Leeds University study finds people classified as internet addicts are more likely to be depressed than non-addicted users

British psychologists have found evidence of a link between excessive internet use and depression, research published today has shown.

Leeds University researchers, writing in the Psychopathology journal (abstract here subscription required for full pdf), said a small proportion of internet users were classed as internet addicts and that people in this group were more likely to be depressed than non-addicted users.

The article on the relationship between excessive internet use and depression, a questionnaire-based study of 1,319 young people and adults, used data compiled from respondents to links placed on UK-based social networking sites.

The respondents answered questions about how much time they spent on the internet and what they used it for; they

also completed the Beck Depression Inventory a series of questions designed to measure the severity of depression.

The report, by the university's Institute of Psychological Sciences, said 18 of the people who completed the questionnaire 1.4% of the total were internet addicts.

"Our research indicates that excessive internet use is associated with depression, but what we don't know is which comes first are depressed people drawn to the internet or does the internet cause depression?" the article's lead author, Dr Catriona Morrison, said.

"What is clear is that, for a small subset of people, excessive use of the internet could be a warning signal for depressive tendencies."

The age range of all respondents was between 16 and 51 years, with a mean age of 21.24. The mean age of the 18 internet addicts, 13 of whom were male and five female, was 18.3 years.

By comparing the scale of depression within this group to that within a group of 18 non-addicted internet users again of a mean age of 18.3 years and made up of 13 males and five females researchers found the internet addicts had a higher incidence of moderate to severe depression than non-addicts.

They also discovered that addicts spent proportionately more time browsing sexually gratifying websites, online gaming sites and online communities.

"This study reinforces the public speculation that over-engaging in websites that serve to replace normal social function might be linked to psychological disorders like depression and addiction," Morrison said.

"We now need to consider the wider societal implications of this relationship and establish clearly the effects of excessive internet use on mental health."

The six-page report is the first larger-scale study of young western people to consider the relationship between internet addiction and depression.

Much of the previous research into the subject has been carried out in east Asia.

International Institute for Strategic Studies says cyber attacks could become weapon of choice in future conflicts

Cyber-warfare attacks on military infrastructure, government and communications systems, and financial markets pose a rapidly growing but little understood threat to international security and could become a decisive weapon of choice in future conflicts between states, the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies warned yesterday.

IISS director-general John Chipman said: "Despite evidence of cyber attacks in recent political conflicts, there is little appreciation internationally of how to assess cyber-conflict. We are now, in relation to the problem of cyber-warfare, at the same stage of intellectual development as we were in the 1950s in relation to possible nuclear war."

The warning accompanied yesterday's publication of the Military Balance 2010, the IISS's annual assessment of global military capabilities and defence economics. The study also highlighted a series of other security threats, including the war in Afghanistan, China's military diversification, the progress of Iran's suspect nuclear programme, and the impact of terrorist groups in Iraq and elsewhere.

Future state-on-state conflict, as well as conflicts involving non-state actors such as al-Qaida, would increasingly be characterised by reliance on asymmetric warfare techniques, chiefly cyber-warfare, Chipman said. Hostile governments could hide behind rapidly advancing technology to launch attacks undetected. And unlike conventional and nuclear arms, there were no agreed international controls on the use of cyber weapons.

"Cyber-warfare [may be used] to disable a country's infrastructure, meddle with the integrity of another country's internal military data, try to confuse its financial transactions or to accomplish any number of other possibly crippling aims," he said. Yet governments and national defence establishments at present have only limited ability to tell when they were under attack, by whom, and how they might respond.

Cyber-warfare typically involves the use of illegal exploitation methods on the internet, corruption or disruption of computer networks and software, hacking, computer forensics, and espionage. Reports of cyber-warfare attacks, government-sponsored or otherwise, are rising. Last month Google launched an investigation into cyber attacks allegedly originating in China that it said had targeted the email accounts of human rights activists.

In December the South Korean government reported an attack in which it said North Korean hackers may have stolen secret defence plans outlining the South Korean and US strategy in the event of war on the Korean peninsula. Last July, espionage protection agents in Germany said the country faced "extremely sophisticated" Chinese and Russian internet spying operations targeting industrial secrets and critical infrastructure such as Germany's power grid.

One of the most notorious cyber-warfare offensives to date took place in Estonia in 2007 when more than 1 million computers were used to jam government, business and media websites. The attacks, widely believed to have originated in Russia, coincided with a period of heightened bilateral political tension. They inflicted damage estimated in the tens of millions of euros of damage.

