O2 is preparing to face thousands of disappointed customers as the mobile phone company looks set to run out of the latest version of Apple's iPhone within minutes of some of its stores opening on Friday morning.

The company is suffering from what one insider termed "Hype 2.0" - a play on the fashionable social networking term Web 2.0 - as the new 3G version of the iPhone goes on sale in the UK and 21 other countries on Friday.

O2, Apple's exclusive network partner in the UK, ran out of stock for pre-orders within a few hours of the phone becoming available on its website on Monday. Many customers will be expecting to be able to go into its stores when they open on Friday and buy a phone over the counter.

O2, however, warned tonight that it has only limited stock and is limiting purchases to one per customer.

"On average, we will only have a few dozen iPhone 3Gs per store (some stores more, some stores less, dependant upon store size so we expect to sell out quickly)" the company warned on its website.

O2 claims that more than 200,000 people registered an interest in the 3G iPhone while 35,000 people registered interest in the previous version of the phone before it went on sale last year.

Carphone Warehouse, the only independent retailer that will stock the phone in the UK, reckons interest in the new phone is 10 times greater than it was for the original version.

The new phone coincides with Apple's opening up of the device so that third party application developers can create software for it. From Thursday the iTunes store will stock these applications and already there are 500 available - ranging from games and full copies of The Bible to iPhone versions of social networking sites and tools such as MySpace and Twitter.

The new 3G version of the phone is expected to be more popular in Europe than the device sold last year because it runs over the new 3G networks which European operators have rolled out over the past few years.

The 8GB version of the new phone - which can store about 2,000 songs - is free for O2 customers willing to sign up for 18 months at £45 a month, while the larger capacity 16GB phone is free for anyone on a £75-a-month deal.

Yesterday, virtual worlds such as Habbo Hotel and Second Life, in which people interact with each other through their alter egos, or avatars, were niche markets, albeit very large ones; today, they may be on the road to becoming a mass phenomenon.

Why? Because Google, the most popular search engine on the planet, with a massive fan base, has moved in with its own virtual world, Lively (For the moment it is only on Pcs, not on Apple computers).

The world offers users their own "virtual" rooms, which they can kit out from an inventory of armchairs, tables and lamp stands. I found it easy to do this; and to pull down a TV set from the inventory, then click on it and insert the web address of a YouTube video, which then started playing inside my virtual apartment. Rooms can be either private or public so all your friends, and strangers as well, can come and chat.

As is Google's style, it didn't spend a cent on advertising: it just quietly added Lively to its list of services and allowed the rest of the world do the marketing for it - yes, as I am doing now.

When I dipped into it yesterday, I was unimpressed: just a mass of cartoony characters in makeshift rooms saying "Hi" to each other as if imprisoned in their comic balloons. For anyone used to the creativity of Second Life, it all looked elementary.

Then it dawned on me: most of them had probably never been in a virtual world before. All of the other worlds - and there are more than 100 of them - have been start-ups coming from nowhere and are often too complex to navigate through (though not the new generation aimed at youngsters); this one is simple.

And, more to the point, this is the first virtual world to be launched using the leverage of a company whose icon is on the screen of well over 70% of the world's computers. This doesn't guarantee success, but Google hopes it has found the common denominator of virtual worlds. Google has had plenty of failures, but mass leverage isn't exactly a handicap.

When I went back on to Lively this morning, newcomers were already getting the hang of it, with well furnished rooms, bars, discos, chess games and, inevitably, erotica appearing all over the place and in many different languages, a sign of Google's global reach. There are already ominous signs of "lag", when your room takes ages to "rez", or materialise; and rooms get filled petty quickly, so it is not always possible to get into the popular ones.

Like others, I was caught on the hop with this announcement. A virtual world has been expected from Google for yonks, but a lot of the speculation presumed it would be glued on to Google Earth. Maybe that is still a work in progress. I had written a tour d'horizon of virtual worlds, which appears in today's Technology Guardian, including the Finnish Habbo Hotel and the British RuneScape, both of which claim more than 100m registrations, and the article went to press the day before Google's announcement (or non-announcement).

What does all this mean? For Google, this is a new direction. The company is built on searching other people's content, whether text, photos or videos. Now, for the first time on a big scale, it is putting its own content up, though user-generated material will inevitably follow when they have built up experience.

Second, users can embed Lively on their own websites or blogs, so they don't have to go to a different screen to enter a virtual world because now it has converged with the real world.

They are all just different ways of connecting with other people. This won't stop critics of virtual world devotees asking: "Why don't you get a real life?" But it is a major step towards breaking barriers.

Most of the three-dimensional projects in the pipeline, such as metaplace.com, are trying to do two things: merge virtual worlds with the rest of the web and make them interoperable, so you can move from one world to another, in contrast to the present "walled garden" approach, in which avatars can't move from World of Warcraft to Entropia Universe or Second Life. If virtual worlds want to replicate the real world, then inhabitants must be able to move from one country to another.

One of the attractions of virtual worlds is that they enable you to meet not just friends, or friends of friends (as with Facebook, MySpace and Bebo) in a static way, but to meet people in a live environment whom you have come across randomly or because they share your interests.

This carries obvious dangers, not least of children straying into an adult environment, so Google is wise to take it slowly. But as a way of linking people, whether for political or artistic reasons, with others across the globe, virtual worlds have awesome possibilities.

This doesn't mean Google will win the race: the experience of the so-called Web 2.0 revolution is that small start-ups take the cream not the dinosaurs of the dotcom boom. For instance, Google had its own video site but couldn't use its massive leverage to achieve critical mass, so it had to buy YouTube instead. It remains to be seen whether it will be different with virtual worlds.

I lived in London for almost four years and I miss many parts of Britain's infrastructure. I miss the NHS and British trains (try Amtrak if you don't believe me). I listened to the BBC with wistfulness last week as the country celebrated Ernest Bevan and the NHS's 60th birthday. But when I think of British government, I don't think of a dynamic, internet-powered wired government. That's Barack Obama's turf, right? I think I might be wrong.

At a presentation recently, I was stunned to see shots of members of Parliament actually talking online, to each other and to voters. I had the privilege of hearing Tom Steinberg of mysociety.org, whose organisation uses technology to help citizens actively participate in government, from a site like FixMyStreet, to the No10 petitions website. This was quite stunning to an American audience, since it's built on an open source platform and seemingly unmediated. And in Britain you can try to ask the prime minister questions on YouTube. Granted, there are some exceptions within the American federal system, but Governing 2.0, as it's been dubbed, may be a long time coming. Instead, in the US we like to focus on the campaign.

I think many Americans have the wrong conception of what an online-empowered political system looks like. Many say Obama would never be the Democratic nominee if it were not for the internet. And the statistics are mind-blowing: more than $45m raised online in February 2008 alone. Over a million donors with an average gift of below $100. Apparently, 50% of February's donors gave less than $50, and a third of those donors went on to volunteer by signing up at my.barackobama.com, the candidate's social networking community.

You might think we're so online-empowered here. Yes, my.barackobama.com has millions of users but it's a remarkably directed environment. The ideal outcome would seem to be the creation of many self-organising teams who meet to cheer on Obama. Based on past campaigns, the site will probably shut down on November 5 this year, the day after the presidential election, and those teams will disperse, only to come back in four years' time.

It's fair to say this attitude extends to most American political operations. Internet operations are valuable to campaigns for cash-gathering capabilities (one can turn on the spigot, in effect, by sending out online fundraising solicitations) and cool online programmes make for great process stories in the media. The huge need for cash in American campaigns coupled with what I understand to be sometimes arcane and particular rules about political communication within the federal government means online communities are less valuable when governing is actually happening.

