Barack Obama is due to name a senior adviser to take control of America's cybersecurity efforts, nearly seven months after first declaring that protecting the country from internet attacks was a "national security priority".

Reports suggest that Howard Schmidt, a government veteran who previously served as an adviser to President Bush, will be named as the White House's cybersecurity coordinator on Tuesday - with responsibility for overseeing the online defences provided by the Pentagon and intelligence agencies.

The job of bringing together the disparate groups is seen by some as an impossible task - particularly since the various agencies often battle against each other for political gain - but some Obama administration officials see it as a vital role.

The announcement is likely to head off criticism that the White House has failed to follow through on its own plans to establish a new office to deal with cybersecurity, which were announced in the summer.

In one of his earliest acts on taking office, President Obama ordered a lightning review of US internet security. When the results were published in May, the president urged a major revision of the way American defence, security and intelligence agencies worked to protect the country's computer systems, calling hacking a "weapon of mass disruption".

"Cyberspace is real, and so is the risk that comes with it," he said, adding that it is "one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face".

The issue became even more pressing after a series of reports suggested that a string of major attacks on US institutions had taken place - including the country's electricity grid and computers containing information on the Joint Strike Fighter programme, a $300bn project being conducted by the Pentagon and other governments around the world.

The continuing lack of an appointment to the post had caused some concern in Washington - but while officials said that delays in making an appointment were merely part of the process, reports suggested a number of candidates had turned the job down.

As a result, the appointment of Schmidt is seen by many as a decision to put the task in safe - if familiar - hands.

Schmidt, who worked for eBay and Microsoft after retiring from government in 2003, previously held the role of special adviser on cyberspace security for two years during George W Bush's first term in office.

His career has given him significant pull in the technology community, but some elements - including a controversially delayed scheme to introduce new ID cards for federal employees - have been criticised in the past.

He may find the winds in his favour, however. Last weekend it emerged that Russian and American officials had been meeting to discuss potential collaboration over internet security and cyberdefence - a move which could mark a significant breakthrough in the often-frosty relations between the two countries online.

Rod Beckstrom, the former director of the US Cybersecurity Center, told the Guardian that he had met with Russian officials too - and had encouraged such collaborations while working to a brief that is similar to Schmidt's.

"We do see international collaboration improving," said Beckstrom, who now runs the internet administration body Icann. "We are pleased to hear that superpowers such as Russia and the US are addressing these topics."

The BBC is trying to dictate what kinds of televisions and set-top boxes we use to watch its programmes

Last summer, the BBC tried to sneak "digital rights management" into its high-def digital broadcasts.

Now, generally speaking, the BBC isn't allowed to encrypt or restrict its broadcasts: the licence fee payer pays for these broadcasts, and no licence fee payer woke up today wishing that the BBC had added restrictions to its programming.

But the BBC tried to get around this, asking Ofcom for permission to encrypt the "metadata" on its broadcasts including the assistive information used by deaf and blind people and the "tables" used by receivers to play back the video. The BBC couched this as a minor technical change, and Ofcom held a very short, very quiet consultation, but was overwhelmed by a flood of negative submissions from the public and from technologists who understood the implications of this move.

Fundamentally, the BBC is trying to leverage its broadcast licence into control over the devices that can receive broadcasts. That is, in addition to deciding what shows to put on the air, the Beeb wants the power to decide what kinds of tellies and set-top boxes will be able to display and record those shows and it wants the power to control the design of all the devices that might be plugged into a TV or set-top box. This is an unprecedented amount of power for a broadcaster to have.

As Ofcom gears up to a second consultation the issue, there's one important question that the BBC must answer if the implications of this move are to be fully explored, namely: How can free/open source software co-exist with a plan to put DRM on broadcasts?

A brief backgrounder on how this system is meant to work: the BBC will encrypt a small, critical piece of the signal. To get a key to decrypt the scrambled data, you will need to sign onto an agreement governed by a consortium called the Digital Transmission Licensing Administrator (some of the agreement is public, but other parts are themselves under seal of confidentiality, which means that the public literally isn't allowed to know all the terms under which BBC signals will be licensed).

DTLA licenses a wide variety of devices to move, display, record, and make limited copies of video. Which programmes can be recorded, how many copies, how long recordings can last and other restrictions are set within the system. To receive a licence, manufacturers must promise to honour these restrictions. Manufacturers also must promise to design their devices so that they will not pass video onto unapproved or unlicenced devices only DTLA-approved boxes can touch or manipulate or play the video.

DTLA enforces these rules through a system of penalties for non-compliant vendors. It also has the power to "revoke" devices after they are sold to you, so that the BBC's signals will refuse to play on your set-top box if the DTLA determines that its security is inadequate and they pass it a revocation message (even though you always used your box in accordance with the law).

With DTLA devices, the integrity and usefulness of your home theatre is subject to the ongoing approval of the consortium, and they can switch it off if they decide, at any time in the future, that they don't trust it any more.

The entire DTLA system relies on the keys necessary to authenticate devices and unscramble video being kept secret, and on the rules governing the use of keys being inviolable. To that end, the DTLA "Compliance and Robustness Agreement" (presented as "Annex C" to the DTLA agreement) has a number of requirements aimed at ensuring that every DTLA-approved device is armoured against user modification. Keys must be hidden. Steps must be taken to ensure that the code running on the device isn't modified. Failure to take adequate protection against user modification will result in DTLA approval being withheld or revoked.

This is where the conflict with free/open source software arises.

Free/open source software, such as the GNU/Linux operating system that runs many set-top boxes, is created cooperatively among many programmers (thousands, in some cases). Unlike proprietary software, such as the Windows operating system or the iPhone's operating system, free software authors publish their code and allow any other programmer to examine it, make improvements to it, and publish those improvements. This has proven to be a powerful means of quickly building profitable new businesses and devices, from the TomTomGo GPSes to Google's Android phones to the Humax Freeview box you can buy tonight at Argos for around 130.

Because it can be adapted by anyone, free software is an incredible source of innovative new ideas. Because it can be used without charge, it has allowed unparalleled competition, dramatically lowering the cost of entering electronics markets. In short, free software is good for business, it's good for the public, it's good for progress, and it's good for competition.

But free software is bad for DTLA compliance.

Free software is intended to be examined and modified by all comers.

Generally, the licence terms for free software require that it is licensed for public examination and adaptation. It is literally impossible for a device to be both "open" and for it to prevent its users from retrieving keys hidden in its guts, or from changing the code that runs on it. This, of course, is totally incompatible with the DTLA requirement to hide keys and prevent modification of code.

And so, when the BBC threatens to infect its high-def broadcasts with DTLA, it also threatens to remove free/open software from consideration for any device that can play, record, or manipulate the video that the licence fee pays for. It means that you can't use a GNU/Linux phone to watch a show, or an open video player like VLC on your laptop. It means that your kids can't use free/open video-editing software to cut some of last night's news into a presentation for class.

It means that British entrants into the DTV device market can't avail themselves of the free software that their competitors all over the world are using, and will have to spend fortunes reinventing the wheel, creating operating systems and programs that do the same things as their free counterparts, but in such a way as to enforce restrictions against the device's owner.

Ofcom is meant to guard the public interest in matters such as these. If the public interest is to be upheld here, the BBC must explain how it intends to do the impossible: add DRM without banning free/open source development.

Revenues from customers in Britain were diverted to Google Ireland Limited

Google, which has an estimated 90% market share of UK internet searches, last year used a cross-border network of subsidiary companies to ensure it did not pay a penny in corporation tax on its 1.6bn advertising revenues in Britain.

The international corporate structure enables Google to avoid paying what could otherwise have been a corporation tax bill in the UK of as much as 450m.

Recently filed accounts for subsidiary company Google UK Limited show none of the search engine's advertising revenues from British customers were accounted for in the business, despite operations in London and Manchester incurring "administrative expenses" of 177m last year, including a wage bill of 70m.

While much of the costs linked to the running of Google's British operations are recognised for tax purposes in the UK; revenues from customers in Britain, however, are diverted to another Google company in Ireland, where the corporation tax rate is between 10% and 25%. British corporation tax is levied at between 28% and 30%.

The accounts for Google UK describe its principal activity as "the provision of marketing services to Google Ireland Limited and the provision of research and development services to [US parent company] Google Inc".

As a result Google UK reports turnover of 150m and a pretax loss of 26m. By contrast, Google Inc's annual report showed 14% of the company's $21.8bn ( 13.5bn) revenues came from the UK, making it the largest market outside of the US.

Multinational companies engaged in so-called "transfer pricing" where expenses are booked in high tax jurisdictions and earnings in low tax areas are seen by many anti-avoidance campaigners as presenting one of the biggest challenges to the already strained exchequer.

Such transfer pricing arrangements must have the agreement of tax authorities in the UK and are entirely legal. They are commonplace in many industries other than advertising, from pharmaceuticals to bananas. Multinationals with significant intellectual property such as Google and Microsoft are particular well placed to transfer revenues to the most advantageous tax regimes because they are able to charge inter-group companies significant royalty payments.

Tax expert and anti-avoidance campaigner Richard Murphy said: "This indicates a pattern of tax avoidance by Google suggesting they are dedicated to minimising corporation tax on profits arising outside of the US."

Over the weekend, Vince Cable, deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats, urged Google to pay "its fair share" and warned that it risked damage to its reputation. "Avoidance like this is hard to stomach at the best of times, but when the country is in recession and everyone is feeling the pain, it really sticks in the throat it means higher taxes for the rest of us".

Google, which was built on a motto "don't be evil", said: "It would be wrong to think of Google's revenues from UK advertisers as solely the result of operations carried out locally. We invest in R&D, data centres and other infrastructure on a global basis, and that then helps generate revenue in different countries."

A spokesman pointed out that Google employs more than 800 staff in the UK, making a "substantial contribution" through payroll and other taxes. He added that Dublin was Google's European headquarters, pooling revenues from across the continent, not just the UK. He said the competitive tax environment was just one reason why Google, like many other multinationals, had chosen Dublin for its European base.

The smallprint of the 2008 annual report for Google Inc, which is registered in Delaware, reveals that despite the search engine's international reach, its two major tax jurisdictions are the US and Ireland. "We and our subsidiaries are routinely examined by various taxing authorities," it states, confirming Irish officials are examining tax years 2002 to 2008.

A small design company in America has filed a lawsuit against Microsoft, alleging that it is unfairly using the Bing name for its search engine.

Bing! Information Design, based in St Louis, Missouri, launched a legal action last week in a local court - alleging that the multibillion-dollar software corporation "had knowledge of the mark" and "intentionally interfered" when it relaunched its search engine with a new name earlier this year.

Lawyers for the Missouri firm said that the action damaged the smaller company's business, and would seek punitive damages to "punish" Microsoft and deter other companies from acting in a similar manner.

"For nearly 10 years my client has been using the Bing! mark," said lawyer Anthony Simon in a statement. "My client selected this unique mark to distinguish itself in the marketplace and invested substantial time and effort promoting its business using Bing!."

"Microsoft's use of the identical mark and its aggressive advertising have gutted all of my client's efforts to distinguish its business and created confusion that must be remedied."

