Official data shows 160 requests a day from computers used by MPs, peers and staff between June and October last year
More than 24,000 attempts were made to access pornographic websites in the Houses of Parliament since the general election, according to official data.
The figure of 24,473 attempts represents about 160 requests per day on average from computers and other devices connected to the parliamentary network – which is used by MPs, peers and staff – between June and October last year.
It comes amid a sex scandal in Westminster, during which Theresa May sacked her de facto deputy, Damian Green, after he made “misleading” statements about allegations that police found pornography on computers in his parliamentary office in 2008.
In his resignation letter, Green continued to deny “unfounded and deeply hurtful” claims that he downloaded or viewed the material.
The data, released after a freedom of information (FoI) request by the Press Association, shows a spike in September in the number of attempts to visit the sites, with 9,467 requests from both the Houses of Lords and Commons that month.
Parliamentary authorities say the majority of attempts are not deliberate.
The figures also show a sharp decrease in the number of attempts to access pornographic websites in recent years. In 2016, the parliamentary filtering system blocked 113,208 attempts, down from 213,020 the previous year.
Figures for January and February 2017 could not be provided by the parliamentary authorities due to changes in technology and the way the data is held. However, the available data showed there were 30,876 attempts from March to October.
During this period, parliament was dissolved from late April to early June ahead of the general election, and MPs were away during the summer recess from the end of July to early September.
A parliamentary spokesman said of the figures: “All pornographic websites are blocked by parliament’s computer network. The vast majority of attempts to access them are not deliberate. The data shows requests to access websites, not visits to them.
“There are 8,500 computers on the parliamentary network, which are used by MPs, peers, their staff and staff of both Houses. This data also covers personal devices used when logged on to parliament’s guest wifi.”
A separate FoI request showed there were also at least 2,751,755 attempts to access blocked websites on the parliamentary network from January to October this year.
Lucia Mee has been awarded a British Empire Medal for her work raising awareness of organ donation.
The 18-year-old, from Ballycastle in Northern Ireland, who has had three liver transplants - the first aged eight - is the youngest person on the New Year Honours list.
She campaigns for organ donation to be taught in schools and for everyone to sign the organ donation register.
She previously told the BBC that each new organ was "a gift".
Miss Mee was diagnosed with auto immune hepatitis when she was young and told she needed a new liver.
However, two transplant surgeries in 2007 and 2009 ended in her body rejecting the new organs and she received her third new liver when she was 16.
'Education and conversation'
"For me, it has always been a special thing to know that the decision has not been made for someone but has been a gift from each person or their family," she said.
"Whatever system we have in place it is more important in my view that it operates alongside education and conversation."
She also said the family should always have the final say.
And she said recently: "There is not enough evidence that the opt-out system results in more organ donations if it is done without education."
Miss Mee said she had written to two of her organ donors but had not heard anything back from them.
She is now finishing up her studies at school in Country Antrim after her most recent liver transplant.
Government ministers in Northern Ireland and England are thinking of moving to a system of 'presumed consent', in which people would have to opt out of organ donation rather than opting in by signing a donor register.
Wales has already adopted the 'presumed consent' approach and Scotland plans to introduce a similar scheme.
Around 6,500 people in the UK are currently waiting for an organ transplant.
One in 10 recipients of this year's honours were from the health sector.
They include a damehoods for Cathy Warwick, former chief executive of the Royal College of Midwives and Clare Marx, outgoing president of the Royal College of Surgeons, and a CBE for Dr Robin Lovell-Badge, from the Francis Crick Institute, for services to genetics and stem cell research.
There was also a Knight Grand Cross for medical scientist Sir Keith Peters.
The discovery of a planet with a highly elliptical orbit around an ancient star could help us understand more about how planetary systems form and evolve over time.
The new planet, HD76920b, is four times the mass of Jupiter, and can be found some 587 light years away in the southern constellation Volans, the Flying Fish. At its closest it skims the surface of its host star, HD76920. At its furthest, it orbits almost twice as far from its star as Earth does from the Sun.
Superimposing HD76920b’s orbit on the Solar system shows how peculiar it is. Its orbit is more like that of the asteroid Phaethon than any of the Solar system’s planets.Jake Clark
Details of the planet and its discovery are published today. So how does this fit into the planet formation narrative, and are planets like it common in the cosmos?