I've written before that Obama is a very well-marketed candidate, and like all good marketing campaigns, this necessitates a short-term, laser-focused approach. Recent articles have questioned whether the campaign values its online community beyond fundraising.

Obama has caught a lot of well-deserved flack recently for his support for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa) amendments that the Senate passed on Wednesday. This issue is a hot button for the netroots supporters who were important to Obama's primary success. The Fisa legislation broadly expands executive powers to conduct warrantless wiretaps and grants immunity to the telecom companies that have already participated in illegal wiretaps at the request of the Bush administration. Concerned Obama supporters started a new group on my.barackobama.com to ask the senator to vote against the Fisa revisions. Obama responded, via his blog, appropriately. Obama (or his policy team) wrote: "I intend to run as president of the United States - a White House that takes the constitution seriously, conducts the peoples' business out in the open, welcomes and listens to dissenting views, and asks you to play your part in shaping our country's destiny."

Obama's blog post garnered 2,443 reader comments. It's a start. Obama could be the first president to use the internet as a tool for real civic action, in addition to electioneering. Obama has pledged to use digital technology to open up government to the public and appoint the first White House chief technology officer. But it's a slow road to change in a country addicted to the excitement of campaigning, and sceptical about the realities of governing. Maybe we should take a page from the UK.

BT is in talks to buy Silicon Valley internet-phone software developer Ribbit as it looks to create a one-number web-based communications platform to take on the likes of Google and Skype in the burgeoning online telecoms market.

Ribbit, founded two years ago and based near Google's headquarters in Mountain View, claims to be "Silicon Valley's first phone company". It has created software that allows programmers to design applications that tie together mobile phones, fixed-line phones and even social networking sites into a single online communications hub.

Reports in the blogosphere said that BT is spending $55m (£28m) on the company. No actual deal is understood to have yet been signed off, and BT refused to comment today.

Bringing together the information stored on the internet with mobile phones and computers, a trend known as unified communications, has been mooted for many years. But the take-up of broadband and the creation of fast mobile phone networks has made it easier to achieve. Last year Google snapped up another Californian company involved in this area, called GrandCentral, for about $50m.

Ribbit's technology is open to any software developer to use - a model known as open source - so they can build their own applications. London-based Square Circle, for instance, has created a web-based phone application that looks like a chalkboard. American business communications group Salesforce.com, meanwhile, has a Ribbit-based application that lets a company's sales people keep track of all their calls and contacts through a single web page and costs $25 per user per month.

Ribbit is also testing a consumer platform called Amphibian, which looks like a social networking site with a phone attached. It allows users to transcribe voicemail messages left on their mobile as text on a web page, meaning they can search for keywords in a message. Calls can be patched through from a mobile to a computer; not only will the caller's number be displayed but Amphibian can pull up their profile and latest postings from sites such as Flickr, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Because the system is open, calls from other web-based telephony services such as GoogleTalk and Skype can also be accessed.

Google, too, is experimenting with open-source mobile communications with its Android mobile phone operating system, due to start appearing in the first generation of handsets towards the end of the year. Application developers are likely to use the platform to create unified messaging services. Apple, meanwhile, is also letting developers create applications for its iPhone device and a Ribbit service has already been created.

Ribbit has raised about $13m from venture capital firms Alsop-Louie Partners, Allegis Capital and KPG Ventures. It was co-founded by serial entrepreneur Ted Griggs who serves as chief executive, former AT&T product development head Crick Waters and two of Griggs' colleagues from his previous company, telecoms software group Syndeo Corporation: Peter Leong and Ramani Narayan, Ribbit's head of marketing, meanwhile, used to be head of marketing at another Californian start-up in the web telephony market called Jajah. He previously worked for Apple.

The BBC has said its social networking site for young children, MyCBBC, has reached 100,000 registered users in four months, as the corporation addresses demand for safe social media tools for younger children.

MyCBBC was launched shortly before an official report by media regulator Ofcom found that more than a quarter of eight- to 11-year-olds in the UK regularly use social networking sites designed for older children and teenagers.

Bebo, Facebook, MySpace and most other major networks require users to be at least 13. A smaller number of sites offer services for younger children, because of tighter safety demands.

MyCBBC, which was developed with production company TwoFour Digital, is designed for six- to 12-year-olds, and invites them to design their own "dens" with furniture and accessories. It also offers material related to BBC children's programmes to customise the page.

The identity of children is protected by disguising real names, and by limiting "friends" to 16 other users who can only choose from multiple choice comments. Profiles can only be seen by those 16 friends.

Rival commercial sites tend to be focused around a special interest or gaming, such as Horseland, Neopets or Stardoll, or brand extensions such as BarbieGirls.

Marc Goodchild, the head of interactive and on-demand for BBC Children's, said the focus for MyCBBC was media and technology literacy.

"Our research showed that while kids love the idea of sites like World of Warcraft, they are still quite innocent and quite nervous about joining," Goodchild added.

"We're really pleased that we have reached 100,000 sign-ups because it demonstrates that it is appropriate to hand-hold kids gently into being expressive and creative."

He said sites such as Club Penguin focused on play and causal chat rather than creativity with a British voice.

"To get the full benefit of many of these sites you have to pay a subscription," Goodchild said, adding that that could contribute to a digital divide.

"I certainly don't think we should be monopolising this area, but we are trying to help set standards," he added.

Goodchild said the BBC has talked to Lego and "other trusted brands" about developing best practice for children's social networking sites.

Introducing more creative features for children will be a priority, he added, making more connections between the service and other BBC content and allowing them to output some of their work, so pictures could be printed and sound clips sent to their MP3 player.

The challenge, Goodchild said, was to allow children to use and share more content while keeping their identity hidden.

"We also want to reduce the barrier to entry," he added, "The conundrum is: Do we allow kids not just to post CBBC content? We could be more open, but how do you police that?"

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The Financial Times website was thrown into chaos early today after equipment was stolen from the company's technical contractor in Watford overnight.

Cable & Wireless confirmed there had been a theft from a network site and said it is working to rectify the problem, which left the FT.com news desk unable to update the site for several hours due to what one journalist described as a "serious service disruption".

The FT switched to a back-up system using servers in New York, but the problem has slowed the speed of the site and impaired the search function and new subscriber tools.

FT.com's financial markets comment and analysis blog Alphaville maintained a running commentary on the theft and published major news stories while the main site was experiencing difficulties.

"If in the early hours of this morning you saw a couple of scrap metal bandits in the vicinity of the Cable & Wireless data centre at Watford let us know," wrote Neil Hume on Alphaville.

"The suspicion is that with soaring metals prices these things are actually worth more broken up. Anyway - various damage and alleged theft at the data centre meant FT.com and various other internet services around London have suffered serious service disruption this morning.

"You can get to FT.com - that is now running off American servers - but the main news desk here are still not able to publish content. Which they're really happy about."

Cable & Wireless said the thieves had stolen not servers but other equipment that had disrupted FT.com and the theft was from a network link site rather than a high-security data centre.

"We are in the process of investigating the incident and have deployed specialist engineers to work on restoring full services to affected customers as quickly as possible," said the company in a statement.

"Delivering a great service to customers is our core priority, and we are working with those affected to minimise the impact on their business."

The firm, which also has contracts with Sainsbury's and thinkproperty.com - which is owned by Guardian Media Group - emphasised that the theft was a minor one.

