The device, likely to be called the iSlate, has no keyboard and allows users to watch TV shows and read online magazines

Apple is expected to start the new year with the launch of its latest gadget: a tablet computer that will allow users to surf the web, watch TV shows and read the next generation in online magazines and newspapers.

Speculation is rife that the Californian technology group will unveil the device, which has no keyboard and resembles a large iPhone, at an event on 26 January in San Francisco. Some technology bloggers have already christened the touchscreen device the iSlate after it emerged that Apple has registered the iSlate.com internet domain name.

Apple has used the month of January to launch revolutionary products before, in part as a way of diverting attention from its rivals presenting their latest inventions at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which Apple does not attend, and that takes place the same month. In January 2008 Apple unveiled its ultra-slim MacBook Air computer, and the previous year saw Steve Jobs, chief executive, announce the first version of the iPhone.

Apple has previously investigated the possibility of producing a tablet computer but shelved the idea at the last minute, and there are already tablets available in the market from rival PC manufacturers. France's Archos, which pioneered digital music players but saw its market lead stolen by Apple, has already created an internet tablet based on Google's Android software. Microsoft's latest tablet prototype, codenamed Courier according to rumours, involves two 7in multi-screens side by side in the form of a booklet.

But the explosion of legitimate digital content services, the rise of downloadable applications fuelled by the iPhone and the widespread availability of wireless broadband has created a market for a tablet PC that is more of a multimedia device than merely a "keyboardless" computer. It would essentially be a cross between the iPhone, Apple's TV service and an iPod.

Apple refuses to comment on speculation about new products, but there is talk that it is working on two versions of the iSlate, one with a 10in screen and a smaller version with a 7in screen. Users would be able to download applications produced by third-party developers onto the device just as they can for the iPhone.

There are also a number of content deals in the works that would make the iSlate a valuable platform for media groups. Apple is rumoured to be trying to cement a deal with American TV companies including Disney and CBS that would see top shows appear regularly on the device.

Several American publishers, meanwhile, have got together to create an iTunes for magazines. Cond Nast, owner of Vogue and Vanity Fair, has teamed up with Cosmopolitan owner Hearst, Meredith, News Corp and Time to set up an open magazine platform that will allow readers to buy and browse titles on so-called e-readers. The iSlate would be a perfect device for the next generation of digital publications, not least because it will be in full colour, unlike the current generation of electronic books such as the Amazon Kindle.

In a recent note on Apple, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster estimated that there is "a 75% likelihood that Apple will have an event in January and a 50% chance that it will be held to launch the Apple Tablet if Apple announced the Tablet in January, it would likely ship later in the March quarter."

Speculation about the arrival of the latest Apple creation helped shares in the company close Christmas week at a new record high of just over $209 ( 131), making Jobs' stake worth more than $1.1bn. The shares have gained almost 150% this year as the iPhone, and its success in persuading users to download applications from the iTunes store, has cemented Apple's position as the world's leading consumer electronics brand.

The company has rented a stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco later next month. It is the same venue that the company used in September for Jobs to make his first public appearance since his recovery from illness, when he launched a new range of iPods.

Sales of Palm Pre at Carphone Warehouse fall short
Orange sold 90,000 iPhones in the first month of offering

Carphone Warehouse is giving away two free airline tickets to anyone who buys a Palm Pre before the end of January as speculation increases that sales of the mobile phone, seen as the closest competitor to Apple's iPhone have fallen far short of expectations.

Mobile phone network O2, which offers the Palm Pre under an exclusive deal in the UK, is believed to have mountains of unsold phones.

News of the Carphone Warehouse offer comes amid rumours that the iPhone itself is not doing very well for one of its new network partners, Orange. Sources in the retail channel maintain that Orange sold a very creditable 90,000 devices in the first month of offering the handset, but roughly nine in ten of those handsets went to people who were already Orange customers, making the iPhone effectively an upgrade for them. Orange was unavailable for comment.

Orange started selling the iPhone on 10 November, ending O2's two-year exclusive grip on the handset, and announced it had sold more than 30,000 iPhones within hours of it going on sale. Since then, however, Tesco has started selling the device while Vodafone will start to provide the iPhone to its customers from 14 January. The fact that the device is now available on four networks in the UK, however, has not led to a price war, partly because Apple is understood to demand a say in any pricing tariffs to maintain the cachet of iPhone's "premium" image.