China last week accused the Obama administration of waging "online warfare" against Iran by recruiting a "hacker brigade" and manipulating social media such as Twitter and YouTube to stir up anti-government agitation.

The US Defence Department's Quadrennial Defence Review, published this week, also highlighted the rising threat posed by cyber-warfare on space-based surveillance and communications systems."On any given day, there are as many as 7 million DoD (Department of Defence) computers and telecommunications tools in use in 88 countries using thousands of war-fighting and support applications. The number of potential vulnerabilities, therefore, is staggering." the review said.

"Moreover, the speed of cyber attacks and the anonymity of cyberspace greatly favour the offence. This advantage is growing as hacker tools become cheaper and easier to employ by adversaries whose skills are growing in sophistication."

Defensive measures have already begun. Last June the Pentagon created US Cyber Command and Britain announced it was opening a cyber-security operations centre attached to GCHQ at Cheltenham, in coordination with MI5 and MI6.

William Lynn, US deputy defence secretary, described the cyber challenge as unprecedented. "Once the province of nations, the ability to destroy via cyber now also rests in the hands of small groups and individuals: from terrorist groups to organised crime, hackers to industrial spies to foreign intelligence services This is not some future threat. The cyber threat is here today, it is here now," Lynn said.

The chief executive of Arm has given the strongest hint yet that the company's technology is inside Apple's iPad.

The Cambridge-based technology group - whose microchip designs are to be found in more than nine out of every 10 mobile phones sold across the world - already has chips in the iPhone and iPod. That has led intense speculation that Apple's A4 chip, which powers the iPad, incorporates an Arm Cortex-A9 MPCore - the same processor as Qualcomm's Snapdragon chip, which powers Google's Nexus One.

In an interview with the Guardian, Arm's chief executive, Warren East, hinted that the mystery would soon be over.

"I would doubt whether anybody other than Apple has taken the iPad to bits yet," he said. "But in a month or so it will be available and somebody other than Apple will take it to bits - and then we will know."

Famously coy about the destination of the company's technology, East hinted that the iPad was powered by Arm designs but refused to confirm outright that the A4 chip is based on the company's intellectual property.

"I have seen all the same speculation that you have seen and I can point out the fact that they [Apple] publicised the fact that it runs Apple iPhone and iPod Touch applications straight off and from that you can do some inferring," he teased.

"But I cannot possibly confirm anything."

When a new gadget is released, analysts can be relied upon to pull it apart and spot the firm's handiwork. They have yet to get their hands on an iPad, however.

There had been concerns that Apple's $275m ( 148m) acquisition of Californian chip designer PA Semi in 2008 would see Arm slowly pushed out of Apple's products.

But the A4 chip - the first piece of silicon to emerge since that takeover - suggests there is still a very definite role for Arm to play.

East was speaking after the company announced a better than expected set of fourth quarter results.

It has benefited from the boom in sales of smartphones from the likes of Apple, Nokia and RIM, maker of the BlackBerry. As these devices have become more complex, meanwhile, Arm has been able to install more of its chip designs in individual gadgets - covering everything from the handset's microprocessor to Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or GPS connections.

While revenues in the three months to end December were down 10%, at 85.2m, that was a better performance than the City had predicted and a lot better than the 20% drop recorded by some of its rivals.

In the quarter, the company sold a record 1.3 billion chips. Annual sales of 305m were up 2%, while profits of 96.8m were down 4%.

In its results statement, ARM said it is generally anticipated that the semiconductor industry will see improving conditions in 2010 compared to 2009, but warned that "the rate of improvement is still unclear as it will be influenced by consumer confidence and the broader macro-economic environment".

East cautioned that the industry's expectations for growth of 15% to 20% this year, may be over-optimistic. His own prediction is for Arm to grow at 13%, with the rest of the industry seeing more modest growth.

There's an iPad flavour to most of this week's progamme as we deconstruct the most anticipated launch of 2010.

Was the launch of Apple's iPad a whole lot of hot air or the next evolution in gadgetry? The debate begins as author and technology commentator Nick Carr joins us to debate the highs and the lows of the next must-have gadget, and Bobbie Johnson describes getting his hands on the iPad.

The studio is also buzzing with the escalating row between publishing house Macmillan and Amazon. Did the virtual bookseller drawn a line in the sand by removing all of Macmillan's books from its shelves at the weekend? Was the launch of the iPad a contributing factor? Literary agent Clare Alexander - a former editor-in-chief at Macmillan - joins us to debate the future of publishing and the iron grip that Amazon has over the old media. We also hear hints that Google might have a tablet device of their own on the way later this year.