An FT spokesman confirmed the problem and said the company is "working with our supplier to replace the missing equipment and will restore full functionality as soon as possible".

· To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 7239 9857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 7278 2332.

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The Daily Telegraph science editor, Roger Highfield - the first man to bounce a neutron off a soap bubble - has been appointed editor of New Scientist.

Highfield, who is leaving the Daily Telegraph after more than 20 years, will become the weekly science news magazine's ninth editor and will help with its expansion into America and India.

"I have had two fantastic decades at the Daily Telegraph, where I have managed to do so much more than write news and feature articles," Highfield said.

"From the very first day I was recruited in 1986, I have been fortunate to work with many exceptional people. I am especially grateful to my editor, William Lewis, for the exciting and unprecedented opportunities he has given me to explore what the web has to offer journalism.

"I will have the chance to lead a fantastically talented team to take New Scientist into new markets and to enhance its reputation as the best source of novel ideas and new thinking on the planet."

Prior to the Telegraph, Highfield was news editor of Nuclear Engineering International and clinical reporter for family doctors magazine Pulse.

He has an MA and DPhil in chemistry from the University of Oxford and also worked as a scientist at Unilever and the Institut Laue-Langevin in Grenoble, France, where he became the first person to bounce a neutron off a soap bubble.

Highfield has written six books and edited leading geneticist Craig Venter's A Life Decoded.

New Scientist has editions in the UK, US and Australia and has a weekly circulation of more than 174,000. It began publication in 1956.

Its website, newscientist.com, has 2.3 million visitors a month.

Jeremy Webb, the New Scientist editor-in-chief, said: "We are expanding in the US, into new markets in India and elsewhere, and improving our web offering.

"The magazine is right at the centre of all these efforts and we need a strong, creative editor to lead it. I can't wait to start working with Roger."

The Telegraph Media Group editor-in-chief, Will Lewis, said: "Roger has been a fantastic science editor for the Daily Telegraph and I know that he will be a real asset to the New Scientist. I wish him all the very best in this new exciting role."

· To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 7239 9857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 7278 2332.

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BT yesterday snapped up the online business directory firm Ufindus for £20m as it prepares to take on Yell.com, Google and other dotcom start-ups in the local information market.

The deal will help BT as it creates an online directory with social networking technology, so that users will not only be able to find businesses and services in their area but will also be able to rate and review them, for subsequent users.

BT has already launched a test version of such a service, called BT Exchanges, and is planning a full launch of the site in the autumn. The Ufindus portfolio will bring the company advertisers and technical expertise. BT used to own the Yellow Pages publisher Yell, but sold it seven years ago to reduce debt.

Ufindus has more than 20,000 small and medium-sized business customers and nearly 2m online directory listings on its three main internet directories: SmileLocal, MoreUK and Ufindus. It also has a host of niche directories for individual trades, such as builderregister.com and bathroomspecialistfinder.com.

"Ufindus will play an important role in the continued development of BT Directories' online portfolio," said David Benjamin, head of BT Directories. "Through Ufindus' considerable expertise and experience in online classified advertising, we access further local classified product offerings, significant search traffic and new customers."

Ufindus generates more than 9m searches a month and last year made £14m. The company was sold to BT by the AIM-listed Iomart Group. Shares in Iomart closed yesterday up 4p at 49.5p.

The local information market is booming as more people get fast broadband access at home and the new generation of mobile devices such as the iPhone make it easier for people to get web-based information when on the move. Google and Yell are already heavily involved in the online directories market, linking business information with maps and directions.

But the sheer wealth of information available has brought into fashion websites that offer feedback as well as names and contact details. There are already a number of such sites, such as LocalLife.co.uk. TouchLocal.com is a full-scale social networking site that allows users to review everything from pubs to plumbers.

Is the XM1063 a stink bomb, a banana skin, or a bad trip? It's hard to know. XM1063 is the code name for the US army's new secret weapon which will "suppress" people without harming them, as well as stopping vehicles in an area 100m square. But is it a violation of chemical weapons treaties, or a welcome move towards less destructive warfare using non-lethal weapons?

Exactly how it works is classified, but we have established some details. The first part of the weapon is an artillery round - or as the army puts it, "a non-lethal personal suppression projectile" - fired from a 155mm howitzer, with a range of 28km. It scatters 152 small non-explosive submunitions over a 1-hectare area; as each parachutes down, it sprays a chemical agent. Development was overseen by the US Army's Armament Research, Development and Engineering Centre (Ardec).

A presentation by the makers, General Dynamics, says the XM1063 will "suppress, disperse or engage personnel" and "deny personnel access to, use of, or movement through a particular area, point or facility" (=see PDF).

Smelling it out

Experts suggest three possible payloads: an existing riot-control agent, malodorants or a new chemical agent. Existing agents include CS gas and a form of pepper spray. But these seem unlikely choices, because their effects only last minutes, and could wear off before friendly forces arrive. They could also face a legal challenge: the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention prohibits the use of riot control agents in warfare

"The matter is further complicated if pepper gas was used as the irritant since this is a plant toxin," says Steve Wright of Leeds Metropolitan University. "Such toxins are explicitly banned."

The possibilities seem to boil down to anti-traction agents (which make the whole area impossibly slippery), a malodorant or some novel chemical agents.

Anti-traction agents are possible, but seem unlikely because research in this area (such as Darpa's Black Ice program) still seems to be at an early stage. It would be unusual for an agency to still be doing basic research when another is about to field a finished product.

A malodorant is a super stinkbomb with a truly intolerable smell. The Pentagon has been working on such chemicals for years, and a recent US army briefing on future artillery concepts specifically mentions artillery-delivered malodorants. (see PDF)

This might sidestep the Chemical Weapons Convention with the argument that malodorants are not chemical weapons. However, Ralf Trapp, an independent disarmament consultant formerly with the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, challenges this interpretation.

"That argument rests on the assumption that there are no other toxic effects of these chemicals, and that one can control the dose so that one never crosses into the dose range for toxic effects," says Trapp. "It also is based a concept of toxicity that is centuries out of date - malodorants do have a physiological effect and toxicity is not limited to lethality."

Finally, there is the possibility that the US has decided to ignore the convention and use new non-lethal chemical agents. This approach has supporters in high places. Before the Iraq war in 2003, Donald Rumsfeld pushed for rules of engagement that would allow US forces to use non-lethal chemicals.

Until the 1980s, the US maintained stockpiles of a chemical incapacitant known as BZ or Agent Buzz. BZ is a psychoactive chemical causing stupor, confusion and hallucinations lasting for more than 24 hours. It has an evil reputation, but this is based largely on rumour as few facts are available. Most people have only heard of BZ in connection with the film Jacob's Ladder. This depicted soldiers exposed to a secret chemical weapon in Vietnam with terrible results, including permanent psychosis.

"We are reaping the whirlwind today because of government secrecy in the past," says Jim Ketchum, who ran the BZ testing program in the 1960s. "It has allowed critics to make unsupportable claims about agents such as BZ without rejoinder from the government research community." Although the US is known to have been active in this area since 2000, no comments are available from researchers on non-lethal chemical agents - now termed "calmatives", whatever their chemical action.

Ketchum has written a book, Chemical Warfare Secrets Almost Forgotten, about his experiences of testing BZ on hundreds of volunteers. The effects are very different to those portrayed by Hollywood. None suffered physical harm, mental breakdown or any lasting after-effects. Rather than driving subjects berserk, it has a sedative action. But unlike the fentanyl used in 2002 by Russian police when they stormed a Moscow theatre where Chechen rebels were holding hostages, BZ does not rely on sedation for its effects and does not carry the same risk.