The situation may not be clear cut. The company says it has been using the name since at least 2000, and an application for the trademark outlines the use of the name Bing! for advertising and services for the advertising industry.

However, a trademark application for the name was not filed until May - when rumours about Microsoft's new product had already spread widely across the internet.

Microsoft, meanwhile, filed its own trademark applications for the name in March - for a variety of uses, including search engine software, interface software, advertising, telecoms and for "providing a website and website links to geographic information, map images and trip routing".

In addition, two other companies are also taking action against Microsoft over what they say are trademark infringements: a web-based shopping service called BongoBing and software company Terabyte, which has a product called BootIt Next Generation, or Bing for short.

Microsoft lawyer Kevin Kutz said that he believed the case would be dismissed because there was little confusion between his company's business and the St Louis firm.

"We believe this suit to be without merit and we do not believe there is any confusion in the marketplace with regard to the complainants offerings and Microsoft's Bing," he told the Register. "We respect trademarks and other people's intellectual property, and look forward to the next steps in the judicial process."

That assertion, however, may ring hollow for some - coming after a difficult week for the Seattle-based software company in which it admit having stolen computer code from a Canadian internet startup.

After allegations that a site developed by MSN China had lifted code from messaging website Plurk, Microsoft apologised for the transgression and said it was the fault of an independent contractor.

"It was never our intent to have a site that was not respectful of the work that others in the industry have done," the company said.

Plurk responded by saying it is still considering whether to take legal action.

All through the printed paper notably in the G2 (tabloid) section on Thursdays, when we will have game reviews and the top 10 bestselling games chart (an innovation in print). We're aiming to produce more news stories and features for the main part of the newspaper. And at weekends there will be the Guide, with its usual page of unusual findings from the web, plus more reviews. And the Observer will also offer a fresh take on the topic (and a continuing place for technology stories).

The key place to find our technology coverage of course is online as has been the case for some years now, as we produce more than can be squeezed into a physical paper on most days.

The first place to start is with Twitter, where the @guardiantech account (twitter.com/guardiantech) has more than 1.5 million followers and provides links to every story produced across the Guardian that relates in any way to "technology" in its broadest sense whether that's people Twittering about the X Factor final, or how 3D engines are written, or the release of the Guardian's iPhone app (of which more later).

The next place, if you want to see a rolling version of those stories, is at our "all stories" page guardian.co.uk/technology/all where you will find a list of the stories; it's like Twitter but without the interaction.

If interaction is what you're after, though, the place to go to is the front page, at guardian.co.uk/technology where the news and features of the day are laid out for you. There are plenty of subdivisions for you to examine gadgets, the internet, computing but it's often the case that the busiest places are the blogs.

That's the Technology blog, at guardian.co.uk/technology/blog and the award-winning Games blog at guardian.co.uk/gamesblog and of course the PDA blog (which sits on the flourishing patch between media and technology) at guardian.co.uk/media/pda.

Ask Jack is still here to help with his own blog at guardian.co.uk/askjack for questions and answers.

But wait, there's plenty more. For those who want to know more about particular topics or companies Apple? Microsoft? Google? we have a huge range of "keyword" pages. So for example there's guardian.co.uk/apple and guardian.co.uk/microsoft and guardian.co.uk/google. Prefer news about mobile phones? guardian.co.uk/technology/mobilephones. And so on. Each has its own RSS feed so (this is left as an exercise for the reader) you can generate your own Twitter feed for them.

We would be remiss if we didn't remind you of the Tech Weekly podcast (you can figure out the frequency), which aims to enhance your world for half an hour: you can find it through guardian.co.uk/techweekly to listen directly or on an MP3 player.

And finally, there's the new platform for reading the Guardian, including the technology content: the iPhone app, available for 2.39 at the iPhone App Store. It works offline on iPod Touches too. Read on ...

Twitter, crowdsourcing and the reinvention of Apple - some of the Guardian's technology team looks back at 2009 and pick out their best bits of the noughties

The Asus 1201N is the world's nippiest Windows 7 netbook, but the keyboard layout lets it down

When you buy a netbook, you expect to compromise on performance, but the Asus 1201N makes the compromise acceptable. It's noticeably nippy when running Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium, and it runs videos full screen without stuttering.

In most situations, you'd think you were running a decent notebook PC, apart from the lack of a DVD drive. When the 1201N appears early next year (15 January in the US), it should be the most powerful netbook ever.

The 1201N has two secrets. First, it's using an nVidia Ion (ie GeForce 9400M) graphics chip, like the one in new MacBooks. Second, it has a 1.66GHz dual core Intel Atom N330 processor, instead of the usual N270 or N280, and 2GB of memory.

Windows 7 sees the N330 as four processors, and it makes a big difference to the system's general snappiness, especially with Windows 7's more pointless sliding and fading effects turned off. I found the dual core Atom a lot more responsive than a single-core CULV (Consumer Ultra Low Voltage) chip.

When it comes to the hardware, the 1201N is recognisably a new-style thin Asus. It has a good quality 12in screen and a full-sized isolated keyboard of the sort common on much more expensive Sony and Apple laptops. The review sample had a very glossy black top that looked terrific, though it does show fingerprints. At 3.1lbs, it's also a fraction lighter than some rivals.

The 1201N has a good set of connections including three USB ports, an RJ-45 Ethernet port, an SD card slot, and two ports for monitors one of those is, of course, HDMI. The six-cell battery is removable, and you should get about five hours in everyday use. The hard drive is a reasonable size (250GB) and you also get Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, so the only thing that lets it down is the 0.3 megapixel webcam.

The screen resolution is 1366 x 768 pixels, which is the format that has become standard on notebooks with 13.3in screens. On a 12.1in screen, text is smaller than I'd like, but I have below-average eyesight.

The 1201N's Windows Experience Index rating is 3.1, which is the score for the processor. The gaming graphics score is 5.0 and the hard drive 5.7. It's obviously not a gaming rig, but it's impressive for a netbook, and online games shouldn't be a problem.

The main thing I didn't like about the system was the keyboard layout. Like some systems from Asus and other manufacturers, the 1201N has a vertical column of six keys (Home, Page Up, Page Down etc) to the right of the Enter and Delete keys. One day I might adjust but at the moment I still hit Home almost every time I want a backspace. Which is often. A bigger Enter key would be nice, too.

Quite how well the 1201N will do is another matter. It's an inbetween machine, at the top end of the netbook market, and at the bottom end of the ultraportables based on power-efficient Intel CULV Core 2 Duo processors. In other words, it's a lot better than an Asus 1008HA netbook, which has a 10in screen and an Atom N280 processor, but it's not as good as Asus UL30a, which has a 13.3in screen and an Intel Core 2 Duo.

So, does it offer the best of both worlds, or does it fall between two stools?

It depends on the price where you live 399 or less in the UK and $499.99 in the US and how the "street price" compares with other options. If the price is close to the UL30a, it's not such a good buy. If it's closer to the 1008HA netbook, the 1201N should be a hit.

Pros: Much more power and performance than other netbooks; Windows 7; full-size keyboard; HDMI port; bigger screen than a 10 inch netbook.
Cons: Less power and performance and a smaller screen than a 13.3 inch CULV notebook; low-res webcam; annoying keyboard layout.
asus.co.uk

Basic iPhone 3G offered at 35 a month on a two-year contract
Vodafone hoping to attract consumers with network reliability

Vodafone will start selling the iPhone in Britain next month, offering customers a free handset for 35 a month on a two-year contract, disappointing consumers hoping for a high-street price war over the device.

The pricing plan comes as a surprise because it does not give Britain's second-biggest mobile phone company a competitive advantage, especially on an 18-month deal, where it is slightly more expensive than its rivals.

"I don't think this is about a price war I think this is a network quality war," said Vodafone UK's chief executive, Guy Laurence. "At the end of the day, customers will seek out the best deal and we are competitive, but it is about the quality of the network. We have spent a year optimising the network for the iPhone.

"It's very simple: now you can get the iPhone on a network you can rely on."

The arrival of the iPhone on Vodafone brings the number of mobile phone companies supplying the device in Britain to four. Vodafone customers who register interest before it goes on sale on 14 January will get free calls to other Vodafone users for the life of their initial contract.

Orange started selling the iPhone last month, ending O2's two-year exclusive grip on the handset, then Tesco arrived this month, complicating matters by opting for 12-month contracts and demanding consumers shell out several hundred pounds for the device itself.

Vodafone's "entry-level" prices for the iPhone over 18 months are about 15 more expensive than Orange and O2, while Tesco does not offer an 18-month contract.

Vodafone's entry-level prices over two years are about 40 cheaper than O2 but almost 75 more expensive than Orange. Different handsets, however, have been pitched by different networks at different price points and with varying bundles of texts and minutes.

The basic iPhone 3G is cheapest with Orange over 18 months, at 624.98, and with Tesco over two years provided consumers renew their 12-month contract at 702. But most consumers are likely to want the 16GB version of the faster iPhone 3GS. That is cheapest with Tesco, where it costs 800 over two years for consumers who renew their 12-month contract.

The 16GB iPhone works out at 829.64 for Orange customers, 869 on Vodafone and 909.35 on O2.

Variety of packages

For that price, Tesco offers 60 of calls and texts a month which works out at about 600 minutes or 1,200 texts while Vodafone offers 300 minutes and unlimited texts per month and O2 gives customers 600 minutes and 500 texts. In stark contrast, Orange offers just 150 minutes and 250 texts.On the face of it, Tesco and Vodafone offer better '"value'" than Orange or O2 on the iPhone 3GS 16GB over two years. Some people have been put off Tesco Mobile, however, by the fact that it uses O2's network to run its service and the company has been suffering network capacity issues in recent months, especially in London.

With Britain's newest network, 3, having made it plain that it wants to get its hands on the iPhone but unlikely to get it for several months and with T-Mobile having counted itself out of the race for the device for the foreseeable future, the arrival of Vodafone completes the range of choices for UK consumers.

Vodafone is offering all three versions of the iPhone on 18-month and 24-month contracts, the same as Orange and O2. Vodafone's 18-month tariff starts at 30 a month, but consumers will have to pay for their iPhones. The basic iPhone 3G which has 8GB of memory and a 2 megapixel camera costs 99, the iPhone 3GS 16GB which has a 3 megapixel camera and a faster processor costs 189 and the iPhone 3GS 32GB - which has double the memory capacity - will cost 290.

Over the length of the 18 month contract, therefore, consumers will pay 639 for the iPhone 3G, 729 for the 16GB version and 820 for the 32GB version.

The equivalent 18-month entry-level prices on O2 are 625.73, 713.82 and 803.07. For Orange the equivalent prices are 624.98, 712.98 and 802.48. To get a free iPhone 3G on Vodafone, customers must sign up to an 18 month contract at 40 a month.

Vodafone is also offering all three devices on 24-month contracts. At the basic 30-a-month contract the iPhone 3G will cost consumers 59, the iPhone 3GS 16GB 149 and the iPhone 3GS 32GB 239. Over the two-year period, therefore, consumers will pay a total of 779 for the iPhone 3G, 869 for the 16GB iPhone 3GS and 959 for the iPhone 3GS 32GB.