Elsewhere, Charles picks through the Tories plan for broadband if they win the election (verdict: unlikely) and we discuss the financial issues at Wikileaks. There are your comments as always, too.

This week we're also asking for your comments on how you'd like to change Tech Weekly in future - we've had plenty of responses already, but please do leave us your thoughts, it's important to hear from you all.

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PS3/Xbox 360/PSP/DS; 29.99- 44.99; cert 3+; THQ

Apart from having three abbreviations in its title perhaps a record MX vs ATV Reflex (motocross versus all-terrain-vehicle) doesn't start well.

I know that this is a fairly anal gripe, but the voiceover is immediately annoying. A bad William Shatner impression into a low-quality microphone recorded in an echoey toilet cubicle, its effect is further worsened by a grinding, patronising and limited script. After 10 frustrating minutes, I was so incandescent with rage that I could only complete the training with the sound turned off.

The training section is slow and frustrating, even without the disembodied voice of Captain Kirk criticising your every failure. You are taken slowly through the complex and fiddly control system in a large arena, but while you can see lots of tempting jumps strewn around, you aren't allowed to stray from the measly training path to try them. Therefore, before I even started the first race, this game needled me. This is a pity, because once you get used to the controls you steer your vehicle with the left stick and control the rider with the right, which is crucial for control at speed as well as tricks this is actually quite a satisfying game.

The graphics are very pretty, despite the fact by necessity for dirt bike and ATV racing the engine is used mostly to render earth in various muddy shades. Tricks are quite intuitive once you are used to the controls, and the feeling of having to balance your rider as well as steer is great for immersion. Additionally, being able to practice tricks during loading-times is an outstanding touch.

The physics engine deserves a mention, too. Mistime a trick, and you have to watch the consequences of your mistake on your unfortunate avatar in extreme, sadistic detail. I genuinely had to look away, sometimes, so brutal are the graphics. This is compounded by the sound: what sick game developer decides that he needs a sound-effect for a spine snapping? When it's not being used to viscerally highlight the dangers of dirt-biking, the physics are very good indeed. The muddy tracks transform as you race over them, and your opponents tyre-tracks can trip you up.

There are still some annoyances. The AI is pretty bad, especially when it comes to avoiding collisions, and there is no mini-map in the race levels. But there are lots of fun touches, too, as well as plenty of vehicle and game modes to fiddle about with. But what recommends this game most is the combination of that excellent physics engine and a control system that, while it does take some getting used to, is actually rather good.

Rating: 3/5

From cleaver-wielding suffragettes to a gun-toting delusional Edwardian, the National Portrait Gallery has played host to more than portraiture in its 150-year history

They are some of the forgotten stories from the last 150 years of the National Portrait Gallery: an Edwardian murder and suicide, a cleaver-wielding suffragette and a big rat problem.

The gallery announced today the posting online of an archive catalogue along with reports, letters and photographs which give a fascinating insight into some of the less well-known chapters in its history.

It comes after two years of cataloguing previously unseen material, a project that the gallery's archivist and records manager, Charlotte Brunskill, said they were about a third of the way through: "When I first started there was a 150-year backlog of stuff that hadn't been looked at."

One of the most dramatic stories in the gallery's history was a murder and suicide in the east wing in 1909. The newspapers were full of it, the Daily Express reporting on the well-dressed man, a 70-year-old from Hove "wearing a silk hat and a fur coat", who visited the gallery with his 58-year-old wife.

When they got to Room 27 the man pulled out a revolver and shot his wife before turning the gun on himself. Two young women on a day out fled in terror. It later turned out the man was "delusional with a persecution complex" believing he was being pursued by someone not identified.

An internal report on the incident includes the detail: "Three attendants remained after the gallery was closed to clear up in Room XXVII. Men were sent from HM Office of Works to remove by scraping such stains as remained in the floors after they had been washed over by the Gallery charwomen."

Many documents relate to an incident involving a suffragette in 1914. A woman who later gave her name as Anne Hunt, a "well-known militant" as it turned out, visited the gallery with a meat cleaver hidden in the folds of her dress. When she got to a Millais portrait of the Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle "I think they particularly didn't like him," said Brunskill she smashed through the glass and ripped his face, shouting that it was "a protest against the re-arrest of Mrs Pankhurst."

A report said an attendant had seen the woman a few days earlier and taken her to be American "from the closeness with which she then examined the pictures". When she turned up again on the Friday he thought he must be wrong as "no American would have paid the 6d entrance fee twice over". She looked suspicious enough for him to follow and grapple with her when she attacked the Millais, possibly preventing further damage.

