tv Click BBC News September 6, 2020 12:30pm-1:00pm BST
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hong kong police have fired pepper spray projectiles at pro—democracy protesters. the unauthorised demonstration was organised to mark the day that legistlative elections were scheduled to be held, before the government delayed them for a year. hundreds of thousands of people have been evacuated out of the path of a powerful typhoon which is on track to hit southern parts of japan. it is the second storm to strike the region in less than a week. the coronavirus lockdown is being extended in australia's second biggest city of melbourne by another two weeks. the city is at the centre of the country's second wave of infections and it's already been under lockdown for six weeks. police in england have launched a murder investigation after a series of stabbings in the city of birmingham in which one man was killed and another seven people wounded. two of the victims are being treated in hospitalfor serious injuries.
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now on bbc news, click reveals the discovery of one of the largest collections of material belonging to the so—called islamic state group ever found on the internet. this week: the largest cache of terrorist content ever discovered online. but why is it so hard to take down? unfurling the latest phone. and, stand—up comedy in lockdown — it's no laughing matter. hey, welcome back. i hope you are doing 0k. we are still here for you, and we always will be. until we get the memo, at least.
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hey lara, how are you? how was your time off? do you feel refreshed? oh, i certainly do, but it's going to be back at work, even though that does just involve going to a quiet corner of my house and, of course, putting the click sign back up. how has your break been? it was quiet, to be honest. i managed to fill it doing all the things i have not had time to do in the last six months. is that a break? i am not sure whether it is, really. i don't know, but it does feel like the start of a new chapter. yeah, it does, it does. september has always been an important month for me — end of summer, back to school and so on. but 19 years ago, one terrible event defined one particular day in september like none other. i am, of course, talking about 9/11. it is easy to forget that the horrific september 11 attacks on the us happened before social media, before youtube, before it became easier to spread hate online and recruit people
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to your cause. these days, extremist and terrorist content keeps emerging on the internet, and it always seems to be one step ahead of the authorities who are trying to clamp down on it. and now, one researcher has discovered one of the largest living and growing collections of online jihadist material belonging to islamic state group. technology author carl miller met with the institute of strategic dialogue, who were behind this crucial find. al—baghdadi is dead. it was the early hours of the morning. extremism specialist moustafa ayad was getting alarmed. following the death of the islamic state leader, the digitaljihad was raising a dirge to baghdadi on twitter. flitting from account to pro—is account, ayad
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noticed something strange. some of them had short, discrete links, not within their tweets, but nestled in their biographies. he clicked. it was a powerpoint. in a folder dubbed "the mujahid's bag" and it taught you how to hijack planes. in that folder is everything you need to know how to build your own bombs, create your own chemicals, plan an attack, co—ordinate an attack, kidnapping operations, stabbing operations. things that teach you how to be a better terrorist, essentially. when moustafa told me his story, i was completely astonished. there, just a click away, was folder after folder, file after file, just this vast multi—ethnic, multilingual expanse of terrorist content, bigger than anything that any one of us had ever heard of before. for moustafa, though, his story was just beginning.
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this one is much clearer. this is higher resolution. to his knowledge, this was the largest cache of is material ever discovered — more than 90,000 pieces of content in all. and although he did not know it then, it was also the first time it was being pushed into the outside world. and, to his horror, this was no document dump, no static thing of the past. the contents of the cache were changing and growing. someone was editing the cache live. that is not good! what it proved was that despite concerted attempts to clear extremist and terror content from the internet, and claims by various agencies that they had been largely successful in doing so, isis is not defeated. it is still there, alive online. voiceover: this is al-khilafa, in all its glory, remaining and expanding...
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so moustafa alerted the counterterrorism prosecutors in new york, as well as the met police and home office in london towards the end of last year. ten months on, he is yet to hear back. there are thousands of schools for our cubs... getting it removed became a passion for moustafa and his team. they understand how not just to game platforms, they understand the power of the content that is contained within the caliphate cache. while the documents remain up, the traffic going to them can be monitored. according to the researchers, access to the cache is largely from young people, mainly 18—to 24—year—old males based in the arab world. almost half of the traffic comes from popular social media sites, and most of those clicks come from youtube.