The equivalent prices for O2 are 822.24, 909.35 and 997.43 and for Orange they are 704.64, 829.64 and 929.64. To get a free iPhone 3G on Vodafone customers have to spend at least 35 a month on a two year contract.

Tesco started selling the device last week and while it grabbed headlines by being the first operator to make the phone available on a contract at 20 a month and lasting just a year, consumers have to pay 222 to buy the basic 3G handset or 320 for the 16GB version of the faster 3GS handset and 407 for the 32GB version of the device.

Over the life of an annual contract, therefore, the 3G phone on Tesco costs 462, the 16GB 3GS 560 and the 32GB version 3GS 647.

Expanding the price over 18 months in order to compare the Tesco deals with O2 and Orange, the iPhone 3G on Tesco costs at total of 582 over a year and a half, the 16GB 3GS costs 680 and the 32GB 3GS costs 767. All these prices are lower than the equivalent prices from O2 and Orange, but only by 35 to 40 over 18 months. Compared with Vodafone's 18 month prices, Tesco is about 130 cheaper.

It is not possible, however, to get an 18-month contract with Tesco so either customers would have to renew their 12-month contract or opt for Tesco's more expensive 24-month contract from the outset.

Doubling-up the 12-month contract leaves the 3G costing 702, the 16GB 3GS 800 and the 32GB 887 over two years.

Anyone signing up to Tesco's 24-month contract, at 60 a month, in contrast, will get the iPhone 3G and the 16GB 3GS for free rather begging the question why anyone would want the basic 3G phone while the 32GB version costs 50. Over 24 months, therefore the cost to a consumer of the 3G and 3GS 16GB devices would be 1440 and the 32GB 1490.

O2 sells the basic iPhone 3G for 96.89 on an 18-month contract at 29.38. The 16GB version of the iPhone 3GS is 184.98 on the same contract and the largest 32GB version 274.23. Over the year-and-a-half of the contract, therefore, the devices cost 625.73, 713.82 and 803.07.

O2 gives the iPhone 3G away for free on a 24-month contract at 34.26 a month while the 16GB iPhone costs 87.11 and the 32GB version 175.19. Over the two years, therefore, the prices for O2 are 822.24, 909.35 and 997.43.

Orange sells the basic 3G iPhone for 96.50 on an 18-month contract costing 29.36 a month; the 16GB 3GS costs 184.50 and the 32GB version 274. Over the lifetime of the contract, therefore, the three versions on Orange cost 624.98, 712.98 and 802.48. Or a mere 75p, 84p and 59p cheaper than O2.

Orange gives the iPhone 3G away free on a 24-month contract at 29.36, while the 16GB version of the 3GS costs 125 and the 32GB costs 225. Over the two years, therefore, the prices for Orange are 704.64, 829.64 and 929.64.

Computer retailer couldn't cancel an order after it was placed, despite it being obliged to do so under the Distance Selling Regulations

It is fascinating to compare the efficient processes companies operate to pocket customers' money with the torturous hurdles in place to prevent refunds.

Back in the summer, Paul van Rossum placed an order with Dell for a Logitech Presenter (a tool to control a laptop PowerPoint presentation). The company estimated a one- to two-week delivery time. However, a few days later van Rossum checked his order status and noticed the dispatch date had been shunted back eight weeks, although at this point the sales page on the website was promising potential customers delivery within 24-hours for the same item.

Given that the item was intended as a gift and a two-month wait would defeat the purpose, van Rossum bought one from another more efficient supplier then tried to cancel his order with Dell. Dell, however, declared that such a feat was technically impossible because once an online order is placed customers details are "locked in" and no mortal can liberate them. The only solution, he was told, was to wait for the order to be delivered and his credit card debited, and then the item could be collected free of charge and his money refunded.

The adventures that would probably await him when he tried this strategy are all to predictable. Luckily, van Rossum instead contacted the Guardian which contacted Dell's press office which, it just so happened, possessed the secret alchemy to "unlock" his details and cancel the order. It explained that a "missing part" which was out of stock had delayed the orders, even though someone had forgotten to inform the web team.

Obviously, whatever the idiosyncracies of Dell's ordering system Van Rossum, and indeed anyone else, has the legal right to cancel an order without penalty under the Distance Selling Regulations, provided they do so within seven working days of placing it.

If you are ordering an item as a gift and it is vital that it arrives by a certain deadline you should state that "Time is of the essence" from the outset, so that the agreed deadline becomes part of the contract. If you don't, the law tends to allow companies "reasonable" time to fulfil their obligations, but that time might not be reasonable enough to suit you.

When children slip off to their bedrooms to play games online after Christmas lunch, it pays to know your limits. Lisa Bachelor reports

It's a scene likely to be played out across the country on Christmas Day. Presents will be unwrapped, the turkey digested, grandad will snooze on the sofa and the children will disappear to their rooms. Nothing to worry about - unless the children are running up a big bill by watching TV or playing games on the internet.

Just over a third of broadband users plan to watch more online TV over the festive season, according to research by website broadbandchoices.co.uk, while Christmas Day and Boxing Day are peak times for downloading content, according to thinkbroadband.com. Someone watching two hours of iPlayer a day would use 45 gigabytes (GB) in a month; and that would be 70GB on iPlayer HD.

"Everyone unpacks their Nintendo Wii or Xbox and instantly plugs in new computer games to download and update," says Andrew Ferguson of Thinkbroadband. "This will create an extra surge between Friday and Sunday." Some broadband packages, especially cheaper ones, come with a clear download limit. A "light user" package that comes with a 1GB limit, will let you surf the web for four hours a day and, over the course of a week, will allow you to send 15 emails with picture attachments, or 100 emails without, download 10 music tracks, and listen to two hours of online radio. According to Ferguson, the average customer uses 6GB or 7GB a month. Penalties for exceeding this agreed limit can vary from financial - typically 30p to 2 per extra GB used - to a forced slowdown in speed.

Those on limited packages tend to be aware of the restrictions and stick to them; it is consumers on unlimited deals who are often caught out because they come with a fair usage policy - if you exceed what the company deems to be "fair", the penalties cut in.

"Anyone planning to catch up on their favourite TV shows using their broadband connection should be aware of their download limit and fair usage policy to ensure they don't receive a penalty, or have their connection speed throttled," says Michael Phillips of broadbandchoices.co.uk.

But sticking to your limit is not always as straightforward as it seems.

"One of the problems is that what determines fair usage is often hidden," says Ferguson. "Some companies make very general statements and don't publish the limits."

Generally a provider will notify people if they feel their usage is excessive. If you don't heed their warning - or don't notice the warning, which often comes via email - the provider will slow the speed of the connection at peak times and, in serious cases, terminate an internet connection. Once your speed is forcibly slowed this can last up to 30 days with some providers, says Ferguson.

If you regularly watch TV or play games online, the best thing to do is to go for one of the more generous unlimited packages, such as those fromSky, BE and 02, says Ferguson.

Phillips also points to BE and O2. "Although their unlimited packages come with fair usage policies, both providers are more generous with their allowances than most," he says. In the case of Sky and O2, users should sign up to the company's unlimited packages and not to O2 Access or Sky Connect, which are cheaper.

Other good, smaller, providers include Zen, IDNet and the little known Andrews & Arnold, says Ferguson.

For anyone who is struggling to stay within their limit or fair usage policy, Phillips provides the following tips:

Download at night: traffic management is applied during peak hours in the evening. So downloading files at night will be a lot quicker.

Turn off your peer-to-peer. If you just close them they will continue to run in the background and still upload files to the sharing network, so make sure you fully exit the program each time.

Track usage: you can do this using free broadband download monitors such as Broadband Choices and thinkbroadband.

This article was amended on 21 December 2009. In the original we said that programs such as the BBC iPlayer use peer-to-peer software to share files faster between users. This has been corrected.

After a Facebook campaign against Simon Cowell's chart domination, music fans celebrate their victory

In recent years, it had become as predictable as elections in North Korea singer wins X Factor, singer's debut single goes to No 1. So when Joe McElderry won the TV talent contest, he was no doubt confident he would celebrate Christmas at the top of the charts.

Alas for the 18-year-old from South Shields, it wasn't to be: a song almost his own age denied him the top spot after a successful online campaign.

Killing In The Name, an expletive-heavy rock song first released in 1992 by the Californian rock band Rage Against the Machine, won the battle for Christmas top spot on the basis of downloads only. It sold about 500,000 copies last week, about 50,000 more than The Climb, McElderry's earnest ballad.

Depending on your view, the Rage victory was either a delicious dismantling of the X Factor Christmas No 1 juggernaut or a cynical assault on the festive charts. There was, though, some indignation when it emerged both records had links to Simon Cowell, the entertainment industry's favourite pantomime baddy. With the Rage track having been released by Sony, and McElderry's by Cowell's Syco, a Sony subsidiary, some claimed the high-waisted X Factor judge would emerge triumphant whichever act won the chart battle.

Rock fan's campaign

But arguably the real victor here was a rock fan from Essex who started a Facebook group a month ago with the (then) pie-in-the-sky idea of usurping the X Factor winner from the no 1 slot.

Jon Morter, 35, a part-time rock DJ and logistics expert from South Woodham Ferrers, near Chelmsford, decided it would be a bit of a giggle to start a campaign to encourage people to buy a record with pretty much the opposite vibe to the X Factor winner's ballad. While McElderry urges listeners to "keep the faith", the Rage track is best known for its now-ironic refrain: "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me."

He had tried a similar wheeze last year, when he attempted to get Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up to the top of the Christmas charts. Alexandra Burke, the 2008 X Factor winner, won that battle, but having succeeded in propelling Astley to "the lower echelons of the chart", Morter was emboldened to try again. This time, he was helped by the comedian Peter Serafinowicz, who on 15 December urged his 268,000-plus Twitter followers to join in, and it snowballed from there. By the time Paul McCartney and former X Factor winner Steve Brookstein had pledged their support, poor McElderry seemed doomed.

When the Guardian broke the news to Morter that he had won, he was initially lost for words. "Oh bloody hell," he said, as the consequences of what he had done became clear. Composing himself, he said: "I think it just shows that in this day and age, if you want to say something, then you can with the help of the internet and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. If enough people are with you, you can beat the status quo."

But doesn't he feel guilty about denying McElderry his first No 1? "Umm. no," he said. "Not really. At the end of the day he has had a Christmas no 2 with his debut single, which is still a phenomenal achievement."

Gracious in defeat

Morter, a big Iron Maiden fan, said the choice of a relatively obscure Miley Cyrus cover for McElderry's single helped the Rage campaign: "If he had released Don't Stop Believing [the Journey song McElderry sang in an X Factor heat] we would have been dead and buried."McElderry took his defeat graciously, saying: "Fair play to the guys who have organised the Facebook campaign it's been exciting to be part of a much-hyped battle and they definitely deserve congratulations. This time last year I never thought for one minute I'd win The X Factor, never mind having a single out. I'm just delighted to be in the charts."

