Apple apparently blocks Chinese downloads of iPhone software that features Tibetan spiritual leader

Chinese users of the iPhone are unable to download applications related to the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Buddhist Tibet, or Rebiya Kadeer, an exiled minority leader, after Apple apparently blocked them from its iPhone App Store in the country.

The move suggests that Apple has followed Google in self-censoring content available in China, under pressure from the government.

Apple does not maintain a single app store; there are different ones for each country, and Apple has the final say on what software appears in each.

The iPhone was launched in China two months ago on the carrier China Unicom. The apps for the Dalai Lama and for Kadeer are available in most countries, according to the news service IDG.

In a statement to IDG, an Apple spokeswoman, Trudy Muller, said: "We continue to comply with local laws. Not all apps are available in every country."

IDG says at least five iPhone apps related to the Dalai Lama are unavailable in the China store. Some Dalai Quotes, Dalai Lama Quotes, and Dalai Lama Prayerwheel display inspirational quotes from the Tibetan spiritual leader. Another, Paging Dalai Lama, tells users where he is currently teaching. A fifth, Nobel Laureates, contains data about Nobel prize winners, including the Dalai Lama.

English-language searches on the Chinese iTunes store made from outside China display two applications and a number of English-language education downloads relating to the Dalai Lama. However, using Chinese characters for the search produces no results.

IDG says searches on iPhones displayed at the Apple Store in Beijing this month returned no results for the term Dalai. Nor did results appear in searches done with a computer on iTunes after switching the country selection to China.

The Dalai Lama fled Tibet in 1959 but remains widely revered among Tibetans. The Chinese authorities have dismissed him and blamed him for violence that has flared in Tibet.

China has taken a hard line with western governments or organisations that deal with the Dalai Lama and have attempted to freeze him out of any discussion in the west about Tibetan self-determination.

China operates rigorous censorship of the internet, having told Google that a condition of operation in China was that it would block access to information about so-called "dissident" groups including the Dalai Lama. It operates a widespread filtering system that aims to prevent the dissemination or discovery of information about such groups, and others such as pro-democracy organisations.

Kadeer is an exiled leader of China's Uighur minority group and is similarly reviled by Chinese officials and state media. An iPhone app named 10 Conditions, based on a documentary about her life, did not appear in test searches of the App Store in China.

James Boldiston, the developer of the app about Kadeer, told IDG he had submitted the app for all countries' app stores. Other developers told IDG they could not recall if they had excluded China but most had other apps for sale in the China store.

One developer based in China told IDG: "Given that Apple has co-operated with China before [by not distributing games], it's of course very likely that it's Apple, not the developers, that are preventing certain apps from appearing."

Boldiston and other developers of the missing items said Apple had not told them their apps were unavailable in China.

"I didn't know the app had been pulled and wasn't informed," James Sugrue, who designed the Dalai Quotes app, told IDG. "Apple reserves the right to do this sort of thing and, while from a censorship point of view I disagree with this, I can understand why they did."

Troubled startup SpinVox - once a shooting star of the British technology industry - has been bought by an American rival in a deal worth $102m ( 64m).

After a difficult year that saw substantial losses and unrest among its investors, it was today confirmed that the company - which converts customers' voicemails into text messages that they can read more easily - has been acquired by US technology firm Nuance.

In a statement Nuance, which makes the popular voice recognition program Dragon NaturallySpeaking, said it was buying SpinVox to help expand its reach into new countries.

"Around the world, the voice-to-text market has experienced tremendous growth over the last year," said Nuance vice president John Pollard. "With SpinVox's robust infrastructure, language support and operational experience, we will broaden the reach and capabilities of our platform."

The deal marks a heavy loss on the investments made in the Buckinghamshire-based company, which had raised more than $230m ( 145m) in recent years to fund its ambitious expansion plans - and once valued itself at more than $500m.

While it boasted a legion of fans, however, the company had struggled to pay for major expansions around the world, while simultaneously fighting a series of claims that its automated voice-to-text technology actually relied heavily on call centre staff.

Over the summer, it rejected a BBC report suggesting that humans not computers - transcribed large portions of customers' messages and held a demonstration of its system for journalists.

The increased scrutiny exposed a series of fissures inside the company, however. The management team, led by chief executive Christine Domecq, came in for criticism, and in August, recently-appointed director Patrick Russo the former chief executive of telecoms giant Alcatel-Lucent - stepped down.

With losses mounting, the company raised more funding in August largely to service its debts and began paying staff with stock, rather than cash, as a way to save money. But in September one of its backers, Invesco, wrote down its outlay by 90% and confirmed that SpinVox was up for sale.

Rumours of the Nuance deal were reported earlier this month, around the same time that the company was given more time to repay a 30m loan that had placed extra pressure on its finances. However, early suggestions were that the company was closing in on a $150m price tag - significantly more than the $102.5m deal that was eventually struck.

Investors in the company who include Goldman Sachs, Carphone Warehouse chief Charles Dunstone and Peter Wood, the founder of insurance group Directline will receive a total of 42m in cash for the acquisition, with the rest of the money coming in the form of Nuance stock.

Shares in the Massachusetts technology company which had climbed by more than 50% over the past year - were down around 1%, to 15.97, on the news.

• Latest salvo in war between technology rivals
• iPhone, iPod and Mac computers targeted in complaint

Mobile phone giant Nokia has stepped up its dispute with Apple by claiming that "virtually all" of the Californian company's products infringe its patents.

