Apple launches the iPad, its 9.7" colour screen tablet, which aims to rob Kindle of growing ebook market and be hottest gadget in technology history

The veil was finally lifted on one of the most hotly anticipated gadgets in technology history tonight as Apple's Steve Jobs held aloft the iPad, a tablet-shaped computer which he hopes will win Apple domination of the ebook market.

Looking like an oversized iPhone, and sporting a 9.7in colour screen the same size as Amazon's black-and-white Kindle ereader the iPad would "open the floodgates" for the sales of ebooks, said Jobs, Apple's chief executive.

In front of an excited crowd, he showed off web surfing, email, games, presentation software and various other tricks. But it was clear ebooks are, at least initially, Apple's highest priority for the touchscreen iPad, as Jobs unveiled a program called iBooks to let people "discover and purchase and download" ebooks directly on to the device from iTunes.

The company has signed deals with five major publishers HarperCollins, Penguin, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan and Hachette to sell ebooks on the iPad.

Reaction online was mixed, but the publishing industry keen for a digital salvation in a form that does not obliterate its profits was generally effusive, as were voices from the education sector.

The iPad would help "attract millions of new readers to the world's best books", said John Makinson, chairman of the Penguin Group.

If the iPad ousts the Kindle, currently dominant in ereading, it would mark the third business that Apple has set its sights on conquering. It first took on digital music with the iPod, and more recently has been overhauling larger incumbents such as Microsoft in the smartphone sector with its three-year-old iPhone.

Speaking at the launch in San Francisco, Jobs suggested it would be "far better" at tasks such as web browsing, email and reading ebooks than either smartphones or laptops, creating a "third segment" of computing between handheld phones and laptop computers. Success will rest on whether Apple can convince customers they need such a device and a key factor could be price.

The first versions, without mobile connectivity, will go on sale worldwide at the end of March, priced from $499 in the US; UK prices are not yet set. Versions with 3G will arrive at least month later.

The view from some industry analysts tonight was that sales of iPad-like devices are poised to explode, after years when tablet computers have barely sold. "These 'Goldilocks' devices not too big, not too small are expected to have a break out year in 2010," said Jim Sloane, lead technology partner at the consultancy Deloitte. "By offering a more appealing balance of form and function, net tablets will be purchased by tens of millions of people in the year ahead."

But they mark a move from active creation of content to passive consumption, noted Ian Fogg, principal analyst at Forrester Research. "With the iPad running an iPhone-style user interface, it's optimised for media consumption rather than creation."

Jobs came on stage and praised Amazon's Kindle, but in effect vowed to bury it. "Amazon's done a great job of pioneering this [ebook] functionality with the Kindle, and we're going to stand on their shoulders," he said.

Apple is understood to be offering electronic content publishers a 70% share of any revenues from sales through iBook and is allowing book publishers to set higher prices than Amazon has. That will be attractive to publishers worried that ebooks will undercut them.

Newspaper and magazine publishers will also be watching how well the iPad does.

Jobs warned Apple's rivals: "Because we've already sold 75m iPhones and iPod Touches, we already have 75m people who know how to use an iPad."

Apple will sell publications for the iPad through its online App Store, which already has 140,000 applications for sale. Scott Forstall, in charge of iPhone software at Apple, said that all those programs could run unchanged on the iPad. That gives it a potentially valuable lead over Amazon, which has only began to court developers in the past month.

The announcement crowns a decade in which Apple has remodelled the music, mobile phone and now possibly publishing industries. Earlier this week it recorded record quarterly revenues of $15.7bn, and profits of $3.4bn, a far cry from December 2000 when it warned investors it would make a loss of $250m on quarterly revenues of about $1bn.

The iPad is 0.5in thick, weighs 1.5lb (0.7kg) and can store 16 to 64 gigabytes of data. Apple claims that it is capable of 10 hours' battery life, though real-world tests hardly ever confirm manufacturers' claims.

The announcement brings to an end one of the most intense build-ups for any product even from a company like Apple, which is notorious for generating excitement and hype among its legion of fans. The iPad project has been in the works at Apple for several years, but was repeatedly knocked back by Jobs. The latest tablet computer to hit the market, it still has some way to go before it convinces the public that it is worth buying. Previous tablets have proved merely niche devices despite support from luminaries such as Bill Gates, who famously announced in 2001 that he believed they would be the most popular form of computer within five years.

But Apple, which helped kickstart the Silicon Valley computer revolution in the 1970s, has good form. Its Apple II and Macintosh personal computers helped popularise home computing more than 25 years ago, while the iPod which was first launched in 2001 went on to change not only the way we listen to music.

Meanwhile tThe iPhone, the iPad's closest sibling, has sent tremors through the mobile industry since its launch in 2007. While it has not dominated the enormous mobile phone market in terms of sales Apple has sold 41m handsets in three years, the same number Nokia sells in a month it has won much of the more lucrative smartphone market, and drove its competitors to develop their own touchscreen handsets.

You may wonder what the Apple iPad is for. The answer: everything, but could that be too much?

Like everything Apple designs, the iPad is intended to satisfy our cravings for simplicity and clarity. Steve Jobs had already sneered at the idea of netbooks, labelling the cheap, low-powered laptops that have proved phenomenally popular with consumers slow and clunky but it's clear that this is the market the iPad is aiming for.

On the surface it appears to be little more than an oversized iPhone, a flat, black screen with a single button but underneath it wants to be a laptop.

As one of a small group of people given a sneak, hands-on preview of the iPad, my first impressions were good: it's hefty but not heavy, feeling solid and responsive in the hand. The screen is about the size of a large paperback, but it's just half an inch deep. That big, glassy screen does leave it vulnerable to breakages, but could also prove liberating for people who are used to toting a laptop around with them.

Using it will be familiar to anybody who has tried an iPhone: it uses the same combination of swipes, pokes, jabs and sweeps of the finger of its smaller cousin. Sweep your hand across its reactive 9.7-inch screen, though, and everything feels more satisfying and natural.

The big problem I had was in trying to understand what the iPad was for: the answer, it seems, is everything.

It attempts to do almost everything that your laptop can, while also offering almost everything your smartphone can do as well. Surfing the web was a breeze, while it plays video smoothly and handles a variety of games pretty well. You can use any of the existing iPhone applications straight away, though it is disappointing when you realise that they become blocky and almost childlike when expanded to fill the larger screen.

Switched into ebook mode, the way the iPad emulates the printed page feels fairly natural, if not entirely on a par with rival ebook readers such as Amazon's Kindle. The backlit screen doesn't come anywhere near the clarity of electronic ink, which means it's going to prove a lot harder on the eyes of bookworms(it's great for reading in bed, one Apple flunky told me, keen to stress the positive side). But what it loses here, it makes up for with the addition of colour and even video. When you get down to business, the iPad might not be enough for heavy users. The on-screen keyboard will take a little getting used to: unlike the thumb-driven flash of text messaging, typing on the iPad requires either a single finger stab or putting it down on a flat surface. But for casual entertainment, it manages to do plenty very well: the sort of thing likely to tempt customers who want a lightweight laptop but doesn't really need it to do any heavy lifting.