Despite Cowell giving some pseudo-grumpy interviews, he phoned Morter on Saturday night to congratulate him on the campaign. "He commended us on how we had marketed the campaign, and said if we won, he would be the first to congratulate us," Morter said.

Rage Against the Machine have pledged to give all profits of the single to the homelessness charity Shelter, and will perform a free victory gig in the UK to thank those who bought their single.

McElderry is off on an Alpine skiing holiday to ponder his next move.

Scientific research and medical breakthroughs increasingly depend on huge computer power

HOW DO YOU predict whether a given patient is likely to die from a heart attack? Conventional medical wisdom would base a risk assessment on factors such as the person's age, whether they were smokers and/or diabetic plus the results of cardiac ultrasound and various blood tests. It may be that a better predictor is a computer program that analyses the patient's electrocardiogram looking for subtle features within the data provided by the instrument.

A team of researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Michigan analysed a large data-set of 24-hour electrocardiogram recordings collected at a Boston hospital as part of a clinical trial for a new drug. Employing a number of computational techniques involving algorithms for signal processing, data mining and machine learning, the researchers developed a way to analyse how the shape of the electrical waveform varies, a measure they dubbed morphological variability. At the heart of the approach are mathematical techniques used in speech recognition and genome analysis which allow researchers to compare individual beats. "We compute the differences for every pair of beats," reported one of the researchers. "If there is lots of variability, that patient is in bad shape."

The team then applied their algorithm to a second set of electrocardiogram recordings and found that patients with the highest morphological variability were six to eight times more likely to die from a heart attack than those with low variability. They concluded that it consistently predicted as well or better than the indicators commonly used by physicians.

In the same week, researchers at the Sanger Institute in Cambridge revealed that they had reconstructed the biological history of two types of cancer in a piece of research that, according to the Guardian report, "promises to transform medical treatment of the disease". The research exposed every genetic mutation the patients have acquired over their lifetimes, including the ones that eventually caused healthy cells in their bodies to turn into tumours.

One of the diseases studied was lung cancer. The research revealed 23,000 mutations that were exclusive to the diseased cells. Almost all were caused by the 60 or so chemicals in cigarette smoke that stick to DNA and deform it. "We can say that one mutation is fixed in the genome for every 15 cigarettes smoked," said Peter Campbell, the scientist who led the lung cancer part of the study. "That is frightening because many people smoke a packet of 20 a day."

Although these stories are reports about medical research, they are really about computing in the sense that neither would have been possible without the application of serious computer power to masses of data. In that way they reflect a new but so far unacknowledged reality; that in many important fields leading-edge scientific research cannot be done without access to vast computational and data-handling facilities, with sophisticated software for analysing huge data-sets.

In many significant areas, advanced research is no longer done by individuals looking through microscopes or telescopes, but by computers enabling investigators to collate, visualise and analyse the torrents of data produced by arrays of instruments such as the Australian Square Kilometre radio Telescope or the Large Hadron Collider.

The man who did most to alert the world to the urgent need to take "computational science" seriously was Jim Gray, a much-loved visionary who worked for Microsoft Research. Towards the end of his life, Gray argued that we had moved into what he called "the Fourth Paradigm" of scientific research, which he dubbed "data-intensive scientific discovery". In 2007 he went sailing off the Californian coast and simply disappeared. Neither he nor his boat was ever found, despite an intensive conventional search butressed by a huge online effort by volunteers who scanned satellite images of the maritime area where the boat was estimated to be.

Last week, in a touching tribute to a lost colleague, Microsoft Research published a handsome book of essays in his memory. It's entitled The Fourth Paradigm: data-intensive scientific discovery and is available as a free download. In it are 30 thoughtful essays on four areas which were central to Jim Gray's vision environment, health, scientific infrastructure and scholarly communication. This book should be required reading for every policymaker responsible for science and technology to remind them that we now have to provide the resources to fund the IT infrastructure. If we don't give them these tools, then we cannot expect them to finish the job.

If you're struggling with 'infomania' and can't get any work done as a result, it may be time to declutter your inbox

Ping! Ever feel like you can't seem to knuckle down and focus on a task in hand because (Ping!) one email after another keeps unloading itself (Ping!) from your computer or handheld device?

A study found that a worker's IQ test score drops briefly by an average of 10 points when juggling phones, emails and other electronic messages a more pronounced effect than after smoking marijuana or losing a night's sleep. So if you spot the creeping symptoms of "infomania", what can you do to combat them?

Filter out unwanted email. Any email client worth its salt will have filters built in to exclude mail by sender, subject or recipient. Go through your inbox and weed out anyone who persistently sends you extraneous material. Googlemail has a great function called "Skip the inbox" which diverts certain email to a side folder where you can register its presence without it cluttering up your inbox. Spend half an hour setting up a few of these and watch your inbox clear magically.

Beat spammers at their own game. Don't fall for the biggest trick in the book and click on "unsubscribe" at the bottom of a marketing email. Spammers use this to work out if addresses are active, resulting in yet more spam.

Schedule unplugged times. Put aside certain times of the day, evenings or weekends where you will block out all incoming traffic: no phone, no computer, no PDA, nothing. Turn off your email when working on important projects, or set it to only check mail once an hour.

Keep to the point. The subject line is your headline, and the email's purpose should be clear in the first two lines. The action expected of the recipient should be explicit.

Cut out clutter by discouraging the sending of one-word "Thanks" or "OK" emails. An instant message or even shock horror a face-to-face greeting, would be better.

Files outline South Korea and Washington's strategy in event of war on the peninsula

South Korea's military is investigating a cyber attack in which North Korean hackers may have stolen secret defence plans outlining Seoul and Washington's strategy in the event of war on the Korean peninsula.

The highly sensitive information, codenamed Oplan 5027, may have found its way into hostile hands last month after a South Korean officer used an unsecured USB memory stick to download it.

It reportedly contained a summary of military operations involving South Korean and US troops should North Korea conduct a pre-emptive strike or attempt to invade.

According to the Chosun Ilbo, a South Korean newspaper, the document outlines troop deployments, a list of North Korean targets, amphibious landing scenarios and how to establish a post-war occupation.

The Yonhap news agency said the plan allowed for the deployment of 700,000 US troops in the event of a full-scale war.

Embarrassed officials in Seoul attempted to play down its importance. The document was not a full text of the plans, said the defence ministry spokesman Won Tae-jae, adding that the 11-page file was intended simply to brief military officials and did not contain sensitive information.

The investigation has yet to establish how the hackers were able to get in or whether they were acting with North Korean support. One theory is that they used an internet protocol address registered in China, a preferred route for North Koreans attempting to hack into files on foreign networks.

The US has 28,500 troops based in South Korea. David Oten, a spokesman for the US military in Seoul, said: "As a matter of policy we do not comment on operational planning or intelligence matters, nor would we confirm details pertaining to any security investigation."

The mishap occurred in one of the world's most militarily sensitive regions. Tensions between the two Koreas have grown this year amid Pyongyang's refusal to abandon its nuclear weapons programme. Although the three-year Korean war ended in 1953 the countries have never signed a peace treaty and are divided by one of the world's most heavily fortified borders.

Faced with the military might of the world's only superpower, North Korea appears to believe it can at least gain an advantage in cyberspace. It is thought to have been responsible for high-profile cyber attacks in July that caused web outages at the White House and its South Korean equivalent, the Blue House. Reports in South Korea said investigators had traced the Chinese IP address used in those attacks to North Korea's post and telecommunications ministry.

The communist state is believed to operate an internet warfare unit, staffed by between 500 and 1,000 people, that attempts to hack into US and South Korean military networks in search of classified information or to throw government institutions into chaos.

The revelation that such sensitive information may have fallen into North Korean hands has provoked outrage in sections of the South Korean media. In a stinging editorial, the Chosun Ilbo noted that tens of thousands of heavily armed South Korean and US troops were involved in a tense standoff along the two Korea's land and maritime borders.

"If North Korean hackers can infiltrate the south's cyber borders at will, then all of those troops and weapons protecting the country along the border are useless," it said.

The electronic border control system was flawed from the outset. The IT profession needs to learn to stand up to its paymasters

One of the finalists in this year's e-Government national awards to be presented next month is a project called e-Borders. It is up for a gong in the category "innovation in strategy at a national level". This involves "delivering innovative strategies which have demonstrated above-average results in improved services, processes and effectiveness within the transformational government agenda".

There is one blot on the scheme's chance of winning. E-Borders, it seems, has been found to be illegal and unworkable and everyone involved must have seen this coming, despite immigration minister Phil Woolas's public defence of its legality today.

As usual, it started with quite a sensible idea, that of requiring intercontinental air travellers to the UK to be screened before they board their planes, not when they arrive physically in the UK. Troubles began to mount up when ministers announced that the same rules should apply to all international passengers, arriving by all carriers. This made enemies of everyone from City commuters to British homeowners in France to recreational sailors, few of whom are able or willing to give 24 hours notice of international travel.

The scheme also got into a monumental twist in order to accommodate the UK's land border with Ireland. To preserve the common travel area between the two countries, the government had to propose formal border checks on flights and ferries between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. And when that, understandably, outraged unionist opinion, the illiberal proposal was to propose border checks on all domestic ferry services.

Mercifully, following a challenge by rail and ferry operators, the European commission now seems to have killed off ambitions to impose the scheme on travel within the EU. The Home Office has had to concede that the scheme must not be used to impede the free movement of EU citizens.

In effect, data collection will now be voluntary, defeating the whole point of the exercise.

The question that must now be asked is how did anyone ever think e-Borders within Europe would be acceptable or legal? (Short, of course, from parting company with the EU and/or Ireland.) Did no one sound a warning? This is a public policy failing reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher's poll tax, and should be investigated accordingly.

In particular, we deserve to know if anyone in Trusted Borders, the commercial consortium contracted to implement the scheme, at a cost of 1.2bn, sounded a warning. The consortium's members include Raytheon, Accenture, Capgemini and Steria. These firms were specifically charged to "work as an open, honest and collaborative team". Did none of this open honesty involve pointing out that e-Borders within Europe risked being unworkable and illegal? I suspect the answer will be no: quibbling about the legality of a billion-pound contract is, in the jargon, a career-limiting move.

One of the main prongs of the government's efforts to reduce the toll of public sector IT disasters is to build up what it calls a government IT profession. IT suppliers and the industry's own professional body, BCS the Chartered Institute for IT (of which I am a member) say they are keen. But one of the marks of a professional is a duty to speak inconvenient truth, answering to a higher calling than your immediate paymaster. This doesn't make for the easy life it's no coincidence that the government's most intractable battles over policy tend to be with doctors and lawyers.

If the IT profession wants to be taken seriously, and perhaps do a better job along the way, it needs to get stroppy when necessary. It should also call to account its members who, when asked to do something unacceptable, keep their heads down and take the money.

What are your best gaming memories from the festive season?