The iPhone is available across O2, Orange, Tesco and Vodafone starting at about 30 a month for customers willing to pay up-front for the device. The basic iPhone 3G is available free from 35 a month but most customers want the more powerful iPhone 3GS which is free on contracts from about 45 a month.

That is the same price at which O2 makes the Palm Pre free for customers. The device was launched in the US in June and in the UK on 16 October and was supposed to resurrect the fortunes of its Californian developer. Previously, Palm created the market for so-called personal digital assistants (PDAs) with its range of handheld organisers, and dominated the smartphone market before it was eclipsed first by Nokia and then by Apple.

But while the Palm Pre has been a critical success, with reviewers saying it runs the iPhone a close second in terms of functionality, the handset has been a poor seller.In the three months to the end of November, Palm shipped 783,000 smartphones, representing a 5% decrease from the three months to August, although it does mark a year-on-year increase of 41%. Carphone Warehouse is offering anyone who buys the phone before 31 January, two free return flights to one of 15 European destinations.

Micro-blogging service Twitter buys startup Mixer Labs
Deals with Google and Microsoft will allow them access to data

Twitter, the micro-blogging business, is buying a startup called Mixer Labs in an effort to pinpoint the locations of people posting messages on its service.

Mixer Labs, founded by two former Google employees, has developed a location-tracking tool called GeoAPI. Twitter chief executive, Evan Williams, believes GeoAPI could prove helpful by showing where people are as they share what they are seeing or experiencing.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote in a blog: "When current location is added to tweets, new and valuable services emerge everything from breaking news to finding friends or local businesses can be dramatically enhanced."

"Our efforts in this area have just begun. Today, we're excited to announce a major new step into the location-aware future."

Financial terms of the deal, which was announced last week were not disclosed.

Twitter has recently signed agreements with Microsoft and Google to allow the two technology companies access to its data for use in their search engines, Facebook has also agreed a similar deal. Silicon Valley speculation suggested that the site could be charging Google $15m ( 9.3m) and Microsoft $10m ( 6.2m) for use of the data leading to the idea that the startup could be making a profit.

The speculation has countered online criticism about Twitter's lack of a business model and difficulties in making money.

About 58 million people around the world use Twitter, which accommodates messages of no more than 140 characters. The company which is based in San Francisco, has raised about $155m ( 97.1m) from investors since its inception in 2006.

Move follows warnings from British Library and National Museum of Scotland that historical record is being lost

New legal powers to allow the British Library to archive millions of websites are to be fast-tracked by ministers after the Guardian exposed long delays in introducing the measures.

The culture minister, Margaret Hodge, is pressing for the faster introduction of powers to allow six major libraries to copy every free website based in the UK as part of their efforts to record Britain's cultural, scientific and political history.

The Guardian reported in October that senior executives at the British Library and National Library of Scotland (NLS) were dismayed at the government's failure to implement the powers in the six years since they were established by an act of parliament in 2003.

The libraries warned that they had now lost millions of pages recording events such as the MPs' expenses scandal, the release of the Lockerbie bomber and the Iraq war, and would lose millions more, because they were not legally empowered to "harvest" these sites.

The powers are very similar to copyright laws which require every publisher in the UK to provide the libraries chiefly the British Library and the NLS, but also the National Library of Wales, the Bodleian in Oxford, Cambridge University library and Trinity College Dublin with copies of every printed book, magazine, journal and newspaper.

The internet is fast becoming the dominant form of publication in the UK: about a third of all works currently published are only in digital form and that number is increasing dramatically. Ministers predict the UK will host 15m websites by 2016 but under existing powers the British Library would be able to archive only 1% of them.

Ministers originally decided to postpone all the new powers until after the next general election, blaming their advisory panel and internal hold-ups for the delay. The libraries feared this would mean further lengthy delays as the Tories, widely thought to be favourites to win the election, have so far refused to announce any plans to enact these powers.

In an attempt to head off criticism, Hodge has now launched a consultation, due to end in March, which would allow the libraries to copy and archive free sites using the .uk domain name and all other UK-based sites. There are more than 4m free websites active in the UK and proposed new domain names such as .sco for Scotland and .cym for Wales will also be included.

Hodge has conceded she is unlikely to get these powers in force before the next election but officials from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport said: "We will make as much progress as we can in the time available."

However, paid-for websites which may soon include the Times, the Sun and all other News International titles under plans for paywalls outlined by Rupert Murdoch will still be closed off to the copyright libraries.

Hodge has again delayed introducing legal powers to harvest websites which charge to access them, or have restricted access, until after the election. She said there are still legal and technical issues to resolve.

