Hillary Clinton's call for Beijing to investigate Google cyber-attack claims could damage bilateral relations, China warns

US calls for greater internet freedom could damage bilateral ties, China warned today as it hit back at Hillary Clinton's critical speech.

The US secretary of state yesterday portrayed tackling censorship as a new priority for American foreign policy and called on Beijing to conduct a full and open investigation of Google's claims of a China-originated cyber attack targeting the emails of human rights activists.

"The US has criticised China's policies to administer the internet and insinuated that China restricts internet freedom," said foreign ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu, in a statement published on the ministry's website. "This runs contrary to the facts and is harmful to China-US relations.

"We urge the United States to respect the facts and cease using so-called internet freedom to make groundless accusations against China."

A commentary on the English language Global Times website, which is state-run, hit out at the "information imperalism" of the west.

Another piece on the China Daily website, also in English, was titled: Internet New shot in the arm for US hegemony.

Reuters reported that critical articles had appeared in other Chinese media but were removed from websites hours later.

The two countries face accumulating disputes over issues ranging from climate change to the Chinese currency which the US believes is under-valued to how to tackle Iran's nuclear programme.

But both have so far appeared keen to avoid raising tensions. China made little comment on the Google issue even when the US state department called for an explanation.

While Clinton's speech was unusually critical of China's policies, it was also cautious in tone. The US also appears to have held off from issuing a demarche a formal request for a response to the Google claims which it initially said would be issued early this week.

Ma's statement said each side should "appropriately handle rifts and sensitive issues, protecting the healthy and stable development of China-US relations".

Prior to Clinton's speech, the vice-foreign minister He Yafei, warned: "China and the United States especially the US must both carefully handle the issues of weapons sales to Taiwan, the Dalai Lama, and trade frictions."

Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University, said Clinton appeared to have "violated" Obama's diplomatic style.

"Clinton's appeal is close to a moral and ideological crusade, using language that is so wide and generalised. She even appealed to Chinese citizens to use American technology to cross the government's so-called great firewall," he said.

"I don't think the Chinese government and a large part of the Chinese public will accept this kind of language. It has made any possible compromise between Google and the Chinese government more difficult."

Shi said bilateral ties had improved over the previous 12 months, adding: "This month is already more difficult than most of last year. But relations still have quite a strong basis and I think if it goes too far both sides will take measures to restrain developments."

He described Clinton's speech as being "delivered for American public opinion ... The domestic situation is not so good."

Google's chief executive, Eric Schmidt, said yesterday the company hoped to find a way to maintain a presence in China but intended to stop censoring search results within "a reasonably short time".

Speaking before the foreign ministry statement, Niu Jun, an international studies expert at Peking University, told Reuters: "I think over the short haul [the Google issue] is going to go away because other problems that the US and China face are rather numerous."

"I think economic and trade issues are still more important. Both sides will find a positive solution through talks. But this is not necessarily just a simple commercial issue. I don't know what the solution will be. But it won't take a long time."

Organisational inertia means we're saddled with an ageing, vulnerable browser across our hospitals and key government departments. That's not good

Don't worry, said Microsoft a few days ago: the zero-day vulnerability that Chinese hackers exploited to infiltrate Google's network only affects Internet Explorer 6 (released in 2000) running on Windows XP (released in 2001).

The implication being that nobody uses that still, do they? Ed Bott, who has forgotten more about Microsoft than many people know, says in a vehement blogpost at ZDNet that:

"Any IT professional who is still allowing IE6 to be used in a corporate setting is guilty of malpractice. Think that judgment is too harsh? Ask the security experts at Google, Adobe, and dozens of other large corporations that are cleaning up the mess from a wave of targeted attacks that allowed source code and confidential data to fall into the hands of well-organized intruders. The entry point? According to Microsoft, it's IE6."

By Bott's measure, we'd have to conclude that there's a lot of malpractice going on in UK government. More than 750,000 workstations in the NHS and 500,000 in the Department of Work and Pensions use exactly that combination. (See the comment here from user "limbo".) The DWP installation of IE6/XP in 2002/3 took a total of three years, he suggests.

In fact it is still a requirement of any new web application being deployed in the NHS that it works on IE6/XP. You can see the 2008 machine requirements for the Primary Care Trust Prescription services report deployment, for example, which specifies machines that these days you'd have trouble finding outside eBay:

Client Machine Requirements for Report Deployment:

Windows: Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0, 5.5, 6.0; Netscape Navigator 4.7, 6.2; Acrobat Reader 3.0, 4.05, 5.0 (If PDF viewing/printing is required)

Mac OS: Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0, Netscape Navigator 6.2, Acrobat Reader 3.0, 4.05, 5.0 (If PDF viewing/printing is required)

OS/2: Netscape Navigator 4.61, Acrobat Reader 3.0 (If PDF viewing/printing is required)

Solaris: Netscape Navigator 6.2, Acrobat Reader 3.0, 4.0 (If PDF viewing/printing is required)

A year ago, Microsoft itself posted an NHS advisory recognising the problems around backwards compatibility with IE6, and noting that virtual machines (VMs) could do the job on newer machines, by hosting an instance of IE6/XP.

Neil Slater, who wrote the note, commented that he knew

"that the [NHS] IM&T Tools Project needs to remain focussed on the challenges you are facing today. One of these challenges is applications that require Internet Explorer 6 (IE6)."

He continues:

"Incompatibility of applications with Internet Explorer 7 (and soon 8) has been a much discussed problem for NHS Trusts planning upgrades to Windows Vista. Testing and migrating applications can be time consuming, and meanwhile users are unable to take advantage of the new capabilities and enhancements offered by the new OS. By delivering applications in a Virtual PC that runs Windows XP and IE6, IM&T teams can remove the barriers to OS upgrades. If you have an application that requires IE6, please get in touch. Whether it is a widely-deployed national application or a bespoke Trust-specific application, I would like to hear from you."

It's organisational inertia like this which is really dangerous. It's difficult enough of course to get the vast mass of people to upgrade their browsers; even more so to change their browsers to a different one. Yet the indications are that a significant proportion of individuals really do take an interest in what browser they're using: how else to explain that Firefox now looks like the most popular individual browser?

Part of the incentive for those upgrades must be personal security: Internet Explorer has had so many well-documented exploits targeting it that eventually the message permeates through to individuals.

The irony is that organisations like the NHS and DWP and all sorts of other government departments control personal information that is truly valuable, connected by systems which have woeful security holes. It's very easy to argue (and I'm sure that someone will) that the vast majority of those NHS and DWP workstations are not connected to the internet, and so don't face the same threats that you and I browsing the web would.

While that's true, it overlooks the point: it only takes one of those systems to be connected to the net, or to be forwarded an infected attachment over the intranet from someone perhaps on a completely safe machine and the entire network is, potentially, compromised. (A scenario like that is highly likely to have been the modus operandi at Google.)

The key question is, how do you solve that problem? How do you ensure that you won't be tied to outdated browsers and operating systems? Quite simple: write to web standards. Then all you need to do is upgrade (or move) to a browser that supports those standards.

And that's where the failing was when the NHS specification was written. In 2000, there were plenty of web standards around; IE6 didn't meet all of them. But because the NHS was a huge project, and the government wanted to use Microsoft, it went with IE6.

Short-term gain, long-term problem. Now we have to wonder if our medical records and national insurance data are safe against malware-driven intrusion on computers that use a decade-old browser which wasn't built for the hostile environment that the web has become.

Microsoft could make out that IE6/XP is the only system at risk (though it is now patching all versions of IE and Windows against the vulnerability - including a warning for the NHS). Unfortunately that "only" system turns out to be rather widely used.

It's ironic that this has happened in the week of the official launch of data.gov.uk which is a browser- and platform-independent approach to using all the (non-personal) data that the government has got squirreled away, and is now being encouraged to open up. Yesterday, the civil servants who've worked so hard at the launch of that site, who I discussed this issue with, were covering their faces in horror at the thought of it.

But then a ray of light dawned. "I know!" said one. "We'll replace them all with modern browsers running HTML5!"

Well, we can hope. In the meantime, let's hope that Chinese hackers just don't think our health records or pension or national insurance details are that interesting. Fingers crossed.

• Takeover gets EU approval after nine months
• Sun chief says employees need to 'let go'

Oracle's $7.4bn takeover of software rival Sun Microsystems looks set to go through after European regulators finally gave their approval to the deal.

Nine months after the surprise acquisition was announced, EU competition commissioner Neelie Kroes has said she is satisfied that the deal holds no potential danger to the software market.

"I am now satisfied that competition and innovation will be preserved on all the markets concerned," she said in a statement.

"Oracle's acquisition of Sun has the potential to revitalise important assets and create new and innovative products."

The deal, first announced in April last year, will see the world's second largest software company take control of its smaller rival. In the process, Oracle will gain access to a suite of products including the Java programming language and business-oriented Solaris operating system.

The acquisition had come in for criticism from some campaigners, who felt that Oracle's power would threaten free competition particularly in the database market.

Monty Widenius, who sold database company MySQL to Sun in 2008 for $1bn, was among the chief objectors - arguing that Oracle would kill off open source products like MySQL to protect its existing sales.

"I just don't buy it that Oracle will be a good home for MySQL," he said in December, adding that competition "not only scares, but actually hurts Oracle every day".

But after a series of hearings and reports of a rift between regulators on either side of the Atlantic, the takeover now has the seal of approval from Washington and Brussels. Although authorities in Russia and China still have to give it their blessing, executives appear confident that affairs will now be completed in short order.

In a memo to staff, Sun chief executive Jonathan Schwartz told his employees that they had to prepare for the change and praised Oracle's management.

"With nine months of getting to know them, I've found Oracle to be truly remarkable, led by remarkable people," he said. "I've seen their commitment and focus, now they need yours."

He added that staff should "let go" of any resistance they have to the deal, or attachment they have to Sun's particular values.

"Every employee needs to emotionally resign from Sun," he wrote. "Go home, light a candle, and let go of the expectations and assumptions that defined Sun as a workplace. Honour and remember them, but let them go."

