Decision from world's leading search engine comes amid a clampdown on the internet in China over the last year

Google, the world's leading search engine, has thrown down the gauntlet to China by saying it is no longer willing to censor search results on its Chinese service.

The internet giant said the decision followed a cyber attack it believes was aimed at gathering information on Chinese human rights activists.

The move follows a clampdown on the internet in China over the last year, which has seen sites and social networking services hosted overseas blocked including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube and the closure of many sites at home. Chinese authorities criticised Google for supplying "vulgar" content in results.

Google acknowledged that the decision "may well mean" the closure of Google.cn and its offices in China.

That is an understatement, given that it had to agree to censor sensitive material such as details of human rights groups and references to the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989 to launch Google.cn.

Google was in contact with the US state department before its announcement. Spokesman PJ Crowley said: "Every nation has an obligation, regardless of the origin of malicious cyber activities, to keep its part of the network secure.

"That includes China. Every nation should criminalise malicious activities on computer networks."

In a post on the official Google Blog, the company outlined a "highly sophisticated and targeted" attack in December which it believes affected at least 20 other firms: "These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered, combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web, have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China.

"We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all."

Human Rights Watch praised the decision and urged other firms to follow suit in challenging censorship. "A transnational attack on privacy is chilling, and Google's response sets a great example," said Arvind Ganesan, director of the group's corporations and human rights programme.

Google said the cyber attack originated from China and that its intellectual property was stolen, but that evidence suggested a primary goal was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

Two accounts were accessed but Google believed only account information and subject lines were obtained. It is notifying the other targeted companies and working with US authorities.

Its investigation had shown that, separately, the accounts of dozens of US-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appeared to have been routinely accessed by third parties.

The company added that it was sharing the information not just because of the security and human rights implications "but because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech".

Acknowledging the potential consequences, it stressed: "This move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China."

The message, headlined "A New Approach to China" and signed by David Drummond, senior vice-president of corporate development and chief legal officer, said the company launched Google.cn in 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China "outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results".

At the time Google promised to monitor conditions in China and reconsider its approach if necessary.

But Evgeny Morozov, an expert on the political effects of the internet and a Yahoo fellow at Georgetown University, questioned why Google had made the decision after four years.

"They knew pretty well what they were getting into. Now it seems they are playing the innocence card ... It's like they thought they were dealing with the government of Switzerland and suddenly realised it was China," he said.

Morozov said it was hard to see the logical connection between the security of human rights activists and Google's self-censorship, particularly given that the firm had chosen not to comment on whom it believed responsible for the hacking. It had become easier for "pretty much anyone" to launch cyber attacks in the last few years, he added.

He added that it could have been damaging for Google if news of the breach had emerged later and it appeared the company had done nothing.

Google has only a third of the search-engine market in China, which is dominated by the Chinese giant Baidu. Although its revenues have continued to rise, many analysts believed it was finding business hard going. In June Google suffered intensive disruption to search functions and Gmail for over an hour, after authorities told it to scale back search functions.

China has the world's largest internet population.

Rebecca MacKinnon, an assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong's Journalism and Media Studies Centre, said her research showed Google had censored less than Baidu.Google's decision "certainly sets an example in terms of a company trying to do what's best for the user and not just whatever increases the profit margins", she added.

Nart Villeneuve, research fellow at the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab which examines the exercise of political power in cyberspace said the decision to give such a full account of the attacks and link it to human rights issues was unprecedented.

Google's decision to launch the censored service was highly controversial at the time. It was attacked by campaigners and accused of "sickening collaboration" in a Congressional hearing.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry referred the Guardian to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. But an employee at MIIT said it was not responsible for handling the query, because it dealt with only the technical side of internet issues. He added that many other departments dealt with other aspects of internet management, but added that he did not know who the Guardian should contact in this instance.

Internet giant brings an end to four years of controversy
Reputation damaged by decision to launch censored index

Google's decision to lift its censorship in China brings to an end four years of controversy that have left the company and its reputation battered and bruised.

What began in 2006 as a mission to expand its reach soon attracted a firestorm of criticism and concern over Google's dedication to freedom of information.

Officially, the company said it saw its entry into the Chinese market as a way to bring more freedom of information and expression to the country, and that offering Chinese citizens access to more data even when that data was censored was still a significant improvement.

But critics and human rights campaigners were worried that the company was ditching its commitments to freedom of expression in favour of cashing in on a lucrative new market.

"Google's statements about respecting online privacy are the height of hypocrisy in view of its strategy in China," said Reporters Without Borders at the time, adding that Google's collusion meant that China was "becoming more and more isolated from the outside world".

Google, which has the phrase "don't be evil" as its corporate motto, had been keen to press home that it would not make an immediate profit from launching in the Chinese market, but few doubted it had the potential to turn the country into its next cash cow. In terms of the sheer volume of users alone, China is now the world's biggest presence on the internet, overtaking the United States in 2008 with well over 300 million web users.

The business opportunity was compelling, particularly as Google had already ceded ground to US rivals such as Microsoft and Yahoo, which had started making significant inroads into the Chinese market with their own ventures. Faced with their apparent successes, Google chose to launch in co-operation with Beijing.

In fact, as part of its deal with the Chinese government, searches conducted on google.cn did not completely screen out controversial subjects such as Tiananmen Square or the Falun Gong. Instead, users were presented with results that, when censored, simply led nowhere or failed to load. That ensured that the site would always be available to users in China, and put the job of enforcing the filtering on to Google, rather than leaving it to the so-called Great Fire Wall.

Despite what many saw as a golden opportunity, however, Google failed to displace its rivals. After millions pumped into operations, and constant, draining negotiations with Beijing, the company still lags behind the homegrown Chinese search engine, Baidu.com, which also censors its results on government orders.

While Google's share of the Chinese market is around 29%, according to local analysts, it is still a far cry from the UK.

Google's founders have admitted that the decision to launch a censored index had severely damaged its reputation.

"On a business level, that decision to censor was a net negative," co-founder Sergey Brin told the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2007.

His partner, Larry Page, has regularly rejected calls for the company to close down its Chinese operation. "We always consider what to do," he has said. "But I don't think we should be making decisions based on too much perception."

The XML patent case that has stopped Microsoft's sales of Word in the US turns out to have quite a history, as Loudon Owen, chairman of i4i Inc, explains (updated)

The chairman of the company that has won an injunction preventing Microsoft from selling Word 2007 because of patent infringement says he will not license the technology to the company and has not ruled out going after any other products that infringe its XML patent.

And in an exclusive interview with the Guardian, Loudon Owen, chairman since 1996 of i4i Inc, a 30-strong company based in Toronto, Canada, said that his aim is for the company to "become the Oracle of unstructured data" and strongly rebuffed claims that the lawsuit against Microsoft was a case of "patent trolling".

i4i, set up in 1993 by Michel Vulpe, has provided systems for the US Patent Office ("ironic, in the circumstances" remarked Owen), US Air Force and a number of pharmaceutical companies including Novo Nordisk and Bayer. Basically it takes huge amounts of unstructured data and puts XML wrappers around it, making it useful and usable.

The injunction against Microsoft, first in a jury trial and then confirmed in an appeal before judges, means that the company cannot sell its Word 2007 product from its online store because it was found to have infringed i4i's patent on custom XML. i4i was granted a patent on the use of custom XML in 1998.

Some people have asserted that i4i was patent trolling suing and extracting large sums of money from companies that accidentally infringe its intellectual property because it filed the suit in the courts of Tyler, a city in Texas.

But Owen says that is not the case at all and points out that the judges found that Microsoft "wilfully" infringed the patent. It turns out that the two companies are not strangers.

Back in 2000 or so, says Owen, i4i was heading towards its largest-ever size, with about 150 staff. (None of them lawyers; then, as now, the company would hire outside legal help if needed.) Owen had in the 1990s been on the board of SatImage Softimage, a small company at the forefront of animation which Microsoft bought. Then in 2000-01, Microsoft and i4i began talking about XML, and custom XML. "We had extensive dealings with Microsoft over the course of several years about the possibility of working together," Owen told me.

But that came to naught. Then in 2001 Microsoft began talking publicly about including XML schemas in forthcoming versions of Word. In 2002 betas of the Word 2003 program were released publicly. The next year, Word 2003 including custom XML schema systems came out. And i4i's business started to shrink.

"This isn't something that suddenly showed up on our screens," says Owen. "The first court found, and the court of appeal found, that the infringement was wilful."

(At this point long-time Microsoft watchers may be getting distant ringing bell sounds in their head. Microsoft including other companies' technologies in a patent-infringing manner? Sounds like Stac Electronics "Stac executives were outraged, as Microsoft had previously been in discussions with Stac to license its compression technology". Or the Excel-Access case: "He said he tried to sell this technology to Microsoft in 1992 but they turned him down. According to Amado, Microsoft started including his software in their releases between 1995 and 2002." Or maybe Eolas. Stories of Microsoft approaching companies, getting close and then mysteriously producing just the same thing are legion. I asked Owen whether he had read Charles Ferguson's 'High St@kes, No Prisoners', which relates life in a startup that is close to being acquired or will it just be steamrollered? by Microsoft. He hadn't, but it all sounded familiar to him.)

Although Microsoft is now considering appeals to the US Supreme Court, and to the federal circuit of appeals, the reality is that i4i has won every round so far. Which brings us to Texas: why Texas? And why Tyler? "We flew all over the US and the company of lawyers we settled on were based in Dallas. As to why file in Tyler, well, what people don't know about Tyler is that the judges there are excellent. They have a deep interest and commitment to patents."

Er but you would say that, wouldn't you, having just won a world-shaking case? "If anybody thinks it's easy to get a jury, then a judge, then court of appeals judges to agree unanimously that they're in favour of your claim it's not easy, not easy at all." And, he points out, Tyler isn't used for patent claims only by small companies such as his: Samsung, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle have all filed patent lawsuits there.

"There's no single court in the US that has an absolute right to hear these cases. There's a limited number that have the expertise to hear them though. It was a surprise to me as well," Owen says.

Having now won victory, what does i4i want next? Will it license its patent to Microsoft, perhaps at a hefty fee? And will it go after Sun, distributors of OpenOffice, for the ODF file format, as eWeek suggested?

On licensing to Microsoft, Owen sounds on the edge of anger: "No. No. This is our property. We are going to build our business. There's no right for Microsoft to use it and go forward." But i4i could license it at some humungous, eye-watering price that Microsoft might have to pay, surely? No, says Owen.