In a statement issued on Tuesday, the Finnish handset manufacturer said that Apple was unlawfully using proprietary Nokia technology to help power its best-selling iPhones, iPods and Macintosh computers.

"Nokia has been the leading developer of many key technologies in small electronic devices" said Nokia's Paul Melin. "This action is about protecting the results of such pioneering development."

It is the latest salvo in an ongoing and increasingly acrimonious - battle between the two companies. After licensing negotiations broke down earlier this year, the rivals launched a flurry of claims against each other in the courts.

In October, Nokia filed a lawsuit in Delaware claiming that Apple's iPhone was infringing a number of its wireless technology patents and demanding payment for every handset sold.

Apple responded earlier this month by launching its own countersuit, suggesting that Nokia had copied the iPhone and infringed a number of its own patents in the process. Lawyers for the Californian company also claimed that Nokia had refused to license other technologies on fair terms.

Nokia's latest complaint, made to US regulator International Trade Commission, marks a serious step up in hostilities since it covers almost all of Apple's major products.

"While our litigation in Delaware is about Apple's attempt to free-ride on the back of Nokia investment in wireless standards, the ITC case filed today is about Apple's practice of building its business on Nokia's proprietary innovation," the company said.

Among the infringements claimed by Nokia in its latest complaint are elements of user interface, camera and power management systems a broad set of allegations that strike at some of Apple's most popular and enduring products.

Since it launched at the beginning of the decade, the iPod has become the market leader in digital music. Meanwhile the Macintosh computer brand, which is now more than 25 years old, has been revitalised with laptop range proving particularly popular.

But the heart of the dispute is the battle for dominance in the high-end mobile phone market, seen by many industry insiders as the next major frontier in consumer electronics.

As the world's largest mobile phone manufacturer, responsible for around 40% of all handsets sold worldwide each year, Nokia has long held a position of dominance.

The arrival of the iPhone in 2007, however, has upset the balance of power and forced rival manufacturers to develop their own touch-sensitive handsets.

In addition, the iPhone's popularity with high-spending customers has given the Californian company a major boost leading to the moment last quarter when, for the first time, Apple overtook Nokia as the most profitable mobile manufacturer, despite its smaller sales.

The ITC usually takes up to 30 days to rule on whether it will pursue a complaint, indicating that the basis of Nokia's claims will be weighed up by the end of January. The court cases, meanwhile, are not expected to be heard until 2011.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment.

Google could be preparing to launch its new mobile phone as early as next week, after the company called a press conference at its Californian headquarters.

Speculation has been rife that the company is planning its own branded phone, known as the Nexus One, as it tries to tempt customers and handset manufacturers into using its Android mobile phone software. Earlier this month it confirmed that employees have been testing the device for some time, with reports suggesting that could be ready to launch early in 2010.

But in an announcement sent to journalists today, the company said it would hold a "press gathering" next Tuesday to showcase Android and demonstrate new products - giving the strongest indication yet that the Nexus One's release could be imminent.

"With the launch of the first Android-powered device just over a year ago, we've seen how a powerful, open platform can spur mobile product innovation - and this is just the beginning," it said.

While plenty of Android handsets have hit the market since Google first launched the software two years ago, the manner in which the Nexus One has come together signals a distinct shift in the company's strategy

In the past, Google has worked alongside partners such as Motorola - offering assistance and advice to mobile makers and networks, but not taking a leading role. This time, however, the phone is being manufactured by Taiwanese technology company HTC - with Google overseeing design and development.

Taking a stronger hand in the development of the Nexus One could help it to push its way into a market already crowded with more established rivals such as Apple's iPhone, the BlackBerry and Nokia.

It is not yet known which networks the Nexus One will be made available on, but there are suggestions that Google could sell the handset direct to customers through its website, and the Guardian has previously reported that the company has held talks with a number of operators - including T-Mobile and Vodafone in the UK - about linking up for the launch.

The event appears carefully timed to spoil announcements from its rivals, as it comes on the eve of the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas - where the world's largest technology companies unveil their forthcoming products and plans.

In particular, the timing will prove an irritant to Google's greatest rival, Microsoft, whose chief executive Steve Ballmer is due to give the opening keynote at CES next Wednesday. With only a day between the two announcements, Google may be hoping to pile the pressure on the company it has targeted as its main competitor.

An early January announcement also gives Google several weeks of breathing room before Apple makes its own major product announcement - believed to be a tablet computer - later in the month.

Xbox 360/PS3; 39.99; cert 18+; Platinum Games/Sega

If you like your games to be completely bonkers, you're probably aware that nobody does unhinged better than Japanese developers. Of which Platinum Games, formed from ex-Capcom guys with the likes of Devil May Cry and Resident Evil 4 on their CVs, is one of the newest and possibly the nuttiest of them all. Bayonetta, impressively, pulls off the feat of being completely off-the-wall, yet utterly brilliant to play.

Bayonetta herself is destined to become an iconic character in the world of games she makes Lara Croft, for example, seem dull and frumpy. She's an amnesiac witch pretty much the last one remaining in a gothic, steampunk world, with impossibly long legs, guns attached to her stilettos as well as in each hand, and magic hair, known as a Wicked Weave, which can arrange itself into a giant fist or stilettoed heel to administer devastatingly powerful attacks, or even, in the form of her so-called Climax move, giant animal-shaped demons which tear or bite enormous bosses into pieces.

