And on today's tech tent with a bit of a computer security thing we'll visit the death column black hat gatherings in Las Vegas where the world's hackers are meeting this week and find out some of the mischief they've been up to. Rector certain looking for our safe cracking robot we're going to attempt to crack open a combination fires that is nobody's job safe from a robot and we'll be chatting to Dave Lim The man behind Amazon's Alexa intelligent speak a business to find out how the service might develop plus I witnessed a hacking challenge involving stopping a rogue state from firing nuclear weapons thankfully that was just a fictional scenario my special guest this week is William Goodwin commissioning editor of Computer Weekly who takes a special interest in security and privacy keep listening I'll be right back after the news. Hello I'm Gerri Smith with the b.b.c. News North Korea claims its latest test of an intercontinental ballistic missile proves it now has the ability to strike any target across the United States Western experts agree most major u.s. Cities could now be in range President Trump denounced the launch as reckless With more here's Michael Bristow it's thought the intercontinental ballistic missile tested by North Korea will hear this month could have reached Alaska and perhaps the West Coast of the u.s. Mainland Pyongyang claims this latest rocket brings into range much more with the United States including cities on the East Coast if true this is a significant development in response u.s. Forces in South Korean troops immediately staged a misspelled drill and the South Korean president ordered the deployment of additional launches from a u.s. Missile defense shield China has condemned the latest missile test fired Salo North Korea but it's also lashed out at South Korea's decision to extend its missile defense shield in response to Pyongyang's launch a statement from Beijing warm soul that the shield would destroy the regional balance of power. President Trump has described his new chief of staff John Kelly as a true star of his administration after moving right into previous from the post in a tweet to the president said Mr Kelly a retired Marine Corps general had done a spectacular job as head of Homeland Security where he introduced a tougher immigration policy. Earlier Mr Priebus said he had resigned because President from wanted to do things differently he told c.n.n. That the president had the right to the recent past and I've always said to him and he for always greet with me any time either one of us think that we need to make a change or or move in a different direction let's just talk about it and get it done and so I think the president thought about that and we talked about it yesterday and I resigned and he accepted my resignation but this is about the president it's about moving his agenda forward the governing party in Pakistan is to meet later today to name a new prime minister following the resignation of no serif he stepped down after the Supremes disqualified him from holding public office over corruption allegations just in roll out reports we understand the decision will be made at a meeting of the ruling party later today we understand that there minded to appoint now was Sharif the brother Shahbaz Sharif to be the leader there is a problem though he's currently the chief minister of Punjab and is not a member of the National Assembly so couldn't technically become prime minister so what we're expecting is that he will essentially be crowned this afternoon but that interim leader will be chosen who will become prime minister while they find a seat that he could take on to allow him the possibility of becoming prime minister news from the b.b.c. . Police in Germany have surged a migrant hostel in Hamburg that was home to a failed asylum seeker suspected of stabbing a man to death and injuring 5 more in an attack at a supermarket media has a motive a group of men pursuing the suspect as he fled witnesses said the 26 year old charted God is great in Arabic during the attack which police have not confirmed. For Lanka has signed a $1000000000.00 deal with China for the lease and development of the southern port of Hermann toter the agreement was delayed by several months because of local concerns of the port could be used by the Chinese military are South Asia editor Senate Iran reports Sri Lanka states that deal will help it get out of a debt trap it borrowed billions of dollars from China to build roads ports and airports to revive the economy after the end of the civil war in 2009 now it is struggling to repay Beijing the money from the deal officials say will be used to do this but the agreement has also raised concerns that the festivity could be used for Chinese naval activities the hum of the port sits near the main shipping route from Asia to Europe well and will insist earlier this week that still NGO's Navy will be responsible for the security of the port the head of the worldwide Anglican church and I should be a pretty large Bishop of Canterbury Justin Welby is beginning a visit to East Africa during the 5 day trip he will consecrates the 1st archbishop of South Sudan and visit refugee camps in Uganda. A woman in the u.s. State of Ohio has been rescued by firefighters after a large pole constrictor fixed its jaws on to her face in a call recorded by the emergency services the woman said the one and a half metre long snake had wrapped itself around her waist and had bitten her nose the local fire chief said firefighters had to cut off the snake's head with a knife to remove it from the victim's face b.b.c. News. Hello and welcome to Tech tent a weekly update on what's hot in the technology world I'm Jane Wakefield sitting in for rule reward he's on holiday and on today's show we'll be hearing what the world's hackers have been up to at the Black Cat and Def Con gathering in Las Vegas Plus we'll chat to the Amazon executive in charge of its voice activated intelligent speaker Lexa and the range of devices on which Alexa can be found and I'll be reporting from a hacking competition which involves stopping a rogue state from firing nuclear weapons thankfully that was just a fictional back story with me today is the B.B.C.'s online technology editor Leo Kelly and hello. And my special guest is Bill Goodwin commissioning editor of the magazine Computer Weekly Hi Bill. We'll be chatting to you about hacking and Privacy as I know there amongst your special interests but that 1st has a flavor of what's coming up I would call not only the smart speakers but also the category of Ai and intelligent