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Uneasy first steps with Google Glass

By - Mar 15,2014 - Last updated at Mar 15,2014

NEW YORK — Shaped like a lopsided headband, Google Glass is an unassuming piece of technology when you’re holding it in your hands. You feel as if you can almost break it, testing its flexibility. Putting it on, though, is another story.

Once you do, this Internet-connected eyewear takes on a life of its own. You become “The Person Wearing Google Glass” and all the assumptions that brings with it — about your wealth, boorishness or curiosity. Such is the fate of early adopters of new technologies, whether it’s the Sony Walkman, the first iPod with its conspicuous white earbuds, or the Segway scooter. Google calls the people who wear Glass “explorers”, because the device is not yet available to the general public.

With its $1,500 price tag, the device is far from having mass appeal. At the South By Southwest Interactive tech jamboree in Austin this week, I counted fewer than a dozen people wearing it, including technology blogger Robert Scoble, who isn’t shy about posting pictures of himself in the shower, red-faced, water running, wearing the device.

Google, like most successful technology companies, dreamers and inventors, likes to take a long view on things. It calls some of its most outlandish projects “moonshots”. Besides Glass, these include its driverless car, balloons that deliver Internet service to remote parts of the world and contact lenses that monitor glucose levels in diabetics.

There’s an inherent risk in moonshots, however: What if you never reach the moon? Ten years from now, we may look back at Google Glass as one of those short-lived bridges that takes us from one technological breakthrough to the next, just as pagers, MP3 players and personal digital assistants paved the way for the era of the smartphone. Fitness bands, too, may fit into this category.

In its current, early version, Google Glass feels bulky on my face and when I look in the mirror I see a futuristic telemarketer looking back at me. Wearing it on the subway while a homeless man shuffled through the car begging for change made me feel as if I was sporting a diamond tiara. I sank lower in my seat as he passed. If Google is aiming for mass appeal, the next versions of Glass have to be much smaller and less conspicuous.

Though no one knows for sure where wearable devices will lead us, Rodrigo Martinez, life sciences chief strategist at the Silicon Valley design firm IDEO, has some ideas. “The reason we are talking about wearables is because we are not at implantables yet,” he says. “(But) I’m ready. Others are ready.”

Never mind implants, I’m not sure I’m even ready for Google Glass.

Specs in place for the first time, I walked out of Google’s Manhattan showroom on a recent Friday afternoon with a sense of unease. A wave of questions washed over me. Why is everyone looking at me? Should I be looking at them? Should I have chosen the orange Glass instead of charcoal?

Ideally, Google Glass lets you do many of the things we now do with our smartphones, such as taking photos, reading news headlines or talking to our mothers on Sunday evenings — hands-free. But it comes with a bit of baggage.

Glass feels heavier when I’m out in public or in a group where I’m the only person wearing it. If I think about it long enough my face starts burning from embarrassment. The device has been described to me as “the scarlet letter of technology” by a friend. The most frequent response I get from my husband when I try to slip Glass on in his presence is “please take that off.” This is the same husband who encouraged me to buy a sweater covered in googly-eyed cats.

Instead of looking at the world through a new lens on a crowded rush-hour sidewalk. I felt as if the whole world was looking at me. That’s no small feat in New York, where even celebrities are afforded a sense of privacy and where making eye contact with strangers can amount to an entire conversation.

Breastfeeding past two years linked to infant tooth decay

By - Mar 15,2014 - Last updated at Mar 15,2014

NEW YORK – Breastfeeding is credited with a long list of benefits, but one downside of extended and intensive breastfeeding may be a higher risk of cavities in baby's first teeth, according to a new study.

The more frequently a mother breastfed her child beyond the age of 24 months during the day, the greater the child's risk of severe early tooth decay, researchers found.

"The No. 1 priority for the breastfeeding mother is to make sure that her child is getting optimal nutrition," lead author Benjamin Chaffee of the University of California, San Francisco told Reuters Health.

Chaffee completed the study as a doctoral student at the University of California at Berkeley.

He and his team looked at a possible link between longer-term breastfeeding and the risk of tooth decay and cavities in a survey of 458 babies in low-income families in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil.

Because the study lasted more than one year, most babies were eating various kinds of solid food and liquids in addition to breast milk.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) recommends that babies are fed breast milk exclusively for the first six months of their lives, with solid foods added to the diet at that point. However, the WHO also recommends continued breastfeeding up to age two and beyond, the authors note.

