Microsoft founder plays down Beijing's attempts to stifle dissent on the internet as 'very limited'

After pouring billions of dollars into the global fight against malaria and rebranding Microsoft in a more cuddly, human way, Bill Gates had just about shaken off accusations that he represented all that was unappealing about aggressive American capitalism.

But today his reinvention suffered something of a setback when he played down China's attempts to stifle dissent on the internet as "very limited".

Less than two weeks after Google said it planned to uncensor its Chinese search engine in protest at attempts to break into the email accounts of human rights activists, Gates criticised his rival's decision and insisted that agreeing to Beijing's demands was just part of doing business in the country. "You've got to decide: do you want to obey the laws of the countries you're in or not? If not, you may not end up doing business there," he told ABC's Good Morning America programme.

He also brushed aside accusations that Microsoft has been complicit in helping filter the web by saying that it was not an issue because any censorship could be circumvented with technical knowledge. "Chinese efforts to censor the internet have been very limited," he said. "It's easy to go around it, so I think keeping the internet thriving there is very important."

Gates's comments echo those last week by Microsoft chief executive, Steve Ballmer, who took a swipe at Google by suggesting that the company had over-reacted in China. "People are always trying to break into other people's data," he said on Friday. "There's always somebody trying to break into Microsoft."

Ballmer also likened Microsoft's complicity in actively filtering internet content to the oil industry's decision to import oil from Saudi Arabia, despite the censorship that takes place there. "If the Chinese government gives us proper legal notice, we'll take that piece of information out of the Bing search engine," adding that even countries with "extreme" free speech laws, such as the US, exercised some censorship.

The comments of both men come despite the fact that efforts to censor the internet in China a project known as the Golden Shield are among the most extensive in the world. The country's estimated 300 million internet users are almost all affected by the various blocks and filters, which include direct censorship of anti-government protesters, members of the Falun Gong religious group, Tibetan independence campaigners and the Taiwanese media. At various points, Beijing has also blocked access to international news websites including the BBC and the Guardian, and around 50 Chinese bloggers are in prison as a result of their postings.

Google's stance has drawn widespread support from the human rights community and freedom of speech campaigners, but the Chinese authorities have repeatedly denied any link to the hacking.

Today the government made its most direct response to the issue yet rejecting suggestions that it turned a blind eye to the activities of some hackers, and defending its right to punish those who challenge its rule.

"Any accusation that the Chinese government participated in cyber attacks, either in an explicit or indirect way, is groundless and aims to denigrate China. We are firmly opposed to that," a government spokesman told the state news agency, Xinhua, adding that China was itself the victim of numerous internet-based attacks.

Panel hears how Google's competitors are looking at different ways of searching the internet

The front of the pack isn't always the best place to be. In a panel of search engine representatives at the Munich DLD conference, Google's Ben Gomes was the most reluctant to give anything away. Alsio on the panel were Conrad Alpha, of WolframAlpha, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, the architect of Microsoft Visual Earth, and Ilya Segalovich, of Yandex Russia's largest search engine.

Questions from the panel host, Jochen Wegner, the editor of Focus Online, kept on coming. Is it possible to compete with Google in non-English-speaking markets as the successful Yandex does? "We have done very respectably in almost all markets we are in," was Gomes's answer. Is Google failing in giving the right answers, especially when a topic becomes very popular? "We have recently launched 500 changes. Overall, search gets better day after day after day." Are you reacting to Bing? "I don't believe we are reacting to Bing in any way. We are really focused on the user."

There is no doubting that Google is still top dog among search engines. However, the spontaneous applause of an impressed audience here at DLD wasn't for Google, but for WolframAlpha and Bing.

WolframAlpha's approach to making the world's knowledge computable clearly found fans, and showed that the search engine market is less and less about search, but more and more about giving answers and providing decisions, as Wegner put it.

WolframAlpha can tell you the weather on the day David Cameron was born. "Everything I show you with Wolfram Alpha is done in the cloud and sent back live," explained Wolfram. Yes, WolframAlpha is not a search engine anymore. It is a knowledge engine which provides you with possible answers.

If you type in "Microsoft v Google", you will get the latest trading information as well as the fundamental statistics and finances. If you type in "egg and bacon" you will be told how much running you have to do today to get rid of the calories you just ate.

"WolframAlpha is about high power computation and knowledge that meet at an exciting time when computation gets democratised," explains Wolfram.

Bing also has a new search approach, trying to organise the search results in a different way and Bing continues to grow its market share. In fact, it is becoming an incredible user-oriented search engine which made a deal with Wolfram Alpha last year to provide search results in select areas across nutrition, health and advanced mathematics.

Microsoft's search engines results rely more and more on structural data a term that Aguera y Arcas is fond of using.

In addition, there is the new map project which Aguera y Arcas presented to a stunned audience. Its three-dimensional view of New York shows clearly that Bing Maps will provide stern competition for Google maps. It is built in Microsoft Silverlight, and provides an amazing real view of the streets.

"We envision space as a canvas;" says Aguera y Arcas. His team is building different features for the map. Recently for example, they came up with a geolocation of the front pages of all the world newspapers. The new beta mapping site was just launched.

The clash of the search engines has definitely started.

Firefox isn't supporting the H.264 video standard because it's patented and the patent owners want fees: it's not free. But if Google and YouTube make it ubiquitous, will users have a real choice? Should they care?

YouTube has recently announced an experimental HTML5 player that uses the H.264 codec for video instead of a format based on Adobe Flash. You might think that would be applauded as a move towards open standards, but as I noted briefly last week, the new system works with Google Chrome and Apple Safari browsers, but not Mozilla's Firefox. It doesn't support H.264.

This is a critical issue for Mozilla, because it risks losing market share. If users find they can play YouTube videos using Chrome or Safari but they won't play in Firefox, some users are going to switch browsers.

Mozilla's problem is that H.264 is encumbered by patents: it's not a royalty-free format. And according to Robert O'Callahan in a Saturday blog post on Video, Freedom And Mozilla (with the rider that it's "nothing but my own opinion as a developer of video-related Mozilla code!"), licensing the patents "would violate principles of free software that we strongly believe in." He says:

"Users just want video to work. You Mozilla people are such idealists! Yes, that is the reason for Mozilla to exist. Anyway, in the short term, our users probably won't be affected much since Flash fallback will still work. In the long term, I think freedom will ultimately benefit users (not just Firefox users, but all users)."

The same day, Mike Shaver, Mozilla's vice president of engineering, explained why Mozilla doesn't license the H.264 codec, and his post included the following:

"Mozilla has decided differently, in part because there is no apparent means for us to license H.264 under terms that would cover other users of our technology, such as Linux distributors, or people in affiliated projects like Wikimedia or the Participatory Culture Foundation. Even if we were to pay the $5,000,000 annual licensing cost for H.264, and we were to not care about the spectre of license fees for internet distribution of encoded content, or about content and tool creators, downstream projects would be no better off."

As Shaver points out, that kind of fee would have made the success of the web impossible. Mozilla would never have got going if it had had to pay $5m or so to use HTML, CSS, JavaScript and similar technologies.

The web has had to cope with patented technologies before. The main examples are the GIF image file format and the MP3 music file format, both of which became ubiquitous. These were discussed by Christopher Blizzard, Mozilla's Open Source Evangelist, in a long post: HTML5 video and H.264 what history tells us and why we're standing with the web.