For anyone who loves new technology, getting the first touch of a new Apple device is a little like laying hands on the Shroud of Turin, or seeing a unicorn: the first experience of a mythical object imbued with miraculous properties.

Jobs trumpeted it as exactly that, a magical device that will change the way we use computers in our everyday lives. And while playing with the iPad was not exactly a religious experience, it's not hard to see that the gadget, or at least the ideas it contains, will be with us for a long time to come.

Internet service provider criticised by human rights watchdog for plans to analyse online activity of customers

Plans for Virgin Media to monitor customers' internet use for possible copyright infringement have come under fire by a human rights watchdog. The group Privacy International has expressed concern over Virgin Media's use of Cview, a software programme that would allow the internet service provider to analyse the online activity of customers. This would potentially include those who are sharing music online through unauthorised peer-to-peer sites.

This latest move comes less than a year after Virgin Media announced that it was in talks with Universal Music to create a subscription service that offered unlimited downloads for a monthly fee. It is thought that the implementation of software which would allow Virgin Media to scrutinise what customers are doing online is a result of their ongoing discussions with the record industry.

Alexander Hanff, head of ethical networks at Privacy International, told the BBC: "Under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) intercepting communications is a criminal offence regardless of what you do with the data." Privacy International has asked the European Commission to investigate the use of Cview.

However, Virgin Media claims use of the software will not violate the privacy of its customers and will not be used to identify individuals. "CView works at a core-network level, and simply analyses, entirely anonymously, the percentage of data that flows across the network that is copyrighted and being shared unlawfully," said Virgin Media spokeswoman Emma Hutchinson. She said that "at no point will we collect or share customer data as part of this trial".

The proposal for the use of Cview software suggests that 40% of the activity on Virgin Media's network would be analysed in a trial study. Hutchinson confirmed that it would initially concentrate on traffic to three major P2P websites with links to unauthorised filesharing: Gnutella, eDonkey and BitTorrent. However, the trial is still in the planning stages and it is not clear exactly when Cview will be up and running.

UK cloud computing strategy could save up to 3.2bn a year, says Cabinet Office

The government has unveiled a sweeping strategy to create its own internal "cloud computing" system such as that used by Google, Microsoft and Amazon as part of a radical plan that it claims could save up to 3.2bn a year from an annual bill of at least 16bn.

The key part of the new strategy, outlined by the Cabinet Office minister Angela Smith, will be the concentration of government computing power into a series of about a dozen highly secure data centres, each costing up to 250m to build, which will replace more than 500 presently used by central government, police forces and local authorities.

The government will also push for "open source" software to be used more widely among central and local government's 4m desktop computers. That poses an immediate threat to Microsoft, whose Windows operating system and Office applications suite is at present firmly embedded as the standard on PCs in government, such as the NHS, which is one of the largest users in Europe.

But John Suffolk, the government's chief information officer, pointed out that cost savings of just 100 per machine would total 400m across government. Unlike Windows, open source operating systems such as Linux have no licensing costs and can be used on as many machines as required.

By 2015, the strategy suggests, 80% of central government desktops could be supplied through a "shared utility service" essentially a cloud service resembling Google Docs, which lets people create documents online for free.

The move to a "government cloud" mirrors the system used by Google and other large companies, which put cheap "server" computers into huge data centres to provide computing power on demand which is delivered where it is needed via the internet. That would be provided to government departments and local government, replacing the ageing and inefficient systems used in many of the hundreds of data centres presently used and frequently run at far below their capacity because they are dedicated to one department.

Suffolk said that "as a rule", UK citizens' personal data will not be transported overseas although he could not rule it out. But security of data, and the data centres, would be a high priority, he said. He did not rule out using Google's or Microsoft's new cloud services: "We will see if they fit our business requirements and personal data requirements," he said.

Similarly the new "cloud" system will not include the security services such as MI5 or MI6, which have their own, separate systems.

Estimates prepared for the government suggest the "cloud" system could save 900m in their first five years, and 300m annually after that compared to the present structure.

The government also wants to build its own "app store" of software to solve frequently-seen problems, by re-using programs that have been written elsewhere and can be re-applied. "In government I've seen innovations where we have cracked hideously tough problems, but other parts of government are looking for the same solution and don't know it's there," said Suffolk.

Moving to a cloud-based infrastructure could cut costs of government computing significantly and also satisfy its drive for a "green" agenda by reducing power usage. The Inland Revenue, for example, is presently seeing huge demand for its online tax return system but that peaks every January, and then drops substantially. A cloud-based system shared among departments could deal with such sudden loads while using less power, said Kate Craig-Wood, managing director of the hosting company Memset, who has been working with the government on the strategy.

"The good thing here is that the government has tried hard to involve small businesses," Craig-Wood said. She said that the new open source approach will benefit small businesses that want to bid for government contracts, and that it should lessen the number of big IT projects that are at risk of cost overruns: "The ability to take advantage of the cloud means you can build those projects up iteratively, which is how industry does it."

Smith admitted that the government had not always been quick to embrace new technology. "Back in 1885, the civil service bought its first-ever typewriter, despite stiff resistance from in-house calligraphers. About 20 years later the government took another leap into the unknown when it invested in its first telephone, a mere three decades after the technology was first demonstrated."

But telephones too could be revolutionised. The new scheme aims to replace many of the government's physical phone lines with internet-connected "voice over internet" (VoIP) systems by 2017.

The latest episode of Tech Weekly welcomes Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who helped launch the government's new open data project, data.gov.uk. Charles Arthur, Bobbie Johnson and Aleks Krotoski discuss the implications and the future of this important and exciting new initiative.

Then Charles and Bobbie mutiny, turning the spotlight on Aleks, who presents Virtual Revolution, a major new BBC2 documentary series about the social history of the web starting this Saturday. Charles digs deeper into the making of the show, asking the series' multiplatform producer Dan Gluckman why the BBC was so keen to make the development of the four films open and collaborative.

There's wild speculation about the big announcement from Apple taking place this week, and more analysis of the escalating China-US internet freedom conflict.

All this, plus your views from the blogs and the rest of this week's news.

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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

Britain used to produce some of the most entertaining and idiosyncratic videogames in the world. Then the eighties ended. But are the glory days returning?

PlayStation killed Britsoft. We didn't realise it at the time, but it took a cold, technological scythe to the British development community. And Lara Croft, that gloating figurehead of the PlayStation Generation, once viewed as a symbol of this region's success and creativity, should now been read as a harbinger of doom. Because, nothing was ever the same again.

Of course, PlayStation didn't destroy the whole business of developing major videogames in the UK that's still happening, though largely for foreign paymasters. But the era of expensive team-based 3D game production ushered in by Sony's original machine effectively ended the peculiarly British scene of the eighties. This was the halcyon period in which lone coders like Jeff Minter, Mike Singleton and Matthew Smith plied their trade, unfettered by neurotic marketing departments. It was the era of hobbyist fanatics like the Oliver Twins, and multimedia revolutionaries like Mel Croucher, whose prescient masterpiece of adult-orientated audiovisual entertainment, Deus Ex Machina, was probably bought by less people than now make up a current-gen development team.