For food writer Simon Majumdar, his BlackBerry is as much of a lifesaver as his dhal

What's your favourite piece of technology, and how has it improved your life?
It's my BlackBerry Storm I absolutely love it. For me it's an iPod and iPhone killer. It's much better for my emails, and I just find it easier to use. It's not as intuitive as the iPhone, but once you get used to its idiosyncrasies, it's much more forgiving.

When was the last time you used it, and what for?
Today, to read the questions before doing this interview, while I was cooking my lifesaving dhal. I always keep it in the kitchen with me because I hate being too far away from my email and I'm never far away from my kitchen.

What additional features would you add if you could?
The one thing that I find very weak on it is the web browsing it uses 3G rather than Wi-Fi, and from that point of view its very slow. The iphone is much quicker.

Do you think it will be obsolete in 10 years' time?
I think it will be obsolete in 10 weeks time all these things, the moment you buy them they almost are, aren't they?

What always frustrates you about technology in general?
It's never as quick as you think it should be and it always goes wrong. Macs, when they work well, are fantastic, and when they don't you just want to hurl them out of a window. When technology fails, it more frustrating than when we had no technology.

If you had one tip about getting the best out of new technology, what would it be?
Patience. Always be patient particularly when you travel as much as I do.

Do you consider yourself to be a luddite or a nerd?
Well, when I'm talking to nerds I consider myself to be a bit of a luddite; when I'm talking to luddites, I consider myself to be a bit of a nerd. I can get by I'm the halfway house.I know more than the lasst generation, but not as much as the next generation.

What's the most expensive piece of technology you've ever owned?
Probably my Macbook, which cost me about 1,000. I'm not one who buys big televisions or anything like that.

Mac or PC, and why?
Mac partly because of my background in publishing, and partly because as someone who doesn't really know all the ins and outs of computing, Mac is more intuitive.

Do you still buy physical media such as CDs and DVDs, or do you download? What was your last purchase?
I download I haven't bought a CD for some years. My last DVD purchase was The Best of The Larry Sanders Show, with which I'm obsessed it's the best television programme ever made.

Robot butlers a good idea or not?
Absolutely a good idea, as long as they can learn how to talk.

What piece of technology would you most like to own?
A top-of-the-range induction hob for the kitchen one of those instant hot, instant cold ones. I have odd dreams about them, they're just such fantastic things.

Simon Majumdar is a food blogger at doshermanos.co.uk and has just published his first book, Eat My Globe.

Developers are being sought to produce iPhone-style apps as Kindle faces Apple tablet challenge in ebook market

Amazon is inviting developers to build iPhone-style apps on its Kindle ebook reader, in what is seen as a pre-emptive strike against the expected launch next week of an Apple tablet computer.

Developers are promised the capacity to "build and upload active content that will be available in the Kindle Store later this year". The first developers will be allowed to join a test programme a limited beta from next month.

The Kindle development kit page is soliciting email addresses for applicants to join the beta programme. It offers the same 70% royalties available from Apple minus "delivery fees" for using the Kindle's Whispernet wireless system, which gives Kindle owners in the US free access to shop for books and soon, presumably, apps.

Early releases are said to include an active Zagat restaurant guide, word games and puzzles from Sonic Boom, and games from Electronic Arts.

Amazon also looks to be following Apple by planning to filter apps through a set of guidelines, unlike Google's Android app platform which has no restrictions. It says that it will ban "voice over IP functionality, advertising, offensive materials, collection of customer information without express customer knowledge and consent, or usage of the Amazon or Kindle brand in any way", but adds that it will "refine" these guidelines during the beta.

This is the second time in as many days that Amazon has improved its Kindle offering, while Apple appears to be getting ready to move into Amazon's territory: there are widespread reports that it is negotiating with publishers to carry their content on its forthcoming tablet.

Yesterday Amazon doubled the royalties available through its Digital Text Platform, which lets authors and small publishers upload books for sale on the Kindle, again to an Apple-style 70%-30% split. Books have to meet several conditions including being priced less than $9.99, and at least 20% less than the physical version to qualify for the higher royalty rate. Last Friday it opened Digital Text Platform to authors outside the US. It has also, without public fanfare, allowed books to be published on DTP without digital rights management, a source of some contention in the past.

The requirements of the Whispernet system have so far limited the Kindle's international spread: since last October, you can buy a version that will work in the UK, but it comes from Amazon US, priced in dollars, and has book prices raised to compensate for higher wireless costs.

Readers wanting to split the difference between Amazon and Apple can already buy a Kindle app for the iPhone.

A day after the launch of the data.gov.uk webstie, the government has ruled out supplying postcode data to developers

Web developers have cried foul after the government appeared to rule out the possibility of a free copy of the Postcode Address File (PAF) which contains geographical data about the locations of every Royal Mail delivery address in the UK being made available to non-profit and community websites.

Coming the day after the launch of data.gov.uk, a website which brings together more than 2,500 datasets from across central government for unrestricted reuse including commercial exploitation disappointed developers have said that the rejection looks like "it's back to government business as normal".

Although Gordon Brown has pushed through a scheme which will make some Ordnance Survey mapping data free from April, postcode data has been harder to come by. The release of that would have to be approved by the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, headed by Lord Mandelson.

For now that seems to have been turned down. In a response to a petition lodged with the No.10 website which said that "We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to encourage the Royal Mail to offer a free postcode database to non-profit and community websites" the government has passed the buck,, saying that deciding whether a copy of the PAF is provided under such terms is down to the Royal Mail and the postal regulator Postcomm.

"As access to the PAF is governed under a condition of licence, Postcomm monitors its practice. Royal Mail's licence obliges the company to make access to the PAF available on reasonable terms," says No.10. "Postcomm allows the company to make a reasonable specified profit margin and monitors its accounts."

In 2005-06, the latest year for which figures have been made available, sales of PAF generated about 18m and a profit of less than 2m.

The PAF or its simpler version, PostZon, which has geographical details for the UK's 18m are frequently used by web services to provide location-based information about users' surroundings. Last September the PostZon file was leaked on Wikileaks but developers shunned it on the basis that they could be prosecuted for using it without a licence.

Harry Metcalfe, a web developer who attended the launch of data.gov.uk and who has also previously built applications that used data derived from PAF and received a lawyers' letter from the company telling his company to cease and desist said the government's approach to PAF and postcode data was outdated.

On the blog for the ernestmarples site which was sued by RM - he wrote:

"The problem is that the licence was formed to suit industry. To suit people who resell PAF data, and who use it to save money and do business. And that's fine I have no problem with industry, commercialism or using public data to make a profit."

"But this approach belongs to a different age. One where the only people who needed postcode data were insurance and fulfilment companies. Where postcode data was abstruse and obscure. We're not in that age any more."

But there are signs that the PAF's elusive paywall will not last for long. Nigel Shadbolt, professor of computer science at Southampton University who together with Sir Tim Berners-Lee was instrumental in opening up government data for the new data.gov.uk website, tweeted that there is "Still much to do" upon seeing the failure of the petition.

Shadbolt and Berners-Lee have been making the case inside government since June last year that data collected by government-owned bodies has in effect been paid for already by the public - and that releasing it to them enhances the economic benefits and opportunities far more than any monetising by government itself.

The No.10 response to the petition notes that the government is the only shareholder in RM, and notes that it maintains an "arms-length" relationship. But it then recognises the potential usefulness of the PAF:

"The Postcode Address File (PAF) dataset was designed and engineered by Royal Mail and is owned and managed by the company as a commercial asset of the business (containing around 29 million addresses in the UK). Royal Mail developed the PAF with the primary purpose to aid the efficient delivery of mail, though over the years the PAF has come to be used for a number of purposes other than the postal purpose for which it is designed and was established. Indeed, many organisations, including new postal operators, banks, insurance companies and others offering to deliver goods to your door, use the information held on the database. The PAF is also used in other business processes, including mailing list "cleaning", anti-fraud activities and various customer services. "

It adds that

"Royal Mail invests significantly in collating and maintaining the Postcode Address File (PAF) and this cost is recovered through an independently regulated licensing arrangement. It would of course be very time-consuming and costly for anyone to try to replicate the list, so Royal Mail licenses PAF data, for a fee, allowing others to use it. "

However figures for the precise amount of investment made by RM in the maintenance of PAF are notoriously difficult to find.

There is understood to be some resistance within government to Berners-Lee and Shadbolt's manifesto - which mirrors that of the Free Our Data campaign run by Guardian Technology since March 2006, arguing that government-collected datasets including those of government-owned organisations like Royal Mail and Ordnance Survey should be made available for free to all users.

Even with Royal Mail it seems that the PAF's licensing is a problem. As a commenter called Chloe points out in a comment to one of Tom Watson MP's posts about RM and PAF, "I work for royal mail and i know my managers use google to lookup incomplete addresses and not the royal mails own software because it is more accurate and up to date and does not have to be licensed to each computer in their office."

Before our digital lives disappear too far into 'the cloud', we must wrest it from corporate and governmental control

The internet, our relationship with it, and our culture are about to undergo a change as profound and unsettling as the development of web 2.0 in the last decade, which made social media and search Google and YouTube, Facebook and Twitter mass, global phenomena. The rise of "cloud computing" will trigger a battle for control over a digital landscape that is only just coming into view.

The internet we have grown up with is a decentralised network of separate computers, with their own software and data. Cloud computing may look like an extension of this network-centric logic but, in fact, it is quite different.

As cloud computing comes of age, our links to one another will be increasingly routed through a vast shared "cloud" of data and software. These clouds, supported by huge server farms all over the world, will allow us to access data from many devices, not just computers; to use programs only when we need them and to share expensive resources such as servers more efficiently. Instead of linking to one another through a dumb, decentralised network, we will all be linking to and through shared clouds.

Which raises the question: whose clouds will these be?

Cloud computing is bringing with it "cloud capitalism". Companies will make money from organising these clouds for us. Apple already is, with its iTunes cloud of music and its cloud of thousands of third-party apps to run on the iPhone. Cloud computing will also bring a kind of cloud culture: increasingly, we will express ourselves through these clouds of films, videos, pictures, books, stories and music.

But cloud capitalism and cloud culture will not always be in harmony. The best way to understand the coming conflicts over the cloud is to look at the issues already being raised by some of the earliest applications. China, where Google is belatedly standing up for the principles of a cloud free from government interference, is the most immediate example.