For the study, the researchers checked in on babies when they were about six, 12 and 38 months old. At six months, the study team gathered data on the number of breast milk bottles the baby drank the day before and any other liquids, like juice.

At the 12-month mark, parents reported whether they fed their babies any of 29 specific foods, including fruits, vegetables, beans, organ meat, candy chips, chocolate milk, cookies, honey, soft drinks or sweet biscuits.

Two trained dentists examined all of the babies at each of the visits.

Nearly half of the children had consumed a prepared infant formula drink by age six months, the researchers write in the Annals of Epidemiology, but very few still drank formula by age one.

The researchers found that about 40 per cent of children breastfed between ages six and 24 months had some tooth decay by the end of the study. For babies breastfed for longer than two years and frequently, that number rose to 48 per cent.

"Our study does not suggest that breastfeeding causes caries," Chaffee said.

It is possible that breast milk in conjunction with excess refined sugar in modern foods may be contributing to the greater tooth decay seen in babies breastfed the longest and most often, the authors speculate in their report.

More research is needed to determine what's going on, but the findings are in keeping with professional dental guidelines that suggest avoiding on-demand breastfeeding after tooth eruption, they write.

"There are two aspects of breastfeeding — the actual human milk, which has some, but very little, ability to promote tooth decay," said William Bowen, professor emeritus in the Centre for Oral Biology at the University of Rochester Medical Centre in New York.

"The second is the physical aspect of breastfeeding, or even bottle-feeding, and that's where the problem arrives," he said.

Bowen was not involved in the new study.

When a baby sucks on a mother's breast or from a bottle, the baby's teeth are sealed off from saliva in the mouth. This physical barrier prevents the saliva from breaking down bacteria, and increases the chances of tooth decay, Bowen said.

Even though participants in the study came from poor backgrounds, "bad habits can form at any socioeconomic level," Bowen told Reuters Health.

About 16 per cent of babies in the U.S. were still exclusively breastfed at age six months last year, according to the National Centre for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion.

The good news, Bowen said, is that it's very easy to clean an infant's teeth.

A simple wipe in the mouth with a water-dampened cloth or Q-tip can effectively remove food before the baby's first teeth, he said, adding: "It's important to get the excess food out of the mouth."

One not-so-good habit is allowing infants to stay on a mother's nipple throughout the night, Bowen said. This usually means very little saliva circulates in the baby's mouth, which can increase the risk of decay.

Quitting smoking linked to improved mood

By - Mar 13,2014 - Last updated at Mar 13,2014

NEW YORK – Smokers who kick the habit appear to benefit from an improved mood, according to a new review of past studies.

On average, quitting smoking was associated with improvements in mental health similar to taking an antidepressant drug, a team of UK researchers found.

“The main message is that when people stop smoking, they feel better than they did when they were smoking,” Dr Paul Aveyard, one of the review’s authors, told Reuters Health.

“People who quit smoking may feel grumpy, irritable and bad — those feelings are similar to feelings of stress and people conflate the two,” Aveyard, from the University of Oxford, said.

“For clinicians like myself, when we see people who smoke who also have mental health difficulties, there’s often a feeling that we are depriving them of a way to deal with the stress,” he said. “But in fact we are helping these people to get better.”

It is widely known that quitting smoking has saved lives. But it’s nearly impossible to prove that smoking causes specific health problems, or that quitting prevents them, because of other differences that exist between smokers and non-smokers that could impact health and well-being.

With that in mind, “the claim of this paper that quitting is as good as drugs needs more research,” Dr Prabhat Jha, of the University of Toronto Centre for Global Health Research in Canada, wrote in an email to Reuters Health. Jha was not part of the new analysis.

For their review, the researchers examined data from 26 studies of smoking cessation. Some studies included smokers in the general public and others focused on people in psychiatric hospitals. Participants smoked an average of 20 cigarettes per day initially.

All of the studies assessed participants’ mental health before quitting smoking and about six months later, on average.

Compared to people who continued to smoke, the studies showed drops in anxiety, depression and stress and improvements in psychological quality of life among quitters.

Other explanations related to mood improvements among quitters need to be considered, the researchers write in the British medical journal BMJ. For example, it’s possible that life events improved people’s mood, leading them to quit smoking.