Bayonetta's moves form the core of the game. They are triggered by nailing sequences of button-presses, beat-em-up-style, which would potentially be frustrating if it wasn't for the responsiveness of the controls. Fill up her magic-meter and you can launch Torture Attacks, in which Bayonetta conjures up the likes of Iron Maidens and giant racks, boots an enemy into them and plays havoc with them. And she can take advantage of pick-ups, such as long pikes, which she employs for a deadly pole-dance, revolving horizontally while shooting. You can cash in the golden haloes you collect from defeated enemies for magic lollipops which give, among other things, health boosts and periods of invulnerability, or even extra moves. The best of which sees Bayonetta breakdancing while shooting in every conceivable direction.

Story-wise, Bayonetta is rich if generally confusing. Bayonetta flips between light, dark and limbo-worlds, and a journalist (who believes Bayonetta killed his father), rival witch Jeanne and a little girl called Cereza, who thinks she is Bayonetta's daughter, crop up frequently. The story, one suspects, is more than anything an excuse to create gloriously baroque enemies and bosses which appear to have emerged from the mind of a mediaeval, religion-obsessed equivalent of William Blake. Most of the creatures that Bayonetta fights are forms of angels, although they couldn't be less angelic. The frequent boss-battles are simply wondrous to behold Bayonetta is one of those rare games that you would be happy to watch someone else play.

As if there was any danger of monotony setting in (which it doesn't), there are plenty of extraneous elements to the main game, including an old school-style shoot-em-up between chapters and hidden areas which set you specific tasks. As far as Bayonetta is concerned, there's just one proviso: as soon as Hollywood sees the game, it will want to make it into a film. But it just wouldn't do as good a job as Platinum.

Rating: 5/5

There's lots to save you from the Christmas/New Year limbo with this week's Guardian Tech Weekly. It's the annual predictions show, where we're joined by Charles Arthur, Bobbie Johnson and Robert Andrews, who will spill the beans on what they're expecting from 2010.

There's talk of the hardware over which we're set to drool, monetisation of our favourite sites, and even a touch of augmented reality - all recorded for posterity, so you can sit back and judge the accuracy of the statements in a year's time.
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PURE packs a lot into its promising all-singing touchscreen radio, but it's more than its poor little processor can handle

Last year, digital radio maker PURE began integrating DAB with internet radio with their Flow range. Now they've taken this one step further with the Sensia, bringing internet applications to your radio.

Shipping with two of what PURE says will be many applications, the Sensia's 5.7in capacitive touchscreen allows you to check the weather or update Twitter. Taking a page from the iPhone-inspired mobile phone app stores, PURE plans to open up their radio platform to external developers.

You can see the weather forecast full-screen or watch a slideshow of images stored on your computer while listening to music. PURE's Flowserver software, a modified version of Twonky Media's Universal Plug and Play server software, allows you to stream media from your computer. And the Sensia easily recognised other UPNP software such as Windows Media Player 10 and 11.

The Sensia has a timer and a clock and alarms so is useful in the kitchen or bedroom. It also boasts a light sensor to dim the screen when the lights are off.

As with the other radios in PURE's Flow range, the Sensia is coupled with The Lounge, a website that helps you manage stations, favourites, podcasts as well as add programmes from the BBC's catch-up radio service. When I last checked, The Lounge had 14,354 internet radio stations to choose from, too many to sift through on the radio itself.

It's a good job there is a website, because you wouldn't want to have to rely on the touchscreen. Even after a firmware upgrade, the interface was sluggish. The radio has a lot of features, perhaps too many for its processor.

The Sensia also suffers from the same problems that all DAB radios do. Reception can be poor in metal-framed buildings, unless you put the radio near a window. As DAB providers cram more stations on multiplexes, the lower bandwidth stations suffer poor sound quality. Many of the internet radio stations had higher bandwidth rates than DAB stations and provided better sound. That's not an criticism of the radio, but of DAB.

However, for 249, sound quality on the Sensia could be better. In comparison to a PURE Evoke, the DAB sound lacked the rich bass and supporting mid-range on the Sensia.

The Sensia has a lot of features and a lot of promise. More processing power, to ensure that the touchscreen experience is smooth, and audio that sounded as good on DAB as it does for internet radio would deliver on that promise.

Pros: Multitude of sources including DAB, FM, internet stations and music stored on your computer; easily networked with home music collection.
Cons: The interface is sluggish; it's expensive and, for the price, the sound should be better.
pure.com

If you want evidence of how virtual worlds are breaking into the mainstream, look at how commerce is taking hold within them

I'm standing outside a branch of Diesel and a colourfully dressed man is dancing the robot in front of me like Peter Crouch on steroids. Browsing through the items on offer in the window, I spot a pair of jeans that I like the look of. The price tag says 1.59. A licensed, authorised, branded pair of Diesel jeans for 1.59. The only catch is that they're made of pixels, not denim, and they belong in a fictional universe that could be the future of advertising, social networking and gaming combined. Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of PlayStation Home.

The concept of PlayStation Home is simple. It's a free-to-use, beautifully rendered, fictional universe in which anyone who owns a PlayStation 3 can reside. Once a user loads up their profile they are dropped into an apartment with a balcony that overlooks something resembling Monaco. In the town outside lie a communal square, a bowling alley, a pool hall and even a shopping mall in which to buy real estate or clothes.