Martyn Wade, Scotland's national librarian said: "We welcome the consultation and look forward to taking part in it. We hope that it will lead to meaningful and rapid progress being made towards implementation of legislation which will enable us to collect the published knowledge of Scotland in electronic form; knowledge which is currently being lost."

Lynne Brindley, chief executive of the British Library, said: "By 2020 more material will be published in digital format than in print; the British Library must collect, preserve and provide access to that material. I very much welcome this consultation which extends the principle of legal deposit to cover material published digitally and online."

Sales of Sony's premium product have disappointed so far, accounting for just 12% of DVD player sales in Europe

It offers pictures with up to six times more detail than standard DVDs, and should be the ideal way to view films on the high-definition TVs now reckoned to be in nearly 50% of households. But although big-name releases such as Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Star Trek XI are expected to boost sales of blu-ray players and discs this Christmas, the format has not been the hit that many expected.

Two years ago, Sony was brimming with confidence: in April 2007 it produced an internal presentation of sales projections which reckoned that by the end of 2009, 27m players would be in use, and 85m discs sold.

Blu-ray player sales have grown rapidly this year , but they still make up less than 12% of DVD player sales in western Europe, according to data released recently by the analysis company GfK Group.

"Sales have been disappointing for the industry," said Richard Cooper, senior video analyst at the media analysis company Screen Digest. "They were expecting that it would be adopted more quickly. But you wouldn't choose to launch a premium upgrade product in the middle of a recession."

Blu-ray is a high-end product it is difficult to persuade people to upgrade to more expensive, premium products when they are surrounded with "good enough" cheaper ones. DVD was able to supplant VHS video because it offered direct access to any point on the disc, was more robust than tape, and had extras such as deleted scenes, commentaries and multiple languages. Even so, it took just over 10 years for DVD to completely kill off VHS sales.

Another problem was that like VHS, which outlasted Betamax, Blu-ray began in a format war with Toshiba's HD DVD format, another high definition video format. Although HD DVD bowed out of competition in early 2008, it had left people wary of committing to the new format.

The way seemed to be open. The difference is, instead of just one challenger, Blu-ray now faces many challenges in the fight for attention, including HD television and, particularly, the internet, where the iPlayer and YouTube - which both also offer high-definition versions - can be piped into TV sets via games consoles including the Wii, Xbox 360 and PS3. And there are also legal and illegal downloads in growing numbers, plus Sky and Virgin offering what are effectively video-on-demand services in standard and high definition.

In 2005 Bill Gates commented that Blu-ray would be "the last physical format there will ever be" because in the future, "everything's going to be streamed directly or on a hard disk".

And now the film industry is moving to embrace a future of content delivered over the internet. Warner Brothers has launched a Europe-wide video on demand service that sees titles available to cable customers in some countries the same day they are released on DVD.

Apple, meanwhile, is reportedly sounding out leading US broadcasters with a view to launching subscription TV through it's online store iTunes. And in the UK, media companies offering video on demand, such as BT and Virgin, continue to expand their services.

But it is too early to read the last rites of Blu-ray. "There's a huge number of channels on TV, and it's easier to go to video-on-demand than it was before. Yet people still buy content in a package," said Cooper. Blu-ray can offer the complete package - discs, extras and, with newer machines, links to online extras, he explained.

Mike O'Mahoney, general sales manager at the consumer electronics company Pioneer GB, admits that take-up has been "fairly slow" but says that this year sales have been up 150-fold on 2008, helped by falling prices of players and discs.

One challenge has been that people can buy an "upscaling" DVD player - which will make an ordinary DVD played on a high-definition TV appear to fill the screen. Such upscaling players typically cost no more than 100, and the apparent improvement in quality over a normal DVD player (though using the same disc) is enough for many viewers.

But there are other problems. Ben Rose, an internet analyst, said: "The main issue is content. Most of the movie archive doesn't have an HD digital transfer and therefore can't be released on Blu-ray. Blockbusters like those from George Lucas or Spielberg are going to capture the public on the new format and they just aren't here yet."

Even among illegal downloaders, the preference is still for standard quality over HD, Rose notes, pointing to statistics from one of the largest "torrent" sites which shows that there were 12,500 "standard" downloads of the latest Doctor Who episode, The Waters of Mars, against 2,500 of the HD version. The same applies for Top Gear, also popular with downloaders, where only 1 in 3 went for the HD version.