Still, there is “an entrenched belief in our culture that smoking ‘calms the nerves’ and can help alleviate stressful situations,” psychiatry researcher Benjamin Le Cook of the Cambridge Health Alliance in Somerville, Massachusetts told Reuters Health in an e-mail. He said this message has met little resistance from public health, mental health and medical communities so far.

The current review serves as a reminder that tobacco withdrawal symptoms like anxiety can easily be confused with mental health problems, said Brian Hitsman of the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. Both he and Le Cook were not involved in the review.

Move over ‘123456’: passwords go high-tech too

Mar 13,2014 - Last updated at Mar 13,2014

HANOVER, Germany – Internet users may before long have a secure solution to the modern plague of passwords, in which they can use visual patterns or even their own body parts to identify themselves.

Developers at the world’s biggest high-tech fair, CeBIT, say that one of the biggest frustrations of having a smartphone and a computer is memorising dozens of sufficiently airtight passwords for all their devices and accounts.

“The problem of passwords is that they are very weak, they are always getting hacked, and also from a user point of view, they are too complicated, everybody has 20, 30, 60 passwords,” said Steven Hope, managing director of Winfrasoft from Britain, the fair’s guest country this year.

“They all have to be different, no one can remember them, so everybody writes them down or resets them every time they log in. They don’t work in the real world today.”

Passwords have proliferated so much that it’s a daily struggle for users to cope with so many of them.

And as millions of Internet users have learned the hard way, no password is safe when hackers can net them en masse from banks, e-mail services, retailers or social media websites that fail to fully protect their servers.

Many simply throw in the towel and use no-brainer codes like “123456” and “password” –– which are still the most common despite how easily they can be cracked, CeBIT spokesman Hartwig von Sass said at the event in the northern German city of Hanover.

In response to the vulnerabilities and hassles of the antiquated username-and-password formula, Winfrasoft has developed an alternative based on a four-colour grid with numbers inside that resembles a Sudoku puzzle.

Users select a pattern on the grid as their “password” and because the numbers inside the boxes change once per minute, the code changes too, making it far harder to hack.

“There is no way anybody could see which numbers you are looking at. You see typing numbers but you don’t know what the pattern is because each number is here six times,” Hope said during a demonstration.

 

Backup from body parts 

 

Biometric data offers another alternative to seas of numbers, letters and symbols.

US giant Apple has already equipped its latest generation iPhone with a fingerprint reader to boost its security profile.

But a group of European hackers, the Hamburg-based Chaos Computer Club, demonstrated that the system could be pirated using a sophisticated “fake” fingerprint made of latex.

Japan’s Fujitsu turned to the other end of the hand and has developed an identification system based on each person’s unique vein pattern.

At its CeBIT stand, the company was showing off its PalmSecure technology on its new ultra-light laptop computer which has a small sensor built in.

Meanwhile Swiss firm KeyLemon has developed a face recognition system using a webcam.

The computer registers parts of the face, “the eyes, the eyebrows, the shape of your nose, your cheekbones, the chin...” a company spokesman said.

The person must then only sit in front of the screen to be recognised and gain access to the computer.

The system, already used by some three million people according to the company, still has a few kinks however so users must remember to take off their eyeglasses, for example, or have consistent lighting in order to pass the identity test.

“Face recognition and fingerprint recognition are additional safety security features; they will never have only face recognition or fingerprint recognition” but rather use them as a crucial backup to passwords, he said.

Yahoo’s search engine leans on Yelp for help

By - Mar 13,2014 - Last updated at Mar 13,2014

SAN FRANCISCO — Yahoo is cribbing from Yelp’s online reviews of local merchants to soup up its search engine.

Ratings and excerpts from Yelp’s merchant reviews began to appear in Yahoo’s search results on Wednesday.

Financial terms of the partnership weren’t disclosed. News of the deal first leaked out last month, so it didn’t come as a surprise. Yahoo’s stock dipped seven cents to $37.49 in afternoon trading while Yelp’s shares gained $2.48, or nearly 3 per cent, to $92.48.

Yahoo Inc. is hoping the snippets from Yelp Inc.’s popular service will spur more people to rely on its search engine when they’re looking for information about a specific city. Yelp could generate more revenue and polish its brand by having its content featured in Yahoo’s search results.

Boosting search traffic is a high priority for Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer because the queries spawn insights into users’ interests. That knowledge can then be used to sell advertising.

Yahoo ranks a distant third in Internet search behind Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp.’s Bing.

Neither of those search engines will be able to highlight Yelp’s material in the same way that Yahoo now can.