This brings us to the jeans. Inside the shopping mall lies a branch of the real-world clothing brand Diesel. In it, users can buy any number of pixelated replicas of Diesel's real-life ranges for real-life money. Diesel is by no means the last brand that will set up shop here, because PlayStation Home has just announced reaching 10 million users. Home isn't alone either, it's merely the latest in a long line of virtual reality (VR) worlds that are now springing up all over the internet.

Is this all a waste of time? Conventional wisdom states that we should have better things to do with out lives than spending hard-earned pennies on pixelated pairs of jeans. Critics will argue that these worlds are populated by nerds, geeks and middle-aged recluses with all the social skills of a road accident. Perhaps years ago this was the case, but the popularity of VR environments has seen a staggering rise. World of Warcraft now has over 11 million subscribers worldwide. Second Life has an economy so large that their Linden dollar is tradeable currency in the real world to the tune of $29m per quarter. The games industry now generates more revenue than its cinema counterpart. It appears that, one by one, we're all becoming geeks.

With so many people now taking part in these environments, it's just not possible that they are all losers. I've dipped my toes into Second Life, Home and (briefly) World of Warcraft. While they didn't hold my attention for long, the people I met there were, by and large, friendly and interesting. Perhaps tellingly, most of them admitted that they kept their VR identity a secret in the real world for fear of mockery, so a VR enthusiast might be closer than you think. Admittedly, these worlds still have a long way to go. Anyone with a reasonably busy lifestyle probably can't spare the time to indulge in them and wouldn't see the point. This was my initial reaction, and the one that still holds me back from diving in to VR headfirst. But pause a second, and imagine the possibilities that VR might enable in the future.

One day these experiences will be totally immersive. Sony already has a patent on (though are unlikely to be anywhere near developing) a device that replicates sensory interaction via a neural connection to the user's brain. Touch a granite surface in the VR world and it will feel like granite. Drink a glass of Coke and it will taste like Coke. In this kind of genuinely immersive, graphically photorealistic world, the possibilities are endless. Imagine constructing your own dream holiday to a perfectly rendered 1960s London, or ancient Rome. When you combine these capabilities with the attraction such worlds already have for brands and advertisers (imagine a living, breathing VR Paris with your company's banner hanging over the Eiffel tower), the horizon grows broader still.

In addition, the scope for VR worlds goes beyond gaming. What is Home but a graphical manifestation of social networking? The same people who once scoffed at old-world networks such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, but now use those services daily, may one day warm to a VR version. Why Facebook a friend in Thailand when you can catch up in a virtual reality Bangkok? VR has come a long way, but it has not yet broken into true mass appeal. Worlds such as Home do, however, do show how far the technology has come. Personalised fantasy holidays, as popularised in films such as Total Recall, are closer than we think. With new worlds that are graphically comparable to the latest game releases, supported by advertising and almost unlimited in scope, the possibilities for virtual reality are endless.

OLEDs may soon replace lightbulbs in homes and offices with panels of energy-efficient light built into walls

Wallpaper that can glow with light and bendable flat-panel screens are a step closer thanks to research into organic LEDs (OLEDs), which are widely hailed as the next generation of environmentally friendly lighting technology.

OLEDs use very little power to produce light, even compared with modern energy-saving bulbs. The chemicals they are made from can be painted on to thin, flexible surfaces, allowing them potentially to be used to replace traditional lightbulbs in homes and offices with panels of energy-efficient light built into walls, windows or even furniture. Other uses include flexible display screens, whose very low power consumption would mean they could operate without mains power, for example as roadside traffic warning signs powered by small solar panels.

Lomox Limited, a two-year-old company based in north Wales, awarded more than 450,000 today by the government-backed Carbon Trust to accelerate the development of its OLED technology.

Around a sixth of all the UK's electricity is used for lighting and Lomox claims its OLEDs are 2.5 times more efficient than standard energy-saving lightbulbs. The Carbon Trust said that, if all modern lights were replaced by OLEDs, annual carbon emissions around the world could fall by 2.5m tonnes by 2020 and almost 7.4mT by 2050. Replacing old, incandescent bulbs with OLEDs would generate even greater CO2 savings.

OLEDs have shown much promise in laboratories but must get over two major hurdles to become widespread consumer items: they are expensive to make and they tend to have relatively short lifetimes. "What our technology does, with the seven patents we have, is fix those problems," said Ken Lacey, chief executive of Lomox. He said his company's OLEDs have the potential to last as long as modern fluorescent lights and, for the display sector, as long as LCD panels. Lomox also claims its light matches natural light more closely than other energy-saving bulbs.

The company will focus its efforts on getting the first of its OLEDs to market by 2012, mainly for outdoor lighting. "The early part of the grant is to do the testing and take this out to that marketplace," said Lacey.

Mark Williamson, director of innovations at the Carbon Trust, said: "Lighting is a major producer of carbon emissions. This technology has the potential to produce ultra-efficient lighting for a wide range of applications, tapping into a huge global market. We're now on the look-out for other technologies that can save carbon and be a commercial success."

The grant for Lomox is one of 164 projects supported by the Carbon Trust for small companies working on a range of renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies such as fuel cells, combined heat and power, bioenergy, solar power, low-carbon building technologies, marine energy devices and more efficient industrial processes.

Yahoo, Flickr and Microsoft introduce access filters

It may have given the world the Kama Sutra and the Bollywood wet sari scene, but it appears that India is not yet ready to be exposed to the delicate subject of sex on the internet.

A Guardian investigation has discovered that several internet companies have quietly introduced filters to prevent Indian users from accessing sexual content.

