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A grandfather has told of how he lost money saved for Christmas presents after his family were duped by fraudsters on WhatsApp.

The 75-year-old, who wished to remain anonymous, said they had been tricked by criminals posing as his grand-daughter on the messaging service.

He transferred £1,550 to the con-artists, for an emergency medical bill that was a fake.

WhatsApp and trading standards officers are warning others of the scam.

‘You feel a fool’
Fraudsters posing as the young student sent a message to her father, saying she had a case of haemorrhoids that she was embarrassed to talk about.

Subsequent messages suggested that she needed money for private medical care and asked for the money to be transferred directly.

The correct spelling of her unusual name helped convince the family it was genuine, and her grandfather agreed to pay the supposed bill.

Attempts to contact her directly failed, as the calls went straight to an answerphone.

Only after the money was paid did they get through to her, and realised they had been tricked.

“You feel such a fool,” her grandfather said. “I was angry that I was able to be duped.

“You get used to these scam calls, but they are getting quite clever. I used to run my own business, so if they can fool people like me, a lot of very vulnerable people will be in trouble.”

He is trying to get the money refunded from his bank, but so far they have said their fraud checks were sufficient and have refused to reimburse him.

Young targets
Surveys have suggested that 59% of those asked had received a message-based scam attempt in the last year.

Younger age groups, who were more likely to text than call, were said to be more exposed to these kinds of scams.

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Trading standards officers said that scammers sent messages that appeared to come from a friend or member of the family, before asking for personal information, money, or a six-digit code.

Usually you would need this code when setting up a new account, or logging in to your existing account on a new device.

However, if you have not initiated this request, it could be a scammer trying to log in to your account.

The messages are sent from the compromised accounts of friends, or from an unknown number claiming to be a friend who has lost their phone or been locked out of their account.

“These kinds of scams are particularly cruel as they prey on our kindness and desire to help friends and family,” said Louise Baxter, head of the National Trading Standards scams team.

Advice from WhatsApp includes:

Stop. Take five minutes before responding. Make sure your WhatsApp two-step verification is switched on to protect the account
Think. Ask if the request makes sense. Scammers prey on people’s kindness, trust and willingness to help
Call. Verify that it really is your friend or family member by calling them directly
Kathryn Harnett, policy manager at WhatsApp, commented: “WhatsApp protects our users’ personal messages with end-to-end encryption, but we want to remind people that we all have a role to play in keeping our accounts safe by remaining vigilant to the threat of scammers.

“If you receive a suspicious message, even if you think you know who it is from, calling or requesting a voice note is the fastest and simplest way to check someone is who they say they are. A friend in need is a friend worth calling.”

The cost to all scam victims’ wellbeing has been estimated at a collective monetary total of £9.3bn a year, according to the consumer group Which?.

A US federal judge has denied a plea by Apple to delay changes to its App Store as a result of its landmark legal battle with Epic Games.

Apple largely won the fight with the maker of Fortnite. However, it was told it could no longer ban developers from telling customers about non-Apple payment options.

Apple appealed against that ruling.

However, it has been denied permission to delay implementing the change while its appeal is ongoing.

That means that from December, app makers will for the first time be allowed to tell their customers that they do not have to use Apple’s payment system.

Going outside that system means the developers do not pay Apple’s 15-30% cut of sales.

The current rules ban any mention of an external payment system inside apps downloaded from Apple’s App Store. So, for example, a TV or movie streaming service would not be allowed to tell people to sign up on a website before using the app.

‘Fundamentally flawed’
The initial judgement, handed down in September by Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, found that Apple could not be considered a monopoly for the way it handles its App Store or the fees it charges. “Success is not illegal,” she wrote.

But this week, she threw out Apple’s request to delay implementing the changes on the one key part it lost.

“Apple’s motion is based on a selective reading of this court’s findings and ignores all of the findings which supported the injunction,” she wrote in her ruling.

“The motion is fundamentally flawed,” Judge Gonzalez Rogers added.

In the hearing, she was also critical of Apple’s request for a stay until all appeals are resolved – which could take years – rather than a limited one of some months while it tried to figure out how to change its long-standing rules.

Writing in her judgement, she said: “Other than, perhaps, needing time to establish guidelines, Apple has provided no credible reason for the court to believe that the injunction would cause the professed devastation.

“Links can be tested by app review. Users can open browsers and retype links to the same effect; it is merely inconvenient, which then, only works to the advantage of Apple,” she wrote.

In a statement provided to US media outlets, Apple indicated it plans to go to a different appeals court in a bid to get its bid approved.