Later came the dominant bad boys of the Amiga era - Sensible Software and the Bitmap Brothers - with their hyper-polished, subtly anarchic 2D masterpieces. These emergent cult superstars fought for economic life in a bizarre, haphazard marketplace rife with cottage-sized publishing houses nefarious independent distributors and vibrant fanboy magazines. Those days are gone.

Except, they're not. Britsoft, it seems, didn't die; it was just sleeping...

Fuelled by vibrant online development communities, indie gaming festivals, and new distribution channels, it is waking up. The likes of Ubisoft, EA and Activision will hardly be quaking in their boots, but it was never about them. It's about us.

Robert Fearon got into games when his parent bought him a Spectrum in 1984. He could have started coding them back then, joining the ranks of Minter, Tony Crowther and co, but he didn't. "I thought, do I stay in my room or do I go out there, chase bands about the country in the back of a van and do all those wonderful things that you look back on now going, 'man, I can't believe I coated the entire room in my own sick and ended up in hospital'" But then he hit his mid-twenties, got into a relationship, settled down and became quietly disillusioned with mainstream media. "I stumbled upon the lovely community of folks who remade old games for the PC. So I entered a competition with an awful version of the old Speccy game Kokotoni Wilf, and met some good people who encouraged me no end. I did a few more remakes before embarking on my own path. I'm 35 this year, only just getting started and still loving what those guys are doing "

Fearon is now part of a growing UK indie development scene, creating brilliant, idiosyncratic shooters like War Twat and Squid and Let Die and distributing them largely through his own website, Bag Full of Wrong. As the titles suggest, his games have the irreverent, impertinent feel of the early eighties Britsoft classics, the likes of Jet Set Willy and Skool Daze, which came loaded with prurient humour and wacky tangential concepts. Similarly, there's Charlie Knight, whose frantic blast'-em-ups Space Phallus and Scoregasm, mock the mindless machismo of the shooter genre, while betraying an admiration - and indepth working knowledge - of genre classics like Bangai-O.

For his part, Fearon accepts the comparison with 8bit trailblazers, but doesn't want this to be entirely about nostalgia. "It'd be easy for me to trot out the obligatory 'well, there's Minter, he's brilliant. Jarvis, he's brilliant, Croucher, he's brilliant.' But really, it's not that simple.

"I take my inspiration and influence from pretty much every game I've ever set eyes on, even the shit ones, and I try and weave that into what I write. I'm also incredibly reactionary. I wrote War Twat after getting fed up of the frustrations of Everyday Shooter. SYNSO came after a forum comment on my second web home, Way Of The Rodent, SYNSO2 came about partly for Indiecade and partly influenced by what Matt James and Bizarre Creations are doing with the neo-retro thing. And er, the next game I'm writing has parts written by Kevin Toms of Football Manager fame, which is an honour. I wasted so much life with that and Software Star as a kid it's great to be able to say a very public thank you."

Matt James, name-checked by Fearon, is another rising star of the neo-Britsoft scene. His beautiful, weirdly poignant shooter Leave Home is available on Xbox 360 thanks to Xbox Live Indie Games, a section of the console's online service where coders can upload their projects, then get a decent percentage of the download revenues. Leave Home looks like a retro-tinged 2D shoot-'em-up, an eye-scorching audio visual assault, requiring the twitch reflexes of a caffeine-wired meerkat, but it's also a metaphorical tale about, yes, leaving home or as James puts it, "a coming of age story told as an algorithmic fixed length horizontal shmup." In this game, the end-of-level bosses represent your parents, while your struggle to save the universe is effectively a struggle for personal freedom. Activision games don't really tend to do this, do they?

Like Fearon, James has a gaming history going back to those early eighties glory days. "I started when I was about eight on the ZX spectrum 128k coding cacky adventure games in Basic. I then moved on to an Amiga and AMOS and then C which is when I really started enjoying programming, staying up all night to do it, etc. I was really into making electronic music when I was a teenager, though, and just did the games programming every now and again. It wasn't until I was at uni that I realised I was a pretty crap musician but had become not too bad at making games. So then I started working seriously on the Net Yaroze and turning out some games that were decent-ish."

Ah yes, Net Yaroze this is where Sony redeemed itself. Released in 1997, the programmable PlayStation was available with a cut-down software development kit and a range of graphics libraries. Suddenly, home programmers had a chance to fiddle with a modern 3D games console, and the competitions and community elements Sony oversaw represented an important attempt to engage with the bedroom coding scene. It was surely also an influence on the whole Xbox Live Indie Games endeavour. That's why Sony isn't really the bad guy of this piece.

But in some ways, the provision of restricted development toys by the major players isn't the point. The point is, in the modern era of cheap powerful computers, freely available open source software and various online distribution channels, 'The Man' needn't be involved at all. Indie game development is currently going though its own punk era; talent or lack of it needn't be a restraining factor. The important thing is to just start playing. "We're in a sort of golden age where anyone who wants to make a game can, and if anyone's reading this and thinking 'I'd like to make a game' now's the time to get started," says Fearon. "You don't need thousands of pounds. You don't need a computer that goes like shit off a shovel. You just need a bit of free time and an idea. It doesn't even have to be a good idea. Better out than in, right?"

Fearon is a defiant example of the fact that you don't need to be a programmer anymore, you don't even have to understand the coding process. This isn't about tech geeks programming machine code for weeks on end. It's about raw and dirty creativity. "I've got a reasonably top-end PC, but I'm more reliant on software that enables me to get stuff down as fast as possible," admits Fearon. "So, I use Pro Motion for banging together pixels, GroBoto for 3d stuff, Photoshop because it may be cumbersome and has the worlds worst installer, etc, but for sheer brain-to-page it can't be topped. And I write my games in Game Maker because I can't code for love nor money. Best 15 quid I ever spent, that."

Game Maker is to the current indie gaming generation what the "here are three chords, now form a band" ethos was to punk music. Originally developed by Dutch computer scientist and games academic Dr Mark Overmars, it's now distributed and regularly updated by UK-based indie site YoYo Games, co-founded by Sandy Duncan, who once headed up the Xbox's European business. The software works around drag-and-drop principles allowing users to easily draw and place game elements. The basic edition is free, but a Pro version, available for $25, adds dozens of more advanced features. The software has apparently been downloaded over three million times since YoYo began operations in 2007, and the 'games created' counter on the home page is showing 77432. Quite a community.

The interesting thing about Game Maker, though, is the way in which it facilitates people who may be more interested in making artistic or literary statements, rather than bashing out a quick platform game. Polish developer Kaworu Nagisa used to organise manga festivals and write plays before moving to Scotland two years ago he now has his own game site, Sadmoons, and releases weird, experimental projects, like interactive short story Clouds of Melancholy and the uncategorisable World of Black and White, a strange analysis of Taoism both of which were written using Game Maker. To him, games are like songs or stories, a means of emotional expression when I point out to him how sanguine these titles are, he replies, "That's how I feel. The things that inspire me most are music and animation. These media have already found their ways to be emotional. That's what I want to be doing with everything I try now. Games are everything that other media can do plus interactivity "

There's a danger perhaps as there always is when writing about 'scenes' of aligning these developers and their games too closely. Nagisa took a couple of weeks to create World of Black and White, but it took Matt James over a year to code the more technically orthodox Leave Home, using Microsoft's XNA Game Studio. These are very different projects.