The Yahoo search engine and Flickr photo-sharing site (owned by Yahoo) altered their sites earlier this month to prevent users in India from switching off the safe-search facility. The block also applies to users in Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea.

Microsoft has also barred Indian users of its Bing search engine from searching for sexual content. Users who do try to search for sexual material receive a notice informing them that "your country or region requires a strict Bing SafeSearch setting, which filters out results that might return adult content".

The clampdown is understood to be in response to recent changes to India's Information Technology Act of 2000, which bans the publication of pornographic material.

That law, which is based on a 150-year-old statute (section 292 of the Indian penal code), defines obscenity as "any content that is lascivious and that will appeal to prurient interest or the effect of which is to tend to deprave or corrupt the minds of those who are likely to see, read or hear the same".

In October, the scope of the 2000 act was dramatically widened to enable action to be taken against a wide range of providers, from internet search engines and internet service providers to cyber-cafes. Under the new law, they are obliged to exercise due diligence and disable access to any content which contravenes the act. Failure to do so carries a three-year jail sentence and a fine of up to 500,000 rupees ( 6,690).

Search engine reports suggest that users in India are responsible for more searches for "sex" than those in any other country. Its popular daily newspapers are packed with pictures of young women in states of undress and Bollywood oozes sexuality from every pore.

But at the same time it remains a deeply religious country in which traditionalists regularly take violent offence at anything deemed to be too suggestive.

The latest attempts to constrain internet users come at a time when the vexed subject of sexual behaviour is once again dominating the domestic headlines.

Last week an Indian news channel broadcast video footage of a man said to be the 86-year-old governor of Andhra Pradesh, Narayan Datt Tiwari, in bed with three young women. He quit on Sunday, citing health reasons and still denying that the man in the video was him.

Today there was also mixed news for the tens of thousands of fans of India's most popular and only cartoon porn star, Savita Bhabhi.

The sexual antics of the energetic housewife won her website a daily audience of nearly 200,000 visitors, until it was closed down by the Indian government in June.

Now the site is back at a new web address but already it has fallen foul of the Internet Service Providers Association of India, whose president, Rajesh Chharia, warned that it faced closure again because its content was "not acceptable to our culture".

No one from Yahoo was available for comment today but a posting on the Flickr website explained that "Flickr is a global community made up of many different kinds of people.

"What's OK in your backyard may not be OK in theirs. Each one of us bears the responsibility of categorising our own content within this landscape. So, we've introduced some filters to help everyone try to get along.

"If your Yahoo! ID is based in Singapore, Hong Kong, India or Korea you will only be able to view safe content based on your local terms of service (this means you won't be able to turn SafeSearch off)."

Pledge for fast universal broadband access in peril
Dispute over terms of sale of analogue TV spectrum

The government's plans to bring broadband within the reach of every home by 2012 have been put in jeopardy by BT. The telecoms operator has warned that it will take legal action if the government presses ahead in the new year with plans to liberalise the nation's mobile phone spectrum.

BT's move could derail a key part of the government's Digital Britain programme. The government's pledge to introduce universal broadband access of at least 2Mb a second in time for the London Olympics was seen as one of the least contentious parts of the final Digital Britain report in June. But universal access requires changes to the way the airwaves are split between the UK's five mobile phone networks, so they can run mobile broadband services in rural areas where fixed-line services are too slow. It also requires the sale of new space on the spectrum that will be freed-up when the analogue TV signal is switched off in 2012.

The government appointed the former regulator Kip Meek as an Independent Spectrum Broker to try to thrash out a deal with the networks. Part of his proposals included letting them run mobile broadband on the spectrum they were given in the 1980s and 1990s for voice and text services. In return, the five networks would have the 3G licences, which they snapped up for 22.5bn in the dotcom boom, extended indefinitely. Those licences are due to expire in 2021.

Meek also suggested tying the sale of the old analogue TV signal with the sale of a new part of the airwaves at 2.6Ghz, which is perfect for super-fast broadband in urban areas. He also proposed capping the amount of spectrum that any one operator could own.

BT, however, has sent a "letter before action" to the business secretary, Lord Mandelson, raising serious objections to Meek's plans and threatening a judicial review if they are implemented. The company believes the mobile phone companies are being given an unjustifiable government subsidy by having their 3G licences extended.

It also wants the government to be more even-handed with new entrants when it comes to selling off new wireless spectrum. BT is believed to be interested in snapping up a sizeable chunk of the 2.6Ghz spectrum and using it for super-fast wireless broadband in towns and cities.

"BT has major reservations around the wireless spectrum proposals from the Independent Spectrum Broker," said a BT spokesman, confirming that the company had written to the government. "The proposal to extend current 3G licenses indefinitely represents a gift of several billion pounds from the UK taxpayer to the mobile operators and is a barrier to competition and innovation in the mobile market," he said.

"We would like spectrum to be auctioned in a way that is fair to all operators and stimulates competition in the market for both existing operators and new entrants," he added. "We are discussing our concerns with BIS and are hopeful that these will be addressed."

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) has already extended the deadline for consultation on Meek's plans by a further month in an effort to appease BT. But senior figures within the mobile phone industry have warned that the new deadline of 5 February could leave the government with no time to enact the necessary secondary legislation before a general election.

Mobile phone industry executives are also livid at BT's opposition to changes to the spectrum regime, given that the company itself will benefit from the 50p-a-month telephone tax , which will be in next year's finance bill. The tax is designed to raise upwards of 175m a year to help pay for the roll-out of the next generation of super-fast broadband networks in rural areas. BT is expected to be the main recipient of the cash.

