Maxim Bange

Palestinian dissident group takes over its homepage

Remember Google's fancy laptop, the Chromebook Pixel?

There's a new one now that's a lot more affordable than the $1,300 Google asks for it.

Today, Google and HP announced the HP Chromebook 11, an 11-inch laptop with a super-sharp screen that runs Google's Chrome operating system. It only costs $279.

(If you're unfamiliar, Google's Chrome operating system is essentially just a tweaked version of the Chrome browser. Instead of storing most stuff to your computer, you store it all online using the Google Drive cloud storage service.)

Even though the device is cheap, it's extremely well built. The Chromebook 11 is made from durable plastic that includes a sturdy frame on the inside so it doesn't bend or creak. It comes in black or white. The white version has a variety of Google-themed color accents like blue, green, or yellow.

Another interesting spec: The Chromebook 11 charges with a normal USB cord, the same kind used on just about every non-Apple smartphone or tablet. 

The screen is just about as sharp as the one on the Chromebook Pixel, but doesn't include touch to keep costs down. (You don't really need touchscreens on a laptop running Chrome anyway.)

The Chromebook 11 goes on sale starting today. You can get it directly from Google or at stores like Best Buy.

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A comet that struck Earth around 28 million years ago annihilated part of modern-day Egypt — but managed to leave behind a few relics for modern scientists to marvel over.

According to a team of South African researchers, a small pebble discovered by an Egyptian geologist in 1996 has been identified as having come from an ancient comet. Although comet material has been identified in atmospheric and Antarctic dust, this pebble marks the first time that a comet fragment of such size has been found on Earth. That fragment was analyzed by the team of researchers, who published their results this week in Earth and Planetary Science Letters. Using techniques that included X-ray diffraction and Raman spectroscopy, they were able to...

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Microsoft has been trying to persuade Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC to load the Windows Phone OS jointly with Android on future smartphones, it has been reported.

Today is Russian macho-man Vladimir Putin's birthday. The Russian president turns 61 years old.

We don't know what he's doing to celebrate it — perhaps an elephant hunt, bear wrestling, or maybe just spending the day at home while propping up a brutal Syrian regime — but the President has aggressively worked to develop a macho image.

He's successfully maintained control of Russia since 1999 in part due to his publicity campaigns.

Here are 39 photos that confirm that Vladimir Putin is a consummate badass.

Vladimir Putin is a consummate outdoors-man. Here Putin recharges on a visit to the Siberian Khakasiya region.

A 16-year veteran of the KGB, Putin knows his way around a gun. After his retirement in 1991, he rapidly rose through Russian politics to become top dog in the world's largest nation.

Here, Putin trains with an assault rifle simulator.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Grand Theft Auto 5's shocking world of murder, theft and golf is a much more soothing place when it's narrated by Morgan Freeman — or in this case, Morgan Freeman impersonator Jason Stephens.

Machinima shared a video of Stephens' spot on impression via its YouTube channel. The video follows one of Grand Theft Auto 5's three anti-heroes, Franklin, as he visits with a paid lady friend, takes an unintentional swim and picks up a new vehicle. You can watch Stephens' very NSFW video, "Franklin's Shitty Vacation," above.

More of Stephens' voice work, including impressions of Christopher Walken, Charlie Sheen and Kermit the Frog, are available on his website.

Zombie Studios' horror game Daylight will support the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, the developer announced last week, giving fans of scares delivered via video game the chance to immerse themselves deeper in the experience. At Indiecade in Culver City, Calif. this weekend, Zombie brought its Unreal Engine 4-powered game and an Oculus Rift dev kit to show how effective their take on VR horror will be.

In a time-limited demo, we explored the abandoned, haunted asylum of Daylight. Guided only by the light of the protagonist's smartphone flashlight and its glowing LCD screen, we chased down shadows while looking for a way out of the game's creepy procedurally-generated hospital. Unfortunately, I had little in the way of success.

B...

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It’s been a tricky couple of years for AMD’s graphics card division. Not because the last batch of Radeon HDs were bad, but because the competition’s offerings were often better — and because improvements in integrated graphics have hurt demand for discrete GPUs in general. However, as was revealed …

The post AMD’s graphics card comeback: the new R7 series, R9 series and Mantle appeared first on AIVAnet.

Tomb Raider, Thomas Was Alone and Lego City Undercover have been shortlisted for the 2013 Writers' Guild Awards video game category, according to the Writers' Guild of Great Britian website.

Writers Rhianna Pratchett for Tomb Raider and Graham Goring for Lego City Undercover are in the running to win the video game writing award from the Guild, along with Mike Bithell for Thomas Was Alone. The Thomas Was Alone writer is currently working on his second game, a modder-friendly crime-simulator called Volume.

We previously spoke to Pratchett about her work on the Tomb Raider reboot, where she discusses how Lara Croft's backstory "finds a middle ground between strict adherence to canon and poetic liberty."

