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Facebook said Tuesday it was reconfiguring its News Feed, in a move aimed at giving people more information about what is happening to "the friends you care about."

The world's biggest social network unveiled changes which decrease reliance on "referral" traffic or the sharing of news articles or other content.

"The goal of News Feed is to show you the content that matters to you," said a blog post by Facebook's Max Eulenstein and Lauren Scissors.

One of the key changes aims "to ensure that content posted directly by the friends you care about, such as photos, videos, status updates or links, will be higher up in News Feed so you are less likely to miss it," the blog said.

To make room, Facebook will push down items such as commentary on a news story or another person's post.

"Many people have told us they don't enjoy seeing stories about their friends liking or commenting on a post," Facebook said.

"This update will make these stories appear lower down in News Feed or not at all, so you are more likely to see the stuff you care about directly from friends and the pages you have liked."

Facebook also will relax its previous rule that prevented people from seeing multiple posts from the same source.

This change is aimed at "improving the experience for people who don't have a lot of content available to see," Eulenstein and Scissors wrote.

"Previously, we had rules in place to prevent you from seeing multiple posts from the same source in a row. With this update, we are relaxing this rule. Now if you run out of content, but want to spend more time in News Feed, you'll see more."

While the changes could drive down the so-called referral traffic such as articles shared from newspapers Facebook is reported to be in talks with media organizations to host this content in an effort to better target news at specific readers.

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Some technology and communication firms are helping militants avoid detection by developing systems that are "friendly to terrorists", Britain's top anti-terrorism police officer said on Tuesday.

Mark Rowley, the national police lead for counter-terrorism, said companies needed to think about their "corporate social responsibility" in creating products that made it hard for the authorities to access material during investigations.

"Some of the acceleration of technology, whether it's communications or other spheres, can be set up in different ways," Rowley told a conference in London.

"It can be set up in a way which is friendly to terrorists and helps them ... and creates challenges for law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Or it can be set up in a way which doesn't do that."

Ever since former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden disclosed the extent of surveillance by U.S. and British security agencies in 2013, intelligence chiefs have said the authorities' ability to monitor terrorism suspects had been severely degraded.

Documents leaked by Snowden showed spies had harvested data from the likes of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, leading some other firms to create new encryption and privacy products that make it hard for agents to intercept communications.

"Snowden has created an environment where some technology companies are less comfortable working with law reinforcement and intelligence agencies and the bad guys are better informed," Rowley told Reuters after his speech.

"We all love the benefit of the internet and all the rest of it, but we need their support in making sure that they're doing everything possible to stop their technology being exploited by terrorists. I'm saying that needs to be front and centre of their thinking and for some it is and some it isn't."

He declined to identify which firms he was referring to.

Rowley's comments echo those made in January by John Sawers, the former head of Britain's foreign intelligence service, who said trust between technology firms and governments had been shattered and needed to be rebuilt.

Prime Minister David Cameron has vowed to give the security and intelligence services new powers to monitor Internet communications should he win an election on May 7.

© Thomson Reuters 2015

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Twitter on Tuesday began implementing a new policy aimed at curbing use of the social network to incite violence, and to crack down on abuse and harassment on the service.

The new rules are the latest implemented by social networks aiming to stem violence and harassment while attempting to safeguard freedom of online speech.

"We need to ensure that voices are not silenced because people are afraid to speak up," said Twitter's head of product management Shreyas Doshi in a blog post.

"To that end, we are today announcing our latest product and policy updates that will help us in continuing to develop a platform on which users can safely engage with the world at large."

Some of the changes were outlined last week in a Washington Post column by Twitter general counsel Vijaya Gadde.

On Tuesday, Doshi noted that Twitter had updated its policy on violent threats "so that the prohibition is not limited to 'direct, specific threats of violence against others' but now extends to 'threats of violence against others or promot(ing) violence against others."