Some senior mobile phone industry insiders have also pointed out that while BT objects to anything that helps out their industry, it is currently fighting for the right to be able to demand that the entire fixed-line telecoms industry helps pay its pensions bill. BT is locked in talks with the regulator Ofcom about trying to narrow its pension deficit by raising the price that its Openreach business charges everyone else for access to its residential phone lines.

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 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.

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."

This atmospheric Bioshock sequel is balanced, intuitive and looks set to be a classic of the genre

"Jack from the first game wouldn't last long in this new Rapture," I am told, as I get my first glimpse of Bioshock 2. In which case it's lucky that you now play a Big Daddy the huge, hulking baddies that made the first game famous and are armed with a drillbit the size of Optimus Prime's arm and a boltgun that could take out a T-rex.

But this is 10 years after the original Bioshock. Splicers are unsurprisingly easy to kill, but there are a hell of a lot more of them; and there are other, more powerful foes to contend with. These include the sinister Big Sisters, terrifying creations which hunt you as if you were a gigantic metal fox, making for a genuinely nerve-wracking, edge-of-the-seat experience.

Getting stuck straight in, the combat is some of the most satisfying of any game I have played. Balanced and intuitive, it is serious fun, and more tactical than in the first game, too. For example, you adopt a Little Sister, but when you set her to work collecting ADAM mutagen for you, a rush of splicers will appear. There are a large number of tactical options: hack the bots hacking has been streamlined lay a minefield, prepare a fire plasmid to ignite an oil spill, or just power up the drill and fight them off the old-fashioned way; it's all up to you.

The game's atmosphere, too, is outstanding. The mournful, ominous screech of a Big Sister stalking you is genuinely unsettling; radios play big-band classics in a broken-down theme park, with working attractions; you can sneak up on a pair of splicers and eavesdrop on their conversations. The attention to detail is stunning.

The kitsch 50s artwork and music are juxtaposed perfectly against the Kubrick-esque ultraviolence, and if that sounded dangerously like literary criticism it's because this game has real literary aspirations. The original game was at the forefront of the games-as-art movement: the founder of the fictional city-state of Rapture, Andrew Ryan (his name intentionally recalls the philosopher Ayn Rand), and the disastrous dissolution of his underwater utopia was a work of exquisite satire, and the sequel goes even further.

In the brief demonstration I played I spotted references to Jules Verne, Rand again, Ralph Waldo Emerson, some Shakespeare and Walt Disney, just to name a few; and satires so diverse as to lampoon American consumerism one minute and Russian socialism the next. Nor is the game merely a series of satirical and literary vignettes; the storyline is rich and intense, and the gameplay sublime.

There is a very exciting multiplayer component, too, set back in the time-frame of the first game, which features several familiar locations. Plasmids carry over from game to game, and your character changes and improves as you win matches. This part is being coded by Ontario-based Digital Extremes, who were largely responsible for the fantastic Unreal Tournament series and know the Unreal engine backwards and inside-out, meaning that the gameplay is likely to be top-notch, though expect familiar modes like deathmatch, team deathmatch and capture the flag.

By this point it will hopefully be clear that I liked this game. A lot. If it lives up to the promise of the demo level, then BioShock 2 is going to be a classic.

Bioshock 2 is due for release on February 9, 2010

With 500 million users in its sight, questions are raised over future growth for world's favourite social network site

Even by Facebook's standards, the past 12 months have been remarkable. The site cemented its position as the world's favourite social network, reached the verge of profitability and even exerted its influence over the race for the Christmas No 1.

After an extraordinary year, experts say the site now faces a series of challenges not least the problem of how to keep getting bigger in the face of government interventions and its own internal strife.

With the astonishing landmark of 500 million users now in sight, internet insiders suggest that the pressure may bring more headaches to Facebook's 25-year-old founder, Mark Zuckerberg, and his team.

"It's definitely an interesting time," said Justin Smith, whose Inside Facebook website has tracked the network's ups and downs for nearly four years. "While 2009 was a year in which Facebook saw really incredible growth... we'll see how they manage that growth."

There is little doubt that 2009 was the moment that the site truly exploded. In January, Zuckerberg announced the "milestone" of 150 million users worldwide. Less than a year later, the social network has more than doubled and now boasts that more than 350 million people log on each month.

The biggest difficulty is how to manage the privacy of users while growing so fast. With so much personal information kept on Facebook's servers, it is coming under increasing scrutiny from governments and campaign groups. Earlier this year it spent $9.5m ( 5.9m) settling a lawsuit over an intrusive advertising system launched in 2007, and last month it made a series of changes that exposed millions of people's information to the world.

The changes angered privacy advocates who called them "flawed" and "ugly" and led to an official complaint to the US regulator. To combat such threats to its future, Facebook has spent the past year hiring a team of lobbyists in Washington and Brussels to push its cause with politicians.

With no more than 1.5 billion people online worldwide, the company is already close to saturation point in many countries and is now looking further afield. Earlier this year Moscow internet group Digital Sky Technologies invested more than $200m in Facebook, with the explicit intention of making it the top social network in Russia and eastern Europe. And in August, Facebook's international manager, Javier Oliv n, told the Guardian that the company was putting more effort into places like Brazil, India and Indonesia.

"We're trying to do things in countries where we start seeing traction," he said. "We want to make sure people understand what Facebook's all about."

