tv Click BBC News September 23, 2021 3:30am-4:01am BST
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this is bbc news, the headlines: the british prime minister, borisjohnson, has warned that november's climate summit in scotland is a critical turning point for humanity. in a speech to the un generalassembly, mrjohnson called for all countries to commit to substantial reductions in carbon emissions by 2030. president biden has announced the united states will donate another five hundred million coronavirus vaccines to low income countries in need. the world health organization has warned they need help now. mr biden described the pandemic as a global tragedy which couldn't be solved with half measures. scientists in spain's canary islands have warned of the dangers from exploding rocks and toxic gasses, when lava from an erupting volcano flows into the sea. the authorities have declared a four—kilometre exclusion zone offshore to stop sightseers in boats getting too close. now on bbc news, it's time for click.
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this week we're looking at the world of extremism in gaming. also, meet your robot squash coach. let's play squash! and we all know that mosquitoes suck, but so do these anti—mozzy machines. hey, welcome to click. hope you're doing 0k. this week we are going to be talking about video games, but not perhaps in the way that you might think. i don't know about you, lara, but my boy is now playing more games online with his friends, which means i'm starting to have to think about the type of games that he wants to play and who he's talking to online.
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are you at that stage yet? no, we're not therejust yet, but we are hoping, when the time comes, she's just now into the nice, light—hearted stuff, i really don't like shooting games. yeah, exactly. we know that there are constant suspicions about links between violent games and violent people, and that's something that infuriates the gaming community, but that is not actually what we are talking about this week. we are notjust talking about the playing of the games but also the chat that goes on alongside them. that can be within the games or on other chat platforms that gamers have open at the same time. and although a lot of the chat is about gameplay orjust talking to your mates, popular platforms have historically also played host to more sinister conversations and even become places to recruit people into extremist groups. we have joined forces with a group of investigators who have been watching game streams and listening
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to the conversations happening in the gaming world, and as carl miller explains, what they learned was a revelation. today, we are going to be exploring our nazi camp that we have built. in fact, as i have been watching a spattering of games being played recently, i've been horrified to learn just what a fertile ground for extremist culture they can turn out to be. mainstream games, as well as indie and custom—made ones, have become places not only to play online, but spaces where like—minded people meet, chat and posture.
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how about we try to win a battle royale across multiple games while chatting nationalism? this is mark collett, the founder of the white nationalist group, patriotic alternative, talking to players on call of duty. it is one of the many examples of what the team have come up with, representing just a taste of what is out there. online gaming basically forms a means for people to connect over a shared hobby online, and this includes extremists, which can be really, really important in terms of advancing and furthering the extremist movement globally. within these huge gaming platforms, small but dedicated communities of extremists opportunistically use the chat either built into the games or on sites popular with gamers to create a culture where extremist views can seem normal. loser! it is not seig—heiling, it is not wearing swastikas or waving hitlerflags, it is just like you do with your normal friends. you sit at home after school
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and you play games. and so i think the gaming element to it can create the sense that far right activism is just like any other activity that you enjoy. and, of course, once you are in that world, then the radicalisation can happen. that is when, all of a sudden you are starting to go to other meetings, you're starting to go to smaller groups that are not necessarily playing games, but you are talking about politics more explicitly. like, at least with cod, they have not totally bent over to this like strong female lead characters in every military shooter. unlike the kind of wider gaming world, where the better you are at gaming, the more prowess you get, in this space, it's not necessarily like that. people are just really happy or excited to play a game with a famous far right figure. it almost kind of works the opposite way round. in these, the extreme right wing have potentially found safe harbours to broadcast their ideology or to engage in more traditional propagandising, the sort of thing that they would have done a few years ago on facebook, youtube and twitten _ the topics are all too familiar. misogyny, anti—semitism and homophobia. but all of this does go beyond just community building.
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the gamers can build whole spaces where their far right fantasies can come alive. these are small and not played by a huge amount of people, but what they do allow extremists to do is to create sort of custom—made role—playing experiences, for you to live out your radicalised fantasies online. you can do things like run a concentration camp or participate in a terrorist attack _ do you guys think after hitler| read the diary of anne frank, he started checking the attic? i'm sure! these games are set up which allow you to fight against feminists, or play as donald trump. they are sort of dog whistles and nudge nudge wink wink, which advertise to other players that you might have a far—right ideology. although these numbers are small, the way it can play out is highly disturbing, such as the attack in christchurch, new zealand.
