Month: October 2021

Facebook’s announcement that it is changing its name to Meta has caused quite the stir in Israel where the word sounds like the Hebrew word for “dead”.

To be precise, Meta is pronounced like the feminine form of the Hebrew word.

A number of people have taken to Twitter to share their take on the name under the hashtag #FacebookDead.

The emergency rescue volunteers Zaka even got involved, telling their followers on Twitter: “Don’t worry, we’re on it”.

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.
View original tweet on Twitter
1px transparent line
Another Twitter user said: “Thank you for providing all Hebrew speakers a good reason to laugh.”

Facebook isn’t the only company to be ridiculed over translations of its branding.

Here are a few examples of when things got lost in translation.

‘Eat your fingers off’
When KFC arrived in China during the 80s, its motto “finger lickin’ good” didn’t exactly go down well with the locals.

The motto’s translation in Mandarin was “eat your fingers off”.

But it didn’t harm the company too much. KFC is one of the largest fast food chains in the country.

‘Manure’
Rolls-Royce changed the name of its Silver Mist car as mist translates as “excrement” in German.

The car was named Silver Shadow instead.

Meanwhile when Nokia released its Lumia phone in 2011, it didn’t exactly get the reaction it was expecting.

In Spanish, Lumia is a synonym for a prostitute, although it apparently only appears in dialects with a heavy gypsy influence.

Honda however had a lucky escape. It almost named its new car the Fitta, which is a vulgar description for vagina in Swedish. It apparently did not translate well in a number of other languages.

Apparently the issue was detected early on and a decision was made to name the vehicle Jazz in most countries.

ShotSpotter’s incident-review room is like any other call centre.

Analysts wearing headsets sit by computer screens, listening intently.

Yet the people working here have an extraordinary responsibility.

They make the final decision on whether a computer algorithm has correctly identified a gunshot – and whether to dispatch the police.

Making the wrong call has serious consequences.

ShotSpotter has garnered much negative press over the last year. Allegations that range from its tech not being accurate, to claims that ShotSpotter is fuelling discrimination in the police.

In the wake of those negative news stories, the company gave BBC News access to its national incident-review centre.

ShotSpotter is trying to solve a genuine problem.

“What makes the system so compelling, we believe, is a full 80-95% of gunfire goes unreported,” chief executive Ralph Clark says.

People don’t report gunshots for several reasons – they may be unsure what they have heard, think someone else will call 911 or simply lack trust in the police.

So ShotSpotter’s founders had an idea. What if they could bypass the 911 process altogether?

They came up with a system.

Microphones are fixed to structures around a neighbourhood. When a loud bang is detected, a computer analyses the sound and classifies it as either a gunshot or something else. A human analyst then steps in to review the decision.

In the incident-review room, former teacher Ginger Ammon allows me to sit with her as she analyses these decisions in real time.

Every time the algorithm flags a potential shot, it makes a “ping” sound.

Ms Ammon first listens to the recording herself and then studies the waveform it produces on her computer screen.

“We’re looking to see how many sensors picked it up and if the sensors made a directional pattern, because, in theory, a gunshot can only travel in one direction,” she says.

Once confident a shot has been fired, Ms Ammon clicks a button that dispatches police officers to the scene.

It all happens in under 60 seconds.

“It kind of feels like you’re playing a computer game,” I say.

“That is a comment that we get frequently,” she replies.

ShotSpotter’s successes
There are clear examples of ShotSpotter working.

In April 2017, black supremacist Kori Ali Muhammad went on a murderous rampage in Fresno, California.

Trying to kill as many white men as possible, he walked around a suburban neighbourhood, picking off targets.

The police were receiving 911 calls – but they were delayed and unspecific.

Yet ShotSpotter was able to indicate to officers Muhammad’s route.

After three minutes – and three murders – Muhammad was apprehended.

Fresno police believe without ShotStopper, he would have killed more.

“ShotSpotter gave us the path he took,” says Lt Bill Dooley.

The company has been hugely successful at convincing police forces to adopt its technology.