assistance in the home a true category I play a lot of video games and I just realised that I can do computers and I just fell into it and it's really worked out for me listening for that some more but 1st this week we go to Las Vegas where 2 giant gatherings of the world's computer hackers have been taking place black cats and Defcon a sort of fiction in the calendar of computer security events these days security being the flip side of hacking but what are the hackers getting up to we sent our colleague Dave lay the B.B.C.'s North America tech reporter to hang out from this week in Vegas is basically a summer camp for hackers there are 2 main events black hat which is a quite serious corporate event Defcon an event which has a reputation for Mischief and Mayhem don't use the word for they warn or you'll almost certainly have your phone hacked and don't dare and try to take money out tonight yeah I'm. Going from the unfathomably. Complex just the plain silly one this caught my eye here is downright dangerous a hacker who goes by the name of ploy has hacked a small gun case meant to make it impossible for a not authorized person to fire I'm going to check it out it's going to how it was the amount of IP one smart get and that's what this means is this designed to be fired only by an authorized party in this case it has 2 components the pistol and a watch in the store talk to the watch listen to the watch has been able for firing is it within about a foot of the pistol that the stool see the watch is present and allow itself to be fired at so I touched the IP $13.00 different was what was fixed in the range So normally the gun will work within about a foot of the watch x. Of that range out to about 3 or 4 meters 2nd I made the gun refused to fire even when it's otherwise authorized So it's a good analysis of the 3rd amid the gunfire you would not authorize and I did this using magnets so essentially I took a big saw to the side of the gun and with that slight small cheap modification that would make the gun fire even without the watch now I know everything happens on the show floor of course and I've been told about a hack that's being worked up in a hotel room. So how do they got good grades so far thanks. Nathan Seidel and founder of Spark Fun electronics this rector said looking thing is our safe cracking robot we're going to attempt to crack open a combination fire 6 we designed it for a particular type of say from a company called century safe but it doesn't really matter you can actually 3 d. Printer coupler that will match any safe that you may have this is things magnetic so we just walk up attach it to the safe and it starts doing its thing the motor is going to turn the dial and pull on the handle and it's going to take some measurements so a normal safe has about a 1000000 combinations $100.00 times $100.00 times 100. This reduces that problem set from a 1000000 down to about a 1000 combinations any safe any law can be opened really and we're just trying to show the. Vulnerabilities that we found daily reporting from Las Vegas with some of the hacks being shown off at Defcon and we're all safe cracking robots may sound far fetched computer breaches in the headlines all of the time just this week news emerged Packer's accessing the data of up to 400000 customers of Italy's largest bank Unicredit Bill Goodwin thank you Computer Weekly you're here today and this is your speciality Why is it that we sort of still hear about this all the time a computer boss is not yet appreciating the danger that they're in I think computer computer bosses do appreciate the dangers it's phony very much an issue for chief executives that very worried about it so the reputation of their companies is at stake so I don't think it's a case that companies are not aware or are not worried about it it's more a case that we're in an arms race with very clever people often backed by the resources from nation states and it's very hard to keep up with the technological defenses and I'm on that point would you say that it's kind of the smaller companies that are a bigger risk or is it these global giants that hack the targeting now. Everyone is sort of this but smaller companies it's much harder for them to differ and they don't have the same resources to hire white hackers and penetration testers to come in and tell us the systems the big companies do the problem the big companies faces they've got so many i.t. Systems and so many servers to keep up to date and patching that's a real nightmare and we're seeing changes well out there in the kind of approaches that are happening very briefly what are those sort of changes we've seen I think what we've seen recently over the past few years are from much more nation state backtracks So it's really becoming a political issue it's war plan that means so it would be perhaps wrong so we're entering a new cyber Cold War But we're entering a complex place where there are multiple countries China Russia. North Korea we're going to come back to that later in the program actually so before we do that let's get a quick roundup of the week's other techs Doris' with Kelly and we've had a bunch of results from some of the big tech companies this week including from 2 social media firms with contrasting fortunes That's right Jane let's start with some stonking results from Facebook revealed its mobile ad sales had jumped by more than 50 percent in the last quarter which is quite remarkable if you think about the fact that it needs to be really careful not to overload our news feeds with promotional pitches Facebook says it was helped by the success of ads on Instagram as well as its main platform and investors became hugely excited when. Facebook's founder talked about monetizing what's up and Messenger faster than planned and as a result since it shares to record high over Twitter though things were a little bit more grim. Pale to gross number of active users over the past quarter Naturally if you look at the figures for the us the number of people using it fell despite all the best efforts of President Trump and his tweets that makes it less enticed thing for. Advertisers and investors got scared and its shares fell more than 14 percent after the news was released which do you prefer Bell a u.s. Facebook or or a tweet tweet or. Definitely a tweet or. Ok so the next thing that being big in the news is big Korean and it looks as if it could be make or break a for the next week or say yeah that's right the virtual currency is facing the prospect of splitting into there's been an issue with the transactions have been taking longer