"We want to sell it to the customers. We don't want Microsoft selling it to the customers. We're excited about building a tremendous company. We can license third parties if we want to. But our objective is to solve the conundrums of all this unstructured data that's out there."

What about ODF and OpenOffice? Owen declined to comment. (If he were to suggest that ODF infringes the patent and were wrong, Sun could sue for defamation; if he were to suggest it doesn't, that wouldn't help any case that i4i might file.) OpenOffice users, or more specifically Sun, will have to wait and see.

i4i is profitable, he says, though it's a private company which hasn't released its revenue figures. As to the whispers still on "patent trolling" questions about investments by two companies, McLean Watson Capital Inc and Northwater Intellectual Property Fund, Owen says that the first is his own company and has invested in i4i since 1996, after he met Vulpe in a coffee shop in Toronto and that the second is a company that has capital and "expertise in patent monetisation". The investment from Northwater was because the company had shrunk since 2001 from 150-odd to 30-odd staff, "and we needed some help." But, he says, "that doesn't make us patent trolls. Those are non-practising entities who just try to make a return on patents. It's a very, very different situation here."

(Bonus reading, just for fun: an article from the Guardian Observer from 2000, imagining where Microsoft would be in 2010. The interesting question to answer: why didn't it all turn out like that?)

Update: If you want a longer read, including all the personalities at i4i, have a read of the Toronoto Globe and Mail's interview from September 2009, which also explains neatly how i4i's system works:

"At issue is U.S. Patent No. 5,787,449 - "Method and system for manipulating the architecture and the content of a document separately from each other." That isn't a bad title. (The formal company name is pretty transparent too: Infrastructures for Information.) i4i's software allows users to customize the extensible markup language (XML) code embedded in documents - code that tags the information within, and which, with i4i's software, can be used to search through and alter a database without delving into each document."

PS2/Wii/DS/PSP; 19.99- 29.9; cert 7+; D3Publisher, 2/5

Rebooting and reimagining classic childhood characters is common in today's media marketplace. The big danger is the chance that something we loved as a kid won't cut the mustard when we take off our rose-tinted reminiscing glasses.

Japan's iconic Astroboy has had a 2010 makeover, with a movie and tie-in game; however, his latest foray into the console world is somewhat lacking, and no amount of retro love can make up for its faults.

Perhaps we're too spoilt these days, but its look and feel would have been considered average if released back when the PS2 was top dog. But in today's environment, the game looks extremely low budget. Poor cut scenes skim over a basic storyline simply put in place to link levels, which at first could be considered "retro cool" but soon become repetitive.

The gameplay consists of 2D scrolling levels set in Metro City, focusing on beat- and shoot-em-up combat with occasional platform action thrown in. You can move freely around the screen but are often stopped in your tracks by invisible walls preventing you from moving on until you have beaten down all on-screen enemies. As they are damaged they release collectable energy that allows you to perform special attacks great for when you tire of punching or scissor kicking the baddies into annihilation.

You have four super abilities to choose from including Astroboy's butt cannon, which temporarily freezes opponents and destroys any missiles heading your way. Rather than having a finite number of lives you instead have a health bar, replenishable through a special ability. Therefore the challenge is weighing up when to use special attacks or heal in order to survive each level. For a short while Astroboy can be entertaining arcade fun, but even with its mix of ground, platform, air and boss fights, it doesn't take long for the feeling of d j vu to kick in.

Playing through the story mode on co-op might make it a little more entertaining, but its arena combat mode is simply more of the same and adds little to the experience. Both gameplay and graphics appear more suited to its handheld formats. When played on a home console its attraction is short lived, making it more of a rental than purchase consideration.

Rating: 2/5

It's a household name in Britain, thanks to its popular digital radios. But can Pure Digital make inroads in the US, where the idea has never taken off? The company's Colin Crawford explains why it is time to take on America.

Plus, we delve further into the chances for UK technology firms to make an impact at CES by talking to the people trying to cheerlead the nation's entrepreneurs: the chaps from UK Trade and Investment are on hand to discuss the chances for British companies to make it big.

The subject is picked up by our guests, Michael Brook from T3 magazine and Tasha Eichenseher of National Geographic, who also discuss their favourite moments from this year's show and ponder what it means to be green amid this orgy of gadgets.

Meanwhile Scott Cawley finishes up his tour of the halls, before we all head away, exhausted, from Las Vegas.

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Sales for five weeks to 9 January fell 13.8%
Pre-tax profits to drop below market estimate of 96m

Game Group has vowed to make online sales and download services a key part of its business strategy as it reassures investors after a disappointing Christmas.

The festive slump contrasted sharply with a generally buoyant season on the UK high street and sparked a dire profits warning from the retailer . Game's shares dropped as worries intensified about competition from supermarkets and the longer-term threat of the computer games market going through the same upheaval as record labels with gamers moving to downloading products rather than picking them off shelves.

Game, which has almost 700 stores and concessions in the UK and hundreds more overseas, was hurt by a weaker year for new releases and depressed margins as it offered shoppers pre-Christmas discounts. The retailer's like-for-like sales for the five weeks to 9 January fell 13.8% as its domestic market saw a 17.5% drop. International like-for-like sales were down just 5.9%.

The weak Christmas, in which Game typically does around a quarter of its business, left like-for-like sales down 14.8% for the 49 weeks to 9 January. Annual pre-tax profits are expected to be between 87m and 93m, against market consensus of 95.8m and well below last year's record 126.2m.

"The negative trends in the pc and video games market ... continued over the key Christmas selling period despite strong software releases and a sizeable installed base of hardware," said chairman Peter Lewis, citing a strong comparative period the previous Christmas, when there was a greater surge in demand from people who had recently bought a Wii console, PS3 or Xbox 360.

But as Game's shares came under heavy selling pressure for the second time in as many months, Lewis sought to reassure the market about trading since Christmas, including a growing second-hand games business.

Despite supermarket and online competition, Game hopes that new technology this year will drive customers to its stores for specialist advice. It also promised more details with full year results in April on how it aims to be at the forefront of the market's "evolutionary process" by investing in a combination of stores, e-commerce and digital distribution.

In the nearer-term, the company highlighted upcoming releases including Splinter Cell: Conviction and Bioshock 2, announcements on new motion sensing technology from Microsoft and Sony and the fact the UK now has 28.5m consoles installed.

The profits warning compounded a downbeat trading statement in early December and left Game's shares down 5.9p at 100p yesterday. They have fallen a third over the last year. Analyst Mark Photiades at Singer Capital Markets highlighted several challenges.

"Looking ahead we believe key risks include the threat of increased competition (particularly in the lucrative pre-owned market), pricing pressures on key software titles as rivals, especially mass merchants and supermarkets, cut prices, and the longer term structural threats posed by internet retailers and digital distribution," he said.

Analyst Freddie George at Seymour Pierce suggested Game's depressed share price may have put it on the radar of private equity firms attracted to its relatively strong balance sheet, strong cashflow and a well established network of international stores.

Taking part in The Great Porn Debate at CES, porn star Ron Jeremy has annoyed many gamers by claiming that "violent video games are a much bigger negative influence on kids"

Porn star Ron Jeremy caused a stir in The Great Porn Debate at the Consumer Electronics Show last week by saying that studies have found that "violent video games are a much bigger negative influence on kids".

CES at the Las Vegas Convention Centre coincides with the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo at the Venetian hotel. In this case, Jeremy was also promoting tools that help parents control their children's access to undesirable content. He said: "Because we make porn, we are the bad guys. We don't want kids to watch porn but yes we recognise that it happens. We are not in favour of that," reports BBC News.

The porn industry is keen on products such as InternetSafety.com's Safe Eyes as a way of making content inaccessible to those under 18. This is a problem because of the amount of "adult" material that is now widely available. "The Internet has changed the game completely," said Craig Gross, the activist debating (not for the first time) against Jeremy. "What we used to have to work hard to find, you now have to work hard to avoid."

Presumably, this ubiquity is not good for the porn business, which sees its products widely pirated. In a blog post, the BBC reporter Maggie Shiels said Jeremy "heaped further scorn on the net because, he said, it is putting his industry out of business":

"People can download stuff for free these days, so why the heck are they going to buy it? The only ones making money out of porn are the novelty companies. I just hate the internet in general."

Jeremy also offered views similar to those of Nicholas Carr, a former editor of the Harvard Business Review, who suggested that Google is making us stupid. Sheils quotes Jeremy saying:

"I am a former school teacher, I have a masters degree and two BAs, and I think the internet is making people stupid.
"It's good because you can research any topic. In my day, we went to the encyclopedia for that. Nowadays, though, kids can't memorise anything. No dates, no times tables, no history. If there is anything you need to know, you just press a few buttons. We could be giving rise to a generation of idiots."

Games companies also have problems with internet piracy though violent games are perhaps not as visible online. Like the porn industry, the games industry has ratings systems that are intended to keep unsuitable material out of reach of minors. However, it also has a perception problem: computer and video games are often considered as being "for kids" even though most players are adults, whereas pornography is considered unsuitable for children. There may be cases where adults allow children to play 18-rated violent games when they would immediately stop them from watching pornography.

But whether violent video games are actually a much bigger negative influence than pornography is another matter. The influence of both types of material has been argued at length, and Jeremy didn't provide any reference sources for his observation.

It's easy to use and a snap to set up, but this webcam is pricier than most

While webcams are now built into many laptops, netbooks and even flat panel screens, many desktop computers and a fair few laptops still require a standalone webcam.

It's a crowded market with webcams from Creative, Logitech, Microsoft and Hercules. French company Guillemot makes gaming accessories under the Thrustmaster brand and Wi-Fi products, speakers and other computer accessories including webcams under the Hercules brand.

The Dualpix Emotion from Hercules boasts a 1.3-megapixel (MP) CMOS sensor. It can take 5MP interpolated stills pictures. Like many webcams, it has face-tracking so can keep your face framed as you move about in front of the camera.

To stand out from the crowd, the Dualpix Emotion offers a software suite that will add effects to your video, such as inverting the image or adding fiery trails.

The webcam also includes Hercules' Xtra Controller Ex software that allows you to add a slideshow of images to video chat, and the included software makes it easy to upload captured video to YouTube.

The bracket held the webcam securely to the top of my laptop screen and adjusted easily to fit to the top of the flat-panel screen on my desktop.