Its microphones are in more than 100 cities across America – and for years, the technology was considered uncontroversial.

That all changed with George Floyd’s murder, as people became more interested in the technology so many police forces were using.

ShotSpotter is too expensive for the police to roll out across a city.

Instead, microphones are often placed in inner-city areas – areas with higher black populations.

So if the technology isn’t as accurate as claimed, it could be having a disproportionate impact on those communities.

Suddenly, ShotSpotter was in the spotlight.

Accuracy Concerns
ShotSpotter claims to be 97% accurate. That would mean that the police can be pretty confident that when a ShotSpotter alert happens – they are almost certainly responding to a gunshot.

But that claim is exactly that, a claim. It’s hard to see how ShotSpotter knows it’s that accurate – at least not with the public information it has released.

And if it isn’t, it could have wide consequences for American justice.

The first problem with that accuracy claim is that it’s often difficult to tell, on the ground, whether a shot has been fired.

When Chicago’s Inspector General investigated, they found that in only 9% of ShotSpotter alerts was there any physical evidence of a gunshot.

“It’s a low number,” the city’s Deputy Inspector General for Public Safety, Deborah Witzburgh, says.

That means in 91% of police responses to ShotSpotter alerts, it’s difficult to say definitively that a gun was fired. That’s not to say there was no gunshot, but hard to prove that there was.

Gunfire sounds very similar to a firecracker, or car backfiring.

So how is ShotSpotter so confident that it’s nearly 100% accurate? It’s something I ask Mr Clark.

“We rely on ground truth from agencies to tell us when we miss, when we miss detections or when we miss-classify,” he tells me.

But critics say that methodology has a fundamental flaw. If the police are unsure whether a gunshot has been fired, they are not going to tell the company it was wrong.

In other words, say critics, the company has been counting “don’t knows”, ‘”maybes”, and “probablys” as “got it rights”.

Chicago defence lawyer Brendan Max says the company’s accuracy claims are “marketing nonsense”.

“Customer feedback is used to decide whether people like Pepsi or Coke better,” he says.

“It’s not designed to determine whether a scientific method works.”

Conor Healy, who analyses security systems for video-surveillance research group IPVM, is also deeply sceptical about the 97% accuracy figure.

“Putting the onus on the police to report every false positive means you expect them to report on stuff, when nothing’s happened… which they’re unlikely to do,” Mr Healy says.

“It’s fair to assume that if they [ShotSpotter] have solid testing data to back up their claims, they have every incentive to release that data.”

Gun crime on the rise
Back in Fresno I join the police on a night-time ride-along with police officer Nate Palomino.

Fresno has some of California’s worst gun crime, and just like many other cities in America it’s been getting worse in the last two years.

Sure enough, a ShotSpotter alert comes through. However, when we reach the scene, no casings are found and there’s no physical evidence of a gunshot.

Officer Palomino tells me the audio recording sounds like a gunshot – and it seems more than possible it was – but it’s difficult to prove.

He says that scenario is typical.

ShotSpotter’s accuracy should be beyond doubt.

It has been used in courts up and down the country as evidence for both defence and prosecution.

The worry is that if it isn’t as accurate as is claimed, ShotSpotter is sending officers into situations wrongly expecting gunfire.

Alyxander Godwin, who has been campaigning to get rid of ShotSpotter in Chicago, summarises the concern.

“The police are expecting these situations to be hostile,” she says.

“They expect there to be a gun, and because of where this is deployed, they’re expecting a black or brown person to be holding a gun.”

But ShotSpotter says there is no data to back this theory up.

“What you’d be describing is a situation where officers get to a scene and they’re basically shooting unarmed people,” Mr Clark says.

“It’s just not in the data – it’s speculation.”

Yet he seems to also accept that the company’s own accuracy methodology has its limitations.

“It might be a fair criticism to say, ‘Hey, look, you’re not getting all the feedback that you might possibly get,'” Mr Clark says.

“That might be a fair criticism.”

Mr Max, the Chicago lawyer, says ShotSpotter reports should not be allowed as evidence in court until the company can better back up its claims.