On Friday Keith asked what games you may be playing this Christmas, but for me this time of year is all about gaming nostalgia. Yup, it's time for your festive gaming memories. Mine are centred around the C64 and the N64. First up was getting the Commodore 64 for Christmas and then having to wait after lunch while the likes of Chiller, Hunchback 2 and Daley Thompson's Decathlon loaded up. A real '80s Christmas classic. More recently it was playing Ocarina of Time on the N64 at Christmas 1998. Gathering everyone round to wow at the graphics remember this was when Nintendo was at the cutting edge (ish) of graphics as well as gameplay before they all disappeared leaving me to experience the gaming heaven that was Hyrule Field. Actually Nintendo first party games seem to always crop up when I think of Christmas gaming. This year Spirit Tracks will definitely be figuring. Anyway, go on then, it's only a few days to go. So what are your favourite Christmas gaming memories?

The 100 most voted for games in this week's Games of the Noughties list.

A few readers have asked for this, so as an epilogue to an interesting week of discussion, here are the top 100 games that made up our Gamesblog Games of the Noughties list. As you'll see, plenty of favourites were bubbling just below the top 50, although still no room for Dwarf Fortress!

1. Half-Life 2
2. World of Warcraft
3. Fallout 3
4. Portal
5. GTA: San Andreas
6. GTA: Vice City
7. Resident Evil 4
8. Bioshock
9. Call of Duty Modern Warfare
10. Civilization 4
11. Deus Ex
12. Pro Evo Soccer
13. Baldur's Gate 2
14. Halo
15. Super Mario Galaxy
16. Elder Scrolls Oblivion
17. Ico
18. Shadow of the Colossus
19. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
20. Football Manager
21. GTA 4
22. Elder Scrolls: Morrorwind
23. GTA 3
24. Mass Effect
25. Metroid Prime
26. Left 4 Dead
27. Rome Total War
28. Uncharted 2
29. Guitar Hero
30. Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
31. Advance Wars
32. Mario Kart Wii
33. Wii Sports
34. Gears of War
35. Metal Gear Solid 3
36. Okami
37. God of War
38. Medieval Total War
39. Prince of Persia: Sands of Time
40. Rock Band
41. Halo 3
42. LittleBigPlanet
43. Zelda Twilight Princess
44. Bejeweled
45. Final Fantasy XII
46. Gran Turismo 3
47. Metal Gear Solid 2
48. Team Fortress 2
49. Timesplitters 2
50. Call of Duty
51. Final Fantasy X
52. Diablo 2
53. Eternal Darkness
54. Halo 2
55. Jet Set Radio
56. Mario Kart Double Dash
57. Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots
58. Battlefield 1942
59. Silent Hill 2
60. SSX Tricky
61. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
62. Demon Souls
63. Fable II
64. Gran Turismo 4
65. Killzone 2
66. Operation Flashpoint
67. Perfect Dark
68. Psychonauts
69. Shenmue
70. Sims
71. Super Monkey Ball
72. Batman Arkham Asylum
73. Dead Rising
74. Lego Star Wars
75. Rez
76. Street Fighter IV
77. Battlefield Bad Company
78. Beyond Good and Evil
79. Braid
80. Championship Manager
81. Counterstrike
82. Crackdown
83. Far Cry 2
84. FIFA 10
85. Gears of War 2
86. Katamari Damacy
87. Animal Crossing
88. Assassin's Creed 2
89. Burnout 3 Takedown
90. Crazy Taxi
91. Dead Space
92. Dragon Age Origins
93. Fable
94. Fahrenheit
95. Far Cry
96. God of War 2
97. Max Payne
98. Mirror's Edge
99. New Super Mario Brothers
100. Quake III Arena

The online encyclopedia claims that I passed away on 10 December. I'm happy to put the record straight

I can stop fretting about the imminence of my 70th birthday, for Wikipedia tells me that I am dead. It says that I have died very recently only a week ago, in fact and I would be interested to know what it thinks happened to me on 10 December, the supposed day of my death. As far as I recall, I did nothing at all that day except sit by the fire and write a column for G2, later rewarding myself with a large drink and an early bed. I have pinched myself again today, so I can state, as Mark Twain once did, that the report of my death is an exaggeration.

It was a reader who drew the Guardian's attention to my recently updated Wikipedia entry, which starts "Alexander Chancellor (January 4, 1940 December 10, 2009) was a British journalist".

Noting that the Guardian hadn't thought it worth commenting on my demise and that it had also published a column by me on the day after my death, the reader wondered whether someone had been "erroneously or maliciously editing the Wikipedia entry". Good question. I wonder, too.

Malice is the more appealing explanation, for it would be fun to try to guess who was responsible and why. But error is the more likely one. The examples of premature obituaries or death notices in the media are legion, but are nearly always the result of some muddle over a name or misunderstood report. Sometimes they can have a salutary effect, as when Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite, reading in his own obituary that he was a merchant of death, decided to make amends by setting up the Nobel prizes.

But I have merited no obituary so will just go on being a journalist for a while, though perhaps being a little more cautious about putting my faith in Wikipedia from now on. Anyone can edit it, and even as I have been writing this, someone has kindly brought me back to life.

Predicting the technology that wins out is hard work, but scientists and engineers are searching for the right answers

A few years ago, people who felt betrayed by the future suddenly gained a new rallying cry. After a lifetime of promises about robots and flying cars, we started to wonder: "Where's my jetpack?" Since then, the jokey slogan has found itself appearing everywhere from T-shirts to songs.

It's a jab in the eye of every futurist who made firm predictions about what we'll see in generations to come, and it's easy to laugh at the fools who dreamed of such frivolities. After all, merely guessing at the future is a fundamentally foolish business. That doesn't mean that we can't understand what is coming tomorrow, however, and prepare for the most likely futures by understanding how things happened in the past.

That is where the rich history of the Guardian's technology pages becomes more than just an archive of old newspapers. Over nearly 30 years, there have been titanic changes in the way we view and use technologies. We've seen computers move toward the centre of our lives, much of our food is engineered, families can be created in a lab and keeping in touch is cheaper and easier regardless of whether we do it physically or virtually. So what should we expect from the next decade?

Of all the trends that will dominate our lives in the coming years, computing is the one that has set the standard and followed distinct rules along the way.

The unending influence of Moore's law (a formulation that is both so beautiful and so ubiquitous that it has taken on an almost Shakespearean quality) dictates that our computers will become more powerful and less expensive as time goes on.

This will mean, for starters, machines capable of ever-increasing feats of power: lifelike graphics, smarter understanding, greater intelligence. "Singularity" advocates such as Ray Kurzweil believe this will end in sentient computers and while that is almost certainly excessive, we are already seeing extraordinary leaps in what machines can do. Academics are now crunching everything from terabytes of data pouring out of the Large Hadron Collider to data pushed to PlayStations to scour the universe for alien life.

With ever-increasing amounts of computing power to throw at complex problems, the ideas that have baffled scientists and engineers for decades may finally start to emerge from the darkness. That opens up the chance of high-quality visual recognition systems and accurate translations that work so fast they resemble acts of magic.

The trends set by Moore's law also mean that even the smallest devices will pack an increasingly powerful punch. Today, an iPhone contains the same amount of computing power as a Mac from 10 years ago; soon enough our handsets will enjoy the same processing power and capabilities as the high-end desktop computers we use now.

Look to the clouds

There is also an argument, however, that gadgets will become less powerful rather than more. Why? Because the immense computational power at our fingertips will also be available on demand thanks to cloud computing. With storage, memory and connectivity also advancing at a rapid clip, the built-in capabilities of your gadgets become less important than their ability to connect to a more powerful machine elsewhere.

And if the real brain of your phone or TV or games console can be squirrelled away somewhere else, many consumer electronics might simply become screens that plug into the network and present you with the appropriate information. These developments could easily ramp up as those screens continue to evolve to become cheaper, lighter, thinner, more flexible and more robust.

In addition to the gadgets we carry or use in the home, the plummeting cost of computers means it is almost certain that more of our world - the things we touch, we build, we grow will be able to incorporate these ideas. It's happening at various levels already: anyone carrying an Oyster card around on the Tube today, for example, has the same amount of memory in their pocket as one of Clive Sinclair's ZX81 computers from 1981.

This sort of ubiquitous computing (even at the lowest end) offers the possibility that we can build networks of things that talk to each other constantly. This subtle layer of activity will take place outside of our perception, but will have profound implications for our everyday lives with objects able to assess and regulate themselves and report back on what is happening to them.

So, the idea of an internet fridge in every home may still be an amusing fiction in 2020, but for western city dwellers there is a high likelihood that miniature computers will be baked into every brick, every piece of clothing or item of food.

Those objects could well include people, too. Biotechnology is another area of speedy development, and one that is just beginning to undergo the same revolution as the IT industry did in the 1970s. Understanding the processes of life, and treating organisms like we treat machines, suddenly opens new horizons all around us.

Now the human genome is mapped, for example, we are understanding more and more about it every day. Personal genomic companies are springing up and medicine is on the verge of ambitious advances in both treatment and cure. Certain diseases and syndromes could become a thing of the past in the next decade, while others if not eradicated will certainly be more properly understood.

Other areas, such as human enhancement and the production of artificial organs, are moving forward. Engineers are already able to "print" custom bones to order, though sometimes the change is much too fast for our ethical understanding to keep up. That is where the structures of the old world could step in order to slow progress down, as development becomes a game of politics not possibilities.

Politics is also likely to hurt the area where development is, perhaps, most necessary of all: energy. Our oil-based economies are ripe for technological revolution, but the answers today seem only half-baked and could quite easily stay that way.

While there is a groundswell of entrepreneurs and academics working tirelessly to come up with new answers, it is hard to tell whether the energy landscape will look very different in a decade. The Copenhagen summit is just one example that shows how difficult consensus can be.

Pull up to the bumper

In fact, as we engage in everyday behaviour watching 3D films with distant friends over our tiny disposable flexi-screens, or getting advance traffic reports streaming in from tiny transmitters hidden in cars and by the roadside the important theme could be how to use that technology to solve the problems presented by our dwindling natural resources.

Despite the continually falling prices, as physical goods get ever cheaper thanks to the efficiencies afforded by technology, we may find ourselves struggling to hold back. So often we hear about "doing more with less" soon that may be a battle cry, not a bumper sticker.

Whatever happens, the one thing the world still has in abundance is ingenuity, and while we're unlikely to see those jetpacks any time soon, there's still plenty to look forward to.

American military contractor shows off iPhone application intended to help soldiers track and kill insurgents on the battlefield

In little more than a year, applications for Apple's popular iPhone have become a sensation - with more than 100,000 downloadable programs that do everything from stargazing to virtual farting.

But now one of America's biggest military contractors is taking the concept to extremes, by building a series of apps for use on the battlefield.

At a conference in Arizona on Wednesday, US defence company Raytheon announced its plans to launch a new range of military-oriented programs that can turn the popular touchscreen mobile phone into a tool for use in war zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

The first application in its plans, called One Force Tracker, uses satellite positioning and mobile networks to give soldiers constantly updating field maps that track the position of friendly troops and enemy fighters in real time.

The program dubbed a "situational awareness application" by Raytheon executives would combine data from many sources to try and give an accurate picture of hotspots such as sniper hideouts and vantage points. Troops could also use their iPhones for secure communication, said the company.

"We are committed to providing innovative technology solutions for warfighters and all of our customers," said Jay Smart, chief technology officer of Raytheon's intelligence and information systems business.