GfK still expects Blu-ray players to be "one of the top-selling products this Christmas" and adds that the sales are underestimated because every PS3 sold is also a Blu-ray player. So far, 2.5m have been sold in the UK. It may be that Blu-ray is simply sidling into peoples' homes but whether it will be the success that was dreamed of in 2007 is quite another matter.

Despite bold but vague boasts of record sales, Kindle figures are thought to be lagging behind early years of Apple's iPod

In recent months Amazon has been keen to trumpet "record-breaking" sales of its electronic book reader, the Kindle. But the company's extreme secrecy means that nobody is sure quite how popular the device really is.

In November Amazon boasted that the gadget was its "most wished for, most gifted and number one best-selling product", and last week it said December was already the Kindle's best month yet. But it has refused to say exactly how many have been sold since the 2007 launch.

"Amazon has always been a secretive company. Companies like Amazon think that giving out information will help competitors," said Paul Biba, editor of Teleread, which tracks the electronic book industry.

Sandeep Aggarwal, an analyst with Collins Stewart in New York who has tracked the Kindle's performance, believes that across both models the paperback-sized Kindle 2 and larger-screened DX Amazon may be on target to have sold a little over 500,000 units by the end of the year. That would lag behind the pace set by Apple's iPod, which sold 376,000 in its first year on the market, in 2002, and almost 1m in its second year.

Even at that point, the iPod's dominance of the music market was not yet obvious. It was only in 2004, after Apple launched the iTunes download store in several countries, that sales began to increase dramatically. The company has now sold around 230m iPods worldwide.

There is no suggestion that Amazon's blockbuster descriptions of popularity are false, but a clearer picture of the truth may lie between the lines of its carefully chosen language. For example, the company says the Kindle is the "number one best-selling" product on Amazon.com. But because all worldwide sales of the gadget are routed through the company's US site, the chances are high that it will rank among these best-selling items.

Furthermore, Amazon is the only outlet through which the Kindle is available unlike rival devices from the likes of Sony and others, which are sold through a variety of shops and websites.

An Amazon spokeswoman told the Guardian that Kindle sales were "not a figure Amazon discloses". Nor does it divulge data about the Kindle-compatible books it sells, even screening figures from the publishing industry's main monitoring group, Nielsen BookScan.

"Unfortunately, we do not currently capture ebook sales in our BookScan US system," said Nielsen's Dennis Halby. "Ebook data remains a major priority for us and we're currently working towards our goal of adding this data to our physical book sales data."

Without figures, it is hard for publishing companies and rival ebook makers to accurately gauge how popular is the market for their products. Last month the US book retailer Barnes & Noble launched its own Kindle competitor, the Nook.

"The Nook has sold out, much to the embarrassment of Barnes & Noble," said Teleread's Biba. "If Amazon had released its sales figures then maybe Barnes & Noble could have used these to plan better when ordering its first shipment of Nooks. Always keep the competition guessing."

'Twas the day after Christmas and all through the Guardian, not a creature was stirring ... except Charles Arthur, Bobbie Johnson, Robert Andrews and Susi Weaser, who were there to dissect the year's technology highlights.

Join us as we talk about the year of content, who's been offering alternatives to the ubiquitous iPhone and what the government has been doing to get us all online. And, there's a chance for a bit of self-marking, as Bobbie and Charles review the predictions they made last year - who'll be teacher's pet and who'll be sent to the corner in disgrace?

Merry Christmas to all!

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The noughties have been technologically inspiring and liberating: but the threats to a wired world have also become starkly clear over the past 10 years

THE TEMPTATION, of course, is to sum up the decade in terms of brands. Thus the noughties could be seen as the period of Google's inexorable rise, of Apple's metamorphosis into a music and mobile phone colossus, of Amazon's increasing dominance, of mushrooming user-generated content (Flickr, Blogger) and social networking (MySpace, Facebook, Twitter), of the emergence of Wikipedia as the world's leading reference work, of YouTube and the BBC's iPlayer and of corporate stumbles (Microsoft, Yahoo, eBay, innumerable record labels and newspaper groups).

Or you could see the decade in terms of broad trends. It was the decade in which what Ofcom calls "online catch-up TV" went from an exotic preoccupation of geeks with fast internet connections to a domestic proposition. The key driver was the spread of broadband connections. By the end of 2008, 95% of UK households with an internet connection had broadband with a speed of 2Mb or more. This made it possible to have an enjoyable experience with YouTube (launched in 2005) and the BBC iPlayer (launched at the end of 2007) and in the process changed the media landscape in unimaginable ways.

