The government plans to become the first in the world to make all of its computers carbon neutral.

In a speech at the Science Museum today, Cabinet Office minister Tom Watson is to announce 18 measures that will change the habits of civil servants throughout Whitehall.

The proposals, including desktop computers that switch themselves off if they are inactive for too long, are aimed at making energy consumption from all of Whitehall's information and communication technology carbon neutral by 2012.

Watson hopes that by 2020 government technology will be carbon neutral throughout its lifetime, including manufacture and disposal. "We won't just do this by offsetting but by making serious changes to the way we do business," Watson will say.

The government is the largest buyer of information and communications technology in the UK and its IT equipment is responsible for up to a fifth of the government's carbon emissions - 460,000 tonnes a year. Watson will say: "Worldwide, computers are responsible for the same quantity of carbon emissions as the airline industry."

His proposals follow claims that the government has been falling short of its declarations that it will lead by example by reducing its carbon emissions.

This month a cross-party group of MPs said the government was "lagging far behind" in this area. In March the annual report of the government's independent watchdog, the Sustainable Development Commission, said more than half of Whitehall departments were failing to reduce their carbon emissions by enough to meet their targets.

"Turning off every desktop PC in central government for the 16 hours that fall outside the standard working day could save up to 117,500 tonnes of CO2 per year," a Cabinet Office briefing document says.

A government source told the Guardian that a centralised system would switch off computers detected as inactive.

Watson will also ask departments to remove active screensavers, which use the same amount of energy as a screen in full use. Civil servants will also be urged to ensure re-use of PCs which are discarded but are still serviceable.

John Higgins, director general of technology sector organisation Intellect, welcomed Watson's initiative. He said: "These 'quick wins' - rationalising servers and data centres - are a credible series of first steps."

The Sustainable Development Commission's report said that apart from the Ministry of Defence, which significantly reduced its emissions in 2005-06, government departments emit 22% more CO2 than they did in 1999.

Small niche internet service providers and BT - and their customers - will be the early beneficiaries of the telecoms giant's announcement on Tuesday that it will spend £1.5bn to install new fibre-optic cables to reach the streets, and in a small number of cases the walls, of 10m homes.

The new systems, to be installed over the next five years, should be capable of speeds of up to 100 megabits per second (Mbps), though more usually up to 40Mbps. That compares with current speeds which top out at 24Mbps on standard copper-based phone lines. Virgin Media, the UK's only cable provider - following the aggregation of dozens of cable companies in the 1980s and 1990s - provides speeds of up to 20Mbps.

Ian Fogg, telecoms analyst with the research company Jupiter, called the move "a game changer for the UK broadband market" - but warned that the rivals that have pursued local loop unbundling (LLU) such as Sky, Carphone Warehouse (though its TalkTalk subsidiary), Be, O2 and Tiscali "suddenly face the prospect of their copper [phone line-based] services becoming obsolete in a few years".

Paul Lee, telecoms director at the analyst Deloitte, notes that people will want different speeds: "While some web users will be happy with low broadband speeds, sufficient for email and a spot of online shopping, power users may want to consume video over the web and thus need the highest speeds." But that creates a problem: "The underlying costs of fibre deployment are substantially the same, regardless of speed. So the industry needs to ascertain how to charge customers who are migrated from copper to fibre yet just want the speed they had on copper."

Niche ISPs have struggled to stay in business as everyone has had access to virtually the same line speeds - up to 8Mbps) or in the case of Be, up to 24Mbps, depending on distance from the exchange. In fact, though, most people see download speeds of around 3Mbps with the ADSL broadband now in use. BT has begun upgrading that to ADSL2+ (BT's plan for quicker connection, April 17), which has a maximum 24Mbps speed on lines that previously ran at up to 8Mbps; most people will see a near-doubling of line speeds as a result.

However it is not clear whether BT will seek to charge customers more to pay for the investment in the systems. Its calls for a "regulatory holiday" over the investment have been favourably received by Ofcom - though exact pricing structures will be key in Ofcom's future reaction.

BT will fund the work by cutting £500m from other network investment, abandoning a £700m share buyback, and putting in £300m of new spending.

DNS fix zoned out

After reading articles about the net's latest security problem, I made sure I installed the Microsoft update. Result: I could not access any web pages until I rolled my computer back, at which point everything was fine.
Jane Knight

JS: The bulk of this week's mailbox came from Zone Alarm users who lost their internet access following last week's Windows Update. The update was part of a netwide security effort led by Microsoft, Cisco and Sun to deal with a fundamental design flaw in the Domain Name System (DNS) discovered by Dan Kaminsky. The DNS translates memorable names (eg, doxpara.com) into the numbers used to route traffic (eg, 66.240.226.139). Anyone who can control that can send visitors to almost any site they like. Basically, hackers could take over the web.

The project involved patching or upgrading many of the net's DNS servers and routers as well as server and PC operating systems, and it went astonishingly well. Zone Alarm seems to have been the only major failure, and the company quickly produced a patch. If you don't have that, a workaround is to set Zone Alarm Internet Security to "medium".

However, Zone Alarm users should uninstall Windows Update KB951748 from Windows XP, restart their PC, apply the Zone Alarm patch from
download.zonealarm.com then reinstall the update. KB951748 can be uninstalled using the Add or Remove Programs applet after ticking the box at the top that says "Show updates".

The problem could affect products from more than 80 vendors and potentially all operating systems. Kaminsky has put a DNS checker on his website so that people can find out if their DNS server is vulnerable.

Replacing Zone Alarm

I'm concerned that Zone Alarm had all these problems while other firewalls seemed to cope OK. Are there any other free personal firewalls you can recommend?
Sally Taylor

JS: The DNS fix randomises the source port used for DNS queries: it seems the Zone Alarm firewall assumed they'd come from only one port. That may well be a one-off problem, and if you're otherwise happy with the product, you may not gain anything by switching. This is particularly true if you have the paid-for version rather than the cut-down free version.

However, I prefer the Sunbelt-Kerio Personal Firewall for Windows XP. This starts as the full product but turns off its advanced features after 30 days, and nags you unless you pay for it. Comodo and Jetico also offer decent free firewalls. The final choice is partly a matter of taste.

Printer quest

I am looking for a very light portable printer to replace an old Canon BJC80 for conferences and fieldwork. Is there anything new out there cheaper than the new Canon Pixma iP100?
Dan Rigby

JS: Not that I know of. Sadly, all the Canon BJC ultraportable printers seem to be unavailable, and the Canon Pixma iP90v and iP100 look like the best alternatives. They're about the same size as the BJC but heavier - it weighs 4lbs instead of 3lbs. HP has rivals such as the OfficeJet H470 Mobile Printer but at similar prices. Does anyone have any other suggestions?

Corporate iPhone?

I'd like to get an iPhone to access my work emails. Unfortunately the IT department only supports BlackBerrys.
Richard Hickson

JS: Try asking if they support anything besides BlackBerrys. If they support Microsoft Exchange "push email" and synchronisation features, then these work with devices that have ActiveSync This includes some Windows Mobile, Nokia and Palm Treo phones, and the new iPhone 3G. If they support non-BlackBerry devices via BlackBerry Connect, this works with some Windows Mobile, Nokia and other phones, but not the iPhone, at the moment. However, IT departments generally like to eliminate variations, because standardisation simplifies support and therefore saves money. If they only support BlackBerrys, it might not make financial sense to change to the system to support a single iPhone.