Such growth is crucially important to its business ambitions, and it has started cashing in on its popularity thanks to lucrative advertising programmes, brand campaigns developed with major TV, music and film franchises, and sales of virtual goods.

Those have not always proven a runaway success last month's live world premiere of a new music video from the Colombian singer Shakira, for example, took place exclusively on Facebook but drew less than 100,000 viewers less than one in 3,000 users tuning in. But with advertising picking up, the company says it is in good financial health and on the verge of profitability.

Rapid expansion into emerging markets is a double-edged sword, however, since the money to be made is smaller and harder to come by.

"There are challenges with making a profit in many places around the world where there's not as big an advertising market, or people have less disposable income," said Smith.

And amid all of its other struggles, the site has to worry about how to handle its staff while coping with such rapid expansion. Like any company growing quickly, Facebook appears to be suffering from its fair share of friction.

Testimonials on the employment website Glassdoor.com, where workers anonymously share their experiences from inside thousands of companies, suggest that some tempers are fraying.

"Burnout is more common, even as the company grows," said one comment.

"People are often not treated fairly, as egos get big fast when a company grows so quickly," said another. "You give up your life and soul with little career growth or monetary incentives."

However unassailable Facebook's position may appear today, history suggests that even the largest websites can fall spectacularly from grace in just a few years. A decade ago AOL was one of the most powerful companies in the world, worth so much money that it was able to force a $162bn merger with media giant Time Warner the biggest ever seen.

After 10 years of struggling to make the deal work, the company is now an internet also-ran valued at less than $3bn.

"Any time you get to the point where you're talking about 300, 400, 500 million users, you're starting to touch on some of the larger, global institutions you're starting to become relevant to governments and to politicians and to a variety of interests around the world," said Smith.

"I do think that will be a big challenge, and Facebook will need to navigate those questions."

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.

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!

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 Tories will pay someone if they find a way of tapping the wisdom of crowds. They won't like my solution: more democracy

I claim one million pounds. The Conservatives are offering that sum to the person who designs a mechanism for effectively harnessing the wisdom of crowds in order to make better government. My scheme lets every citizen directly control how his and her schools, hospitals, police and other public services are doing. It enables them not just to ask questions. It enables them actually to be in charge.

It is called the vote. The vote is not another daft scheme for internet pseudo-empowerment of the sort David Cameron seems to have in mind. We have had those from New Labour for over a decade. They just pay consultants to design websites telling people what the government is doing. The vote, properly deployed, is genuine empowerment, from the bottom up not the top down.

The most important vote, when it comes to public services, is for those who run the three-quarters of services delivered, in some sense, locally rather than nationally. Some are currently run by local authorities, others by central quangos. Under my scheme all should be subject to election, as they are in all sophisticated democracies other than Britain.

Voting means standing for election, going around talking to other citizens, proposing ideas and putting them forward at regular, mostly local, elections. It means more than voting for people. It means voting on taxes and charges. It means giving electors discretion over how much they want given to them by the state, and how they wish to pay for it, subject to redistribution from rich to poor areas.

The Conservative party is terrified of voting. It wants to maintain a maximum of central control. It even wants to reduce the amount of money raised locally by limiting council tax and denying localities freedom to raise other forms of revenue, such as by income or sales taxes. Less money raised locally means less power.

Cameron wants to neuter parishes, districts, towns and counties by continuing Thatcher's policy of fixing what they should be spending by central diktat and then capping revenue accordingly. He will continue with centrally appointed health authorities and remove the other normal focus of local democracy, schools, altogether from local control.

He has no plan to rebuild the core institution of local services in France, Germany, Scandinavia and America, the truly local community as parish, commune or municipality, into a most-purpose authority, where voters know their councillors and mayor, and thus can hold them directly accountable for their government. Instead Cameron thinks, like Tony Blair, that a website is an adequate substitute for democratic accountability.

Like all British parties, the Tories fear democracy. But the remedy is easy. The Athenians invented it and most countries practise it. It is called voting. A million pounds please.

Online retailer may be on target for sales of 500,000 Kindle e-readers over Christmas

Spare a thought for the humble hardback this Christmas. It seems the traditional giftwrapped tome is being trumped by downloads, after Amazon customers bought more e-books than printed books for the first time on Christmas Day.

As people rushed to fill their freshly unwrapped e-readers one of the top-selling gadgets this festive season the online retailer said sales at its electronic book store quickly overtook orders for physical books. Its own e-reader, the Kindle, is now the most popular gift in Amazon's history.

Amazon's shares rose sharply today after it updated investors on a strong Christmas performance. On its peak day, 14 December, the retailer said customers ordered more than 9.5m items worldwide, the equivalent of a record-breaking 110 items a second.

The Seattle-based company's top sellers in its home market included Apple's iPod touch, Scrabble Slam Cards, Nintendo's Wii Fit Plus with balance board, the latest Harry Potter DVD, Sarah Palin's book Going Rogue and Susan Boyle's album, I Dreamed a Dream.

Although Amazon has repeatedly trumpeted "record-breaking" Kindle sales, it has refused to say exactly how many have been sold since the 2007 launch.

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 DX Amazon may be on target to have sold a little over 500,000 units by the end of the year.

Nor does it divulge data about the Kindle-compatible books it sells from a Kindle Store that now includes more than 390,000 titles.