But Google also has a more pragmatic, commercial motive. Gmail is a cloud service. Users do not store their messages on their own computers but in a remote cloud run by Google. (The Guardian newspaper recently junked its own, costly email service in favour of Google's enterprise-level Gmail offering.) If Google cannot maintain the integrity of the Gmail cloud, it does not have a secure service to sell. There will be many battles of this kind in years to come where corporations, citizens and governments struggle for control of the cloud.

An equally significant battle involving Google's influence over the cloud is being played out in a nondescript courtroom in New York, where the company has been defending its plans, devised with several university libraries, to create a cloud of more than 10m digital books. The question is: on what terms will Google make these available to readers and recompense their authors and publishers?

This shared cultural cloud will come at a price that is difficult to calculate. Google will acquire considerable power over the future of publishing and books which books to include in the cloud and which not.

The French and German governments warned the court that the company's plans would create an "uncontrolled, autocratic concentration of power in a single corporate entity" that would threaten a fundamental human right: the free flow of ideas through literature. Google's peers are also opposed. The Open Book Alliance, which includes Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo, wants to create its own cloud of digitised books.

This dispute is a template for many others to come. Governments will also have their own views about these clouds, seeing in them threats to national culture (the French response); threats to security (the Chinese response) or threats to competition (the response of the US department of justice).

Thus, just as it is emerging, open cloud culture is threatened on all sides by vested interests of traditional media companies, hungry new monopolists and governments that are intent of reasserting control over the unruly web. The "netizen" beneficiaries of open cloud culture are far less well funded and organised than its opponents. That is why before cloud capitalism becomes entrenched, there should a clear statement of principles to defend the public, open cloud against the encroachments of both corporations and governments.

I propose five main points towards that manifesto, an Open Cloud Declaration:

The first main threat to open cloud culture is homogeneity: we do not want a digital sky dominated by standardised clouds branded Google and Apple. The first principle should be variety: we need public clouds, such as the World Digital Library being created by a set of leading museums around the world and open, social clouds such as Wikipedia.

The second threat to open cloud culture is corporate control. To counter that, we need new approaches to regulate these commercial clouds, to limit their power and to expose them to competition, ensuring people have a diversity of potential suppliers of cloud-based services. Personal information stored in clouds needs to be safe and clearly to belong to the person rather than the cloud. The emergence of cloud capitalism will need to be matched by new forms of media regulation.

The third threat is the rearguard action being fought by industrial-era media companies to prevent clouds forming. At the heart of this is copyright. Cloud culture will breed creativity only if people can easily collaborate, share and create. New forms of licensing are required, building on open access and creative commons, which are designed to allow sharing but also to channel rewards to creative artists.

The fourth threat comes from attempted government control of the cloud on grounds of state security, public decency or economic necessity. These threats do not just come from authoritarian regimes in the east, but also from western liberal democracies where governments lack the courage to stand up for the open web. To counter that we need to find ways to support online activists in authoritarian regimes with ways around firewalls and to connect them with potential supporters outside.

The fifth, and most significant challenge to a truly open, public web is inequality. When people from the poorest countries arrive in the digital world, as many million will in this decade through the mobile web, they will find people in the rich countries a long way ahead. For cloud culture genuinely to promote global cultural relations, we should focus on: open source development of tools that develop capabilities outside the dominant regions; creating more initiatives like Wikipedia that are public, but diverse and global in reach; promoting more global exchanges such as Kiva which allow resources and skills in one place to be matched with need in another.

The potential for a more cosmopolitan, open cloud, which can connect hundreds of millions of people all over the world in shared endeavours, will only be realised if we tackle these threats. We are entering a new, exciting and yet dangerous phase in the web's development. Huge untold opportunities will exist for anyone connected to the web and by the end of this decade that will be several billion people to draw on shared culture resources and add to them through their own creative expression.

Yet if we are not vigilant, we will find our culture will belong to corporations and governments, rather than us. That is why we need an Open Cloud Declaration, a set of principles for a global campaign to keep open a large, public, diverse space for clouds in all possible shapes and sizes.

This is an edited version of an essay written for Counterpoint, the independent thinktank of the British Council. "Cloud Culture: The Future of Global Cultural Relations", a Counterpoint pamphlet by Charles Leadbeater, will be published on 8 February.

Google's 360-degree images now include iconic castles, country houses and outstanding landscapes

Google have teamed up with the National Trust to take Steet View off-road in the UK. The Street View service, launched last March, now includes 19 specifically chosen castles, country houses and outstanding landscapes viewable in 360-degree images.

In Wiltshire, Street View ploughs into a field to take a peek at the Avebury Stones, while in Warwickshire it wanders around the bountiful garden path of the Baddesley Clinton manor house. In Cambridgeshire Street View goes on a long, meandering walk around Wicken Fen, bumping into fellow ramblers as it goes.

Google captured the images using the Google Trike (pictured), a three-wheeler bicycle with a 360-degree camera strapped to its rear, making previosously inaccessible paths, bridleways and castle roofs fair game for Google's all-seeing eye. The trike covered 125 miles while collection the National Trust images, moving at an average speed of two miles an hour.

The National Trust selections are the latest off-road attractions to be added to Street View's portfolio, following the recent incorporation of 19 UNESCO Heritage sites and 29 historic attractions chosen by Visit Europe.

40Mb-a-second BT service to reach 10m homes by 2012
Virgin criticises speed and cap on usage

BT is launching its next-generation super-fast broadband service next week with a claim to have undercut Virgin Media's prices, sparking a war of words with its bitter rival.

The next generation of super-fast internet connections are more than five times faster than the basic 8Mb connections enjoyed by most people today and enable whole music albums to be downloaded in seconds and HD movies in just a few minutes.

BT is spending 1.5bn putting a new fibre network within the reach of 10m homes by the time of the Olympics in 2012. It will have 500,000 homes connected by the end of next month and 4m by the end of this year. Virgin Media, meanwhile, has already upgraded its existing cable network, which passes 12.5m addresses, and launched its own ultra-high speed offering.

From 25 January, BT will start selling its super-fast broadband service, called BT Infinity, to customers who have already had their lines upgraded, starting at 19.99 a month plus 11.54 line rental. That is less than the basic 28 a month plus 11 line rental charged by Virgin Media.

The cable firm, however, hit back at BT's pricing, accusing the company of misleading consumers because Virgin Media's service is actually faster. BT's service runs at 40Mb per second while Virgin Media's is 50Mb per second.

"We're not sure why people in the UK would want to wait for BT's 40Mb service which hasn't launched yet, when they can already get Virgin Media's great value 50Mb service," said a spokeswoman. "Last summer we completed the roll-out of our next-generation service to 12.5m homes and people throughout the country are already enjoying all the fantastic things you can do online with the UK's fastest broadband service."

Virgin Media also pointed out that the 19.99 basic version of BT Infinity comes with a 20GB a month usage cap. That is lower than the fair usage policy of many residential broadband providers offering services at much lower speeds who typically restrict users to downloading no more than 40GB a month. It could also seriously impinge on broadband users as 20GB is only about 50 hours of on-demand television while a single HD movie is about 5GB. Virgin Media does not have a monthly usage cap on its 50Mb service.

But the head of BT's consumer business, John Petter, responded that super-fast broadband is not just for people who download a lot of data such as computer game players or film fans it will also appeal to people who just want to continue to use the web as they do now, but have much faster access. "There will be a group of customers out there who just want their existing broadband usage to be seamless," he said.

BT has removed its monthly usage cap for people willing to pay 24.99 a month for super-fast broadband. Customers on this version of BT Infinity will also benefit from upload speeds of 10Mb a second meaning they will be able to send large files to other people quickly. In stark contrast, Virgin Media's upload speed even on its 50Mb service is 1.5Mb, though it is currently testing 10Mb.

Petter refused to give any prediction for how many people the company expects to sign up to its super-fast service but stressed "we expect this to be extremely successful".

BT Infinity currently relies upon Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) technology essentially running a new fibreoptic network to the green roadside cabinets that dot the country and then using traditional copper lines to connect individual houses. But BT is also testing fibre to the premise (FTTP) technology which is capable of speeds of more than 100Mb. BT reckons 75% of its target of 10m homes and businesses by mid 2012 will use FTTC, with the remaining 25% having access through FTTP.

Google has suggested that the advertising market is beginning to return to normal, after announcing profits of nearly $2bn for the last three months of what it called a "rollercoaster year".

Announcing its latest quarterly financial results, the company said that it had received a substantial boost in the period from October to December 2009 - pushing profit for the quarter to $1.97bn.

That figure came on the back of a 17% year on year growth in revenues, up to $6.67bn from $5.7bn during the same period in 2008. Led chief executive Eric Schmidt to make an optimistic assessment of the current state of affairs.

"Given that the global economy is still in the early days of recovery, this was an extraordinary end to the year," he said. "Our performance in 2009 underscored the strength of our management team, the resilience of our business model and the pace of innovation within our product and engineering teams, which continued unabated throughout the downturn."

While profit was higher than Wall Street analysts had expected, however, there was disappointment that revenue growth was not higher - an example, perhaps, of Google suffering from the weight of expectation.

"All of those things they report at a basic level were fine," Martin Pyykkonen, senior analyst at Janco Partners, told Reuters. "The reason the stock is down is that it wasn't a blowout. I think the stock will recover. I don't think it will fall through the floor."

In Britain, one of Google's most important markets outside the US, revenues came to $772m - the same proportion of the company's income as it was this time a year ago. At that point, the internet giant was pushing through the deepest trough of the recession - cutting jobs and axing new projects.

In a conference call with reporters and analysts, Google executives said that they were now investing heavily in the future, with substantial efforts in search, the social web, mobile phones and the company's suite of business offerings.

Asked about the company's conflict with the Chinese government - which some have worried could end up with the company frozen out of the world's biggest new market - Schmidt remained relatively quiet.

"In a reasonably short time we'll be making some changes there," he said, indicating that the company would press ahead with its threat to uncensor the Chinese version of its search engine in protest at attempts by local hackers to break into its systems.

Shares in Google dropped 5% in after hours trading.

The world's biggest phone maker takes fight to Apple and Google with free apps

Nokia is taking the dramatic step of making its satellite navigation software free to current and future owners of its smartphones as the world's largest mobile phone manufacturer intensifies its fight against Apple's iPhone and handsets using Google's Android platform.