Charlie Knight, meanwhile, is perhaps the closest in approach to an old school games coder, mixing and matching his programming applications and varying techniques for different projects. "I'm programming in Blitzmax at the moment, which is a sort of Object Orientated BASIC/C++ hybrid. It's fast, concise and allows me to compile on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux with the bare minimum of extra work. Hardware-wise, I use an old Pentium 4 PC, an even older iMac G5 and a monstrously slow laptop.

"In terms of how long it takes to make a game, it really depends. It took me about a year and a half to make Bullet Candy; Space Phallus took about two months; Scoregasm has taken 9 months so far. The high concept of Irukandji was Deep Blue (the David Attenborough documentary) vs lasers. Not dreadfully complex, and as such the game didn't take long to make."

What unites these developers though is a sort of creative integrity, a determination to explore and satisfy their own visions. Matt James is happy to admit that he effectively codes his games for himself: "I was pretty crap at making games to begin with; I was mostly trying to go down that Nintendo route of 'fun' games that pander to the player in every regard - you focus test the game constantly and then revise everything to suit the average player. I've definitely moved away from that. I like the nobly bits, the small mistakes, and if I want to totally piss the player off I will. Now when I'm making a game, the player is always me "

Of course, not everything works as well as Leave Home, and this solipsistic approach can lead to self-indulgent unplayable tosh let's be honest, there's plenty of that out there. But this is also the only way to force a pure unsullied vision into streams of game code. Even now, some of the most amazing mainstream games are coming from studios dominated by one or two creative masterminds: Keita Takahashi, Peter Molyneux at Lionhead, Hideki Kamiya and Atsushi Inaba at PlatinumGames, Fumito Ueda at Team Ico for example.

But for lone indie coders, there are no development meetings, no team idea pitches just explosions of development that intersect messily with everyday life. "I tend to go weeks, sometimes months unable to do anything but tinker and sketch down different concepts, game ideas, whatever," says Fearon. "Then when inspiration hits, I'll become the house tramp whilst I get most of the work done in a flurry of late nights and fluffy dressing gowns, trying to ignore what everyone else is doing around me."

"I can wake up in the middle of the night with an idea and just go into the next room and sit in my pants coding it up immediately," agrees James. "This happened with the idea for the final boss stage in Leave Home. The bosses, who can be interpreted as the players' parents, have behaviours that mean something as well as working as a gameplay mechanic. The idea took a long time to solidify in my brain into something that worked. Eventually I had something at about 2am one night and I got up and had it coded by the morning."

Another vital aspect, however, is the growing sense that something is really happening here and not just in the UK. There's a massive global community of talented, unorthodox developers who are presenting an alternative idea about what games can achieve in the 21st century, far way from the polished, franchised and so often sanitised entertainment on offer in your local Game shop. Almost all of the developers I spoke to cited Braid as a huge influence this complex and gripping platform/puzzle game, developed by US indie coder Jonathan Blow, became a crossover hit when it was released on Xbox Live in 2008. It is the Sex, Lies and Videotape of indie gaming, a potent symbol for the saleable potential of non-mainstream productions.

Publishers are starting to take notice. Just as the big movie studios began sending agents to Sundance in the hope of snagging the next Soderbergh or Tarantino, the likes of EA, Activision and Sony are now scoping the indie festivals for promising developers and projects. And there are plenty around. The Independent Games Festival takes place annually as part of the enormously important Game Developers Conference, offering a major development competition for indie talent. I'm on the judging panel this year and there have been some staggeringly good titles, including Joe Danger from British start-up, Hello Games and Tyler Glaiel's awesome, Closure.

There's also the inspiring international roadshow event, Indiecade, as well as dozens of 'rapid game prototyping' or Game Jam get-togethers throughout the world, where coders meet for a weekend of intensive development. Right here in the UK we have the brilliant Dare to be Digital competition, a student game development challenge organised by the University of Abertay. Similarly, this spring will see the Microsoft XNA student GameCamp hitting Birmingham City University (19-20 February) and University of Huddersfield (19-20 March) students will be challenged to create working games in just 48 hours based on a theme disclosed moments before they start. We also have Nottingham's GameCity festival and Eurogamer's Expo both of which have strong indie elements.

This is it. Just like punk, just like independent moviemaking, there is a scene that inspires and supports. There is community. "Rolling up to the Indie Arcade at the Eurogamer Expo last year and getting to meet some of the people who put this stuff together was fab and it's amazing the talent we have," enthuses Fearon. "When you've got folks like Dan and Ben of Zombie Cow taking on Lucasarts at their own game and shaming Telltale in the new adventure game department, Hello Games out-exciting Excite Bike, Rudolf Kremers and Alex May making the strategy equivalent of a Brian Eno wet dream, the crazed claymation Metal-Slug-a-tron of Cletus Clay being developed in Sheffield . Plus, Matt James is absolutely way ahead of the game on his shooters. And that's without taking into account Introversion or Minter still throwing stuff out there, or less media-dahling folks like Charlie Knight plugging away at ace stuff.

"There's a terrible tendency to do down what we have over here but in so many ways we're so out there and brilliant it's hard not to think 'yeah, actually, we're doing bloody good stuff' when you take stock, and so much of it is distinctly Anglo-centric that it couldn't come from anywhere else in the world. We should be proud of that rather than getting bogged down in pathetic arguments over tax relief or whatever shock tactics Rockstar are employing this week "

Fortunately, indie game development is becoming easier to follow. While the eighties stars figured regularly in passionate games magazines of the time the likes of Crash, Computer & Videogames and later, Amiga Power now we have equally committed indie game news sources like Jay Is Games, The Independent Gaming Source and The Indie Games Weblog.

And through crossover smashes like Braid, World of Goo, and N, Charlie Knight reckons the message is getting out there to the wider gaming population. "I think people are starting to notice that games are capable of something more than headshots and prostitutes, and that they don't necessarily need to be fun or addictive in order to be good. With indie games there's scope for hugely personal, emotionally provocative interactive stories and experiences that aren't necessarily games in the traditional sense, and I think this recent trend is a sign of something truly interesting and unique to the medium just over the horizon "

Britsoft is back, and like all the best scenes it is happening without anyone's permission, and it is linking arms with development communities the world over. This isn't about nostalgia for a bygone age anymore it is about the future. And with original mainstream development becoming increasingly scarce in Britain, it might be the only real future we have.

Next Monday: how to become an indie developer in eight easy steps!

Firm bought by Hewlett Packard was earlier hired to build a customer services system for broadcaster

Computer giant Hewlett Packard is liable to BSkyB over a troubled multimillion-pound data package, a high court judge ruled today.