Backchat

· Jane McNicol wanted to move her iPod libraries to a new PC. On the Ask Jack blog (blogs.guardian.co.uk/askjack), Doctor reminded her that "if you do not intend to use your old PC, remember to de-authorise that machine as Apple will only allow you to have five machines authorised at any one time". He also mentioned Xilisoft's iPod Rip, "a brilliant piece of software that will transfer all your files from your iPod into your iTunes library" (xilisoft.com/ipod-rip.html).

Get your queries answered by Jack Schofield, our computer editor at jack.schofield@guardian.co.uk

Fancy yourself as a tasty videogamer? Then you might soon want to pursue a career in the army. Joypad dexterity, that most 21st-century of skills, is poised to assume a key role on the battlegrounds of Afghanistan and Iraq, now that defence contractor Raytheon has announced plans to use videogame technology in its unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones.

Currently, the larger, armed British and American UAV drones buzzing around Afghanistan and Iraq are operated from a base in Arizona, using aircraft-style joysticks and visual data from on-board videocameras. Raytheon claims to have built a system based on the Xbox 360 processor which generates a videogame-like view using accurately mapped terrain, and will replace the joysticks, which become unwieldy over the course of eight-hour shifts, with lower-input controllers. Indeed, many of the smaller, unarmed, hand-launched UAVs already use controllers similar to those of the Xbox 360.

Of the 40 drones lost by the US military and air force in the past five years, 67% went down due to operator error, so at £5m each, the move could save a lot of money. And if the technology is adopted, operators could simply be trained to the requisite level of proficiency on £200-£300 Xbox 360s or PlayStation 3s, rather than costly simulators.

The key to the adoption of videogame technology in war is the sheer number-crunching power of the latest consoles. Anyone who has played Call of Duty 4, for example, will testify to the startling realism of modern war videogames. And videogames have already insinuated themselves into military life, the most famous example being America's Army, which was commissioned by the US army and launched in 2002 as a recruitment tool - it has since become one of the world's most popular games online. Future wars, it seems, could be won by the side with the most agile thumbs.

It's been a while since the last F1 management sim, and this one ropes in all the required elements: merchandising, suppliers, pit crews and a whole stack of car set-up options. You can create your own team or take over a struggling one, choose your drivers and then watch the races unfold across 17 international circuits. The absence of truly unpredictable weather deprives you of tougher tyre choices, but pit stops can still be a real test of race tactics. The trouble is, without licensed teams, cars and drivers, it's hard to feel attached to your team, no matter how well it performs. RTM does a pretty decent job at a keen price, but it never feels like F1.

Hands off my IP

There is a double problem - massive oversupply of music to a saturated market, and the perception of the public that music doesn't have to be paid for (The right to peer inside your iPod, July 10).

I split everything 50/50 with my record label, who invest time and effort into promoting my work - if they are screwed, so am I. The problem affects all media producers now - first it was music, then printed media started to lose circulation as online alternatives grew, and now television channels are struggling to adjust to a world where people expect free content on demand. It won't be long before people expect free films and games, too. Someone, somewhere will have to pay ... and it isn't going to be the freeloaders.
Martin Wheeler, Berlin

[I'm] rather suspicious of anything which is so wholeheartedly in favour of IP, without mentioning the need to balance between the rights of owners, competitors and users, though [I] suspect anything so detailed would be beyond the ambit of a general summit of world leaders. As for individuals being stopped at customs, this would be too costly and time consuming.

ipkitten.blogspot.com

The focus of the Guardian article is on music and video content. But the same can be applied to books.

bookyards.blogspot.com

Unless Congress manages to entirely reapeal the Fourth Amendment (that pesky thing protecting Americans from warrantless seach and seizure), this bill appears to be entirely unconstitutional.

happilyoblivious.com/blog

The solution: encryption, encryption, encryption! Encrypt everything no matter how trivial and leave dummy files all over your device to throw them off and take up as much resources as possible.

shoutluton.blogspot.com

Poor iPhone reception

Thought you might be interested in the 700-plus people who ordered the iPhone from the Carphone Warehouse last Monday and took delivery Friday. As of Sunday we are still being told stories from them as to when the phone will start working. We now have a ETA of Wednesday for them to start working. So far we have not received any communication from anyone at CPW to inform us what has happened or apologies for the problem.
Keith Clifforth, Newbury

The whole O2 online shopping experience is fraught with problems. It seems clear that, five days before people actually pick up iPhones, O2 has not managed to prepare for the event, even knowing what usually happens when new Apple kit goes on sale. No wonder people think that the iPhone is marvellous - it must be, after receiving the O2 treatment, even if it isn't!
Tony Crooks, Eastbourne

Chemical brothers in arms

When the US Senate ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention, it specifically identified incendiaries, herbicides and riot control agents as exceptions to the CWC (US military weapons research is raising a stink, July 10). That is to say, US forces can use riot control agents and not be in contempt of the CWC.

blog.wired.com/defense

This is what they are leaking to the public ... my curious side wonders what are they doing in weapons research that they are not leaking.

warnewsupdates.blogspot.com

Protecting your data

Jack Schofield reminds us of his Second Law: "Data doesn't really exist unless you have at least two copies of it" (Eureka! I've discovered the Third Law of computing, July 10). Don't overlook Taylor's Rejoinder, which states that two copies of the same data are always slightly different.
Andy Taylor, Austrian Philatelic Society

· Read all this week's letters in full

Write to: tech@guardian.co.uk

We just call it 'unbuilding'

Building demolition, Tokyo-style, where there isn't room to do the usual blow-up-and-sweep-up. Here, giant jacks slowly lower each storey to the ground for disassembly. Simple. Really?

Keeps you drier than a blade

With all the moral panic about knife crime, perhaps today's violent youth will turn to these super-strong umbrellas that can slice watermelons. Brolly-brandishing hoodies? OK, we're worried.

Can you make it play 'Sit Down'?

Sony's Rolly music player can flash its lights and whirl around. Sure to be huge in Japan - and flop everywhere else.

· Send links to tech@guardian.co.uk

His kingdom is an alehouse and his scepter a can, which is seldom out of his hand". Sounds like a familiar 21st century binge drinking problem. But it is actually from The Man in the Moone, taken from a unique copy printed in 1609 and preserved in the Bodleian library. I came across it serendipitously as I was looking through the books - now more than 1m - that Google has been quietly scanning as part of its ambition to create a digital archive of every book that has lived or died. Google's "reader" will point you to a publisher or to a library or somewhere local to get it. If it is out of copyright you could download it as a PDF or self-publish it through sites such as lulu.com.

When it started, publishers were up in arms about Google's presumption that they could scan first and worry about copyright later. We don't hear many protests now, apart from in the US. This is because most publishers have signed up to a deal which enables anyone to read up to 20% of a book for nothing. Some publishers have found that the more they allow a reader to read, the more sales it generates. This is one of the reasons - along with the explosion of print-on-demand titles (another digital phenomenon) - that pushed book sales up 36% in 2007. They seem to be rising not in spite of but because of the digital revolution. Music industry take note.

