Three defends mobile tariff 'price hike'

Thousands of customers currently paying £17 a month for unlimited data and calls have been told they will be moved onto a new £30 tariff if they do not opt out within 30 days.The company has notified customers by post and said it would also text them.Three said the more expensive plan was the closest remaining deal offering unlimited calls and data.It stopped offering the £17 monthly deal to new customers in 2014 and said it was phasing out "legacy" tariffs, but the BBC understands hundreds of thousands of customers still use the tariff and will be affected by the switch.

'Inevitable' changeOne mobile industry analyst told the BBC the demise of unlimited data plans was "inevitable".

"Consumer data usage is growing exponentially," said Ben Wood from CCS Insight."The networks are seeing huge growth in data consumption as people watch more video content at ever-higher resolutions on their smartphones. At some point certain all-you-can-eat tariffs become uneconomical."While the network does still offer plans with unlimited data and calls, Three says its average account holder consumes just 4.9 gigabytes of data per month.The firm had 8.8 million customers in 2015, according to its website.Some have posted their anger at the tariff change online, ironically tagging their posts #MakeItRight - the hashtag Three uses in its advertising campaign."That's how you lose brand loyalty," tweeted software engineer Joseph Longden.

Spam text programmer spared jail

Naveed Ahmed, 27, of Tampa, US, wrote a programme that helped a group of scammers bombard mobile phones with unsolicited text messages.Recipients were told they had won gift cards for an electrical retailer that could be claimed by visiting a website.He was sentenced to two years probation and can continue to work with computers monitored by probation officers.Contact information harvested by the scam was submitted to Internet Cost Per Action networks, which are companies that gather personal information and pay for submissions.

ICPA networks are legal - but the way Ahmed and his group obtained the details they submitted was not, said Assistant US Attorney Jimmy Kitchen.Ahmed is thought to have earned more than $2,000 (£1,400) a week between September 2011 and February 2013 by taking part in the scam, according to the Associated Press.'Invincible'It is believed the money raised was channelled though a Swiss bank account controlled by a so far unidentified co-conspirator.

Ahmed was one of 12 people charged for advertising their computer skills for illegal use on a cybercriminal marketplace which was shut down by the FBI in July.Ahmed told the judge: "I know my actions were irresponsible... I had this naive, immature view of being invincible."Defence lawyer Melvin Vatz said Ahmed was "a man of considerable intelligence" who had "succumbed to directing those talents in the wrong way".

Wikipedia editors make trustee resign

Nearly 300 backed a vote of no confidence over allegations of involvement in a no-poaching deal while he was a Google human resources boss.Mr Geshuri was alleged to have fired an employee who violated an agreement by approaching an Apple staff member.Wikimedia board members said Mr Geshuri did not want to be a distraction from the organisation's work.Patricio Lorente, who chairs the board, and its vice-chair, Alice Wiegand, announced Mr Geshuri's decision to editors on Wednesday.

They wrote: "Throughout the discussion about the appointment of Arnnon Geshuri to the board of trustees, the board has carefully listened to you and discussed internally."Earlier today, Arnnon decided to step down from the board."To paraphrase his words, he doesn't want to be a distraction for the important discussions that the community and the foundation need to face in the times to come.

"We want to thank Arnnon for his ongoing commitment and for helping us to move forward."The board governance committee is working to improve and update our selection processes before we fill the vacancy left by Arnnon's departure."We are sorry for the distress and confusion this has caused to some in our community, and also to Arnnon."Documents filed with a US court indicated Mr Geshuri, who now works for Tesla Motors, had been involved in enforcing a deal struck between Apple and Google not to poach each other's staff.In a 2007 email, while he had been working at Google, he had assured his boss, Eric Schmidt, that a company employee would be "terminated within the hour" for approaching an Apple staff member, the documents indicated.

Mr Schmidt had contacted Mr Geshuri after Apple's co-founder Steve Jobs had complained to him, the documents indicated.