The application can run on ordinary iPhone handsets a decision that came, Smart said, because building software for the gadget was cheaper and simpler than some of the expensive options specifically designed for military use.

"Raytheon's experience with mobile communications in the tactical environment and the government customers' need for low-power, simple plug-and-play applications led to the development of a real-time situational awareness application using Apple's touch technologies," he said.

It is not the first time the iPhone has been linked with military uses, however. Earlier this year Knight's Armament Company, an American weapons maker that supplies rifles to the Pentagon, launched a $12 ballistics application called BulletFlight which helps snipers and sharpshooters to hit their intended target.

Although it is most notorious for hi-tech weapons such as the Silent Guardian a pain-inducing microwave gun - Raytheon, which based in Massachusetts, has a history of using popular technology for military purposes. Among its innovations are systems used in the unmanned aerial vehicles that are based on video games consoles.

One Force Tracker is not only for the battlefield, though. Raytheon told the Intelligence Warfighting Summit that the software could also be used with some tweaks - by emergency workers such as doctors and firefighters responding to major incidents.

YouTube may begin offering subscription services that allow users to watch major new TV shows and films online, according to a senior Google executive.

While a number of broadcasters - including Channel 4 and Channel Five - have already forged deals with the Californian website to show full-length programmes online, the company indicated yesterday that it may consider paid options as well.

In an interview with Reuters, Google executive David Eun - who is in charge of partnerships with media companies - confirmed that paid subscription was an option as it tries to convince more TV channels and Hollywood studios to sign up.

"We're making some interesting bets on long-form content; not all content is accessible to us with the advertising model," he said.

The move would be an attempt to forge agreements with more rights owners, many of whom are reluctant to put their content online without adequate compensation.

Until now, the site has remained resolutely free for users and attempted to make its money through advertising. It has made limited deals to show movies on the site, as well as agreements such as the one with Channel 4, which was announced in October. Rather than charging users, these deals are based on a revenue split from the commercials attached to the programmes and films.

Despite these successes, however, the site - which Google bought for $1.65bn in 2005 - has not found it so easy to convince other broadcasters to follow suit. Hollywood studios have been notoriously testy about the possibility of putting more recent movies online with only the prospect of a share of advertising revenue in return.

"I think a free model is a very difficult way to capture the value of our content," said Chase Carey, the president of News Corporation - which owns broadcasters including Fox and Sky, as well as studios such as 20th Century Fox and Fox Searchlight - earlier this year.

Instead, Google hopes that offering money raised through subscriptions can tempt broadcasters to put their content on the site. The possibility of a pay-per-view model - such as the one used by Apple's iTunes store or Amazon's on-demand video service - could also be on the cards.

Google chief executive Eric Schmidt has said that making money from YouTube is a "top priority", with some analysts estimating that the site will haemorrhage as much as $470m ( 288m) this year alone.

Although the site is a household name that commands hundreds of millions of visitors each day, it has found it difficult to successfully cash in - with advertising attached to viral videos and user-generated content collecting paltry amounts of revenue.

Such a move could also help YouTube fend off growing rivals like Hulu - the US website that operates as a joint venture between NBC, News Corporation and Disney.

Since launching publicly in 2008 with a slate of hit shows including House and The Daily Show, Hulu has become the second most-watched video site in America. It is thought be considering expansion plans outside the US, which would include a move to Britain.

Far from being a cure for the industry's woes, substituting streams for downloads wastes bandwidth, reduces privacy and slows innovation

Someone convinced the record and movie and TV industries that there is way of letting someone listen to audio or watch video over the internet without making a copy. They call this "streaming" audio, and compare it to radio, and contrast it with "downloading", which they compare to buying a CD.

The idea that you can show someone a movie over the internet without making a copy has got lots of people in policy circles excited, since it seems to "solve the copyright problem". If services such as Hulu, Last.fm and YouTube can "play you a file" instead of "sending you a file", then we're safely back in the pre-Napster era. You can sell subscriptions to on-demand streaming, and be sure that your subscribers will never stop paying, since they don't own their favourite entertainment and will have to stump up in order to play it again.

There's only one problem: Streaming doesn't exist.

Oh, OK. Streaming exists. It is a subset of downloading, which comes in many flavours. Downloading is what happens when one computer (a server, say) sends another computer (your PC, say) a file. Some downloads happen over http, the protocol on which the web is based. Some happen over BitTorrent, which pulls the file from many different locations, in no particular order, and reassembles it on your side. Some downloads take place over secure protocols like SSH and SSL, and some are part of intelligent systems that, for example, keep your computer in sync with an encrypted remote backup.

Streaming describes a collection of downloading techniques in which the file is generally sent sequentially, so that it can be displayed before it is fully downloaded. Some streams are open-ended (like the video stream coming off your CCTV camera, which isn't a finite file, but rather continues to transmit for as long as the CCTV is up and running).

Some travel over UDP, a cousin of the more familiar TCP, in which reliability can be traded off for speed. Some streaming servers can communicate with the downloading software and dynamically adjust the stream to compensate for poor network conditions.

And of course, some streaming software throws away the bits after it finishes downloading them, rather than storing them on the hard-drive.

It's this last part that has the technologically naive excited. They assume that because a downloading client can be designed in such a way that it doesn't save the file, no "copy" is being made. They assume that this is the technical equivalent of "showing" someone a movie instead of "giving them a copy" of it.

But the reason some download clients discards the bits is because the programmer chose not to save them. Designing a competing client that doesn't throw away the bits one that "makes a copy" is trivial.

All streaming involves making a copy, and saving the copy just isn't hard.

Does this matter? After all, if the entertainment industry can be bought off with some pretty stories about a magical kind of download that doesn't make a copy, shouldn't we just leave them to their illusions?

What harm could come from that?

Plenty, I fear. First of all, while streaming music from Last.fm is a great way to listen to music you haven't discovered yet, there's no reason to believe that people will lose the urge to collect music.

Indeed, the record industry seems to have forgotten the lesson of 70 years' worth of radio: people who hear songs they like often go on to acquire those songs for their personal collections. It's amazing to hear record industry executives deny that this will be the case, especially given that this was the dominant sales strategy for their industry for most of a century. Collecting is easier than it has ever been: you can store more music in less space and organise it more readily than ever before.

People will go on using streaming services, of course. They may even pay for them. But people will also go on downloading. Streaming won't decrease downloading. If streaming is successful that is, if it succeeds in making music more important to more people then downloading will increase too. With that increase will come a concomitant increase in Big Content's attacks on the privacy and due process rights of internet users, which, these days, is pretty much everyone.

If you want to solve the "downloading problem" you can't do it by waving your hands and declaring that a totally speculative, historically unprecedented shift in user behaviour less downloading will spontaneously arise through the good offices of Last.fm.

There are more problems, of course. Streaming is an implausible and inefficient use of wireless bandwidth. Our phones and personal devices can be equipped with all the storage necessary to carry around tens of thousands of songs for just a few pounds, incurring a single cost. By contrast, listening to music as you move around (another factor that has been key to the music industry's strategy, starting with the in-car eight-track player and continuing through the Walkman and iPod) via streams requires that you use the scarce electromagnetic spectrum that competing users are trying to get their email or web pages over. Count the number of earbuds on the next tube-carriage, airplane or bus you ride, multiply it by 128kbps (for a poor quality audio stream) and imagine that you had to find enough wireless bandwidth to serve them all, without slowing down anyone's competing net applications. Someday, every 777 might come with a satellite link, but will it provide all 479 passengers with enough bandwidth to play music all the way from London to Sydney?

What's more, streaming requires that wireless companies be at the centre of our daily cultural lives. These are the same wireless companies that presently screw us in every conceivable way: charging a premium for dialling an 0870 number; having limits on "unlimited" data plans; charging extra for "long distance" text messages. They're the same wireless companies whose hold-queues, deceptive multi-year contracts, surprise bills, and flaky network coverage have caused more bad days than any other modern industry.

Why would we voluntarily increase our reliance on expensive, scarce wireless bandwidth delivered by abusive thugs when we are awash in cheap, commodity storage that grows cheaper every day and which we can buy from hundreds of manufacturers and thousands of retailers?

Especially when every streaming song creates a raft of privacy disclosures your location, your taste, even the people who may be near you and when you're near them that are far more controllable when you listen to your own music collection.

Finally, there's the cost of going along with the gag. The more we pretend that there is a technical possibility of designing a downloader that can't save its files, the more incentive we create for legal and technological systems that attempt to make this come true. The way you hinder a downloader from saving files is by obfuscating its design and by creating legal penalties for users who open up the programs they use and try to improve them. You can't ever have a free/open source downloader that satisfies the desire to enforce deletion of the file on receipt, because all it would take to remove this stricture is to modify the code.

An incentive to obfuscate code, to prohibit third-party modifications and improvements, and to weld the bonnet shut on all the world's computers won't actually stop downloading. But it will have anti-competitive effects, it will reduce privacy, and it will slow down innovation, by giving incumbents the right to control new entrants into the market.

Hard problems can't be solved with technical denialism. The market has spoken: people want to download their music (and sometimes they want to stream it, too). The supposedly for-profit record labels could offer all-you-can-download packages that captured the law-abiding downloader, and then they could retain those customers by continuing to make new, great music available. It's been 10 years since Napster, and the record industry's hypothesis that an all-you-can-download regime can't work because users will download every song and then unsubscribe from the service is not borne out by evidence. The fact is that most downloaders find cheap, low-risk music discovery to be a tremendous incentive to more consumption, as they discover new music, new artists, new songs and new genres that tickle their fancies.

Selling customers what they desire is fundamental to any successful business. If Big Content can't figure out how to do that, then we can only pray for their hasty demise, before they can do too much more damage to humanity's most amazing and wonderful invention: the internet.

Hey, dude, what's with the roof? How not to look cool in the new BMW roadster

Is there any more hip- sounding class of car than a roadster? Not only does it conjure up the romance of yore, when a chap might shoot down to Brighton with his best gel by his side, but it also conveys a sort of contemporary ironic cool. For surely a roadster is what a dudemeister would drive.

And please, let's not get bogged down in definitions of who qualifies as a dudemeister. We all know one when we see one. In normal circumstances, I hasten to add, I wouldn't lay claim to dudemeister status, but driving a BMW Z4 is not a normal circumstance, even with the top up.

As a rule, what matters, or at least satisfies, most in sports cars is not performance but looks. Of course, that's a kind of sacrilege, especially for the school of thought that speaks in horsepower and torque. But the truth is it's highly unlikely that a driver will ever realise a sports car's potential on the road, whereas its appearance can be appreciated to the full at any time.

And the pleasing thing about the BMW Z4 is that it says "roadster" clearly, although not overly loudly, in a stationary position. The moment you see the long, sloping bonnet and tight little rear, the word "roadster" involuntarily forms on the lips, as though the mouth itself were revving up for action.

The BMW roadster has come a long way since the Z1 back in the 80s. That was short and angular, not at all what a roadster should be, and it featured strange retractable doors. Gradually it metamorphosed into the current model, which comes, for the first time, with a hard convertible top.