The webcam is compatible with Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. I found installing the webcam on a Windows 7 computer was a snap. The included driver works well without an update. The software suite is stable, which isn't always the case with cheaper webcams.

The webcam isn't Skype certified, but it does work with Skype and work well.

The face-tracking is responsive, and the webcam has a feature to compensate for strongly backlit rooms, which worked very well. The still images are crisp and well balanced. I did find that at higher resolutions, the video suffered from some ghosting.

At 49.99, it's more expensive than many other webcams from Hercules and its competitors.

It's a stylish and capable webcam with a good software package. If you do video chatting often and want a higher spec camera with a comprehensive software suite, the Dualpix Emotion is a good choice.

Pros: Easy setup with a full software suite.
Cons: Pricier than many webcams and suffers from ghosting when recording higher resolution video.
Hercules.com

The rise of social networking online means that people no longer have an expectation of privacy, according to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Talking at the Crunchie awards in San Francisco this weekend, the 25-year-old chief executive of the world's most popular social network said that privacy was no longer a "social norm".

"People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people," he said. "That social norm is just something that has evolved over time."

Zuckerberg said that the rise of social media reflected changing attitudes among ordinary people, adding that this radical change has happened in just a few years.

"When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was, 'why would I want to put any information on the internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?'."

"Then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way, and just all these different services that have people sharing all this information."

His statement may not be a surprise, particularly since it helps to justify the company's recent and highly controversial decision to change the privacy settings of its 350 million users.

But it also represents a remarkable shift from where the Californian company originally started out.

Launched in 2004 as an exclusive network for Ivy League students, the site grew in part because allowed people to communicate privately or at least among small groups of friends.

The constant tug of war between public and private information that ensued led to a series of embarrassing incidents where individuals published information online thinking it was private, only to have it reach the public.

These episodes are partly the result of the way people use Facebook, which has changed its service on several occasions in recent years. Each time the site brings more information into the public domain and at each point it faces a series of protests and adverse reactions from users.

Moves included the decision in 2006 to introduce the "news feed" an update of people's activities that is now central to Facebook's service. A year later it launched Beacon, a contentious advertising system that allowed advertisers to track your activities online. That eventually led to the company settling a lawsuit for $9.5m, but it did not prevent it from bringing in new privacy changes in December that one campaign group called "plain ugly".

In his talk, however, Zuckerberg said it was important for companies like his to reflect the changing social norms in order to remain relevant and competitive.

"A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they've built," he said. "Doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do.

"But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner's mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it."

Not everybody agrees. Marshall Kirkpatrick, of the technology industry blog ReadWriteWeb, said Zuckerberg's statement was "not a believeable explanation" and pointed to the company's complicity in changing the way people think about online privacy.

Meanwhile, others have rejected the idea that younger people, in particular, are less concerned about privacy. Last month Microsoft researcher and social networking expert Danah Boyd told the Guardian that such assumptions often misunderstood the reasons that people put private information online.

"Kids have always cared about privacy, it's just that their notions of privacy look very different than adult notions," she said.

"As adults, by and large, we think of the home as a very private space for young people it's not a private space. They have no control over who comes in and out of their room, or who comes in and out of their house. As a result, the online world feels more private because it feels like it has more control."

There are moral and ethical issues concerning online privacy. But while we may be sharing more, we're gaining more too

People who share personal information online undermine everyone else's right to privacy, according to Dr Kieron O'Hara, senior research fellow at the department of electronics and computer science at the University of Southampton. Those naughty internet users! They're to blame for invasions of privacy. Or are they?

Dr O'Hara states, "If you look at privacy in law, one important concept is a reasonable expectation of privacy. As more private lives are exported online, reasonable expectations are diminishing. When our reasonable expectations diminish, as they have, by necessity our legal protection diminishes."

No doubt O'Hara's first line of attack would be bloggers such as myself, but saying that those who share intimate details online are to blame for the erosion of privacy is like saying newspapers are to blame for etching their words onto people's eyeballs and causing blindness. Humans will always be interested in reading/learning about other humans' lives, whether via websites, or via printed papers: curiosity is the human condition.

Divulging personal information on the web does not make one accountable for privacy laws. As Marshall McLuhan once said, "the medium is the message". It's not the content that has moved the goalposts of our privacy, rather, the way in which we've come to use technology.

If O'Hara wants to attack the blurring of boundaries between public and private, why not criticise those who allow their every purchase of household goods to be known (Nectar, Tesco Clubcard holders); or who allow their spending habits (and credit scores) to be tracked (ATM and credit card users); or those who allow their information from the electoral register to be used by marketing firms? Hey, if they didn't opt out, they're to blame for all the junk mail that's sent to them, right? Just because one medium the internet appears to attract more headlines about its supposed effect on privacy, it doesn't mean that other areas in life are less responsible for any loss of privacy we might experience.

Of course, there are serious moral and ethical issues concerning the loss of online privacy. Facebook has frequently been accused of revealing, by default, personal information about its users; the company recently changed the privacy settings for all its members. Its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, claims that privacy is no longer a "social norm", and that people no longer have an expectation of privacy online; but maybe that's just as a result of 350 million people using the service: they've become indifferent to sacrificing their privacy in exchange for the gains they receive.

Perhaps, in our rush to embrace the digital era, we've voluntarily, albeit unwittingly, forfeited any privacy protection we had. Every social networking site we sign up to involves another profile, more uploading of information, further chipping away of the private block, shaping it into the public one that's on display. But is this such a bad thing? Is it not a fair price to be paid by the dramatic improvements in communication, connectivity and socialising, gained by embracing the online medium?

We may be sharing more, but we're gaining more too. No longer the forum (no pun intended) merely for chat, the web and social networking in particular offers people the chance to connect (Facebook, Twitter, Bebo, MySpace); share pictures and videos (Flickr, Qik); find out who's in town when you're passing through (Dopplr); get book recommendations (GoodReads); listen to great music (Last.fm); get motivated to run a particular path/distance (Daily Mile); cook a delicious recipe (Bake Space); find hints on keeping fit (Spark People); knit something nice (Ravelry); or find who is doing something local in your area (Smugly). We're social beings: social networking allows us to explore what comes naturally to us sharing and connecting with others.

As O'Hara says in a recent paper, Lifelogging: Privacy and Empowerment with Memories for Life: "The privacy argument is clearly real, but it must be offset against the empowerment of the individual." We may have lost some privacy in our embrace of advancing technology, but what we have gained from it, both personally, and in society as a whole, is worth much, much more.

Google gives its visual news experiments greater prominence, while quietly ceasing to update its AP content

Google integrated two of its news experiments, Fast Flip and Living Stories, into the US homepage of Google News today.

Living Stories, a project developed with the New York Times and the Washington Post, is on the upper right next to Top Stories, while Fast Flip (picture above) is right down at the bottom of the page. Both experiments should now see their audiences widen considerably.

"Encouraged by the positive feedback we've received from users and partners, we decided to expose the service to more potential readers by integrating it with the US English version of Google News," software engineers Jack Hebert, Matthew Watson and Corrie Scalisi wrote about Fast Flip on the Google news blog.

Fast Flip is Google's visual approach to news aggregation and was introduced in September. It features about 50 newspapers, magazines, web outlets, newswires and TV and radio broadcasters from the US and the UK.

"Fast Flip is still in Google Labs, so we'll continue to experiment with the format. But so far we've found that the speed and visual nature of the service encourages readers to look at many articles and, for the ones that catch their interest, click through to the story publishers' websites."

Meanwhile, it has become apparent that new Associated Press stories are no longer appearing on the site, which has hosted them since 2007. Google hasn't added new AP content since December 24.

Asked for the reason, Google was somewhat evasive: "We have a licensing agreement with the Associated Press that permits us to host its content on Google properties such as Google News. Some of that content is still available today. At the moment we're not adding new hosted content from the AP."

Google hosted material produced by the AP along with other news agencies directly on Google News for 30 days from August 2007, but the agreement is set to expire at the end of January.

As AP and Google are in the process of renegotiating their licensing agreement, paidContent suggests this might be not be a good sign on the progress of the talks.

The search engine has ongoing licensing agreements with the Canadian Press, Agence France Presse and the UK's Press Association, as well as with several members of the European Pressphoto Agency.

In today's state of information overload, it might be useful to reintroduce restrictions on who people can communicate with

Email overload has become a severe problem. In fact, in the past couple of years the problem has become so immense that the internet itself got overloaded with tips on how to get rid of it.

Within easy reach, for example, are at least five ways of dealing with email overload, six tips for reducing email overload, 12 steps to getting control of your email inbox, or the secret to dealing with email overload, apart from several startup companies devoted to delivering a program that helps you manage your email.

Yes, it is official: email is hell, especially when workers return from their holidays.

In fact, email has killed holidays for some employees in their former sense the sense of forgetting about work. These days, instead of clearing the mind of work during holidays, it is easy for people to succumb to the temptation to reach for the BlackBerry or laptop and clear out the inbox, to avoid having hundreds of emails on their the return to work.

A former boss had the trick of simply not looking at the mail that was sent while he was away. He always said that if the mail was important, it would be re-sent. However, not everybody is a boss. And now there might be hope for the rest of us.

Enter Twitter and Facebook, which may lead us out of our misery.

At first sight, Twitter and Facebook seem to confront us with more information, not less. However, there is an important cultural difference: email never managed to entirely distance itself from its associations with the traditional "snail mail" letter.

New email did the work of the old mail but unfortunately better

Certain aspects of email were always handled with a similar cultural approach as to letters, especially reading them. A delivered letter was a delivered message. The world didn't care if you refused to open your bills, divorce papers, or birthday cards. The message was delivered, therefore the message was valid.

This culture of posting was passed from the old media letter to the new media email. What happened was what the Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan famously once described: "In the name of progress, our official culture is striving to force the new media to do the work of the old."

And we gave in to that force, and started to deal with emails as if they were letters: they had to be opened and read. Only there was a lot more of them, and most of them were not as important as divorce papers, bills or even birthday cards. However, people expected you to read the emails, and being afraid to miss out on birthday wishes, we all obeyed.

There seemed to be nothing to stop the flood of email. While physical mail is often expensive to send out, cheap, fast and direct email is easy to use. Always. Whenever. By anyone. Emails and spam, in particular have proliferated like an animal that has no natural enemies.

While sending a letter was once a private act, sending an email has became a cut-copy-multiple-recipient-mass-mailout. This is where Facebook and Twitter can be a relief, as their cultural habit of dealing with a message is fundamentally different.