The Finnish company, which makes roughly four out of every 10 phones
sold worldwide, spent 6.5bn ( 5.6bn) on map firm Navteq in 2007, but
from today will let anyone with a recently introduced GPS-enabled
Nokia device such as its X6 or 5800 - download its navigation
service and maps for free from its Ovi mobile application store.

To date Nokia has sold more than 80m compatible handsets worldwide and users of older devices such as the N97 will be offered the chance of
downloading the service over the next few weeks. Contrary to initial
expectations, Nokia is not, however, allowing users of one of its
earliest smartphones - the N95 - free access to its satnav service.

Full satnav direction services for both road users and pedestrians will be available across 70 countries from today, with extensive maps available in more than 100 others.

The move is likely to infuriate satnav companies such as Garmin and TomTom, which charge up to 100 for in-car satellite navigation systems and will see their market effectively undercut by Nokia. It will also threaten companies that currently charge for downloadable satnav mobile phone applications such as US-based ALK Technologies, whose CoPilot UK product currently costs 26.99 for iPhone users.

Nokia executive vice president Anssi Vanjoki denied that the decision to give its satnav service away for free is a defensive move against companies such as Google, which are increasingly encroaching on the company's turf.

"It is a very offensive move if you will," he said. "We are not talking one product for one country, we are talking map coverage in 183 countries, launching simultaneously globally in 76 countries with 46 languages and with millions of devices already out there, plus with all of our new products being equipped with this. So it does not sound too much like defence to me."

But giving away sophisticated turn-by-turn car and pedestrian satnav direction services to entice customers to choose one of its smartphones over devices such as the iPhone and Google's Nexus One is symptomatic of Nokia's desperation to get back into the high-end mobile phone market.

The company has seen its share of the lucrative smartphone market come under sustained attack. It was slow to create a viable touchscreen rival to the iPhone while bitter rival Rim has successfully moved its BlackBerry line of mobile devices from the boardroom to the classroom, enticing a new generation of younger users. There have also been successful touchscreen launches by Samsung, which has already overtaken Nokia in the UK market. After more than two years of development, Google's Android platform is starting to become a major force in the mobile market.

Google recently unveiled its first own-branded Android device, the Nexus One, to rave reviews. The internet company already has an extensive maps business and offers turn-by-turn directions in the US.

Outside North America it relies upon mapping data from Tele Atlas, owned by TomTom, and is not able to give full satnav services. But it is rumoured to be building up its own maps database outside the US with a view to launching turn-by-turn direction services at some point.

Vanjoki also denied that the dramatic volte-face suggests that the company now thinks Navteq is worthless. "Quite the contrary," he said. "Right now, what is happening is we are unleashing all this power based on the Navteq acquisition which will help Nokia in three different ways: first of all this becomes a tremendous average sales price defender for our products because it will be completely unique there is nothing similar available from anyone else; secondly this will be a demonstration of the capabilities and precision of the Navteq maps, so their business will be improved; and thirdly, there are all these developers that are developing applications based on the quality of the maps and then we can distribute those through Ovi store which is another business opportunity for us."

Nokia is also making its maps available to any third party developer that wishes to build applications on top of them. These applications will be sold through the Ovi store and already Nokia is offering its customers free Lonely Planet and Michelin Guide information on its maps.

"It becomes a giant environment for mash-ups," Vanjoki said. "Where people can deliver new applications and immediately they will have a huge customer base available to them".

Nokia's maps service also allows people to share their location with friends on Facebook, adding pictures and status updates. Its maps also include information about local attractions and events within walking distance of a user's location through a deal with San Francisco-based local information aggregator Wcities, which has data for over 350 cities worldwide.

Nokia will still allow other satnav companies to use Navteq's data for their services. Navteq's maps, for instance, are used by Garmin.

This article was amended on 21 January 2010. The original said that the N95 handset was among those able to download the navigation service. This has been corrected.

In the beginning there was Mosaic, and then there was Netscape Navigator, and from August 1995 there was Internet Explorer and the first browser wars began. By 2004 IE had a market share of around 90%. There have always been alternatives: Safari (mostly on Macs), Opera (especially on mobile phones) and Firefox, from Mozilla, a collaborative, not-for-profit foundation. All have their champions and the battle between them has been good for the web, improving speed, stability and security, and keeping the internet out of the hands of one corporate giant. Microsoft has been the loser in the second browser war, which is now under way. In December 2009, Firefox 3.5 is believed to have overtaken Internet Explorer 7 as the most popular single version of a browser though IE in all its forms still has about two-thirds of the market. This week the French and German governments called on web users to drop Microsoft's browser entirely to protect security. The recent assault by Chinese hackers on Google apparently exploited a weakness in some versions of IE although Microsoft, not surprisingly, denies there is a particular problem with its browser and argues that its rivals are less secure. The dispute comes at a tricky time for the company: Google is busy promoting its Chrome browser, which until now has been a minority player but is growing fast. The battle is on to offer the public the safest and most reliable way of working online and all free of charge. It is a contest from which web users can only gain.

Japanese electronics firm puts back launch of motion-sensitive games controller for PlayStation 3 by six months

Sony has delayed the launch of its motion-sensitive rival to Nintendo's highly successful Wii games console by six months and it will not now hit the shops until the autumn.

The delay means that the Japanese gaming giant now has only a slim timing advantage over Microsoft, which is due to launch its revolutionary hands-free gaming interface codenamed Project Natal for the Xbox 360 in time for Christmas.

But it does mean that by the festive season, video gamers will have the choice of three different devices, all of which will use motion-sensitive control, giving players a far more interactive experience.

The news is an obvious setback for Sony, which was plagued by delays when it launched the PlayStation 3 three years ago. It also comes after the company last week admitted that the launch of hotly anticipated racing game Gran Turismo 5 has had to be delayed yet again. It has been more than five years since the last instalment of the popular franchise.

But the company stressed that the decision to delay the launch of its new controller was not linked to any particular hardware or design fault. Instead the company wants to ensure that there are enough games available that can use the new controller before launching it on the market.

The success of the Nintendo Wii, launched in 2006, has revolutionised the games market. Allowing players to ditch their joysticks and traditional button-heavy controllers in favour of a wand they can wave at their TV screens has helped widen the appeal of video games, taking consoles out of the teenage bedrooms and back into the living room.

Sony unveiled its answer to the Wii, a motion-sensitive controller for the Playstation 3, at the E3 electronics show in Los Angeles last summer. It uses a television-top camera to track a wireless controller held by the player. Sony claims it can track actions with "sub-millimeter accuracy".

Microsoft's Project Natal, however, is more ambitious and does not require players to hold a controller at all. Microsoft maintains it can track a player's movements in three dimensions. It can also recognise faces and react to voice prompts, greatly expanding the range of actions which software developers can use in their games.

Xbox 360/Wii/PS3; 29.99; cert 12+; Warner Bros Interactive

If the third instalment of the Scene It? series were actually a film, it would be a straight-to-DVD, B-movie affair. Bright Lights! Big Screen! lacks some of the glitz and glamour that its name suggests and doesn't live up to the billing of its predecessors, but it will provide a fun evening or two.

Scene It? Bright Lights! Big Screen! is a fairly standard movie trivia game, with a variety of puzzle types for up to four people. Some of the puzzles are better than others, the highlights being the mode where a star is obscured behind bubbles and another in which a scene is recreated by pixellated characters. With the ability to buzz in ahead of your friends on certain puzzles, and the negative points mode to punish wrong answers, there is a reasonable competition to be had.

The star system is another element that works in this genre. The awards range from quickest correct answer to worst overall player and, once you've collected two of them, they can be traded in for the chance to win a 1.5-point score bonus for the next round. But make a though and you could be handing someone else your bonus. Unfortunately, this is where the praise ends.

The host is a constant irritant and his biggest contribution to the party is the option to switch him off. His lip-synching is off, his jokes are awful and, frankly, I'd rather listen to the sound of a cat dragging its claws down a blackboard. While being run over. The buzz-in element of the game makes for the most competitive puzzles, but is let down by the difficulties in working out who actually buzzed first.

The major flaw with this game is the removal of the online mode which was present in Box Office Smash, but not in this latest release. Being a party game it only really works with two or more people so, without the option to challenge other film buffs online, this game will only come out when your friends do. It's a real oversight.

Overall, Scene It? Bright Lights! Big Screen! is a decent one-off party game, but too fraught with annoyances to keep you coming back. Like a B-movie, it could be fun for a rental, but this sequel is not quite up there with the Hollywood royalty.

Rating: 2/5

The UK video games industry is threatened by international competition, and is seeking the same kind of support as the film industry

The great and good from the games industry Ian Livingstone from Eidos, Chris Deering from Codemasters, David Braben of Elite fame gathered in Whitehall, London, today for the Westminster eForum, to discuss what the games industry wants the government to include in its pre-budget report next week.

And while some MPs turned up including former defence minister Tom Watson, and shadow minister for the creative industries Ed Vaizey the star turn was a no-show. Keith Vaz MP, widely known for his anti-gaming views, had to be unavoidably elsewhere. Reporters looking for an attention-grabbing headline and a bit of Vaz-bashing (or not, depending on what he said) were disappointed.

The games industry is undoubtedly important to the UK economy, and several speakers at the eForum said it was bigger than the film industry. The problem is that it is in relative decline. Indeed, it looks as though the UK currently the world's third-largest producer of computer and video games will be overtaken by Canada and France, both of which provide tax breaks to games developers. It could sink to sixth.

TIGA, the independent game developers' association, has been asking for similar tax credits to be offered in the UK. Our developers can compete with the best in the world when the playing field is fair, claimed TIGA chief executive Richard Wilson, but it isn't fair. "The creative industries need the chance to flourish and grow," he said. "A tax break against production costs could create an extra 3,500 jobs, and generate an additional 400m for the Treasury over five years."

Wilson pointed out that the film industry in the UK gets 100m a year in tax credits.

There are also two other areas where the games industry wants government to act. First, there are problems with the higher education system. Second, the UK is falling behind in terms of broadband provision, and online gaming is today's growth area.