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the killer filmed the massacre with a camera strapped to his head, mimicking the point of view shot of a video game, and then streamed the whole thing online. and actually so much does it look like call of duty that far right figures have taken that footage and around it, they have placed the elements of a computer game. while many of these are now hard to find, it shows how games can be used to memorialise a terrorist attack, and reflect the ideologies of the far right. the world just got 10ft taller. this is not a straightforward story of how games produced terrorists. what we do have here is something more complex and subtle than that. it is about how games can be spaces which allow extremist communities to be sustained and to develop, especially in the face of increased enforcement from places like facebook and twitter. this isn'tjust about culture though, it's also about money. new research suggests that streaming propaganda on platforms popular with gamers can be used by extremists to monetise their audiences. some of the ways that you can get money on the video
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game streaming world is through sponsorships and advertising, and those kind of traditional ways of making money. the newer way is to take donations directly, so you kind of cut out the middleman. and you take donations directly from the people watching you. this is interesting in the far right space because they are not usually playing the video games themselves, they are just talking. they have a game going in the background, but that is not really why they are there. the reason they are there is to talk politics and to convey hate speech and to incite violence and things like that. the more incendiary my speech, the more money i'm going to make. you can kind of dial up and down the rhetoric, and earn money, i'm talking easily six figures by many of the creators that i looked at, so i'm thinking of probably ten of them in particular earning more than $50,000 a year, some of them more than $10,000 a month. megan's research on this world
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of extremist streamers centred on us—based dlive, who say that they have stopped the monetisation of extremist speech, but the practice isn't restricted to one platform or one region. we approached the companies about what they are doing to deal with extremist content. some of the games featured here were removed after we contacted them and others have been taken down after being on the platform for a while, but the bigger issue still remains, and the responses that we did receive are all very similar. they all reiterated that they have zero tolerance policies against hate and violent extremism of any kind and they all proactively try to find and remove any content that violates their community guidelines. so, gaming and gaming platforms are being used by certain far right groups to make money, exert influence and build community, but the big question is how significant a threat this really is. it is so easy to turn round
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and say that this is blown up, this is exaggerated, and we have heard this, year after year, that the threat of the far right isn't as big as everyone says it is. the fact of the matter is, in the last three or four years we have seen record numbers of terrorism arrests from the far right in the uk. we have seen huge increased numbers in terms of young people and young far right groupings existing in the uk, many of which engage in gaming. i think that is a concerning trend that we are seeing with gaming, right? is it isjust another avenue to easily reach young people, potentially vulnerable people with some of the most dangerous violent ideologies. any idea that these things are kind of overblown is a luxury and i'd love it to be true but the truth of the matter is far right politics kills people and it recruits people and it ruins peoples lives and gaming is an element which the far right are using to do that right now. carl, as always an excellent investigation, thank you so much. that was a really difficult to watch. my heart sinks that this stuff makes it so easily online.
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is there any way of controlling this kind of thing? these are huge platforms, there are all kinds of activities happening there, the vast majority of their use is completely benign, and it can be really overwhelming, for any company to try and accurately and reliably spot when and where they are being misused in the ways the programme highlights. can't platforms, whether the gaming ones or the chat one is actually just look out for trigger words? you can have a huge talk about hitler without anyone being radicalised and there is plenty of radicalisation happens without mentioning hitler or any other kind of extremist phrase or trigger word, so it is never as simple as the presence of some words within chat. i would have thought that the walled gardens that are the gaming world would make players easier to track. you have got to buy the game with a credit card. you have got to surely know
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where you are, your ip address, to send you this high—speed gaming data, is that not the case? these are walled gardens, but more like walled giant lavish meadows! they are huge, there are millions of users in it. but then when you are in them, they can often actually be quite private, so these can be small groups, one chats, and not easy for researchers or investigators, often, to look into those kinds of places to see where radicalisation is at work. some of the companies we saw annual report, like minecraft, they are big, they have got money, why are they not able to help themselves? all technology companies are walking this kind of balancing act. 0n the one hand you have the balance of the platform is being misused and the other the cost and difficulty of enforcing it and they all arrive at some kind of weird point in the middle where they kind of have to balance
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the costs and on the one side and the public risks on the other and currently, right now, it isjust less visible that this kind of stuff is happening on gaming platforms, they have just had less embarrassment and less public exposure around it. do you get the sense that these extremists are somehow being chased off the traditional social media platforms for example by something like say facebook is doing? with the capital riots, the far right especially and conspiracy theorists have seen a mounting campaign of enforcement by facebook and the others. 0n the other hand, they are radicalised in the game already so it was notjust the capital riots and enforcement that made them play call of duty, they were already playing it, and these were already places they were hanging out. what is the scale of this problem? it is unbelievably difficult to know how big all this is, but we know in the face of all of this the far right problem is growing. there are more blocks,
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groups and cells, over the last couple of years, this has been an increasingly kind of large slice of the kind of radicalisation issue has come from the far right. hello and welcome to the week in tech, the week that apple unveiled new iphone 13 handsets that, cinematic mode, a portrait style option for shooting video. sir clive sinclair, who popularised home computing has died at the age of 81. he invented the zx computers, the slimline pocket calculator and even the c5 electric pod. and in south korea google was fined $170 million for blocking android customisations. in other google news, the internet giant has landed a 7000 kilometre subsea cable in the uk. the great hopper line runs from new york to bute in cornwall. the company says that it will allow for 17.5 million people to stream 4k video concurrently.