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there are also the twitter accounts featuring links to the cache in their bios, 01’ sometimes even embedded in images. these accounts are lucky to survive for a day in the face of twitter‘s enforcements, so is hijacks accounts and tries to automatically create new ones constantly and at scale. a hijacked justin bieberfan page was used to host the links, as was an england rugby team supporter‘s account, which was then unwittingly followed by the team itself. it is important to recognise here that not all of the cache‘s contents are violent. there were a lot of other ways of trying to entice people to islamic state, and the food and lifestyle, even the healthcare — or at least heavily propagandise versions of them were all used as a way to try and entice people in. someone who knows from her student days how young people could be enticed is hadiya masieh. she now helps women who may be in danger of falling victim
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to online radicalisation and tells me it is often the lure of a particular lifestyle that pulls people in. yeah, so this is like having a fun party, and they are saying they have all the ice cream that they want there, it like is not, again, a war zone, it is a land of plenty. it is what advertising is, so they are good at advertising. i have watched beheading videos. i have been in conflict zones. i have had people close to me die at the hands of terrorist groups. the fact that they are able to operate such an extensive operation is not only frustrating to me on a professional level, but it is personally demoralising. the threat of the caliphate cache extends beyond just
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propaganda on the internet. it is a means by which people become activated to do harm. the type of platform on which this caliphate cache sits makes it particularly tricky to pull out. no way, we are willing to lay down our blood on the soil! mina al—lami is a specialist in this area. the biggest development in jihadist use of technology this year has been their exploitation of decentralised websites, decentralised platforms. decentralisation software allows users to store and share content across the web at multiple locations. the servers used are owned by people, rather than one company. the developers of these decentralised platforms have no way of acting against content that is stored on user—operated servers, or content that is shared
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across a dispersed network of users. it is really all about privacy, freedom, encryption. it is really the control, the full control that they promise to give to users — that is what attracts jihadists to these platforms. and despite moustafa's team having alerted the authorities in both america and the uk, the cache is still online. in fact, it has even got bigger. so we as a programme approached the authorities once again. london's met police acknowledged receiving the disclosure last year, and said: .
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the us attorney's office for the eastern district of new york declined to comment. the thing is multiplying. and it will continue to multiply, unless we take some sort of action. fascinating yet terrifying report there. carljoins me now. carl, hi. why do you think it was so difficult for the authorities to be able to police this content? what the police have is a nightmare. you've got the perpetrators in one country, you've got the victims in another, you've got evidence sprayed all over the world, and it is unbelievably difficult if you are any police force, anywhere in the world, to reach across all those borders and bring them all back into anything that looks like an investigation, let alone a court case. because what we did see in the film
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was that counterterrorism authorities in the us and the uk had been contacted, but that didn't seem to amount to a great deal. the problem is that it is kind of everyone‘s problem and therefore nobody‘s problem. we might want to blame the police, we might even want to blame the tech giants but there is a whole new kind of player in this game which is decentralisation. so suddenly, there is not even really a tech giant or a police force to pick up the phone and yell at. how do you think this content can ever be stopped? i think very clearly coming out of this, we are learning that information is basically indestructible. you cannot destroy it, you can't kill it, it is very difficult to get rid of. and that means that invariably, the kind of territory which so—called is has managed to carve out online is going to be much, much more difficult to ever fully kind of invade or defeat than any of the territory which they once held in the physical world.
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hello and welcome to the week in tech. it was the week that uber introduced selfie tech in north america to make sure passengers wearface masks. amazon's prime air fleet has been given permission to lift off by us regulators. and tesla showed off its model 3 production centre in china. we know face masks help stop the spread of coronavirus, and now a new device from lg comes with air—purifying tech as well. the puricare mask feeds filtered air to the wearer and uses sensors to adapt fan speeds to help make breathing feel more normal. spot the four—legged robot has been deployed to take patients‘ vitals in a us hospital. the boston dynamics machine carries a tablet so doctors can ask patients questions. four cameras measure skin temperature, breathing, pulse rate and blood oxygen levels from up to two metres away. artificially intelligent cctv cameras are being rolled out to detect violence on sydney's rail network.