Elite developer David Braben, founder of Frontier Developments, complained that "we are getting far fewer people with computer science skills: we're having to recruit people from abroad". He blamed this partly on ICT being a dull subject in schools, leading to a decline in applications for computer science degrees. "Games courses that are just studies of games are no use to us," he said.

Ian Livingstone said "the problem with universities is that they're paid on a bums-on-seats basis", which led to a "dumbing down". There should be incentives to promote the study of "hard" topics such as maths and computer science.

Keith Ramsdale, Electronic Arts' vice president for Northern Europe, said "the UK punches above its weight in Europe", but we needed action on taxes and skills to keep the UK attractive as a place for development. He pointed out that the movie industry had a unified voice in the government-backed UK Film Council, which also got lottery funding. Again, there wasn't a level playing field.

Ramsdale said that, on an optimistic prediction, the online games business could be close to the packaged games business in revenues this year, and that broadband speeds were important. "Getting 2Mbps by 2012 is not quite ambitious enough," he said. "The broadband pipe needs to be a whole lot thicker and faster."

Vaizey, who quipped that "every MP needs a Wii", said the focus of the next government would be reducing the deficit "if we're lucky enough to be elected" so tax breaks would not be easy to introduce. He also wondered if the UK Film Council could "extend its remit" to include games, though "to be frank with you, I don't know whether that would work".

A member of the audience pointed out that it had taken years to get games ratings out of the hands of a film body (the BBFC) that "doesn't understand games at all". Livingstone replied that in terms of moving images they were similar, so "it has to be looked at, even if it doesn't work out."

You could, of course, say the same about the rest of the debate. Everybody recognises that the UK games industry is not doing as well as it could be, and isn't the publishing powerhouse it used to be; that the universities are not producing enough computer scientists; that slow broadband could limit the development of online gaming.

The government will recognise that all these things have to be looked at, but there seems to be relatively little chance of them coming up with something that works out.

My predictions for 2009 were about two-thirds right. Will I do any better this year?

Charles Arthur's results for 2009

It's prediction time again! Yes, I know that January is half-over already, but that gives me less time to make it all happen, doesn't it?

And remember, fully two-thirds of these should be correct, going by past performance. Although please remember that your home may be at risk if you bet it on any single one of these things happening.

So without further ado, let's get under way

Apple

1) Apple will launch a tablet computer. The drumbeats and careful leaks all point to it happening, in only a few days' time. What, you want more? Oh, all right: a multitouch interface that uses a 3D paradigm (as per the patent revealed recently). And in some models has mobile connectivity, like a big iPhone.

2) Apple will sell 5m tablets in the first nine months or so. (It sold 4m iPhone in its first six months in 2007.)

3) No viruses or self-replicating worms will be discovered that affect Mac OS X. Still a banker of a prediction, year after year.

4) Steve Jobs will remain as chief executive of Apple through to 2011.

5) Apple will not release a netbook. It doesn't need to the tablet will do the job.

Microsoft

6) Windows Mobile's share of the smartphone market, as measured by Canalsys, will continue to fall, while Apple, RIM and Palm grow theirs.

7) Steve Ballmer will continue as chief executive of Microsoft through to 2011, but shareholder pressure will grow as the company's revenue growth fails to match that of rivals.

8) Internet Explorer, having been revealed as the avenue for far too many hacker attacks, will continue to lose market share to Firefox and especially Google's much-advertised Chrome browser.

Google

9) The Chrome operating system for netbooks will be advertised on the basis that, among other things, "you don't need virus protection" (because the OS and apps can't be changed, except by Google itself).

10) Google's market share will continue growing in the US and Europe, prompting privacy investigations

11) More devices will be sold that run the Android operating system than the Windows Mobile. (This will be tricky to measure because Microsoft has recently become all shy about announcing sales figures for Windows Mobile, at just the time that Apple leapfrogged it with the iPhone.)

12) Eric Schmidt will not remain as chief executive of Google through to 2011, though he will probably stay as chairman.

Computing

We now have hard drives that can hold more data than we can ever create, and computers that can process faster than we can generally find use for. What we don't have is really long battery life and really light machines, except at a premium. So there's a market to go for

13) Three of the big computer makers (for example HP, Dell and Apple) will begin to offer solid state (Flash) hard drives for a growing number of their laptops, with SSDs becoming the primary option for some by the end of the year. (I'm not including the MacBook Air, which has an SSD as standard.) SSD prices are dropping fast: you sacrifice some storage capacity, but gain battery life and a lighter machine.

14) OLED screens will become a build-to-order option on laptops from major manufacturers (probably starting with Sony, Acer or Asus): they're brighter than LED-based ones.

15) On Apple's lead, more companies will tout their tablet (more precisely, keyboardless "slate") computers but won't see anything like its sales, despite Windows 7's multitouch abilities.

Ebooks

16) Despite all the excitement at CES about ebooks and ereaders, and the subsequent excitement about Apple's iTablet, they won't show much growth in revenues compared to 2009. Free ebooks are fine, but they're just a sop to people who have ereaders and consequently no cash left.

17) Copyright, and particularly file compatibility arguments, will continue to dog ereaders and ebooks, while the popularity of physical books will grow: more physical books will be sold in the UK in 2010 than 2009.

Government

18) The Digital Britain bill will fall as the election (in May?) intervenes and kills off legislation in progress.

19) The freeing of Ordnance Survey map data (in April) will see rival companies vying to produce paper maps specialised for various niches such as ramblers and climbers, and an explosion in websites that mash all sorts of government content against maps.

20) If elected, the Tories will also back the freeing of Ordnance Survey data (rather than privatising it) and of other government data.

Hackers and hacking

The Chinese attacks on Google and other high-profile US companies have put a strong spotlight on web security.

21) The use of Microsoft Windows in security-critical organisations will be seriously questioned. Although the developers of many of the high-profile companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter use Linux or Mac OS X, there is still a notable security hole in the people in those organisations who use Windows for example, in lower-profile areas such as accounting and finance. What's the cost of switching from Windows? And what's the cost of losing your source code through a hole in Windows? For a growing number of companies, the first number will become smaller than the latter. And what did those adverts for Google Chrome OS say?

22) Suddenly, encrypted email will start to look like a good idea. It might be time to investigate GPG, the freeware encryption system.

23) Hackers will resort to DNS poisoning (already used in some situations) as a corollary to phishing, because you're directed to sites that look like they have the correct URL (such as paypal.com) but are in fact fakes.

Broadband and video

24) The demand for data through the BBC's iPlayer will make ISPs complain again about the strain on their networks. (Isn't it odd how that complaint went away, though demand went up?) Even so, iPlayer use will show a rising (if not exponential) growth. As a consequence, ISPs still won't offer truly unlimited broadband packages.

25) 3D TV and 3D Blu-ray will arrive and will be wildly popular among early adopters. Other people, who can't afford to upgrade their TV every two years, will sniff that they "still like their old DVD, thanks very much" while secretly coveting the new stuff.

26) The government consultation on how to encourage the building of next-generation broadband will generally get the response that government ought to encourage "outside-in" construction putting fast broadband in the far-flung places where it would never arrive if the market ruled. That's because those are the people who generally suffer the most from high transport costs when travelling to work.

Being social

27) Facebook's growth will level off in the western world. There's only so many people you can encourage to poke and friend you.

28) Twitter will start making money not just through searches (it charges Google and Bing), but also through charging companies for various sorts of access to its network and data.

29) AOL will sell Bebo and/or News Corporation will sell MySpace; in either or both cases, at a substantial loss.

And finally ...

30) Mobile phones with geolocation/GPS will comprise 5% of those sold in the UK. Ambitious, but we can hope.

There you go. Let's meet again to evaluate them on 7 January 2011. And what have I missed? Tell me in the comments.

Who wants to see poor people? Soon, technology will allow us to airbrush them out

According to technophiles, experts, and that whispering voice in your head, 2010 will be the year that augmented reality makes a breakthrough. In case you don't know, "augmented reality" is the rather quotidian title given to a smart, gizmo-specific type of software that takes a live camera feed from the real world and superimposes stuff on to it in real time.

Being a gadget designed for people who'd rather look at a screen than the real world, the iPhone inevitably plays host to several examples of this sort of thing. Download the relevant app, hold your iPhone aloft and gawp in astonishment as it magically displays live footage of the actual world directly in front of you just like the real thing but smaller, and with snazzy direction signs floating over it. You might see a magic hand pointing in the direction of the nearest Starbucks, for instance a magic hand that repositions itself as you move around. It's incredibly useful, assuming you'd prefer to cause an almighty logjam by shuffling slowly along the pavement while staring into your palm than stop and ask a fellow human being for directions.

The Nintendo DSi has a built-in camera with a "fun mode" that can recognise the shape of a human face, and superimpose pig snouts or googly eyeballs and the like over your friends' visages when you point it at them. You can then push a button and save these images for posterity.

For a while, it's genuinely amusing ("Look! It's dad with a pair of zany computerised bunny ears sprouting from the top his head. Ha ha ha!"), until you realise there are only about six different options, two of which involve amusing glasses. If you could customise the options, you could make it automatically beam a Hitler moustache on to everyone in sight, which would improve baby photos a hundredfold but you can't customise the options, probably for precisely that reason. You could print the picture out and draw the Hitler moustache on yourself with a marker pen, but that wouldn't be very 2010.

But while current examples of augmented reality might sound a tad underwhelming, the future possibilities are limitless. The moment they find a way of compressing the technology into a pair of lightweight spectacles, and the floating signs and bunny ears are layered directly over reality itself, the floodgates are open and you might as well tear your existing eyes out and flush them down the bin.

My goggles would visually transform homeless people

Years ago, I had an idea for a futuristic pair of goggles that visually transformed homeless people into lovable animated cartoon characters. Instead of being confronted by the conscience-pricking sight of an abandoned heroin addict shivering themselves to sleep in a shop doorway, the rich city-dweller wearing the goggles would see Daffy Duck snoozing dreamily in a hammock. London would be transformed into something out of Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

What's more, the goggles could be adapted to suit whichever level of poverty you wanted to ignore: by simply twisting a dial, you could replace not just the homeless but anyone who receives benefits, or wears cheap clothes, or has a regional accent, or watches ITV, and so on, right up the scale until it had obliterated all but the most grandiose royals.