The video game award is one...

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A team from Holland's Delft University is leading the world's toughest solar car race at the end of its second day.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has confirmed that it won't prosecute gamers for participating in pretend war crimes, but that doesn't mean it wants to leave the topic alone. The Committee has released a statement in which it outlines its desire to collaborate with videogame developers to show the consequences of a player's actions if they engage in virtual torture, the harming of civilians, attacks on medical personnel, or anything else covered by the Geneva Convention.

It stopped short of clarifying quite what these consequences should be, suggesting only that "game scenarios should not reward players for actions that in real life would be considered war crimes." On the other hand, the ICRC feels players found...

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Nederland telt vergeleken met andere landen weinig laaggeletterden, maar het aantal neemt wel toe. Dat staat in een OESO-onderzoek naar de reken- en taal- vaardigheden van 16- tot 65-jarigen.

Armed with corporate credit cards, you’d think businesspeople would hit up steak houses, but it turns out that they’re far more likely to opt for Big Macs at McDonald’s.

Earlier this year Yahoo banned working from home, forcing all employees to come into the company's offices. It was a huge, national controversy. 

Now it looks like HP is trying to do something similar, though not nearly as harsh or as strict. 

Arik Hesseldahl at All Things D reports, "HP employees are being told by bosses that if they can work at the office, they should work at the office."

He also says, "the rules governing work from home are being tightened and decisions about who gets to do it will now be made at a higher management level than before."

Hesseldahl got a look at an internal Q&A from HP to its staff, saying that it needs everyone in the office to turn the company around.

"During this critical turnaround period, HP needs all hands on deck," says the internal document. "We recognize that in the past, we may have asked certain employees to work from home for various reasons. We now need to build a stronger culture of engagement and collaboration and the more employees we get into the office the better company we will be."

As you can see, this is nowhere near as harsh or as strict as Yahoo's outright work from home ban. 

But, that might be due to the fact that HP has ~300,000 employees worldwide. Hesseldahl estimates that ~80,000 work from home due in part to the fact that HP just doesn't have office space for all of its employees. 

Read more at All Things D >

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Taiwan's Foxconn Technology Group wants to jump-start a new manufacturing operation in Indonesia next year, potentially bringing in more smartphones to the country.

Drones zijn de laatste tijd vaak in het nieuws, vooral met betrekking tot privacy. Maar die uit de ruimtevaart afkomstige onbemande vliegtuigjes kunnen voor veel meer dingen gebruikt worden dan spionage. Ze zijn het onderwerp van de dertiende editie van Woensdagmorgen.nl.

Ter ere van het 200-jarige bestaan van het Nederlandse koninkrijk wordt een munt met alle zeven Nederlandse vorsten geslagen. Het portret van Willem-Alexander is en profil weergegeven met een lint, dat doorloopt in portretten van zijn zes voorgangers.

De Koninklijke Munt biedt ook een gekleurde versie aan van de munt, die 2 euro waard is. Volgens de maker is dat een primeur in Nederland.

De munt wordt ook verkocht in een setje van zeven, waarin ook originele munten met Willem II, Willem III Wilhelmina, Juliana en Beatrix zijn opgenomen en een replica van de inhuldigingspenning van Willem I.

Herdenkingsmunt

De munt is niet de eerste met de nieuwe koning. Eind april werd al een Koningstientje geslagen, waarop de aanstaande koning met de tekst 'Je maintiendrai' stond. Het ging om een herdenkingsmunt die ook als betaalmiddel gebruikt kan worden.

Ook nu gaat het weer om een herdenkingsmunt. De reguliere euromunten moeten begin volgend jaar in roulatie komen. Het portret daarvan wordt naar verluidt gemaakt door Erwin Olaf.

This was a tough year for Internet freedom around the world.

In Pakistan, the government blocked thousands of websites. There was a dramatic increase in web censorship in Venezuela surrounding President Hugo Chavez's death. The Edward Snowden leaks in the U.S. caused a wake-up call about how much the government monitors our online conversations.

In the last three years, overall freedom on the web globally has steadily declined, with significant downgrades in four countries since 2012, the United States included, according to a report just published by Freedom House.

Not surprisingly, the United States was dinged in the survey due to reports of extensive NSA surveillance tied to intelligence gathering and counterterrorism. America landed a tie with Germany in the No. 3 spot. Iceland came in at No. 1, the best in the world for Internet freedom, and Estonia landed in No. 2.

Iran is dead last behind China and Cuba.

Freedom House scored countries based on laws and directives that restrict online speech, the number of arrests of individuals for online posting, intimidation against social media users and surveillance.

According to the report, these are the ten most common ways governments try and control use of the Internet:

• Blocking and filtering
• Cyberattacks against regime critics
• New laws and arrests for political, religious, or social speech online
• Paid pro-government commentators manipulating online discussion
• Physical attacks and murder
• Surveillance
• Takedown requests and forced deletion of content
• Blanket blocking of social media platforms
• Holding intermediaries liable
• Throttling or shutting down Internet and mobile services

Check out the Freedom Network's map of Internet freedom:

You can read the full report here.