We moved from an era when "the computer was the PC" to the world of "cloud computing" where John Gage's famous declaration that "the network is the computer" finally became true. We started the decade using expensive software packages for word-processing, emailing and doing spreadsheet calculations, and finished it using free services provided on the internet. This shift was also visible in the corporate world as companies began to shift their IT operations into the "cloud" by renting virtual servers from Amazon and others.

In doing so, we crossed a threshold into uncharted territory. For one thing, nobody really knows how secure cloud computing really is. And although it may be free (ie ad-supported), the vast server farms needed to make it possible have significant environmental downsides.

Optimists will see the noughties as a period of liberation and creativity when the stranglehold of editors and media proprietors was finally broken. Blogging services made it possible for anyone to be published. Anyone with the inclination to do so could edit an entry in Wikipedia. Flickr enabled any photographer to create a gallery of online images. YouTube gave aspiring cinematographers a way of screening their work. MP3 audio compression enabled garage bands to get their music to potential fans. Twitter and Wikileaks made it much more difficult for governments and corporations to keep their secrets from the great unwashed, as Trafigura discovered.

On the other hand, pessimists will view the decade as the period when the utopianism of techno-libertarians was exposed for what it was: naivety on stilts. In 2000, the UK Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) set the tone by illustrating the power of the established order to curb online freedoms. While it remained true that you could protect your documents with unbreakable encryption, Ripa enabled the home secretary to threaten you with two years in gaol if you declined to provide his officials with the key: suddenly the liberation provided by technology began to look less convincing. And while John Gilmore's dictum that "the internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it" remained broadly true, China demonstrated that if you throw enough people, resources and western technology at the problem, you can effectively erect a great firewall around 1.3 billion people. Even the technophobic Iranian regime found it relatively easy to throttle a flood of inconvenient truths after its grisly presidential "election".

What all this suggests is that the noughties were the years when the internet went from being exotic to mainstream indeed, to being a utility. No child under the age of 11 knows there was once a world without Google. Most teenagers cannot imagine a world without Facebook or YouTube. And even the proportion of adults who can remember travel agents is declining fast. Almost without noticing, we have become dependent on the network. Our task in the next decade will be to make sure it remains free and open, rather than the captive of the corporations and governments who would love to control it. Happy New Year!

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.

Reports of sums taken are exaggerated, bank says
Crime network re-emerges as US cyber chief is named

The FBI is investigating the activities of a notorious Russian internet gang amid accusations that it stole tens of millions of dollars from US banks.

The hackers, known as the Russian Business Network, had been quiet for two years after masterminding a string of hi-tech crimes including identity theft, fraud, spam and child pornography.

But the gang could be back in action, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal which suggested that Citigroup was the focus of a federal investigation linked to the Russian group. It claimed that an attack believed to have been orchestrated by the network netted large sums of money after targeting Citigroup's computer systems.

Reports of the cyber attack came as the White House today named its head of cyber security as Howard Schmidt, who had a similar role for several years under George W Bush. He will co-ordinate US government, military and intelligence efforts to repel hackers.

There has been a string of reports about hacking attacks on the US government in recent months, as well as the theft of more than 5m from systems belonging to the Royal Bank of Scotland. The threats led President Obama to declare that defence against internet attacks was a "national security priority" a shift which culminated in Schmidt's appointment.

Citigroup, the world's largest financial services company, has rejected suggestions that the FBI is investigating an incident at the bank, and denied that a raid of such proportions had taken place.

"We had no breach of the system and there were no losses, no customer losses, no bank losses," said Joe Petro, managing director of Citigroup's security and investigative services. "Any allegation that the FBI is working a case at Citigroup involving tens of millions of losses is just not true."

Instead, a spokesman said, the company is aware of one customer whose account was drained of more than $1m after being hacked.

While the nature of the attack remains contested, the reports mark a significant comeback for one of the internet's most high-profile crime groups. The organisation disappeared from view in 2007 after moving its operations from St Petersburg to China.

The extended absence had left some wondering whether it had disbanded, but experts familiar with the network's activities suggested that its influence on organised crime was still strong.

"All signs point to a dramatic rise in cyber crime," said Anton Chuvakin, a computer security expert based in San Jose. "The strategy is pretty much the 'blue ocean' one, with a lot of unexplored opportunity and a low barrier to entry."