The gallery had no paintings during the second world war they went secretly to Mentmore, a mansion in Buckinghamshire but did have rats. They were everywhere, it seems, and their extermination was formalised in rat reports saying where they were killed and trapped, along with "killers' remarks". A typical entry might have read: "1 Trapped in library" - "drowned by Pitkin." Or another in the library that was "speared by Pittock with poker after it had escaped, with great excitement."

The gallery also said it had received a grant to catalogue the papers of the first director, Sir George Scharf, covering years when the gallery had no permanent home. It was originally in a private house in Great George Street, then South Kensington and briefly in Bethnal Green before moving in to its present home in 1896.

Some of the most interesting material are Scharf's pocket books packed full of drawings, including some from his visit to Blenheim palace and one of an infant Winston Churchill.

Brunskill said a lot of Scharf's diaries covered his obsessions with the weather and his health but he was also a committed campaigner against the "national disgrace" of the gallery not having a permanent home. Sadly he died shortly before the gallery moved to its home in St Martin's Place, near Trafalgar Square.

The archive also touches on the 1960s and the groundbreaking Cecil Beaton exhibition of 1968 which the gallery clearly wanted as a happening, swinging event. It was more like a concept album and there was music and incense and it was all a bit too much for a Mr Steer from Barnes who wrote a letter of complaint.

The gallery's then new young director, Roy Strong, wrote back defending the show, but adding: "You may like to know that both the next two exhibitions will have no music or smell."

Video website Ustream has announced a substantial new investment as it attempts to expand in Asia and take on rival YouTube.

Japanese internet and telecoms giant Softbank announced today that it was buying a $75m ( 47m) stake in the Californian dotcom company, as part of its strategy to back what it called "next generation services".

Ustream, which allows users to broadcast their own live TV channels on the internet, already has more than 2m users and receives more than 50m viewers each month - but co-founder and chief executive John Ham said that the cash injection would allow the company to broaden its horizons.

"Asia offers a significant, untapped market opportunity for streaming video," he said. "Softbank will enable us to develop this opportunity and deliver on our vision of live streaming video everywhere. We look forward to deploying these resources to accelerate our growth in the United States and Asia Pacific."

Online video has proved a huge hit in recent years, with sites like YouTube which was bought by Google in 2006 for $1.65bn proving web mainstays, and services like the BBC iPlayer and America's Hulu.com quickly becoming indispensable for millions of people.

Ustream is among a new breed of video site that allow users to broadcast live, bringing a new element of immediacy and interactivity to the medium with rivals such as Qik and Justin.tv also providing similar serices.

For its part, Softbank is hoping that it can use Ustream's proven popularity in the US to push and encourage more people to use high end mobile phones. While many broadcasters on the site use traditional cameras or webcams, it also allows people to use their mobile phones as video streaming devices.

With greater penetration of 3G handsets in countries like Japan and South Korea, and Softbank's position in the mobile market it is the only provider of the iPhone in Japan, for example Ustream will likely focus heavily on expanding its mobile user base.

The deal marks the latest in a series of investments in Silicon Valley companies by Softbank, which was one of the world's richest companies during the height of the first dotcom boom.

One of the firm's other US investments, the social networking application company RockYou, has made significant inroads in the Asian market although it has also been plagued by controversy after millions of passwords were stolen when the company's servers were hacked.

It also means that Ustream becomes the latest in a new generation of Californian dotcom companies to draw significant investment over the past year. Last spring Russian investment vehicle Digital Sky Technologies bought a $200m stake in Facebook, while Twitter confirmed late last year that it had taken a "significant" round of funding, said to be around $100m.

Reports say planned human flights to the moon and Mars likely to be ditched in effort to rein in US deficit

Nasa's plans to send a manned mission to the moon and launch the US into a bold new era of space exploration are likely to remain on the ground today when Barack Obama unveils his budget.

The president wants to cut back or abandon 120 government programmes to help rein in the US deficit among them the funding of the US space administration as part of the $3.8tn ( 2.4tn) budget.

According to the Washington Post, Obama will seek to shelve the $81bn Constellation programme, which called for a return to the moon by 2020 and human landings on Mars by the middle of the century. The plans were laid out by his predecessor, George Bush, in 2004.

The budget could also spell the end for Nasa's successor to the space shuttle, the Ares 1 rocket, which has already cost billions of dollars to develop.

The government will instead call for $6bn to be spent over five years to develop a commercial craft to transport astronauts into orbit. Such a move would mark a sea change in how Nasa works, forcing it to rely on a private company to design and manufacture a spacecraft.