You don't have to keep up with messages on Twitter and Facebook

Thanks to social media, the privacy of a message has been reintroduced. Tweets and status updates might tell everyone how you feel, but nobody feels obliged to keep track of them all. What a relief!

So if you decide, for example, not to use Twitter during your holiday for fear your significant other confronts you with a screaming fit, you can come back home, open Twitter and ... you have to keep up with nothing. Life can be so easy. After your holiday, you simply come back and start all over as if nothing has happened.

You don't have to read all the tweets or status updates you missed, because you never had to read any tweets or status updates at all in the first place. You might have a look at your "mentions" in Twitter, because managing your reputation is part of work these days, but that's about it.

Facebook and Twitter have cleaned up the email mess. While it may look, at first glance, as if these systems steal a lot of your time with irrelevant information, they are actually doing the opposite.

Furthermore, since you can only get direct messages from people or accounts that you find interesting and decide to add or follow, both systems constrain the numbers of possible senders. Twitter will only forward a message from a person you follow, and the new privacy settings on Facebook allow you to only get messages from friends.

Spamming? Once again impossible, or at least embarrassing. Think of the endless times you tried in vain to get off an email list. On Facebook or Twitter, no one will ever spam you, and if so they will have to do it in public, and you can simply unfollow or unfriend or block that account.

Do we want the barrier of social introduction back?

Sure, being able to contact someone will become a bit harder. It will be like in the old days, where people were only able to talk to each other after being introduced. Again, you'll have to ask friends to make a contact, or establish it by mention @her or @him on Twitter.

In that way, your friends and followers will become the effective spam filter we always waited for. In fact, Yahoo Mail just introduced the feature to highlight email from your friends and tells you with it forget about the rest.

Years ago Marshall McLuhan wrote the sentence: "One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There's always more than you can cope with." Social media finally seems to take that into account. Yes, please, save me from my email.

Will email survive till 2020? And how do you handle email? Please, share your thoughts with us in the comments.

'Significant' job cuts for AOL in UK, and office closures across Europe, after voluntary redundancy scheme falls short of target

AOL has moved to shut down many of its European offices after failing to reach a target of cutting a third of its worldwide workforce through voluntary redundancy.

The UK operation would see a "significant reduction" in staff numbers, the company said. It announced plans in November to cut 2,500 jobs across the world, with the aim of saving $300m a year, and about 1,100 employees have taken voluntary redundancy. More than 1,000 further job cuts are expected across the US and Europe.

"We will be significantly reducing our UK staff, but will continue to have a robust advertising operation as well as a consumer offering," an AOL spokesman said in a statement. "Ireland will remain a core technology development centre for the company. Both the UK and Ireland were part of the voluntary separation programme we ran late last year. Regarding Bebo, it continues to be part of AOL Ventures."

AOL UK would not give a total employee count or the number it expects to cut.

The company said that meetings were held across its European operation yesterday about cutbacks and the closure of "many" offices, starting with those in Spain and Sweden. Four German offices will close, in Hamburg, D sseldorf, Frankfurt and Munich. In France the company has considered a number of options and intends to consult on closing its Paris office.

The AOL spokesman stressed that successful operations, such as the advertising business AdTech, would continue to have offices in Europe.

In the USA the company said that it would "begin notifying a limited number of individuals impacted by the involuntary lay-off ... with the majority of notifications taking place in the USA on 13 January.

"For many of the employees impacted in the USA Wednesday will be their last day in the office," the company said.

AOL also said that it was closing its Seattle office, home of some of its mobile operations, with the mobile division to be centralised in California.

AOl has said that the restructuring programme will see it take a $200m charge this year.

"We have looked at every aspect of this business," said a spokesman for AOL. "We evaluated our competitive position and product portfolio in every market, and we asked the hard questions about areas that were no longer core to the strategy and our profit profiles in the businesses and countries where we operate."

The company had approximately 6,900 employees before the restructuring, of whom about 4,500 were in the US. AOL was spun off from its former parent group, Time Warner, in December.

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

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European trade unions and industry groups call for tighter controls on illegal filesharing and more pressure on ISPs

European trade unions and industry groups from TV, film and radio have joined Bono, Lily Allen and other big-name artists in calling for wider legal crackdowns on internet piracy.

Workers' representatives and trade groups from across Europe have formed a coalition to urge the European Union to formally adopt a strong stance against illegal filesharing and to put more pressure on internet service providers (ISPs) to help curb piracy.

The calls follow headline-grabbing plans from the UK government to curb copyright infringement, including sending warning letters to persistent unlawful filesharers. Under the proposals, if piracy is not reduced by 70%, the government will introduce a series of "technical measures" that could include suspending a pirate's broadband connection. The plans have drawn intense criticism from ISPs and consumer groups but support from musicians, including Allen, who collated the views of various artists in a controversial blog last autumn.

The European Audiovisual Social Dialogue Committee is now calling for "improvements to the legal framework" throughout the EU to encourage producers, broadcasters and content creators to provide more lawful online services.

"The unauthorised filesharing of protected works and performances as well as the need for all right holders to derive tangible benefits from the exploitation of their work are important issues that need to be better recognised by the European commission and other EU institutions," the committee whose members include the Association of Commercial Television in Europe, the International Federation of Film Producers Associations and the European Federation of Journalists said in a joint statement.

The committee wants the internal markets commissioner to "ensure that all member states have the necessary infrastructure to effectively enforce copyright protection laws and ensure all ISPs work to prevent illegal P2P filesharing and other IP infringements through their services."

The commission is also being asked to carry out research into the economic effects of online piracy, including possible job losses and lost revenues, and to consider introducing or reviewing EU legislation to protect copyright holders.

The UK grouping of entertainment industry trade unions, called the Creative Coalition Campaign, backed the Europe-wide calls.

"Although the UK is taking a lead with the proposals outlined in the digital economy bill, unfortunately, other EU countries are lagging behind, putting the whole of the EU's creative sector at serious risk," Christine Payne, general secretary of Equity and chair of the Creative Coalition Campaign, said.

But the demands are likely to face strong opposition from ISPs. The UK plans have already been strongly condemned by TalkTalk as draconian and unlikely to work.

Last week the broadband company, part of Charles Dunstone's Carphone Warehouse business, criticised comments by Bono, the U2 frontman, questioning ISPs' claims that they cannot always know the nature of internet traffic.

Bono cited "America's noble effort to stop child pornography" as proof to the contrary, but Andrew Heaney, TalkTalk's executive director of strategy and regulation, said: "It is outrageous to equate the need to protect minors from the evils of child pornography with the need to protect copyright owners.

"Bono obviously does not understand how simple it is to access copyright-protected content without being detected. P2P filesharing can be spotted (albeit at great cost) but there are dozens of applications and tools out there which allow people to view content for free and no amount of snooping can detect it."

Bobbie Johnson takes a look at the big and small of North America's largest trade show

Despite the recession, this year's Consumer Electronics Show was still big: very, very big. More new exhibitors turned up than ever before, visitor numbers were good, and the taxi drivers in Las Vegas said it was busier than they expected. Just like every year, the showfloor went on forever - and after what seemed an eternity of walking the halls, I'm home - and extremely glad to be done.

Regardless of the gigantic displays and vast number of companies in attendance, though, it still felt a little underwhelming. Even with a bit of distance, I can't think of too many standout technologies on display, and I've already explained my thoughts about the expo's often laughable green push. Still, there were serious pushes for some technologies that might make be fixtures in our lives in coming years: 3DTV, ebooks, netbooks and so on.

But the lack of big winners doesn't mean that there wasn't a lot to learn: so here are the lessons I'm taking away with me.

You don't have to be at CES to be at CES

I've said it already, but the biggest success story at the show was the one company that never makes an appearance. Steve Jobs wasn't here, but he exerted an influence far beyond anything . Will it release an iPad device later this month? Probably. Do we know what it's going to be like? Not really. Did that stop dozens and dozens of companies trying to get in on the act? No. As Andy Inahtko, the author and journalist, suggests, the threat of Apple was enough to send companies like Microsoft (and therefore everyone who relies on Microsoft) into a panic.

Don't underestimate Android

Google's decision to launch its own branded phone the day before the conference might have set the show off on a strange note, but it wasn't just about the Nexus One. The halls were stuffed with Android devices, from a smartbook produced by HP to the slightly odd Alex e-reader. Not all the gadgets are there just yet, but it's clear that manufacturers like the idea. And with Google's Chrome operating system due later this year, the internet giant is really starting to stake out its territory.

There's still room for the little guy

The show is, unsurprisingly, dominated by the big companies. Microsoft opens proceedings. Sony gets plenty of coverage. The likes of Intel, Samsung, LG, Panasonic and others still get the lion's share of coverage and the majority of the crowds turn up at the show's central hall - where most of the big firms dwell. But that doesn't mean that the smaller companies can't make an impact. Parrot proved a surprise hit with their AR Drone, and among the herd of ereaders, the Plastic Logic Que really impressed me. Yes, it's a little tedious to look through row upon row of iPod cases - but there are genuinely interesting ideas needled away in the haystack.

Next year, I hear, the show plans to spread the big companies out around the halls, rather than have most of them concentrated in one place. Will that encourage more innovation? Almost certainly not, but it will at least get more eyeballs on the interesting smaller things. Still, I'm interested to find out how these trends pan out over the next year. Given the blisters on my feet and the general air of exhaustion, I can't believe I'm going to say this - but roll on CES 2011.

Can't read things? Photograph them with an Intel Reader and it will read them back to you. It could be a boon for people with limited vision or dyslexia

You probably don't own any Intel products, as distinct from products that contain Intel chips. But one of the devices that the company has designed and manufactures is the Intel Reader, which is a product of the Intel Health division. It's a fattish Atom-powered portable that converts print into large print and, if you want, reads it aloud. It's aimed at people who find reading difficult because of impaired eyesight or dyslexia, for example.

The Intel Reader needs to be portable so that you can carry it around. When you run into something you can't read, you use the Reader's built in camera to photograph it -- it might be a restaurant menu, a ticket, a notice, or the instructions on a bottle of pills. It's not simply an electronic book system, though it can be used to read ebooks including (hip hip hooray) books in the Daisy (Digital Accessible Information System) format used by the RNIB.

So why did a company that normally provides chips create a whole product? At CES 2010, I asked Intel's Tracy Counts, the Reader's marketing manager. She said the product's developer is dyslexic and knew how hard it was "to get printed text in a format he could listen to and understand. He went to the general manager of our group and pitched the idea, and Intel Heath got behind it because it fits with the whole idea of digital health, which is helping people to be independent."