Before the first exoplanet discovery, our understanding of how planetary systems formed came from the only example we had at the time: our Solar system.
Close to the Sun orbit four rocky planets – Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. Further out are four giants – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
The eight planets move in almost circular orbits, close to the same plane. The bulk of the debris also lies close to that plane, although on orbits that are somewhat more eccentric and inclined.
How did this system form? The idea was that it coalesced from a disk of material surrounding the embyronic Sun. The colder outer reaches were rich in ices, while the hotter inner regions contained just dust and gas.
The Solar system formed from a protoplanetary disk, surrounding the young Sun.NASA/JPL-Caltech
Over millions of years, the tiny particles of dust and ice collided with one another, slowly building ever larger objects. In the icy depths of space, the giant planets grew rapidly. In the hot, rocky interior, growth was slower.
Eventually, the Sun blew away the gas and dust leaving a (relatively) orderly system – roughly co-planar planets, moving on near-circular orbits.
The exoplanet era
The first exoplanets, discovered in the 1990s, shattered this simple model of planet formation. We quickly learned that they are far more diverse than we could have possibly imagined.
Some systems feature giant planets, larger than Jupiter, orbiting incredibly close to their star. Others host eccentric, solitary worlds, with no companions to call their own.
Artist’s impression of the Hot Jupiter HD209458b - a planet so close to its star that its atmosphere is evaporating to space.European Space Agency, A.Vidal-Madjar (Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris, CNRS, France) and NASA
As a result of these discoveries, astronomers developed two competing models for planet formation.
The first is core accretion, where planets form gradually, through collisions between grains of dust and ice. The theory has grown out of our old models of Solar system formation.
The competing theory is dynamical instability. Once again, the story begins with a disk of material around a youthful star. But that disk is more massive, and becomes unstable under its own self-gravity, causing clumps to grow. These clumps rapidly form planets, in thousands of years.
Massive protoplanetary disks can become unstable, rapidly giving birth to giant planets.
Both models can explain some, but not all, of the newly discovered planets. Depending on the initial conditions around the star, it seems that both processes can occur.
Each theory offers potential to explain eccentric worlds in somewhat different ways.
How do you get an eccentric planet?
In the dynamical instability model you can easily get several clumps forming and interacting, slinging one another around until their orbits are both tilted and eccentric.
Under the core accretion model things are a bit harder, as this method naturally creates co-planar, ordered planetary systems. But over time those systems can become unstable.
One possible outcome is for one planet to eject the others through a series of chaotic encounters. That would naturally leave it as a solitary body, following a highly elongated orbit.
Chaotic planetary systems can eject planets entirely, leading to lonely rouge planets.NASA/JPL-Caltech
But there is another option. Many stars in our galaxy are binary – they have stellar companions. The interactions between a planet and its host star’s sibling could readily stir it up and eventually eject it, or place it on an extreme orbit.
An eccentric planet
This brings us to our newly discovered world, HD76920b. A handful of similarly eccentric worlds have been found before, but HD76920b is unique. It orbits an ancient star, more than two billion years older than the Sun.
The orbit HD76920b is following is not tenable in the long-term. As it swings close to its host star, it will experience dramatic tides.
A gaseous planet, HD76920b will change shape as it swings past its star, stretched by its enormous gravity. Those tides will be far greater than any we experience on Earth.
That tidal interaction will act over time to circularise the planet’s orbit. The point of closest approach to the star will remain unchanged, but the most distant point will gradually be dragged closer in, driving the orbit towards circularity.
All of this suggests that HD76920b cannot have occupied its current orbit since its birth. If that were the case, the orbit would have circularised aeons ago.
Extremely eccentric planets have been discovered before, but this is the first around such an ancient star.Goddard Space Flight Center/NASA
Perhaps what we’re seeing is evidence of a planetary system gone rogue. A system that once contained several planets on circular (or near circular) orbits.
Over time, those planets nudged one another around, eventually hitting a chaotic architecture as their star evolved. The result – chaos – with most planets scattered and flung to the depths of space leaving just one – HD76920b.
The truth is, we just don’t know – yet. As is always the case in astronomy, more observations are needed to truly understand the life story of this peculiar planet.
One thing we do know is the story is coming to a fiery end. In the next few million years, the star will swell, devouring its final planet. Then, HD76920b will be no more.