Clouding the issue

Ketchum is now retired, and his successors have had decades to develop more effective and safer agents. But strict secrecy is still in place and there is no information about current research. Ketchum argues that the use of incapacitants would save lives, especially in situations where insurgents are mixed with the civilian population. Others believe that such agents are not just illegal but a step towards unlimited chemical weapons.

"It shouldn't be forgotten that the horrors of gas warfare in the first world war began with teargas, followed up with lethal firepower," says Wright.

As a sideline, the XM1063 projectile also has a "vehicle area denial" component composed of nanoparticles. The US army has researched chemicals to interefere with engine combustion in the past, including work with ferrocene (normally used as an anti-knock additive) which prevent engines from working, with the idea is that this would stop any vehicle within the affected area. However, the potential health risks are unknown, especially when nanoparticles are involved.

Testing of the XM1063 was completed successfully last year and it is due for low-rate production from 2009. Ardec says that the production decision is on hold awaiting further direction from the program manager. It seems the decision on whether to enter a new age of chemical warfare now rests with the military rather then civilians. Unless put under pressure, the US Army seems unlikely to give any details of what's in the surprise package until it is used. And maybe not even then.

Another week, another mediocre film tie-in. As you may expect if you, or your kids, have played any game based on a film licence over the past year, this is a button-bashing affair that demands little skill. Most of the play involves simple combat, with the odd puzzle section thrown in. Don't get too excited, though - these conundrums normally involve simple tasks like pulling the right lever. That's not to say this is a terrible game. Shove a Narnia fan in front of the TV and they will probably enjoy playing out some of the film's action-heavy scenes. The graphics are decent enough, though a little too dark in places. Frustratingly the camera is unhelpful, making some sections harder than they need be, while the cutscenes and narrative are fragmented and confusing. Combine these problems with the uninspiring gameplay and you have a Narnia game for fans only.

Moving music

We want to put our existing iPod libraries on to the new PC.
Jane McNicol

JS: Apple's website provides instructions for moving your music library either via a CD or DVD or using an iPod (support.apple.com/kb/HT1329). However, this requires the use of iTunes 7 on both machines. One alternative is to use iGadget software ($15), which has replaced iPod Agent by the same developer, but there are many others. The main problem is transferring any protected files bought from the iTunes store. According to Apple, you must authorise the new PC by selecting Authorize Computer on the Store menu in iTunes. You can then attach the iPod, go to the File menu, and select Transfer Purchases from iPod (support.apple.com/kb/HT1727). Of course, you can always copy your files onto CD or other storage medium and add them to iTunes on the new PC. However, this will lose the metadata you had in the old library.

TinyURL revisited

What's the best way to follow up your many TinyURL references?
Tom Garrud

My system - Firefox 3, Zone Alarm Security Suite, Windows XP - will not let me access any TinyURLs.
David Gompertz

JS: TinyURL references work as published if you type them directly into the address bar of your browser or, at worst, stick http:// on the front, eg http://tinyurl.com/owd8n etc. But it's probably easier to follow the links from the Ask Jack blog, where I use the full address of each link instead of the TinyURL. Some websites and security programs may block TinyURL addresses as they can be used to take people to malware sites. The Zone Alarm Suite now does this via its Spy Site Blocking tab, but this is not part of the free firewall program.

Saving boot time

I can remember having to wait for radio valves to warm up. Why do I have to wait even longer after switching on my Windows XP PC?
Hugh Roberts

JS: When correctly set up by the manufacturer, Windows XP boots in about 30 seconds, resumes from Hibernate in 20 seconds, and resumes from Standby in five seconds. The boot time for a well-used PC is generally more like 60 to 90 seconds, depending on how many applications are being loaded in the background. These will usually include a firewall and antivirus software, but most other preloads are unnecessary. Search for [windows startup manager] and you will find lots of programs that allow you to control which things are loaded. I use AnVir Task Manager Free for this purpose, though Windows Vista has a utility built in. Otherwise, you can go to the Control Panel, click Power Options, and set your PC so that it will hibernate after a specified time. This uses very little power but it will start up quicker.

Data destruction

I've bought a replacement for my broken down PC, and would like to dispose of it, but it still has my data on the hard drive.
Barbara Evans

JS: Simply remove the hard drive before disposing of the base unit. If the drive is big enough to be worth the effort, you could mount it in an external drive case and use it as a USB drive with your new machine. If it's a small drive and you don't need to rescue any data, you can do enough physical damage to render it inoperable - eg, wrap it in a tea towel and whack it with a hammer. The tea towel is to stop bits flying around, but you should also wear appropriate protective equipment such as goggles.

What's Kontiki?

I have installed the BBC iPlayer, but every time I activate it, a program called Kontiki pops up.
Denis

JS: When you download TV programmes using iPlayer - as distinct from watching streamed versions online - they are downloaded using Kontiki (kontiki.com). This is a peer-to-peer file sharing program, which is also used by similar services such as Sky by Broadband and Channel 4's 4oD. Kontiki seems to load and use your bandwidth, even if you are not using iPlayer: use the Windows Task Manager to see if Kservice is running. The BBC has a page that explains how to stop it running on startup and when you are not using iPlayer (tinyurl.com/4h2t26). You can remove it altogether using the kclean.exe program from tinyurl.com/5msknq. However, if you do, any Kontiki-based programs such as iPlayer may not work.

Backchat

Vista user JH Prentice wanted a photo retouching program to replace Microsoft's Picture It! I suggested the Picnik website and Paint.net. Two readers suggested Picasa (picasa.google.com), which is mainly a photo organiser, while Marcus Fallon proposed XnView (xnview.com), which is mainly a viewer. I'd go for XnView too, if its retouching facilities meet your needs. A great pro solution is Adobe's Lightroom, if you have £200 to spare.

Laws are like London buses, which come along in threes. I've therefore suffered a bit of teasing for only having two Laws of Computing. However, I am now thinking about a third law, which will roughly state that "the easier it is for you to access your data, the easier it is for someone else to access your data". If you can come up with a snappy or even witty formulation, I'd be grateful. I'm obviously not Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler or Isaac Asimov, and I'm not proud.

My laws are nothing like real laws in the scientific sense. They are simply intended to help people think about the possible consequences of their actions. We all like computer geegaws, and can be sucked in by their shiny-shiny aspect. But as every teenager soon discovers, short-term attractions can have regrettable long-term effects.

And over the long term, data is the only thing that matters. In 50 years, you won't care which computer hardware or software you used, and whether it had fashionably rounded corners. But you will care if you can't read your old notes and diaries, play your favourite songs, or access old family photos. Data is forever.

With that in mind, Schofield's First Law of Computing says: never put data into a program unless you can see exactly how to get it out.

This law was born in the early 1980s when I edited a monthly magazine called Practical Computing. We used a lot of incompatible machines with different storage formats including cassette tape, 5.25in and 8in floppies, 3in and 3.5in "stiffies" and Sinclair Microdrives. We used even more incompatible word processors and other software. All of this stuff was doomed, but what isn't?

Schofield's Second Law of Computing says that data doesn't really exist unless you have at least two copies of it.

This one was born when we got hard drives that were so big that we didn't back them up. When files were on floppies, you knew you needed a spare. When you could back up a 40MB or 80MB hard drive to a 700MB CD-Rom, backups were a doddle. If you had to back up an 80GB hard drive with a 700MB CD-Rom, it was easier not to bother.

But could you remember which files you had backed up, which you'd deleted to make space, and which had simply gone missing? Of course not. You only found out what you had when the hard drive failed, as all of them do, eventually.