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it's part of an initiative to improve safety for women travelling on public transport at night. and finally, with some galleries struggling to reopen, how about this entirely virtual art museum? voma, the virtual 0nline museum of art, claims to be the first completely imagined gallery to showcase art loaned from world—leading institutions. find art on display, a cafe for catching up and even a garden for some tranquillity. this is samsung's third attempt at a folding phone and honestly, what a difference a year makes. compared to the original galaxy fold, almost everything has been improved, apart from the name — this is the samsung galaxy z fold 2 5g. chuckles. when the original galaxy fold went on sale in september 2019, it had a tiny screen on the outside,
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a huge camera notch on the inside and a metalfinish that was a total fingerprint magnet. this time, the outside screen is a sensible 2.6 inches, —— 6.2 inches, the inside bezzles are reduced to a sliver and the back is pleasant matte finish. everything is so much more refined, it makes last years galaxy fold seem like a prototype, and that's why people say it's not always a good idea to be an early adopter. but what is the use? evidently, it combines the convenience of the phone with a screen the size of a tablet, and some apps support flex mode, which splits the folding display in two, so you can watch youtube videos like this, and in the camera, you can take photos like this, although i'm not exactly sure why you would want to. although with the external display, you can use the phone as its own stand for video calls, which is quite useful. i think it would be quite nice
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if you could keep it on your desk sideways to see notifications and calendar events, although the lock screen is vertical only so it's not really optimised for this, and you get that feeling for a lot of apps. samsung acknowledges it needs more developers to modify their apps for this format and, in time, it will improve, but this disconnect extends to the operating system. you can put your favourite apps on a wallpaper on the home screen, close the phone, and they're gone, because they're two independent home screens which is not how i expected it to work. the category of folding phones has definitely put some excitement back into smartphones, but it's difficult to say what will become the most popular format, if any. companies are still figuring out what works best. samsung has its z flip — instead of expanding into a tablet, it folds in half, and the new microsoft surface duo has two displays, but the screens themselves don't fold. the latest effort from samsung still doesn't fold completely flat, there is still a gap between two
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screens which i expect they will change in the future and, crucially, unlike other flagship smartphones, this isn't water— or even dust—resistant, and i think if people are spending £1,800 on a smartphone, probably don't want to get it broken by dust, although if you are rich enough to spend that much on the phone, you can probablyjust buy a second one to spare. that was chris. now, over the summer, one of the many festivals to be cancelled was the edinburgh fringe. usually thousands of performers descend upon scotland, bringing comedy, dance and theatre. this is a really big deal, i love this festival, and i especially love watching all the comedians testing out their new material. but you have been making up for it online, haven't you? i have. so, i have been going to quite a few virtual comedy gigs and this is where comedians are finding new ways to get themselves heard. welcome to the covid arms, give me a massive cheer for the start of the show!
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drop into the online comedy club the covid arms and you will find landlady kiri pritchard—mclean introducing a host of stand—ups, and while they do their gigs, the club has so far raised over £100,000 for charity. one of the things about lockdown is you get to know your kids a lot better because you are with them 24/7 so, like, you have thoughts like, "i need to give the teachers a big present." but doing stand—up without being able to hear the audience's reaction is a tough gig. and you really have to craft your routine carefully. new material is very hard to do online without an audience because it's so symbiotic, that relationship working with new material, because you are basically taking this precious butterfly of an idea and like, "is this rubbish" and they are like, "yes," or "no, let it fly," so you definitely need some kind of live audience when you do new material but if you are doing tried and tested, you know where funnies are.
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what's the point of saying anything amusing? there's no—one want to hear it. comedy panel shows on tv and radio have also gone out without an audience and in many cases, without a studio. ijust realised, weirdly, i've never been to your house. that's true. well, we're certainly not to be inviting you anytime soon, nish. yeah, good — because of the lockdown. mm...sure. one of the first was the mash report where rachel parris and nish kumar went from feeding off live laughs to hoping theirjokes hit home, at home. as a performer, i miss the audience is so much and i can tell the difference between my performances when i'm in front of a live audience are not and when you've got an audience, this light comes on. it's rachel parris and marcus brigstocke! cheering and applause. and now, rachel, and her husband, fellow comedian marcus brigstocke, can hear the laughs again.
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you keep chatting, and i'll give it a go. alright, i'll keep chatting. we had a conversation... people laugh. that's the most upstaging thing you could do. that's made it worse. this is their weekly online show at the always be comedy club, and it has a live front row. i think the front row that we hear and see on these online gigs is only 10 people, and it makes such a huge difference. it changes the gig, in my mind, completely, and it improves, it means you can do yourjokes with the correct timing. and, as we heard earlier, a live audience is vital in helping comedians to workshop new material. after all, barnstorming routines don't arrive fully formed. so i would be going out at least five nights a week to play tiny venues with a brand—new hour, you know, and they pay a very small amount of money and, i suppose, in a sense,
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that's what the tuesday night abc shows, it's £3, which we regret, that is a bit too low, but it's £3 of us tumbling through a string of ideas, some of which will turn into, hopefully, great and long—lasting routines that we do for the next year. james gill is the mc and warm—up for the couple, and he's found that there are certain hazards to having an audience who are live in their own living rooms. two of our regulars, and they are such lovely people, but they got a dog, and so a couple of... again, you know, you don't get this at the palladium. but a couple of times, a comedian might be in the middle of a set, and you can hear... barks. so i know that tim, quick as a flash is finding that box, clicking mute. this is a different world for comedians who are so used to a microphone, a stage and very little else, and some are experimenting.