The Intel Reader isn't so much a consumer electronics device as a health product with a limited market (people with poor vision, the blind, the dyslexic), and that's reflected in the 999 price at Amazon.co.uk. It could also find users in schools and libraries, and Intel is showing the Reader at this week's BETT educational technology exhibition at Olympia in London (13 - 16 January 2010).

The Intel Reader was one of the Top 10 devices in the Last Gadget Standing competition at CES, and Engadget put it through its paces in a hands-on video, below:

Take a look at some of the gadgets being unveiled at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas

Will Apple's iTablet lead media companies out of a wilderness of non-paying customers?

For the video content makers nervously biting their fingernails over how soon filesharing of films and TV is going to wipe out their revenues, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas last week offered wonderful news TV, like film, is going 3D. And you know what 3D means? Can't be filmed by a camcorder in a cinema and copied endlessly; can't just be grabbed from the set-top box and redistributed on torrent sites. Or if it is, it will look even worse than a fifth-generation VHS copy (remember those?).

And then there was the AR Drone, a mini-helicopter that can be controlled by an iPhone, which is sure to be banging into walls in advertising agencies around London hours after it goes on sale; and an unbreakable mobile phone (you can hammer nails with it).

But the hype, the noise, the lights CES is peculiarly named because although it calls itself a "consumer electronics" show, its keynote opening speech comes from Microsoft which has failed woefully year after year to come up with any consumer electronics people want to buy, apart from two- button mice and, OK, the Xbox (though it's lost pots and pots of money on it).

This year it was Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive, who signally failed to set the event, or the world, on fire. Meanwhile, all over the place computer companies were showing off their wares, which will make barely any difference to anyone's lives except those of their desperate makers. Will a laptop with a transparent screen (so you can be distracted by people walking behind it as well as reflections) really transform our experience of work or leisure?

Instead, the susurrus behind CES was about tablet computers large screen, no keyboard, touch interface. Although Ballmer referred to them in his speech, and a number of companies (including Lenovo and HP) showed them off, and the Que e-reader (from a British company) wowed some, the focus was not on them but on Apple which never exhibits at CES. Until last year, Apple had its own show that conflicted directly, and its much-expected tablet is due this month. That expectation was all but confirmed by a story carefully leaked to the Wall Street Journal last Monday, detailing a possible price, and suggesting that "people briefed by Apple also say that the company believes it could redefine the way consumers interact with a variety of content".

It's the latter phrase that has media companies producers of books, newspapers, films, TV, music, and especially, for some reason, newspapers gasping like parched travellers in a desert. They look at the success of the iPhone (which, before its announcement, had mobile phone makers laughing: Apple? A computer company? Make a phone?) and gasp: let the iTablet lead us out of this wilderness of non-paying customers!

This ignores the question of how you'll have to redesign or repurpose your content to fit Apple's as yet unseen device (is it just a big iPhone? Is it also 3D?) a question that has troubled Ben Hammersley of Wired UK, who points out on his blog (http://bit.ly/wiredUK) that present workflows for most magazines simply don't countenance the idea of a hyperlinked, perhaps video- and audio-enabled end product; they're trying to produce something for print. The iTablet (or whatever) will mess that up badly.

So be careful what you wish for from CES. It has given you the DVD, which you've loved. It has given you Blu-ray, which has not quite taken over the world. It has given you high-definition TV, and now it's giving you 3D films and TV. But it never gave you the iPhone, and won't give you the iTablet. Shows are one thing. But the decisions that really change the game are made in the shops and homes.

Even so, one of those iPhone helicopters would be nice. Just saying.

Is Apple planning to show a 3D interface on its much-anticipated tablet later this month? A new patent suggests so

Apple has acquired the patent for a system that could create virtual 3D worlds on the tablet computer that the company is expected to unveil later this month.

The patent, originally filed under the names of three French inventors, is called "Touch Screen Device, Method, and Graphical User Interface for Manipulating Three-Dimensional Virtual Objects" and describes "a portable electronic device with a touch screen display" which displays what looks to the user like a 3D layout.

The key element here is that it's a multi-touch device - just like the Apple iPhone.

The Baltimore Sun's Gus Sentementes has also done some fabulous detective work to show that the ownership of the patent is entirely in Apple's hands:

"According to documents filed with the USPTO, Apple obtained the rights to this patent application from three French citizens: Fabrice Robinet, Thomas Goossens, and Alexandre Moha. The inventors assigned the patent to Apple on Sept. 29, 2008. It's not clear if those citizens are Apple employees, per se. (Update: Actually, Mr. Moha is a product and engineering manager at Apple, per his LinkedIn profile; Mr. Robinet is a software engineer at Apple, again, per LinkedIn, and Mr. Goossens is an Apple software engineer (thanks to Baltimore's Bill Mill for digging up Goossens!) Regardless, searches under Apple's name in the patents database doesn't retrieve this patent, because the names of the original French inventors are still on it. (I wonder why that is? Hmmm. :-) "

As Sentementes points out, the patent points out that the reason why we all need 3D touch interfaces now is that "...[T]here is a need for electronic devices with touch screen displays that provide more transparent and intuitive user interfaces for navigating in three dimensional virtual spaces and manipulating three dimensional objects in these virtual spaces."

Well, of course. Even if it does look a bit like that 1980s game Battlezone (see below). Two steps forward....

What would you want from a wine app? Or have you already found one which suits you?

Although I enjoy chatting to sommeliers (once I've laid my cards on the table regarding my meagre budget) and will always pick staff brains in a proper wine merchants, the fact is that sometimes you find yourself on your own when it comes to choosing wine. Disappointingly few supermarkets or chain off-licences employ anyone on the shop floor with a real passion for wine, so the idea of applications which can help you pick out a good bottle on the hoof, or identify an unknown grape on a restaurant wine list, is potentially a very exciting one.

Although the wine writers I contacted for recommendations all claimed to be technophobes (it must go with the territory), I found a fan in amateur wine buff and professional expert on mobile apps, Tim Harrison. He's tested most of what's out there and, he says, "came to the conclusion that there was a gap in the market since most of the apps I had tried failed either in the area of catalogue, functionality and relevance (and usually all three!)".

The problem, in his opinion, that many apps are targeted at what he calls 'vinoraks', who have large cellars to manage, and the dedication to input detailed tasting notes for every glass, and the majority are aimed at US consumers, which makes price and stockist details irrelevant to the British user. However, there are a few which are worth their modest price-tags.

Wine Enthusiast Guide, 2.99 (MobileAge)

This is useful tool for anyone who'd like to pretend they know more about wine than they actually do (that's everyone then). Puzzled by a word on the label, or unsure whether 1995 or 1996 was better for Alsatian whites? This app puts the information at your fingertips. It also features reviews from its namesake American magazine and allows you to create a list of your favourite wines, although annoyingly you can't add your own comments. Search is by price, rating, style, varietal and region, so you can get quite specific and this one seems to have more of a world view than Drync (although still no English wine, sadly).

Wine Chap, 2.99 (Wine Chap)

A good-looking app that claims to be the first to evaluate restaurant wine lists, rather than individual bottles so should you find yourself, say, at The Box Tree at Ilkley, you can mug up on their selection in the loo, and then breeze out and say authoritatively, after a mere glance at the wine list, "oh, the 2006 Cristom Vineyards Pinot Gris is terribly good value, we must order that!" There are also 'first date wines', 'old school classics' and 'treat yourself' options, specifically tailored to the menu, so, for example, a red from the Luberon at Edinburgh's The Kitchin is recommended as 'a sound pick for [chef] Tom's game specialities'. This is an app which will become increasingly useful as their selection of reviews expands at the moment, the list is very London-centric (although, for the frequent traveller, Hong Kong and New York are also well served).

Drync Wine Pro, 2.99 (Drync)

If you're looking for information on a particular wine, then this is almost certainly the app for you as it searches 10 online databases, including Snooth, to bring you ratings on over 80,000 wines and reviews from the likes of Robert Parker. You can also build your own virtual cellar, add your own ratings, and see what's top of other users' wish lists. It's rather US-centric, both in terms of featured bottles (strong on France and the Americas, not so hot on Australia or Eastern Europe, for example) and reviews (you won't find anything from UK critics here), but it's easy to use, and if you get lucky, there's a few wines that can even be bought online from British stockists although not many.

Wine Quiz, 1.19 (Berry Bros & Rudd)

This is an ideal app to have on your phone, being utterly frivolous and guaranteed to leave you feeling cross and worthless. It's nothing fancy just endless rounds of questions on the world of wine, with enough easy ones to keep you motivated and sufficient brain teasers to stop you throwing the phone away with a contemptuous curl of the lip; I'd like to think I'm not alone in failing to name the grapes used to produce 'the Hungarian wine Egri Bikav r'.

Pair It!, 1.79 (Pair It)

This app is, as the name suggests, a tool that helps you match food with wine, and vice versa, and contains over 20,000 different suggestions, from the standard (Stilton and port) to the extremely niche (spicy citrus bourbon ribs with Asti Spumante, anyone?). Some of the dishes featured are so specific that a link to a recipe would be helpful, and a few of the suggestions are rather general it suggests nearly 40 styles to go with a beef lasagne but it's not a bad tool to have with you in the supermarket, even if you'll never need to know what to drink with a Sloppy Joe (white zinfandel, apparently which frankly sounds even worse than the thing itself).

There are of course mobile devices other than the iPhone available. We asked Neil Davey how those apps which run on the BlackBerry match up, and this is what he told us.

Wine of the Day, 2.79 (Enigma Games)

Does what it says, suggesting a new and interesting wine each day, but it doesn't tell you what food to match with, where to buy, what the grape is (well, not all the time), or the price. The descriptions are pretty good though.

Cellar Rat, 2.09 (Telltale Social Media)

A wine rating app that uses emoticons rather than numerical ratings. Rates over 60 regions worldwide, and two decades of vintages. Designed for everyone from the novice to the expert. Generally favourably reviewed, it can help steer you to something on a wine list or a supermarket shelf - but it's very general, not specific: hence Napa Valley is apparently good for 2005. Er ... OK, but is that ALL wine in Napa?!