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Each year, more than 2,000 architects from 60 countries around the world gather to attend the World Architecture Festival, which features the largest and most prestigious annual awards ceremony for the industry. 

The festival took place October 2nd - 4th at Singapore's Marina Bay Sands, which was also once a WAF Award-winning design.

These 29 incredible designs were winners in their respective categories, which included Housing, Villa, and Office. Among the winners are repurposed public spaces, brand-new constructions, and even buildings that have yet to be started. Completed buildings were finished between January 1, 2012 and June 1, 2013. There is no time restriction on buildings in the "future projects" categories.

BEST HOUSE: This Australian house was created when a tiny caretaker's cottage was recycled and expanded to remove unused space.

Winner in House category: 'The Left-Over-Space House" by Cox Rayner Architects, Australia 

BEST IN HOUSING: The architects of this Los Angeles apartment complex restored and expanded on what used to be a YMCA in the 1920s.

Winner in Housing category: "28th Street Apartments" by Koning Eizenberg Architecture, USA 

BEST OFFICE: This Norwegian building is made up of five layers of offices stacked on top of each other.

Winner in Office category: "Statoil Regional and International Offices" by A-Lab, Norway

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Google Apps scored some enterprise street cred on Monday by announcing a huge customer: Whirlpool.

Whirlpool has 68,000 employees and 66 facilities around the world who will standardize on Apps, Google's cloud email and office productivity suite. Whirlpool did not ditch Microsoft Exchange or Office for Google. It was using IBM's Lotus Notes, its CIO Michael Heim told the Wall Street Journal.

Even so, Whirlpool is a feather in Google's cap for its sheer size and name recognition. Some 5 million businesses are using Google Apps, Google claims. The majority are small to mid-sized businesses.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has been crowing that its competitor to Apps, Office 365, the cloud version of its Microsoft Office apps, is the "fastest growing product" in company history on track to generate $1.5 billion worth of revenue on annual basis. It says it convinced 430 customers to come back to Microsoft after trying Google Apps.

Microsoft has also been snagging some giant contracts for Office 365 including a 100,000-employee deal with State of Texas early this year, a 600,000-seat contract with the Department of Veterans and a 200,000-seat contract with Toyota last year.

Toyota told Business Insider that it looked at Google Apps, but ultimately decided against Google largely because Google's enterprise sales team wasn't set up to deal with the complicated sales process of a huge multinational company. We heard a similar story from another enterprise earlier this year.

We've predicted that such a situation wouldn't last long because Google has been madly hiring enterprise sales folks for months.

Now, with Whirlpool, Google Apps might have all the pieces in place to serve large enterprises. That's got to be making Microsoft really nervous.

SEE ALSO: Tour Google's Luxurious 'Googleplex' Campus In California

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Steve Ballmer's long, slow good-bye to all things Microsoft continued on Monday afternoon when he published "the last shareholder letter I will write as the CEO of the company I love."

In it, he tried to sell shareholders again on his vision for the company. This includes his major reorganization last summer, the value of Bing, a justification for buying Skype for $8.6 billion in 2011 and for buying Nokia's device business for $7 billion last month.

The letter was published with Microsoft's annual report.

It's Ballmer's latest in a long string of good-byes as he prepares to retire from the CEO job. Always an emotional guy, in recent weeks, Ballmer wept through his final speech to 13,000 Microsoft staffers; talked about how weird it was to come to work these days and opened up about his biggest regrets.

Here's the letter:

TO OUR SHAREHOLDERS, CUSTOMERS, PARTNERS AND EMPLOYEES:

This is a unique letter for me — the last shareholder letter I will write as the CEO of the company I love. We have always believed that technology will unleash human potential and that is why I have come to work every day with a heart full of passion for more than 30 years.

Fiscal Year 2013 was a pivotal year for Microsoft in every sense of the word.

Last year in my letter to you I declared a fundamental shift in our business to a devices and services company. This transformation impacts how we run the company, how we develop new experiences, and how we take products to market for both consumers and businesses.

This past year we took the first big bold steps forward in our transformation and we did it while growing revenue to $77.8 billion (up 6 percent). In addition, we returned $12.3 billion (up 15 percent) to shareholders through dividends and stock repurchases. While we were able to grow revenue to a record level, our earnings results reflect investments as well as some of the challenges of undertaking a transformation of this magnitude.

With this as backdrop, I’d like to summarize where we are now and where we’re headed, because it helps explain why I’m so enthusiastic about the opportunity ahead.