In 2015, Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe all agreed to settle a legal action over related claims for $415m (£289m).The day before it was announced that Mr Geshuri had stepped down, Ms Wiegand wrote to editors insisting that he had the board's backing, despite their objections.

"We understand this conversation will continue, and we will continue to monitor it. However, we want to be clear that the board approved Arnnon unanimously and still believes he is a valuable member of the team," she wrote.

Will you like Facebook's new Reactions

The social networking giant is about to roll out emoji-style Reactions, which will allow you to express your feelings in a more nuanced fashion.In the conference call with analysts after Facebook's blockbuster financial results, Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that Reactions - which are being tested in Spain, Ireland and a few other places - would be shown everywhere "pretty soon".The idea, the chief executive said, is to add "a little bit of complexity" to something that is very simple. "When you only have a like button, if you share a sad piece of content or something that makes you angry, people may not have the tool to react to it."

So now Facebook users are being given new tools in the form of emoticons labelled "love", "haha", "wow", "sad" and "angry" - or they can still just "like".There was another button marked "yay" but that has been removed after pilot users apparently said: "Err….what??"For more than a billion people who visit Facebook every day there may now be a tricky period of adjustment. Do I just like that picture of your dog or do I love it? Should I go as far as telling you I'm "angry" about your views on the issues of the day - or is "haha" enough?

But it's advertisers who will be really going "wow" about this change to the way Facebook works. The latest results show just how much they have bought into the social network's message that it offers a unique way to connect with consumers and learn everything about them. Now they will have a far more complex set of data.Simon Calvert, head of strategy at the marketing agency Lida, says if the new system accurately reflects human emotions then it will be very interesting."Emotions travel five times faster than rational thought," he said. "So the ability to build better emotional connections with consumers is something that advertisers really prize."Facebook "likes" have become a somewhat devalued currency, as I found out when my Virtual Bagel imaginary business collected more than 4,000 likes from all over the world.

"They're devalued because brands collect them mindlessly," Mr Calvert explains. But he sees advertisers using Reactions in a far more sophisticated way to get insights into the emotions people feel about products.Another social media marketing expert, Kristal Ireland of Twentysixdigital, says there is always great excitement when Facebook makes a change like this. She believes there is an opportunity to learn far more about what people think of marketing messages but says the real challenge will be to make sense of the flood of new data: "You might end up with such fragmented data that you can't make up your mind what your ad should look like."

Digital safe offers solution to password thefts

Silicon Safe has designed a special box - a piece of hardware which stores passwords separate to the network.Last year there were high-profile hacks at firms including TalkTalk, Ashley Madison and Vtech which exposed millions of users' passwords.One expert questioned whether new hardware is really solving the problem.Online identity theft is becoming one of the most common forms of cyber-attack and can leave large organisations with both financial and reputational losses.The founders of Silicon Safe, Dr Will Harwood and Roger Gross, initially came up with the solution - dubbed Password Protect - as an academic exercise."We were seeing large-scale theft of passwords becoming an increasing problem and conventional security techniques were proving ineffective," Dr Harwood told the BBC.

They quickly saw that there was commercial potential in their idea.Software is prone to bugs and flaws so their first step was to design bespoke hardware - effectively hard-coding a chip - and making sure that it did not run an operating system or any other conventional software. This design, the founders claim, makes it impenetrable via conventional attack routes.The box is designed to be secure and has only one purpose - to store passwords. It runs on 10,000 lines of code - far less than used for a back-end database where passwords are normally stored.There is no conventional interface with the back-end systems although it does allow web servers to send login credentials to the system in order to authenticate passwords. It does not, at any point, reveal these passwords.Dr Harwood admits that hackers able to gain access to the back-end database of organisations could interrogate the box, but he has built in a safety feature."After four attempts to authenticate the password, the account will be flagged to system adminstrators," he told the BBC.