“In the last four or five months, I’m aware of dozens of Chicagoans who have been arrested based on ShotSpotter evidence,” he says.

“I’m sure that has played out in cities across the country.”

He also says the company should open its systems up to better review and analysis.

For example, who is independently reviewing the quality of the analysts? And how often does the algorithm disagree with the human analyst?

Certainly, from my time at the ShotSpotter incident review centre, it’s common for analysts to disagree with the computer classification.

“It’s just filtering out what we see,” Ms Ammon says.

“But I honestly don’t even look at it [the classification], I’m so busy looking at the sensor patterns.”

It’s an interesting admission. Sometimes, the technology is viewed as all seeing, all knowing – the computer masterfully detecting a gunshot.

In practice, the analysts have a far greater role than I expected.

Lawyers such as Brendan Max are interested in trying to establish more information about how the technology works in court.

Saving lives
ShotSpotter has had a lot of criticism over the past year – not all of it fair.

And much of the coverage casually skips over the fact that police forces often give glowing reviews of the technology’s effectiveness.

The company is keen to highlight cases where ShotSpotter has alerted police to gunshot victims, for example, saving lives.

In several cities across America, activists are trying to persuade cities to pull ShotSpotter contracts.

But in other places, ShotSpotter is expanding.

In Fresno, police chief Paco Balderrama is looking to increase its coverage, at a cost of $1m (£0.7m) a year.

“What if ShotSpotter only saves one life in a given year? Is it worth a million dollars? I would argue it is,” he says.

The debate around ShotSpotter is hugely complex – and has important potential ramifications for community policing in America.

It’s unlikely to go away until the tech’s accuracy is independently verified and the data peer reviewed.

A Japanese start-up is hoping to convince motorists to swap their cars for a $680,000 (£495,000) hoverbike.

ALI Technologies’ XTurismo Limited Edition went on sale in Japan, earlier on Wednesday.

Electronics giant Mitsubishi and footballer Keisuke Honda are two backers of the Tokyo-based company.

ALI Technologies says the hoverbike can fly for 40 minutes at up to 100km/h (62mph) on a single charge.

The company aims to have manufactured 200 single-rider 300kg (47-stone) hoverbikes by mid-2022.

Each is equipped with a conventional engine and four battery-powered motors.

“Until now, the choice has been to move on the ground or at scale in the sky,” ALI Technologies chief executive Daisuke Katano said.

“We hope to offer a new method of movement.”

Overcrowding is a big problem for Tokyo’s 13.5 million residents.

The high-tech city is the most populous metropolitan area in the world.

But current laws will prohibit the hoverbikes from flying over Japan’s busy roads.

Although, Mr Katano hopes rescue teams will use them to reach inaccessible areas.

‘Science fiction’
Ben Gardner, of Pinsent Masons, told BBC News vehicles that once seemed like the far-distant future were becoming more tangible every year.

“Ultimately, there is scope for us to see the vehicle being deployed in the UK,” he said.

The hoverbike would not be considered roadworthy under current UK law.

But Mr Gardner said a focus on new technologies in recent years could be signalling a change.

“The current trialling of emerging technologies such as driverless cars, autonomous robots and drones shows there is a blueprint for new forms of transport to move out of the realms of science fiction and into the real world,” he said.

Venture capitalists, aviation corporations and even rideshare company Uber, with its ambitious Uber Elevate, are staking claims on the burgeoning flying automotive industry, which analysts say could be worth as much as $1.5tn by 2040.

Whistleblower Frances Haugen has told MPs Facebook is “unquestionably making hate worse”, as they consider what new rules to impose on big social networks.

Ms Haugen was talking to the Online Safety Bill committee in London.

She said Facebook safety teams were under-resourced, and “Facebook has been unwilling to accept even little slivers of profit being sacrificed for safety”.

And she warned that Instagram was “more dangerous than other forms of social media”.