Our strategy: High-value activities enabled by a family of devices and services

We are still in the early days of our transformation, yet we made strong progress in the past year launching devices and services that people love and businesses need. We brought Windows 8 to the world; we brought consistent user experiences to PCs, tablets, phones and Xbox; and we made important advancements to Windows Server, Windows Azure, Microsoft Dynamics and Office 365. We are proud of what we accomplished this year and continue to be passionate about delivering better devices and services more quickly.

To increase innovation, capability, efficiency and speed we further sharpened our strategy, and in July 2013 we announced we are rallying behind a single strategy as One Microsoft. We declared that Microsoft’s focus going forward will be to create a family of devices and services for individuals and businesses that empower people around the globe at home, at work and on the go, for the activities they value most.

Over time, our focus on high-value activities will generate amazing innovation and new areas of growth. What is a high-value activity? Think of the experiences people have every day that are most important to them — from communicating with a family member and researching a term paper to having serious fun and expressing ideas. In a business setting, high-value activities include experiences such as conducting meetings with colleagues in multiple locations, gaining insight from massive amounts of data and information, and interacting with customers.

Microsoft will enable these types of high-value activities with a family of devices — from both Microsoft and our partners — as well as with our services.

As we go to market, we will primarily monetize our high-value activities by leading with devices and enterprise services. In this model, our consumer services such as Bing and Skype will differentiate our devices and serve as an on-ramp to our enterprise services while generating some revenue from subscriptions and advertising. Enterprise services continue to be an area of great strength, growth and opportunity as businesses of all sizes look to Microsoft to help them move to the cloud, manage a growing number of devices, tap into big data and embrace new social capabilities.

Executing and accelerating

In the past year we took many bold steps forward in executing on our strategy.

First, we are well underway in implementing the new organization structure announced in July. The teams are working together in new and exciting ways. The key change we made is deceptively simple but profoundly powerful: Instead of organizing our teams around individual products, we’ve organized by function, including, for example, engineering, sales, marketing and finance. It ensures we have one strategy and work as one team with one set of shared goals.

Second, in September we announced we are purchasing Nokia’s Devices and Services business — including its smartphone and mobile phone businesses; award-winning engineering and design teams; manufacturing and assembly facilities around the world; and teams devoted to operations, sales, marketing and support. This is a signature event in our transformation and will bring together the best mobile device work of Microsoft and Nokia. It will accelerate our growth with Windows Phone while strengthening our overall device ecosystem and our opportunity.

Third, in September, we also announced a new segment-reporting framework. We have five new reporting segments tightly aligned with our focus on delivering innovative devices and services for both our enterprise and consumer customers. This framework was designed to give valuable insight into our progress in the key transformations we are undertaking in our businesses to drive long-term growth.

As I think about what’s ahead, I’m incredibly optimistic about what Microsoft will deliver. We are accelerating as we bring to market Windows 8.1 PCs and tablets with our partners, Surface 2, Xbox One and new phones; advance our enterprise services including Windows Server, Windows Azure, Microsoft Dynamics and Office 365; and innovate on new high-value activities.

Moving forward

With the decisions we’ve made this year, the strategy we’ve put in place, the organization we’ve designed, the world-class talent we have, and the devices and services we are creating, we are well-positioned to deliver growth and world-changing technology long into the future.

We have seen incredible results in the past decade — delivering more than $200 billion in operating profit. I’m optimistic not only as the CEO but as an investor who treasures his Microsoft stock.

Working at Microsoft has been a thrilling experience — we’ve changed the world and delivered record-setting success — and I know our best days are still ahead.

Thank you for your support.

Steven A. Ballmer
Chief Executive Officer
September 27, 2013

 

SEE ALSO: This Chart Shows Steve Ballmer's New Vision For Microsoft

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The premise of the challenge was simple: Survive one week without using any mobile apps whatsoever. Basically, I would willfully reduce my high-powered cellphone into a husk of its former self, demote it to dumbphone status so I could only use it to text, make phone calls, and jolt myself into consciousness in the morning with an alarm.

Despite being a tech lover, I’m not an app junkie by any means. I pretty much stick to the basics and my very low interest in games saves me from dropping dough on Candy Crush Saga or anything else. One week of deprivation couldn’t be that hard.

Ha.

Denial

You don't realize how often you scroll through your Twitter feed until you can no longer scroll through your Twitter feed.

The morning of my first App-less Day was a whirlwind of little realizations. I couldn’t wake up to a leisurely perusal of Tumblr, read the headlines of the top New York Times stories, or check the weather. Okay, sure, I technically could have done all those things on my real computer, but the clunkier process deterred me.

Then in my haste to leave my apartment, I also completely forgot to grab either a book or my iPod. Usually, before work, I catch up on the developments in the tech world by perusing a few Twitter lists and refreshing my Feedly on the train (I take the 7, so I have a solid 15 minutes above ground before descending into the connectionless bowels of the city).

Today:  zip, zero, nothing. 