He said the previous policy "was unduly narrow and limited our ability to act on certain kinds of threatening behavior."

Twitter's new policy also allows the social network to "lock" abusive accounts for specific periods of time, which could help crack down on so-called cyberbullying and spam.

"This option gives us leverage in a variety of contexts, particularly where multiple users begin harassing a particular person or group of people," Doshi said.

Doshi also noted that Twitter would be testing "a product feature to help us identify suspected abusive Tweets and limit their reach."

The new tool, which was not described in detail, could help Twitter identify abusive activity by looking at "a wide range of signals and context that frequently correlates with abuse including the age of the account itself, and the similarity of a tweet to other content that our safety team has in the past independently determined to be abusive," said Doshi.

This tool "will not affect your ability to see content that you've explicitly sought out, such as tweets from accounts you follow, but instead is designed to help us limit the potential harm of abusive content," he noted.

Twitter's actions follow initiatives by Facebook as well as Facebook-owned Instagram that aim to crack down on abusive conduct and use of the platforms to promote violence.

Social networks have been struggling with defining acceptable content and freedom of expression, and radical extremism and violence increasingly linked to these services.

Facebook said last month it will not allow the social network to be used to promote terrorism or hate speech as it unveiled a wide-ranging update of its "community standards."

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Nokia's acquisition of smaller rival Alcatel-Lucent may avoid the pitfalls that befell earlier telecom network equipment marriages, thanks to a revolution over the past decade in how products are launched and developed.

The brains and brawn of telecom networks today lie in software, which is programmable and flexible, and not in customised hardware as in the past. Products are more modular with open interfaces that allow equipment from different manufacturers to talk to each other.

That should make it quicker and cheaper to combine the two companies' products, analysts and telecom executives said, and may help Nokia succeed where other acquisitions have struggled.

Nokia has promised $960 million of cost savings by 2019 from the Alcatel-Lucent acquisition, which is set to be completed in the first half of next year.

Analysts believe the biggest chunk will come from the wireless business where Nokia's 4G mobile network products will eventually replace those of Alcatel, allowing it to trim expensive R&D budgets and redeploy engineers.

The history of mergers in the telecom equipment sector is poor - including those that brought Alcatel together with Lucent, and Nokia with Siemens in 2006.

The cost savings promised from those deals ended up being given back to customers via lower prices because rivals Ericsson and Huawei went on the attack to steal contracts while the companies were distracted by their integrations.

Culling product portfolios also proved costly and slow because of the need to keep supporting gear already installed in major telecom carriers' networks. A mobile base station installed at an operator such as Verizon or Vodafone remains in service for a decade and the equipment maker commits a team of engineers to a "product development roadmap" to improve it over time.

This time more of those improvements can come from software upgrades so merging product lines will be easier, Nokia Chief Executive Rajeev Suri promised investors after unveiling the Alcatel deal.

"While some of our past integration experiences have been painful at times, you should not be thinking about swap-out costs in the same way as in the past," he said. Open interfaces, 4G technology and cloud computing "allow more rapid and efficient integration", he added.

Getting the transition right is essential to achieving the synergies and avoiding alienating major customers such as Verizon or AT&T, the two leading carriers in the United States which have installed Alcatel-Lucent's 4G technology.

"What took Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia Siemens four or five years to do on the product roadmaps last time around will only take two or three years this time," said Pierre Ferragu, analyst at Bernstein Research.

However, Exane BNP Paribas analyst Alexandre Peterc is less confident and predicted that only half the promised 900 million euros in cost savings will materialise.

Momentum risk
Risto Lehtilahti, union representative at Nokia's R&D unit in Oulu, Finland, expressed concern that the company would lose momentum with clients during the integration, as it had during the Siemens merger and purchase of Motorola's U.S. mobile assets.

"Market shares have never been sustained after these mergers. As we are going through the transition period and before the picture clarifies, part of the orders will go to the rivals Ericsson and Huawei," he explained.