and longer to process as more people adopt it and the communities basically struggle to agree how to solve the issue the best proposals are a bit too complicated to go into here but because it is just complicated full stop it is simple terms one faction's threatening to split off and create a new currency called Big Con cash next week that would then be incompatible with existing bitcoins and if that happens and they get enough support for it you could see the value of Bitcoin plummet and confidence in the whole project undermined I guess we must keep an eye on that and 2 iconic piece of tech which are being phased out this week or are they. Painting flash I mean referring to that let's go with pink 1st and Microsoft announced at the start of the week that it's easy to use illustration programs no longer an active development because it was going to focus instead on a 3 d. Version of the program Q thousands of articles on the net to claim pain dead and lamenting its demise only for Microsoft to come up the next day and say that although the original version of paper be installed a long side a forthcoming version of Windows 10 you will still be able to download it from free from its online store Now whether that was a genuine fear you turned it without or published the stunt I'll leave it to. The other the flash. Is multimedia plugins going to be phased out 2020 you know powered loads of games and videos and things we found on the web but fell out of favor after Apple refused to put it on its i Phones and the new technology called h.t.m.l. 5. Came along what's interesting is that in the past we've seen a petition come out saying. We should open source flash so that enthusiastic Tin-Tin you to develop it and let others the rest of us keep going to websites that depend on flash rather than see them stop function it seems as if people can't say goodbye to these old tech or interesting times you're listening to tech turned on the B.B.C.'s World Service I'm Jane Wakefield in a moment the hacking challenge to stop a raid state firing nuclear missiles sort off. Lots of people are investing in intelligent home speakers these days they can answer questions play music and even turn on the lights in fact I have one of the lexer devices which I have to confess I'm a little bit scared of ever since it told me totally without prompting that it left the actor Benedict Cumberbatch in you've been speaking to the man in charge of Alexa That's right I caught up with Dave this week we were speaking shortly afterwards and had had one of its prime day special days where. Discount of the price on these products and sales of them rolled ahead it's not just that I wasn't selling a lot of these speakers but other companies are falling over themselves to either let their Tech be controlled by an echo or have a small system that Alexa get built directly into their products so when I met with Amazon's devices chief I started by asking him if he now believe the tech to be the 1st breakthrough mess market technology since the smartphone and tablet. Whether or not I can say it's the next big thing I can see it is a big thing probably the biggest difference from this time last year till now is I would call not only the smart speakers but also the category of Ai and intelligent assistance in the home 8. True category and I'm incredibly excited about the momentum that the team has been able to give customers not only in the number and range of various devices that we have capabilities that 3rd parties are bringing developers or bringing to Alexa in the form of skills but also and people will see a lot more of this coming up and into this year's holiday season is the number of 3rd party hardware manufacturers that are embedding Alexa capabilities into their own devices that's And everything from smart home functionality and plugs and light bulbs and thermostats to full on speakers and and even refrigerators and cars that will have a Lexus capability and bedded in to them you believe though if you look at the phone. While trying to develop is to make the really a lot of the really great apps was the fact that they could make a lot of money from them by charging for. Building advertising in should we expect those to come to the skills market as well I think it's super early to decide what way developers will monetize what we want to do is give the ability for developers to experiment with different things and in the early days there are people that are monetizing in some ways some of the Smart home applications they have subscription services Spotify is a big developer on the on the platform and they can sell they have a free tier of their service but they obviously have a premium tier So there are ways that people are already starting to do that but with any new medium and you mentioned smartphones in the early days there was also no clear way to monetize there but eventually you find a path it's a leap to get people to put a device in their bedroom the speaker and it's looking at these new devices that have cameras and people are going to have so. Curity concerns and a worry that effectively a video link of what may doing in their bedroom might be might go out there and who knows what's going to happen to it how do you address those concerns it's fundamental to the trust that we have with our customers that we protect their information and we took a similar approach to developing echo that we did and how we protect you know hundreds of millions of customers credit cards information we do it by making it incredibly secure from day one and in the case of because you asked that specific in the case of microphones and cameras We've added additional layers of protection on behalf of the customer it starts with the hardware itself there's a mute button on the device that you see right here and when you hit that mute button we elect Rickly disconnect the microphone and by the way on the new products the cameras so there is no way to turn on when that red light is on for them for us or anybody else to turn on those microphones and cameras The 2nd thing that we did is we've made it very very prominent that when the microphones are cameras are turned on that you can see from throughout the room even in bright sunlight that there is that capability and then one other example that we try to put the customer 1st and privacy is when that data does get to the cloud we give the customer permission to delete it Dave from Amazon the Bill Goodman I'm told on good authority that you've just invested in one of these intelligence because after resisting for a while does that mean that you'll now can