When I figure it out, Schofield's Third Law of Computing will reflect life in the 2000s. Over the past 50 years, you knew where your data was: it didn't move around. Now you may have data on PC hard drives, laptops, mobile phones, MP3 players and online. This is good, from the point of view of my first two laws, but there's a downside. While it has become much easier for us to access our data, it has also become much easier for other people to access it.

Any data that's online is vulnerable either through mistakes, hacking, social engineering or other causes. Maybe you got the permissions wrong, maybe it was cross-site scripting, maybe it was that library or cybercafe you visited, or you used the same weak password everywhere. Any data on a mobile device is vulnerable to loss or theft, and that includes external hard drives and Flash memory cards.

Data loss has obviously become a major problem for UK government and major corporations. Protecting data could soon become your problem, too.

Landfills and plastics don't mix well. It takes several hundred years for an oil-based plastic bottle to breakdown in a landfill. And plastics can consume as much as 25% of the landfill space, according to the US government's Energy Information Administration.

Those two problems are helping drive innovation into new bioplastic packaging material at research institutions including Missouri University Science and Technology. There, researchers are cooking up recipes for super-biodegradable plastics that decompose in a few months.

These bioplastics are welcome improvements for US cities running out of landfill capacity over the next two decades. In several states - such as Alaska, Connecticut, Delaware, North Carolina, New Hampshire and Rhode Island - capacity is expected to run out in just five years.

Dr KB Lee, professor of chemical engineering at Missouri S&T, and his team are investigating super-biodegradable plastic recipes made up of fillers, such as starch and fibres. Those natural building blocks make it possible for living organisms to break down waste material. Not only do these fillers accelerate the decomposition, but they also reduce the cost in a variety of commercial applications.

Wear, tear and weather

Lee's team is experimenting with renewable polymers such as glycerol, a byproduct of biodiesel manufacturing, and polyactic acid, a byproduct of ethanol fermentation. By combining and creating blends of polymers, the researchers believe the formulations will be suitable for applications such as agricultural films, bottles, biomedical and drug delivery devices.

Researchers agree that bio-based plastics have shortcomings, including being more expensive than petroleum plastics to produce and having limited mechanical strength properties. "It would be hard to expect a plastic product with excellent resistance against wearing, tearing, and weathering during its service life to also have biodegradability after usable service life," says Lee.

The challenges of higher prices are not new. Early in the 20th century, American inventors Henry Ford and George Carver tested formulations of plastics derived from foodstuffs in their labs. But they found the material wasn't cost-competitive with cheap oil-based plastics.

Today, the rising price of oil, coupled with innovative bio-plastic formulations, has improved the commercial outlook for these products. For example, bioplastics are considered good fits for different types of single-use products, such as low-grade stuffing materials, agricultural product containers and bags and packaging for materials with short expiration dates.

US-based market research body Freedonia Group estimates that demand in the $330m (£161m) US market in degradable plastic will grow 13.7% each year as prices and properties become more competitive with conventional polymers.

Other research efforts are focused on improving the strength of these bioplastic materials. Dr David Grewell, assistant professor of agriculture and biosystems engineering at Iowa State University and colleagues are tackling the mechanical weakness by reinforcing bioplastics with nanoclays. These tiny pieces of clay are between just 10- and 20-billionths of a metre in thickness.

The Iowa State researchers are using zein - natural proteins derived from corn and soy plants - which have stronger mechanical properties. One application for bioplastic formulations, says Grewell, is for garden plant pots. The bioplastic pots can be placed in the ground with the plant, thus supplying nutrients to the plant as it breaks down. Other potential applications for bioplastics made from crop proteins include disposable wraps for hay bales and packaging for the food industry. Another application is making green, biodegradable lubrication sticks from soy grease: Grewell and the Cornell researchers are working with prototypes as part of a 20-month pilot project.

Another research effort, 1,000 miles to the east of Iowa State, is based at Dr Emmanuel Giannelis' lab at Cornell University. The researchers there are also using nanotechnology techniques to build composite materials with properties that permit them to decompose faster, yet have mechanical strength and durability. "What we're trying to do is make biodegradable plastics far more attractive," says Giannelis.

Giannelis and his team have used a natural polymer called poly 3-hydroxybutyrate (PHB) to make a bin bag. The microbes produce the material as a way to store energy in the same way the human body produces fat to store energy.

Mad munching microbes

The Cornell team's composite material behaved as a clear plastic polymer but broke down almost completely in compost at room temperature within seven weeks. The rapid breakdown is enhanced by small spaces between the particles, which make the material more vulnerable to chemical attack and consumption by microbes. What's more, the material can also tolerate higher temperatures, thus making it suitable for a broader range of applications.

The outlook for bioplastics research is encouraging. The two most promising areas of research are in the use of polymer-clay nanocomposites (PCNs) and using nanoparticles or nanostructured materials as modifiers, compatibilisers and fillers. With new legislation under consideration across the US for raising landfill prices, plus the increasing cost of oil, the market opportunity for bioplastics may have its day, long after Ford and Carver tinkered with recyclable plastics.

Burning with passion to build a website or service based on official data? Here's some very good news. In the most exciting sign yet of the wind of change blowing through the government's attitude to taxpayer-funded data, a ministerial taskforce last week opened up new swathes of previously invisible information for re-use on the web - and threw in the offer of a £20,000 for the best idea to exploit it.

Meanwhile, the agency responsible for enforcing the crown's copyright opened, on schedule, a promised web channel to handle requests for new data sets that are either unavailable, or for which public bodies set unrealistic prices.

Just two years and four months since Technology Guardian launched the Free Our Data campaign - to an official reaction ranging from indifference to hostility - the idea that non-personal electronic data collected by public bodies should be available freely to all to re-use now has support across the top of government.

A big force behind the new spirit is Tom Watson, an IT-literate MP who took over the brief of Cabinet Office minister at the beginning of the year. At a Downing Street reception for web entrepreneurs last week, he enthused about the possibilities opened up by a project set up by his new Power of Information taskforce. Showusabetterway.com is inviting ideas for re-uses of public sector information, and offering £20,000 to help the best one become reality.

Watson says that the scheme is designed to make "co-creation" happen. "It's about citizens working with public servants to design public services, using existing datasets or datasets that we've just revealed to the world for the first time."

The "gigabytes" of data available include such sought-after treasures as the Office for National Statistics' applications programming interface (API) for neighbourhood statistics, a complete list of schools in England and Wales and the national travel database created by the Department for Transport's website, Transport Direct.

Ideas are flooding in ...

All have previously featured in the campaign. "I'm on the hunt for more," Watson says. He has even hinted on his blog at investigating whether the Royal Mail's Postcode Address File could be made available at "marginal cost" - for the electronic form, zero cost.

Early indicators point to a huge amount of interest. In the first 36 hours alone, Showusabetterway had 150,000 visits, and received more than 100 ideas - and more are arriving every day. "Some of them are brilliant," Watson says. His favourite is a proposal to make use of English Heritage's list of blue-plaqued buildings for mashups with Google Earth and Wikipedia biographies of the people commemorated. "I'm going to make it my mission to talk to English Heritage to reveal the dataset in a way that's useful to people," he says. "I think it would be beautiful; imagine the recreational walks around London to bag a blue plaque - like bagging a Munro."

Watson also expects "great ideas" to emerge from users of the Department for Children, Schools and Families' Edubase database. Its participation in the scheme is a sign of cross-government enthusiasm. He describes the schools minister, Jim Knight - who was key to making the schools data available for the competition - as a great fan of the taskforce who understands the Free Our Data message.