Bone-chilling cold gripped the middle of the US as 2018 began on Monday, breaking a low temperature record, icing some New Year’s celebrations and leading to at least two deaths attributed to exposure to the elements.
The National Weather Service issued wind chill advisories covering a vast area from south Texas all the way to Canada and from Montana and Wyoming in the west through New England to the northern tip of Maine.
Dangerously low temperatures enveloped eight midwest states including parts of Kansas, Missouri, Illinois and Nebraska along with nearly all of Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota and North Dakota.
The weather service said a temperature of 15 below zero (-9.44C) was recorded in Omaha before midnight on Sunday, breaking a record low dating back to 1884, and the temperature was still dropping early on New Year’s Day. That reading did not include the wind chill effect. Last week, Omaha officials cited the forecast in postponing the 18th annual New Year’s Eve Fireworks Spectacular that usually draws about 30,000 people.
It was even colder in Des Moines early on Monday at 20 below zero (-29C) and wind chill dipping to 31 below zero (-35C). Des Moines city officials had closed a downtown outdoor ice skating plaza and said it would not reopen until the city emerged from sub-zero temperatures.
In New York, throngs of revellers braved the second-coldest New Year’s Eve on record in New York to usher in 2018 as the glittering crystal ball dropped in Times Square.
The temperature was 10F (-12C), the chilliest celebration since 1917, when it was only 1F (-17C). Partygoers heeded warnings from authorities and wrapped up in extra layers, dancing and jogging in place to ward off the cold.
The wind chill dipped to 36 below zero (-38 Celsius) in Duluth, Minnesota, a city known for its bitter cold winters. Steam rose up from Lake Superior as a ship moved through the harbor where ice was forming from the bitter cold.
Bitterly cold temperatures also are spreading across the deep south, a region more accustomed to brief bursts of Arctic air than night after night below zero. Frozen pipes and dead car batteries were concerns from Louisiana to Georgia as overnight temperatures in the teens were predicted across the region by Monday night.
An Indianapolis woman was in critical condition after she became confused in the snow and ice and turned her vehicle the wrong direction, driving 150ft on a retention pond before her vehicle fell through the ice, according to WISH TV. She managed to make an emergency call but the phone went dead when the ice cracked.
The Milwaukee County medical examiner’s office said two bodies found on Sunday showed signs of hypothermia. They included a man in his 50s found on the ground in an alley and a 34-year-old man. Autopsies are being performed on both men.
Milwaukee’s annual Polar Bear Plunge at Bradford Beach on Lake Michigan on Monday could be more dangerous than usual, a city official told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. The wind chill was expected to be about 9 below zero (-13C) by the time of the event at noon.
“You’re going to get hypothermic,” said the Milwaukee fire battalion chief, Erich Roden. “Everybody wants to do the polar plunge once in their life; it’s a bucket list item. Unfortunately, it’s something that can cause a lot of harm.”
I am unable to power on my Acer laptop, and the technician says the motherboard is faulty. I am planning to sell it. Will the buyer be able to retrieve my data after changing the motherboard? If so, how do I erase it? Colin
If you are literally scrapping an old PC or laptop, you should either remove the hard drive or destroy it to protect your data. People have been known to scavenge hard drives from tips and retrieve sensitive personal, medical and financial information.
Selling dead machines for spares or repair is even riskier, and how much would your Acer be worth? I doubt it will fetch enough to make it worth spending the time and (probably) money needed to erase your data. And, of course, if you don’t do it, you could be at significant financial risk, depending on the information stored on it.
Whether or not the buyer replaces the motherboard, they will probably be able to read your hard drive, unless you encrypted it with an unhackable password. This is unlikely.
Because your laptop won’t boot, you will have to do what an attacker or repairer would do: remove the hard drive from the laptop. However, if you want to delete your data and reinstall the hard drive, you will need either another PC or a hard disk eraser.
If you have a desktop tower with a spare drive bay, you can mount the laptop drive inside, by connecting the power and data cables. This is easy.
If you have another laptop, you can mount it in an external hard drive enclosure, then connect it to another PC via a USB port.
Hard drive erasers
If you don’t have a PC, you could buy a standalone hard drive eraser. This is much the easiest way to erase hard drives, and companies that decommission lots of PCs should think about buying one. Unfortunately, it’s not economical to buy one for a single drive. The best known device, the Drive eRazer Ultra, cost about £/$250 when available.