Sardined between the other sleepy commuters, I gazed coolly at their phones and MP3 players, feeling like a pseudo-martyr on a quest towards app-free enlightenment. Although I felt less prepared going into work, I congratulated myself for my restraint and for noticing all the crazy-cool graffiti that I didn’t usually lift my eyes to see. 

As the day got going, though, it didn’t take me long to discover my own nervous tic: I have a habit of clicking on my phone, jabbing the Twitter app, and refreshing it absent-mindedly, checking for mentions or replies. Now, all I was doing was clicking my phone on, staring at the screen, and clicking it back off forlornly. 

Other withdrawal symptoms started manifesting themselves loud and clear, too: I would fiddle with my phone purposelessly, make weirdly prolonged eye contact, feel like that poor clueless kid in middle school who’s always missing out on some inside joke. I also became a fairly manic texter, rekindling conversations that had fizzled out several days before because what the hell else was I supposed to do while waiting in line for my bagel?

Shock

Get off your phones, you jerks. 

When you have a smartphone, it’s like you’re never alone. Or bored. Boredom disappears because you always have something to read, or watch, or stare at blankly while avoiding conversation on the elevator. 

Without a smartphone, you realize how much alone time you really have. 

That, and how much of your daily existence you usually feel the need to share with the world. Cutting off my normal regimen of Foursquare, Tumblr, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook, I watched my communication levels plummet. It was like all my hilarious, pithy observations were going to waste inside my own brain! So many delicious meals unphotographed!

Also, I started noticing other people’s cell phone use with the same wrath as my mother would. Whenever I was talking to someone and noticed their eyes flit towards their little screen, I’d be overwhelmed with a matronly indignation. The nerve! 

I felt it the most when I entered the eerie quiet of a packed 7 train at 6 p.m. We were all doing our own thing, except I had no thing, so I was just staring at everyone else, especially the silent 20-somethings with their backs and necks hunched over their glowing devices. Hey, former self. 

Waiting feels so much more significant when you have nothing to do, and, fine, I’ll admit it: Bathroom visits got a whole lot more boring. 

Horror

One frustration after the next.

At the beginning of the week, I made a seminally bad decision in deciding not to turn off my app notifications. Meaning that every time I received a message, tweet, like, or reblog, I would have to willfully ignore it. Oh, the emails I forced myself to flick away! The Snapchats I had to ignore! 

Snapchat really did kill me, too. I’d get a snap from someone, want to tell them why I couldn’t respond for a week, and then realize that I didn’t actually have their number, just their Snap handle. Awkward.

Plus, I’m in a long-distance relationship, and sometimes you just need to send your boyfriend a cross-eyed selfie, ya know?

A particularly embarrassing app-free moment occurred at work when I saw on my phone that I’d been tagged in a picture on Facebook. I swiped away the notification and went to check it out on my real computer. LOL’s commenced ... Until I realized that the hilariously fugly photo of me was not illuminated on my own, tiny, personal screen, but glowing brightly towards the entire half of the office sitting behind me. Checking your personal FB at work: not recommended without a phone. 

In general, the glorious privacy of a smartphone allows you to search for the things you’d be embarrassed to have anyone else see—including the simple math equations that you should be able to do in your head (by God, did I miss my calculator app). 

Going app-abstinent also meant that I was constantly forgetting things. No ever-present to-do lists, no quickly typed reminders or long-reads saved for later. Instead of writing notes for this article on my phone, I had to bust out a good ol’ fashioned pen and paper. The inconvenience of the extended elbows necessary for the physical writing process earned me more than a couple of glares on the train. Whoops. 

Temptation

Lead us not into temptation, but help me find where the eff I am.

I found truth in my mother’s other favorite mantra one evening after work: “You kids don’t know how to get anywhere these days without your phones.”

I’d walked to a Happy Hour with a friend, but several hard ciders later, I peaced out alone. Slightly buzzed, I tried to make my way to the subway without my trusty Google Maps and I don’t dramatize when I say that I quite literally walked in a circle. 

Then, the next day, I wanted to try out a new coffee shop to force myself to be productive, but I neither had any idea where I should go, nor would have been able to find my way there without a map. I felt a surge of longing for my good pal Yelp.  

Midway through the week, apps I don’t usually even use began to tempt me and I felt the strain of having to be tethered to a computer to send updates or give warnings (like when I realized on the subway platform that, sorry boss, I was going to be about 40 minutes late for work). 

Probably the greatest temptation to my streak came Thursday night, when I had to wait a half hour with absolutely nothing to do for my friend to get into Port Authority. My finger hovered over that Tumblr icon nearly to the point of pain. 

(Semi)Acceptance 

I got a crash-course in my own thought process. 

Admittedly, there were some situations where it was almost nice not using apps: I felt like I had an excuse to be even lazier than I am usually. 

“Um, you should find us a place to eat on Yelp!” 

“Will you just look up the directions on your phone, please?” 

“Someone else should take the picture, actually. I can’t Instagram it!” 

