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25 July 2012 | Christian Science Monitor

Two UK media leaders charged with conspiracy over phone hacking

Two prominent British media figures have been charged with conspiracy, together with six others, in a phone hacking scandal that has felled much of Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloid news empire and shaken the British political establishment since coming to light last summer. Rebekah Brooks, former head of Murdoch’s UK News Corp., Andy Coulson, a former Murdoch chief editor and Prime Minister David Cameron’s ex-media chief, and six of the 27 others who have been arrested in the past year are involved. They are charged with conspiracy in using salacious or painfully personal material gained from illegally hacked cell phones as fodder for tabloid stories, embarrassing Cameron's administration. As editors wielding enormous clout in the shaping of British media stories, Brooks and Coulson were much feared and often hated by British politicians and elites as the engines of a Murdoch machine that made and broke members of parliament and prime ministers. The two deny any involvement in phone hacking.

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25 July 2012 | Wired

London Olympics website – the best tested in the short history

In an effort to ensure that its site — www.london2012.com — can juggle traffic from an estimated 1 billion people over the three short weeks of the games, the London Olympics Organizing Committee turned to SOASTA, a Mountain View, California, company that uses cloud services such as Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure to drive traffic to websites and other online applications inside the world’s businesses. The company’s engineers spent six months working with the committee to simulate traffic not only to the Olympics website, but also across the many mobile apps that tie into it. The result, SOASTA CEO Tom Lounibos says, is that the London Olympics website is probably better tested than any other Olympics site in the web’s short history. “In the past, to do the kind of testing we did with the Olympics Committee, you had to spend weeks setting up hundreds — if not thousands — of servers, and you would have spent millions of dollars just trying to do one test. With cloud testing, you can simulate 100,000 users within a few minutes. You can get the data from those tests in a matter of minutes. And you can do it for a fraction of the cost.” says Lounibos.

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25 July 2012 | The Guardian

Virgin Tivo subscribers to hit 1 million

The Popularity of boxes that connect TVs to the Internet has helped offset the fall in cable customers. The number of subscribers to Virgin Media's Tivo box is due to reach 1 million this week, less than a year after its launch. The number of homes with the box, which connects sets to the Internet as well as traditional television channels, rose from 261,700 to 938,800 during the last three months, helping boost revenues by 4% to £1 billion. The rise in pay-tv income helped counter the worse-than-expected loss of 14,700 cable customers in Virgin Media's seasonally weak second quarter, which often sees customer numbers drop as student households disconnect for the summer.

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25 July 2012 | Press Gazette

Digital focus for Guardian’s Olympic efforts

In accordance with its digital-first strategy, Guardian News and Media has created a number of interactive features to supplement the 60 journalists who will be covering the Games "on the ground". These include ‘Could you be a medallist?’, an interactive feature, which enables readers to compare their sporting achievements with those of top athletes. GNM is also launching Second Screen - a desktop and iPad dashboard, displaying all of the website’s content as well as key facts, figures, Twitter messages, and photos. The title's London 2012 experts’ network will provide insight from 100 different sporting experts around the world, including former Olympians, via www.guardian.co.uk and Twitter. The newspaper will also be introducing a Second Screen experience - a desktop and iPad dashboard, displaying all of the website’s content, designed to be used alongside watching the Games – as well as a stream of live blogs and print supplements.

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25 July 2012 | The New York Times

Google Moves Toward Settlement of European Antitrust Investigation

The European Commission said on Tuesday that it had reached an “understanding” with Google that could lead to a settlement of an antitrust investigation into allegations that Google abused its dominance of the Internet search and advertising markets. “The commission considers Google’s proposals a good basis for further talks and has now reached a good level of understanding,” said commission spokesman, Antoine Colombani. He added that meetings on a more technical level would now be held to reach a settlement. The commission found after a nearly two-year inquiry that Google might have given its own products an edge over those of others while maintaining that it offered neutral results. Google’s search engine has a 90 percent market share in many big European markets, compared with less than 70 percent in the United States, where it is also under investigation.

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25 July 2012 | Ynetnews.com

Egyptian candid camera show launches ‘war’ on Israel

A talk show “Dialogue with the others”, shown daily on the Egyptian Al-Nahar satellite TV during the Ramadan, is thought to be crossing the ethics line. In the show, a celebrity guest is brought in for a TV interview seemingly conducted by a German TV channel, which discusses daily news issues that have been making waves in Egypt. During each show, the host asks the guest random questions, then slowly the questions turn to issues related to Israel – the peace agreement, normalization etc. The guest is being provoked to say something controversial on the topic and as soon as it happens, he is told that he is not on a German show, but he is in fact on an Israeli show. Then the colours of the Israeli flag appear behind him. The guest then starts to panic and after a moment he is told that he was the victim of a prank and everybody claps. The show often includes violent fights between the guests and the production team and controversial or even unethical statements about Israel issues.

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