While other social networks were about performance, play, or an exchange of ideas, “Instagram is about social comparison and about bodies… about people’s lifestyles, and that’s what ends up being worse for kids”, she told a joint committee of MPs and Lords.

She said Facebook’s own research described one problem as “an addict’s narrative” – where children are unhappy, can’t control their use of the app, but feel like they cannot stop using it.

“I am deeply worried that it may not be possible to make Instagram safe for a 14-year-old, and I sincerely doubt that it is possible to make it safe for a 10-year-old,” she said.

The committee is fine-tuning a proposed law that will place new duties on large social networks and subject them to checks by the media regulator Ofcom.

Asked if the law was “keeping Mark Zuckerberg awake at night”, Ms Haugen said she was “incredibly proud of the UK for taking such a world-leading stance”.

“The UK has a tradition of leading policy in ways that are followed around the world.

“I can’t imagine Mark isn’t paying attention to what you’re doing.”

British English problem
Ms Haugen also warned that Facebook was unable to police content in multiple languages around the world – something which should worry UK officials, she said.

“UK English is sufficiently different that I would be unsurprised if the safety systems that they developed primarily for American English were actually under-enforcing in the UK,” she said.

And she said that dangerous misinformation in other languages affects people in Britain.

“Those people are also living in the UK, and being fed misinformation that is dangerous, that radicalises people,” she warned.

Ms Haugen also urged the committee to include paid-for advertising in its new rules, saying the current system was “literally subsidising hate on these platforms” because of their algorithmic ranking.

“It is substantially cheaper to run an angry hateful divisive ad than it is to run a compassionate, empathetic ad,” she said.

And she also urged MPs to require a breakdown of who is harmed by content, rather than an average figure – suggesting Facebook is “very good at dancing with data”, but pushes people towards “extreme content”.

“The median experience on Facebook is a pretty good experience,” she said.

“The real danger is that 20% of the population has a horrible experience or an experience that is dangerous,” she said.

“Accept under-resourcing”
She warned that employees were unable to report internal concerns at Facebook – something she called a “huge weak spot”.

“When I worked on counter-espionage, I saw things where I was concerned about national security, and I had no idea how to escalate those because I didn’t have faith in my chain of command at that point,” she told the committee.

And she warned: “We were told to accept under-resourcing.”

Similar problems plague Facebook’s Oversight Board, which can overturn the company’s decisions on content, she said. She repeated her claim that Facebook has repeatedly lied to its own watchdog, and said this is a “defining moment” for the Oversight Board to “step up”.

“I don’t know what the purpose of the Oversight Board is,” she said.

It comes as several news outlets published fresh stories based on the thousands of leaked documents Ms Haugen took with her when she left Facebook.

Facebook has characterised previous reporting as misleading, and at one point referred to the leaked documents as “stolen”.

“Contrary to what was discussed at the hearing, we’ve always had the commercial incentive to remove harmful content from our sites,” a spokesperson said, after Ms Haugen finished giving evidence.

“People don’t want to see it when they use our apps, and advertisers don’t want their ads next to it. That’s why we’ve invested $13bn (£9.4bn) and hired 40,000 people to do one job: keep people safe on our apps. “

The company said that over the last three quarters it has halved the amount of hate speech seen on Facebook, which it claims now accounts for only 0.05% of all content viewed.

“While we have rules against harmful content and publish regular transparency reports, we agree we need regulation for the whole industry so that businesses like ours aren’t making these decisions on our own,” the spokesperson said.

“The UK is one of the countries leading the way and we’re pleased the Online Safety Bill is moving forward.”

An avalanche of information emerged on Monday from leaked Facebook documents – and it was hard to keep up.

Allegations include that the social media giant is aware of its role in inciting violence all around the world, or causing harm to its users from US and UK to India and Ethiopia.

A common theme runs through each of the stories. They all suggest a tension between employees raising the alarm about their concerns and a corporate machine that does not appear to be using this to inform its policies.

Reporters and journalists have been highlighting many of these same concerns, especially for the past 18 months. I’ve investigated the human cost of online disinformation and abuse again and again and exposed the damage being done to real people offline using these sites.