Google had been showing Yelp snippets it in its search engine a few years ago, prompting Yelp to complain that it was being cheated out of revenue and traffic. After US antitrust regulators opened an investigation in 2011 into whether Google was trying to stifle competition, the company stopped using Yelp’s reviews in its local search results.

Yahoo’s search market share has been steadily slipping since the Sunnyvale, California, company began relying on Microsoft’s technology to produce most of its results in 2010. That alliance still gives Yahoo the flexibility to add other features to its search results.

Microsoft also helps sells some of the advertising displayed alongside Yahoo’s search results. Ad revenue initially slumped after Microsoft and Yahoo joined forces, but the numbers have been looking better during the past two years. After subtracting ad commissions, Yahoo’s search revenue last year rose 6 per cent to $1.7 billion.

Yelp’s revenue last year totalled $233 million, a 69 per cent increase from the previous year.

What’s in a WiFi home router?

By - Mar 13,2014 - Last updated at Mar 13,2014

The days are gone where one device would connect to the web via a simple modem supplied by the telecoms. Now a WiFi router has become a must in any home that has an ADSL subscription. Installing and managing it can be a breeze or a nightmare. It all depends on what you expect from it and to which extend you are, or are not, tech-minded. In any case, however, the device will prove extremely useful.

In the most common setup a WiFi router is an additional, small digital network and communication device that takes the Internet signal from the modem and can then make it available to countless wireless computer-like devices: tablets, smartphones and others, without the need for cables, as the name implies. Moreover, and perhaps as interestingly, the router creates an internal wireless network that enables all these digital devices to communicate and exchange data and files between them all, regardless of the Internet; hence its usefulness. In other words, even if your Internet connection is down, a wireless router still has a useful role to play!

A simple, “dummy” ADSL modem is not enough anymore for many a reason, and they all make perfect sense. First comes mobility. Even assuming that you only have one “poor lonesome” laptop computer in your home that you want to connect to the web, a modem wouldn’t be practical enough for you need to move around, free of wires. Typically, with one laptop and one standard, unsophisticated modem, the connection is made through an Ethernet or network cable. The need to move your single laptop from one room to another implies adding and installing a wireless router.

From the moment you have, in addition to a computer, at least one tablet or one smartphone at home, which by today’s standards is a rather common situation, a router becomes an absolute necessity, just after water, electricity and food; and this hardly an exaggeration. Some try to live without the device by relying on the 3G network of their mobile phone service provider. But till now 3G doesn’t provide the same kind of performance as ADSL, be it in the download speed or in the available monthly download quota, or even pricing.

New, modern routers offer a wealth of features. Admitted, some are complex to understand and manage but if you are not particularly a tech-head you can always ask a friend (or a smart teen-ager, as usual) to help. Besides you would normally need to tackle the sophisticated part of the setup only once. Other than that the basic features are not difficult at all to set if one is willing to read the user manual.

With a WiFi, or wireless router you can decide to give full access to your home devices and restricted access to those guests who come to visit and who want to use your network from their smartphone for example, this by assigning different access passwords. You can also easily set various levels of parental control in a very flexible manner. You can block specific sites to specific devices in the house. A good wireless router will also act as a media server, allowing you to playback the music or video stored on any device on the network, from any other device on the network, wirelessly of course. This alone is worth the purchase and the trouble.

Even better, most new models come with a USB port where you can plug an external storage device, a USB flash drive or an external hard disk. This unit then becomes a convenient common storage area that all devices in the house can share and use. For instance, save photos and music there and make them accessible to every tablet, laptop or smartphone in the premises. Or use it to make automated, programmed backup sets for security.

The best-selling brands of wireless routers are Cisco, Linksys (a Cisco sub-brand), Trendnet, Asus, D-Link and Netgear. For JD50 to JD100 you get a decent wireless router in Amman, and JD100 to JD200 will buy you a very sophisticated one. The speed or performance is indicated with the letters b, g, n or AC. The first two are old, slow and practically obsolete, while “n” is a faster one. AC is the latest and provides unprecedented performance.

Kids with family routines more emotionally, socially advanced

By - Mar 13,2014 - Last updated at Mar 13,2014

NEW YORK – Preschoolers who sing, tell stories and eat dinner with their families tend to be emotionally healthier and better adjusted socially than kids who don't have such routines, a recent study has found.