If that also fails, then Apple must make the changes by 9 December, which will be 90 days since the initial ruling was handed down.

Epic has also appealed against the initial ruling, which it lost on nine of 10 issues.

The Duke of Sussex has said he warned Twitter boss Jack Dorsey about political unrest in the US – just a day before the deadly 6 January riots.

“I warned him his platform was allowing a coup to be staged,” Prince Harry said at the RE:WIRED tech forum in the US.

“That email was sent the day before. And then it happened and I haven’t heard from him since,” the duke said.

He was speaking at a session discussing whether social media was contributing to misinformation and online hatred.

Mr Dorsey, who is Twitter’s chief executive officer, has so far made no public comments on the issue.

Internet ‘being defined by hate, division and lies’
Prince Harry, who now lives with his wife Duchess of Sussex in California, appeared at Tuesday’s session via video chat as a guest speaker. He was introduced as the co-founder of the Archewell organisation.

The duke used his personal experience with online hatred and the press to reflect that social media companies were not doing enough to stop the spread of misinformation.

He said the internet was “being defined by hate, division and lies”, adding: “That can’t be right.”

His appearance via video chat comes two weeks after a data analytics company alleged that 70% of the hate directed towards the Duke and Duchess of Sussex on Twitter was generated by just 55 accounts.

Meanwhile, investigations into what happened on 6 January, when a mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol building in Washington DC and disrupted the official certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the White House race, are continuing.

More than 670 people have been charged with taking part.

On Tuesday, a congressional committee investigating the riots summoned more of Mr Trump’s closest aides to give evidence.

Among the latest batch is a former White House press secretary, a senior policy adviser and personal assistants.

The inquiry is trying to find out if Mr Trump had foreknowledge of the attack.

A teenager who went missing in the US has been found after she used hand signals that went viral on TikTok to show she was in danger.

The girl had been reported missing by her parents in North Carolina on Tuesday morning, and was spotted inside a car in Kentucky two days later.

The 16-year-old used the gesture designed to help domestic abuse victims ask for help to alert a passing driver.

Authorities say they arrested a 61-year-old man.

A driver called police after noticing “a female passenger in the vehicle making hand gestures that are known on the social media platform TikTok to represent violence at home – I need help – domestic violence,” the Laurel County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement.

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The caller noted that the girl “appeared to be in distress” and was being driven by an older male.

The girl, who has not been named, told officers she had travelled through North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Ohio.

Police later arrested James Herbert Brick, 61, of Cherokee, North Carolina, while he was driving near a Kentucky interstate on Thursday afternoon.

Signal for Help

The hand gesture is a one-handed sign someone can use when in distress, according to the Canadian Women’s Foundation.

The victim holds up their hand with their palm facing out, then tucks their thumb into their hand before closing their fingers on top of the thumb.

The campaign, called the “signal for help”, spread across social media in 2020 during the initial pandemic lockdowns, in an attempt to address a rise in domestic violence.

The idea was a way for domestic abuse victims to seek help using a non-verbal cue.

Videos demonstrating the signs also gained momentum in the UK in the aftermath of the murder of Sarah Everard, which sparked a debate over women’s safety.

One of Facebook’s earliest investors has labelled the social media giant’s plans for a metaverse as “dystopian”.

Meta, as Facebook is now known, is investing billions in the project.

But Roger McNamee told the BBC: “It’s a bad idea and the fact we are all sitting and looking at this like it’s normal should be alarming everyone.”

Meta’s chief product officer Chris Cox told attendees at the Web Summit in Lisbon that the idea would make “the internet less flat”.

He said it would be considerably better than video conferencing as a space for meetings.

However, speaking at the same event, Mr McNamee was highly sceptical.

“Facebook should not be allowed to create a dystopian metaverse,” he said.

The term metaverse was coined in the 1990s in a science fiction novel Snow Crash, where it served as a virtual reality successor to the internet.

Apparently, it’s the next big thing. What is the metaverse?
Facebook changes its name to Meta in major rebrand
Mr McNamee became a critic of Facebook as he began to see more misinformation on the platform. He said he was not convinced the metaverse would be safe in chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s hands.

“There’s no way that a regulator or policymaker should be allowing Facebook to operate there [in the metaverse] or get into cryptocurrencies,” he said.

“Facebook should have lost the right to make its own choices. A regulator should be there giving pre-approval for everything they do. The amount of harm they’ve done is incalculable.”

Real life
Mr Cox, speaking for Meta, put forward a different view – that the metaverse idea is the next step for the internet as a whole, not just for his company.

“Technology often starts in lower resolutions versions of what it becomes,” he said.