Michael Griffin, a former Nasa administrator who championed the Constellation programme, told the Post the budget would prevent the US from being "a significant player in human space flight for the foreseeable future".

"The path that they're on with this budget is a path that can't work."

While commercial firms such as SpaceX and Orbital Sciences had a role to play in space flight, they were not ready to take astronauts into orbit, he said.

"One day it will be like commercial airline travel, just not yet. It's like 1920. Lindbergh hasn't flown the Atlantic, and they're trying to sell 747s to Pan Am."

His remarks were dismissed by John Gedmark, executive director of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation.

"The defence department began using commercial rockets a long time ago to launch priceless national security satellites that our troops' lives depend on," he said. "If the Pentagon can trust private industry with this responsibility, we think Nasa can too."

Yesterday, a White House spokesman said the president's commitment to a "robust 21st century space programme" would be reflected in the budget.

"Nasa is vital not only to spaceflight, but also for critical scientific and technological advancements," he said. "The expertise at Nasa is essential to developing innovative new opportunities, industries, and jobs. The president's budget will take steps in that direction."

An expert panel appointed by the president last year concluded that Nasa would need another $3bn a year to conduct a functional human spaceflight programme three times the amount they are to receive in the budget.

The panel said the Constellation programme would not have the money to fulfil its aim of a moon landing in 2020, the first such mission since the last Apollo lunar mission in 1972.

Google's Docs and Sites group has announced that support for Microsoft's IE6 browser will be reduced after 1 March. Since IE6 still has around 20% of the market, this could discourage the adoption of Google's online applications

Google has made an announcement on Web browser support for Docs and Sites, saying it will reduce support for "older browsers like Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers". Google suggests users upgrade to Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0, Mozilla Firefox 3.0, Google Chrome 4.0 or Safari 3.0 or, in all cases, later versions of these browsers. As users have complained in the comments to the blog post, the list omits the Opera browser.

The main impact will be on those people still using IE6 which, as pointed out below, still has about 20% of the market, according to Net Applications' usage monitoring statistics.

Google says it is "going to begin phasing out our support, starting with Google Docs and Google Sites on March 1st". After this date, "newer features may not be available and some features may even stop working".

Last July, according to reports, Google's YouTube started giving IE6 users a message to say that: "We will be phasing out support for your browser soon. Please upgrade to one of these modern browsers."

However, phasing out IE6 support is a much bigger risk to Google Docs. Google is trying to sell its online applications to companies, and a large proportion of IE6 users -- perhaps the majority -- appear to work for large companies and government organisations. These usually have locked-down PCs so individual users cannot upgrade their browsers. Testing and then rolling out a company-wide browser upgrade is expensive, especially if it requires any in-house web applications to be rewritten.

The UK government has IE6 users and seems very slow to upgrade. Last week, an NHS advisory (ie6gudiance.pdf) echoed Microsoft security bulletins about the Aurora vulnerability and suggested applying the patch, but warned:

"Organisations should ensure that appropriate levels of testing of the update take place prior to mass deployment. Organisations should be satisfied that the update does not cause any problems with already existing applications and so forth prior to applying it to all affected systems."

Upgrading to IE7 is recommended but the current and most secure version, IE8, wasn't suggested even though it runs on XP. The note says:

"It is additionally further recommended that organisations still using Internet Explorer 6 on the affected platforms upgrade to Internet Explorer 7. Internet Explorer 7 has been warranted to work correctly with SPINE applications such as CSA and provides additional security features over Internet Explorer 6."

Microsoft has been trying to get IE6 users to upgrade their browsers since it launched a replacement, IE7, in 2006. When it released IE8 last year, Microsoft offered up to $1m to feed American children in a "Browser for the Better" campaign. This involved Microsoft paying $1.15 per IE8 download to Feeding America.

However, the major impact on IE6's market share continues to come from users upgrading from Windows XP to Vista (with IE7) or Windows 7 (with IE8). Both browsers have more features and better standards support than IE6, but also consume more resources.

Unfortunately, it's only by installing IE7 or IE8 that Windows users replace the IE6 code in their operating system. Simply using a different browser, such as Firefox or Chrome, does not do this.

Microsoft's Dean Hachamovitch wrote last year that

"Dropping support for IE6 is not an option because we committed to supporting the IE included with Windows for the lifespan of the product. We keep our commitments. Many people expect what they originally got with their operating system to keep working whatever release cadence particular subsystems have."

Microsoft will therefore continue to support IE6 until 8 April, 2014, when it stops supporting Windows XP.

