases.”

In January the US Federal Trade Commission ordered Apple to provide a full refund of in-app purchases made without the permission of the account holder, after it received 10s of thousands of complaints. As an example, the FTC said one parent had complained her child spent more than $2,600 in the Tap Pet Hotel app without her permission.

As part of the agreement, Apple was ordered to change its purchasing process by 31 March to ensure consumers give full consent when purchasing items in mobile apps.

The FTC said Apple failed to inform consumers that they could be approving in-app purchases by entering a password on their device, which this new pop-up warning attempts to address.

Google faces a similar US lawsuit over unauthorised in-app purchases of virtual currency by children.

Sony will reveal a virtual reality headset for the PlayStation 4

Sony's wireless personal 3D viewer head mounted display could be the basis of its new virtual reality headset.

Sony will reveal a virtual reality headset for the PlayStation 4 to directly compete with the pioneering Oculus Rift next week, sources have told the Guardian.

Gaming magazine Edge reported that Sony will unveil the headset at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco next week along with some limited software from a Sony games studio. Sony refused to comment. But other sources indicated to the Guardian that the report is correct.

Third-party developers who have been given a prototype of the headset told Edge that Sony’s equipment is far superior to the current implementation of the Oculus Rift, which has received over $90m of venture capital funding as well as $2.5m from a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2012.

Sony is holding a “driving the future of innovation” session at the GDC on 18 March, which is being hosted by senior Sony research and development executives previously involved in Sony’s PlayStation Eye and Move peripherals, as well as Sony’s president of worldwide studios Shuhei Yoshida.

‘Future of innovation’

The Oculus Rift has shipped over 50,000 units worldwide to developers interested in the virtual reality technology. Legendary games programmer John Carmack, who was the father of Doom and Quake before becoming Oculus VR’s chief technical officer last year, promised a second developer kit will be available soon, based on the improved Crystal Cove headset the company showed off at CES in January.

Sony has sold head-mounted displays since 2011 known as the Personal HD and 3D Viewer, but has yet to make public moves into the virtual reality space despite long-running rumours suggesting it was working on a form of VR headset.

VR headsets have a long history stretching back to the 1990s, but never took off for general use partly because of price, weight and screen resolution issues. There were also concerns that lengthy use could cause nausea because the landscape the user sees does not agree with what the body’s balance system is experiencing. “Laggy” movement of the display contents could make this worse.

Head-mounted evolution

Oculus Rift marked the first stage in a new era of virtual reality headsets. It promises to revolutionise gaming and screened entertainment, providing an immersive 3D experience coupled to motion tracking technology. Dozens of PC games are expected to support the consumer version of the Oculus Rift when it goes on sale.

Sony’s version, with support from Sony’s first-party development studios and the PlayStation ecosystem has the potential to bring virtual reality into the mainstream.

Previous efforts at expanding the PlayStation gaming experience with the PS Move and motion gaming have not found the sales success of Microsoft’s Kinect system, however.

Mark Zuckerberg: US government surveillance is a threat to the internet

Zuckerberg said: ‘The US government should be the champion for the internet, not a threat.’ Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

The billionaire CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, criticised US government surveillance in a Facebook post on Thursday, saying it was a “threat” to the internet – and revealed he had called Barack Obama personally to air his concerns.

Zuckerberg made his remarks a day after the The Intercept website reported that the NSA has been using automated systems to spread malware over the internet, sometimes using “fake” Facebook servers.

“The US government should be the champion for the internet, not a threat,” Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post on Thursday. “They need to be much more transparent about what they’re doing, or otherwise people will believe the worst.”

In the post, Zuckerberg said he had called Obama to express his “frustration over the damage the government is creating for all of our future” and said he was confused by the government’s actions.

“The internet works because most people and companies do the same. We work together to create this secure environment and make our shared space even better for the world,” he wrote.

He went on: “This is why I’ve been so confused and frustrated by the repeated reports of the behavior of the US government. When our engineers work tirelessly to improve security, we imagine we’re protecting you against criminals, not our own government.”