It would not be the first time that Citigroup, which is based in New York, or its customers had been targeted by computer criminals. Earlier this year Albert Gonzalez, a 28-year-old hacker from Florida, was charged by US prosecutors with being the mastermind behind a series of computer attacks that netted millions over the course of several years. Citibank was among the groups targeted by the strikes, which also hit computers belonging to payment processing company Heartland and resulted in more than 45m credit card numbers being stolen from the retailer TJX.

Gonzalez, who faces 15 to 25 years in prison, was once linked to another well-known group of internet gangsters known as Shadowcrew.

In the US, the announcement of Schmidt's appointment came as the final step in a much-criticised seven-month search for a candidate. The continuing lack of an appointment had caused some concern in Washington 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.

Last weekend, it emerged that the Russian military had been meeting Washington officials to discuss potential collaboration over internet security and cyber defence. Such a move would mark a breakthrough in the often frosty relations between the two countries over their activities online.

Rod Beckstrom, the former director of the US Cyber Security Centre, told the Guardian that he had met with Russian officials too and had encouraged such collaborations while working for the government. "We do see international collaboration improving," he said. "We are pleased to hear superpowers such as Russia and the US addressing these topics."

The constant chime of criticism about Twitter - aside from the accusation that it is pointless and frivolous - is that it has no way of making money.

Hours of discussion about the company's business model, or apparent lack of it, have agonised internet buffs far and wide (on these pages).

So when it emerged overnight that the company could be profitable, it's no surprise that more than a few people were left scratching their heads. What? How did a company that looked to be so ephemeral suddenly produce so much revenue? Did everybody get it wrong?

Not exactly - and here's why.

The reports suggesting that Twitter is profitable are based on the fact that the San Francisco startup signed lucrative deals with Microsoft and Google, in which the two technology megacorps get access to its data for use in their search engines. Bloomberg's sources suggest Google is paying $15m for the privilege, while Microsoft is forking out around $10m. (Facebook also has a similar deal in place, though it is not clear how much money is changing hands there).

A couple of weeks ago, when Google unveiled what it calls "real-time search" facilities, there were questions about the monetary terms of the deal, but all parties were tight-lipped.

Putting aside the question of whether Twitter is charging enough for its data, there's no doubt that it's a positive step for the startup. $25m is hardly small change.

But while such sums may make Twitter profitable today, when it is still relatively small, that doesn't mean it's enough in the longer term.

In the past Twitter has tried to be frugal and played down the traditional image of high-spending startup culture. For example, when it took a cash injection of $100m, the claim was that it was money in the bank. When I interviewed him earlier this year, co-founder Biz Stone questioned whether the company would ever grow very large.

"Do we need to be a company of thousands? Maybe not," he said. "Maybe we can be a company of hundreds and still bring Twitter to a huge number of people around the world."

But that doesn't mean $25m is enough. Right now Twitter employs around 100 people, meaning that its wage bill probably comes in around the $10m range each year. It has shifted to new offices in downtown San Francisco. It has brought on former Google executive Dick Costolo to manage operations, and is likely to bring in more senior staff in the coming months. It has hired like barmy (doubling in size every six months so far) and, given the amount of traffic it now serves, must be spending significant amounts on infrastructure.

True, there is money coming in - and that is good in a dotcom world so often built from flimsy, insubstantial businesses. But as the site grows, that money will be used up. And Twitter's investors (like all venture capitalists) don't want small, safe returns on their money: they want serious cash. Most successful dotcoms grow fast, invest heavily and then try to cash out.

So the fact that $25m is enough to make the company profitable leaves me pondering two possible conclusions: that its price tag is vastly inflated, or that it will need to find a lot more Googles and Microsofts to keep the bottom line looking healthy.

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

BT has given its five-millionth customer a prize, while announcing plans to deliver high-speed fibre to UK homes up to nine months ahead of schedule

BT has announced its five millionth broadband customer: chip shop worker Elizabeth Patterson of East Kilbride, Glasgow. She has won "a luxury trip to Vancouver to watch the Winter Olympics," says BT. The company reckons there are more than 14m ADSL broadband customers in the UK, and says it is spending 1.5bn to lay fibre past 10m homes covering 40% of the UK population by 2012.

BT chief executive Ian Livingston said the fibre roll-out was six months ahead of schedule and would pass 4m homes by the end of 2010. This means more homes should have access to faster broadband for the London Olympics, for which BT is the "official communications partner". However, he pointed out that this was without any support from the UK government. He said:

"If you look around the world, several governments are proactively supporting the roll out of fibre broadband. There's still a debate in the UK - which is fine - but we need our politicians to decide how much of a priority fibre broadband is. BT is the only company currently planning to invest large sums in this area but we can only go so far with our shareholder's money."