3.5% of BBC's licence fee to upgrade broadband network
BT says it aims to get fast broadband to 10m homes by 2012

The Conservatives today claimed they were willing to loosen BT's grip on the local telephone network and use parts of the BBC licence fee to deliver "superfast" broadband to the majority of Britain's homes by 2017.

Using "market-based solutions" the party believes the UK can be the first leading European country to have speeds of "up to" 100 megabits per second (Mbps), the shadow chancellor George Osborne said. He said "the Conservatives would support changes to the regulatory framework", adding that private investors being allowed to pay for better cabling would encourage competition. If the market failed to deliver, then 3.5% of the licence fee currently used to pay for digital switchover could be diverted to pay for broadband expansion, Osborne said. That would raise between 750m and 1bn on the basis of 25m TV licences.

But Labour hit back, noting that the proposal to tax the BBC would benefit Rupert Murdoch's BskyB and Carphone Warehouse, whose co-founder David Ross donates to the party as an individual. Labour has committed to extending broadband to 90% of homes by 2012 at 2 Mbps. Labour has also planned a 50p a month levy a "broadband tax" which will be used to fund "next generation broadband" for areas where the market is unlikely to deliver.

This levy is expected to raise between 1-1.5bn by 2017 But Osborne claimed his plans were more ambitious than those of the government. "In the 19th century we built the railways," he said. "In the 20th century we built the motorways. In the 21st century let's build the superfast broadband network that will create hundreds of thousands of jobs for Britain."

He said the Conservatives would end BT's "local loop monopoly" and allow other operators to move in with their own ducts and fibre cables, an approach that has proved successful in countries such as Singapore and South Korea.

" I think the best way to deliver this is by breaking up the British Telecom monopoly at the moment, which holds back companies such as Carphone Warehouse or Virgin".

He added:" if we find the market can't do that, then use the BBC licence fee, the digital switch over money in the BBC licence fee, to get Broadband out to the rest of the country.

Shadow culture, media and sport secretary Jeremy Hunt said: "These regulatory changes will create the right conditions for sustainable growth and ensure that the digital sector plays a leading role in a competitive, balanced economy."

But financial secretary to the Treasury Stephen Timms said: "On broadband it's not Britain but the Tories that are playing catch-up. Labour have already announced measures for rolling out broadband across the country and the Tories have opposed the plans to make that happen."

Other Labour sources pointed out that the founder of Carphone Warehouse has donated 150,000 to the Tories and is a friend of many senior Tories.

Liberal Democrat culture, media and sport spokesman Don Foster said: "This announcement shows once again the fantasy world of Tory economics. Anyone can promise the earth what matters is how you pay for it. All independent research shows that the market simply cannot provide high speed broadband in all parts of the country in the short term without investment.

"Hints that the license fee payer will be hit are the closest the Tories come to explaining how they intend to pay for this."

A spokesman for BT said: "The UK boasts one of the most competitive broadband markets in the world with BT having a 25% market share. Ninety nine percent of homes can access copper broadband, prices are low and close to 20m homes are already enjoying services. Technology is moving on and BT is at the forefront of that revolution. We are investing 1.5bn to get fibre to at least 10 million homes by mid 2012 and we want to go further."

This article was amended on 2 February 2010. The original described Carphone Warehouse as a donor to the Conservative party. This has been corrected.

The Roadster Sport isn't just the first genuinely head-turning electric car, a quick spin around London shows it is practical too

How often do police take your picture just because they like your car? Not very often, presumably. In which case, try driving the latest electric sportscar from Tesla Motors, the Roadster Sport.

Being the first British newspaper journalist behind the wheel of this 87,000 superstar new model one that has been Anglicised with a right-hand drive is a strange experience. Driving it around London, people literally stop, stare, gawp and nudge their friends and children. The jaws of two men drop simultaneously; I'm not sure if they are more impressed by the car or horrified to see a woman driving it. And Dave, a community support police officer in central London, can't resist taking a photograph. "My brother would kill me if I didn't," he says, peering inside afterwards . A few minutes later when I ask a police officer for directions, his eyes light up. "Is that that new electric car?" he asks, as his partner rolls his eyes. I've never experienced anything like it.

But what about the driving? First of all, you're incredibly low down on the road (let's skip quickly over the business of clambering in and out not graceful, to say the least) and at moments on the London roads I feel like a weeny unprotected child, in between all the double decker buses and coaches.