For a digitally enhanced holiday, Google Reader is one of dozens of bookish sites that could help. In preparation for a long drive in France, I downloaded Madame Bovary, read by Julie Christie, for £7.99 from silksoundbooks.com, a company that gives the actors who do the narrating a share of the profits. Whether this has anything to do with audible.co.uk - now owned by Amazon, which had a near monopoly of audio downloads - dropping its prices I don't know, but it now offers cheaper audiobooks including the Guardian's top 40 for £7.99 or less. Whether reading or listening you are spoilt for choice with sites such as ebooks.com, fictionwise.com, the wonderful gutenberg.org and pagebypagebooks.com (for free books), or banned books from Lysistrata onwards. Booksdownload.org claims to be the world's biggest peer-to-peer downloader starting at £1.99 a month. One of the more interesting sites, Lovereading.co.uk, with 150,000 claimed readers, has started Lovewriting.co.uk, a paid-for service offering independent authors a "one-stop shop" for readers to discover their books. Maybe the start of an iTunes market for books?

If you want to read digital, what device should you use? I tried a new app to download a classic to an iPhone or iTouch for less than $5. When the buttons didn't respond I tried gutenberg.org instead and downloaded Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice on to my iPod touch for nothing (but beware of network charges). The reading experience was surprising, but not in the same league as the new electronic readers that come closest to the pleasure of reading a real book. The only problem is that they are either too clunky (the iRex iLiad) or tied to walled gardens (Kindle with Amazon and the eBook with Sony). A Guardian colleague showed me a new Cybook Gen 3 by Book Keen bought from a US site for $350. It is so light (6.13oz) and thin it fitted into my inside pocket. It downloads free books from Gutenberg easily but doesn't have a Wi-Fi link like Kindle and iLiad. The drawback was a clunkiness and a flash of black appearing in the background as pages were turned. Only the reader can say whether ebooks pass Anthony Trollope's criterion: "Of all the needs a book has, the chief need is that it be readable." But more needs to be done to encourage more relaxed holidays. A survey for Credant Technologies found that 83% of workers will take their BlackBerrys or mobiles on holiday, with 65% confessing they would be in touch with the office. There is a lot to play for.

vic.keegan@guardian.co.uk

It's surprisingly easy to drown in data. Just as you can drown in water that just covers your mouth and nose - unconsciousness plus a two-inch puddle will do - so a comparatively small amount of what looks like useful data can balloon into completely unmanageable columns and rows of figures. So I thought while making some early stabs at integrating the government's newly released list of the address and other details of all the schools in England and Wales (get it from showusabetterway.com/call/data.html) with the league tables from 2007.

Of course, these data being the product of civil servants rather than data designers, they came as an Excel spreadsheet. Scanning those, I realised how easily government creates and then drowns in seas of data.

So, you have a school. With an address. And postcode. And number of pupils. A local authority number, establishment number, phone number. Those are the basics. Then there's the gender of entry (boy, girl, mixed?), institution type, age range, admissions policy, whether it's a feeder for the sixth form, number of pupils covered by statements of special educational needs (SSEN), the number covered by SAP, the number at Key Stage 4 or 5 at the start of the school year and the number at KS4 or KS5 under special educational needs or admissions policy.

That's all before you get to any actual measures of performance - that is, how well things went in the testing. Wrestling with these vast tables (some of which have more than 30 columns), I reflected on how dangerous spreadsheets are.

Spreadsheets are ad-hoc databases in which you can use the interdependencies of the different table elements to run "what-if" scenarios (what if the cost of staff goes up by 5%? What if the cost of materials goes up 5%? What if both happen at once? Oh, hell, there goes the dividend). That's their power.

But that also means that it's easy to use them to try to measure things which don't need measuring, and use poor data structures that mean you can't do rigorous analysis. These spreadsheets were a miasma: for "age range", the entries included "Sep-17" (meaning it takes 17-year-olds in a September entry) and "13-19" (self-evident). The problem is that's a human-readable, not machine-readable description: if you're trying to do an in-depth performance analysis of tens of thousands of schools, then columns whose content might be a number or might be text yet are meant to indicate "age" will screw it up royally.

What I find truly niggling is the suspicion that those Excel spreadsheets are used to do analysis inside government. Oh, sure, they're fun things, and require little training. But that obscures how badly the tables are structured and how they hide correlations and causations. All those leagues and tests - but what are they telling us? If the only way we have to visualise them is the (at best) three-dimensional plots of an Excel graph for data that have 12 or more variables, we're unlikely to pull out the real connections that make a difference.

An unpatched PC running Windows XP will last on average between four and five minutes before it is attacked by a worm, according to the latest update from the Sans Institute - which says that the "window" during which a machine is safe to download the necessary software updates from Microsoft after, say, a system reinstallation "has shrunk over the past couple of years"

But in less discouraging news, researchers at McAfee's AvertLabs report that the exponential growth in the amount of unique malware such as worms and viruses has stopped - to be replaced by a much slower, linear growth.

"For years the security industry has been fighting an uphill battle, with the number of new samples increasing every month at an alarming rate," says Toralv Dirro, one of the anti-malware team. "Now with constant, though still massive, growth there is some light at the end of the tunnel. If this trend keeps up, planning for future resources and technologies will become much easier and more manageable."

However Thorsten Holz, one of the founders of the German Honeynet project (which aims to discover how prevalent malware is) reckons that survival times are much longer for an unprotected machines - ranging from 10 minutes to 20 days. Even so, he adds: "The time is still short and you need to patch a system before taking it online."

That might seem like a catch-22, but the principal attacks are from longstanding worms that attempt to connect to open ports on a machine.

The threat from existing malware to the millions of systems running Windows XP remains real, notes Lorna Hutcheson at the Sans Institute. "More than once, I've dealt with a compromise of a system that was placed on the network before it was hardened. I got the same answer every time 'We needed it working ASAP'."

That problem will not go away, even if the growth in the amount of malware trying to break into a machine is slowing down, as McAfee reports in so-far unpublished data.

It says: "The growth is no longer exponential but linear, averaging around 600,000 samples added each month. Looking at our own numbers of new samples, I can confirm this new linear growth," says Dirro - who cautions that it only applies to code that is uniquely identified as different from any preceding ones using a cryptographic hash. "Should we see more file-infecting viruses in the future, and there are some indications they will make a comeback, this way of counting will quickly become useless."

The excitement surrounding the launch of iPhone 3G probably would have passed me by if it weren't for the fact that my in-tray was full of press releases all saying the same thing: "Hi, I'm a mobile games publisher. I'm releasing stuff on the popular new Apple phone. Please tell your readers to buy some."

Mobile games publishers are really excited by iPhone 2.0 - for a lot of the same reasons they were really excited about Nokia's N-Gage application. It's a single platform, so they don't have to write 600 iterations of each game to different handsets. It also has its own attractive online shop, which makes downloading games a pleasure - unlike trying to buy Java games from your standard mobile's network operator portal.