"The difficulty we've got is we've only got one prize of £20,000, and we've got some really good ideas, so I think I'm going to find some more prizes so we can work with some of them."

In a related development, the Office of Public Sector Information, the rejuvenated arm of the old Stationery Office which is now charged with handling the government's intellectual property, has launched on time its promised "unlocking service" for public-sector information. The web channel's role is to solve problems with "charging, licensing or the data standards that public sector information is provided in" - all issues that have figured in Free Our Data. The page) invites users to describe the asset they want unlocked for re-use and post a request.

"We'll contact the public-sector information holder and see what can be done to unlock the information for re-use." In the spirit of web 2.0, other people will be able to see the request and support it, either by adding a comment or by voting.

By Tuesday, there were three requests, including one for data on the boundaries of electoral wards and constituencies, whose proponent says: "I find it odd that if I want to know the actual boundary of the ward or constituency I am in (co-ordinates, not just an image), I have to pay Ordnance Survey lots of money. I would have thought that, given it's quite important to know which MP or councillors I'm going to have the option of electing, that this information should be freely available as part of a healthy democracy."

... but it's not over yet

We shall watch with interest. But in the meantime, we commend ministers - who, in the present political climate must be tempted to cover their ears when they hear the words "government data" - for picking up the idea.

So, 27 months after launching Free Our Data, can we put away our campaign boots? Not yet. Some obstacles remain. One, hinted at in the electoral boundaries request, is the activities of information trading funds, required by law to pay their way, and which are vociferously defending their business model.

Watson says we shouldn't expect that situation to change overnight. "The difficulty we have sometimes is that the people who have monetised the use of data within the public sector are our entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs, they've got great ideas, they understand that the data itself has a value and they've gone out and made their area of the public sector better by creating an income stream, because of that." Suddenly making such data available free will be "quite difficult", he says.

"There's a cost to the taxpayer, and you've got to work through that. This great complexity of government needs unravelling." An ongoing Treasury review of trading funds, due to report in September, may come up with some suggestions. In the meantime, "we're making progress".

You could be forgiven for thinking that virtual worlds had disappeared. Since the hype around Second Life last year there has been a dearth of mainstream publicity, as if they had all gone from virtual to invisible. In fact a lot is happening. Any moment now Habbo Hotel, a space for teenagers, will overtake the all-conquering World of Warcraft by having 10 million active users a month. It actually has 100 million registered users, bigger than most countries, but the monthly total is a better indicator of activity. These are the two biggest virtual games. The third is RuneScape.com, which has grown from nowhere a few years ago to more than 6 million active players, of which 1 million are paying subscribers. At the weekend there were 138,000 players all on at once (well over twice Second Life's concurrent users). Interestingly, all three companies are "European". RuneScape is British, based in Cambridge; Habbo Hotel is Finnish and World of Warcraft, though a US game, is owned by the French group Vivendi. If the virtual revolution is all it is cracked up to be, will Europe breed the likes of Yahoo, eBay and Amazon? It hasn't made a bad start.

There is more to come. Entropia Universe of Sweden has 700,000 players, including entrepreneurs making small fortunes, even though its complex rules are a turn-off for some. Entropia is building the first stage of the awesome Beijing Recreation District which alone will be capable of hosting more than 15m avatars, making it the biggest virtual world on the planet. This is the first stage of a huge Chinese plan to dominate virtual worlds in the way that they have taken over manufacturing. Another European world is Twinity of Germany - not yet public - which mashes virtual worlds with real cities, including New York. My avatar has an apartment in Berlin, though I have not yet figured out how to open the front door. One neat feature is that you can upload a photo of yourself (front and side views) to paste on to your avatar to make it more lifelike.

An interesting British start-up I have already written about, (footballsuperstars), is launching soon. It claims to be the world's first dedicated virtual football game in which players from around the world can play in a field or a stadium or sample the football lifestyle in a local bar. If they get the gaming right, there is clearly global potential and success could propel virtual worlds into the mainstream. It is a symptom of Europe's importance that this year London will host two virtual world conferences, virtualworldsforum.com (at London Bridge, starting October 6), while its US rival is at the Queen Elizabeth II conference centre on October 20 to 21.

Second Life has gone ex-growth, judging by the number of avatars online simultaneously (it rarely exceeds 64,000) but it is the place to be for experimentation. Universities and companies are still piling in, especially as SL is adopting open source and allows companies to bolt their own servers on. Nielsen Online figures show that Second Life is the third most popular application in the UK in terms of minutes spent on it (after Facebook and YouTube) with growth of 137% in the past year. The only other virtual world in the top 10 was Disney's Club Penguin, which claims 4 million users. This is one of an exploding number of sites aimed at younger people that which will provide an expanding base of people ready for grown-up virtual worlds later. Others include dizzywood.com, barbiegirls.com, revnjenz.com (a racing game), Webkinz and imvu.com, a kind of 3D chat room which claims 20m registrations, including 600,000 active ones.

Sites such as there.com have attracted corporations into its walled garden for youngsters and there is a buzz around the launch of metaplace.com, which will offer you a virtual world of your own. The virtual revolution is only just beginning.

vic.keegan@guardian.co.uk

With the launch of the 3G iPhone, the ante has been upped in the search for a definitive "iPhone killer". The HTC Diamond Touch looks the part: it's small, sleek, bursting with functions and possessed of a slinky touchscreen interface.

But it has a fatal flaw: a third-party graphic user interface (GUI) bolted on top of the operating system (Windows Mobile 6.1). In use, this means there is always more than one way of doing anything: via the standard Windows Start menu, or via the Touch-Flo interface.

Up and running, it's mostly good. You've got a choice of text input methods, all on the touchscreen: standard Qwerty, condensed Qwerty, an alphanumeric keypad with either T9 or ABC entry, a handwriting recogniser and a block recogniser. The Qwerty keyboards offer both T9 or ABC text entry. Perhaps, though, fewer choices might have meant no crashes.

Yes - crashes. The add-on GUI is a memory hog, and also seems to suffer from a memory leak (where the longer it runs the more memory it uses). I leave my mobiles on all the time; after just under a week, it started crashing, hard. Leading up to the crashes, it seemed to be unable to release RAM, even when I shut all the apps down.

The Touch-Flo interface locked up and the phone wouldn't respond to any input. I braced to do a hard reset - ie, wiping it of all my stuff. But here's the catch: the combination of button presses and stylus pokes is physically impossible with only two hands - truly a phone for the future when we grow three hands. Fortunately, after a couple of hours the phone spluttered back into life. But this happened twice on one day.

Other than the shiny package and pretty GUI, it has all you'd expect of a top-of-the-range smartphone: GPS, moving and still pictures, music (annoyingly, it has a proprietary jack so you can't replace its average earbuds with something better), lots of storage (4GB, but no expandable memory), threaded texts and a couple of games.

Connectivity is good: besides Bluetooth and 3G, it also has HSDPA and Wi-Fi, meaning web browsing either via the mobile network or a hotspot is good.

Aside from the inherent instability of the GUI - which is a major failing - I have a couple of minor niggles: the phone gets terribly grubby with fingermarks, and when it rings any touch on the screen answers the phone: not good when you're scrabbling for it in a bag.

The camera is good for a mobile, but in practice it's hopeless: there's no button that turns it instantly on, so by the time you've got into camera mode you'll have missed the shot.

It will be available on Vodafone, Orange, T Mobile and O2 through the summer; otherwise it costs £434.69 sim-free via expansys.com.