R-Vintage Lookup, 2.79 (REGARD Solutions Corporation)

Again, rates vintages - numerically - and also suggests "drink" or "hold". A few reviews on the BlackBerry, mostly of the 4, 5 star variety. Not comprehensive by any stretch but would appear to be the best of its kind on the BlackBerry. Nice interface, simple to use.

Useful as these are in their own ways, none tap into what either Tim or I really want from a mobile wine guide which is to have a trustworthy sommelier in our pockets, ready for all eventualities. We both agree that a regularly updated app which collated the recommendations of British critics would be helpful, so we could see at a glance what Jancis or Victoria or Jonathan were recommending that week, as would one which noted our favourite styles, and then alerted us when, say, our beloved Sicilian reds were on offer locally.

Tim, who has big ideas, even dreams of a programme which uses the barcode scanner tool already available on the iPhone to give you information about bottles on the shelf "Wouldn't it be great to scan something in Sainsbury's," he says wistfully, "read a few views from the press and your mates and then go and buy it more cheaply at Majestic?"

So, what would you want from a wine app? Or have you already found one which suits you?

Netbooks taking off, 2 million people with dongles, an iPhone upgrade in autumn and the demise of Vonage where was I right and wrong about the year just gone?

Now we can get 2009 into perspective, and the hangovers have worn off (less so the credit card bills, perhaps), let's see how my tech predictions for 2009 went. Time to tot up

Prediction 1: At least three companies will withdraw from the PC manufacturing business.

They didn't. Did they? That's 0/1

Matthew Wheeler points out that MPC did. MPC? "Edge PC owned by Micron Tech, then MicronPC, sold to Gores Tech, changed to MPC, sold to Hyperspace of Utah, then Chap.11," he explained. And of course there's Psystar, which thought it could put Mac OS X onto generic boxes, and got told by a judge it couldn't. (These are hardly the big names I was originally thinking of, though.) And Psystar is still offering T-shirts, according to The Register.

In fact, companies didn't withraw from the PC-making business; instead, seeing how desktops and even standard laptops weren't making money, they shifted to netbooks, which saw explosive growth. Lesson: manufacturers like making things. The shift to making netbooks was a sort of evolutionary episode in the punctuated equilibrium of the computer business.

Prediction 2: There will be more "netbooks" aka ultraportables, aka liliputers, like the Asus Eee PC than ever, and their sales growth will far outpace that of the PC market.

Bullseye. PC market growth: 1.3% (or -7%, depending whose numbers you like). Netbook market growth: almost 100% (by revenue). 1/2

Prediction 3: Sun Microsystems won't have a near-death experience, but it's going to keep shrinking.

True. Being the subject of a (wished-for) takeover by Oracle hasn't made it grow. 2/3

Prediction 4: Vonage will die. I'm sorry, guys, but your income statement shows you have debts of $276m, cash of $112m, and are paying "interest" (on the debt) of $5m per quarter, which means losses of $7m per quarter. That's just not sustainable, and debt isn't going to get cheaper to service, either.

Completely wrong. Vonage is still going. I have no idea how. 2/4

Prediction 5: Palm will come close to death, but advance sales of its Pre webphone, plus a little more money from its venture capitalist backers, will save it.

Its latest figures show that it didn't do well, and the Pre hasn't actually been fabulous. But the money from the venture capitalists has certainly helped. 3/5

Prediction 6: Twitter will find a way to charge for its service, from at least some users, and so move towards at least revenue, if not yet profit. Its growth will become explosive.

Tricky, this. Twitter's growth did become explosive, helped along by Oprah, and Iranian election, and so on. Is it charging you or me to use it? No. Is it, however, charging Microsoft and Google to use its database for their "real-time" search engines, putting it squarely into revenue and, arguably, profit? Yes. Can we call Microsoft and Google "Twitter users"? I don't see why not I've previously argued that it should charge for use of its API, and charging those two giants for that is good enough.
So, 4/6

Prediction 7: Many as in thousands of IT jobs will be lost. Lots will go in finance as that industry shrinks; but there's a general trend now where small companies are beginning to rely on cloud services from companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon. Those don't need a lot of people. (Ever seen a job advert to work on a cloud service?).

(The point about this was that the jobs were being lost in developed countries, of course, rather than in total all over the world.) Has there been a dramatic uptick in the number of IT jobs? Not thinking so. 5/7

Prediction 8: IT will more and more resemble the building business. Either you specialise, or you're coordinating the project, or you're doing simple, low-paid work that someone from another country can and will do for less.

This ties in with the one above. Cloud-based services mean that setting up a business that relies on downloads, for example, is simple. (Twitter caches your pictures on Amazon's S3 service, for example.) Are IT people becoming multi-specialists? Or finding it harder to get general work? We're still hearing that there's a skills shortage in IT but the shortage is at the top end, in the project coordination side, or in getting the services set up. There's less demand for bodies. These days, you either specialise, or get out. Though I realise that this could be described as my biased view, without data. So let's call it a half. (Data either way to prove or disprove very welcome.)
5.5/8

And now we come to that ever-popular subject, Microsoft.
Prediction 9: Windows 7 will be pushed out of the door in time for the end of the year, and particularly for Christmas sales. It won't be perfect, but it will get corporates interested in an upgrade from XP, which Vista didn't.

It certainly was pushed out for the end of the year; October 22 is good enough. While you could argue that it's not perfect, it's considered by lots of people to be very, very good. And it certainly has corporate customers very interested in an upgrade. Come on, that's solid.
6.5/9

Prediction 10: Microsoft will buy chunks of Yahoo (after being forced to overbid by challenges from Google), which will raise yowls of pain from all over the web. And then in six months people will have forgotten all about it.

Microsoft did buy chunks of Yahoo well, sort of. Specifically, it bought the right to put its ads against search, which it would do. Google didn't challenge it at all. Though this one sounds right, when you examine the detail, it's wrong.
6.5/10

Prediction 11: XP will finally be declared dead once Windows 7 is released, because a version of Windows 7 will be made to run on netbooks.

Yes, Windows 7 is made to run on netbooks. XP hasn't formally been declared dead (apart from the fact that it's been declared dead ages ago) but it's vanishing.
7.5/11

Prediction 12: Internet Explorer will continue to lose share to Firefox, Apple's Safari and especially Google's Chrome.

Oh, yes, that did keep happening. Firefox has reached historical highs. And Internet Explorer (all versions, cumulative) keeps slipping.
8.5/12

Prediction 13: No Zune phone, and no Zune in Europe either.

Can I claim two? No? Damn. There was a moment in November where I worried er, hoped no, worried that there might be a Zune in Europe. But it turned out that Microsoft was just using the name, a bit, for its online video marketplace in Europe. Microsoft hasn't launched a Zune Phone (it's doing badly enough with Windows Mobile without trying to make its struggling music player mimic the iPod's transition into the iPhone) and the Zune remains an idea that has yet to make sense in the US, let alone Europe.
9.5/13

Ubiquity

Prediction 14: Dongles will fall in price, and data charges will too as the phone networks realise that it's a great way to tie people to lucrative contracts without having to subsidise them with mobile phones. So they'll become pervasive. Let's put a number on it: 3 million users, PAYG or contract, by the end of the year.

Result: true, and data charges have as well. There are actually about 13 million mobile data users in the UK. How many dongles? At least 3m of them, surely.
10.5/14

Prediction 15: Being able to transfer sound and, increasingly, video around your home between different devices will become more important, and more and more products will appear built around the DLNA standard to assist it.

It's an enduring mystery why this hasn't been more visible. But in fact more and more people are moving video around the home. What do you think the iPlayer is all about? Except, of course, they don't tend to link it to their TV. The Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii though are changing this, by offering iPlayer (PS3, Wii) and film (PS3, Xbox) streams. That's not, though, what I'd imagined, which is people actually storing data centrally in their home and shifting it. Though "more" DLNA products have appeared (I loved the LaCie 1TB NAS drive, for example, which has DLNA compatibility). My feeling though is that this hasn't happened.
10.5/15

Prediction 16: Femtocells which improve mobile reception inside homes and businesses by providing a mini-cell, and pushing the data over your broadband connection will struggle because the mobile companies will price them wrong, thinking they should be a niche, and hence expensive, product.

I also said during the year that femtocells weren't going to make it, which brought lots of plangent cries from femtocell companies saying that no, really, 2010 was the year they were aiming at. I was sent a femtocell to try. (Thank you, Vodafone. Afraid I made little progress.) Have you seen a femtocell anywhere? Anywhere at all? (Mobile phone company employees and femtocell manufacturers excluded.) I think this can't be anything but correct.
11.5/16

Prediction 17: Mobile networks will tout phones on the basis that they let you contact your friends on Twitter rather than last year's favourite, Facebook via the data connection. (SMS will remain too expensive for Twitter to use outside the US.)

Facebook remained the powerful force and the reason people wanted to connect: plenty of phones were marketed on the basis that you'd be able to check Facebook; none that I saw on the basis on twittering. (A classic case of early adopter over-optimism about Twitter's penetration on my part though it has completely entered the language, having been used in a scene in Gavin and Stacey.) And Twitter re-introduced SMS updates outside the US. So wrong on both counts.
11.5/17

Linux

Prediction 18: Advocates will declare that 2010 is going to be "the year of desktop Linux" while the bugs are ironed out this year.

This was bound to fail. Linux advocates always say that this year is the one when desktop Linux is going to take off. Ubuntu got plenty of fans, especially for version 9.04 in April.
11.5/18

Prediction 19: But in fact the sales of netbooks running Linux will mean that it's best-selling year for desktop Linux ever.

Then again, this one was bound to succeed. Desktop Linux has had so few avenues for sale that it wasn't going to fail to have its best-ever year once a few machines with it were sold. Of course, I overlooked the popularity of Android, Google's mobile phone operating system, which is Linux. Had I forecast that mobile Linux would have a standout year, that would have been a really worthwhile prediction. Still:
12.5/19

Apple

Prediction 20: Let's start with a banker. No self-replicating worm for Mac OSX or the iPhone's OSX by the end of the year.

Correct. It always is, year after year.
13.5/20

Prediction 21: Snow Leopard will be released for sale in May 2009 this date means it will have been slightly more than the average delay for OSX releases since Leopard's release in October 2007 which leaves time for an announcement and release schedule.