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# i am, isay...#. harry hill hides on the edge of his webcam shots. 56, it's 56, init? al murray's pub landlord character now preaches from a virtual beer cellar. straight on the van. and the virtual background video feature means that stuart laws is sometimes upstaged by himself during his gig. probably hp, but they are both brown sauces, leave it. different sauces for different courses. nonsense noises. and some comedians have gone even more interactive. boop. boop! beautiful, great. this is how comedian monica gaga teaches improvisation in online lessons. she's also part of an online improv show called hell yeah where they line up, react, and improvise remotely with each other. she says it's a skill which is useful in life and work as well as on the stage.
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it's all of those key skills, like listening, being able to be open to failure, it's about listening to yourself and not judging yourself, and also it's about playing and creativity, something that i find, as an adult, we kind of condition ourselves out of. if a situation happens and it's like, "i know what i'm doing," and all of a sudden, it changes, and that's not panic inducing for you, it means that whatever situation you are put into, you're able to deal with it. comedy clubs are now starting to reopen, and the comedians that i've spoken to are gagging to get back to them but online gigs may just stick around. one thing that's come out of this is, i think, that when, and if, my tour comes back, i will have a digital date on the tour. also it means that anyone who wasn't able to get a babysitter that night or whatever, you know, or has anxiety, gets to go and see it as well. but if anyone can visit a gig
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anywhere in the world, it does cause a problem for comedians who are still honing their act. you're just blasting through material. when i do a tour, each night is special, and you can talk about where you are with the rest of it. broadly speaking, i do that same show every time with some stuff that's special to that night. you can't do that online, and therefore what you develop... that's true. ..it can't get good in the same way. because you can't repeat it. but who knows? maybe a new generation of live comics will be borne out of this situation who can make the medium work in new ways. after all, how many gigs have you been to that and like this? # saturday night, saturday night, da da da dum.# and that's it for this week. we hope you've enjoyed the programme. as ever, you can keep up with the team on social media on youtube, instagram, facebook and twitter at @bbcclick.
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thanks for watching, and we'll see you soon. bye— bye. hello. for most of us, overall today the weather isn't looking bad at all. there is a mixture of sunny spells, a few fleeting showers and thatis spells, a few fleeting showers and that is pretty much it. if you are unlucky you might run into a downpour with thunder and lightning. here is the satellite picture. we have clyde‘s streaming in from the north—west. fairly thin, broken cloud for most of us, hence the sunny spells going through. showers
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in parts of northern england and wales through the afternoon, just the possibility of a downpour in the southin the possibility of a downpour in the south in the afternoon. for the vast majority of the uk it is dry weather with temperatures in the high teens, possibly 20 in london. at night it stays dry in england and wales, but rain is expected in scotland and northern ireland, certainly by the end of the night. for belfast and glasgow, it will be a soggy monday morning. temperatures overnight will be around the 10 degrees mark. 0n monday, high—pressure to the south, so monday, high—pressure to the south, so dry for the southern counties. in the north, weatherfronts, so more ofa the north, weatherfronts, so more of a breeze here, when around the western isles of scotland. you can see this removing in scotland, northern ireland, the lake district, the north west, north wales, but for the north west, north wales, but for the east and east anglia, it will be bright on monday with temperatures getting up to 21. for tuesday and
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the middle of the week, high—pressure to the south and this current of warm and humid air. it will feel muggy and murky, particularly in western areas. we will get drizzle and light rain around the western coasts. in the east, in this situation the clouds often east, in this situation the clouds ofte n b rea k east, in this situation the clouds often break up. if they do, sunny spells can develop with temperatures up spells can develop with temperatures up to 25 degrees. by the end of the week, by thursday, fresher air will come in from the north. there will bea come in from the north. there will be a temperature dip towards thursday, back into the teens, but on the whole, apart from a fair bit of and on the whole, apart from a fair bit ofand a on the whole, apart from a fair bit of and a spell of rain on monday, the weather isn't looking too bad for most of us. i buy.
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good afternoon. one person has died and seven people have been injured, two critically, in a series of stabbings in birmingham overnight. west midlands police declared a major incident and they're hunting for one suspect. police say it appears to be a random selection of people who were targeted over roughly two hours, and that there is no suggestion it is terror—related. from birmingham, sian lloyd sent this report. a night of violence on the streets of birmingham.
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