Though Zuckerberg has been openly critical of government surveillance,the post had a surprisingly strong tone considering Facebook has longbeen criticized for its privacy policies.

However, Zuckerberg is part of a long list of tech giants who have condemned the extensive government surveillance programs made public by Edward Snowden in the summer of 2013.

Companies including Google, Microsoft and Yahoo demanded sweeping changes to surveillance techniques in December.

Recent revelations about government surveillance activities have shaken the trust of our users, and it is time for the United States government to act to restore the confidence of citizens around the world,” Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said in the December announcement.

Code Club opens up its coding-for-kids projects for UK parents and teachers

Code Club wants to make its programming materials available to more children around the UK.

British after-school programming clubs network Code Club has started publishing its materials online, in an effort to make its coding lessons available to a wider range of children.

The organisation, whose network includes more than 2,100 volunteer-run clubs around the UK, has made its Scratch, web development and Python projects available online for the first time.

“We’ve done this to help more kids learn and create on a computer. Not everyone is lucky enough to have a Code Club yet, but many children do have access to a computer at home or in the classroom,” explained Code Club on its blog.

“The projects are aimed at 9 to 11 year olds, but there is no reason why younger children and grown ups can’t learn too.”

The projects, which are also available for people outside the UK, were developed over the last year by Code Club and its volunteers. “We’re hoping that now the projects are open for all, it will be more tempting to start new Code Clubs,” explained the blog post.

The news follows Code Club’s recent announcement of a training programme to teach computing skills to British primary school teachers, backed by £120,000 of funding from Google.

Its Code Club Pro initiative is launching ahead of the introduction of a revamped primary curriculum in September, which will include computer programming for the first time.

“The computational thinking strand of the new curriculum is the bit some teachers are less happy about: they don’t know it, and were never taught it,” co-founder Clare Sutcliffe told The Guardian at the time.

“That’s fair enough. If you were told suddenly that you had to teach somebody sailing, and had never sailed before, you’d be pretty scared too. But we think we’re in a good place to help those teachers out.”

Growing interest in early programming skills from parents and teachers is also behind the release of a number of tablet apps teaching coding to kids. The latest, Tynker, launched this week, joining Hopscotch, Hakitzu Elite, Kodable and others on the app stores.

Bill Gates: Microsoft would have bought WhatsApp too

Bill Gates said Microsoft was interested in purchasing WhatsApp before Facebook paid $19bn for the company. Photograph: Mehdi Taamallah/AFP/Getty Images

Microsoft’s founder, Bill Gates, says that Facebook and Google weren’t the only companies interested in acquiring WhatsApp: Microsoft was also “willing” to buy the messaging app.

Facebook bought the five-year-old WhatsApp cross-platform text message replacement app, which sends messages via phones’ data connections rather than SMS, for $19bn in February. WhatsApp is Facebook’s biggest acquisition and showed the importance of the drive to mobile from the desktop for the social network.

WhatsApp rebuffed a $1bn offer from Google in April last year prior to the social network’s bid. Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg said that WhatsApp was on track to connect 1 billion people which is what made it valuable.

“Microsoft would have been willing to buy it, too. I don’t know for $19bn, but the company’s extremely valuable,” Gates, 58, told Rolling Stone in a wide-ranging interview covering technology, climate change and God.

‘User bases are extremely valuable’

“I think [Zuckerberg’s] aggressiveness is wise – although the price is higher than I would have expected. It shows that user bases are extremely valuable,” said Gates.

Gates, who co-founded Microsoft in 1975, explained that the community and user base is the most valuable aspect and that it might start with messaging, but the company can then expand the service to sharing photos, documents and games.

WhatsApp founder and chief executive, Jan Koum, announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that the company would be adding voice messaging in the second quarter of the year.

Gates praised Zuckerberg’s drive, but described him as “more of a product manager”, insisting that he was more of a coder starting with architecture where Zuckerberg “starts with products, and Steve Jobs started with aesthetics.”