Wrong. Wrongy, wrongy, wrongy wrong wrong. Snow Leopard was released in August 2009.
13.5/21

Prediction 22: Snow Leopard squashes down application sizes, and uses the graphics processing unit (GPU) to help processing. But why would you want to do that? It feels oddly as though Apple is imagining a Flash drive-based machine able to run Snow Leopard, with a comparatively weak processor that uses the GPU to hide the fact. Plus it owns a chip design company. Even so, I don't think it will offer a tablet computer. Or a netbook. Neither fits with its strategy which is all about the iPhone, and pricey computers.

Apple turned up its nose at the idea of a netbook. (Even if I did suggest that it should. Yes, accuse me of wanting it all ways.) It also didn't announce a tablet computer in 2009. (2010, ah, perhaps different.)
14.5/22

Prediction 23: Apple will charge for the Snow Leopard upgrade just as much as it has for previous upgrades.

Yes, it did charge but not as much as for previous upgrades. That's a miss.
14.5/23

Prediction 24: ZFS won't be built into the kernel for Snow Leopard; it'll be an optional install, for server honchos.

In fact, ZFS has disappeared from Apple builds. The cause seems to be intellectual property problems. Ah well. It would have been a nightmare.
15.5/24

Prediction 25: Steve Jobs will remain chief executive through the year. That might sound like an obvious prediction. It isn't.

Hmm technically, he was the chief executive, but he stepped aside to have a liver transplant and recuperate for six months. This prediction was made amid all the rumours of Jobs's illness at the tail-end of 2008. The rumours were that he would have to step down because of the condition (at that time, still a secret). My feeling was that it wasn't such a big thing. Turns out it was a Big Thing. I think this is half-right - no more.
16/25

Prediction 26: The iPhone hardware won't be updated before the autumn.

The iPhone 3GS was released in June, and Stephen Fry reviewed it in the same month. June is not autumn, not even in the southern hemisphere.
16/26

Prediction 27: The iPhone software will be updated to 3.x, which will bring copy-and-paste and photo messaging. About time.

It was, and it did. Finally.
17/27

Environment

Prediction 28: Oil prices are diving, but electricity is still not getting cheaper. Expect more companies even quite big ones to reduce their in-house server usage in favour of outsourced pay-per-process services offered by Microsoft, Google and Amazon.

This is the move to cloud computing, and it's one-way traffic at present. Do you know of anyone who has brought their computing back in-house from the cloud?
18/28

Free Our Data

Prediction 29: The government will take a deep breath and acknowledge that it must make a significant part of Ordnance Survey's data available for free unfettered reuse and will do it.

I was there at 10 Downing Street when Gordon Brown, flanked by Tim Berners-Lee (he invented the web, you know) and Martha Lane-Fox, announced precisely that. Actually, I'd have traded all the other predictions for this one but this one is a great one, a huge year-end bonus to the Free Our Data campaign and to everyone who is going to benefit from it.
19/29

Processing

Prediction 30: In 1992 I wrote a feature based on some analysts' predictions about how in five years we'd all be using speech-to-text input for our computers. We didn't. [but] by the end of the year, we should see programs able to turn the ad-hoc spoken to the written almost faultlessly.

Er, we didn't. From the revelation of the people behind the curtain at Spinvox, to the nearly-good-enough-but-not-perfectness of Dragon Dictate on the iPhone, we're still some way off perfect trasncription. (Believe me, we're always looking for one so we can turn our Tech Weekly podcast back into words for the hard-of-listening.)
19/30

So that's 19/30, or 63%. For comparison, in 2008, my predictions hit 20.5/30, or 68%. Look, what's a mark and a half between friends? Certainly not statistically significant. Basically, what I think we're seeing is that you can rely on me to be wrong about one-third of the time. You can decide whether that's better or worse than a weather forecaster. (The Met Office suggested there was a 1-in-7 chance this would be a cold winter in its long-range forecast.)

And what about the things I missed? The biggest was Google the rise of Android, and the announcement of its Chrome OS for netbooks. That's going to be huge this year, I think so come back for my predictions for 2010 next week. Oh, and tell me what other important events of 2009 I missed.

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.

Meeting in California in March will discuss possible field trials of schemes that would tackle climate change by reflecting sunlight or fertilising the ocean with iron

Scientists are to hold a high-level summit to discuss how the world could take emergency measures such as blocking out the sun to slow dangerous global warming.

Experts from around the world have been invited to attend the meeting in March in California, which will examine possible field trials of so-called geo-engineering schemes, such as pumping chemicals into the air and oceans to combat climate change.

The move follows the failure of the recent Copenhagen climate talks to set meaningful carbon reduction targets, and comes amid mounting concern that such controversial techniques may be the only way to curb rising temperatures.

Mike MacCracken, a global warming expert at the Climate Institute in Washington DC, who is organising the conference's scientific programme, said: "Most of the talk about these geo-engineering techniques say they should be saved until we get to an emergency situation. Well the people of the Arctic might say they are in an emergency situation now."

He added: "It is hard to see how mitigation [carbon cuts] can save the Arctic and losing the Arctic is a tremendous risk, not just for the region but for the rest of the world. So are there other ways to save it?"

Without significant cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, scientists say global average temperatures could rise by 4C within many of our lifetimes, which could devastate wildlife and threaten the water and food supplies of hundreds of millions of people.

Geo-engineering techniques, such as filling the sky with shiny dust to reflect sunlight, could curb such temperature rises without the need to restrict greenhouse gas emissions. The meeting aims to assess risks and benefits, establish ground rules for research and plan experiments that would be needed before a full scale geo-engineering attempt.

Calls for such research have increased as pessimism grows about the likely course of global warming.

In an influential report last year, the Royal Society, Britain's premier scientific academy, concluded that geo-engineering methods that block out the sun "may provide a potentially useful short-term back-up to mitigation in case rapid reductions in global temperature are needed". The society stressed that emissions reductions were the primary solution, but recommended international research and development of the "more promising" geo-engineering techniques.

Bob Watson, chief scientist at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, told the Guardian in November he backed such research. "We should at least be looking at it. I would see what the theoretical models say, and ask ourselves the question: how can we do medium-sized experiments in the field," Watson said. "I think it should be a real international effort, so it isn't just the UK funding it."

MacCracken said: "If there is going to be funding for this kind of research and you are someone in the UK government, then what kind of safeguards do you want to have in place that nothing can go wrong? Because if something does go wrong then you could be up before parliament or worse."

He added: "We also have to be mindful about how we communicate these ideas to the public because some of them can sound a little like Doctor Strangelove."

He said the March meeting was based on a landmark gathering of scientists involved in research with genetically modified (GM) organisms in 1975, which established voluntary guidelines to protect the public, and paved the way for breakthroughs such as the mass production of synthetic insulin in GM bacteria. The geo-engineering conference will take place at the same Asilomar centre, on the Monterey Peninsula.

Some scientists have criticised the upcoming conference because its funding is being arranged by a US group called the Climate Response Fund, which promotes geo-engineering research, and is run by Margaret Leinen, a marine biologist. Leinen's son, Dan Whaley, runs a firm called Climos, a company set up to profit from geo-engineering by selling carbon credits generated by fertilising ocean plankton with iron. Leinen was formerly chief scientific officer with Climos, but told Science magazine she has taken all possible steps to avoid a conflict of interest, and no longer holds a position, shares or intellectual property in the firm.

MacCracken said one aim of the conference was to judge which techniques could work on a global scale, which could count against ocean iron fertilisation. "We don't want to go out and test approaches that could not be scaled up enough to be useful. Would we risk doing anything in the ocean that would only have a small effect? Almost certainly not."

The push towards geo-engineering research has not pleased everyone. A recent report (pdf) for the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation by the ETC group called geo-engineering an act of "geo-piracy" and warned that the "the world runs a serious risk of choosing solutions that turn out to be new global problems".

There are also concerns about how to regulate geo-engineering and whether its techniques could be developed and unleashed by a single nation, or even a wealthy individual, without wide international approval.

The House of Commons science and technology committee will tomorrow open an inquiry into the regulation of geo-engineering, with David MacKay, chief scientist at the Department of Energy and Climate Change, among those due to give evidence.

From artificial trees to giant space mirrors: Possible geo-engineering solutions

Stratospheric aerosols

Spray shiny sulphur compounds into the high atmosphere to reflect sunlight. Relatively cheap and easy to do, though the chemicals gradually fall back to earth. The most likely option, though possible side effects include changes to global rainfall.

Ocean fertilisation

Dump iron into the sea to boost plankton growth and soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Hard to do on a significant scale, and doubts about how deep the plankton would sink have raised doubts about how long the carbon would be secured.

Cloud whitening

Fleets of sailing ships strung across the world's oceans could spray seawater into the sky to evaporate and leave behind shiny salt crystals to brighten clouds, which would then reflect sunlight back into space. Could be turned off at any time, but might interfere with wind and rain patterns.

Space mirrors

A giant orbiting sunshade in space to block the sun. More likely to be a collection of millions or even trillions of small mirrors rather than a giant orbiting parasol. Very expensive and impractical with current technology.

Artificial trees

Devices that use a chemical process to soak up carbon dioxide from the air. Technically possible but very expensive on a meaningful scale.

Author of official book taken aback by appearance of copycat title with 'naughty Viz ring'

The author and publisher of The Rough Guide to Sex are scratching their heads over a mystery title of the same name purportedly written by one Doug E Style.

The doppelg nger book appeared on Amazon in May 2009, seven months before James McConnachie's title which is a blend of social history and manual published by the Penguin-owned Rough Guides imprint was launched. Although the Doug E Style title was listed on Amazon and other books websites, it is not available for purchase, and there is no reference to it on the website of Artnik, the publisher Amazon accords it to. The listing has been removed from the Amazon site in the last 24 hours, but at the time of publishing this story could still be found at a number of other online booksellers.

"[It's] such a mystery," said McConnachie, who admitted to enjoying the "naughty Viz ring" to his rival's pseudonym. "I confess I have no idea what's going on, and if this is part of a bigger thing or just a one-off. Is it a rogue Amazon employee? A discontented editorial assistant? A hacker? The best part of the joke for me is that, pre-publication, Amazon's system had it ranked above my own, relatively real book."

McConnachie had considered using a pseudonym for his own book, which took more than three years to write, but decided against it. "I thought about it, just because the topic of sex gets so quickly turned into ribaldry and innuendo in this country ... and I wanted to spare myself the endless jokes: 'the research must have been fun' - that kind of thing," he said. "I also thought about using a pseudonym to protect books I may do in the future from forever afterwards being referred back to this one people seem to get so weirdly entranced by sex. But then I decided that I was bloody well going to write a book that I'd be proud of, so I wanted my own name on it." A review in the Observer this weekend called it "much more an intelligent compendium than a porn-inspired smut-fest", praising McConnachie's "good-spirited, intelligent approach".