At the time this seemed like a sick, far-off fantasy. By 2013, it'll be just another customisable application you can download to your iBlinkers for 49p, alongside one that turns your friends into supermodels and your enemies into dormice.

And don't go thinking augmented reality is going to be content with augmenting what you see. It's a short jump from augmented vision (your beergut's vanished and you've got a nice tan), to augmented audio (constant reactive background music that makes your entire life sound more like a movie), to augmented odour (break wind and it smells like a casserole), and augmented touch (what concrete bench? It feels like a beanbag). Eventually, painful sensations such as extreme temperature and acute physical discomfort could be remixed into something more palatable. With skilful use of technology, dying in a blazing fireball could be rendered roughly half as traumatic as, say, slightly snagging a toenail while pulling off a sock.

Some people will say there's something sinister and wrong about all of this. They'll claim it's better to look at actual people and breathe actual air. But then they've never lived in Reading. And anyway, even if they're right, we'll all ignore them anyway, because the software will automatically filter them out the moment they open their mouths.

In other words, over the coming years we're all going to be willingly submitting to the Matrix, injecting our eyes and ears with digital hallucinogens until there's no point even bothering to change our pants any more. Frightening? No. In fact, I'll scarcely notice.

Operator of music file-sharing search site Oink found not guilty of conspiracy to defraud

The first person in the UK to be prosecuted for online music sharing has been acquitted of conspiracy to defraud, scuppering the music industry's hopes that it would have a homegrown equivalent of last year's high profile Pirate Bay case in Sweden with which to deter British music pirates.

Alan Ellis, 26, was accused of making hundreds of thousands of pounds from the Oink website, which he operated from his flat in Middlesbrough. Before it was shut down in a police raid in 2007, the website had more than 200,000 members who had downloaded more than 21m music files.

Music industry figures last night blasted the verdict at Teesside Crown Court as completely out of line with successful prosecutions in other jurisdictions.

Last April, a court in Sweden found the four men behind the The Pirate Bay website guilty of breaking copyright law and handed down jail terms and a $4.5m ( 3m) fine. Neither The Pirate Bay nor Oink actually hosted unlawfully copied material; both merely made it easy for active members to find other people on the web who were prepared to share files.

Unlike the Pirate Bay, which was open to all-comers, Oink was invite-only, with users earning the right to ask their friends to join. Reports from the seven-day trial said that the court was told that users had to pay a donation in order to be able to ask friends to join; the court heard that these donations amounted to $18,000 ( 11,000) a month for Ellis. [This was later disputed by some users of the site. One of those contacting the Guardian through Twitter said that while it was possible to make donations to Oink, invitation rights were granted for contributing material to the site, not in exchange for donations.]

"This is a hugely disappointing verdict," said a spokesman for music industry body the BPI. "The defendant made nearly 200,000 by exploiting other people's work without permission. The case shows that artists and music companies need better protection."

A jury at Teesside Crown Court unanimously cleared Ellis, who maintained that he created the website to help him hone the computing skills he was learning as a student at Teesside University. He created it from a free template on the web and it was a hobby. The prosecution said he told police officers: "All I do is really like Google, to really provide a connection between people. None of the music is on my website."

News of Ellis's acquittal came as senior figures from the music, film and television industries as well as sports and union representatives yesterday published an open letter supporting Lord Mandelson's controversial plans to grant the government wide-ranging powers to change copyright law to combat any new forms of online piracy that may emerge in the future.

The business secretary's proposals, included at the last minute as clause 17 of the Digital Economy bill currently progressing through the House of Lords, have been roundly attacked by privacy campaigners as well as internet giants including Google, Facebook, Yahoo and eBay as paving the way for a future administration to introduce "arbitrary measures" in the fight against piracy.

Earlier this week, the government tabled a list of amendments to the Digital Economy bill which watered down the controversial clause so that the law can only be amended in future if there was a "significant" new threat of infringement, but the government has resolutely refused to comply with demands that it be scrapped completely.

In their open letter, 17 industry figures including TUC general secretary Brendan Barber, head of independent television producers body Pact John McVay, Christine Payne from the actor's union Equity and Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore warned that copyright infringement jeopardised British jobs.

"Without the action proposed by the government in the Digital Economy bill (DEB), before Parliament, job losses will be felt right across the chain not only for recording artists, but technicians, manufacturers, musicians, writers, freelance photographers and many others."

"Given new technologies are constantly evolving, the DEB needs to deal not only with the harm caused by current techniques for unlawful filesharing (particularly peer-to-peer), but the emerging and future threats too. Clause 17 of the Bill does precisely that, by giving parliament the ability to approve amendments that keep the law up-to-speed with technology.

"Responding to the initial concerns raised by the House of Lords, the government has made a further amendment, which will increase the levels of scrutiny and consultation required before any changes are made. On behalf of the employers and workers whose livelihoods depend on the passage of the Bill, we support this change," the letter added.

This article was amended on 20 January 2009, to insert rebuttal of a court report that members earned the right to invite friends to join Oink by making donations to the site.

Armed with a few screwdrivers and a child-like curiosity can Robert Llewellyn fix his broken video camera?

I've always been fascinated by gadgets. They're so tiny and complicated: we use them all the time but know so little about how they work. Most of us wouldn't dare to open them up when they go wrong: I am certainly dubious about fiddling with things I don't know much about. But that all changes when, during a house clear out, I come across a video camera I'd forgotten all about.

The camera had fallen on to a stone floor seven years ago and, in an attempt to hide all evidence of my clumsiness, had been relegated to a box. But now it is in front of me and I am curious. What delights might it hold? Could I watch any of the tapes that I'd filmed so long ago? Not so, it turned out. But I am determined to get it working.

I delve through the remnants of my once well-stocked toolbox, retrieve a few screwdrivers I think may come in handy and get to work. I reckon I'll encounter a multitude of tiny parts once I open the camera up, so I lay down a few lengths of gaffer tape to cover the area I'm working on: should my keen eyes and quick reactions fail me, little pieces that try to roll off the table will find themselves trapped to the sticky surface. It's a trick anyone tackling a gadget repair should take note of.

With screws unscrewed and clips unclipped, I pry open the camera and catch the first glimpse of its innards. It's like I've opened a door to a miniature city I never knew existed. I'm not entirely sure I know how to proceed, but I hazard a guess that the rattling noise the camera made when shaken means I need to remove something perhaps a little piece of gravel or reattach something that's come loose.

I work methodically, taking bits out and laying them in a line on the gaffer tape. There are setbacks I come across elaborate circuitry and electronics so beyond my understanding that they might as well be alien in origin but choose to keep going. There's no point giving up now: my camera was heading for the bin anyway, so I may as well prod about a bit more, safe in the knowledge that I can't make anything worse. Eventually I experience a eureka moment: I find the gravel that was rattling around except, of course, it isn't gravel but a tiny connector thing. I join some wires, dab on some superglue and reassemble.

I plug in the mains adaptor, turn the camera on and wait. Soon there's a "pring": a welcoming noise indeed, clearly recognisable from seven years ago. Nothing is guaranteed to work yet but there is an overwhelming feeling of pride creeping over me. I may have helped build a house, installed our sewer system, re-shaped our garden with an eight-tonne digger, but those were all big, chunky things: if anything, fixing something so small and complicated seems much more rewarding.

Then, disaster: where there should have been a close-up of the desk I'm sitting at, there is just a blank screen. All that effort for just a satisfying but essentially useless "pring". Right now it seems like the most appealing way to proceed is to smash the camera back down on the floor and see the pieces fly everywhere. But I don't. I wait. I wait and soon my patience is rewarded: I spot a tiny little glow from the eye piece. I lift the camera to my eye and, yes, there it is, I can see my desk!

I flip open the side door and there are more signs of life: whirrings and whizzings and exciting noises that quickly erase the pain of the last few hours. There's an old tape I want to try first: it's marked Kids 1998. A quick flick of the playback button and I raise the camera to my eye once more.

On the tiny screen I watch my daughter, aged two, running around our old house. She's wearing a pretty pink dress I had forgotten she had. Then there's my son, aged five. He's doing a funny dance and asking, in a breathy, blocked nose voice: "Can I see the film now, Dad?" I've not seen these images in years. Suddenly I'm remembering the tender delight of my young children. A tear trickles down my face.

I'm not embarrassed these are memories I could so easily have lost until I'm caught, mid-sniffle, by my teenage children, who have just retuned from school. Now transferred to hard drives, the footage is safely backed-up and available to induce tears with three clicks of a mouse. I'm just thankful I had the good sense to have a tinker before assigning the camera to the scrapheap.

Robert Llewellyn is an actor, presenter and writer

Analysing the code used to attack Google and 30 other companies, a US security researcher has said he found more evidence that the attack originated in China

A US security researcher has provided more evidence that he says links the attacks against Google and other companies back to China.

Joe Stewart, a researcher with Atlanta-based SecureWorks, analysed the code the Hydraq Trojan also known as Operation Aurora.

On the company's blog, Stewart doesn't mince words about what he referred to as "espionage-by-malware" originating from China:

With the recently disclosed hacking incident inside Google and other major companies, much of the world has begun to wake up to what the infosec community has known for some time there is a persistent campaign of "espionage-by-malware" emanating from the People's Republic of China (PRC). Corporate and state secrets both have been shanghaied over a period of five or more years, and the activity becomes bolder over time with little public acknowledgement or response from the U.S. government.

However, he also explains how difficult it is to definitively link the attacks to hackers in China, much less the Chinese state. He writes, "outside of the fact that PRC IP addresses have been used as control servers in the attacks, there is no 'hard evidence' of involvement of the PRC or any agents thereof." The attackers could have purchased hosting on those servers or compromised them as well. It is one reason why Verisign would not support the statement of its subsidiary, iDefense, linking the attacks to the Chinese state or its proxies. It could be a false-flag attack designed to draw suspicion to China.

Stewart looked for clues in the code. He discovered a CRC (cyclic redundancy check) algorithm that "seems to be virtually unknown outside of China". As he explains in the post: "CRCs are used to check for errors that might have been introduced into stored or transferred data". The CRC code is from China, released in a paper there on optimising such codes for microcontrollers. He has never seen this type of CRC code before, and when he did a Google search on key parts of the algorithm, it returned only Chinese results.