The broadcaster hired Electronic Data Systems, later taken over by Hewlett Packard, in 2000 to build a new customer services system. The contract was ended in March 2002 after a "woeful" performance, the court heard.

Sky was originally seeking 709m in compensation from the data provider over the 48m contract.

But there will be a further hearing over damages in February after Sky's lawyers have examined the judgment.

Mr Justice Ramsey said today: "I find that there was liability on the first defendant [Hewlett Packard] to the claimant [BSkyB] for fraudulent misrepresentation giving rise to damages."

Lawyers for Sky told the judge the project eventually took six years to complete and if the contractor had been honest about its abilities, BSkyB would have chosen a different company.

A spokesman for Hewlett Packard said of the ruling: "This is a legacy issue, dating back to the EDS business in 2000, which HP inherited when it acquired EDS in 2008.

"We are pleased the court dismissed the majority of the allegations made. While we accept that the contract was problematic, HP strongly maintains EDS did nothing to deceive BSkyB. HP will be seeking permission to appeal."

BSkyB said it believed EDS would be liable for at least 200m in costs and damages to the group.

The broadcaster said in a statement: "The final amount of costs and damages will be determined by the court in due course.

"However, based on the judgment, Sky anticipates that EDS will be liable to pay Sky an amount of at least 200m."

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

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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.

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.

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

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.

Copyright may not be perfect, but when applied with common sense, it's the best system we've got

On 5 January, the Independent's website ran a photo uploaded to the Flickr image-sharing site by user Peter Zabulis. Zabulis flagged his photo of a snowed-over field as "all rights reserved," and he took exception to the Independent's use of the image without permission, and he wrote to them to tell them so.

Exception turned to outrage as a terse note from the Independent claimed that by posting the photo to Flickr, Zabulis had not asserted his copyright (whatever that means) and thus copyright had not been breached. The ensuing debate including a public pillorying of the Independent for failing to grasp the nature of Flickr, copyright and photographer's rights generated a lot of heat, but not much light (one bright spot: the Independent paid Zabulis and apologised to him).

Debates about copyright fall apart when they're pitched in terms of absolutes: "Copyright prohibits all copying", or "Non-commercial copying is always legal". Copyright started life as an industrial regulation that set out the rules governing the relationship between different actors in the supply-chain of the "creative industries" (originally just publishing, later music, film, software and many other industries).

Much of copyright was created by simply enshrining existing business practices into law for better or for worse. Many artists have pointed out that copyright, even at its best, can present a playing field tilted in favour of the companies that shepherded its passage into law.

Theoretically, copyright also bound the activities of non-industrial actors fans, audiences, readers, people who were whistling in the shower. But practically speaking, the average person would virtually never interact with copyright: first, because the personal means of interacting with copyrighted works (reading books, listening to records) did not involve making copies, and second, because when copies were made, they were invisible to the copyright industries' radar. No one was going to come by your office to look for photocopied Garfield cartoons stuck on your cubicle.

Which isn't to say that there weren't a myriad of rules, formal and informal, governing the use of creative works by individuals. Certain songs could be sung at the pub, but not in front of a nursery school.

Recounting the plot of last night's TV show to a mate was permissible, but spoiling the ending wasn't. Tracing a library book illustration for a science project was OK: cutting up the book was not. Pretending to have made up a ghost story that you read in a Poe collection was plagiarism, not culture.

Now, thanks to the internet (which runs by copying things, and which makes all those copies visible with a simple search) copyright has been stretched to cover both industrial and non-industrial uses of creative works, and what's more, the definition of industrial and non-industrial has become a lot fuzzier.

We're trying to retrofit the rules that governed multi-stage rocket ships (huge publishing conglomerates) to cover the activity of pedestrians (people who post quotes from books on their personal blogs). And the pedestrians aren't buying it: they hear that they need a law degree to safely quote from their favourite TV show and they assume that the system is irredeemably broken and not worth attending to at all.

It's an impossible situation. As an author, I depend on there being some rules of the road when I negotiate with my publishers, and it's in every commercial creator's interest to try to find a moderate, coherent copyright rule that avoid dumb absolutes in favour of nuance and fairness. I don't pretend that I have all the answers, but here's some of the principles that I think a good copyright system must embrace if is to succeed. Many of these principles are already in various nations' copyright rules as part of "fair dealing" or "fair use," but these user-rights in copyright are complex and difficult to navigate and vary from country to country.

As we on the internet create the norms that will be enshrined in future copyright, here's what I think we should keep in mind: "All rights reserved" doesn't cover commentary or reportage. If the Independent had been commenting on Zabulis's photo ("Witness the interplay of lights and darks" or "Area man sneaks into snowy field, takes photo for proof") then reproducing as much of Zabulis's photo as they needed to in order to report thoroughly on the subject should be fair game. Likewise, Zabulis was in the right to reproduce a screenshot from the Independent's website in order to show people how his image had been taken without permission.

Commercial and non-commercial are different. While there's a lot of grey area between "commercial" and "non-commercial", there are also some bright lines. Newspapers should have to pay photographers for stock images; kids working on school reports (and other non-commercial users) should be able to clip images and use them for without negotiating a rights agreement with a copyright holder.

Incidental use isn't infringement. If Zabulis's photo had included a blowing piece of trash bearing a copyrighted work (say, a copy of the Independent), he should still be allowed to sell and publish his photo without the Independent's permission. Incidental copying includes (for example), Google copying every page on the web in order to create an index of the words on those pages.

Some commercial copying is OK. For example, when a giant movie studio sits down to create a movie (whose copyright they will eventually defend with the atavistic savagery of a maddened grizzly), the designers for the film will create a series of "mood books" filled with clipped, scanned and copied text, images, even video clips, to help the design team agree on the look and feel of the movie. The studio doesn't and shouldn't need permission to make these uses, though they are commercial and involve copying. There are many other cases like this, from pasting articles into an email you send to your boss to photocopying an inspirational text and tacking it up in the break room. They share one common trait: they don't displace any revenue for the rightsholder.

When copyright cartels endanger a new medium, their copyrights should be converted into economic rights or thrown out. This principle is as old as sound recordings: when the sheet-music publishers refused to license their work for records, the state intervened and forced them to sell at a fixed rate. Today, many copyrights are relegated to economic rights: a performer has the right to be compensated for the playback of his CD in a shop, but not to stop the shop from playing the music. Copyright's purpose is to promote participation in culture: where refuseniks subvert that goal, their copyrights should be limited.

This is just a partial list, and it may strike you as radical. But before you dismiss it, consider this: most copyright systems are supposed to work this way in theory. But between corporate bullies who like to assert that "all rights reserved" means that no one is allowed to do anything without permission, and personal theories of what copyright means based on half-remembered lectures from the company lawyer, we treat copyright as absolute. And when we do, we turn a system with a real purpose (providing a framework for participants in creative businesses) into a caricature of itself, one that no one can respect.

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 Wolfram, 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.

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."

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?

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.

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.

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.