Researchers examined the number of daily routines that more than 8,500 children practiced with their families. They found each ritual was linked to a 47 per cent increase in the odds that children would have high so-called social-emotional health, which indicates good emotional and social skills.

Social-emotional health "allows children to express their feelings, understand others' emotions and develop and sustain healthy relationships with peers and adults," said Dr Elisa Muniz, the study's lead author and a paediatrician at Bronx Lebanon Hospital in New York.

Such development plays a key role in enabling kids to thrive in the classroom, researchers said.

"There is strong scientific evidence that children who possess these abilities to a greater degree are more likely to succeed in school," Muniz said.

The researchers used data from a long-term study conducted by the National Centre for Education Statistics to gather information about kids and their families as it relates to childhood development and readiness for school.

Children in the study were taken from a national sample of those born in 2001, and data about them were collected from questionnaires, childhood assessments and interviews of the child's main caregiver. The study followed children from birth until they began kindergarten. The recent report used information about the children that had been collected when they were preschool-aged.

Researchers examined how often children participated in five family routines: having dinner as a family at least five times a week; reading, storytelling or singing at least three times a week; and playing at least a few times a week.

Kids' mothers also rated their child's social-emotional health using a 24-item survey. The children were an average of just over four-years-old.

Muniz and colleagues found that about 17 per cent of the children had high levels of social-emotional health, and that children who took part in more family routines were more likely to be socially and emotionally advanced. The exception was reading, which was not clearly linked to social-emotional health.

For example, 11 per cent of the children who had no family routines had high social-emotional health, compared to 25 per cent of those whose families engaged in all five routines. Three quarters of the children participated in at least three family routines.

The study was published in the Journal of Developmental and Behavioural Paediatrics.

Researchers said the results weren't surprising given how important ongoing nurturing interactions with caregivers are to young children's health and development.

"When you are happy and secure, you are much more able to learn and interact in healthy ways," said Dr. Claire McCarthy, a paediatrician at Boston Children's Hospital who was not involved in the study.

"When (children) are unhappy, insecure or unsure of their environment, energy goes into dealing with that, and not into learning," she told Reuters Health.

Family routines also help build skills that are crucial for success in academic and social settings, she noted.

"The routines in the study can help with what we call 'executive function': skills like problem-solving, negotiation, planning and delayed gratification. Having good executive function skills is absolutely important for school success," said McCarthy.

Parents can foster kids' social-emotional health in many ways, including practicing the routines in the study. Yet the goal - spending time together to foster communication and loving relationships - can also be achieved through other activities that suit each family's schedule and interests, researchers said. These include taking family walks, making dinner together or having a family movie night.

"Every family is different, and every family knows best what will work for them," said McCarthy.

At the crossroads

By - Mar 12,2014 - Last updated at Mar 12,2014

The thing is, after living for three years in Jordan, I am getting quite used to the idea now. Which one? Well, of getting mistaken for a Jordanian. Initially, when I was a brand new resident of the Hashemite Kingdom, I would correct strangers immediately when they jumped to conclusions. 

They would talk to me in Arabic and when I said I did not understand the language, they would look confused. I used to enlighten them about my home country India, but they would insist that I looked more Middle Eastern. “Is your father or mother Jordanian?” they would ask hopefully.

Seeing their disappointed expression I would reassure them by saying that maybe my ancestors were from here. This bit of exaggerated information was enough to cheer them up. 

Over the years I realised that what they really wanted was to claim me as theirs. And so slowly, I sopped making such an unnecessary fuss. I mean, here I was: an ageing, imperfect and flawed lady. And still, if the residents of my host country wanted to adopt me, who was I to complain? And why? Honestly! It did not make sense. 

With that subconscious decision I started behaving more like the locals here. I loved their food, the music, the obsession with football and fashion, and even the distinctive manner in which the women kohl lined their eyes. With a spattering of Arabic words delivered in a distinctive manner I could easily get by as an eccentric Jordanian. 

Only two things I found very difficult to embrace, which are inherent if one wants to be called a true native of this land. One is the incessant smoking that everyone, just about everyone indulges in. And the second is their careless and rash manner of driving. 

In this country, very few people, a minuscule of the entire population, uses regular walking as a means of transporting themselves from one place to another. The result is that the beautiful city of Amman has no pedestrian walkways. 

The very few that are around, have been blocked with huge trees that are planted within a short distance from each other. They look pretty but are a nuisance for the walkers, who have to get down from the walkway onto the main road, to get around them. And with the cars driving at full speed, it is a potential health hazard to even step on the road. 