A 'Babelfish' could be the web's next big thing, says AI expert

Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent (played by David Dixon and Simon Jones) in the BBC's adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams. Photograph: BBC

Though the idea of the “Babelfish” - a thing able to translate between any two languages on the fly - was created by the author Douglas Adams as a handy solution to the question of how intergalactic travellers could understand each other, it could be reality within 25 years. At least, that is, for human language.

Prof Nigel Shadbolt, a close associate of the web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, says that the idea of automatic machine translation “on the fly” is achievable before the world wide web turns 50.

Shadbolt also forecasts that future changes to the web will mean people will be “connected all the time” to medical diagnostic systems – but also that search companies including Google and China’s Baidu may face challenges as web use shifts from the desktop to handheld and mobile devices.

Having first used the web in 1993, via an early version of the Mosaic browser while on a visit to Canada, Shadbolt now thinks that it opens up huge possibilities for artificial intelligence systems built by connecting computers across the web - so-called cloud computing - that will be able to enhance daily life.

“I think we’ll have a sort of Web 3.0 and smarter systems,” he told the Guardian. “With more cloud computing you can imagine that there will be more machine translation.”

The growth of the web and the addition of artificial intelligence systems has already led to automatic translation such as Google’s and Microsoft’s text translation services. But Shadbolt foresees the exponentially growing number of computers connecting to the web providing far greater power.

“A ‘Babelfish’ system will be closing in on reality because of the large-scale resources that will be available to do entire voice translation on the fly,” Shadbolt said. “I would be surprised if in 25 years we haven’t got enhanced Bluetooth-based translators that you can just put in your ear.”

Machine translation and transcription presently struggles with real-time speech. IBM’s Watson system, which won an episode of the quiz game Jeopardy! against the two best human players of the game, had its questions delivered by text (at the same time as the human contestants heard the questions read out). So far no machine has demonstrated an ability to carry out real-time transcription of conversations, though the growing power of cloud computing - and computers generally, which roughly doubles every 18 months - could bring that within reach in just a few years.

Update: Microsoft demonstrated a system in 2012 which can do almost real-time translation between English and Chinese with a lower error rate than before: “rather than having one word in 4 or 5 incorrect, now the error rate is one word in 7 or 8,” noted Rick Rashid, Microsoft’s chief research officer, in a blogpost at the time.

Separately, the OECD calculates that by the time the web turns 50 it could be linking 50bn connected devices worldwide, and that within 10 years people might have as many as 50 internet-connected devices at home.

Shadbolt thinks that “lifelogging”, collecting details about what one sees and hears automatically through an internet-connected system, “will be a big future of the web - people will put more and more of their life on the web - and technology and businesses will be around that will monetise that.”

The growing spread of the mobile web and of web-connected devices which generate their own information and link to each other though will require shifts. “Google uses links between web pages to build its search index,” he explains. That index means that a search for a phrase will rank a series of web pages based on the perceived “authority” of pages containing that phrase, and of those pages which link to them.

“But it gets problematic if people or machines make links that just don’t make sense in the normal way,” Shadbolt says. “Maybe there will be other kinds of search as the ‘machine web’ comes along.”

IBM’s Watson proves that you can get “quite deep integration” with the wealth of information that’s online to answer a broad range of questions effectively, he notes.

“I foresee a world in which there will be augmented intelligence, where we are made smarter by our connection to the web.” He notes that there will be downsides - “cyberterror and cybercrime” - in which there will be an “arms race around security”.

Food Tube: a pukka recipe for the future of culinary content?

Jamie Oliver knows his onions … now his focus is on digital exposure for his recipes. Photograph: Rex Features

"If you don't want my gear [on TV], I've got plenty of other places to take it," Jamie Oliver told advertisers last autumn, brazenly and a tad cheekily, at a Channel 4 "upfront" preview presentation of its 2014 schedule.