But until these documents were released by Ms Haugen, it was very difficult to know how aware Facebook was of that damage.

These latest leaks reinforce the idea that it is conscious of it – although it refutes a number of the claims.

And it means pressure is mounting on policymakers around the world to do something about it.

The Australian government and telecoms giant Telstra are buying a Pacific telecoms company in a joint venture.

The move is being viewed as a political block to China’s influence in the region.

Telstra called the A$2.1bn ($1.6bn; £1.2bn) deal a “unique and very attractive commercial opportunity to boost our presence in the region”.

Digicel Pacific employs 1,700 people across Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Samoa, Vanuatu and Tahiti.

The company’s future has been the focus of speculation for months.

Last year Digicel denied a report that it was in talks to sell its Pacific arm to state-owned China Mobile.

According to Telstra, the Australian government approached it “to provide technical advice in relation to Digicel Pacific” which is “critical to telecommunications in the region”.

The government then agreed to finance the bulk of the bid, Telstra said.

Strategic move
Analysts say the company would otherwise be attractive to China as it seeks to assert greater authority in the region.

“Digicel is the primary player in the Pacific and Australia sees it as a strategic asset that they can’t allow to fall into the hands of China,” said Jonathan Pryke of the Lowy Institute, a Sydney-based think tank.

“They are keen to get Australian business back into the Pacific and they’ve come to the realisation that they are going to have to underwrite.”

A spokesman for Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade told newswire Reuters: “Partnering on infrastructure development is a key part of our Pacific step-up.”

Amid escalating tensions with China, Australia has ramped up its presence in the Pacific.

This includes allocating $1.5bn to investment in infrastructure projects in the region as well as joining the Quad group, with the US, India and Japan, and the Aukus security pact, with the US and UK.

It also largely funded a 4,700km (2,900-mile) Coral Sea cable in 2018 to prevent Chinese telecoms company Huawei Technologies from laying it.

It is also now helping to finance an undersea optic fibre cable for Palau.

Chinese control of telecommunications networks has long been a concern for Washington and its allies.

This has led many countries to ban Huawei and other Chinese companies from supplying phone lines and 5G networks, including the US, UK and Australia.

Major phone networks have agreed to automatically block almost all internet calls coming from abroad if they pretend to be from UK numbers, Ofcom has confirmed.

Criminals have been using internet-based calling technology to make it look like a phone call or text is coming from a real telephone number.

Almost 45 million consumers were targeted by phone scams this summer.

Ofcom said it expected the measures to be introduced at pace as a “priority”.

So far, one operator has already implemented the new plans, the regulator told the BBC, while other phone networks are still exploring methods of making it work.

“We’ve been working with telecoms companies to implement technical solutions, including blocking at source, suspicious international calls that are masked by a UK number,” said Lindsey Fussell, Ofcom’s networks and communications group director.

“We expect these measures to be introduced as a priority, and at pace, to ensure customers are better protected.”

She added that tackling the phone scams issue was a “complex problem” that requires a coordinated effort from the police, government, other regulators and industry.

The move follows months of discussions between Ofcom and the UK telecoms industry.

Will the plans work?
Internet-based calling technology, also known as Voice Over Internet Protcol (VoIP), is used by millions of consumers globally to make phone calls free or cheaply every year.

Popular services you might recognise that use VoIP include WhatsApp, Skype, Zoom and Microsoft Teams.

The Telegraph, which first reported the story on Sunday, cited Whitehall sources that have cast doubt on Ofcom’s plans.

They say blocking traffic from foreign VoIP providers won’t work to stop scam texts and calls, because much of the UK is still relying on old copper-based ISDN networks dating back to the 1970s.

Security experts the BBC spoke to disagree, however.

Apart from consumers, many businesses also use the VoIP technology for internal corporate phone networks.

Whenever a corporate phone network makes a call, a VoIP provider hands over the call from the internet to the phone networks – a technology called “SIP trunking”.