The zebra crossings are very few and for the drivers in their fast cars they are invisible anyway. Crossing a road on foot is tantamount to inviting a huge catastrophe. It is a good idea to draft one’s will and testament before one undertakes such a task. In my initial years in Jordan, my most frequently asked question was, how do you cross the road? With the passage of time I acclimatised myself and when there was a drop in traffic, I would just close my eyes and dash across.

On my flight to London the other day a charming lady was sitting next to me. 

“I have been living in the UK for 25 years,” she confided. 

“You are British?” I asked. 

“Same, like you are Jordanian,” she smiled. 

“I am very Jordanian now,” I agreed. 

“Can I ask you a persoquestion?” she inquired.

“Go ahead,” I assured. 

“How do you cross the roads in Amman?” she probed. 

“Ah, let me tell you a long story,” I said, settling back. 

Flappy Bird may rise again, creator says

By - Mar 12,2014 - Last updated at Mar 12,2014

WASHINGTON — The Vietnamese creator of Flappy Bird says he’s thinking of resurrecting the smash-hit free game that he abruptly took offline a month ago — albeit with a warning about its addictive qualities.

In his first interview since he pulled the app from the Apple and Android app stores, citing the pressure its success put on his “simple life”, Nguyen Ha Dong told Rolling Stone magazine he now feels a sense of “relief”.

But asked if Flappy Bird will ever fly again on mobile devices, Nguyen responded: “I’m considering it.” 

While he is not working on a new version, he said any sequel would come with a warning to users to “please take a break.”

With its 2D retro-style graphics, Flappy Bird — in which gamers try to direct a flying bird between oncoming sets of pipes without touching them — was wildly popular.

When Nguyen, 28, announced on Twitter that he was about to take it down, 10 million people downloaded it in just 22 hours — and one month on, clone versions still pop up.

Nguyen told Rolling Stone he was upset not only by the fame that surrounded his Flappy Bird success, but also by messages from people telling him how the game caused them to flunk exams and lose jobs.

Now enjoying a quieter life, he told Rolling Stone he is busy creating other games, including a cowboy-themed shooter, a vertical flying game and an “action chess game” — one of which he will release this month.

Vietnam has a small but thriving software and games development sector and the global publicity surrounding Flappy Bird is likely to help it grow, technology experts have said.

Rolling Stone posted its interview with Nguyen on its website Tuesday ahead of publication in its March 27 issue.

Web founder Berners-Lee calls for online ‘Magna Carta’ to protect users

By - Mar 12,2014 - Last updated at Mar 12,2014

LONDON — The inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, called on Wednesday for bill of rights to protect freedom of speech on the Internet and users‘ rights after leaks about government surveillance of online activity.

Exactly 25 years since the London-born computer scientist invented the web, Berners-Lee said there was a need for a charter like England‘s historic Magna Carta to help guarantee fundamental principles online.

Web privacy and freedom have come under scrutiny since former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden last year leaked a raft of secret documents revealing a vast US government system for monitoring phone and Internet data.

Accusations that NSA was mining personal data of users of Google, Facebook, Skype and other US companies prompted President Barack Obama to announce reforms in January to scale back the NSA programme and ban eavesdropping on the leaders of close friends and allies of the United States.

Berners-Lee said it was time for a communal decision as he warned that growing surveillance and censorship, in countries such as China, threatened the future of democracy.

“Are we going to continue on the road and just allow the governments to do more and more and more control — more and more surveillance?” he told BBC Radio on Wednesday.

“Or are we going to set up something like a Magna Carta for the world wide web and say, actually, now it‘s so important, so much part of our lives, that it becomes on a level with human rights?” he said, referring to the 1215 English charter.

While acknowledging the state needed the power to tackle criminals using the Internet, he has called for greater oversight over spy agencies such Britain‘s GCHQ and the NSA, and over any organisations collecting data on private individuals.

He has previously spoken in support of Snowden, saying his actions were “in the public interest”.

Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web Consortium, a global community with a mission to lead the web to its full potential,  have launched a year of action for a campaign called the Web We Want, urging people to push for an Internet “bill of rights” for every country.

“Our rights are being infringed more and more on every side, and the danger is that we get used to it. So I want to use the 25th anniversary for us all to do that, to take the web back into our own hands and define the web we want for the next 25 years,” he told the Guardian newspaper.

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