Feedback from Meta’s Oculus virtual reality headset users was that the technology, which was improving all the time, could be “incredibly fun”.

Mr Cox told Nicholas Carlson, editor-in-chief of news publication Insider, that his own dabbling in the metaverse included hosting meetings and entertainment for staff.

He said he and his wife had watched a comedy show with Facebook employees in which everyone appeared as avatars: “Twenty of us in the room, co-workers, all laughing together.”

That same technology was a good alternative to video calls, he argued.

“Everyone is exhausted by video conferencing. You don’t know who is looking at who, everyone is constantly interrupting each other.”

Meetings in the metaverse would be far better, he said, with Meta working on how to improve “spatial audio and body language” in virtual reality.

When asked why anyone would want to meet in virtual reality, he said: “It will not replace real life – nothing should – and I don’t want to design something that does.”

Getting Meta
He acknowledged that no one company, such as Meta, would own the metaverse, pointing to Roblox as an example.

Roblox, a user-generated gaming platform valued at $30bn (£22bn) and with 37 million users around the globe, has its own plans for the metaverse.

Chief executive David Baszucki has for several years been outlining his vision of it as a digital place where people play, work or learn with millions of 3D experiences.

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At Web Summit, Roblox’s head of music Jon Vlassopulos told the BBC: “I think our view of the metaverse is that we’ve been at it for about 15 years.

“So we’re ushering in the metaverse, and we feel it needs to be a place that everyone can access, a place where people can express themselves and connect together.

“We’ve been building around this vision for a long time. We’re excited that more people are coming it to validate that notion.”

Mr Cox was asked whether the metaverse – which Mr Carlson described as a “cartoon world” – was something that the tech giant should control.

He said that there would need to be “a set of standards and a set of protocols” along with “public discourse” about how to keep the space safe.

He added that Mr Zuckerberg was committed to safety, something he said the “company had been working on for over a decade”.

Instagram has brought back support for Twitter card previews after removing the feature nine years ago.

Now, when users share an Instagram link on Twitter, a small preview of the post will be displayed.

Instagram controversially removed the feature shortly after being acquired by Facebook in 2012.

Twitter card previews started for some users on Wednesday and will eventually be available to everyone. Instagram and Twitter are both promoting the change.

“If you want to share your latest Instagram post on the Twitter timeline too, you’re in luck: now when you share a link to an IG post in a tweet, it’ll show up as a card with a preview of the photo,” read a tweet on Twitter’s official support account.

Instagram sparked controversy with users when it removed support for Twitter cards in 2012.

The platform said that it wanted to take back control of its content following its merger with Facebook.

Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom insisted at the time that the mandate came from himself, and not Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg.

He said Instagram was attempting to grow its web platform and shared hopes that the move would help increase traffic.

The Israeli company behind the controversial Pegasus spyware has been added to a US trade blacklist.

Pegasus has reportedly been used by nation states to target the phones of rights activists and journalists.

The US has now put its maker, NSO Group, on its “entity list”, banning business dealings with them.

NSO Group said it was “dismayed” by the decision, adding that its technology helped maintain US national security by “preventing terrorism and crime”.

It has long maintained that its software is sold only to military, law enforcement and intelligence agencies from countries with good human rights records.

But earlier this year, it was accused of having sold its technology to authoritarian governments, which then targeted innocent people.

“We look forward to presenting the full information regarding how we have the world’s most rigorous compliance and human rights programs that are based on the American values we deeply share, which already resulted in multiple terminations of contacts with government agencies that misused our products,” the company said in a statement.

However, US officials said that NSO Group and another Israeli firm, Candiru, had acted “contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States”.

On the face of it this is a surprising move by the US government.

The US and Israel are close allies, with their respective cyber-experts having co-operated, for example, to restrain Iran’s nuclear programme.

But the Pegasus military-grade spyware developed and sold by Israel’s NSO Group has emerged as a formidable cyber-weapon, used by some of its more autocratic customers in the Middle East to target a wide range of people, not just criminals and terrorists.

Journalists, lawyers, peaceful activists and even a member of the UK’s House of Lords have all had their phones secretly infected with malware that allows the customer to read every message, access all their data and even remotely turn on the microphone without the owner’s knowledge.

2px presentational grey line
The US Commerce Department said the decision was “based on evidence that these entities developed and supplied spyware to foreign governments that used these tools to maliciously target government officials, journalists, business people, activists, academics and embassy workers.

“These tools have also enabled foreign governments to conduct transnational repression, which is the practice of authoritarian governments targeting dissidents, journalists and activists outside of their sovereign borders to silence dissent. Such practices threaten the rules-based international order,” it said.