After GIF became popular, Blizzard says "Unisys was asking some web site owners $5,000-$7,500 to able to use GIFs on their sites." He says: "We're looking at the same situation with H.264, except at a far larger scale."

MP3 was also liberally licensed in its early days (indeed, many people thought it was unlicensed), but again, there was an effort to monetise it as it became ubiquitous. Today, says Blizzard:

"If you look at the public published rates for a couple of the MP3 licensors (and there are more than just two) someone who wanted to use it would be looking at a royalty rate of about $1/downloaded unit. So if you were doing, say, two million downloads a day you would be looking at about $2,000,000 per day just to have permission from those companies to include an MP3 decoder. Could you negotiate a lower rate? Probably. But that gives you a sense of the scale if you're a small provider in a world where getting started on the web is hard and you don't have much negotiating power."

It looks as though H.264 is developing in a similar way. And the more widespread it becomes, the more power the patent-owners will have to extract money from suppliers who use it.

Free software and open source supporters will, of course, say that all this is unnecessary: YouTube should simply use the Ogg/Theora codec that offers comparable quality to H.264 (it might be worse, but not a lot worse). And as user Underhill comments on O'Callahan's post: "there is a pretty huge practical difference between 'Someone might have patents on Theora that we don't know about, and might sue' and 'MPEG-LA has patents on H.264 and *will* sue'."

There's a petition to get YouTube to support Ogg/Theora at
http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/oggandyoutube/

Because Google dominates the web, and YouTube dominates web video, it looks as though the decision to use H.264 will mean we all end up using it whether we like it or not. That might not be the case. Blizzard says:

"I, like many others, have reason to believe that H.264 will not be Google's final choice. There's good reason to believe this: they are purchasing On2. On2 has technologies that are supposed to be better than H.264. If Google owns the rights to those technologies they are very likely to use them on their properties to promote them and are also likely to license them in a web-friendly (ie royalty-free) fashion. Google actually has a decent history of doing this."

Web video has never really been open, unencumbered and free. We've had Real Networks RM format, Apple's QuickTime, Microsoft's Windows Media Video (now standardised as VC-1), the DivX and XviD codecs, and Adobe Flash among others. There might never be one open standard, simply because some content owners will want to include DRM (Digital Rights Management) copy restrictions.

However, the web would benefit from having an open, unencumbered and free video format that enabled HTML programmers to include a video as easily as they now include a headline or a photo, wouldn't it? How do we get to that?

In two decades the world wide web has become the most powerful information tool since Gutenberg's printing press, but also the most intrusive and threatening. Aleks Krotoski, presenter of a major new series on the history of the net, reports

On Thursday, the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, gave a speech on internet freedom at a journalism museum in Washington, arguing that the architecture of the web must be free from censorship and manipulation. It is a position that stands in stark contrast with the approach of countries, including China, Egypt and Iran, that seek to curb access and while there was a whiff of economic self-protectionism in Clinton's words, she opened up the floor to a global discussion about the potential revolutionary power of this invention.

Less than two decades after it came into being, the web is now a pawn in an international public policy debate that could create rifts between nations so deep that they lay the foundation for future wars.

For the past year, I have been working on Virtual Revolution, a four-part documentary series for BBC2, co-produced by the Open University. It aims to identify the true political, economic, social and psychological implications of this new technology. I spoke to an extraordinary cast of characters including the web pioneers, the e-entrepreneurs, and the sceptics who have seen it all before.

We identified the new power brokers in our society, whose non-traditional ascents through the web have challenged hundreds of years of hierarchy. We found the kids who took down the economic, communication and political pillars of an entire country with the press of a button. We looked at the tactics extremists use to radicalise new recruits, and compared them to the methods that have proved so successful in getting a generation that had been dismissed as dispassionate involved in politics.

We also looked at how the trails of information that we leave across the web are not only redefining privacy, but are creating feedback loops that may be narrowing our horizons, rather than opening our eyes to the new. And we discovered how the web is changing how we think and who we are.

I started the journey travelling through Ghana with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the unassuming Englishman who put the first website in history online on 6 August 1991. He was on a tour with the World Wide Web Foundation, carrying out field research to understand how the web was affecting rural communities who were only now getting connected. He was modest about his role in the development of this technology, making sure to name-check the others who were toying with the same ideas at the same time. His aim had not been to catalyse a worldwide revolution, but to create a framework that would connect lots of information that would not require one person to look after it. But his idealism and belief in the power of web has driven him to take the web to the world.

"Tim Berners-Lee created a new mode of human communication," Stephen Fry told me. "He created a new way of allowing communication to work in extraordinarily connected ways."

Fry, well-known for his enthusiasm for technology, reflected on what the web had meant to him when he discovered it in the early 1990s. "It seemed like a great new world," he enthused. "It seemed like a new democracy. It seemed like a new way of people coming together and spreading news, of educating, of giving yourself information and access to people and cultures and history. It seemed the most fantastic, radical and extraordinary development since Gutenberg produced his Bible."

His thoughts were echoed by Al Gore, the former US vice-president. "It represents the emergence of a new information ecosystem that will have a more profound impact on human civilisation than did the printing press," he said.

The web has brought about an enormous transformation in what information we have at our fingertips. It is extremely empowering: every one has the freedom to participate in the library of knowledge collected online, by accessing it or creating it. Anyone who has historically held control over the distribution of information governments, media, agents is having to reposition in the face of this information tsunami.

"Individuals without great wealth or bases of power and the industrial world economy can exert influence on others who find their ideas resonating with them," Gore said. "It is inherently democratising and egalitarian and promotes a greater role for the rule of reason."

It is always dangerous, however, to be blinded by idealism. The web is undoubtedly a transformative technology on a par with the printing press, but it's difficult to believe that it will bring the end of inequality or will eradicate international conflict. In fact, some have learned to manipulate the web's power for their own ends.

When this sits well with our personal politics, we celebrate. A 25-year-old from San Francisco can create a piece of software that opens up a channel of communication on the violent streets of post-election Iran, giving protesters the ability to transmit what is happening to the rest of the world. Teenagers in London can organise mass protests on climate change, rallying people from around the country to march on a coal-fired power station in Nottinghamshire. But when the same techniques and tools are used to radicalise new recruits to fundamentalist causes, to attack a country's banks and newspapers, or to promote propaganda within authoritarian states, the web becomes something to condemn.

The debate becomes even more personal when you consider how our use of this overwhelmingly commercial space is transforming what privacy means in the 21st century. As we traipse across the web, our trails of personal information are captured and manipulated. We get services for free, but our actions are analysed to produce precisely targeted advertising that funds the companies behind the websites.

The greatest shock to most people is that we willingly create this commercial pact when we think we're alone. A Google search, for example, transcends the barrier between what we view as public and what we view as private. When we do a search on our computers at home, in the office or on the road, we have a misplaced sense we are transacting only with our machine. In fact, when we type a query in Google's search box, we are divulging our intentions to a technology located across the planet, with hundreds of potential eyeballs sifting through our search terms for the perfect advertising match. Yet we still treat it like an oracle, asking it deeply personal questions and looking for answers in its computer brain.