According to Gabriel Cirlig of US cyber-security firm Human, telcos are not inspecting the traffic they receive from VoIP providers – they just let it through onto the network.

“Recently, because of the ease in implementing your own private enterprise telephone system, everybody can have access to critical telephone infrastructure,” Mr Cirlig told the BBC.

“Because of this lower barrier of entry, it is very easy for scammers to build their own systems to spoof mobile numbers – the cybercriminals are essentially pretending to be legitimate corporate telephone networks in order to have access to legitimate telco infrastructure.”

He adds that right now, it is up to the VoIP provider to check whether the calls it is handing over to telecoms networks are actually legitimate.

“This is not a regional problem or restricted to one type of infrastructure, this is a systemic issue that allows crime to cross any borders,” said Mr Cirlig.

“This feature is enabling the VoIP business model so they don’t want to stop it.”

Matthew Gribben, a former consultant to GCHQ, the UK government intelligence agency, agrees. He used to see ongoing scams while monitoring networks for GCHQ.

“It’s fundamentally the foreign VoIP providers that are technologically enabling these gangs to operate, so it will make a huge dent in this,” he told the BBC. “It doesn’t fix everything but it’s an excellent step in the right direction.”

What else can be done?

Overall, the experts agree that the only way to completely fix the problem is to implement new telephone identification protocols that enable phone networks to authenticate that all calls and text messages actually come a real telephone number.

The new protocols, known as “Stir and Shaken” in a nod to James Bond, were developed by an international standards body, the US-based Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

US authorities have ordered mobile operators to implement the protocols by the end of 2021, but Ofcom told the BBC in August that introducing full authentication in the UK will only be possible when the underlying technology that supports voice services is upgraded to become internet protocol-based (IP) networks, which is due to be completed by 2025.

The Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) told the BBC it can require mobile operators to block, on a case-by-case basis, access to numbers or services in case of fraud. However, it cannot impose Stir and Shaken on EU operators.

“Nevertheless…these protocols are currently [being] discussed at the level of the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations,” said a Berec spokesman.

There are also efforts being made by the UK to invest in technologies that improve overall telecoms cyber-security.

Startup Arqit was asked by BT and the government in 2017 to develop quantum encryption for satellites.

The firm, which listed on the Nasdaq in June, has developed a solution that creates “unbreakable” software encryption keys, delivered via satellite, to secure any device or cloud server.

“The encryption keys we create would take even a quantum computer more than the age of the universe to crack,” said Arqit’s founder and chief executive David Williams.

Arqit recently signed agreements with BT, Northrop Grumman, Juniper Networks and Babcock. It merged with US firm Centricus in September, following approval by the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which consulted with quantum scientists as part of its vetting process.

There was a time when the US tech giants were all in China – even Facebook. Today, Apple’s huge presence in the country looks increasingly conspicuous.

Last week Microsoft, which still operates in China, announced it was to shut down its social network, LinkedIn, there.

The company said having to comply with the Chinese state had become increasingly challenging – so it pulled the plug.

Apple has its own censorship problems in the country.

The BBC reported last week that two popular religious apps had been removed from Apple’s App Store.

It later emerged that Amazon-owned Audible and the Yahoo Finance app had also been taken down.

Apple Censorship, a group that monitors the App Store, says it has seen an increase in apps that have been removed this month.

So what is going on?

The great tech crackdown
It is notoriously hard to gauge what’s happening behind closed doors in Beijing.

Still, what is becoming increasingly clear is that Apple and Microsoft are embroiled in a domestic battle between the authorities and the Chinese tech industry.

China has its own big tech titans – Tencent, Alibaba and Huawei – that are enormous global companies. But the Chinese government has grown worried about the power they wield.

In April, Alibaba accepted a record $2.8bn (£2bn) fine after an investigation found that it had abused its dominant market position
In August, the Chinese government unveiled a five-year plan outlining tighter regulation of the tech economy
It’s also been cracking down on Bitcoin
American companies haven’t been spared from the “great tech crackdown”.