Along with complaints of brief battery life, reports have also surfaced online that the iPhone 3Gs can get hot during usage

Apple's unerring sense for the zeitgeist ensures the company has millions of drooling early adopters queueing up to buy its offerings as soon as they hit the market. But some Apple addicts believe it is better to wait a generation or so with any new device for any problems to be sorted out.

And despite enjoying massive success and sales over the last few years, some of the US firm's flagship products have not been entirely trouble free.

The iPod nano may have taken the MP3 market by storm when it was launched in 2005, but some early users were quick to report problems. Some complained that the screens broke, while others noted how easily they became scratched.

Apple put the broken screens down to "a vendor quality problem in a small number of units" affecting less than 0.1% of all the nanos sold, and offered to replace them. Customers who complained of scratching were advised to "use one of the many iPod nano cases to protect their iPod".

More recently the iPhone has come under scrutiny. Along with complaints of brief battery life, reports have also surfaced online that the iPhone 3GS can get hot during usage.

In a statement on its website Apple noted that the automatic temperature warning could come on if the device was left in a car on a hot day, left in direct sunlight, or if certain applications were used in hot conditions or direct sunlight for long periods.

3D version of match to be shown in nine pubs in five cities
Dedicated 3D channel to be launched in April

Sunday's match between Arsenal and Manchester United will be the world's first live 3D television sports broadcast, Sky said yesterday.

The match at Arsenal's Emirates Stadium will be broadcast at nine pubs in London, Manchester, Cardiff, Edinburgh, and Dublin as the public's first taste of live 3D football ahead of Sky's dedicated 3D channel launching in April.

On Sunday Sky will transmit two live feeds one to its traditional Sky Sports customers and another in 3D. Two separate commentary teams, two camera crews and two production teams will produce the simultaneous broadcasts. The former Arsenal centre-forward Alan Smith and the commentator Alan Parry will be the first voices of live 3D sport.

Sky Sports' Darren Long dismissed the suggestion 3D sport was a gimmick and said the extra dimension gives viewers a greater appreciation of the action. "When you watch a golfer putting in 2D it looks flat it looks easy," he said. "When you see it in 3D you can see every bump and contour on the green and you really appreciate their skill."

Apple is famous for its secretiveness. The company responds to requests for information about future products with the robotic reflex of an out-of-office email reply: it "does not comment on unreleased products". That simply powers up the excitement before its annual launches, of course, the latest of which took place yesterday evening. Apple acolytes, teased by an invitation to the unveiling of its "latest creation", had already bestowed all sorts of genius on what is now officially the iPad. Many of the guesses were right. The iPad is a big, thin, touch-screen, handheld device. According to the hype, it will change the way people watch videos, play games, read, and save the publishing and newspaper industry into the bargain. Realists might point out that it is really nothing more than an oversized iPhone and one lacking that device's ability to receive a 3G mobile signal.

Other companies have made tablet computers and e-readers before, to no great excitement. What Apple does better than anyone is sell clever bits of technology wrapped in iconic design, combining them with seductive ways to buy content online. This link between technology and publishing is what could make the iPad count and getting it right will be fundamental to its chances of success. The tablet is not a fully fledged PC, but boasts more features than Amazon's e-reader, the Kindle. Unlike the monochrome Kindle, the iPad will play video and music more a consumer product than a business one. Running on the same operating system as the iPhone, the iPad launches with applications and games already available (more than 70,000 people have bought the Guardian's application so far).

Not everything that Apple makes is a runaway success: its Apple TV and Newton handheld both ended up in dusty cupboards. But big players in the music and publishing industry hope that the iPad succeeds. Publishing giants such as McGraw-Hill and HarperCollins are preparing books for the tablet. The music industry isn't content with the money it is making from individual digital downloads and wants to create a new premium package to replace the album, hoping that people will pay for video extras and the flashy digital equivalent of liner notes. Magazine giants like Conde Nast and Time are already showing off their vision of a tablet world. Newspapers will try to sell their work on the iPad and other media slates.

Apple's boss Steve Jobs is betting once again that he has anticipated technological desires you didn't even know you had. But with all the breathless predictions around for the iPad, the gadget may yet be met with a collective moan: "Is that it?"

Enriching, enjoyable and possibly even therapeutic free online games, and no violence in sight

Earlier this month, psychiatry researchers at Oxford University published a study showing that playing a computer game such as

Tetris can help to reduce the flashbacks common in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The researchers theorised that "visuo-spatial cognitive tasks" such as rotating and fitting together coloured blocks reduce the "resources required [by the brain] to generate mental images" of trauma. Put simplistically, playing a game, like watching TV or reading, can take your mind off what's bothering you.

It is no surprise that this research has not made huge headlines. It does not fit the still-prevailing media story that games encourage violence, or at least indolence. But Tetris isn't the only game with the potential to soothe.

Take Obechi and Boomshine, two games from creator Danny Miller. Over a calming soundtrack, the player tries to catch dots, or set off cascades of colour across the screen. These games are relaxing in the same way as any other intricate, absorbing task such as knitting or tuning an engine.

Or try Cloud, an award-winning downloadable game in which the player guides clouds across the sky to solve puzzles. The creator, Jenova Chen, has also made Flower, a larger game with a similar aesthetic, for the PS3. Then there are the quirky Japanese Eyezmaze Grow games, where the player chooses in what order to add different elements to a scene maybe decorations to a Christmas tree or buildings to an island. Different orders give different results, and while there is a winning combination, there is no penalty for failure and no ticking clock.

Each of these games is free to play online. All are enriching, enjoyable, and the kind of game you could play with a five-year-old or suggest to a technophobic relative. I'm not saying they'll cure PTSD, but they might just be more therapeutic than channel-surfing.

Davos: A new digital cold war is afoot. At stake is something much larger than just a rivalry between the western and eastern superpowers

Four cheers for Google. Risking the loss of potentially huge long-term profits in the Chinese internet market, it has struck a blow for one of the great causes of our time: global information freedom. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights says that everyone has the right "to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers". In practice, most people in the world still cannot exercise that right, partly because of crippling poverty and lack of education, but also because governments stop them.

There is nothing automatic about the triumph of these wonderful new technologies of communication and information. We (we of this persuasion) celebrate every small victory of digital David over authoritarian Goliath, be it of the mobile phone-using protester in Iran or the VPN-using blogger in China, but Goliath has defended himself quite effectively so far. In real life it may take a Goliath to beat a Goliath. Hence the fascination of "Google versus China".

Or is it, in reality, the US versus China? In a speech last week, Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, laid out the American position in no uncertain terms. Technologies do not take sides in the struggle for freedom and progress, she said, but the US does: "We stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas." And she went on explicitly to criticise the censorship and persecution of internet users in countries as diverse as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Egypt and, yes, China. Ronald Reagan famously stood before the Berlin Wall and said: "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this Wall." Without using such confrontational language, Clinton in effect said: "Mr Hu, tear down this Great Firewall."