The surveillance implications for this are clear, but there are wider cultural implications when the money people behind the scenes get their rewards for feeding us exactly what we want. Amazon's recommendation engine, Last.fm's social music service, even news sites such as the Huffington Post, reduce the possibility for serendipity by serving up what they think we want, channelling us into a loop of confirmation. As author Douglas Rushkoff says: "The more like one of my kind of person I become, the less me I am, and the more I am a demographic type."

Socially, this is as potentially damaging as what the extremists peddle; we are coagulating into tight-knit groups who reinforce our own beliefs. It's a far cry from the global group hug that web proponents such as Fry or Gore had hoped it would be.

In addition, the web may be fundamentally changing how we think. There is evidence that there is a generational difference between how children and adults consume information online. A team of researchers led by Professor David Nicholas, of the independent research group Ciber, at University College London, has begun a series of experiments to test whether the architecture of the web put into place by Berners-Lee is transforming the connections in our brains. A lifetime of use seems to be having a cognitive effect.

Under-18s who have grown up with the web are better at multi-tasking. They also spend less time searching for information before deciding on what they view as the best answer to a question. Most intriguingly, the youngest users, born after 1993, "crowdsource" their knowledge: they look for the wisdom of their friends, networking what they know, rather than holding on to the information for themselves.

My PhD research looked at the social psychological implications of our interactions online. What I have come to conclude is that who we are on the web is simply a reflection of who we already are offline. We project hierarchical systems into the virtual world. We extend our interests and make them happen using the tools the web provides. We seek out things that make us feel good about ourselves. The web is a mirror, and we have to face it in confidence, warts and all.

Our relationship with the web is a synergy: as it matures, so will we. And as it draws us into its networks and its hyperlinks, we will shape them in our global image. It is the most revolutionary evolution that we as a planet have ever participated in. "The sorts of things which the internet brings by connecting people," Berners-Lee said to me while we were travelling to a community centre in Abiriw, outside Accra, "is openness and understanding of other people's ideas.

"On a good day," he added. "I hope we have a lot of good days."

How can companies cut down on the pointless emails clogging up inboxes? Start charging people to send them

I recently attended an off-site training program for a FTSE 100 company, and one of the main points of discussion was how to cut down on unnecessary emails. My response was simple: since sending an email is free, people will send too many. If you want to improve things, start charging a fee.

Markets work by bridging consumer value and the cost of production. The problem with emails like so many other things is that many of the costs are not born by the decision maker. When you copy five people in to an email that you send the additional cost to you is zero. However each of those people need to read through and decide whether it's actionable. You're imposing a cost on them. This is an externality.

One of the best ways to deal with externalities is to create a market. This means we start respecting other people's inbox as their own property, and stop dumping into it without consideration. We create a system that forces people to bear more of the costs of their actions.

It's a myth that businesses should aim to cut costs. Costs play an important role because they provide hurdles that prevent us from wasting resources. In some cases when costs are hidden such inefficiencies occur. A price system would make those costs more transparent, and make it less likely that pointless emails get sent.

The objective here isn't to minimise the amount of emails being sent no one is in a position to judge how many emails "should" be sent, since this depends on a multitude of factors. Rather, the aim is to optimise the number of emails, given existing conditions.

The technology to do this exists. Yahoo has pioneered "CentMail", where users pay a small fee for each email sent to signal that it isn't spam. A similar scheme could be implemented for corporate email, which would actually generate revenue. It might challenge the cultural notion that all resources in a company are shared resources, but such socialism corrodes economies and paralyses an organisation.

It'd be nice if we all cared enough about our colleagues to bear their inboxes in mind before we dump on them, but when pressure mounts we tend to act on our pressing needs. Rather than try to change human nature, if you're serious about a more efficient email system then start charging.

Xbox 360/PC; 49.99, cert 18+; Bioware/EA

The original Mass Effect was a near-classic. The narrative and gripping combat of this sci-fi role-playing game (RPG) only let down by technical glitches. Mass Effect 2 fixes this and is a title that will appeal to a wide range of gamers, especially those who enjoy in-game conversation as much as combat.

Continuing where the original left off, Mass Effect 2 sees you guiding your Commander through a twisting plot and some great set pieces. This is very much an RPG though, with plenty of stats and text. But action is key, with combat crucial to the game. The combat has been made more transparent and more reliant on skill than stats. Gears of War fans should feel right at home with the cover mechanics and controls. Thankfully, there is still a huge emphasis on tactics and RPG stats Modern Warfare 3 this is most definitely not.

The narrative and characters are what really drive Mass Effect 2. Idle chit-chat with the numerous crew members and bystanders soon draws out motives, feelings and possibly romance. The excellent facial animations and acting help too, giving a surprising emotional pull to proceedings. One of the nice touches is the ability to import your character from the first game. Players that do so are rewarded with money and other goodies. But the real benefit is the continuation of the story with decisions you made in the first game which characters were killed off, for example having implications in the sequel.

Mass Effect 2 is a looker, too. The influences are pure retro sci-fi. So think the minimalist look of Star Wars and Space Odyssey. Blade Runner and X-Files are hinted at as well. The soundtrack mirrors this with swooping Vangelis-style pads providing a suitably synthetic mood. The universe feels more alive this time round. Planetary exploration is vastly improved from the original game. Now going off piste is truly rewarding with numerous side-missions to beef up the coffers and the characters.

Downsides? The loading times are still noticeably intrusive albeit improved on the original game. The graphics are occasionally glitchy, but more importantly the font is tiny, even on an HD screen. For a game that involves more reading than most this a major issue. Playing on a non-HD screen is very uncomfortable indeed. Nevertheless, the gripping and engaging action overcomes these issues. It may only be January, but Mass Effect 2 is already a serious contender for game of the year.

Rating: 5/5

Apple announces impressive results as anticipation builds over launch of tablet computer device

Apple was celebrating the best quarter in its 34-year history tonight, as anticipation grew around the launch of the company's tablet computerlater this week .

Announcing its latest set of financial results, the California technology company said strong demand for the iPhone and its computers had pushed sales for the last three months which included Christmas to new heights.

Despite the continued impact of the recession, revenues for the three months to December rose to $15.68bn ( 9.7bn), an increase of 32% on the same time last year. Profits, meanwhile, rose to $3.38bn a 49% increase on the last three months of 2008.

The results were bolstered by the success of the iPhone, with the company selling 8.7m of the handsets around the world over the course of the last quarter. That marked a doubling in sales from the same time last year, with figures boosted by the company's decision to open up iPhone sales in Britain late last year.

The company also sold a record number of computers, shifting 3.36m units largely laptops as purchases increased by a third.

Meanwhile the iPod, the cornerstone of the company's revival over the past decade, continued its slow decline with 21m units sold in the run-up to Christmas down 8% year-on-year.

Steve Jobs, the company's co-founder and chief executive, said: "The new products we are planning to release this year are very strong, starting this week with a major new product that we're really excited about."

That could be an understatement. Industry observers are waiting with bated breath in advance of the launch due tomorrow in San Francisco, of what is expected to be a touchscreen computer that fills a gap between the iPhone and a laptop.

Apple's notorious dedication to secrecy mean that little is known about the device. Even the name is still wrapped in mystery, though rumours have suggested, at various times, that it would be called the iPad, iBook, iSlate or Canvas.