The device has been trialled by several large UK companies, including a retail bank and a telecoms firm, and is due to launch in April. Firms will pay an upfront cost of around £100,000 and will also have ongoing maintenance fees.It is, Dr Harwood said, easy to install and use with existing infrastructure - the box can be simply inserted into existing server racks and requires a few hundred lines of new code from IT managers.But not everyone was convinced it would be the panacea against mass password theft.

"The system assumes that we all practise proper password hygiene and don't have the same passwords for different accounts. All the evidence suggests that this isn't the case," said Prof Alan Woodward, a computer security expert from the University of Surrey.It also might encourage laziness in the IT departments of large firms, he added."You want developers to know what they are doing including knowing how to store data correctly. That might be preferable to paying £100,000 for a box engineered for one specific purpose."The Cambridge start-up remains confident in its solution and last year it launched a hacker challenge, inviting anyone to steal 100 unencrypted passwords from the system. To date, over 2.5 million attempts have been made, but none have been successful, according to the firm.

Java browser plug-in to be retired, says Oracle

The software is widely used to write programs that run in web browsers. But Oracle said modern browsers were increasingly incompatible with it.Oracle said it would begin winding the plug-in down with the release of its latest development kit software but its demise would not be immediate.Java has been criticised by many online security experts, who have said it is vulnerable to hackers.

'Alternative options'"By late 2015, many browser vendors have either removed or announced timelines for the removal of standards based plug-in support, eliminating the ability to embed Flash, Silverlight, Java and other plug-in based technologies," Oracle said, announcing the decision on Wednesday."With modern browser vendors working to restrict and reduce plug-in support in their products, developers of applications that rely on the Java browser plug-in need to consider alternative options such as migrating from Java Applets (which rely on a browser plug-in) to the plug-in free Java Web Start technology."

"Oracle plans to deprecate the Java browser plug-in" in the next release of its Java Development Kit, JDK 9, it said. The technology would be removed from future software releases, it added."By 'deprecate', Oracle doesn't mean that the Java plug-in will be killed stone dead. Instead they will increasingly hide it, and not encourage users to install it. In due course, the software will be entirely removed," said the security consultant Graham Cluley.

'Unpopular'

In a blog post for online security company Tripwire, Mr Cluley said: "Of course, Oracle isn't dropping support for Java entirely - but with the demise of the unpopular web browser plug-in, it hopes users will be happy to switch over to its replacement."He said that, while the number of reported problems had fallen in recent years, Java remained notorious for its vulnerabilities."Many users have found it hard to muster... love for the technology," he said."And yet, the Java browser plug-in has plodded on, shrugging off the brickbats and abuse, and doggedly providing support for the odd, ageing website and bespoke applications relied upon by corporations."

Mr Cluley said browser manufacturers were making the Java plug-in irrelevant.

He added: "Oracle isn't the only company having to recognise that the world is changing. Adobe, developers of the often-attacked Flash plug-in, recently made clear that it was moving away from the platform to an HTML5-based future."

Microsoft tipped to announce Lumia 650 in February

The reports also suggest that it will be a mid-segment smartphone and it will announce via the official blog of the company. Along with this, the company will be revealing the price and availability of the handset at the time of its launch.As per the rumoured specifications, the Lumia 650 features an HD display with 1280x720 pixels resolution protected with a coating of Corning Gorilla Glass on top and runs on Windos 10 opearting system. Powering the handset is a 1.1GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 210 processor paired with 1GB of RAM. The inbuilt storage of the smartphone stands at 8GB which can be expanded further using a microSD card.

The smartphone will flaunt an 8MP rear camera with LED flash and a 5MP front facing camera for clicking selfies. The connectivity attributes of the smartphone include 4G, LTE, 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS and it will pack in a 2,000 mAh battery with wireless charging capabilities. The tech giant Microsoft is gearing up to launch two new flagship handsets at the upcoming Mobile World Congress (MWC) in February. As per speculations, the company might launch the Lumia 850 and the Lumia 750 as their specifications and images are surfacing online since past few months.