No idle threat, either – Oliver's 14-month-old Food Tube channel on YouTube has more than 710,000 subscribers and will be joined at the end of March by another online video venture, Drinks Tube.

Food Tube is still only a small part of the chef and entrepreneur's TV shows to cookbooks and restaurants business, which has annual revenues of more than £150m, but is described by one of Oliver's executives as "probably our biggest future play".

Always an early and enthusiastic digital adopter – his website jamieoliver.com launched in 2001 and averages 8 million users a month – it is perhaps no surprise that Oliver has cottoned on to YouTube's potential as an online video distribution platform.

Jamie Oliver's Food Tube has had some 41m video views since it launched in January of 2013. While it is largely about Oliver cooking with his mates, Food Tube also acts as an umbrella brand for more than a dozen other cooks ranging from newcomers such as DJ BBQ, Food Busker, French Guy Cooking, Cupcake Jemma and the newest addition,Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

The home page is crammed with short videos of Oliver cooking in front of noisy crowds, making advertiser-supported recipes like tasty Cajun rice and turkey burrito with Uncle Ben's rice as a sponsor, and barbecuing cheeseburgers named after cricketer Ian Botham.

"Jamie loves the freedom of Food Tube, and suddenly a diary that was impossible to get any time from, offered time – sort of like finding a fourth dimension," says Roy Ackerman, managing director at Oliver's TV production company Fresh One.

More cooks or new cooking videos are added three times a week. The director of food for the Jamie Oliver Group, Zoe Collins, says that the planned business model for Food Tube goes beyond simply creating a food-focused, multichannel network online that has millions of online subscribers. She also wants all the Food Tube cooks to become their own brands that work both on- and offline, selling products from cookery books to pots and pans, and hosting live events. The first of three Food Tube-branded books will be published in June featuring three of the cooks including Kerryann Dunlop, one of the original apprentices at Oliver's 15 restaurant.

Drinks Tube is still very much a work in progress, but will initially be divided into three broad areas: cocktails, beer and wine. "We are aware of a lot of great talent for whom this could be a natural home, and there isn't much out there serving that community at the moment," says Collins.

Drinks Tube – like Food Tube – offers an opportunity for new talent, cookery genres and formats, but where the profits will come from is still unclear. "Jamie is much more about the momentum of being imaginative and unconventional, rather than going straight for the commercial opportunity," says Ajaz Ahmed, chief executive of AKQA, a WPP-owned digital agency that works with the chef's company.

One area where profits are potentially more obvious is commercials production. Oliver launched new company Fat Lemon in January and it has made its first commercial for EE featuring Oliver with Kevin Bacon, the Hollywood actor who is in the mobile operator's 4G campaign, attempting to make the perfect bacon sarnie. The ad deliberately looks a lot like a Food Tube video and has had more than 3m views.

Competition in the online food and drinks space is heating up: last monthdigital media company Vice Media announced a partnership with The X Factor producer FremantleMedia to create food programming content for both online and TV. There is also the problem of translating the Jamie Oliver "halo" to other, lesser-known cooks on the Food Tube network. The bulk of Food Tube's video views are still of content featuring Oliver himself.

There is potentially more creative freedom in making a cookery programme without first having to secure a TV commission. However, despite his provocative comment at Channel 4's upfront presentation, Oliver does not sound as if he is about to abandon TV. "If TV and digital work together then I think they both become a more complete experience," he says. "Digital obviously has a global reach which gives it a different perspective and we have to consider that when building a dynamic global audience."

Ackerman sees great potential in Food Tube for traditional TV schedules because it is entirely original content and a testing ground that is "low-risk and global" for new talent. "It's not impossible to imagine a Food Tube TV channel," says Ackerman, adding that "serious conversations" are already underway with broadcasters in the UK and abroad about the new cooking talent it has unearthed – reportedly including Channel 4.

"Food Tube itself isn't going to make us a lot of money in the very short term," he admits. "But it is probably our biggest future play and, together with digital in general, is the biggest future-proofing for the group.