The Guardian understands that a number of publishing groups have developed products for use with the device, and a series of deals to produce magazines and newspapers specifically for the machine could be announced at the launch.

Apple shares, which had closed up 2.69% to $203.08, continued to rise in after hours trading.

Originally published on 25 January 1984

Apple Computer, the firm that gave Silicon Valley its style, was converted to Madison Avenue values at a stroke yesterday for the simultaneous launch on both sides of the Atlantic of the computer that will fight its battle with IBM. With all the showbiz of a car launch, including the lights, dry ice, and a revolving stage, Macintosh ("the biggest advance in the office since the telephone and the calculator") was launched in both New York and London as the first stage in Apple's bid to revitalise the company after the comparative failure of its Lisa computer and in the face of burgeoning sales for the IBM personal computer. Based on the advanced 32-bit architecture developed for Lisa, Macintosh is built round a powerful Motorola 68000 microprocessor with 128K of RAM and a 512K version due later this year. It has a built-in nine-inch screen, weighs only 17lb and will fit into a canvas bag the size of an average ruck-sack, with a price in the region of $3,100.

Apart from its power, the secret of the Macintosh's potential is its ease of use, based on the Xerox concept of the "mouse". The mouse, a device centred on a ball bearing which fits neatly in the palm of the hand, is wheeled round the desktop acting as a cursor between labels or "icons" displayed on the screen which do away with complicated instructions to the machine. It makes the Macintosh very easy to use, particularly in its graphics program.

Geoff Andrews

This article has been amended. An editing change to the original led us to give the weight of the first Apple Macintosh as "171b (77kg)".

Tax aid sought for satellite TV launch

The chairman of the BBC, Mr Stuart Young, called yesterday for government action to get DBS, the proposed direct-to-home satellite television system, off the ground.

Mr Young, a City accountant said that there would be no market for DBS unless British television set manufacturers were given financial incentives.

Further talks took place yesterday. Mr Young refused to give details about the BBC's bargaining position but implied that the Government's plan of giving two channels to the BBC and two to the IBA had been discounted.

"There could be two or three DBS channels, but four would not be viable," he said. There would have to be a non-competitive market until enough homes had DBS receivers, and this would depend on price.

At present, the BBC estimates that a DBS kit would cost 500 on top of the price of the television set, and this would push rental costs too high.

"It's got to cost less than 20 per month for the subscriber. So the cost of the set rental must be even lower," said Mr Young.

Peter Fiddick

Twitter has a new suggestion engine to entice new users into the service - but will it please critics?

For some time now,Twitter has been maintaining what's known as the Suggested Users List or SUL, a master list of several hundred accounts rated highly by Twitter staff. Any new user signing in to the site was presented a selection of these accounts as a way of introducing them to the idea of Twitter: that you follow the updates of other people.

The reason for this was straightforward: people new to Twitter often find it difficult to get the point of the service, because they don't know who to follow.

For those unfamiliar with the rapid fire updates, the site's premise is often confounding - and without a gentle introduction to the system, it can feel puzzling, overwhelming or simply empty. It can feel as if you bought a telephone but then discovered there was nobody to call.

But the SUL was criticised (often with merit) as being variously opaque, simplistic and even corrupt because it brought some users hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of followers. Our @guardiantech account was one beneficiary, but beyond the headline figures the benefits of being on the list have never been clear cut (as Anil Dash eloquently noted recently).

What was clear, however, was that how to recommended users was still a problem that Twitter hadn't been able to solve.

Now the site thinks it's made progress by instituting a new version of the Suggested Users List that aims to be more democratic and focused on what new users are interested in.

The new idea? To divide up into areas of interest (like "books", "entertainment" and "science") while providing a list of users in each area determined by their popularity and levels of engagement.

Twitter staff member Josh Elman outlined the changes in a blog post yesterday:

"We've created a number of algorithms to identify users across a variety of clusters who tweet actively and are engaged with their audiences," he wrote. "These new algorithms help us group these active users into lists of users by interests. Rather than suggesting a random set of 20 users for a new user to follow, now we let users browse into the areas they are interested in and choose who they want to follow from these lists."

Is it an improvement? It's certainly more granular than the previous one-size-fits-all-policy, but it's still relatively limited by a small number of subjects.

And it's not really any more clear how the list is put together. That's not necessarily a bad thing (as I've written before, being too transparent makes the system open to gaming) but it's certainly not pleased everyone. Although the system most likely draws from Twitter's "lists" feature, there also appears to be a certain hand-picked element (and any measurement of popularity is skewed by previous appearances on the list).

But it's a step forward: giving new users a proper lead-in to the service has always been a tricky problem for the site.

So how do you solve that problem? What's Twitter still missing?

For a start, I can think of three things I'd like to see built in to the main engine.

• Search functionality that lets you find people like you
Who tweets a lot about the selection of things I am interested in? Who are the people who are connected to them? What's my larger circle of contacts? I'd love to have an easy way to find out who the other Chelsea fans in San Francisco, for example.

• Easy ways to search messages from your stream
I've lost count of the number of times that I have wanted to find that message from somebody that I follow but couldn't remember the details. Who was it that tweeted about that new mobile phone they recommended? Who linked to that story I enjoyed? Twitter knows who I am, but it doesn't let me search my friends' messages. Google can index the messages, but it doesn't know who I am.

• Personalised trends
What are the things the people I like are talking about? I don't care about some pseudo-racist meme that is spreading around, or the fact that everybody and their dog is tweeting about watching Avatar. I want to know what the hot topics are within a degree or two of me. This is even more important given that you don't see all the messages that your friends send to other people.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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

Computer experts in the US can now identify people from personal information, leading to concerns over security and confidentiality

Computer scientists in the US have discovered ways to "re-identify" the names of people included in supposedly anonymous datasets.

In one example, a movie rental company released an anonymous list of film-ratings taken from its 500,000 subscribers. Using a statistical "de-anonymisation" technique, the academics were able to identify individuals and their film preferences.

The discovery raises concerns about how safe it is to release personal information such as medical records or mobile phone data even if details such as names or national insurance numbers have been removed. There are fears the information could be accessed by criminals.

The discovery has led British researchers to raise the issue in a report they are writing for the European commission. Dr Ian Brown, of the Oxford Internet Institute and a co-author, said the example of the film list was relatively trivial. "But this raises concerns for more sensitive data such as medical records. Epidemiologists say they could do interesting research if they had access to more anonymous data. This shows it is difficult to do that in a way that can't be reversed."

One concern is that criminals could identify individuals through mobile phone data and use the information to track people's movements and find out when they are away from home. "That is one worry. Other people who you might worry about accessing that information include employers, insurers or the government. There are a whole range of potential users," Brown said.

Experts say the discovery that lists can be "de-anonymised" needs to be included in the debate about how information is released and where to draw the line. But they also highlight the benefits of letting researchers and others access large datasets.

Last week Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web, launched a new website data.gov.uk on which members of the public will be able to access information on crime rates, exam results, house prices and more.

"They are talking about non-personal data," said Brown. "But another thing they are looking at releasing is crime reports down to street level. You have to think about how people might be able to link that back to individuals."

William Heath, founder of Ctrl-Shift, which specialises in how personal data are used, said: "If you take it in the light of Friday's news about data.gov.uk, the government has clearly done something really good to make public data available. Now they need a more enlightened approach to personal data, but you can't simply say anonymised data can be safely made public because it is clear how hard it is truly to anonymise data."