Secondly, it's surprisingly heavy that's the weight of the bank of lithium-ion batteries that keeps it moving and like many sports cars it doesn't have power-steering. The power behind its famous 0-60mph in 3.7 seconds is not instantly obvious, the weight making it slightly less nippy than you would expect in the traffic. The braking (regenerative obviously) is joltingly powerful I nearly put the Guardian's camerawoman through the window several times.

It is an automatic, which takes a little getting used to, but is then heaven. And there's a neat little display on the dashboard which shows how much current you're using two amps while sitting in traffic, and up to 68 when driving at high speed. The dashboard is actually a little over-complicated, and the speed dial is positioned awkwardly behind the steering wheel so you can't see it unless you duck a little (or maybe I should have been taller.)

However, the place where the Tesla finally stops feeling strange and starts to feel extraordinary is as you might expect the fast lane of the motorway. Without a private track we can't go from a standing start to try out the acceleration experience that nearly caused Jeremy Clarkson to swallow his own dentures on Top Gear. But I went for a spin on the M4 and it was instantly powerful. One moment we are doing 55mph and the next we were doing 70. Other cars just drop away like falling fruit.

But adrenalin kicks aside, why should we care about the Tesla? I would argue that it's one of the most important cars ever made. Back in 2006 the idea of the electric car was dying see Chris Paine's documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? as the giant car companies dragged their feet and then either brought out models with restricted availability, dumped them or just threw up their hands and said "it's impossible". Nickel-metal hydride batteries could not provide the range that was needed and there didn't seem to be much else available.

And then, like Sir Galahad in a sunlit clearing, the Tesla appeared. Unlike the unattractive and slow city cars that had made up most electric history, it was slinky, bright red, desirable and capable of sportscar-worthy performance off a bank of lithium-ion batteries (the batteries that lap-top computers use). Robert Lutz, vice-chairman of General Motors, has been quoted as saying that "all the geniuses here at General Motors kept saying lithium-ion technology is 10 years away, and Toyota agreed with us and boom, along comes Tesla. So I said, 'How come some tiny little California startup, run by guys who know nothing about the car business, can do this, and we can't?' That was the crowbar that helped break up the log jam."

In the years since the log jam appears to have nearly disappeared, with Renault, Nissan, BMW, Mitsubishi and GM itself all taking the electric car seriously these days. The Leaf, the i-MiEV, and the electric Mini are the new generation of EVs which are going to be appearing all over Europe this year and next; they're all good to drive, they're modelled like a normal petrol car rather than the Marmite love-it-or-hate design of the G-Wiz and the car manufacturers have worked out that if they lease you the expensive battery instead of selling it with the car, then they'll be priced like, well, any other car.

But for now the Tesla Roadster is very much not like any other car. Just ask a policeman.

There are now dozens of websites to help budding authors to publish their novels, poems and pictures and, perhaps, even make a profit from it

If you want to realise a dream by publishing your own book, there are lots of companies willing to extract upwards of $500 from you for the privilege. At the other end of the spectrum is Amazon's digital text platform, which allows you to upload your pre-prepared files to its Kindle reader and then set your own price.

The catch? Amazon takes 65% of the income from sales. Ouch. Fortunately, there are lots of other options of which more later for budding authors. What you get out of them is subject only to the limits of your imagination.

It doesn't have to be an embryonic bestseller because self-publishing is best suited to limited editions. Anything over 1,000 copies and you would be better off going to a traditional printer to take advantage of economies of scale. I know a lot people who are self-publishing a record of their own lives together with memories of their parents and grandparents as a bit of family history. That's not vanity publishing, just a great way to preserve memories for future generations and add to the archive of local history. Self-publishing is ideal for that.

Others publish their blogs or photo albums. Every year I try to put the best photos of the past 12 months from a photo site (Flickr.com in my case) so we have the equivalent of the traditional photo album which will last longer than my Flickr subscription and my hard disk. You could equally download an out-of-copyright book from the not-for-profit Gutenberg archive or from the millions of books Google has scanned (maybe for your book club) or extracts from the Wikipedia and it's all legal.

For years I have written poems as a relaxing pastime rather like other people collect stamps. I couldn't face the prospect of collecting rejection notes from agents and publishers so decided to self publish. The first book I did by paying for 1,000 copies to be printed in the traditional way (because it was only a little bit more expensive than printing 500). Expensive mistake.

By the time a second book was ready new technology came to the rescue. I used Lulu.com, which enables you to upload files and cover designs for nothing, and launched it in the virtual world Second Life (at no extra cost to a member). For marketing, I experimented with "product placement" by attaching poems to photos or paintings on Flickr and other sites thereby generating discussions that you wouldn't get with traditional publishing where the author is remote from the reader.