I had a few problems with the roof, namely that it failed to open on a couple of occasions. At these frustrating moments a warning signal informed me that something was wrong, although I had noticed this myself when the roof remained over my head, rather than folding, as it had done previously, into the boot.

As I repeatedly pressed the convertible button without success, I suddenly no longer felt like a dudemeister in a roadster. I felt like a nerd in a dud. I had a strong suspicion that it was me, not the car. But happily no one knew I was incapable of performing the defining function of driving a convertible. Indeed, I imagine few onlookers even realised it was a convertible. They probably just thought it was a coupe and I was the kind of person who likes tapping the dashboard for no good reason.

With or without the top, it's a very solid ride, almost heavy. Most of the weight goes into comfort, the pleasing and secure sense of a substantial piece of machinery you wouldn't, for example, want to find your hand in the way of a swinging door. The rest, presumably, is down to the roof. Except, of course, the roof stayed up.

As the noughties come to a close, we take a look at the biggest technology stories of the decade - and how the Guardian reported them at the time

We're closing in on the end of our review of the decade's technology stories, and how the Guardian reported them, and today's year of choice is a doozy.

In the wider world, there was a lot of big news: bird flu panic swept the planet, Israel and Palestine were constantly in the headlines, England didn't win the World Cup and Saddam Hussein was executed (among other things).

In technology, there was an awful lot of action - both at the hands-on consumer end of the spectrum and at the high-faluting, blue sky side of things: Blu-ray was launched; the PlayStation 3 came out; the latest Mars orbiter reached the red planet; Warren Buffett donated some $30bn to the Gates Foundation.

But what else was happening?

2006

• Flush with profits from its ever-growing internet advertising empire, Google was on a bit of a rampage as the year wore on. It launched a ream of products - though whether Base, Google Finance, Video and artificial intelligence were successful is up for debate. The company did make at least one major breakthrough, however, when it splashed out $1.65bn to purchase YouTube in October.

• Google also brought another big issue into the spotlight in 2006: internet censorship in China. Just weeks after it was targeted by the authorities, Google decided to launch a censored version of its index. The backlash was significant, and by early 2007 the company admitted it had damaged its reputation (though it continues to provide the censored version to this day). Google wasn't alone, though: Microsoft caught flak for
closing down a blog criticising the government in Beijing, while most notoriously of all Yahoo - which had been complicit in the jailing of dissident journalist Shi Tao - began to find itself the subject of legal action. In 2007, it apologised for its actions. He is still in prison.

• Closer to home, the BBC made waves by announcing what we called "radical plans to rebuild its website around user-generated content, including blogs and home videos". One cornerstone of the concept? A rebranded video service called iPlayer - but also the idea of a sort of public service MySpace, which then-BBC digital boss said would let users "create your own space and build bbc.co.uk around you... [to] exploit the functionality and usability of services such as Flickr, YouTube, Technorati and Wikipedia". Looks like somebody swallowed the Web 2.0 dictionary.

• With all that in mind, 2006 was clearly the year that social networking first hit the mainstream in a big way. MySpace was already in Rupert Murdoch's hands, but it turned out that a little-known site called Bebo was already proving more popular in Britain. Facebook, meanwhile, took one radical step - introducing its "news feed" of your friend's activities, which caused great concern and then (just weeks later) opening the site to anyone in the world, not just students.

• Picking out other major stories and trends was tough, but surely it's worth pointing out a landmark in digital music, as Gnarls Barkley became the first act to reach No1 on the basis of downloads alone. Little more than a month after digital sales were allowed to count towards the top 40 charts, Crazy - which was heard up and down the country all summer - hit the top spot... and unleashed a new sort of music buying behaviour into the wild.

More than one site has been hit by the pro-Iranian hackers who briefly misdirected web traffic for Twitter to their own site

The "Twitter hack" by the "Iranian Cyber Army" turns out not to have been a hack of Twitter itself: instead they took aim at the DNS records for the site itself (though Twitter itself says in a blog post that API services - which contact the servers directly - were unaffected.)

The hackers also appear to have hacked mowjcamp.org, an advocacy site for Iranian protesters against the re-elected President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

I tried to contact the "Iranian Cyber Army" at the given (Gmail) address on the website: it bounced as undeliverable.

Rik Ferguson, a security analyst at Trend Micro, said: "This kind of DNS hijacking usually involves compromising the registrar responsible for the DNS records of the victim company. The attackers then make unauthorised changes to the DNS records. These changes mean that when you or I type a web site address into our browsers, we are directed not to the real web site but to a second site, set up by the hackers, in this case the 'Iranian Cyber Army'. This has the net effect of making it look like, in this example, servers belonging to Twitter were compromised when in reality that was not the case."

Similar misdirections have happened in the past by accident when "root servers" which route queries for domain lookups have been misprogrammed. Pakistan was blamed for making YouTube inaccessible to the world in February 2008. The government ordered ISPs to set up their DNS servers to reroute any queries inside the country for the site to an "inaccessible" message - but that block was then passed on to DNS servers around the world. (Update: altered to try to clarify that the Pakistan/YouTube incident was about routing tables, not DNS.)

However security experts know that DNS servers are a major source of weakness in the internet: because they determined how traffic is routed, control of them gives hackers the ability to send people where they like. In July 2008 researchers had to race to fix a flaw discovered in the DNS setup before hackers could exploit it.

Ferguson added: "These sorts of attacks are usually limited to hacktivism activities like this one today, but imagine the potential to criminals if they could pull this off against any site requiring log in credentials, such as PayPal, eBay, MSN, Facebook. One has to wonder how quickly the attack would be noted if the dummy site was an exact replica of the victim and was simply there to harvest credentials and redirect the user then into the real site."

Such attacks, called "pharming", presently happen on individual PCs that have been silently taken over by malware, not DNS compromises. But, warns Ferguson, "the potential is demonstrably there. If attacks like this can be said to serve any purpose at all, then perhaps they can serve as a reminder that we all need to absolutely ensure that our business partners meet our own high security standards, and that stands in both the on- and offline worlds."

Update: a translation of some of the text has been provided: "the red text says "Peace be with you. Ya Hossein!" (Hossein being the third imam in the Shia Islam hierarchy, this phrase is used as an exclamation, a bit like we might say 'Oh my god!')'.

'The lower text says "If the leader orders us to, we will attack and if he wants us to, we will lose our heads. If he wants us to have patience and wait, we shall sit down and put up with it."'

(We still don't know what the top part, in blue, says: that's Arabic not Farsi/Iranian, apparently.)

Intriguingly this site's content (the pic is from mowjcamp.org) is different from what was allegedly put on the Twitter misdirection: "U.S.A. Think They Controlling And Managing Internet By Their Access, But They Don't, We Control And Manage Internet By Our Power, So Do Not Try To Stimulation Iranian Peoples To . NOW WHICH COUNTRY IN EMBARGO LIST? IRAN? USA? WE PUSH THEM IN EMBARGO LIST ;) Take Care."

Gameloft will scale back on developing games for Google's Android, despite appearing to reverse its decision after drawing flak from industry experts

Mobile-game developer Gameloft will still cut investment in Google's Android platform despite an apparent U-turn on its controversial decision last month to scale back on developing games for the operating system.

Gameloft's chief financial officer, Alexandre de Rochefort, told an investor conference in November that Android's limited ability to get Gameloft products to customers had been a deciding factor in cutting investment. "It is not as neatly done as on the iPhone. [Moreover,] on Android nobody is making significant revenue."

The announcement drew immediate criticism, including from Telecoms analyst Peter Boyland of IHS Global Insight, who said: "While the iPhone is undoubtedly the iconic handset of the decade, its status as a 'must-have' is waning. While Android is still something of an unknown quantity, Google is fully committed to entering the mobile internet market, and is unlikely to allow the platform to fail without a fight."

Perhaps heeding such warnings, Paris-based Gameloft made a volte-face within days, announcing that it would be bringing out a number of high-definition titles for the second generation of Android handsets and reaffirming its commitment to the current generation.

Yet its investment in Android is still being reduced, and it's becoming clear that the company still considers the iPhone to be very much where it's at at least for the moment.

De Rochefort told the Guardian that the iPhone had had a dramatic effect on the mobile-gaming industry: "With regular mobile phones, those running Java and BREW, only 3% or 4% of users download games on a regular basis. On the iPhone, that usage rate rises to around 15%, and up to 18% in the UK according to recent research. It's clear that people are keen to play games on their phones it's just that previously there has been no platform allowing them to do this in a way they were sufficiently excited about.

"The way I see the market growing is that more and more people are going to be equipped with iPhone-like devices, and we can thus hope to grow usage rates from 3% for most of our business, to maybe in the region of 10% a tripling in market size."

Gameloft, which was launched in 2000 by Ubisoft co-founder Michel Guillemot, has since gone on to become one of the world's leading mobile-game companies, with an expected $180m in sales in the current year and more than 4,000 employees. De Rochefort credits much of its success to its development capacity: "Our teams all work in house. We do not subcontract, which allows us to keep close control on the development cycle of the games and, at the end of the day, have a better quality. We also have put a lot of emphasis on being able to sell worldwide; we are the only non-Japanese company to sell mobile games in Japan."

Gameloft's biggest selling mobile games have been, as de Rochefort describes them, "simple casual games," such as arcade puzzler Block Breaker Deluxe. As more powerful handsets reach ever-greater numbers of consumers, Gameloft has responded with increasingly sophisticated titles. "Basically there is an ongoing shift from 1MB apps your regular Java app to 300MB apps that exist today on the iPhone."

The company's recent and upcoming releases for the iPhone include a port of the 1999 PlayStation classic Driver; a Halo-esque first-person shooter called NOVA; driving game GT Racing; and Avatar, an action platformer based on the new James Cameron film. Many of Gameloft's recent games have been very well received, both critically and commercially, and these latest titles seem to be no exception. NOVA, in particular, looks extremely promising.

There has been some criticism, however, that a large proportion of Gameloft titles are either revamped versions of old games (as with Driver and the recently released port of Earthworm Jim), or else highly derivative games taking their cue from other titles, with little in the way of innovation.

De Rochefort plays down such claims: "I admit we haven't reinvented games genres, but then very few companies have. At the end of the day, all video game companies are just refining genres and game types and trying to improve the experience for the consumer. New game concepts are very, very difficult to come by. There's only one Tetris, and the next Tetris might not appear for 20 years.

"I know some gamers would like to see new concepts all the time, but that's impossible. We're just trying to make the best games in their genre; the fact that the genre already exists means elements of those games will remind you of things you've seen in the past. You're not going to reinvent the wheel every time you make a game but, as a start, we can refine and improve the experience. This is something you've seen in the industry since the beginning, and it's driving the industry in the right direction."

Having worked with a digital distribution model since its inception, Gameloft has recently begun branching out into releasing content for other platforms. De Rochefort says: "Over the last year and a half, we've seen a convergence between mobile phones and consoles. On the one hand, mobiles are getting closer and closer to console capacity the prime example being, of course, the iPhone, which, in my opinion, is far better than the DS from a gaming perspective, and getting very close to the PSP now.