The US has also put its money where its mouth is; or a little of it, anyway. The state department now has a modest funding programme for initiatives to enhance global information freedom. Some of those dollars are given to people trying to find technical ways to get around, over or under the cyberwalls of censorship. These "circumvention technologies" go beyond the traditional websites on the world wide web, which depend on relatively easily blockable IP addresses, to use more elusive "peer-to-peer" (P2P), mobile phone or satellite TV forms of connection and dissemination.

The big catch is this: every hole in the cyberwall you open up for the idealistic, information-hungry netizen is also a potential loophole for the child pornographer, the terrorist, the preacher of hate and the cybercriminal. In her speech, Clinton goes on to recognise that there are evils that free societies want to defend themselves against, and mentions the Council of Europe's cybercrime treaty. This criminalises the dissemination of child pornography, and authorises the sharing of stored computer data in the attempt to combat it. But there again: how can you stop the very same kinds of technology and internationally sanctioned legal provision that are used by a democracy to identify, censor, catch and imprison the paedophile from being used by a dictatorship to identify, censor, catch and imprison the dissident?

And remember that, for someone like Li Changchun the politburo standing committee member responsible for media talk of what Americans call "freedom", and of a "massacre" on Tiananmen Square, may be the political equivalent of child pornography. This is "decadent thought", propagated by "hostile forces" to undermine the spiritual health of Chinese society. The policy of the US is denounced as "information imperialism".

This is not simply a digital cold war between the US and China, just as the original cold war was far more than just a straight geopolitical contest between the US and the Soviet Union. Now as then there are larger differences which don't always coincide with the interests of the leaders of those states at a particular time.

If I wanted to summarise the larger ideological argument here, I'd say: think of a boxing match between the ghost of Samuel Huntington and the spirit of Google. Huntington argued that a "clash of civilisations" could only be avoided if what he called the "core states" of competing "civilisations", such as America and China, basically let each other do things their own way in their own spheres of influence. This is a rule that many multinational companies in fact cleave to: when in China, do as the Chinese do.

In their initial reactions to the Google-China stand-off, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer of Microsoft have seemed to be veering in this direction. And Yahoo took the principle to a disgraceful extreme when it in effect shopped a dissident Chinese Yahoo-user to the Chinese authorities. He was subsequently sent to prison for 10 years. As between the commercially competing nations of Europe, so between competing companies, the Chinese authorities can hope to divide and rule.

The other way is one we can now again unreservedly identify, politically as well as aesthetically, with Google. This is the spirit of liberal universalism. It says that there are some universal rights it is not the prerogative of any state or "civilisation" to curb; and that, as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, the right to information freedom is among them.

Just as with freedom of speech inside a country, this does not mean that anyone is free to say whatever they like to anyone about anything. There are always limits and some of them are indicated in other international covenants. What we need is a global conversation about what those limits should be. There will be some restrictions on which everyone agrees. For example: is there a state on earth that would argue that child pornography should be freely disseminated? There will be others on which they disagree.

Those disagreements run inside countries and civilisations, not merely between them. Some Chinese wholeheartedly agree with Google; others with Li Changchun. Some Americans agree with Google and Clinton; others (especially in what they do as businesses, rather than what they say on Sundays) with Huntington and Yahoo. Both tendencies are strongly represented here at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, which would therefore be a good place to start.

Bring on that debate. And broaden it out, please, beyond the old cold war west and its traditional allies. There is a serious conversation to be had about what the limits to global information freedom should be. But one has to ask why authoritarian rulers are so reluctant to step out and have this debate openly. If they think their system is better, why not make the case for it? Otherwise even their own citizens and netizens are bound to be left with the feeling that their rulers fear the light.

The only premise we Googlista liberal universalists cannot accept is that this debate is itself, in principle, illegitimate because the legitimate limits to information freedom are wherever the rulers of a given state at a given time say they are. But that is precisely what the world's most powerful opponents of global free speech want to claim. So the argument we first have to win is about whether we should be having this argument at all. It may prove the most difficult.

We asked a panel of leading commentators in a range of industries for their reactions to the launch of Apple's iPad tablet computer. Here are some of their thoughts

Jonathan Glancey: Guardian architecture and design correspondent

Without holding one in my hands and trying one out, I can only say that the universally-hyped iPad looks very much like a giant iPhone.

And none the worse for that. Designed by a team led by Jonathan Ive, Apple's British-born head of design, the iPad is slim, sleek and to use an overworked, yet appropriate word, minimalist. It reflects Ive's clearly expressedadmiration for the work of the self-effacing and supremely talented German designer, Dieter Ram 45 years Ive's senior whose electric and electronic products for Braun have been a byword for fine, simple design for half a century.

Computer and communication buffs will have to tell us how well the iPad performs. If I works as well as it probably does, then it will sell like hot cakes raising the perennially fascinating issue of why so very many people, worldwide, otherwise oblivious to such coolly sophisticated design, will fork out good money for Apple's latest gizmo. Because it's a gizmo is the most probable answer. Would a Jonathan Ive or Dieter Rams style house, or pad I should say, sell as well? I very much doubt it.

Bigger than a mobile phone and smaller than a laptop, the iPad will be carried around the house and in bags to and from schools, colleges and workplaces. Will its shiny plastic and metal surfaces scratch? How will it cope when it drops on floors and pavements? Will it need, and does it come with, a special bag to carry it about in and protect it? Just how robust will it be?

Apple has surely addressed such questions, yet the proof of the digital pudding will lie in the e-ting. Meanwhile, expect to read many times over of how Steve Jobs really did look like a contemporar Moses at the product launch, coming down from Apple's very own Mt Horeb with what many computer pundits said would be called the iTablet. The iPad will do many things, yet I doubt if it will allow users to talk to burning bushes or strike water from a rock. With the hype surrounding this coolly sophisticated gizmo, you might expect nothing less.

Nick Gibson: Games research and strategy consultant

While the iPad is not intended to be primarily a games device like the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS, gaming will undoubtedly represent an important driver of app sales for the iPad and quite possibly also hardware sales.

The intuitive and innovative interface, strong hardware specification and advantageous business model for the iPhone has attracted substantial interest from games companies and this success looks like being replicated with the iPad. While extended versions of existing iPhone games will doubtless form a core part of the iPad games portfolio, it is easy to see how games that take advantage of the iPad's design differences will also play an important role.

An example might be local multiplayer games where two or more players play a game together on a single iPad, such as an enhanced, virtual version of board or card game.

Jeff Henry: CEO, TellyLinks.com

Apple appears to have done it again. From the Mac to the iPod, from the Apple store to the iPhone, the much heralded launch of the Apple iPad consolidates an already successful range of offerings that are popular the world over. There is no doubt that the iPad will be a success and will be good news for the TV industry. The touchscreen is a master-stroke and I believe the iPad will allow video to be consumed on the move in a dynamic, personalised and stylish way. This exciting new product has a real wow factor about it. I love it it is big enough to ensure an excellent viewing experience yet slim enough to be portable, a flat-screen TV/PC under your arm.