Google stopped short of implicating the Chinese government, even when pressed, and this is but another piece of circumstantial evidence of the origin of the attack.

However, pulling together this evidence, Stewart concludes:

considering the scope, choice of targets and the overwhelming boldness of the attacks (in light of the harsh penalties we have seen handed out in communist China for other computer intrusion offenses), this creates speculation around whether the attacks could be state-sponsored.

This still is not definitive proof, and other explanations exist, but Stewart told the New York Times, "Occam's Razor suggests that the simplest explanation is probably the best one."

Growth of legal digital sales drops back to 12% as crackdowns fail to halt online pirates

The rise of new services such as Spotify and legal crackdowns on online pirates failed to stem tumbling music sales last year, according to industry figures that show a dramatic slowdown in digital growth.

Record labels struggling to make up for the sharp fall in CD sales by increasing downloads and other new revenue streams have blamed rampant piracy for a slowdown in the growth of digital revenues to 12% last year, taking total worldwide sales to $4.2bn ( 2.6bn).

That was less than half the 25% growth rate in 2008 and left overall music sales down for the 10th year running, according to figures out today from international trade body the IFPI.

Although critics of the music industry accuse it of failing to keep up with changing consumer demands, IFPI head John Kennedy insisted 2009 had seen a range of new services such as download stores, streaming sites and subscription offers.

"It would be great to report these innovations have been rewarded by market growth, more investment in artists, more jobs. Sadly that is not the case. Digital piracy remains a huge barrier to market growth," said Kennedy.

The music industry's global sales have fallen 30% over the last five years even though digital sales grew by 940% in that time, according to the IFPI. It estimates that overall, music sales fell 10% in 2009 to $15.8bn.

The debate over piracy and how to stem it has taken centre stage in a number of countries in recent months as governments have implemented or considered introducing legal measures. Kennedy admitted "it's boring talking about piracy" but said that new industry models would struggle to survive as long as they had to compete against free music. The IFPI estimates that 95% of music downloads worldwide are illegal.

He dismissed critics' arguments about why piracy remained so widespread, saying surveys showed consumers' reasoning was "because it's free and because we can. It's not more complex than that, not a better offering, not a better service. It's because it free and because we can."

While the IFPI noted some success in growing sales in countries with new legal measures, notably Sweden and South Korea, it launched a withering attack on governments it accused of turning a blind eye to piracy. Spain in particular came under fire for a "culture of state-tolerated apathy towards illegal file-sharing".

"Spain has the worst piracy problem of any major market in Europe. In 2009, no new Spanish artists featured in the top 50 album charts, compared to 10 in 2003," said Kennedy. "It's getting to the stage where it is nearly irreversible."

The IFPI said investment was drying up in new artists in Spain, and that sales of Spanish artists' albums fell by two-thirds over the last five years.

Rob Wells, head of digital at Universal Music Group International, underlined the falling investment story in a market that had traditionally exported much of its local repertoire to Latin America.

"Spain runs the risk of turning into a cultural desert," he said. "I think it's a real shame that people in authority don't see the damage being done."

Government and armed forces to continue using version of browser attacked by Chinese hackers in Google security breach
The IE zero-day vulnerability, Google, and you

The British government and armed forces are to continue their widespread use of the version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser that was attacked by Chinese hackers who broke into Google's corporate network even though both the French and German governments have advised people to stop using it.

The Cabinet Office, which oversees the deployment of computers in government, said today that "it doesn't think the issue [of being open to hacking] would be resolved any better by going elsewhere".

But over the weekend the German government advised citizens to stop using any version of Internet Explorer because of the possibility of attacks against it which could compromise the user's computer without their knowledge and lead to the theft of data or incursions into corporate networks.

Today, the French government followed suit, issuing an advisory suggesting that all versions of Internet Explorer, which is included with Windows, are vulnerable to the attack that was used against Google, Adobe and an estimated 30 other western companies, by hackers originating in China.

Google said the attacks were used to steal intellectual property and compromise email accounts, and identified Internet Explorer as the weak point that was exploited.

The specific version of the browser known to be vulnerable to the attack mounted on Google is Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), which was first released in 2000 and is standard on Windows XP, which was released in 2001. Despite its age and known weakness to hacking, IE6 is still the most widely used browser in the world, ahead of newer, more secure versions and rivals' alternatives such as the free Firefox, Opera or Safari browsers.

IE6 is extensively used by the British government, including UK armed forces: in response to parliamentary questions asked last year by Labour MP and former Cabinet Office minister Tom Watson, the Ministry of Defence, which has 300,000 desktops worldwide (including ships), said it was sticking with IE6, "and at the current time does not have a requirement to move to an updated version".

Watson said today: "The government's own advice to businesses and consumers, through its Get Safe Online site that it helps to fund, is to not use IE6. So other than the fact that they aren't taking their own advice, it's preposterous that they wouldn't take this threat seriously. With the added security threat, all departments should certainly ditch IE6 and upgrade."

Microsoft sought to play down the risks of the vulnerability in a blog posting on Sunday, saying that "we are only seeing very limited number of targeted attacks against a small subset of corporations. The attacks that we have seen to date, including public proof-of-concept exploit code, are only effective against Internet Explorer 6."

However both the French and German government advisories say that there are weaknesses on newer versions of Internet Explorer on all versions of Windows, including the recently released Windows 7.

Hackers place Palestinian flag and anti-Semitic messages on newspaper's homepage

The Jewish Chronicle's website was suspended for around 18 hours after an attack by hackers who placed a Palestinian flag and anti-Semitic messages on its homepage.

The site was breached at around 4pm yesterday and was suspended shortly afterwards to allow technicians to fix the problem. It only went back up at 10.30am today.

Superimposed on the image of the flag, hackers left a message supporting "Palestinian Mujaheeds" that contained quotations from the Qu'ran and anti-Semitic views in a mixture of English and Turkish.

The Jewish Chronicle editor, Stephen Pollard, said the attack had come from a Turkish IP address and that technicians were working to learn more about its precise origins.

He said the Metropolitan police had been informed about the incident, the first of its kind to affect the Jewish Chronicle.

It follows recent attacks by a group calling itself the Iranian Cyber Army on Twitter and the Chinese search engine Baidu.

 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.

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

Personal data and tutorials in hacking offered online
Founder of site traced to London internet cafe

To the casual observer, there was little to distinguish the Java Bean internet cafe in Wembley from the hundreds of others dotted around the capital. But to surveillance officers staking it out month after month, this unremarkable venue was the key to busting a remarkable and sophisticated network of cyber criminals.

From the bank of computers inside, a former pizza bar worker ran an international cyber "supermarket" selling stolen credit card and account details costing the banking industry tens of millions.

Renukanth Subramaniam, 33, was revealed today as the founder and a major "orchestrator" of the secret DarkMarket website, where elite fraudsters bought and sold personal data, after it was infiltrated by the FBI and the US Secret Service.

Membership was strictly by invitation. But once vetted, its 2,000 vendors and buyers traded everything from card details, obtained through hacking, phishing and ATM skimming devices, to viruses with which buyers could extort money by threatening company websites.

The top English language cybercrime site in the world, it offered online tutorials in account takeovers, credit card deception and money laundering. Equipment including false ATM and pin machines and everything needed to set up a credit card factory was available.

It even featured breaking-news-style updates on the latest compromised material available, while criminals could buy banner adverts to promote their wares.

So vast was its reach, with members in the UK, Canada, US, Russia, Turkey, Germany and France, the UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca), which helped bust it, said it was "impossible" to put a figure on how much it cost banks worldwide.

Subramaniam, who used the online soubriquet JiLsi, was remanded in custody at his own request at Blackfriars crown court today after pleading guilty to conspiracy to defraud and five counts of furnishing false information. Judge John Hillen warned it was "inevitable" he faced a "substantial custodial sentence".

A Sri Lankan-born British citizen, Subramaniam was a former member of ShadowCrew, DarkMarket's forerunner, which was uncovered by the US Secret Service in 2004. "JiLsi was one of the highest in cybercrime in this country with what he managed to achieve setting up a forum globally. No JiLsi, no DarkMarket," said one Soca investigator.

Its 2,000 members never met in real life. Quality, not quantity, was the key. DarkMarket was fastidious in banning "rippers" who would cheat other criminals. Honour among thieves was paramount.

It operated an "escrow" service, with payments and goods exchanged through a third party "like a PayPal for criminals", the judge observed, and an arbitration service resolved disputes. To keep off the radar, the rules were strict: no firearms, drugs or counterfeit currency.

Built on a pyramid structure, administrators decided who joined, moderators ran specific site sections, and reviewers vetted wannabes each demanding 5% or 250 per transaction as a fixer's fee.

To get on, criminals had to present details of 100 compromised cards free of charge - 50 to one reviewer, 50 to another. Reviewers would test the cards and write an online review of customer satisfaction just like eBay customers. "If the cards did what they were supposed to they would be recommended. If not they weren't allowed in," said the investigator.

Payment was via accounts on WebMoney, or E-Gold. "It was the QuickTime method of sending money anywhere."

Subramaniam was one of the top administrators. He kept his operating system on memory sticks. But when one was stolen, costing him 100,000 in losses and compromising the site's security, he was downgraded to reviewer. Surveillance officers caught him logging on to the website as JiLsi unaware the fellow criminal MasterSplyntr he was talking to was, in fact, an FBI agent called Keith Mularski.

Considerable money was exchanged, though actual transactions took place away from the site for security reasons. One buyer spent 250,000 on stolen personal information in just six weeks.

Described as "a very quiet man", Subramaniam worked at Pizza Hut and as a dispatch courier. "He owned three houses but was largely itinerant," said Sharon Lemon, Soca deputy director. "The key to investigations of this sort is finding the evidence to connect the online persona with a living, breathing person."

Harendra de Silva QC, defending Subramaniam, said the "evidence was unchallenged" but said the "question of interpretation does arise in certain areas" and there would be submissions on "nuance" of the fraud in so far as it applied to his client. He is charged alongside John McHugh, 66, known as Devilman, also a site reviewer who has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud and at whose Doncaster home officers found a credit card-making factory. The two will be sentenced later.

But the battle against cybercrime continues. "This was one of the top 10 sites in the world, but there are more than 100 we know of globally, and another 100 we don't yet know of," said the investigators.