Pros: small, neat device; beautiful interface;

Cons: memory leaks; hard reset is difficult to do

Visualise a plate of lasagna ...

The thing with data visualisations is that you should be trying to make lasagna - layered - not spaghetti, explains Noah Ilinsky. Clever, and definitely worth five minutes of anyone's time.

A little help from your Fonz?

Joe Cocker's incoherent Woodstock performance of A Little Help From My Friends, with a helpful computer-generated lyric sheet. If only closed captioning had been around in the 60s ...

Is that you, Philip K Dick?

"Scrambled" CCTV footage by Emitall, a Swiss company. Too like living inside A Scanner Darkly for comfort, we feel.

· Send links to tech@guardian.co.uk

It's the season for summer blockbusters, and while cinemagoers have countless overhyped and overrated CGI spectaculars at the box office, those of us who prefer our entertainment interactive are awash with cross-media adaptations. We managed to avoid a virtual Sex in the City, but Iron Man, Speed Racer, The Hulk and the excellent Lego Indiana Jones have been doing roaring trade - and expect entries from the Lego Batman, 007 and Harry Potter camps as the season wears on.

Each of these movies has enough action sequences to pad out 10 to 20 hours of controller-based fun. I'd be surprised if the scripts weren't developed with the ensuing merchandise in mind, but there are so many incongruous pairings released every year that the path of interactive enlightenment is littered with them. A Dirty Dancing videogame? Oh yes. It has been done.

Yet the most bizarre aren't tied to movies. They're usually extensions of TV shows, albums and pop ephemera (someone please kill that Crazy Frog). I am both distressed and compelled by this phenomenon, and bolstered by discovering the 1980s innovation television documentary series Connections with James Burke and its Myst-like game adaptation, I asked Gamesblog readers for their favourites. They came up with several peaches.

The award for most unlikely book-to-game goes to Super Noah's Arc 3D, a biblical port of the FPS Wolfenstein 3D for the Sinclair Spectrum, in which the enemy Nazi soldiers are replaced by animals and the gun is swapped for a hand throwing grain. The award for most distressing album-to-game cover goes to Give My Regards to Broad Street, the racing game based on the Paul McCartney album. It was a close contest, with two others hot on Macca's heels: Michael Jackson's Moonwalker, in which Jacko saves kidnapped children from an evil Mr Big; and Frankie Goes to Hollywood's flamboyant digital outing.

The award for most bizarre TV show-to-game conversion is tied between adaptations of Neighbours and Eastenders. There was a well-deserved nomination for How To Be A Complete Bastard, a game which stands in its own right as something still worthy of emulation, plus mentions of the Desperate Housewives and Little Britain.

There are so many ridiculous pairings out there that there's undoubtedly something new and different in them. It seems an oversight only to play Halo or GTA, so cast them aside and go in search of the truly bizarre. Send your suggestions for my consideration, and may the most obscure one win.

Eye on the future

It seems that LED computer displays contained within a contact lens are becoming reality. Just one more step in mankind's gradual transformation into cyborgs (Your life will be flashed before your eyes, July 3).
michaelsidney.thehoskincentre.com

Woe on an Operatic scale

You did a big disservice to your readers in describing Opera 9.5 (Read me first, July 3). Look at the Opera forum and read stories about people who lost their email, crashes, broken features that have worked for years, pages that used to work but don't now, missing extensions in file cache, pages that still don't work, and on and on. Even Opera admitted "we have fixed the worst issues after 9.50 and are preparing for a 9.51 update". A general release is not supposed to have "worst issues". I have to question, did Brown actually use Opera or did he write from a press release? Given the problems reported from users, why didn't he have any? Opera 9.5 was not ready for public distribution.
M Smith, by email

Vista doesn't suck

Vista really is OK - honestly -it just takes some getting used to (Is this the end of Windows XP as we know it? Well, not quite, July 3). This email ain't useful, but it's better telling you guys than my girlfriend again ...
David Luff, Stoke Newington

Brainy gamers

I like this story in the Guardian, not only because it highlights us, but because it presents how much it's not only about "shallow v deep" or "violent v peaceful," but about a real passion to diversify the interactive audience and present new models to think about (Search for the intelligent mainstream gamer, July 3).
impactgames.com/blog

Oyster is safe

In response to Stephen Moffitt (Letters and blogs, July 3) I would reassure all Barclaycard OnePulse customers that in the unlikely event of the Oyster function of a card being manipulated, it would not make the payments part of the card vulnerable. The two applications are entirely separate, both physically on the card's chip and in terms of the software used to operate them. Security is paramount.
Richard Mould, head of contactless card development, Barclaycard

I write to reassure Don Keller (Letters and blogs, July 3) and all TfL customers that no personal information is stored on an Oyster card, whether you use pay as you go or a season ticket. Personal data is held securely on a remote database. Far from being complacent, TfL has re-examined its security measures and found them to be robust. Londoners can have confidence in the security of their cards and details. This was a manipulation of a single Oyster card, not a hack of the Oyster system.
Shashi Verma, director of fares and ticketing, Transport for London

Ready to throttle Virgin

A month after Virgin.net became Virgin Media my internet connection became amazingly erratic. I found the solution after some time (We won't cut off users, says Virgin, July 3). I had enabled software on my Mac that would look for American TV shows which in turn would start up a torrent program. The second any torrent software was opened the connection would cut off, and would only restart again after the torrent software had been quit and the router rebooted. They may be saying that they are not threatening to cut users off, but this technique of disabling the connection once one of the torrent ports are activated seems to suggest otherwise. I suspect that there will be a sharp increase in incidents like this from them other ISPs as the pressure from music companies increases.
Henry Hobson, by email

· Read all this week's letters in full at blogs.guardian.co.uk/technology

A flaw in the way the internet works has prompted the "largest security update" in the history of the web, and fears of millions of people remaining exposed to criminals and malicious hackers.

Microsoft was among net companies yesterday which announced action to close the loophole that has potentially affected every site on the web.

The bug was spotted this year by Dan Kaminsky, a director at the American security specialist IOActive, who immediately contacted big technology firms to alert them to the problem.

The scam involved hijacking internet addresses and sending surfers to websites other than those they intended to see. By this route criminals stood the chance of tricking victims into handing over personal details or making payments to the wrong people.

Details of the bug, which uses a technique known as "cache poisoning", have not been made public. The idea is to let firms find a solution before hackers learn how to exploit the situation further.

"Computers use the equivalent of address books to figure out where they need to go on the web. This attack could compromise that by attacking the servers that give out the addresses," said Rich Mogull, of the US-based firm Securosis.

Although there is no evidence of the bug being exploited by hackers, news of the flaw drew an unprecedented response from the technology industry. Large companies, including Microsoft and Cisco Systems, scrambled to fix the problem.

"This is the largest synchronised security update in the history of the internet," said Kaminsky. "The severity of this bug is shown by the number of those who are on board with patches."

As fixing the problem is largely the duty of those who operate the millions of web servers, which hold all the information on the internet, rather than those who use the web, most computer users will not have to do anything.

However, a failure to update software could mean surfers still being at risk. And the fixes may not make things entirely safe. The US Computer Emergency Readiness Team, an American agency which deals with security breaches, said that even the changes put forward by Microsoft and others would not remove all possibilities of a hijack. "It is important to note that without changes to the DNS [domain name system] protocol these mitigations cannot completely prevent cache poisoning," said the agency on its website.

Kaminsky said he would reveal more details about the problem at a computer security conference next month.