One cheaper alternative is StarTech’s USB Hard Drive Duplicator and Eraser Dock (£51.91), which I found by searching Amazon. This has two drive slots, so as well as erasing hard drives and SSDs, it can clone them for backup purposes. You can also use it connected to a PC.
In theory, you could also use a degaussing machine, which uses very strong magnetic fields to erase all forms of magnetic media – disks and tapes. The Intimus 20000 is a good example, and you could buy one for £35,783.27 or possibly less. Unless you happen to know someone who already has a hard disk degausser, this is probably not an option.
Despite what you see in the movies, you can’t erase a modern hard drive using powerful magnets. K&J Magnetics tried and failed. Not even a 3in neodymium magnet costing almost $350 had any effect on the data. (Note: keep strong magnets away from hard drives because they might damage the read/write head and stop the drive from working. Also, remember that neodymium magnets are dangerous.)
You could, of course, simply destroy the hard drive physically, which is what some government departments prefer. You could, for example, wrap the drive in a cloth (to prevent any bits flying out) and drive a couple of six-inch nails through the platters. However, research drive destruction first, and take all the recommended safety precautions.
Electronic erasure
It’s easy to delete the data on a hard drive in a working PC or in an external USB enclosure. It’s not quite so easy to erase it completely. When you delete files, the operating system doesn’t erase them, it just removes them from its directory. This frees up the sectors for use by other programs, so most of them will be reused eventually. Until that happens, someone with an un-erase program can locate the data sectors on the hard drive and reconstruct the original file.
If you really want to delete files, you have to overwrite the data so that it can’t be recovered. This requires multiple over-writes, usually either three or seven. It depends how much security you need.
There’s a wide range of free file and disk erasure programs, including Heidi’s Eraser, FreeRaser, Darik’s Boot And Nuke (better known as DBAN) and Disk Wipe. I’ve suggested Heidi’s Eraser before, and it has some video tutorials.
Saving the OS
Erasing the whole drive is effective but it also deletes the operating system and hidden recovery partitions. This may not be the most useful approach if you are selling a PC, though the buyer can easily reinstall Windows 10, if applicable, or an earlier version of Windows if there’s a legible product key on the COA (Certificate of Authenticity) stuck to the case.
In many cases, it’s simpler to erase all the files on the drive’s active partition (C:) and then reinstall the operating system. This will remove all the data that various programs have stashed in their own directories, which you may not even know about. In particular, it will remove any email files that programs such as Windows Live Mail, eM Client and Thunderbird have stored on your hard drive. If you have any emails that are not backed up, you should rescue them before erasing the hard drive.
With Windows Live Mail, copy the whole Windows Live Mail folder at C:\Users\Your_ID\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Live Mail. The emails are stored as separate eml files, so you can find the folder by searching for those.
In your case, a three-step approach might give reasonable security without wasting too much time and effort.
First, with the drive in an external enclosure, run Piriform’s CCleaner to remove temporary internet files, cache files, log files and other rubbish. Check the root directory (formerly C:) for the hiberfil.sys, pagefile.sys and swapfile.sys files, and if you find them, delete them. Second, run a disk defragmentation program – a defragger such as Auslogic’s Disk Defrag Free – to compact the remaining files. Finally, use a disk eraser to securely overwrite the remaining hard drive space.
The big security hole in this approach will be any still-working programs that you have allowed to store passwords. You could change them, but will you remember all the ones that need changing?
If you have a working PC running Windows 8 to 10, you can reset the PC to factory condition. To do this, run the Settings app (the cogwheel), select Update & Security, click Recover in the left-hand menu, then “Reset this PC”. If you are parting with a drive or a PC, you must select “Remove files and clean the drive” to stop files from being recovered. Obviously, this takes longer.
Laptop for repair
Another reader, Ben, asked about the security of his personal data when his laptop goes in for repair. The problem is that, unless the whole hard drive is encrypted with Windows BitLocker, TrueCrypt or a similar program, someone with physical possession of the hard drive can almost certainly read it. They don’t even have to boot Windows: they can read the drive from a Linux Live CD or USB memory stick. (Windows sets file permissions, but if Windows isn’t loaded, the permissions don’t mean anything.)