In the DarkMarket

DarkMarket price list

Trusted vendors on DarkMarket offered a smorgasbord of personal data, viruses, and card-cloning kits at knockdown prices. Going rates were:

Dumps Data from magnetic stripes on batches of 10 cards. Standard cards: $50. Gold/platinum: $80. Corporate: $180.

Card verification values Information needed for online transactions. $3-$10 depending on quality.

Full information/change of billing Information needed for opening or taking over account details. $150 for account with $10,000 balance. $300 for one with $20,000 balance.

Skimmer Device to read card data. Up to $7,000.

Bank logins 2% of available balance.

Hire of botnet Software robots used in spam attacks. $50 a day.

Credit card images Both sides of card. $30 each.

Embossed card blanks $50 each.

Holograms $5 per 100.

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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The new Pixo is cheap, is pretty nippy around town, and, perhaps best of all, has done away with the glove compartment altogether

During the course of automobile history, there have been some strange car parts with strange names crankshaft, for example, manifold gasket, rear gusset but none has become as fixed and misleading a fixture as the "glove compartment". Has anyone, with the possible exception of Kenneth More, ever placed their gloves in the glove compartment? Of course not. For a start, there's no room for them. Why? Because that huge car manual that you have no intention of ever opening takes up all the space. With ingenuity and determination, it's just about possible to squeeze in a CD, but chances are the effort will warp the disc.

New designs and innovations come and go, but the glove compartment, in all its frustrating uselessness, stubbornly remains. Until now. One of the small pleasures of the pleasurably small Nissan Pixo is that it does not have a glove compartment. Instead, it has a glove slot, a sort of open rack where you'd expect to find the glove compartment. It's generously large, with more than enough space for an unused car manual and all manner of random stuff that looks too messy spread around the floor. In fact, it occupies roughly the same cubic area as the rest of the car, which is not a thing of expansive comfort.

But then, it's not meant to be. Space saved is money saved with the Pixo. And nowhere have the readies been so conspicuously unspent as in the boot. I say boot, but it turns out that it's really just a glove compartment without a car manual. Putting anything larger than a used hanky in it involves folding down the rear seats. You can forget visiting Ikea unless it's to collect a catalogue there's room for that in the glove slot.

Further economies have been made on design and production costs by cleverly taking a pre-existing car namely the Suzuki Alto and sticking a new badge on it, along with a new bumper, grille and headlights. It's a bit like sticking a bandage around Britney Spears and hoping we'll think she's Lady Gaga.

The result of all this cosmetic disguise is that the most basic version of the Pixo is, at less than six grand, about the cheapest car you can buy this side of Rawalpindi. It's not pretty or fast, but the three- cylinder engine makes a glorious sound and lends an impression of perkiness that doesn't necessarily correlate with the speedometer.

I drove the Pixo around a snowbound London. It could have been a Holiday On Ice experience, but it felt stable in the way that smaller vehicles often don't. Best of all, the heating was so toasty, I had no need for gloves. Which was just as well because I couldn't remember where I had left them.

The invention of movable type led to a paradigm shift in communication. It was the midwife of the modern world. At the time, however, it seemed merely that monks would have to find things other than copying biblical texts to do with their days. The internet has always been different. Almost from its inception, trying to gauge where the world wide web might take us has been a major preoccupation of commerce, not least the newspaper industry.

The government, equally, has pondered how it might be used. Predictably, its first instinct was simply to use it to do what it was already doing but a bit more quickly. But this week it dramatically raised its game, with the launch of new website, data.gov.uk, which has met with a warm reception. It puts into the public domain every bit of information collected by public bodies that is not personal or sensitive, from alcohol-attributable mortality to years of life lost through TB. Happily, not all the data sets deal with death.

Even a generation ago most of the vast amount of data collected by government was unavailable, and some of it such as the location of the Post Office tower was classified as an official secret. At the very least this amounts to a genuine culture change in what has always been a deeply conservative bureaucracy. At its most powerful, it could transform the nature of power.

The Guardian has been pushing for this data for nearly four years. We argued that the taxpayer had paid for the collection of the data, but the government was exploiting it commercially. And beyond the moral argument, it did not even make financial sense. In the US, open access had actually led to far greater financial benefits for government, because the private sector is smart at using it to make money money on which tax can then be collected. Finally, six months ago, Gordon Brown invited Sir Tim Berners Lee and the academic Professor Nigel Shadbolt, to advise the government on how to do it. It was an inspired choice. Almost as soon as he had given us the world wide web, Sir Tim began working on an overhauled and more intelligent network. He called it the semantic web, and it was to be a way of making possible what he called "machine reasoning".

What he and Professor Shadbolt have persuaded Whitehall to do is not only to begin the process of putting all its data sets online, but to use a common language that will allow data to be correlated mechanically, showing trends and causes just as Professor Snow mapped cholera deaths on to Soho's water pumps in 1854 and demonstrated the causal link. Since last autumn, the duo have energised Whitehall and the developer community the brilliant geeks who think nothing of sitting up for 24 hours at a stretch to work on a new application for mashing up, as they say, the state's data with other online information in some ingenious new way. Already there is, for example, a postcode newspaper, and a map showing bicycle accidents, another warning you about any new planning applications in your neighbourhood, and others again showing you what 1bn buys in public services. With ever more nations and cities sharing their data, it is all but impossible to predict exactly what will happen next at this new interface between government and the crowd.

It is equally hazardous trying to envision how freer data will redraw the boundaries between different communities or recast their relationship with power. But it is reasonable to speculate that the uncovering and unlocking of so much information will drive improvements in public policy. It will level the territory on which voters meet politicians, and could prove a powerful brake on campaigning hyperbole in the coming election. Without the printed word there would have been no informed electorate, no demand for accountability from our leaders and indeed no democracy at all. Open data will surely revive it, and in time could transform it too.

Tom Franklin, chief executive of the Ramblers' Association, claims "We've achieved a world-class network of paths and open access in the country" (Off the couch: Ramblers target the young, 18 January). He seems to have forgotten that less than three years ago the association itself stated that "more than 30% of paths in England Wales are still reckoned to be difficult or impossible to use" (Public Rights of Way Strategy for England and Wales, Ramblers' Association, October 2007).

In case Mr Franklin thinks that a revolutionary improvement on our paths has occurred since then, I (and thousands of other ramblers) can disabuse him. In fact, the situation has almost certainly got worse because local authorities now have less money to spend on maintaining the paths, and the Ramblers' Association itself is showing less interest in fighting for public access. At the same time local councils' ability to process claims for the statutory recognition of paths not yet recorded as public has also suffered.

Mr Franklin is equally astray when he claims world-class status for open access (freedom to roam) in England and Wales. He need look no further than Scotland, with its basic across-the-board right to roam to see what a ludicrous claim that is. Hundreds of square miles of uncultivated land, especially in the south and Midlands, remain shut to the public by the whims of landowners.

It is all very well to be chasing the young walkers with, of course. a trendy genuflection to Facebook and Twitter but if Mr Franklin had a realistic sense of the needs of ramblers of all ages he would launch a public and aggressive campaign to free the paths and remove the fences on open country. We campaigned thus for nearly 70 years and the membership of the association rose year by year. Since 2003 our numbers have fallen from more than 140,000 to fewer than 123,000 because we have ceased to be on the frontline in getting the paths and countryside open.

Chris Hall

Vice-president, the Ramblers' Association

The history of the Communist Party of Great Britain is not one of sustained success, so I feel it important that one of its undoubted victories is not credited to others. The mass trespass on Derbyshire's Kinder Scout in 1932 was not organised by the Ramblers' Association, as you claim, but by the British Workers' Sports Federation, an organisation of the CPGB. Though the Ramblers have never, I believe, acknowledged their debt to the Communists, it was the furore created by the mass trespass and the subsequent jailings which led to the formation of the Ramblers' Association in 1935.

Neil Redfern

Honorary research fellow, Manchester Metropolitan University

PS22 Chorus

There is something incredibly life-affirming about hearing choirs, especially children's choirs even if they are singing Kum Ba Yah. As we've seen from Glee, American school choruses enjoy singing the odd contemporary tune, too. The kids of the 50-strong PS22 Chorus from Staten Island, New York are closer to junior school age, but, led by music teacher Gregg Breinberg, they've sung brilliant rearrangements of Lady Gaga, Jay Z, Bj rk, Chas & Dave and, most recently, Fireflies by Owl City. Their enthusiasm is infectious Rihanna is among their celebrity fans and an instant cure for January blues.

The Museum Of Animal Perspectives

Ever wondered what the world looks like from the viewpoint of an armadillo? Well now's your chance. Curated by "video naturalist" Sam Easterson, the Museum of Animal Perspectives collects films taken from miniature cameras attached to animals' heads to give you some idea of what life is like for turtles, pigs, scorpions, spiders and dozens of other animals across the world. The films mainly YouTube clips are geo-tagged so you can pick a location (Britain's contribution is a rather sad film of some sheep on a bleak hillside). Elsewhere is footage taken from motion-triggered hidden camera traps seek out that of a black bear having a good old rub against a tree.

BLOG ROLL: CRIME WRITERS

Shamus Town

A stunning repository of all things Raymond Chandler, including amazing ephemera, photos and maps.

Crime Squad

Dead good online mag focusing on interviews, reviews and new authors.

Elmore Leonard

Opening chapters and thoughts on his Hollywood adaptations, including new US TV series Justified.

Mark Billingham

Site of the stand-up turned crime writer includes the essay: So This Serial Killer Walks Into A Bar.

Cathi Unsworth

The queen of London Noir serves up soundtracks to novel Bad Penny Blues.

Stieg Larsson

The man responsible for translating Larsson's bestsellers on the books' inspiration and locations.

WHAT WE LEARNED ON THE WEB THIS WEEK

The Time Out cover schedule for 2010

History is better when it rhymes

Ten places you will probably never get to enter

Lady Gaga is a doll

What it would sound like if Elvis sang TV theme tunes

What the nerdiest tank top ever knitted looks like

Peeping Toms have been caught wearing hoods the colour of the sun

What the world would be like 28 drinks later

Augustus Gloop became an accountant

A chart of body parts to musical genre