“I don’t know, why don’t you Google it?” 

I was like a very bossy little kid, almost gleeful about the fact that I couldn’t operate sufficiently on my own. 

I had a lot of one-on-one time with my brain, got to coo over way more adorable babies on the train than I would have if my eyes were glued to a screen, and forced myself into lots of small talk. 

In a way, abstaining from apps came down to trust. I just had to trust that I didn’t need to be connected 24/7. The world wouldn’t spontaneously combust if I didn’t read a tweet, send an email, respond to a Snap. 

No, I definitely couldn’t give up my beloved apps on any permanent basis, but it was nice to give myself a brief break from the constant connection. 

Now, see y’allz on Instagram. 

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American adults out-performed by many global peers on workplace skills assessment test

WASHINGTON (AP) — It's long been known that America's school kids haven't measured well compared with international peers. Now, there's a new twist: Adults don't either.

In math, reading and problem-solving using technology — all skills considered critical for global competitiveness and economic strength — American adults scored below the international average on a global test, according to results released Tuesday.

Adults in Japan, Canada, Australia, Finland and multiple other countries scored significantly higher than the United States in all three areas on the test. Beyond basic reading and math, respondents were tested on activities such as calculating mileage reimbursement due to a salesman, sorting email and comparing food expiration dates on grocery store tags.

Not only did Americans score poorly compared to many international competitors, the findings reinforced just how large the gap is between the nation's high- and low-skilled workers and how hard it is to move ahead when your parents haven't.

In both reading and math, for example, those with college educated parents did better than those whose parents did not complete high school.

The study, called the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, found that it was easier on average to overcome this and other barriers to literacy overseas than in the United States.

Researchers tested about 157,000 people ages 16 to 65 in more than 20 countries and subnational regions. It was developed and released by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which is made up of mostly industrialized member countries. The Education Department's Center for Education Statistics participated.

The findings were equally grim for many European countries — Italy and Spain, among the hardest hit by the recession and debt crisis, ranked at the bottom across generations. Unemployment is well over 25 percent in Spain and over 12 percent in Italy. Spain has drastically cut education spending, drawing student street protests.

But in the northern European countries that have fared better, the picture was brighter — and the study credits continuing education. In Finland, Denmark, and the Netherlands, more than 60 percent of adults took part is either job training or continuing education. In Italy, by contrast, the rate was half that.

As the American economy sputters along and many people live paycheck-to-paycheck, economists say a highly-skilled workforce is key to economic recovery. The median hourly wage of workers scoring on the highest level in literacy on the test is more than 60 percent higher than for workers scoring at the lowest level, and those with low literacy skills were more than twice as likely to be unemployed.

"It's not just the kids who require more and more preparation to get access to the economy, it's more and more the adults don't have the skills to stay in it," said Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a statement the nation needs to find ways to reach more adults to upgrade their skills. Otherwise, he said, "no matter how hard they work, these adults will be stuck, unable to support their families and contribute fully to our country. "

Among the other findings:

—Americans scored toward the bottom in the category of problem solving in a technology rich environment. The top five scores in the areas were from Japan, Finland, Australia, Sweden and Norway, while the U.S. score was on par with England, Estonia, Ireland and Poland. In nearly all countries, at least 10 percent of adults lacked the most basic of computer skills such as using a mouse.

—Japanese and Dutch adults who were ages 25 to 34 and only completed high school easily outperformed Italian or Spanish university graduates of the same age.

—In England, Germany, Italy, Poland, and the United States, social background has a big impact on literacy skills, meaning the children of parents with low levels of education have lower reading skills.

America's school kids have historically scored low on international assessment tests compared to other countries, which is often blamed on the diversity of the population and the high number of immigrants. Also, achievement tests have long shown that a large chunk of the U.S. student population lacks basic reading and math skills — most pronounced among low-income and minority students.

This test could suggest students leaving high school without certain basic skills aren't obtaining them later on the job or in an education program.

The United States will have a tough time catching up because money at the state and local level, a major source of education funding, has been slashed in recent years, said Jacob Kirkegaard, an economist with the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

"There is a race between man and machine here. The question here is always: Are you a worker for whom technology makes it possible to do a better job or are you a worker that the technology can replace?" he said. For those without the most basic skills, he said, the answer will be merciless and has the potential to extend into future generations. Learning is highly correlated with parents' education level.

"If you want to avoid having an underclass — a large group of people who are basically unemployable — this educational system is absolutely key," Kirkegaard said.

Dolores Perin, professor of psychology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, said the report provides a "good basis for an argument there should be more resources to support adults with low literacy."

Adults can learn new skills at any age and there are adult-geared programs around the country, Perin said. But, she said, the challenge is ensuring the programs have quality teaching and that adults regularly attend classes.

"If you find reading and writing hard, you've been working hard all day at two jobs, you've got a young child, are you actually going to go to class? It's challenging," Perin said.