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."

HP to bundle Omnifone music service with new computers
MusicStation deal covers 10 European countries including UK

The latest salvo in the digital music war will be fired today when British group Omnifone announces it has clinched a crucial deal with Hewlett-Packard, the largest PC manufacturer in the world, to have its MusicStation unlimited track download service pre-loaded onto computers and laptops.

The deal, which covers 10 European countries including the UK, comes as online music service Spotify continues to gain ground in Europe, and Apple is understood to be planning to announce its own streaming music service for iTunes on Wednesday. Late last year, the Californian technology company snapped up small music start-up Lala. It has expertise in online storage and streaming and that deal was widely seen as preceding a move by Apple into the streaming music market.

Many current online music services only allow people to listen to tracks when connected to the internet. MusicStation, which is already available as a mobile phone service from operators including Vodafone in the UK, allows users to download an unlimited number of tracks from a library of 6.5m - and play them offline. For 8.99 a month ( 9.99 outside the UK), subscribers to MusicStation for the PC also get their 10 favourite tracks each month without any copyright protection, meaning they can load them onto any digital music device.

The digital music market has become a battleground not just for the music companies and retailers, but also for hardware manufacturers and even internet service providers. HP is just the latest in a long line of brands to jump on the bandwagon.

While iTunes and the iPod gave Apple a significant head start, its grip is being loosened by a plethora of new services. Satellite broadcaster Sky recently launched its Sky Songs streaming and download service and Virgin Media is trying to get a similar service up and running, reportedly under the title MusicFish.

Mobile phone manufacturer Nokia launched its Comes With Music service more than a year ago, bundling unlimited track downloads in with some of its smartphones. The service, however, has failed to attract significant takeup, not least because its advertising left many people baffled. Omnifone, meanwhile, powers rival mobile phone maker Sony Ericsson's own music service PlayNow.

Omnifone launched MusicStation in 2007 and teaming up with HP, which globally ships almost 50m computers a year, will give it access to a huge potential market. Anyone buying one of 16 HP computers and laptops across Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK will get MusicStation bundled with their new hardware and will be offered a free trial and the chance to subscribe to the full service.

For HP, the deal gives the company the chance to boast to consumers about the media credentials of its hardware, at a time when bitter rival Dell has poured millions into advertising its own consumer-friendly range of brightly coloured multimedia laptops.

"Omnifone is proud to partner with HP, the world's largest PC manufacturer, to deliver MusicStation to consumers on millions of PCs in 10 countries across Europe," said Rob Lewis, Omnifone chief executive. "The HP rollout sees MusicStation Desktop preinstalled on multiple HP PCs, available in seven languages with each territory featuring an individually tailored music catalogue."

 "We look forward to extending our partnership onto even more PCs and territories, to ensure consumers have the ability to gain legitimate access to the world's music on every HP PC they purchase."

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.

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.

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.

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.

Chris Hall's letter questions whether the Ramblers is "on the frontline in getting the paths and countryside open" (Forget Twitter ramblers need a grown-up campaign for access, 23 January). It neglects to mention that the charity recently (two months ago) achieved one of the biggest campaigning victories in its history: securing a continual walking path around the entire coastline of Britain, which will open up an unprecedented amount of out-of-bounds coast for the public to walk, use and enjoy for ever.

The Ramblers will always be an active campaigning organisation with thousands of volunteers working to open up, and unblock, footpaths right across Britain. We never shy away from taking strong measures to protect people's rights including legal action where necessary, but we prefer to work in partnership with local authorities, landowners and farmers, many of whom are supportive.

Our vice-presidents have a range of views, which we welcome, including about using modern campaigning methods that reach out to new walkers, like Facebook. The Ramblers has new challenges to urgently address. One of the biggest is to encourage more people young and old to take up walking, and make the most of Britain's 130,000 miles of footpaths and 936,000 hectares of open access land. That's why the Ramblers network includes groups just for people in their 20s-30s (our fastest growing source of membership), and walks aimed at weekend, older and family walkers too.

Keith Roberts

Director of campaigns, Ramblers

It may look grim out there, but unemployment is down, days are getting longer and Tony Blair is set to provide us with the best daytime TV ever. Tim Dowling brings us 25 reasons to be cheerful

The skies are dark, the weather is terrible, your job isn't safe, the economy is in a trough, the planet is heating up, the Tories are about to win an election for the first time in 13 years and we've just put the terrorism alert up a notch to "severe". And if you gave up drinking for January, you've still got five long days to go. Can things get any worse?

The answer, thankfully, is no. This is rock bottom. From here on in things can only get better. In fact, there are signs that battered Britain is already on the mend, if you will only screw up your tired eyes and look for them. Can you see the upside yet? No? Well, look harder! The road to happiness may be partially flooded and in poor repair, but it's still right there in front of you. Let's begin:

1 Official figures released today are expected to show that the recession is finally at an end in Britain. It is estimated that GDP grew by 0.4% in the last quarter of last year, following six consecutive quarters of negative growth. The UK may be the last of the G7 nations to leave the recession behind, but better late than never, and let's face it: never was definitely one of the available options.

2 According to a complex and largely nonsensical mathematical equation reckoning with such variables as weather, debt, and seasonal motivational levels, yesterday was officially the most depressing day of the year. From now until Christmas the outlook can only improve.

3 Good news for mice! A pioneering new technology could soon allow cosmetics to be tested using laboratory-grown human skin cells instead of animals.

4 Johnny Depp is alive! Over the weekend, rumours of the actor's untimely death spread like wildfire online and started trending on Twitter. Fortunately, the story turned out to be a hoax he's fine! If you hadn't heard anything about the rumours in the first place then this isn't particularly good news, but at least you didn't waste the weekend faffing around on the internet.

5 Rumours of Brad and Angelina's imminent split, however, are so rife that Paddy Power has put the odds of a separation at just 4/7. The good news is that the big betting money is on Brad's next partner: 1/2 for his ex, Jennifer Aniston, 12/1 on Rihanna, 20/1 on Britney Spears and 33/1 on Cheryl Cole.

6 Unemployment has fallen for two successive months, and now stands at 2.46 million, well under predictions of 3 million at the start of the year.

7 Apple's new tablet thingy is being launched tomorrow, and it's not just going to be cool, it's going to save newspapers, books, magazines and the music industry. Get your hopes up now!

8 The UK film industry, a perennial source of gloom, is actually doing rather well: 2009 was the second-best production year ever, cinema attendance was at its highest since 2002 and box-office takings topped the 1bn mark for the first time.

9 Two weeks ago the Hayes Hawks BMX bike club of Hayes, Middlesex, had 33 of their bikes stolen, placing the club's future in jeopardy. But police acting on a tip-off have now recovered all but six of the bikes. Nice work, snitches!

10 At first we thought it was going to be a mild winter, meaning councils had thoughtlessly stockpiled way too much grit. Then we had all that snow, and it suddenly looked as if we had far too little grit. Then, as stockpiles dwindled to nothing, the snow stopped, so we ended up stockpiling more or less the right amount of grit. Well guessed, professional estimators!