But iPhone potentially offers much more than N-Gage. OK, so the user base is microscopic in comparison to Nokia's. However, it's the type of customer that's important. According to startup iPhone developer Ngmoco, iPhone users spend up to 60% of their phone time on activities other than phone calls - they want to download stuff.

Also, there's a major mobile gaming bugbear that the iPhone addresses and N-Gage never did - the interface. The Apple product boasts motion sensing capabilities and a multitouch screen; it couldn't be more tuned into the zeitgeist if it changed its name to Wii phone and started offering fitness games.

Developers are also getting hassle-free access to the camera and GPS functionalities, which should finally lead to the development of mainstream location-based and augmented reality games.

And then, of course, iPhone is ... well, the iPhone, the latest wrap of indefatigable Apple crack; a semi-religious artifact crafted by industrial design demi-gods. When Steve Jobs says iPhone is going to be a games platform, it bloody well is going to be a games platform. When some suit in Nokia with an unpronounceable Finnish surname says N-Gage might be quite good, frankly who gives a damn?

Anyway, if you have succumbed, check out EA's Scrabble and Tetris conversions or Gameloft's Brain Challenge and Platinum Sudoku, or wait for the much-vaunted physics-based platformer, Rolando (rolandogame.com), which iPhone enthusiasts are calling innovative and groundbreaking, but the rest of us see as just a stylish take on some well-used ideas. Hey, that sounds sort of familiar ...

We may finally be let into the great secret of just how safe - or unsafe - we are as momentum builds to publish a breakdown of criminal incidents in London, though the battle is far from over. The Metropolitan Police plans to publish some data as early as next month. However, initial indications are that only property crimes (not violent crime) will be revealed, and that the data will be aggregated into large, artificial geographic regions called "super-output" areas.

I've long campaigned for the release of criminal incident data broken down by street, having lived in the US where it was easily available. I worked as a crime reporter, and not only were anonymised crime incidents published weekly in the local newspaper (and now online), but as a reporter I could go through individual incident reports down at the station.

Knowing what crimes happen and where is important for several reasons. First, people want to know how safe (or unsafe) they are. They need accurate and detailed data if they are to form an opinion of the safety of their neighbourhood. When they know what's happening, they are in a better position to help or support the police. They are also better able to hold the police to account. This is perhaps what the police fear most, but it is a misplaced fear according to Richard Pope, the creator of civic website planningalerts.com (a site that mines planning applications to local authorities and provides alerts by postcode) and groupsnearyou.com.

Police and thieves

"The police are coming at this the wrong way," Pope says. "They're scared that people are going to use it against them, but it could really help the police." A few years ago he had the idea of building a civic website using crime data mapped out and accompanied by a discussion forum where neighbours could talk about problems in their area and liaise with their local police officer. "But we couldn't get any raw data," he says, so the project never got off the ground.

It seems ludicrous that, sitting in my flat in London, I can look online to see what's happening on a street in Chicago and yet know nothing about what's happening outside my front door. However Richard Thomas, the information commissioner, has said that releasing crime data from the grip of the police into the hands of the public would violate victims' privacy.

The Met also cites privacy as a reason not to release location specific crime data. Yet the Data Protection Act does not prohibit personal information being disclosed, even if one considers anonymised crime reports "personal"; and Boris Johnson's pledge was only ever to publish crime data by street level, not by exact address. The law's purpose is to ensure that disclosure is for a legitimate purpose. State-mandated ignorance benefits no one.

Crimes are not a great secret, particularly not violent crimes - such as the spate of stabbings in the UK in recent months - though without access to the raw data, how can we know how and where it's rising? Pope thinks the main problem is that the police are not technically savvy, citing an encounter at a meeting between locals, the council and the police where the Met admitted it couldn't provide incident detail broken down by area - so the council ended up paying the Met just to get this information.

In my own freedom of information request made to the Met in July last year for a breakdown of crime by postcode, I encountered this, too: "It is not possible to produce crime data based upon the first three digits of the postcode," the Met said, adding that "crime data is recorded against the BOCU or borough which, under Home Office counting rules, it was allocated against rather than the address of the crime. This allocation is the method against which crime is presented in most instances in a geographic format."

Yet Brian Paddick, a former deputy assistant commissioner of the Met, has gone on record saying the police already use crime mapping data themselves. So how exactly do the police record crime?

Pope says that any technical issues are surmountable. "The Met use GIS, at least for some crimes, and every incident will be logged down to street name. Technically, putting it on a map is easy."

Powerful tools

Aron Pilhofer, editor of interactive news technology at The New York Times, has plenty of experience of turning government data into useful public tools. "Almost every police force I know of, even in the smallest town in the States, uses GIS as a way of analysing crime. It's a very powerful way for police departments to spot trends and patterns. It's been proven to be one of the most powerful tools in crime fighting. I find it impossible to believe that it hasn't made its way into the UK.

"Are they really saying they lack the technological skills to convert that information into an anonymised data feed? I find that difficult to believe and, if true, that says a lot about the department and the people working there." So it's either a failure of police capabilities - or of willingness to inform the public. We may find out which next month.

· Heather Brooke is the author of Your Right to Know (yrtk.org)

The facts on crime data

Immediacy You can't wait months to get information. You want to know immediately, at least within the week, when a crime happens. The Met plans to publish only monthly.

Proximity The data must be broken down to a geographic area people understand, such as street or postcode. The Met plans to publish data by "super-output areas". A super-output area comprises an area about the size of five council wards. Richard Pope says: "These will be no use to people whatsoever."

Detail Personal information such as names and exact addresses can be stripped but we need to know the type of crime, when it happened and where. Currently the Met plans only to publish what it calls "tier two" offences, which include burglary, robbery, theft and handling stolen goods. This is useful, but serious and violent crime is what most concerns the public.

There's a growing pile of subnotebooks by the side of my desk, and so far, Hewlett-Packard's HP2133 Mini-Note is the biggest and the best.

It's a full-spec ultramobile with a lovely brushed aluminium casing, excellent screen and a keyboard that you can actually touch-type on. As a Wired blog headline put it, it's "what we really wanted the MacBook Air to be".

But it's quite a lot wider and chunkier than an Asus Eee PC900, it's heavier (from 1.3kg), and it tends to be slow - at least with the Windows Vista running on the version loaned for review. (SuSE Linux is a cheaper option.)

The Mini-Note's Achilles heel is the 1.2GHz Via C7-M processor, which rates a 1.7 on the Vista Experience Index. In other respects, the machine fares well, with graphics rated 2.9 and the 120GB hard disk scoring 5.2. With the new Via Nano processor, it would be a great machine. An Intel Atom would at least be competitive for its class.

HP knows this, of course. But it's pitching the machine for educational use (RM is selling it, downgraded to XP), and it had to make deadlines for evaluation purposes.

Waiting for Atom might have meant missing a school year. However, HP may offer an upgraded version when new chips arrive in volume. The Mini-Note is very slow to boot and slow to load programs, but once up and running, the performance is good for its intended uses: word processing, email and web browsing. Vista's Aero graphics system worked well in 2GB of memory.