Some economists say that large skills gap in the United States could matter even more in the future. America's economic competitors like China and India are simply larger than competitors of the past like Japan, Carnevale said. Even while America's top 10 percent of students can compete globally, Carnevale said, that doesn't cut it. China and India did not participate in this assessment.

"The skills in the middle are required and we're not producing them," Carnevale said.

Respondents were selected as part of a nationally represented sample. The test was primarily taken at home using a computer, but some respondents used a printed test booklet.

Among the other findings:

—Japan, Finland, Canada, Netherlands, Australia, Sweden, Norway, Flanders-Belgium, Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, and Korea all scored significantly higher than the United States in all three areas on the test.

—The average scores in literacy range from 250 in Italy to 296 in Japan. The U.S. average score was 270. (500 was the highest score in all three areas.) Average scores in 12 countries were higher than the average U.S. score.

—The average scores in math range from 246 in Spain to 288 in Japan. The U.S. average score was 253, below 18 other countries.

—The average scores on problem solving in technology-rich environments scale for adult ranged from 275 in Poland to 294 in Japan. The U.S. average score was 277, below 14 other countries.

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Online: http://www.oecd.org/site/piaac/publications.htm

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Follow Kimberly Hefling at http://www.twitter.com/khefling

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Lori Hinnant contributed to this report from Paris.

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Says it goes through 'rigorous' testing

De hackers die eerder de website van Leaseweb vervingen hebben de website van beveiligingsbedrijf AVG gedefaced. De aanvallers vervingen de website van het beveiligingsbedrijf met een politieke boodschap.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - When a Brazilian state prosecutor last year set out to silence anonymous Twitter messages that were revealing the location of drunk-driving checkpoints, he served the social media company's just-opened Sao Paolo office with a lawsuit.

Sharing sightings of police checkpoints does not violate any rules set by Twitter Inc, which has far fewer restrictions on content than social media rivals such as Facebook Inc. Nor would such Tweets be a crime in the United States. Twitter has traditionally resisted efforts to obtain the identity of users whose words might be regarded as a crime.

But in Brazil, Twitter quickly handed over the Internet protocol addresses of three accounts as a demonstration of its "good faith, respect and will to cooperate with the Brazilian judicial power," the company's lawyers said in a legal filing last October.

Even that wasn't enough: the lawsuit, which demands that the company bar any such accounts in the future, is ongoing.

The situation in Brazil is a microcosm of the public policy and business challenges facing Twitter as it seeks to translate global popularity into profits.

Since its inception, the 140-character messaging service's simplicity and mobile-friendly nature - it can be used by any cellphone with a text-messaging function - has helped speed its global adoption as a source of real-time information. Unlike many social media services, it can be used anonymously.

The company's laissez-faire approach to monitoring content, together with an aggressive posture in challenging government censorship requests and demands for customer information, have made it the darling of civil liberties advocates and political protesters from New York's Zuccotti Park to Cairo's Tahrir Square.

But now, as it prepares to become a public company with a valuation expected to exceed $10 billion, Twitter must figure out how to make money outside the U.S. International customers make up more than 75 percent of Twitter users, but only 25 percent of sales come from overseas.

That means opening offices and employing people on the ground: there are now seven overseas offices and counting. And that, in turn, means complying with local laws - even when they conflict with the company's oft-stated positioning as "the free-speech wing of the free-speech party."

These conflicts, paradoxically, arise not so much in countries with repressive governments - the service is banned outright in China, for instance - but rather in countries with Western-style democracies, including Brazil, Germany, France, Britain and India.

"There are a bunch of countries that you can't treat like China because they have democratic systems and they abide by the rule of law, but they have speech restrictions that we would find objectionable," said Andrew McLaughlin, a former director of global public policy at Google Inc and White House technology official who is now chief executive of news website Digg. "Those are the issues where the rubber hits the road on free speech."

In Twitter's initial public offering prospectus, which was made public last week, there was only an oblique mention of protecting speech. The company said its corporate mission was to facilitate the dissemination of "ideas and information instantly without barriers," and that "our business and revenue will always follow that mission in ways that improve - and do not detract from - a free and global conversation."

Alex Macgillivray, the former general counsel who coined the company's free speech slogan and was widely regarded as a staunch civil libertarian, left the company in September.

Twitter declined to comment about potential conflicts between its business goals and its free-speech advocacy in general, or any specific cases.

There's certainly no shortage of political chatter on Twitter, and world leaders ranging from Iranian President Hassan Rouhani to Pope Francis have taken to the service as a means of communicating directly with constituents.

Activists say they haven't seen Twitter backing away from its free-speech policies yet - but they're wary.

"Twitter has always been an ally," said Hisham Almiraat, a Moroccan blogger who manages the anti-censorship website Global Voices Advocacy. "As soon as Twitter becomes public, it needs to be accountable to its shareholders, and its strategy becomes more short-term. If Twitter, for reasons of greed, or because they are politically compelled, decides to change that core philosophy, then I'll worry."