11 Even in this recession, car crime is down 10%, criminal damage is down 8%, and recorded instances of violence against the person fell by 6%. Gun-related murders for the year dropped from 59 to 53. Fraud, forgery, drug offences, burglary and knife crime are all up, but that is not the bright side, so let's not look at it just now.

12 Britain's coldest January in 37 years is just coming to a close. It has been a tricky month for travel, but the cold snap should see a big reduction in garden pests and fungal plant diseases in the coming year.

13 Vampire Weekend's second album has topped the Billboard album chart, pushing Susan Boyle into second place. At first glance this may look like a mildly dispiriting story about a New York band beating a British singer in the US charts, but wait . . . Vampire Weekend are on a British label! Well done, XL!

14 The days are getting longer. Some parts of the country may not have experienced anything resembling "daylight" since new year, but that can't last for ever. Eventually, you will see the sun.

15 On Saturday, shop worker Wismond Exantus was pulled alive from the rubble in Port-au-Prince, 11 days after the devastating earthquake struck and several hours after the Haitian government had declared the rescue operation over. And he managed to drink an entire bottle of whisky while trapped.

16 Mad Men is back! Series 3 of the pitch-perfect Madison Avenue drama starts tomorrow. Even if you don't like Mad Men, this news is bound to cheer up someone you know, and that can only make your life easier.

17 Tony Blair is going to give evidence to the Chilcot inquiry. On Friday, history will take a preliminary view of Blair's dubious legacy when he faces awkward questions about the legality, timing and wisdom of the Iraq war. If nothing else, it should prove the most dramatic daytime television viewing of the month.

18 The Winter Olympics are coming! People always say they don't like the Winter Olympics, but unlike the 2012 games, these Olympics are not going to be our problem, and therefore it doesn't matter how good or bad they are. We can just relax and watch the skating.

19 Lena Bryce of Glasgow had just given birth to the UK's first "iPhone" baby, conceived after three years of trying with the help of an iPhone fertility app that keeps track of ovulation times. Hooray!

20 If the Equality and Human Rights Commission gets its way, mandatory retirement at 65 will be abolished and we'll all be able to work until we're incredibly old. To be honest, we'll probably have to work until we're incredibly old, but at least we won't have to worry about all that red tape.

21 England didn't lose the cricket. OK, so they nearly lost. You could even argue they deserved to lose, but it doesn't matter because they didn't in the end.

22 A 76-year-old Polish beekeeper, Jozef Guzy, collapsed while working, stopped breathing, went cold and was pronounced dead by a doctor, but just as they were sealing him in his coffin someone noticed he had a pulse. He was then rushed to hospital where doctors couldn't find anything wrong with him. Obviously, there's something terribly wrong with him, but it's still a nice story.

23 A 2007 report by the International Panel on Climate Change suggesting that the Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 turns out to be wrong. A lot of cynics have pounced on this admittedly pretty serious mistake and the impact it will have on the credibility of climate-change science, but they are missing the Bigger Plus. The Himalayan glaciers, while ultimately doomed, probably won't disappear for 300 years or so. Phew!

24 The famous Separated Swans of Slimbridge, Sarindi and Saruni, got divorced after only two years together, something that has only happened once before in 40 years in this part of Gloucestershire. It was a sad tale, until now: both swans have returned to Slimbridge for the winter with a new partner apiece in tow! It just goes to show that it can all work as long as you're prepared to be modern about these things.

25 England are going to win the 2010 World Cup, absolutely guaranteed it's in the bag, mate. Start celebrating now if you like. (For Scottish edition: don't worry England is never going to win the World Cup.)

Lucy Atkins helps you choose from the bewildering array of health apps currently available

The number of iPhone health apps, those handy tools you can download (often for free), is already bordering on intimidating. You can now diagnose your symptoms, track your calorie intake, get fit, monitor mood swings, quit smoking, meditate or seek spiritual guidance all through the touch screen in your back pocket.

Health apps range from the genuinely useful type in a symptom, get a diagnosis to the distinctly superfluous (do you really need to use your phone to monitor your partner's contractions during labour?). Even the NHS is on board with its new "Drinks Tracker", allowing people to calculate and control their alcohol intake. And yesterday, one woman told the Sun that the Free Menstrual Calendar app was responsible for the conception of her baby, after four years of trying.

Doctors, too, are increasingly using apps to keep up with medical news. According to doctorsnet.co.uk, the largest network of medical professionals in the UK, around 4,000 now use their app each month.

But for us patients, using so-called "doctor apps" should never replace a necessary visit to a flesh-and-blood GP. And if in doubt about any advice you read, says Professor Steve Field, chairman of the Royal College of General Practitioners, "always check that the information is validated by the NHS". Generally, though, he says, "These apps are fantastic the more information people have about their health, the better."

Odds are that it won't be long until most of us have app-friendly mobile phones, so here is our pick of the best doctor apps available so far.

Diagnostic Tools

WebMD Mobile (free)

Enter some personal details, then use the body map "symptom checker" to swiftly narrow down your symptoms and get a "diagnosis". It's surprisingly easy and quick. You can also access information about medications and treatments, and there is a useful First Aid tool that covers anything from heart attacks to cuts and bruises.

SymptomMD ( 1.79)

Great for those worried about whether to "bother" the doc: you tap in your symptoms, then answer questions to find out how urgently you need help, or how to treat the problem yourself. There is also the Pediatric SymptomMD app, for fretting parents.

Fitness

RunKeeper (free)

Using GPS to monitor your runs (or walks), this will track your speed, distance, timing and how many calories you burned. You can then link up to the runkeeper.com website to view a history of your achievements. Good, free motivation.

iFitness ( 1.19)

A worldwide bestseller, this one is for gym bunnies, offering hundreds of gym-based training programmes, from "Body Toning for Women" to "Glutes Definition", via "Expert Golf". You can customise your workouts, set goals and monitor progress.

Emotional wellbeing

Yoga Trainer Lite (free)

Provides yoga tutorials for all abilities, plus easy-to-follow, calming meditations. You have to read explanations of the poses (rather than hear them) so it can be tricky at first, but it's a handy tool to have on the go.

Pzizz Relax ( 5.99)

This nifty app uses calming sound relaxation. Use it for short or long "naps" to de-stress and energise, or at night to tackle insomnia. Unlike other relaxation apps, you can customise the length of your "pzizz" and turn the voiceover on or off.

Pregnancy

Pregnancy Tracker from WhattoExpect.com (free) From the author of the bestselling pregnancy book, this helps you to trace the growth of your baby (in both measurements and, hilariously, as compared to objects such as walnuts or papayas), see pictures of a developing foetus and make a library of your own belly snapshots. Very informative, if you can stand the cutesy Americanisms.

iPregnancy ( 2.39).

This 'has better pictures of the growing baby. It also helps you get organised, with space to log antenatal appointments and the questions you want to ask at them, along with potential baby names.

Diet and Nutrition

Calorie Counter & Diet Tracker by My Fitness Pal (free) Tap in your age, gender, lifestyle details and weight-loss goal and you're away. It'll set a daily calorie limit and help you track your food and exercise throughout the day. A potentially effective weight-loss tool, if you're prepared to be brutally honest.

Tap & Track Calorie, Weight and Exercise Tracker ( 2.39)

This one gives you not just the calories but also the nutritional value of what you eat and drink, keeping a daily tally and giving you breakdowns of your average carb, fat, protein, fibre, sugar, sodium or GI index.