It also said the announcements were part of President Biden’s efforts to “stem the proliferation of digital tools used for repression”.

A Russian and a Singaporean company – which created hacking tools – were also added to the US trade blacklist.

Separately, the US State Department said it would not be taking action against Israel, Russia or Singapore, based on the actions of the individual companies.

Sir Nick Clegg, Meta’s head of global affairs, has defended the firm formerly known as Facebook at the Web Summit.

Only the day before, whistleblower Frances Haugen had opened the conference in Lisbon by calling on boss Mark Zuckerberg to resign.

Sir Nick said she was entitled to her views but that there were “two sides to the story”.

And he claimed most of Facebook’s content was user-generated “barbecues and bar mitzvahs”.

“Whistleblowers are entitled to blow whistles and describe the world as they see it,” he told Matthew Garrahan, news editor of the Financial Times, in an interview on the Web Summit stage, which he joined via a live link-up to California.

But “the fundamental assertion that Meta algorithmically spoon-feeds hateful content because that increases our profits” was wrong, he said.

The former UK deputy prime minister reiterated the $14bn (£10.3bn) the company had put into keeping the community safe and the 40,000 moderators it employs.

And he said that at just 16 years old, the firm was “young” and still learning.

User-shaped
Sir Nick also tried to distance the company from the idea that Facebook’s recommendations formed the majority of content on the platform.

“The caricature in the media is the idea that people are helplessly receiving a content menu served up by the Facebook algorithm,” he said.

He said less than 10% was recommended. The other 90% of content was “shaped heavily” by user choices, based on friends, groups and pages they follow. And he said less than 4% of content was of a political nature.

But he acknowledged that the firm had been hit with “trenchant criticism” and needed to be more transparent.

Coming clean
Sir Nick said the firm had considered delaying the Meta rebrand and the new focus on the metaverse in the wake of Frances Haugen’s appearance before politicians in the US and the UK, and subsequent media coverage.

“We considered whether we move the announcement, as there was plenty of attention on us already and this would create more,” he said.

But he added: “We thought it was the right moment to come clean about the focus of the company, building towards the Metaverse.”

Asked if Meta would be acting on the criticism raised by Ms Haugen, he cited the example of how its use of a cross-check program – a system that looked at the content of high-profile accounts – had been referred to its oversight board.

Apple swipe
He denied a key early claim from the leaks that internal research suggested the firm knew that Instagram harmed teenagers, saying Meta’s attitude was “mischaracterised”.

But, he added, Meta had nevertheless decided to rethink its plans for a version of Instagram for children.

At the end of the interview he took a swipe at Apple, which earlier this year made updates to its operating system, allowing users to choose whether to share data with apps – in turn knocking billions off of Facebook’s ad revenue.

Given that Apple takes a cut of the revenue of apps on its store, he said the decision was “a flagrant example of double standards”.

“Apple merits a considerable amount of scrutiny, too,” he suggested.

This year’s Web Summit has strict Covid measures in place and a reduced audience of 40,000.

Organisers were unsure whether people would return to the event, which was forced to go virtual last year, due to the pandemic, but tickets have sold out.

The corporation formerly known as Facebook has a new name Meta.

There will still be a Facebook, and an Instagram and all the familiar platforms, as this is simply a renaming of the parent company alone.

The new name also invites people to participate on its “next chapter” – a 3D journey into the metaverse, which it sees as the future of the internet.

But some analysts wonder if the public will trust the firm enough to take part in Mark Zuckerberg’s new vision.

Does Meta matter?
The new name produced millions of online searches for the specific query Meta in the UK and US combined, analysts say.

Popular questions included:

What is Meta?
What does Meta mean?
What does Meta stand for?
Dive into the Oxford English Dictionary and various definitions of meta are available – as a prefix it “denotes change, transformation, permutation, or substitution”, or “beyond, above, at a higher level”.

The company says it favours “beyond”, but it is also seeking a metamorphosis of sorts.

A chance perhaps too to welcome a new brand untainted by leaks and negative press, though an analyst with Forrester noted “a name change doesn’t suddenly erase the systemic issues plaguing the company”.

Officially though it’s about the future.

“Our new company brand captures where our company is going and the future we want to help build,” Meta said.

That destination is the metaverse.

What on earth is the metaverse?
The company believes the metaverse will be the next evolution in the way we use the internet.

“In this future, you will be able to teleport instantly as a hologram to be at the office without a commute, at a concert with friends, or in your parents’ living room to catch up.” chief executive Mr Zuckerberg wrote.