The scratch-resistant 8.9 inch screen (same size as the Asus Eee PC900) shows 1280 x 769 pixels, which is in effect the same as the 1280 x 800 you get on the 13.3 inch Dell M1330 or MacBook Air. Everything's smaller, but that's fine for younger eyes. The keyboard is a big improvement on rival machines, but should be even better. The Mini-Note keyboard measures 10 x 4 inches, which is only slightly smaller than my IBM ThinkPad X31 (10.2 x 4.2 inches), which has a 12-inch screen. It is far better than the Asus's 8.3 x 3.1 inch keyboard, but it should be as good as the ThinkPad.

The selection of ports includes ExpressCard (useful for 3G) and SD slots, two USB 2.0 ports, Ethernet and an external monitor port. The Mini-Note also sports Bluetooth 2.0 and Wi-Fi .

HP's website lists the starting prices as £299 plus VAT for the Linux version, and £349 plus VAT for the Vista Business version tested. Judging by appearances, you'd expect it to cost a lot more.

Pros: High-res screen; good keyboard; big hard drive; well made

Cons: Slow processor; big power brick

View the HP2133 Mini-Note here

Anyone who played the 1980s RSI-inducing classics Daley Thompson's Decathlon and Track and Field will feel right at home here. Assuming you have any feeling left in your hands, of course. Yes, Beijing 2008 is a button-bashing and joystick-waggling recreation of a selection of Olympic events. Simple button-bashers - sprints, swimming - are complemented by more complex events - gymnastics, judo - and the whole package, while mixed, offers some solid entertainment. Multiplayer is key, though - training up an Olympic team by yourself is oddly soulless, especially if you play locally rather than online. Unfortunately, loading screens and unnecessary pre-event sections break up the flow. Yes, swooping stadium flybys and detailed animations of athletes limbering up may look the part but they become annoying very quickly. A bigger problem is the controllers. The PS3 and 360 pads are simply not up to the waggling/button-mashing that the game requires. Despite this, Beijing 2008 is just about worth persevering with. But if you have a Wii, Mario and Sonic is the one to get.

Leave it to the Iranians to make waves by launching a bunch of missiles, only to flub it up by falsifying the photos of missile tests. Yet Iran's military honchos are not the only ones guilty of using Photoshop for propagandistic purposes. The Kremlin has begun digitally removing images of dissidents from political talk shows - but sloppily leaving their feet in the footage, for some reason. Russia, of course, has a long history of altering images for nefarious reasons - Stalin used to airbrush his opponents out of photographs and insert himself next to his comrade in arms, Lenin.

If a photo is worth a thousand words, then a doctored photo is worth a million. In this age of Photoshop, nothing is sacred ground, not even reporters' mug shots at the paper of record. Fox News allegedly altered photos of two New York Times reporters its host smeared as "attack dogs" by - yes - yellowing their teeth and moving back their hairlines. Yet this is no case of Republican camera trickery. Remember that Ann Coulter got similar treatment when her leggy body graced the cover of Time Magazine.

Madison Avenue has also gotten in on the photo-altering act. Recall a Gatorade ad recently making the rounds on YouTube, where a girl leaps over the leftfield wall to catch a fly ball. The footage, of course, was faked - cables lifted her off the ground, not grit, determination or thirst-quenching Gatorade. Or take the NBA's latest marketing campaign, which melds together the mug shots of on-court foes like Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. Not one but two magazine covers - Time and the New Republic - gave similar treatment to the faces of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, prompting accusations of unoriginality from both sides (both are guilty of plagiarism - it was first done by Late Night with Conan O'Brien's "If they mated" bit).

Humourists, too, have jumped on the Photoshop bandwagon. One of the most popular websites of recent memory shows the Garfield comic strip, minus the cat - leaving a lonely Jon talking to himself, pathetically staring off into space. Or watch a popular digitally altered YouTube clip of PBS' Charlie Rose hilariously interviewing himself.

Yet where will this new era of visual dissembling leave us? Will it turn us all into dupes, holed up in our basements listening only to Morse code because it'll be only remaining thing we can trust? Maybe not, but we should be more aware than ever that the field of photojournalism has been invaded by myriad amateurs lurking on the web, where ample material exists to doctor, twist, embellish or distort. Who can forget the falsified image of a just-back-from-Vietnam John Kerry at a 1970s anti-war rally behind Jane Fonda?

The whole point of photojournalism, of course, is that it does not lie - it illustrates to readers what so many column inches can't. More worrisome, however, is that photos in the news do not even have to be doctored to distort reality or damage someone's credibility. Take the picture beamed around the world by helicopter last month of a lost Amazonian tribe, clad in saffron and angrily shaking their sticks. The photo was not doctored but it turns out to have been a hoax no less - the tribe had been known for 100 years. Or recall the photograph of Obama clad in Muslim garb? Every election leaves some iconic image embedded in the minds of voters, for better or worse.

The photo that sticks in my head most recently has nothing to do with politics. It captures a car ploughing headfirst into a motorcade of oncoming Mexican bicyclists. With bike and body parts messily splayed across the photo, like a reality-based version of a Jackson Pollack painting, it is a snapshot of a horrific moment in time, a freeze frame of utter chaos. No Photoshop wizard can touch up such a tragedy. The picture, as it should, speaks for itself.

Can you imagine spending more than two years of your working life on a single project, only to discover that your labour of love will never see the light of day? If you work as a games developer for long enough, that particular form of heartache will become only too familiar - the canning of partially or even fully completed games is commonplace. And a recent spate of high-profile game-culling suggests that more games are being canned than ever.

Last month, Sony announced that Eight Days and The Getaway, both high-profile action-adventure games for the PlayStation 3, first shown to journalists (albeit as tech-demo videos) two years ago had been given the chop. This February, beleaguered British games publisher SCi/Eidos announced that it had canned 14 games.

Even the industry's biggest names aren't immune: World of Warcraft maker Blizzard, generally accepted as the best (and certainly the richest) developer in the world, recently quietly shelved the first-person shooter Starcraft Ghost. British development colossus Peter Molyneux's Lionhead saw the plug pulled on the prehistoric life-sim BC a couple of years ago.

Game over

A fortnight or so before the demise of Eight Days and The Getaway, we had a near-unprecedented opportunity to check out the two doomed games at Sony Computer Entertainment's London Studio. Eight Days' team of about 40 was just gearing up for full production, and the 10-or-so-strong Getaway team was in pre-production, in readiness for the Eight Days team to join it when the latter game was finished. Yet even this rare re-using of talent could not rescue either.

Three weeks later - ironically, in the same venue - we met the man who canned them: Shuhei Yoshida, the new president of Worldwide Studios at SCE (replacing the London Studio-based Phil Harrison, who had decamped to Atari). Yoshida is no Japanese hatchet-man - he's urbane and relaxed, with a good grasp of English after eight years spent heading SCE's US development operation. He explained the reasoning behind the cessation of work on Eight Days and The Getaway: "People were doing the right things on the projects, and there were things in the games that were working really well, but the projects were coming to the end of the pre-production stage, and that is the time when we evaluate every product. We do evaluate and cancel projects all the time, because if we finished the same number of projects that we started, that would mean we were not taking any risks at all, which wouldn't move our industry on any further." He also cited "business situations and priorities", and added that all the Eight Days and Getaway staff would be reallocated to other projects. But they still spent two years working on what turned out to be vapourware.