Since it was first invented 25 years ago, the video game Tetris has undertaken an epic journey. Developed deep inside the Soviet Academy of Sciences by a 29-year-old artificial intelligence researcher, Alexey Pajitnov, who was playing around with mathematical puzzles, it has become, more than a quarter of a century later, the king of casual games. Tetris has travelled from the computing equivalent of the stone age a Soviet copy of an American minicomputer to the Nintendo Game Boy and now to the phone recently celebrating its 100  millionth download to a mobile. The concept is so simple a series of differently shaped blocks fall from the top of the screen, which the player has to arrange in a line without gaps that its durability has taken everyone by surprise, not least its inventor, Mr Pajitnov. There was no scoring or levels in the original version, but once you start playing you can not stop. Operating on the basic commercial principle that if he was addicted, others would be too, Mr Pajitnov began what became a mammoth quest to get the game marketed internationally. Initially the rights were owned by the Soviet state, and without a deal with Nintendo and the help of Henk Rogers, a Dutch game designer the game could have faded into obscurity, as many other games of the 1980s did. Mr  Pajitnov remains surprised to this day about the success of his  computer doodling. But no one in 25 years has come up with  anything better.

Originally published on 26 January 1933

SOUTHAMPTON, WEDNESDAY.

Sir Malcolm Campbell had a tem perature of 103deg. when he sailed from Southampton for New York to-day in the Cunard liner Aquitania on his way to Daytona Beach, Florida, where, on February 10, he hopes to beat his own world's record of 253.963 miles an hour in his reconstructed racing car Blue Bird.

Sir Malcolm, who declared yesterday that he would sail even if he had to be carried aboard on a stretcher, was able to make the journey from his home at Horley to Southampton in a private motor-car. He was wearing a heavy overcoat with the collar turned up and a muffler was round his mouth and nose as he mounted the gangway with Lady Campbell.

When a "Manchester Guardian" correspondent interviewed Sir Malcolm in his suite it was obvious at a glance that he was a sick man. His face was flushed, and periodically he drew his hand across his forehead, which was moist with perspiration caused by his high temperature.

"There is not a great deal I can tell you," he said, "for it is impossible to say what the performance of Blue Bird will be now that she has such a vastly more powerful engine fitted, I am naturally hopeful that I shall succeed in breaking the record, but that will depend upon weather conditions and a certain amount of good fortune.

"If I am fortunate I should be successful. I prefer, however, to make no forecast. For all I know the car may blow up, and in that event there will be no record." Sir Malcolm made this last observation with a smile upon his face, and added: "I have known less expensive cars than this blow up."

Asked whether it would not have been possible to defer his passage for a few days in view of his attack of influenza, Sir Malcolm replied: "No, it was quite impossible, and I was firmly determined to sail. It is essential that I shall make my attempt on the record on February 10, when there will be a full moon, for it is at that time that the beach conditions are likely to be at their best. I think that three or four days in bed during the Atlantic crossing will see me through the influenza attack. In any event I shall have a few days to gather strength after my arrival at Daytona."

Asked whether this would be his final attempt to improve upon the record he now holds, Sir Malcolm said: "That all depends upon circumstances. If I fail this time one never can tell."

Juries are a fundamental pillar of our justice system. But many believe that jurors are now routinely accessing and distributing so much prejudicial information online, that the very integrity of the system is in danger

In 1670, two men named William Penn and William Mead stood trial at the Old Bailey, charged with sedition after leading Quaker prayer services in a London street. The judge, Sir Samuel Starling also London's Lord Mayor was so incensed when the jury returned a not-guilty verdict that he had them all imprisoned.

"You shall be locked up without meat, drink, fire and tobacco," Starling is reported to have told the obstinate jury. "We will have a verdict, by the help of God, or you shall starve for it."

Unbeknown to Starling, the legacy of his tactics was to enshrine greater protection for the 12 men and women who decide a criminal trial. The independence of juries is often referred to as a "hallowed principle" of English justice but this is now being threatened by a very modern phenomenon.

The problem, according to members of the legal profession, is that the internet has entered the jury room. Instances of jurors using search engines such as Google, and social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, is compromising the strict rule that the only information available to them must have been carefully vetted by lawyers so as not to be "prejudicial", or likely to unfairly influence the verdict.

All juries are segregated during each day's hearings, entering and leaving court through private entrances, and eating in a dining room designated only for juries sitting in that court. Yet even in the most high-profile cases, jurors usually go home at the end of each day, making their behaviour outside the courtroom hard to monitor.

The attorney general, judges and lawyers representing both prosecution and defence have all voiced their concerns. "Let us be realistic and address the access jurors have to the internet," Lord Igor Judge, the head of the judiciary in England and Wales, said recently. "Nowadays, judges [direct] the jury not to look at the internet in connection with the trial. [But] inevitably, from time to time, an individual juror will disregard the direction and make his own private enquiries."

The consequences of such enquiries can be serious. In 2005, a man named Adem Karakaya stood trial for repeatedly raping and indecently assaulting a 14-year-old girl. The girl gave evidence against him and the jury found Karakaya guilty. After the verdict, however, a jury bailiff found internet printouts in the jury room, including ironically several about the difficulty of obtaining rape convictions. The case went to the court of appeal, where Lord Judge and two other justices decided the conviction was unsafe. He was acquitted in a retrial.

"The introduction of extraneous material [into the jury room] contravened very well-established principles," Lord Judge said in his judgment. "The internet has many benefits and we do not mean to diminish its value . . . It can, however, provide material which may influence a juror's views. If used for research purposes during the trial, it can just as easily influence the juror's mind as a discussion with a friend or neighbour."

Since the Karakaya case, judges now give explicit instructions at the beginning of a trial that jurors should not look up anything connected with the case on the internet and, in the most serious cases, sometimes repeat this instruction at the end of each day's proceedings. But lawyers say this is not always enough.

"It is becoming a big problem, particularly in cases involving disputed expert evidence," says Eleanor Laws, a barrister at Six Pump court chambers who prosecuted Karakaya. "Or, more disastrously, if there has been sensational and prejudicial reporting of the case or an earlier related case, those details may still be found on the internet. Unless a juror informs the court that another juror has conducted internet research, or as in Karakaya the material is discovered, it is impossible to police."

"This has been a problem for years," another lawyer with extensive experience of criminal trials confirms. "I know one juror who said the first thing he did when he got home from court was to look the case up on the internet."

The high-profile trial last year of Steven Barker, Jason Owen and Tracey Connelly, the defendants ultimately convicted of causing the death of Peter Connelly ("Baby P"), was almost jeopardised by internet sites which revealed their identities and campaigned for justice in the case. The authorities were forced to take unprecedented steps to restrict details available online, with the attorney general, police, prosecutors and lawyers all working to ensure prejudicial information was removed from the internet.

"There are things we can do it's already happening," the attorney general, Baroness Scotland, told the Guardian during the Baby P trial. "We are taking down names and addresses from the internet, and we are working with service providers. People may think they can get away with breaching court orders, but I would say to those people: I wouldn't want to mess around if I were them."

Such efforts to police the information available does not always prevent jurors from doing private research, however. One juror recently approached a journalist at the end of a trial, asking which paper she wrote for and then complimenting her reporting as "a very good summary of events". The juror admitted they had found out more important background by doing some surreptitious Googling.