Some of that may seem familiar to those who have spent the pandemic in video conference calls, but the vision for the metaverse will remind others of earlier virtual worlds, such as Second Life.

However, Meta stresses this is not a virtual world, but a new three-dimensional space to be used and accessed in various ways, saying: “Augmented reality glasses to stay present in the physical world, virtual reality to be fully immersed, and phones and computers to jump in from existing platforms.”

The company says it is: “A social, 3D virtual space where you can share immersive experiences with other people, even when you can’t be together in person – and do things together you couldn’t do in the physical world.”

Azeem Azhar, author of Exponential, says: “It’s not going to be something that will be contained in a VR headset that sits in the corner of the living room. It will be a set of things that will show up across our different applications and across our devices, as those devices get better and better.”

Will it work?
Writing in The Times, technology analyst Benedict Evans characterised Facebook’s motivation this way: “If there is something after smartphones, Facebook wants to be landlord, not a tenant.”

But is the metaverse the right real estate?

Mr Azhar says the “crunch point” is answering the question for the general consumer: “What is the thing that we will actually need to do with this?”

He says at the moment: “We’re still looking for that absolute killer application of these virtual reality and augmented reality technologies.”

And if it does succeed, rather than replacing existing tech, the metaverse will sit alongside it. “It may be 20-odd years since text messaging became popular and people still send text messages, even though there are so many other richer ways we can communicate with each other.”

Great, when will it happen?
Meta already owns virtual reality headset maker Oculus.

And the firm launched experimental versions of two metaverse projects last year – Horizon World, which lets friends meet virtually, and Horizon Workrooms, which enables virtual work meetings.

At the Facebook Connect event where Mr Zuckerberg spoke about the metaverse he also teased a new high-end headset dubbed Project Cambria.

But the metaverse is a work in progress, and the company says fully realising the idea will take another 10 to 15 years.

Meta will spend billions of dollars to bring it to life. The company recently announced it is hiring 10,000 people in the European Union to work on the project.

Mr Zuckerberg also said the metaverse would be the work of more than one company, and that “open standards and interoperability” will need to be part of it.

How safe and private is the metaverse?
After all the leaks, and accusations levelled at Facebook of late, will people trust the world that Mr Zuckerberg built to keep them safe, and their data private?

The Guardian suggested that advertisers might target ads based on “your body language, your physiological responses, knowing who you are interacting with and how”.

Mike Proulx, research director at research company Forrester, said: “Without trust, Meta’s metaverse plans are already at risk.”

Mr Zuckerberg and Meta colleague Nick Clegg, Britain’s former deputy prime minister, have sought to address concerns.

Mr Clegg noted there were years to get regulation and technology right, while Mr Zuckerberg said: “Privacy and safety need to be built into the metaverse from day one.”

Whistleblower Frances Haugen told the BBC that “over and over again, we see Facebook prioritising expansion and growth”. She felt the resources could be better used on improving the safety of Facebook.

Facebook responded that it has no commercial or moral incentive to do anything other than give the maximum number of people as much of a positive experience as possible.

Facebook’s announcement that it is changing its name to Meta has caused quite the stir in Israel where the word sounds like the Hebrew word for “dead”.

To be precise, Meta is pronounced like the feminine form of the Hebrew word.

A number of people have taken to Twitter to share their take on the name under the hashtag #FacebookDead.

The emergency rescue volunteers Zaka even got involved, telling their followers on Twitter: “Don’t worry, we’re on it”.

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Another Twitter user said: “Thank you for providing all Hebrew speakers a good reason to laugh.”

Facebook isn’t the only company to be ridiculed over translations of its branding.

Here are a few examples of when things got lost in translation.

‘Eat your fingers off’
When KFC arrived in China during the 80s, its motto “finger lickin’ good” didn’t exactly go down well with the locals.

The motto’s translation in Mandarin was “eat your fingers off”.

But it didn’t harm the company too much. KFC is one of the largest fast food chains in the country.

‘Manure’
Rolls-Royce changed the name of its Silver Mist car as mist translates as “excrement” in German.

The car was named Silver Shadow instead.

Meanwhile when Nokia released its Lumia phone in 2011, it didn’t exactly get the reaction it was expecting.

In Spanish, Lumia is a synonym for a prostitute, although it apparently only appears in dialects with a heavy gypsy influence.

Honda however had a lucky escape. It almost named its new car the Fitta, which is a vulgar description for vagina in Swedish. It apparently did not translate well in a number of other languages.

Apparently the issue was detected early on and a decision was made to name the vehicle Jazz in most countries.