“The crackdown suggests that both Apple and Microsoft are very aware that their position is more tenuous than it’s been in recent years. They know they need to walk carefully,” says James Griffiths, author of The Great Firewall of China.

The straw that broke the camel’s back for Microsoft appears to be a law due to come into force on 1 November – the Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL) – which would have required the company to comply with more regulation.

Microsoft alludes to it a in statement explaining its decision to pull LinkedIn: “We’re facing a significantly more challenging operating environment and greater compliance requirements in China.”

Graham Webster, editor-in-chief of the DigiChina Project at Stanford University, said: “I think they decided it just wasn’t worth it.”

Mr Webster links the decision to say goodbye to LinkedIn to forthcoming enforcement of the PIPL.

The devil’s bargain
Apple, however, has a different set of priorities in China to Microsoft.

It is deeply entangled in the country, far more so than any other US tech company.

In the last quarter, Apple made nearly $15bn in revenue in China and Taiwan – an extraordinary figure.

Its global supply chain also depends on Chinese manufacturing. And to be in China, Apple knows it has to play by the country’s rules – even if that means censorship.

You might ask: why doesn’t Apple just sell hardware in China, and forget about the App Store?

The problem is, Apple believes the App Store and the iPhone are inseparable. It doesn’t want to set a precedent of side-loading apps, where people can download apps on an iPhone away from the App Store.

For one thing, it would make considerably less money.

So if Apple is going to sell products in China, keeping the App Store operational in that country is deemed essential.

“Apple has been removing apps and essentially censoring the App Store in one way or another for years,” Mr Webster says.

Apple executes New Year’s Eve apps purge in China
China exempt from new Apple privacy features
Apple censors engraving service, report claims
Apple criticised for storing data inside China
But Mr Griffiths argues that censorship has slowly grown stricter during Apple’s time in the country.

“​Apple has set itself a devil’s bargain here,” he says.

“Once you start to agree to remove apps, it doesn’t really stop.”

Secret strategies
Other companies saw the writing on the wall earlier than Microsoft.

Google removed its search engine from China in 2010, after what it said was a Chinese hacking attack. The company said it was no longer happy to censor searches.

Rebecca Fannin, author of Silicon Dragons, believes Microsoft’s pulling of LinkedIn now makes Apple a “big target”.

But she thinks Apple is going to fight to stay in China.

“You know Apple is really one of the market leaders in China… I don’t see Apple pulling out of China over any of these issues any time soon,” she says.

What we don’t know are the conversations that are going on behind closed doors between Apple and the Chinese authorities.

Perhaps Apple does push back, and maybe many apps are still up and live on the App Store in China because Apple stood up for them. We don’t know.

Apple rarely comments on these stories, and points journalists to its human rights policy, which states it will follow the laws of the countries it operates in – even if it disagrees with them.

And in China, they’ve been doing just that.

When the authorities really want an app taken down, it gets removed.

Apple’s presence in the country now feels almost like a hangover from another era. Big Tech simply doesn’t have much of a presence in China any more.

The question now is how much regulation, how much compliance – and how much censorship – is too much?

Almost 45 million people in the UK were targeted by scam text messages or phone calls over the summer, according to telecoms regulator Ofcom.

About half reported getting a scam call or text at least once a week.

A survey of 2,000 adults in September found that almost a million people had been misled by a message or a call which they received.

Text scams are most common among 16 to 34-year-olds, with two-thirds receiving one between June and August.

The elderly are more often targeted using their landlines, with 61% of those over 75 receiving a scam phone call, but all ages are at risk.

UK residents who believe they have been targeted, or are the victim of a scam, can report a text message by forwarding it to 7726 – the numbers on the keypad that have the letters for spam on them.

However, Ofcom found that 79% of mobile phone users were unaware of that service.

Scam calls should be reported to Action Fraud.

Lindsey Fussell, Ofcom’s networks and communications group director, urged the public not to reply to messages which do not seem quite right.

“Criminals who defraud people using phone and text scams can cause huge distress and financial harm to their victims, and their tactics are becoming increasingly sophisticated,” she said.