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it is not expected to be operational until 2022. australian researchers pioneered a world first 3d imaging system for detecting skin cancer. this full body scanner helps track moles and skin spots to identify melanoma early on, with al tools that supports the image—based detection process. and finally, space tourism has boldly entered a new era as space x wants its first all civilian mission with a crew of four trained to perform experiments while circling the earth for several days. the team are travelling in a space x dragon capsule which is set to splash down on the coast of florida is the mission closes. i'd love to go into space, i should start dropping some shuttle hints! this is what a bag of 400 mosquitoes looks like. i'm hoping they don't all fly out! i think they are all dead!
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i don't think they will fly out. this bag of now dead mosquitoes has come out of a mosquito trap that literally sucks mosquitoes out of the air. i am getting all of the legs in my hands! more than 300 of these traps have been deployed here in the city in the south of france, in hyeres where the mosquitoes were driving tourists away. we are surrounded by 1800 hectares of marshlands, where the female mosquito lay their eggs. the hotels lost tourism. people had to leave because they cannot stand the nuisance. so the mayor asked us to find a solution. the thing i hate most about going on holiday is mosquitoes, because they just for some reason find me really tasty and if you go on amazon you can find loads of these little ultraviolet bug zappers that claim to attract and kill them. here is the thing, they are not actually attracted to ultraviolet, they are attracted to carbon
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dioxide in your breath. each trap releases a mixture of carbon dioxide and a sort of sweaty fragrance that mimics what human smell like, and as mosquitoes approach the trap, they get vacuumed in, into a bag, where they die. the local government here is funding the project and get access to an app that shows the location of all of the traps and even how many mosquitoes each one has vacuumed up, and there is a serious side to this as well because mosquitoes can spread deadly diseases, so you can see why this might be a practical solution in regions where that is a problem. i went to a nearby town to meet the co—founders of the company. the machines release carbon dioxide to attract mosquitoes and we hear a lot about how carbon dioxide contributes to climate change. will these machines contribute to climate change. no because we're not creating dioxide, we are reusing carbon dioxide already created because in a lot of industry, we are creating carbon dioxide.
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0ur manufacturer is catching this carbon dioxide, a trap is like a human. so when we are using four traps in a school it is like four humans more in this space. it also releases a fragrance that emulates the human scent, how did you develop that, did you have to go around collecting sweat samples! we made lots of experimentation in the laboratory for the mosquitoes, to create the perfect perfume to attract the mosquito. it really smells like acid perfume for the tropical mosquito, it might smell like mushrooms for the marsh mosquitoes. there is wildlife that eats mosquitoes, once they are removed, will that affect wildlife like birds or frogs? we have no impact on all of the insects on the animals like birds, because we are catching mosquito only in the city, where humans are living
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and we're not catching the mosquito in the natural area, so they are able to be eating that, a lot of animals. what has been nice about coming here is that, as far as i know i have not yet been bitten by a mosquito, although we did have a close call on the first night with a very large mosquito in a restaurant, in an area where they do not have any of these traps so that one just has not been vacuumed up yet, so it has been nice to be able to come out and filmed the video with out costly keeping an eye on my arms and legs to make sure that there are no mosquitoes biting me. that was chris. bites are so annoying. i seem to have got lots of them recently through myjeans, which i don't understand but chris was told when he was out filming this that it is perfectly normal, albeit unfortunate, to be bitten through your clothing.
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i think i have got one in here, so i am holding my breath! go away! let's move on. we are going to talk about racquet sports now. did you see the tennis last weekend? it was brilliant, although i did not need to keep on watching those replays of emma raducanu's injury. i am so squeamish. she was amazing, wasn't she? we will talk about a different bat and ball game now, squash. we went to scotland to find out how technology and robotics cannot only help players to improve their game, but also provide some life changing applications. it is nice to see you again. yes, it is pepper again, we have seen it before in westminster talking to mps. thank you for inviting me to give evidence today. and working as a tour guide in a museum amongst other things. but now they are trying something new. let's play squash!