A spokesperson for Rough Guides said the publisher was looking into the Doug E Style issue. "It did make us chuckle [but] essentially someone has used our name and brand, and that's our copyright which is quite a big deal," she said. "It's quite flattering that someone thought it was a great idea for a book but obviously we'd prefer that it's books we endorse that have our name and brand on them."

The publisher believes the Doug E Style book itself is not real. "As far as we are aware, this book doesn't exist," said the spokesperson. "It is not listed on the Artnik website. We can't imagine they ever intended to publish this book as there is no way they'd get away with using the Rough Guide brand. So did they put it up for a joke? Or to interfere with our book sales? As the publisher of the real Rough Guide to Sex we apparently can't do anything about taking down this entry even though it doesn't exist, because only the publisher can remove it."

Rough Guides said the next step would be to contact Artnik about the issue. Artnik, which describes itself as a popular culture publisher, did not respond to a request for comment.

Hackers target Baidu sparking retaliatory attack from Chinese hackers, but online battle puzzles internet users

Hackers calling themselves the "Iranian Cyber Army" paralysed China's biggest search engine this morning, sparking a bizarre online battle as Chinese hackers apparently retaliated by targeting Iranian sites.

Last month the group attacked Twitter, which has been used by Iranian opposition supporters. But Beijing and Tehran are allies and it was not immediately obvious why hackers targeted Baidu, which commands over 60% of the search market in China.

Some Chinese internet users speculated that it might be in retaliation against Chinese Twitter users who have used a #CN4Iran hashtag to express their support for reformists. Although Twitter is blocked in China, it is used by several thousand people there through proxies or virtual private networks (VPN).

"It's the same warning showed to twitter.com but I'm not very sure how you would connect this to #CN4Iran. Baidu is a very weird choice," said Michael Anti, an influential Chinese blogger.

The search engine is widely regarded as having good relations with the Beijing government and has never been associated with sensitive content. That led other internet users to speculate that foreign hackers were attempting to discredit Iran.

China's state-run People's Daily website reported that Baidu's website began redirecting to a site attributed to the Iranian Cyber Army at around 8am (midnight GMT). The People's Daily site published a screen grab showing a message reading "This site has been hacked by the Iranian Cyber Army", alongside a picture of the Iranian flag.

Other users said they could not open the Baidu site, but it was back up and running by around 11.30am. In a statement, the company said: "Services on Baidu's main website www.baidu.com were interrupted today due to external manipulation of its DNS (Domain Name Server) in the US. Baidu has been resolving this issue and the majority of services have been restored."

As news of the attack spread, other hackers targeted Iranian websites.

On the room98.ir website, beneath a large Chinese flag, a message from the "Chinese Honker Team" read: "This morning your Iranian Cyber Army intrusion [sic] our baidu.com Please tell your so-called Iranian Cyber Army Don't intrusion Chinese website about the United States authorities to intervene the internal affairs of Iran's response This is a warning!"

A message on the iribu.ir website read: "The People's Republic of China long live Oppose splitting Safeguarding unity."

Other targets reportedly included the website of a national wrestling team.

"They seem to be choosing them randomly the content is in Farsi, so they don't necessarily know what they are," said Anti.

Although the message left on Twitter by the Iranian Cyber Army suggested it was sympathetic to the government, experts told Reuters last month that it was unlikely Tehran was involved.

People have been waiting for Google to enter the online storage market with its rumoured game-changing Gdrive, but instead it has decided to start small .

The Official Google Blog and the Official Google Docs Blog have announced 1GB of free online storage for files that you are not obliged to convert it into one of the not-quite-Office-compatible Google Docs formats (ie Google documents, spreadsheets, and presentations). This is a miserly amount of space -- it's what Gmail offered at launch, and pathetic compared to the 25GB that Microsoft has been offering with its Windows Live SkyDrive -- but Google says "you can buy additional storage for $0.25 per GB per year", or $3.50 per GB per year for premium users.

Google's offering lacks either the capacity or the features of the DropBox service, which provides 2GB of space plus synchronisation, and there are plenty of alternatives such as Mozy, Sugarsync and Wuala. As mentioned on the Google Enterprise Blog, you can get your Google Docs storage synced separately via Memeo Connect, and backed up via Syncplicity, if you're a paying user. But it still looks a long way from being the fabled Gdrive, whatever TechCrunch says.

Since Google has been offering online storage with Google Docs and Picasa (and Google Storage) for some time, it's not clear why it's now entering the field with a market-trailing service.

However, a bit of speculation suggests the following. First, as Google says, you will be able to share files that Google Docs can't handle, presumably including avi and MP3. That is clearly useful. Second, Google Docs can be a problem for companies sharing Microsoft Office files, because the features you lose when you convert to Google's formats you can never get back. Google Docs storage will now let people share those files.

And third . Google is planning to launch ChromeOS, where computers run a Chrome browser but have no permanent local storage: everything is done "in the cloud". Google probably does not plan to tell those folks to go somewhere else to store their files, so at that point it will need an online storage offering.

However, don't take Google's suggestion -- "You might even be able to replace the USB drive you reserved for those files that are too big to send over email." -- too literally.

Yes, it's true, you might, if you've somehow failed to notice the odd dozen fast file-sharing services such as RapidShare, MegaUpload and YouSendIt. But if you only have one copy of data, you have no backup and could lose it at any second. This might happen sooner than Google going bust or disappearing into a hole in the ground (if another Great Quake hits California), because your Google account can be hacked or else Google can decide to terminate your ID for whatever reasons.

This also applies, of course, to Microsoft, Yahoo (including Flickr), and every other online storage and service provider.

So whichever online apps you use, you should also keep copies of all your data files either on your local hard drive, on CD/DVD or on a USB thumb drive, and for preference, all three. Emailing them via Gmail also works.

Do we still care about 'finishing' games?

There are few things in life more satisfying than finishing a long, difficult book. The payoff, both in reaching the conclusion of the narrative, and the sense of accomplishment at having fulfilled such a large commitment, can be immense. It would be remiss of me to brag about the heavyweight titles I've ticked off over the past few years, but my most recent undertaking was probably one of the most rewarding things I did all last year. Especially as it was mostly about whales.

And so, it was once the case with video games. Particularly before the advent of 'saving', the completion of even a simple game could take huge amounts of patience, effort and time. The ending, like those last pages of a book, was a key reason why we started playing in the first place. Sure, multiplayer and arcade style games still had their place, but fond 8, 16 and 32-bit memories consist more of completion and satisfaction than particular levels or tricky moments.

Over the past few years, however, the idea of a game as simply something to 'finish' has shifted somewhat. For starters, the availability of downloadable content means no story need ever end, as long as the makers think there's a paying audience. Also, the ubiquity of broadband means multiplayer gaming is now the standard, not the exception it once was. There is no real 'finish' to most MMORPGs.

Whereas once the only reason I wouldn't complete a game would be because it was too hard, now small piles of games lie scattered around my television unloved. They will never be finished. Bioshock. Assassin's Creed. Super Mario Galaxy. I even lost interest in Dragon Age, which captivated my imagination for a good three to four weeks. What incentive is there? The fact that I have more games available to me, and more of a higher quality, than I did as a child is certainly a mitigating factor. But is it just me that doesn't care whether or not I 'complete' a game anymore?

Taking Modern Warfare 2 as an example, what does it even mean to 'finish' the game? To complete the narrative 'For the Record' campaign? How about to complete it on the hardest setting? Or perhaps it should be to get 100% in all the different game modes? But then what about Prestige mode, and all that entails?

Remember some of the classic game endings from the days of gaming yore on this list. How many releases from the current generation of consoles would make it on there? Are endings something today's gamers care about?

Games have become so huge, that even story-led titles need scores of subplots and diversions to keep things interesting. It seems nowadays developers are stuck between a rock and a hard place - make a single, satisfying narrative and the game will be accused of being too short. Make something sprawling and huge, and any sense of momentum of the primary narrative is completely lost.

The cutscenes that rewarded finishing Fallout 3 and GTA 4 - two games I did actually manage to complete - were scant reward for the hours of time invested. The satisfaction felt paled in comparison to that with the games of my childhood. Has the great ending been consigned to gaming history's dustbin?

Proposed amendment to the Digital Economy Bill exempts search engines from copyright infringement claims from third parties Rupert Murdoch presumably included

Time for Rupert Murdoch to mobilise the lobbyists? Search engines would be exempted in UK law from any liability for copyright infringement, under a remarkable amendment (292) proposed to the Digital Economy Bill.

Conservative Lord Lucas is proposing a specific new clause so that

"Every provider of a publicly accessible website shall be presumed to give a standing and non-exclusive license to providers of search engine services to make a copy of some or all of the content of that website, for the purpose only of providing said search engine services ...

"A provider of search engine services who acts in accordance with this section shall not be liable for any breach of copyright..."

Lucas' amendment, Protection of search engines from liability for copyright infringement", would rewrite the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This could throw the cat amongst the pigeons on practices like aggregating MP3 deep links (for which Yahoo has been penalised even in China) - but would have the most profound impact on the ongoing issue of search engines' ability to crawl news publishers articles...

Indeed, it would, for example, give Google legal immunity with which to index News Corp content, settling that thorny topic once and for all. But all would not be lost for publishers who want to retain control. Lucas's amendment does make provision

The presumption (of having an automatic license) may be rebutted by explicit evidence that such a licence was not granted. Such explicit evidence shall be found only in the form of statements in a machine-readable file to be placed on the website and accessible to providers of search engine services.

In other words, Google would be free to copy everything - but a publisher blocking search spiders with a robots.txt file would be taken as withholding that right. An explicit "fair use" provision, which Google often cites against copyright-abuse claims, does not exist in UK law.

The wide-ranging Digital Economy Bill, whose glitziest clauses ask ISPs to warn subscribers accused of illegal downloading before throttling their bandwidth or kicking them offline, is currently going through House Of Lords committee stage.

During its passage, individual representatives are trying to pin their specific interests on to the bill. But there are opportunities for Lucas' amendment to fail. If it fails to win peers' backing, Lucas may yet withdraw it before the Lords decide on a version to pass to House Of Commons MPs, who may themselves remove it if Lucas does not.

It's one of 299 proposed amendments which are being heard in the Lords, with the next such session on Tuesday.