As I never tire of pointing out, the need for fibre to the home (FTTH) has been obvious for at least two decades -- Ian Mackintosh made the case, and analysed the economic implications, in his book, Sunrise Europe, published in 1986. BT and several clueless governments have been making the right mouth movements but doing nothing effective ever since.

Presumably there's action now because BT is coming under pressure from Virgin Media, which has been installing fibre optic cables to the street, if not the home. However, Ofcom's latest market update, for this year's second quarter, says: "BT remained the largest residential and SME broadband supplier in Q2 2009, with its market share increasing by 0.2 percentage points to 26.6%, its highest level since 2001."

Another incentive is the need to support the rapidly growing market for internet video, which in the UK is being driven by the BBC's iPlayer.

BT's larger problem is the loss of fixed lines, which fell to less than 20m in Q3, more than 10m below the peak in 2002, according to Ofcom. But at least converting phone lines to ADSL and fibre broadband connections increases the revenue per line.

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.

BBC iPlayer figures provide revealing snapshot

The technology may have changed, but tech-savvy consumers still watch their favourite TV shows on mobile phones at the same times as they used to watch TV, with a healthy dose taking the BBC iPlayer to bed at weekends.

The BBC, which has provided a revealing snapshot into how consumers are using BBC iPlayer on their mobiles to watch TV, found that peak time viewing is about 9.30pm.

The prime time period for evening mobile viewing runs from about 7.30pm to 11pm across the week, a similar pattern to the viewing habits of people watching on a television. The BBC is keen to learn more about the trend and is contemplating research into the pattern. The corporation also found that mobile TV watching is lower on Friday and Saturday evenings when the younger people are likely to be out socialising.

Weekend mornings, when users are having a lie-in, have also proved to be a hit for the iPlayer on mobiles with a significant bump in viewing between 7am and 10am. The BBC said that, overall, Sunday is the most popular day for watching catch-up TV on mobiles.

The BBC did not provide any figures on how many shows are being viewed by mobile. Numbers are thought to be relatively small, but growth is expected to be high as the iPlayer has jumped from being available on four to 22 devices in a year.

The BBC also revealed that Top Gear was the most watched TV programme of the year on the BBC iPlayer, based on figures to 13 December. Viewers used the device on computers, on Virgin Media's TV service and on the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii. There were a record 1.67m views of the first episode of the 13th series of the hit BBC2 show on the iPlayer. Of the top 20 TV shows it is notable that BNP leader Nick Griffin's appearance on Question Time prompted huge catch-up viewing. It ranked fourth with almost 1 million views.

The second day of the fifth Test of England's gripping Ashes win over Australia at the Oval, broadcast by 5 Live's Test Match Special, was the most popular radio show online. The show was listened to 183,000 times on the radio catch-up service.

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.

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 ...

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.

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?

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

In a lot of ways, it still feels like we're living out in the ripples of 2008. It was, after all, just a year ago. But it was a year of major turbulence, largely the result of financial misadventures - the sub-prime mortgage crash in America turned into a full-blown crisis, and the resulting recession has hit every manjack among us in one way or another.

Once you factor out the bitter, deflated meringue that was the economy, among the big technology companies, there was much of the same: Google continued expanding, Apple released a new version of its iPhone, Microsoft started trying to put the problems of Vista right - by announcing the imminent launch of Windows 7.

A few icons died in 2008, including SF legend Arthur C Clarke, Last Lecture author Randy Pausch and Dungeons and Dragons creator Gary Gygax.

But for the Guardian's technology team, it was an interesting year. The Free Our Data campaign, which had kicked off in 2006 with a crusading article Give us back our crown jewels started making serious headway. I ran the GameCamp event (great fun, and we should have more news on that front soon) and moved to San Francisco to be the Guardian's first full-time correspondent in Silicon Valley.

Anyway. Let's crack on look at how we saw it.

2008

• OK, let's get the horrible stuff over with first. There were massive job cuts all over the technology world, including thousands of jobs gone at Yahoo, Sony and Siemens. For a while, the big companies tried to act as if nothing was happening. A little cheeky, perhaps, given that software was sort of to blame for the crisis anyway.