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nice, you can stop there. at scotland's national performance centre for sport, pepper has been turned into the worlds first automated squash coach. they are exploring how robotics could improve players�* motivation and performance in between sessions with their coach. during their solo practice, a motion tracking sensor attached to the squash racquet translates the player's data to the robot. it has accelerometers measuring the linear acceleration of the racket through three dimensions and gyros which measure the rotations of the racket in three dimensions, because when you hit a shot you are moving the raquet quite fast and you or i cannot really track that, but the accelerometers that we have on here, send data about 1000 times a second, we check it and we process it, using some machine learning and some ai.
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there is a more serious side to this. sport is not the only area where humanoid robots in combination with motion sensor technology could bring value. we have been working with squash coaches and physiotherapists who went on one to one individual squash coaching sessions and physiotherapy sessions. there are so many similarities in terms of the individual, repetitive nature of the exercise, that both groups of people are doing. we wanted to see how possible it would be to use a very similar robotic system to be able to motivate people to the two different sides of things. the idea is that the same principles could be applied to those recovering from strokes or similar conditions. let's see how it works. the game kind of replicates some cognitive rehabilitation tasks, using the tactile sensors on the robot are the head, the left and right hand and feet,
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so we can use a robot potentially to help engage and motivate individuals to engage with cognitive—based tasks, so shall i get started? let's fire it up. pepper tells you a list of body parts to be remembered and touched on the right order to successfully complete the game. a sensor, attached to your arm, vibrates when you make a correct move, and cameras in pepper's eyes track your face and move pepper's head in the right direction for a more humanlike interaction. laughter. go! right hand, head. that is correct, good! dammit! i hope you enjoyed playing.
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it has been prescribed by the physiotherapist that can go on to the pepper robot, i will report back to the physiotherapist how people are doing with the exercises are the physiotherapist is tracking how they are doing in between sessions, the physiotherapist said this is useful to them because it helps them to understand how their patient is performing exercises and really hone in on the correction that they can make when they come in for their physio. in these examples the robot is only the means of delivering the information and data collected in a meaningful way, but in addition to human care and coaching, robotics as a means of additional one—to—one interaction could change the way we learn, and recover, in future. see you next time! that was paul carter. how brilliant was that? and i'm afraid that is it from us for this week. as ever you can find us on social media, youtube, instagram,
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facebook and @bbcclick. thanks for watching, see you next time. goodbye. hello. wednesday wasn't a bad day at all for the greater part of england and wales. but, quite a significant but, there's a different kettle of fish at least for a time through wednesday and parts of scotland and northern ireland, where you had to contend with the weather front which is bringing this increase in cloud and at times bits and pieces of rain. through into thursday, we're going to see quite a vigorous area of low pressure dragging its way over towards southern parts of scandinavia. notice how tightly packed those isobars are. the wind will be a real feature across the north of mainland scotland and especially through the northern isles. it isn'tjust the strength of the winds, there will be showers if not longer
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spells of rain. here, we have the gusts and you'll see i'm indicatimg they are 65, possibly 70mph as we get on through the daylight hours of thursday morning. even further south, the gusts really quite significant. wednesday's weather front just producing the odd bit and piece of rain and sufficient cloud across wales for a time and then slumping to the southwest of england. all the while the low pressure moves away from scotland, pulling its frontal system with it. a weak linkage back towards more cloud and rain getting towards the western side of scotland. but with sunshine through wales, the midlands and eastern england through the afternoon, 22, possibly 23 degrees. much of the weather action across the northwestern corner of scotland as we bring new weather fronts in with a low centre close to the eastern side of iceland. through friday, the windsjust beginning to fall back to the west and the southwest — a relatively mild direction. any suggestion of the cold air behind tonight's lowjust over the northeast of scotland,
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that will be pulled away and will all be flooded into this moisture—laden west to south—westerly air flows as you get on through friday. anywhere facing those western shores could well pick up enough cloud for the odd bit of rain, but again, some brightness and could be looking at 22, 23 degrees. come the weekend, it won't be west and southwest it will be south and south—westerly winds which will pump it really mild air up and across the greater part of the british isles. it's not wall—to—wall sunshine, nor is it dry for everybody. there will be a scattering of showers, but for the time of year, i suspect it will feel very pleasantly mild.
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this is bbc news. our top stories: failing to act on climate change would lead to disaster — the british prime minister's stark warning to the united nations ahead of cop 26. we ahead of cop 26. have an awesome power. in the we have an awesome power. in the next a0 days, we have to choose, the world has to choose what kind of awesome we are going to be. president biden promises to donate half a billion coronavirus vaccines to poorer countries — the world health organization warns they need help, now. 19,000 mainly haitian migrants are stranded on the border with
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