Of course, you can encrypt sensitive files separately, but not many people do that, and when a problem strikes, it may be too late …
Modern SSDs are a bit more secure because they encrypt everything all the time. However, the encryption may be transparent to Windows, so that doesn’t necessarily protect you if someone can run Windows.
It should be possible to make a backup and reset the PC before releasing it for repair, then restore your system after you get it back. If you have a better idea, please let me know in the comments below.
Maker of iPhone publishes the pay of its top earners in a regulatory filing, but its chief designer, Jony Ive, is not included
Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, was paid $102m (£76m) this year after collecting a huge share bonus linked to the iPhone maker’s stock market performance.
Cook was paid a basic salary of $3.06m, a cash bonus of $9.3m (up from $5.4m last year), and collected share awards worth $89m taking his total 2017 payout to $102m, Apple disclosed in a regulatory filing.
The bonus of 560,000 shares paid out in September. Cook received half the award because Apple’s stock delivered shareholder returns in the top third of the Standard & Poor’s 500 index during the past three years. He got the other 280,000 shares for simply staying in the job.
The stock package awarded to Cook when he became chief executive in 2011 was originally valued at $376m, but is now worth much more because Apple shares have increased six-fold since he signed the deal.
As long as he remains the boss, Cook will receive 560,000 shares of stock annually until 2020. He will then get 1.26m shares in August 2021 as the final payment under his original contract.
Apple’s filing also revealed that it requires Cook to travel by private aircraft “for all business and personal travel” for security reasons. Cook’s use of the private jet for his holidays cost the company $93,000. The cost of his personal security detail was $224,000.
Cook collected an extra $104,000 in “vacation cash out”, and his basic $3m salary was increased to $3,057,692 “because 2017 was a 53-week fiscal year, the 2017 salary amounts reflect an extra week of pay”. That extra week’s pay is slightly more than the median US annual household income of $56,516, according to the US Census.
Cook’s top five lieutenants were paid about $24.2m each. Luca Maestri, chief financial officer; Angela Ahrendts, head of retail; Johny Srouji, head of hardware technology; Dan Riccio, head of hardware engineering; and Bruce Sewell, the outgoing general counsel, collected $20m in share awards, cash bonuses of $3.1m and basic pay of just over $1m.
The amount paid to Jony Ive, the company’s British chief design officer, was not included in the filing.
Apple’s shares have increased by more than 200% since Cook became chief executive in August 2011, shortly before founder and previous chief executive Steve Jobs died.
The shares peaked at $176.4 on 18 December but have since weakened slightly to $170.60 following reports of weaker than expected demand for its new $999 iPhone X.
Apple has apologised after facing criticism for admitting it deliberately slows down some ageing iPhone models. The company now says it will replace batteries for less and will issue software in 2018 so customers can monitor their phone's battery health. Some customers had long suspected the company slowed older iPhones to encourage customers to upgrade. Apple admitted slowing some phones with ageing batteries but said it was to "prolong the life" of the devices. In a statement posted on its website, the firm said it would reduce the price of an out-of-warranty battery replacement from $79 to $29 in the US for anyone with an iPhone 6 or later. In the UK the prices will drop from £79 to £25.
It said it was pushing ahead with measures to "address customers' concerns, to recognise their loyalty and to regain the trust of anyone who may have doubted Apple's intentions". "At Apple, our customers' trust means everything to us. We will never stop working to earn and maintain it. We are able to do the work we love only because of your faith and support - and we will never forget that or take it for granted," it said. The firm has had eight separate lawsuits in the US filed against it over the matter, and had also been facing additional legal action in Israel and France. Apple acknowledged earlier this month that it does deliberately slow down some models of the iPhone as they age.
It said it had made changes to the iOS operating system to manage ageing lithium-ion batteries in some devices, because the batteries' performance diminishes over time. "Lithium-ion batteries become less capable of supplying peak current demands when in cold conditions, [when they] have a low battery charge or as they age over time, which can result in the device unexpectedly shutting down to protect its electronic components," the company said. It also emerged on Thursday that the tech giant's chief executive Tim Cook had been ordered by the firm to only use private jets for both business and personal transport for security reasons.
South Australian government’s announcement hailed by this year’s winner Amanda Spratt as ‘a huge step forward for equality’ Riders in ...
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One thing we do know is the story is coming to a fiery end. In the next few million years, the star will swell, devouring its final planet. Then, HD76920b will be no more.