“Stay alert to any unsolicited contact. Put the phone down if you have any suspicion that it is a scam call, and don’t click on any links in text messages you’re unsure about.”

Almost 45 million people in the UK were targeted by scam text messages or phone calls over the summer, according to telecoms regulator Ofcom.

About half reported getting a scam call or text at least once a week.

A survey of 2,000 adults in September found that almost a million people had been misled by a message or a call which they received.

Text scams are most common among 16 to 34-year-olds, with two-thirds receiving one between June and August.

The elderly are more often targeted using their landlines, with 61% of those over 75 receiving a scam phone call, but all ages are at risk.

UK residents who believe they have been targeted, or are the victim of a scam, can report a text message by forwarding it to 7726 – the numbers on the keypad that have the letters for spam on them.

However, Ofcom found that 79% of mobile phone users were unaware of that service.

Scam calls should be reported to Action Fraud.

Lindsey Fussell, Ofcom’s networks and communications group director, urged the public not to reply to messages which do not seem quite right.

“Criminals who defraud people using phone and text scams can cause huge distress and financial harm to their victims, and their tactics are becoming increasingly sophisticated,” she said.

“Stay alert to any unsolicited contact. Put the phone down if you have any suspicion that it is a scam call, and don’t click on any links in text messages you’re unsure about.”

Apple has unveiled its M1Pro and M1Max chips used to power new MacBook Pro laptop computers.

Apple says the M1 Max chip, with 57 billion transistors is the most powerful it has ever built.

The new chips were announced almost a year after the firm revealed its first Mac computers powered by silicon of its own design.

It comes after reports that Apple cut its iPhone 13 production targets amid the global computer chip shortage.

Industry analyst Mikako Kitagawa of Gartner said “the performance boost is pretty impressive”.

Apple claims the new chips will achieve comparable performance to the latest 8-core PC laptop chip running at top speed while using 70% of the power.

Going flat-out the chip, the company claimed, would be up to 1.7 times faster than the 8-core PC chip.

Such claims have not yet been independently verified.

Apple’s chips are sometimes referred to as being ‘Arm-based’ because it licenses the instruction sets from the British-based company of that name.

These instruction sets determine how processors handle commands. However, the core processor circuits are of Apple’s own design.

For years Apple has used chips designed by Intel. The move to designing its own silicon has been positive for the firm, says Ben Wood, chief analyst of CCS Insight.

“The advent of Apple Silicon has been a shot in the arm for the MacBook line-up,” he said.

The two chips power the new 14in and 16in MacBook Pro laptops and a new operating system, macOS Monterey.

In the “Unleashed” launch presentation Apple stressed the MacBook’s power and long battery life.

There has been a sense, one analyst said, that workers in creative industries are starting to drift away from the Macbook Pro.

But they would find the new machines appealing, according to Ms Kitagawa. “Apple is really defending the creative professional market which is their core market,” she said.

The MacBooks were unveiled at a time when the company has warned of the impact of the global chip shortage.

Previously Apple boss Tim Cook said that the issue could affect products using M1 chips. Recent reports suggest that the shortage might hit iPhone 13 production.

Apple designed-silicon will not, Ben Wood says, insulate the company from the shortage.

“The fact that Apple has designed its own chips does not necessarily mean it is immune from the wider chipset shortages,” he said.

“There is little doubt it will be in a strong position to secure supply, but ultimately the overall shortage of semiconductors comes down to manufacturing capacity.”

Ms Kitagawa also noted that as dedicated graphics chips (GPUs) are in short supply, the new MacBook Pros may be “more immune to the shortage as the machine does not have discrete graphics: one less component that they need to worry about.”

MagSafe returns
The new laptops reverse a much-criticised Apple design decision.

In particular the abandonment of Magsafe – a magnetically secured power-supply that releases with a firm pull.

Ben Wood said, “many users will be ecstatic that the MagSafe power connector has returned. When you’ve invested a small fortune in a MacBook, the last thing you want is for a careless trip over a power cable to see it crashing off the desk onto the floor.”