After first taking off in the US, e-readers are becoming increasingly popular in the UK and the Kindle went on sale in Britain in mid-October. The department store chain John Lewis highlighted the popularity of e-readers this Christmas, reporting a jump in sales of Sony's eBook readers.

British publishers have also been exploring the market for electronic versions of books in the hope of enjoying strong sales when e-book stores and reading devices achieve critical mass in the coming years.

The Harry Potter publisher Bloomsbury made the 2009 Wisden Cricketers' Almanack available as an e-book for the first time this year, while Penguin has been selling a range of its classics in electronic form with extra features such as contemporary recipes.

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.

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.

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."

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.

Do you and your partner have the same online friends? Or does he or she have way more than you, a bit like in real life?

Friends you have on Facebook
MINUS
Friends your partner has on Facebook
PLUS
Mutual friends you have on Facebook

Score more than 30

You have hundreds and hundreds of online friends, virtually none of whom you share with your partner. Maybe this is because they don't really like your friends, or maybe it's because they actually have real friends with whom they like to go out in real life. It may be worth checking to see if they're secretly seeing one of your online "friends".

1-30

You have a few carefully chosen friends on Facebook. Correction: everyone you know is your friend on Facebook you just don't know many people. Your partner also knows exactly the same number of people, possibly because you met through a very specialist fan group such as brass-rubbing.

0

You both have a life that doesn't involve gluing your heads to a computer.

Less than 0

Your partner has many, many friends online, very few of whom you share. In fact, it's likely that you've never heard of or met most of them. The normal view you have of your partner is the back of their head and you have to go online to check their emotional status. Your relationship will soon be over or it is already.

At home, at school, on the bus Evan Baden's photographs show that wherever they are, kids are hooked up to hi-tech gadgets. But should we waste time worrying about it?

In many paintings of the Nativity, the Christ child gives off a bright light, and the faces of those gazing in worship shepherds, magi, the Virgin Mother are illuminated by it, as though touched by God. The effect creates a feeling of calm and reverence. Outside the charmed circle, dark shadows fall. But within lies grace and wonder.

Evan Baden's photos of young people hooked into hi-tech devices mobile phones, iPods, computers are similarly haunting in their use of chiaroscuro. Here are kids (as he puts it) "bathed in a silent, soft and heavenly blue glow", as digital technology shines its light upon them. They've eyes only for the luminous screen, ears only for the music in their headphones. The world beyond is outer darkness.

It's a troubling picture of technophilia. But then adults have always been troubled by kids' playthings: television was said to zombify kids; computer games to make them violent; loud music to turn them deaf. Now the new worry is connectivity. A generation of young people is growing up with no concept of life without a screen and a keypad. At home, at school, on the bus, in the street wherever they are, they're plugged in and hooked up. With its instant links and global reach, the web is a miracle but also a trap. It enables kids to feel part of a greater whole while simultaneously removing them from their immediate surroundings. The story Baden's photos tell is one any parent of teenage children will recognise. It's a story of absorption and withdrawal, of contact in the virtual world and solitude in the real one. The kids are there and yet they're not.

The case against juvenile dependence on electronic media has been forcefully made by an increasing number of social commentators, not least the psychologist Aric Sigman, who in his recent book The Spoilt Generation argues that time spent in a virtual world is displacing time that would once have been spent on socialising, and that the personal development of young people is therefore being arrested. The symptoms of the virus include reduced eye contact, loss of personal boundaries, lack of respect for authority, attention deficit disorder, sedentariness and obesity. Playing games used to mean going outdoors. Now it means hunkering down in front of a screen. The sort of kids who would once have been physically active have been immobilised.

So the theory goes. But the young people in Baden's photos don't look yobbish or unhealthy. One girl is checking her mobile while at the swimming pool. Others have an intensity of concentration that lends them beauty. At 25, the Minnesota-based photographer is barely older than some of his subjects, so it's no wonder his images are ambivalent, registering the lure of connectivity as well as the risks. As he puts it, "It's as if we carry divinity in our pockets and purses."

An illusion of omniscience is not the only danger. Parents worry their kids will be corrupted by stuff they're not ready for, the porn and violence all too available on apps and websites. But similar concerns were once voiced about reading, and it's unclear why using mobiles and laptops should be any more harmful than reading Harry Potter or the Famous Five. Increasingly, that's the way Harry Potter and the Famous Five will be read: as a download on an ereader or iPhone. Those of us who love the smell and texture of a printed page won't ever adjust, but to the young an illuminated screen is the primary site for all communication.

With calculators to do our sums, and spellchecks and predictive text to form our words, won't numeracy and literacy decline? It's an obvious thought. But with all the messaging and blogging they perform, kids do far more writing than they used to. Potentially we're a more literate culture, as well as being more dextrous with our fingers. And staring at a screen isn't as solipsistic it seems: there are sites for networking and search engines to expand horizons. As for mobile phones, their purpose isn't just to communicate with friends who aren't there but to forge bonds with friends who are. When teenagers hang out, they're constantly showing each other their texts.

Once they grow up, most children will spend their working lives in front of a screen, so it's natural to want to postpone that moment. But going online isn't like going down a mine. And though a couple of the kids in Baden's pictures look zonked out, as though they've overdosed on sounds or images, appearances can be deceptive: who can tell what's going on behind those blank faces? That's the thing with teenagers: with their headphones on or their bedroom door closed, you never know what they're listening to or watching. All you know is that they're starting to grow away from you. Perhaps it's that, not the technology they use to achieve it, which parents find so hard.