Few people are better placed to assess changing conditions within the games industry than Jon Hare. A co-founder of Sensible Software, of Sensible Soccer and Cannon Fodder fame, and nowadays director of development at Nikitova, he has been making games since 1986. A swift calculation reveals that, in his career so far, he has worked on 66 games, of which just 31 were published. But during his time at Sensible (1986 to 1999), 15 out of 21 were published, and subsequently at Codemasters, five out of eight came out - but in the past year and a half at Nikitova, 16 out of 24 games "never got off the drawing board". He says: "The point, from a creative point of view, is that it's very dispiriting to start working on something, knowing there's a 75% chance that you might as well not bother."

Hare has several beefs: "In terms of trying to sell original product to publishers, it's pretty much impossible nowadays. But the thing with canned games is that it's not just original games you're canning. You speak with a publisher, and often they say they've got these licences - they want to do a rodeo game, say - "so write us a pitch document". But you've got four other guys writing pitch documents as well. From the idea-sources from five different parties - who get fuck-all for it - they pick the cheapest one to make the best combination of what they can put together from your ideas."

Hare attests to the fact that games can be ditched for the flimsiest of reasons. "We worked for four years on an 18-rated game called Sex 'n' Drugs 'n' Rock 'n' Roll. It was a great game, although the programming was struggling, but we sold it to Warner for good money, and they backed it. However, then Warner sold it to GT Interactive, which was basically Wal-Mart, who are bible-belt Christians. It was an incompatible title for the publisher, and we had no means of getting out of it. I spent four of the best creative years of my life on that game so for me it was soul destroying."

Fergus McGovern, president of HotGen, which now develops games for consoles and handhelds, even had one game canned because it was too good: "We acquired the rights to convert a big Japanese title to the Game Boy, and Virgin Interactive commissioned us to develop it. But the Japanese publisher said it wasn't possible to do a version of the game on the Game Boy. We finished it and sent it back, but the Japanese publisher was so embarrassed that we had done what they said was impossible that they cancelled it anyway."

Hare highlights personnel changes as another problem: "I worked on one game which was signed to Microsoft as the publisher. Every six months, a new producer would come on to the game and decide to throw his weight around and try to influence it. In the end, Microsoft got fed up with it." Hare and McGovern agree that the problem lies with the risk-averse nature of the games industry. Hare says: "There used to be a market where the publishers looked to developers to come up with good ideas and then they would sell them to the public. They'd build an IP, which was jointly owned. That model was then changed. Now, publishers almost expect developers, off their own bat, to get themselves financed and develop something for six months to have a 10% chance of maybe getting a deal."

McGovern explains publishers' aversion to risk by pointing out the extreme costs behind developing next-gen games: "From day one to completion, you're risking maybe $10m, then it can take another $5m to market it and another $5m for manufacturing and royalties."

Gone fishing

Hare has a solution, but given that the smart money is on another round of consolidation among publishers, where the big fish swallow up the minnows (EA, for example, has been trying to buy Take 2 Interactive for the best part of a year), his idea seems unlikely.

"The way forward is to bring about a new batch of smaller publishers, because smaller publishers can't afford such wastage," he says. "The industry shouldn't be down to five or six publishers - we used to be up in the 30s or 40s."

Games, then, will still be canned - but one suspects that the publishers will merely redouble their efforts to keep the likes of us from realising what is going on.

Can you imagine spending more than two years of your working life on a single project, only to discover that your labour of love will never see the light of day? If you work as a games developer for long enough, that particular form of heartache will become only too familiar - the canning of partially or even fully completed games is commonplace. And a recent spate of high-profile game-culling suggests that more games are being canned than ever.

Last month, Sony announced that Eight Days and The Getaway, both high-profile action-adventure games for the PlayStation 3, first shown to journalists (albeit as tech-demo videos) two years ago had been given the chop. This February, beleaguered British games publisher SCi/Eidos announced that it had canned 14 games.

Even the industry's biggest names aren't immune: World of Warcraft maker Blizzard, generally accepted as the best (and certainly the richest) developer in the world, recently quietly shelved the first-person shooter Starcraft Ghost. British development colossus Peter Molyneux's Lionhead saw the plug pulled on the prehistoric life-sim BC a couple of years ago.

Game over

A fortnight or so before the demise of Eight Days and The Getaway, we had a near-unprecedented opportunity to check out the two doomed games at Sony Computer Entertainment's London Studio. Eight Days' team of about 40 was just gearing up for full production, and the 10-or-so-strong Getaway team was in pre-production, in readiness for the Eight Days team to join it when the latter game was finished. Yet even this rare re-using of talent could not rescue either.

Three weeks later - ironically, in the same venue - we met the man who canned them: Shuhei Yoshida, the new president of Worldwide Studios at SCE (replacing the London Studio-based Phil Harrison, who had decamped to Atari). Yoshida is no Japanese hatchet-man - he's urbane and relaxed, with a good grasp of English after eight years spent heading SCE's US development operation. He explained the reasoning behind the cessation of work on Eight Days and The Getaway: "People were doing the right things on the projects, and there were things in the games that were working really well, but the projects were coming to the end of the pre-production stage, and that is the time when we evaluate every product. We do evaluate and cancel projects all the time, because if we finished the same number of projects that we started, that would mean we were not taking any risks at all, which wouldn't move our industry on any further." He also cited "business situations and priorities", and added that all the Eight Days and Getaway staff would be reallocated to other projects. But they still spent two years working on what turned out to be vapourware.

Few people are better placed to assess changing conditions within the games industry than Jon Hare. A co-founder of Sensible Software, of Sensible Soccer and Cannon Fodder fame, and nowadays director of development at Nikitova, he has been making games since 1986. A swift calculation reveals that, in his career so far, he has worked on 66 games, of which just 31 were published. But during his time at Sensible (1986 to 1999), 15 out of 21 were published, and subsequently at Codemasters, five out of eight came out - but in the past year and a half at Nikitova, 16 out of 24 games "never got off the drawing board". He says: "The point, from a creative point of view, is that it's very dispiriting to start working on something, knowing there's a 75% chance that you might as well not bother."

Hare has several beefs: "In terms of trying to sell original product to publishers, it's pretty much impossible nowadays. But the thing with canned games is that it's not just original games you're canning. You speak with a publisher, and often they say they've got these licences - they want to do a rodeo game, say - "so write us a pitch document". But you've got four other guys writing pitch documents as well. From the idea-sources from five different parties - who get fuck-all for it - they pick the cheapest one to make the best combination of what they can put together from your ideas."

Hare attests to the fact that games can be ditched for the flimsiest of reasons. "We worked for four years on an 18-rated game called Sex 'n' Drugs 'n' Rock 'n' Roll. It was a great game, although the programming was struggling, but we sold it to Warner for good money, and they backed it. However, then Warner sold it to GT Interactive, which was basically Wal-Mart, who are bible-belt Christians. It was an incompatible title for the publisher, and we had no means of getting out of it. I spent four of the best creative years of my life on that game so for me it was soul destroying."

Fergus McGovern, president of HotGen, which now develops games for consoles and handhelds, even had one game canned because it was too good: "We acquired the rights to convert a big Japanese title to the Game Boy, and Virgin Interactive commissioned us to develop it. But the Japanese publisher said it wasn't possible to do a version of the game on the Game Boy. We finished it and sent it back, but the Japanese publisher was so embarrassed that we had done what they said was impossible that they cancelled it anyway."