• In the midst of all the crap, Microsoft found the time and money to launch an audacious $45bn bid to buy Yahoo. The saga, which went on forever, included rejection, mooted tie-ups with Google, hostility, revolt, agreements, more rejections, disappointment and then - after all of that - the decision by Yahoo boss Jerry Yang to step down. Crikey. Oh, and somewhere during all of that, Bill Gates found time to retire.

• Once upon a time there had been a game called Grand Theft Auto, which sent lots of anti-gamers running for the hills and even got a bit saucy. In 2008, however, it became a genuine mainstream phenomenon when GTA IV launched. The usual questions came up - will it turn us into killers?; can games be art?; is it any good? - but this time all the right boxes seemed to get ticked. Yeah, there had been big games before - Halo 3 in 2007. But GTA IV may have been the first game that everybody took seriously.

• In September, scientists completed the biggest machine the world has ever seen, a 17-mile long particle accelerator hidden under the Swiss mountains. The idea of a Big Bang Machine, ready to show physicists the secrets of the beginning of the universe gave plenty of people the willies. However, the world didn't end when it got started... but given that it broke down almost immediately, there's still time.

• Last but by no means least, a certain Barack Obama proved the power of the web as he surged to victory in the US presidential elections, and therefore into the White House, in November. If every electoral contest of the past 10 years has tried to claim the title of "the election won by the internet" then perhaps this was the first time one genuinely deserved it. Obama raised hundreds of millions online, leading what seemed to be a groundswell of grassroots sentiment after eight years of George Bush. Is that a good thing? Maybe, maybe not - but money is the way the game is played.

Next week we'll take a look at 2009. In the meantime, enjoy Christmas.

Microsoft has been ordered to to stop selling its Word program in January after an appeal against $290m patent ruling failed

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."

Monthly unique user figure for guardian.co.uk sets new record, as Mail and Telegraph both remain over 30m

The number of people using guardian.co.uk surged 13% in November to a record global audience of nearly 36 million people.

According to the latest figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic published today, the Guardian News & Media website, which includes content from the Observer and MediaGuardian.co.uk, attracted 35,792,874 unique users, up 13% on October and 37% year on year.

This is the highest number of unique users in one month for any UK newspaper website, beating the previous record of nearly 33 million unique users set by guardian.co.uk in September.

"We are thrilled with the November figures. October was a strong month for us, but the fact that the number of monthly unique users has risen by 13% in just a few weeks indicates that our online audiences are increasingly engaging with our content," said Emily Bell, director of digital content at Guardian News and Media.

"Our world news and environment sections drove the most traffic to guardian.co.uk in November, with several stories on climate change in particular the story about the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit resonating with audiences around the globe."

At Mail Online, the Daily Mail & General Trust's website network, November traffic grew by 3% month on month to 31,251,273 global unique users, with strong growth of 50% from a year ago.

In third place, Telegraph.co.uk's unique user numbers increased by 3% between October and November to 30,811,865. This was a 34% year-on-year increase.

News International, preparing to move its content behind a paywall, saw less dramatic shifts. Sun Online, which includes News of the World and page3.com, had 20,200,269 unique users, losing 3% month on month in November, but increasing 23% over a year. Its stablemate Times Online recorded 20,930,751 unique users in November. However, it was the only newspaper losing unique users year on year, with a 3% drop.

Mirror Group Digital's network of sites, including Mirror.co.uk, recorded 10,631,333 unique users last month, which was a rise of 5% on October but the strongest year-on-year increase: up 80%.

Independent.co.uk was down nearly 8% compared with October, with 8,927,294 unique users, and stable year on year, with an increase of 0.44%.

Guardian.co.uk remained the most popular UK newspaper website with British web users last month with 12,897,360 domestic uniques, 36% of the total.

Mail Online weighed in second with 11,936,871 UK unique users. Telegraph.co.uk ranked third with 10,370,439, Sun Online fourth with 8,855,798, Times Online fifth with 7,549,910, Mirror Group sixth with 5,716,443 and Independent.co.uk seventh with 4,030,377.

Guardian News and Media's website had an average of 1,926,674 unique users each day in November. The figure gives some indication of how many people are using the site frequently, as the total monthly figure counts a unique user only once within a month.

Mail Online was second, with 1,887,296 daily unique users followed by 1,626,061 daily unique users of Telegraph.co.uk. Fourth most popular newspaper website was Sun Online with 1,235,685 daily unique users while Times Online was fifth with 1,136,093. Mirror Group had 502,754 daily unique users and the Independent had 409,373.

To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000.

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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".

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!