OPPORTUNITY IN BRAZIL

A booming, social media-loving country of more than 80 million Internet users, Brazil perennially ranks among Twitter's most active markets. When the company set up operations in Sao Paolo in late 2012, the company's top sales executive, Adam Bain, described the opportunity in the country as "amazing from a business perspective."

As in many Latin American nations, the service is used by everyone from the president on down. And with Twitter proving to be a powerful companion medium for sports and other forms of televised entertainment, Brazil's role as host of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games make it an especially attractive target.

Yet the broad adoption of Twitter has not been accompanied by broad tolerance of the free-wheeling conversations that characterize social media in general and Twitter in particular. Brazilian government bodies regularly file more requests for user information or content removal than any country other than the U.S., according to transparency reports published periodically by companies including Twitter and Google.

Luis Fernando Canedo, the prosecutor in Brazil, described his case over the driving checkpoints as a landmark for the country - and also for Twitter, which had never before been sued by a government.

"Social networks are a relatively new reality and so is their impact," Canedo told Reuters. "There are future situations today we can't even imagine and in which the State will have to position itself in front of certain illegal, harmful practices being carried out over the Internet."

His case has not exactly gone smoothly. Even after obtaining Internet addresses from Twitter, the prosecutors misidentified the suspects behind the driving checkpoint Tweets.

They then dropped the case against the individuals, but still want Twitter to bar any such accounts in the future.

HATE SPEECH IN EUROPE

Twitter has long tried to hew to the position that users - not the company - are responsible for the content on the service. But last year it implemented a means of filtering Tweets by country, so that if it were forced to censor messages in one place it would still be able to show them in others.

That capability was used for the first time last October, when Twitter yielded to a request from German police to filter a neo-Nazi group's Twitter account so that users in Germany could not see it.

Earlier this year, just as Twitter's head of international strategy, Katie Jacobs Stanton, relocated to France to open Twitter's Paris office, Twitter's lawyers were fighting an order by a French court to reveal the email and IP addresses of users who had sent a spate of anti-Semitic tweets, which are prohibited under the country's hate-speech laws.

When Twitter exhausted its appeals in July, the company turned over the information.

In Britain, meanwhile, parliament in April passed a new defamation law that shifted liability to website operators for its users' posted content, which some observers said could hasten the end of online anonymity.

Like most global companies, Twitter has always acknowledged that it must obey the laws of the countries in which it operates. At the same time, though, it had little physical presence internationally and thus could take a hands-off approach.

Now, as Twitter grows its sales operation, absence is not a viable strategy.

"If you make the choice to operate in a country, you're subject to local laws," said Roy Gilbert, a former Google executive who set up the search giant's operations in India in 2004.

Twitter, moreover, may need local offices even more than some other Internet companies because its ad strategy depends on wooing large brand advertisers that need to be serviced by a direct sales presence, noted Clark Fredericksen, an analyst at eMarketer.

While Google can make money by allowing small businesses in a country to use its self-serve advertising platform, Twitter's self-serve ad product remains in its infancy and is only available in the U.S.

NEW PROBLEMS

In countries such as Egypt and Turkey, Twitter has sought to avoid falling under local jurisdiction by selling ads through contractors, although it remains unclear whether the strategy will be tenable in the long run.

Amid massive anti-government protests fueled by organizers on Twitter this summer, Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan threatened to shut down the service, which he called a "scourge."

His government called on Twitter to set up an office in the country so it would fall under Turkish law. Twitter rebuffed the request and weeks later posted a job for an executive in Dublin to manage ad resellers within Turkey.

Ozgur Uckan, a communication professor at Istanbul Bilgi University, said authorities may still be able to pressure the company by targeting its local partners. "The authorities may try to force Twitter to comply, using their regulation tools like tax issues," Uckan said.

In recent months, the ruling party backed away from its efforts to muzzle the service. Instead, it is adopting a tactic that has raised yet more questions about Twitter's future in the country.

The ruling AK Party recruited thousands of volunteers and paid workers to join Twitter, two party sources told Reuters. The pro-government volunteers have employed tactics such as reporting their political rivals as spammers, leading to their accounts' suspension.

"We decided to fight against them with their own tool and now we are more active on Twitter," said one party member, who asked not to be named.

The tactics proved so successful that Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo was pressed to make a statement in July denying that the company was cooperating with the Turkish government to suspend opposition accounts.

"You can't imagine the Internet without Twitter or Google. They are now considered the air you breathe," said Almiraat, the Moroccan blogger. "Now they're in a position of power, and they should be very careful with that power."

(Reporting by Gerry Shih in SAN FRANCISCO, Esteban Israel in SAO PAOLO, Matthew Smith in DUBAI, Parisa Hafezi in ANKARA, Andjarsari Paramaditha in JAKARTA; Editing by Jonathan Weber)

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