And last year, a juror hearing a case about criminal property looked the defendant up online and discovered he had a previous conviction for money laundering. The defendant was found guilty, but had his conviction overturned because, the court of appeal said, the juror had failed to comply with the "spirit" of the judge's instructions and the rest of the jury had done the same by not reporting the wayward juror until three weeks later. Knowledge of the defendant's previous convictions could have led to the jury forming an unfair "adverse view" of the defendant, the court said.

The concerns of lawyers are not limited to the UK. Research in New Zealand has found that jurors often seek out publicity about trials and conduct their own investigations. And in the US where Barack Obama has just successfully deferred his call to serve on the jury at Cook County circuit court in southern Chicago jurors have been discovered posting messages on Twitter including "my brain is dying from sitting in this juror room . . . uugh!!!" and "loving this juror thing, its like law & order. I know what I want to be now when I grow up."

"Just got done with day 2 of jury duty," another tweet said. "Back at it tomorrow morning at 845 am . . . who dunn it? I dunno . . ." Yet another came as the verdict was being decided: "Deliberating!! I think I've reached my decision! But does everyone agree???"

In response, America's supreme court is considering the most explicit instructions yet banning jurors from using the internet in conjunction with a case. "I want to stress," the proposed script says, "that this rule means you must not use electronic devices or computers to communicate about this case, including tweeting, texting, blogging, e-mailing, posting information on a website or chatroom, or any other means at all."

But is it realistic for courts to place such expectations on people, particularly the young, who are less and less used to listening to information presented orally, preferring to look up anything they are vaguely curious about online? Furthermore, the difficulty of jurors presiding over complex fraud trials following numeric evidence over a period that often stretches to months is also cited as a reason that trial by jury is not up to the demands of modern criminal justice.

"It is perhaps unrealistic to expect that the judicial direction not to research the case on the internet will always be followed," said Laws. "You can warn the jury that they will be in contempt of court, but short of really heavy-handed threats that their computers could be seized which will never happen I'm not sure what else the court can do."

This is a view endorsed by the lord chief justice: "We are hardly likely to welcome a suggestion that the technological equipment belonging to an individual juror should somehow be vetted. Such an intrusion would be entirely unacceptable."

And yet the ever-more unrestrained behaviour of jurors, compared with their more obedient counterparts of yesteryear, continues to cause concern. Last year, Guardian reporter Helen Pidd witnessed scenes she described as "extraordinary" when covering the libel battle between Express owner Richard Desmond and the biographer Tom Bower.

"After delivering a majority verdict in favour of Bower, the jury mobbed him in the corridor outside the courtroom at the royal courts of justice," said Pidd. "Bower lapped up the attention, thanked the jurors for delivering justice, and promised each a free copy of his next book if they emailed him."

Another serious threat to the trial-by-jury system remains the intimidation of jurors albeit no longer by judges such as Sir Samuel Starling back in 1670. Earlier this month, the first ever crown court trial in England and Wales to go ahead without a jury began to hear the case of a Heathrow robbery, after the previous trial had collapsed because of suspected jury tampering. According to the police, another jury trial could only have been held if up to 82 police officers were deployed to protect the jurors, at a cost of up to 6m.

Yet this case has, in fact, led to a strong outpouring of support for the system of trial by jury, confirming its "hallowed" status in English criminal law. Instead, if jurors continue to tweet, blog or Facebook their views, Google the facts of a case and research its background online, the real threat to the future of juries may come from within.

'It's frozen in the dark ages' a young juror writes

My first experience of jury service two summers ago, aged 24, persuaded me that our court system is frozen in the dark ages. On the first day, they drag you out of bed at the crack of dawn and make you turn up at court two hours before the lawyers, clerks and even the accused arrive, to watch a video VHS, that is, filmed no later than 1973 about your indispensable civic role as a juror. Surely they could just have uploaded it online and trusted us to watch it beforehand?

Then there's the waiting room, where you can find yourself sitting for up to six hours a day with no Wi-Fi, so no chance to update your Facebook status to "bored rigid". Days one and two of my fortnight's service were spent here, nails drumming on a table, watching tennis on the sole television provided for 100 people (a TV so cheap that the screen fuzzed over if anyone so much as moved a muscle).

On day three, I finally made it into the courtroom, whereupon the bureaucratic tedium goes up another notch. First, you get sworn in if you're not rejected by the accused because they don't like the look of you. Then the lawyers start talking, and talking, ever more gravely, about major criminal inconveniences such as, ooh, nicking a push bike or stealing a scrap of metal. We discussed our sillier cases (against the rules) over government-issue pie, chips and beans in the jurors' canteen.

So where are the visual aids, the CCTV footage, even the laptops to help us write notes? Maybe older jurors can hack it, but if anything is explained to me in longer than half-hourly instalments, I need more than a scrap of paper and the judge's dronelike summation to take it on board let alone work out what's beyond reasonable doubt.

Some people, I discover, don't get called to a case at all. The jury manager can take pity and release them early, but only on the promise that they phone in at 8am the following morning to see if they are required on a case. What these courts need, at the very least, is an updatable website. They should be able to manage that in an age when anyone even a juror can access any information about a case with a few simple clicks. Not that I did any such thing, of course.

Wii; 19.99; cert 15+; Capcom

This is a strange one a straight port of a game that's nearly eight years old and originally released on the GameCube.

That in itself shouldn't put you off, although it's disappointing that no effort has been made to customise it for the Wii, so no new content at all and no swinging wildly with the Wiimote. Instead you have a choice of classic controls or a combination of Wiimote and Nunchuck. By and large, this means painfully slow turning angles (using the joystick) and an inventory system that can only cope with carrying only six items at once, leading to much to-ing and fro-ing between locations. It's also a return to hilarious and frustrating anomalies like needing to find a typewriter ribbon to save your progress. Given that Zero was supposed to be prequel to the original Resident Evil game, such limitations you simply have to live with.

However, this was also the first of the RE games to involve co-op play, with your two characters (STARS medic Rebecca Chambers and escaped convict Billy Coen) boasting different abilities which makes for some half decent puzzles that require swapping characters with a single button press or taking on different fighting roles as the need dictates. Otherwise, it's your bog standard zombie-basher that takes your heroes through the usual gamut of shambling zombies, dogs, spiders and monkeys. Graphically, the static background are primitive but still superbly atmospheric, although wrestling with the control system merely emphasises how much the genre has moved on since then the 20th century

For all these reasons, it would be easy to slag off Zero to hell and back, but there's still something endearing about its dogged old-school clunkiness. Just as the shuffle zombie/running zombie debate has divided zom-com fans, so there remains a hard core who simply prefer the slower pace that Resident Evil has always espoused. Yes, it's archaic (particularly the ponderous animations every time a door opens or window breaks) but somehow it adds to the nightmare quality of never being able to run or fight as fast as you know you need to.

So, for completists who either dumped or missed the GameCube original, there's still fun to be had and it is cheaper than most RE games. For the rest of you, RE: Darkside Chronicles should be popping up in bargain bins right about now, having done the full-price business at Christmas. RE: Zero may be an acquired taste, but there's enough there to remind you just how influential the franchise used to be and arguably could be again.

Rating: 3/5