Apple has the proven its ability to be of the moment. In the iPad, it has encapsulated convergence into a desirable product and only time will tell if it has universal appeal or (only) appeals to a niche but loyal market; it remains to be seen if consumers really want a jumbo iPhone. The iPad is small and light enough to consume media on the move but large enough to make the viewing experience better than existing mobile devices. In order that television/video consumption takes full advantage of the converged world, the end consumption device must be up to the task. Masters of design Apple seem to once again recognised that great design and superb functionality takes one a long way towards defining a new category of media consumers.

Stephen Heppell: Professor of new media environments, Bournemouth University

The rumours of a new tablet-like device have set the internet alight for some months now, perhaps nowhere more so that in the education community where battery life, weight, ease of use, richness of media and size were all hotly debated in a "wish list" of the ideal educational device. Did the iPad deliver? Well, on that list, it is a star, but beyond that it is a significant device for education in three ways: Firstly, it is firmly targeted as a personal device with synchronisation, wireless and 3G connectivity that waltzes past school networks. This is the beginning of what I like to describe as post-appropriation technology: devices that won't be appropriated by education in the way that calculators, or laptops, or networks were.

This device won't be easily banned, won't be "moulded" to fit education, and will be hugely effective as a web browser, bookshelf, video player, game console and communication device. This time, instead of technology being bent to fit schools (as with the Interactive Whiteboards for example), schools must move themselves to meet the new technology. That makes this a significant moment.

Secondly, it reawakens a whole crucial debate about authoring. Back in the 1980 and 90s, authoring tools like Apple's HyperCard and Toolbook saw teachers and students defining and developing the kind of educational applications that transformed an industry, and re-awakened education. Now we have apps, but we don't any longer have the tools that allow students and teachers to author. Good though Apple's Software Developers Toolkit is, that is a huge hole in the relationship between this wonderful gadget and Learning.

Thirdly, when you watch users stroking and stretching their way around iWorks spreadsheets or movies, you realise just how hopelessly out of date of current school model of ICT assessment is, and has been for quite a long time. This is a wake-up call for ICT assessment in schools: it's time to move it into the 21st century.

It's gorgeous, I want one, but I want to see children and teachers develop for it nearly there.

Matt Kelly: digital content director, Mirror Group

Is that it then? A bloody great iPhone? If any newspaper publishers out hoped the iWhatsit would be the missing link between digital investment and reward, the sight of Steve Jobs lazily stroking his big touchscreen while muttering "awesome" and "incredible" and "wonderful" will have come as a blow.

Just like the Amazon Kindle (another touted saviour of newspapers) at first glance, the iPad is a little underwhelming. Unlike the Kindle (when we at the Mirror were presented it, the Amazon rep told us to "please stop prodding the screen. You might break it") this is at least a thing of beauty. But I see shortcomings.

The reason my laptop has a lid is so the screen doesn't get wrecked after a couple of months like the screen of my, er, iPhone. I can stick my iPhone in my pocket when I leave the house. Where does one stick the iPad? What do you do when it rains?

There are certain parts of the UK where it's not best advised to prance about with 500 quids worth of shiny new tech. No one ever mugged anyone for a copy of the Mirror. Also, should you drop your Mirror in a puddle, or leave it on the bus, you can replace it at any number of locations for just 45p.

One more gripe. All those lovely Apps we've built the Guardian's brilliant newspaper one and our forthcoming MirrorFootball.co.uk app to name but two will need redesigning. Great! Yet another format to develop.

No. The iPad is no great leap forward for newspapers. But something inside it may be. Apple's great contribution to shining light on how we may start directly charging for content is their App Store.

Emulating their elegant, frictionless, payment solution is, to my mind, the single biggest challenge we face at the beginnings of our digital future. The challenge to turn millions of users into customers.

Neill Denny: editor-in chief, the Bookseller

This is, in many ways, the convergent device people were waiting for. In terms of what it could do for publishers, Apple has a superb record from making the Mac to the iPod to the iPhone, in terms of transformative devices, but I'm not sure this is it for books.

The price still remains high and content is a question. In the long term, this could be a very significant moment. I know London publishers are concerned about digital, their main concerns are mainly about piracy. Apple has a pretty good record of defending content against piracy. The other thing is if an Apple device were to become the dominant device they [publishers] would be worried about dealing with a monopolistic buyer. They [publishers] make pretty high margins [at the moment], clearly it will be hard to defend the hardback pricing - you're not going to spend 19 on an eBook. That's a major concern because of the potential to cannibalise book sales.

A way round could be to release the eBook later than the hardback, but the danger is then that people will copy the physical book and release it online. There is probably five to 10 years for print to make digital work, but in the long term digital will help print. I think a new means of publishing for stories, which is what this could be, will ultimately be of benefit. There is a long-term solidity to books, and this will merge it with other mediums.

Fainter broadcasting signals and digital switchover mean Earth will soon be undetectable to extraterrestrials

Human beings are making it harder for extraterrestials to pick up our broadcasts and make contact, the world's leading expert on the search for alien life warned yesterday.

At a special meeting on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (Seti), the US astronomer Frank Drake who has been seeking radio signals from alien civilisations for almost 50 years told scientists that earthlings were making it less likely they would be heard in space.

Astronomers assumed that a standard technique for any alien intelligence trying to pinpoint other civilisations in the galaxy would involve seeking signals from TV, radio and radar broadcasts, Drake told the meeting at the Royal Society in London.

Scientists on Earth have been using this method, without success so far, to find evidence of intelligent aliens. The theory is that elsewhere in the galaxy other civilisations would probably be doing the same.

An example of this interstellar eavesdropping is dramatised in the Jodie Foster film Contact. Based on a novel by the US astronomer Carl Sagan, it tells the story of an alien civilisation that makes contact after picking up TV broadcasts from Earth.

"The trouble is that we are making ourselves more and more difficult to be heard," said Dr Drake. "We are broadcasting in much more efficient ways today and are making our signals fainter and fainter."

In the past, TV and radio programmes were broadcast from huge ground stations that transmitted signals at thousands of watts. These could be picked up relatively easily across the depths of space, astronomers calculated.

Now, most TV and radio programmes are transmitted from satellites that typically use only 75 watts and have aerials pointing toward Earth, rather than into space.

"For good measure, in America we have switched from analogue to digital broadcasting and you are going to do the same in Britain very soon," Drake added. "When you do that, your transmissions will become four times fainter because digital uses less power."

"Very soon we will become undetectable," he said. In short, in space no one will hear us at all.

What is true for humans would probably also be true for aliens, who may already have moved to much more efficient methods of TV and radio broadcasting. Trying to find ET from their favourite shows was going to be harder than we thought, Drake said.

Most scientists at the meeting said they were sure that life existed on other worlds.

Lord Rees, president of the Royal Society and the astronomer royal, said it should soon be possible to detect planets no bigger than Earth orbiting other stars and determine whether they had continents and oceans.

"Although it is a long shot to be able to learn more about any life on them, then it's tremendous progress to be able to get some sort of image of another planet, rather like an Earth, orbiting another star. And were we to find life, even the simplest life, elsewhere that would clearly be one of the great discoveries of the 21st century.

"I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms that we can't conceive. And there could, of course, be forms of intelligence beyond human capacity beyond as much as we are beyond a chimpanzee."