Hare highlights personnel changes as another problem: "I worked on one game which was signed to Microsoft as the publisher. Every six months, a new producer would come on to the game and decide to throw his weight around and try to influence it. In the end, Microsoft got fed up with it." Hare and McGovern agree that the problem lies with the risk-averse nature of the games industry. Hare says: "There used to be a market where the publishers looked to developers to come up with good ideas and then they would sell them to the public. They'd build an IP, which was jointly owned. That model was then changed. Now, publishers almost expect developers, off their own bat, to get themselves financed and develop something for six months to have a 10% chance of maybe getting a deal."

McGovern explains publishers' aversion to risk by pointing out the extreme costs behind developing next-gen games: "From day one to completion, you're risking maybe $10m, then it can take another $5m to market it and another $5m for manufacturing and royalties."

Gone fishing

Hare has a solution, but given that the smart money is on another round of consolidation among publishers, where the big fish swallow up the minnows (EA, for example, has been trying to buy Take 2 Interactive for the best part of a year), his idea seems unlikely.

"The way forward is to bring about a new batch of smaller publishers, because smaller publishers can't afford such wastage," he says. "The industry shouldn't be down to five or six publishers - we used to be up in the 30s or 40s."

Games, then, will still be canned - but one suspects that the publishers will merely redouble their efforts to keep the likes of us from realising what is going on.

The search advertising deal between Google and Yahoo should be blocked, Microsoft has told a US congressional committee, saying the advertising industry has never seen one company dominate 90% of a market.

Brad Smith, Microsoft's senior vice-president and general counsel, yesterday told the Senate committee that Yahoo's chief executive, Jerry Yang, had even warned the technology giant that such a deal would freeze it out of the market.

"Never before in the history of advertising has one company been in a position to control prices on up to 90% of advertising in a single medium," Smith said, appearing before the Senate judiciary subcommittee on antitrust, competition policy and consumer rights.

"Not in television, not in radio, not in publishing. It should not happen on the internet," he added.

Microsoft was backed up by other executives from Yahoo and Google's search advertising rivals, including Matt Crowley, the chief marketing officer of YellowPages.com.

"[If Yahoo] does anything but continue to compete all-out to best Google, there is a real risk that the market will tip even further toward Google," said Crowley. "No one in the industry wants that to happen."

Members of the committee, which was set up to explore how the deal will affect the future of online advertising, also questioned executives on whether the collaboration would strengthen Google's dominance of the market and be even more anti-competitive than the aborted Microsoft takeover of Yahoo.

"[Congress needs to explore] whether this agreement will reduce Yahoo to nothing more than the newest satellite in the Google orbit," said Herb Kohl, the chairman of the committee.

Google's chief legal officer, David Drummond, defended the deal, saying consumers and advertisers would benefit.

"The whole system becomes more efficient: people see and click on more ads that are useful to them ... and advertisers get more potentially interested customers," Drummond said.

Yahoo's general counsel, Michael Callahan, added that Yahoo would become "an even stronger competitor to Google, to Microsoft and to others" because the deal would strengthen its revenues.

The deal, struck between the two firms last month, will increase Yahoo's cash flow by $200m to $450m (£224m) in the first year alone, according to the firm.

· 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.

· If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".

In 1946 Paul Kiefer, chief mechanical engineer of the New York Central Railroad, set his latest steam locomotive, the potent, coal-burning 6,700hp Niagara class 4-8-4, against General Motors' brand new diesel-electrics. The Niagara could generate more power than three of the latest diesel-electrics coupled together. It could run the wheels off them while accelerating passenger trains as long as 30 modern British InterCity carriages with the alacrity of an electric.

The detailed report that followed revealed total annual running costs of $350,095 for Kiefer's finest and $359,478 for a twin-set of 4,000hp GM diesels capable of maintaining existing NYC schedules. As the construction cost of the diesels was nearly 50% higher than that of a Niagara, you might have thought that steam would have continued to rule the railroad roost.

Not a chance, even though the tests were conducted with oil as cheap as chips in today's terms. If, in fact, the NYC management had been forced to buy oil at the equivalent of today's prices, the Niagara would have won the day effortlessly. Or, would it? I don't think so, no matter how you looked at, or cooked, the figures. The problem facing inspired steam engineers like Kiefer and his contemporary, André Chapelon of France's SNCF - whose latest locomotive, 242 A1, was outperforming existing electric locomotives, was, as much as anything else, one of image.

Steam seemed old-fashioned, dirty and labour-intensive. It didn't have to be, but that was the perception encouraged by General Motors, the oil lobby and a new generation of fervently modernising railway managers.

This summer, though, is witness to two intriguing steam revivals. The first is the attempt by the British Steam Car Challenge team to break the world land speed steam record in a beautiful British racing green car. Fueled by Calor Gas, the turbine-powered racer should, with luck, steam across the Bonneville flats in Utah at 170mph, and very possibly top 200mph. The car's designers, led since 1999 by Bill Rich, a retired marine steam engineer, say that the "overall aim of the project is to promote education and awareness of clean burning fuels and ecologically sound technologies to young engineers all over Britain".

And not, you might say, before time. Today, the oil lobby that did for Kiefer's Niagaras is under the global spotlight. Oil is dirty and running low; it fuels war and public strife. A revived steam technology is one way forward, yet steam needs the kind of publicity boost Rich's team might just give it this August.

This summer's second steam adventure is the long-awaited debut of Tornado, a recreation of a 1948 London and North Eastern Railway A1 Pacific. This will be the first express passenger steam locomotive built in Britain since the Duke of Gloucester 54 years ago. Tornado, the result of years of hard work and campaigning by the A1 Locomotive Trust, will take her place alongside the restored Duke of Gloucester running mainline specials. While Tornado is hardly the latest in steam engineering, the locomotive will act as a flag-waver for this overshadowed technology while promoting new projects like David Wardale's super-efficient 200kph 5AT locomotive.

Even then, there is some way to go before steam technology sheds its image of "puff-puffs" and men at the end of platforms with too many Biros in their top pockets. In a sense, steam technology came too early for its own good. The existing land-speed steam record was set by a Stanley Steamer as long ago as 1906.

New fuel and power technologies need to be pursued and developed, and yet steam technology, as old as Hero of Alexandria's first-century turbine, may yet be back on the agenda, road, rails and record books.

· Jonathan Glancey is the Guardian's architecture critic

jonathan.glancey@guardian.co.uk

BT has pledged to bring super-fast broadband to 10m homes within four years by spending £1.5bn on a new fibre-optic network.

In his first major act since becoming BT's chief executive in April, Ian Livingston undertook yesterday to transform "Broadband Britain".

The optic-fibre network will be more than 10 times faster than the broadband provided over BT's copper lines. At a time when the success of the BBC iPlayer is putting pressure on internet service providers (ISPs), it could allow families to watch high-definition movies over the web and play bandwidth-hungry interactive online games at the same time.