It is not the first time that significant flaws at the heart of the internet have been exposed. Last week servers belonging to Icann, the group which administrates the way names on the net are handed out, were briefly hit by Turkish hackers. A group calling itself NetDevilz broke into the Icann website and replaced the organisation's normal web pages with angry messages.

So-called cyberterrorism - including hacking attacks and concerted attempts to bring down government websites - have gained a high profile in recent months, leading to Nato agreeing to fund a cybercrime prevention centre in east Europe.

This week a report by the US Senate's armed services committee emphasised the need for greater security. "We assess that nations ... have the technical capabilities to target and disrupt elements of the US information infrastructure."

The flaw exploits the way the internet's address mechanism, known as the domain name system (DNS), works. This service maps the names we associate with particular websites to numerical addresses - just as a mobile phone's address book links names with telephone numbers. DNS allows people to visit websites by typing in words - such as google.com - rather than by entering a string of unmemorable numbers. The new glitch allows hackers to get into the middle of this process, intercepting names entered and sending people off to other websites. This could be problematic if there was a fake website resembling a genuine one - a copy of a bank's site, for example. Criminals could siphon off personal details or payments and use these to commit fraud or identity theft.

Based on the new Pixar film, Wall-E has its moments - but they're probably not the ones you'd expect. The basic idea and storyline follow the movie, with your trash-compacting bot charged with cleaning up the planet, scoring extra points for solving bonus objectives. It plays like a 3D platform game, with a roaming but often confusing camera to complicate things further. You can also play as a second robot, Eve, which has different abilities, allowing the two to work together, flicking switches or disabling obstacles. But given Pixar's reputation, it's surprising the graphics aren't better. Wall-E is charming enough for kids, but grown-up gamers deserved more development time.

A viral ad campaign to promote the new series of Dexter on FX allows fans to customise a video clip of a UK police press conference and name a friend as the next target on the "death list" of the eponymous serial killer.

The viral ad, called the Dexter Hit List, has been created by digital agency Ralph to promote season two of the hit US show, which made its UK TV debut on FX on Sunday.

FX's new video application, at thedexterhitlist.com, allows Dexter fans to enter the name of a friend and input general details about their age and habits to customise a video of a police press conference on the serial killer.

Users can even record their own question, which is subsequently asked at the press conference as if they are a journalist, or upload a "mugshot" to be shown.

When the recipient of the video watches the clip online, their name and other personal details are seamlessly inserted into the police press conference, which is shot to look like genuine live coverage from a news channel, to make it sound like they will be the next victim.

Ralph has been seeding the viral with viewers who signed up online during last year's first series. There is also a print, TV and outdoor campaign promoting series two.

Dexter, which stars Six Feet Under's Michael C Hall as a Miami police forensics expert with a sideline in killing murderers who get away with their crimes, began its second series on FX with 348,000 viewers on Sunday night.

This was FX's best-ever ratings, up 50,000 on the previous high, for the launch of the first series of Dexter in July last year.

The edgy viral ad follows last year's controversial effort to promote FX's first series of Dexter, which resulted in members of the public making complaints about the shocking content of a similarly customisable online clip.

Ralph's director, Chris Hassell, received a call from the police about last year's viral ad asking him to explain the complaints that had been received about the spoof news broadcast.

The customisable news broadcast ended with a scene in an underground car park that included the blood-splattered name of the recipient of the viral ad scrawled on a wall as the next victim.

"The success of the first viral is apparent a year later so coming up with something special and new for season two was a challenge we knew Ralph would meet head on," said Cecilia Parker, communications director at FX.

"The result is a fiercer more compelling interactive spoof which we think fits perfectly with the new themes," Parker added.

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Flickr users will be able to start making money out of the snaps they post online after the media-sharing site signed a deal with Getty Images, the world's leading photo library company.

Under the terms of the partnership Getty will invite selected Flickr users to join a Flickr-branded photo group on gettyimages.com.

As part of the first commercial licensing deal made through gettyimages.com, Getty will hand-pick photos from the Flickr group and sell images on to its commercial clients, with photographers taking commission for each image.

The group is invite-only and entirely opt-in and will initially feature a few thousand images, according to Getty. The objective is to increase Getty's stock of regionally relevant content, said its vice-president of creative imagery, Andy Saunders.

"Flickr's philosophy of personal sharing and immediacy has already impacted commercial photography," Saunders added.

"The new Flickr collection will expand the definition of stock photography by making it even easier for our customers to find and license imagery that works in the full range of traditional and digital media."

Kakul Srivastava, the Flickr general manager, said the deal is testimony to the website's influential community of photographers.

Srivastava added that Getty gave Flickr "an unbeatable platform, licensing expertise, and a premier brand for members who want to bring their imagery to a worldwide customer base".

Flickr, which is owned by troubled internet giant Yahoo, claims more than 54 million users each month and hosts more than 2bn photos.

The site allows users to choose whether they want their photos published under Creative Commons licences offering different and more flexible publishing rights, although unauthorised copying and reproduction of images is rife on the internet.

Getty Images has moved aggressively to acquire online and offline rivals in the 10 years since it was founded, buying high-end agency Photonica for $51m (£25.8m) in 2005, iStockPhoto.com for $50m in 2006, and UK-based citizen media agency Scoopt in 2007 for an undisclosed amount.

The company itself was bought by private equity firm Hellman & Friedman for $2.4bn in February this year, at which point the investment firm's managing director confirmed that the aim was to turn Getty Images into a global digital media operation.

Getty today told the New York Times that photographers typically earn between $150-$240 (£75-£121) for each rights-managed image that is sold, and $50 (£25) for a non-exclusive image.

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Customers in the UK are more than used to stories of rip-off Britain - and few get hit by high prices as regularly as gadget fans.

So it's no surprise that there has been scepticism about the arrival of the iPhone 3G tomorrow. Despite the headline-grabbing price cuts, many customers are concerned that they are actually being fooled into paying more for the new iPhone than they would have done previously.

So, what's the real situation?

Comparing the terms of a standard 8GB iPhone on a deal costing £35 a month (the most popular combination) it seems that customers could actually be in for a better deal.

Largely it's the result of the falling price of the handset itself - which is now £99, or free to higher spenders. It's a dramatic drop from the earlier price of £269, and the contract prices remain steady.

This means that the bill for owning an iPhone 3G comes in at £729 over 18 months. It's still a long way from being insubstantial, but does mean customers will save £170 compared with the £899 they would have spent for a first edition iPhone.

Not only does the reduced price of the phone itself have an impact, but O2's package has actually improved since the UK launch in November last year. Customers pay less overall, and get more for their money: faster download speeds, free access to BT OpenZone Wi-Fi hotspots (as well as those belonging to The Cloud) and an increased allowance of voice minutes and text messages.

So if the total cost of ownership will in fact drop with iPhone 3G, why all the concern?

Well, much of the talk of rising prices has come from America, where things have become more expensive.

Like O2, AT&T - which is the exclusive provider in the US - has subsidised the cost of the iPhone, with an 8GB model now coming in at $199 (£100). But instead of taking a hit to increase sales, AT&T has decided to compensate its shareholders by raising tariffs instead. That means in order to keep the same package of calls, text and data to which they were entitled with iPhone 1.0, American customers must now spend $15 a month more.

This brings the total cost of an equivalent package to $1,975 - spread over the course of a two-year contract, rather than the 18 months of British version. Comparing like for like, that means a UK iPhone costs £939 over two years, while a US model costs £999 ... making this one of the rare occasions where gadget fans in the UK will pay less than those on the other side of the Atlantic.