"The clients know what those vendors have and how their systems work, while it could take one or two years for us to come up with the product portfolio and client systems."

Analysts have pointed to contracts at U.S. number three operator Sprint as vulnerable because Nokia and Alcatel are the two primary suppliers for the 4G rollout, and the carrier may want to bring back Ericsson to maintain competition.

China's three mobile carriers, which are in the midst of a huge national 4G expansion, could also shift their spending a bit more to Ericsson since the state had mandated that foreign suppliers each get 10 percent of the contracts. After the deal Nokia would have 20 percent versus Ericsson's 10 percent, which may prompt a rethink.

Analysts are divided over how much such "dis-synergies" could hurt Nokia, with Deutsche Bank saying contracts worth 1.5 billion euros are at risk and Bernstein putting it at less than one third of that level.

Nokia tried to reassure investors last week even as it admitted that some contracts could be at risk. "We know that in these kind of transactions there could be situations which are difficult to foresee beforehand... so we're being prudent," said Suri.

The companies will also need to get ahead in the next product cycle. Bringing together Nokia's strengths in wireless and Alcatel's in Internet routing equipment positions the company for 5G, the next generation of mobile technology, when distinctions between fixed and mobile gear will largely disappear.

While 5G is not expected to be introduced until 2020, analysts say carriers will judge 5G suppliers by their ability to present a single product roadmap by late 2017 or face a loss of market share for future orders.

© Thomson Reuters 2015

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Alerts about hit-and-runs and kidnappings in Los Angeles will soon pop up on traffic app Waze, along with road closure information, the West Coast city's mayor said Tuesday.

The agreement is part of a data-sharing partnership between LA and the Google-owned tech company announced by Mayor Eric Garcetti.

The app has already begun showing street closures and will start including hit-and-run alerts and so-called Amber Alerts sent out for kidnappings in the coming months.

"This is going to be updated in real-time, every two minutes, giving motorists the information they need to... get home for dinner in time," said Garcetti.

The agreement to add notifications about hit-and-run and kidnapping alerts was reached Monday "in a very good meeting" between Waze and LAPD Chief Charlie Beck," the mayor said.

In January, it emerged that Beck had sent a letter to the tech company's CEO lamenting that the Waze application posed a danger to police because of its ability to track their locations.

The LAPD chief said at the time that the shooter in a recent double murder of two New York police officers used the application to track the location of cops.

Waze is a traffic and navigation application to which users contribute information in order to share real-time road information.

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BlackBerry Ltd said on Tuesday it is launching a new certificate service that will help bring the security level it offers on smartphones to a slew of devices from cars to smart meters.

Certicom, a subsidiary of BlackBerry and an industry pioneer in elliptic curve cryptography, announced a new offering that it contends will secure millions of devices, expected to be part of the growing Internet of Things (IoT) sphere.

The company said it has already won a contract in Britain to issue certificates for the smart meter initiative there with more than 104 million smart meters and home energy management devices.

The service will make it much easier for companies rolling out such devices to authenticate and secure them, the company said.

Separately, BlackBerry also outlined a plan to expand its research and development efforts on innovation and improvement in computer security.

The initiative is being dubbed BlackBerry Center for High Assurance Computing Excellence (CHACE).

Increased network and device security has become a huge focus for large North American corporations in the face of costly and damaging security breaches.

U.S. retailer Target Corp is still recovering from a major breach in 2013 in which 40 million payment card numbers and 70 million other pieces of customer data such as email addresses and phone numbers were stolen.

Michaels Stores, the biggest U.S. arts and crafts retailer, said last year it had suffered a security breach that may have affected about 2.6 million payment cards.

BlackBerry said the fail-then-patch approach to managing security risk has become a widely accepted practise, but through CHACE it plans to develop tools and techniques that deliver a far higher level of protection than is currently available.

© Thomson Reuters 2015

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