"At the same time, consoles are getting to be more like mobile phones, in that the three main manufacturers Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony have all added download functionality. The business model on these consoles is increasingly looking like what we've been doing for nine years on mobiles; mainstream games sold at 5 to 10, downloaded over the internet. This is exactly what we've been doing on mobile phones, and so it seems natural for us to go there.

"Consoles represented 5% of our sales in the first nine months of this year, and I expect that figure to grow, but it's going to take time. Our core business remains the creation mobile games."

Looking to the near future, de Rochefort is unshakeably confident, in spite of the difficult economic climate: "We're selling games for around the 4 mark, and I believe these low prices will continue to immunise us from the worst of the recession. While it's difficult to accurately estimate the effects of the crisis, in the first nine months of the year our sales grew by 18%. Without the current economic situation, perhaps we could have grown it by 20 to 25%."

Curriculum vitae

Age 36

Education Received his degree from ESSEC Business School in 1996.

Career Senior Vice President and CFO for Gameloft; joined Gameloft in July 2000 shortly after the creation of the company. Prior to joining Gameloft, worked at Schroder Securities in London as a Sell Side Research Analyst specialising in Technology Stocks.

Facebook's new privacy settings have prompted the Electronic Privacy Information Center and other groups to complain to the US government

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), the Center for Digital Democracy and eight other organisations have filed a complaint to America's Federal Trade Commission about the changes Facebook has made to its privacy settings.

Facebook's changes encourage people to make information more widely available and easier to search. Previously, the system encouraged users to make information available only to their friends and people in the same networks. The simplified transition page does allow people to choose to keep their old settings, but the complaint to the FTC argues that the system is less private than it was before.

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg appeared to be a victim of the site's new privacy settings. The changes enabled everyone to look through his photo albums and Valleywag, now part of the Gawker blog, published "some of the more interesting shots". In the UK, the Daily Mail published a picture of Zuckerberg cuddling his teddy bear.

Some Facebook users will be in for a shock when they find that 350 million members can now see photos that they uploaded when they were perhaps only available to a few close friends. Photos, fan pages and lists of friends that are searchable could also show up on Google and other search engines, which in effect makes them available to billions of people.

It could be a great attraction for potential stalkers.

In a statement, Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt said that Facebook "discussed the privacy program with many regulators, including the FTC, prior to launch and expect to continue to work with them in the future."

However, on the All Facebook blog, Nick O'Neill has pointed out that the privacy settings could represent an even greater threat to users who live in countries such as Iran. He writes:

Iran is known for pursuing and occasionally arresting those who speak out against the current regime in an attempt to curb further uprisings. There is no doubt that the state is monitoring Facebook usage including Facebook Pages and groups in an attempt to determine who are the greatest threats to the existing regime.

For Facebook, of course, having more information publicly available makes it easier to target users with paid advertisements.

Millions of White House emails that went missing during the Bush administration have been recovered following an extended court battle.

Around 22m messages spanning more than 90 days were declared missing in 2007, shortly after a scandal arose over the decision to fire nine federal prosecutors who had not toed the White House line.

The Obama administration said that its computer technicians had successfully recovered the lost data, in what campaigners called a victory in the attempt to clear up the "electronic data mess" left behind by Bush officials.

The White House is legally obliged to maintain copies of all the communication it sends, including email, under the Presidential Records Act - brought in after the Watergate scandal in the 1970s as a way of preserving evidence of activities conducted by presidential staffers.

But when public interest campaign groups launched attempts to recover the messages relating to the controversial sackings, it was revealed that millions of emails sent during the period in question had been lost.

That news sparked allegations of deliberate obfuscation by Bush's opponents, and led to lawsuits by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, and the National Security Archive - an independent group that collects public information from the US government.

The groups said they were pleased with the result, which would help transparency efforts.

"We now know that many poor choices were made during the Bush administration," said Meredith Fuchs, general counsel to the National Security Archive. "There was little concern about the availability of email records, despite the fact that they were contending with regular subpoenas for records."

However, the documents may not become available to the public until 2014 - and even then, only if they are deemed valuable under the Freedom of Information Act.

"We may never discover the full story of what happened here," said Melanie Sloan, CREW's executive director. "It seems like they just didn't want the e-mails preserved."

Patrick Leahy, a Democrat senator from Vermont and the chairman of the Senate judiciary commission, said that the White House under Bush had made several attempts to dodge requests to recover the emails.

It was, he said, "Another example of the Bush administration's reflexive resistance to congressional oversight and the public's right to know".

This week we get the closest we can to Santa, in the form of robotics whizz kid Caleb Chung. He's the man behind the lovable dinosaur Pleo, and the equal parts lovable and irritating Furby. Kevin Anderson finds out what makes a good robotic toy and how his background as a street entertainer has helped advise him.

We also hear from Jeremy Allaire of Brightcove, who provide video hosting for the likes of Channel 4, BSkyB and the Guardian. Mercedes Bunz finds out whether they're more than just another YouTube.

Plus there's this week's news including filitering of web content in Australia, the end of Teletext in the UK, the latest turn in the Oracle takeover of Sun, and details of the Guardian's new iPhone app.

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From ebooks and music players, to smartphones and computer gizmos, there's gadgets for all but it pays to research before you buy

If you're planning to give someone a gadget or gizmo for Christmas, be careful, or, if you can't manage that, at least make it cheap. Gadget geeks tend to know what they want, and they can be unreasonably fussy about what are, to rational people, minor differences in specification. But if you do want to surprise someone with a tech gift, there are plenty of options.

One is the Kindle ebook reader, which Amazon.com the US-based version of the shopping site says is "the most wished for, the most gifted, and the number one bestselling product across all product categories on Amazon". It hasn't taken off in the UK, because the original version wasn't available here, and the newer, $259 model has only been shipping to the UK for about a month. Why the delay? The system is based on the idea you can buy books from Amazon and they arrive on the Kindle, so it needs access to a mobile phone network. (You're not charged separately for this.)

Feel the burn

Having tried a new Kindle, I can attest to the fact that it works well as a portable book reader, and in the UK it also provides free access to Wikipedia. Also, while it has its limitations, it's both relatively rare and easily recognisable. This puts users one up on their fellow commuters.

How many people actually need an ebook reader is another matter. Most of us have been getting by with a pocket organiser or PDA, or one of the newer mobile phones. In gift-giving terms, however, today's obvious alternative is the Apple iPod touch. The small screen means it's arguably not quite as good as an ebook reader, at least for novel-length texts, but it's dramatically better as an MP3 music player, portable games console, movie and photo viewer, and web browser.

The third-generation iPod touch is the more affordable alternative to an iPhone, though it lacks the iPhone's camera, GPS and telephone connectivity, and neither device supports Flash. And having an iPod touch means you can listen to music and send emails without worrying about running the iPhone's battery flat.

For people who just want a music player there are more affordable alternatives, including Apple's iPod nano range. Curiously, the fifth-generation nano includes the camera that the iPod touch lacks. But for music buffs, Sony's range of MP3 players is now worth considering, as they generally sound better than iPods, and most or all of them ship with better earbuds.

Sony has taken a bit of a beating over the past decade, for supporting its own Atrac audio compression (used in the MiniDisc system) and its unlovely PC software, Sonic Stage. The newer Sony MP3 players don't use either. Plug them into any computer's USB port and you can use drag-and-drop to copy music files across under Windows, Mac OS X or Linux. Playing a folder full of classical music tracks is easier than trying to manage them using iTunes, though you'll probably want to renumber the tracks in multidisc sets.

While Sony has received lots of attention for its high-end X range of music players, it now has a small clip-style MP3 player that's hard to beat. The NWZ B143B USB Walkman stores 4GB of songs for 29.99 and works like a thumbdrive: you plug it into a USB port. Although you can get similar "off-brand" MP3 players for less, the Sony has a quick recharge feature: three minutes of USB recharging provides about three hours of play time.

Mobile phones have also made a huge impact on the photographic business, and smartphones often include cameras that capture images with 5 megapixels or more. But they also tend to have very small image sensors, which means image quality doesn't really compare with compact cameras, let alone with consumer-level digital DLR cameras.

Watching the detectives

At the moment, one of the most attractive compacts is the Samsung ES55, a 10.2MP camera for under 75. It's a point-and-shoot model with a 2x optical zoom, but it also has face detection (to get people in focus), blink and smile detection, and image stabilisation (to reduce blur). It even has a Beauty Shot feature to lighten and smooth your subject's skin. Although it's also available in black, silver and grey, I suspect a lot of its users will want the pink version.

Other compact cameras worth a look include the slimline Canon Digital Ixus range and the Panasonic Lumix models, particularly the TZ7 ( 229). This has a 25mm wide-angle Leica lens with a 12x optical zoom and lots of electronic features for simple picture taking; it also takes high-def movies (1280 x 720 pixels) in AVCHD Lite

For people who just want to take simple movies, the Flip Ultra HD is the popular choice. Flip, now owned by Cisco, popularised very small Flash-based point-and-shoot camcorders, and remains the market leader. The Ultra HD comes in two versions you can have 4GB ( 90) or 8GB ( 120) of storage and is small enough to carry everywhere. It's great for capturing things for sharing on YouTube, or posting on blogs, and even a child can use one.

But the Flip Ultra's simplicity comes with a lack of versatility. The lens is fixed-focus, there's no optical zoom, and the camera is hard to hold still there's no built-in image stabilisation. Someone who wants to make movies would be much better off buying a more conventional digital camcorder from Canon, Sony, Panasonic or similar company. The Panasonic SDR-S26 ( 170), for example, has a 70x zoom lens, image stabilisation, face detection and a night-view mode. It uses SD cards for storage, so you don't need to be near a PC.

There are also plenty of high-definition (HD) models around now, at more affordable prices. A good example is the Panasonic HDC-SD10 ( 313), but buying and using an HD camcorder needs a bit more research than picking up a Flip Ultra HD.

Widening the net

When it comes to computers, netbooks are an attractive option as they are relatively cheap and work as companion PCs for people who already have larger notebooks and desktops. It's also a market where model ranges change quickly, so older netbooks are often available at substantial discounts.

This Christmas, Samsung looks likely to continue the success it enjoyed with its first netbook, the NC10, which offered a good specification and decent build quality at a reasonable price. That has now been upgraded to the N130, which is available in black, white and pink, and still runs Windows XP. The keyboard, 10.1in screen and lightweight design (1.3kg) make it very good value at a discount price of around 229. There's also a slightly more luxurious N140 version with better battery life for an extra 50.

Asus, which kicked off the netbook market with its Eee PC range, now has the thin ultraportable 1005HA Seashell ( 250), which offers an "isolated keyboard" spaced out flat keys and "up to 10 hours" battery life, against the Samsung's claimed six hours. In other respects, the systems are similar and neither would disappoint.

The computer industry also provides thousands of peripherals that could be potential gifts, including monitors, keyboards, mice, webcams, and thumbdrives. But the one thing almost everyone wants is more external hard drive space, and terabyte (1TB) drives are now available for less than 70. An external hard drive isn't the most romantic gift, but it's one that will actually get used, rather than ending up in a drawer or at Oxfam!