With only 40% of households likely to benefit, the gap between Britain's fastest and slowest web surfers will increase, although BT rejects claims of a new broadband divide, promising also to increase the speed of its basic broadband package.

And the plan will go ahead only if the regulator Ofcom agrees to allow BT higher profit margins when it charges ISPs to use its new network.

Ofcom welcomed the announcement and said it would be publishing detailed proposals on its regulatory framework for the next generation of broadband but stopped short of commenting on BT's hopes of improving its profits.

Livingston freely admitted that the company did not know where BT would lay the fibre, saying it was keen to hear from local authorities and "those who can demonstrate real demand".

Most of the rollout will be fibre-to-the-kerb, with a fibre link from the core network to the nearest BT cabinet. That will mean speeds of up to 40 megabits a second - five times faster than the theoretical maximum BT offers today. But 3m of the homes targeted will be new-builds, where BT will lay a fibre-optic cable all the way to the front door. They would be promised headline speeds of 100Mbps.

Virgin Media has also promised super-fast broadband, offering speeds of up 50Mbps this year.

Conscious of the criticism it faced several years ago when broadband was largely restricted to urban areas, BT insisted that less populated areas may soon enjoy the taste of fibre. "I don't imagine that this will just be a big-cities thing," said Livingston. "We want to make this available in towns, cities and rural areas."

Ben Verwaayen, Livingston's predecessor, played a significant role in the development of broadband by slashing prices soon after joining BT in 2002.

When pressed on whether the fibre plan was his idea or Verwaayen's, Livingston - who used to run BT's retail arm - said that the board had been mulling the plan for some time but speeded up its work in recent weeks.

"We do feel that now is the time to be bold," said Livingston, who believes that the rising cost of petrol will encourage more people to use video-conferencing services rather than driving to a meeting. He even suggested that the troubles of the building industry could keep down the cost of laying cables.

Since being launched just over six months ago, the iPlayer has become so popular that some broadband connections are reduced to a virtual crawl at peak times. BT is spending more to increase its network capacity but suggested yesterday that the fault also lay with ISPs that did not buy enough bandwidth to cope.

It is also planning to offer a faster flavour of its current broadband, called ADSL2+, to everyone in the UK by 2012. That should mean speeds of 10Mbps - fast enough to watch high-definition television - for the majority of the population.

"We will deliver a sea of fast broadband, with islands of super-fast broadband," said a BT spokesman.

About £500m has already been set aside to invest in fibre. The remaining £1bn is new, and will partly come from the suspension of its share-buyback programme.

Some analysts question whether £1.5bn is enough to reach 10m households. But it is BT's insistence on concessions from Ofcom that prompted the most interest.

BT is allowed to make only a 10% return selling access to its network to other ISPs. It already wants to charge more for local-loop unbundling and is determined to improve margins in return for investing in fibre.

"We need to be able to demonstrate that we can make a better return for shareholders than putting the money in the bank," said one insider.

A multimillion pound project designed to improve Britain's security by giving key government officials speedy access to secret intelligence on terrorism and other threats has been shelved, the Guardian has learned.

Ministers have frozen the development of a secure computer network that would have radically transformed the way the security and intelligence agencies handle sensitive information.

The government has refused to disclose the cost of the project, codenamed SCOPE. It has been described by parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee as marking the "beginning of the end" of distributing paper copies of intelligence reports around Whitehall and as "fundamentally changing the way the UK intelligence community interacts".

A limited version of the project, called SCOPE 1, is finally up and running after a two-year delay. This is the first stage of the project and enables the intelligence agencies - MI5, MI6, and GCHQ - and a limited number of other officials, to communicate with each other more quickly and securely than before. It enables them to call up the latest intelligence within 15 minutes rather than waiting up to 12 hours.

However, it is the project's fully-fledged second phase, SCOPE 2, which has been shelved. This would have allowed officials in as many as 10 government departments - including the Home Office, Revenue and Customs, and the Serious Organised Crime Agency - and 1,500 defence officials and military commanders, secure electronic access to intelligence, including the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre based at MI5's headquarters.

It has been stopped at an unknown cost to Whitehall agencies and taxpayers. Although government spokesmen decline to discuss the reasons for the decision, they are believed to be both financial and technical.

The technology involved in making the system secure is more complicated than officials first realised when funding for the project was approved in 2003. The costs escalated as contractors and departments struggled to solve the problems.

SCOPE is the latest in a catalogue of computer projects which have gone wrong, wasting hundreds of millions of pounds of public money. Early this month the national audit office disclosed that a new computer network for the Ministry of Defence was 18 months late and £182m overspent.

Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee, which oversees the intelligence agencies, has repeatedly criticised SCOPE's "history of delays". The project was due to be up and running three years ago - at that point, the committee said it was "concerned that Scope was yet to deliver any usable benefits to the UK intelligence community as a whole".

Though the committee has never spelt out in any detail what has gone wrong, nor revealed how much the project has cost, its reports suggest that initially delays were caused by a mismatch between the project's computers and those of the GCHQ, the electronic eavesdropping agency.

The Cabinet Office managed to get the limited first phase of SCOPE off the ground in late 2007 - two years later than forecast - to speed up communications between the UK's intelligence agencies as well as with four other government departments. Within a few months official reported what they called a "serious process failure", wiping out data relating to intelligence operations.

The committee has also been worried that the Cabinet Office would not be able to recruit and vet enough highly skilled staff to run the project, housed in an undisclosed building, when it was working at its full capacity.

As recently as January this year the government told the ISC that SCOPE 2 was "on track to be delivered in 2008-2009". Any hope of that happening has been dashed.

A Cabinet Office spokesman told the Guardian the project had not been cancelled. However, he added: "We are working with the contractor for [SCOPE] Phase 2 to consider ways in which the additional benefits of that phase can be delivered more simply."

He continued: "That work is expected to conclude shortly. No permanent civil servants have lost their jobs, though a number of contractors have been let go as part of the change of approach."

A teenager from New Zealand who was accused of stealing millions of pounds has been discharged without a conviction, despite pleading guilty to hacking into computers around the world.

Owen Thor Walker, 18, known online as AKILL, was ordered to pay £5,500 in costs and damages after a high court hearing in Hamilton, New Zealand, and could work with police against online crime after Justice Judith Potter discharged him.

Lawyers in the case told the Associated Press that officers were interested in using Walker's skills for positive purposes and Detective Inspector Peter Devoy said that option was open.

Walker was arrested last November after an investigation by New Zealand and Dutch police, the FBI and the US Secret Service, and was accused of leading computer hackers who had stolen more than £12m from victims around the world.

After the court hearing, police said Walker had been employed to write software used by the ring to skim bank accounts. Walker had not directly taken money himself.

Walker admitted accessing a computer for dishonest purposes, accessing computer systems without authorisation, interfering with computer systems and possessing software with the intent to commit crime. His case was part of a crackdown on the ring, which has seen eight people around the world charged or convicted since last year. Thirteen others are subject to arrest warrants.

The ring, said police, had built a network of more than a million zombie computers - a botnet - to steal credit card information, manipulate stock trades and crash the systems of large companies.

In this week's Tech Weekly with Aleks Krotoski ...

Sir Tim Berners-Lee tells Bobbie Johnson all about "web science". It's a new discipline t