Through a chance meeting on Facebook, the Glasgow indie group A Band Called Quinn is recording a number of the poems for a CD, including Truth which can be experienced here on YouTube. My new book I hope to publish on Lulu and an iPhone app, if I can find a decent one. The point about all this is that new technology offers new and cheap ways both to publish and promote your books and we are only at the start of the learning curve.

Which self-publishing site to choose? There has been a lot of change recently. This is partly because of Amazon entering the market (and now Apple as well) but also because the process is becoming simpler and the operation more vertically integrated. Amazon has bought Createspace and Lulu has purchased We Read, a social book club with a presence on Facebook and other social sites with a claimed 3 million readers. This could help it towards reaching the nirvana of self-publishing: to become the iTunes of books.

I've had mixed feelings about Lulu in recent years. In principle, it is a breath of fresh air being an open source site that claims to put the interests of authors above all else (unlike the increasingly proprietary Amazon). In practice, there have been problems not least ludicrously high postage costs (sometimes more than the cost of the book) delays of weeks before delivery and issues about payments which readers have told me about.

They seem to be through these problems, however, and now print in the UK so delivery takes days rather than weeks and postage is down to more reasonable levels. The proof of my latest book arrived while writing this column, five days after pressing the final button.

If you use their template, publishing is remarkably easy you upload your manuscript in PDF form, drag photos across for the front and back covers. It could all be over in 20 minutes (if you don't make silly mistakes as I tend to). It doesn't cost you anything until the first purchase and Lulu lets you keep 80% of the proceeds (after deduction of the printing cost of each book). Lulu expanded by 20% last year and publishes over 400,000 titles a year which it claims is "almost twice as many as by America's entire traditional publishing industry".

Lulu is my favourite for text-driven books, but if you are more interested in picture-driven publications then Blurb.com is the one to choose. It is easy to use if you stick to the easy templates and you can easily import photos directly from Flickr other photo sites. The standard of reproduction is impressive (as long as the original resolution is good) and they helpfully flag up photos that they don't think make the grade in terms of quality. Lulu and Blurb aren't the only fruit and, if you have time, it is worth trawling through some of the dozens if not hundreds of minnows that keep popping up while being on guard lest they are trying to take a quick buck from you. There are various lists of top 10s on the web, or just try your luck with something like Fastpencil which looks easy to use though I haven't followed it through to publication or CompletelyNovel which is based in the UK.

The digital revolution has turned the music industry upside down but it is moving at a more leisurely pace in books where self-publishing hasn't yet taken off in a really big way.

The question this week is whether, once again, Apple will change the game by providing an easy way to publish and generate a conversation. There is still a vast market out there for the taking.

twitter.com/vickeegan

Top Disney animator Andreas Deja is overwhelmed by the clarity of his new high-definition TV system

What's your favourite piece of technology, and how has it improved your life?
That's an easy answer it is my 65in screen and high-definition setup. I am an absolute nut when it comes to high definition and Blu-ray; it has absolutely improved my life. When I saw it in my house for the first time, it felt like somebody had opened a window. The image is so overwhelming it's pure joy.

When was the last time you used it, and what for?
Just before I went on a trip a week and a half ago, I set my TiVo for the series Legend of the Seeker. It's extremely well done, I love it, so I didn't want to miss an episode while I was away.

What additional features would you add if you could?
More storage in my TiVo box. I get frustrated when I have to delete things that I haven't been able to watch. I'm a big nut for nature programmes.

Do you think it will be obsolete in 10 years time?
I hope it will still be around but I think we will be downloading these things in the future. I like my current setup so much I know I will still like it in 10 years.

What always frustrates you about technology in general?
Passwords that you need to create for all sorts of accounts. I keep forgetting them, and it drives me kind of crazy. We are living in an age of passwords.

Is there any particular piece of technology that you have owned and hated?
I have had bad luck with cordless phones and fax machines. I keep buying them and they keep breaking on me. They last for eight or nine months then I have to get a new one.

If you had one tip about getting the best out of new technology, what would it be?
I would say if you like high definition as much as I do, and if you like Blu-ray, get the PS3 player because it has the most capacity and plays Blu-rays the best.

Do you consider yourself to be a Luddite or a nerd?
I'm a little bit of a Luddite I need to have things explained to me. I hate manuals, so I have to have a friend who knows the technology to explain it for me. But I can be a little bit nerdy, too.

What's the most expensive piece of technology you've ever owned?
I bought my first high-definition setup about 10 years ago when the technology was brand new and very expensive. It was a 60in screen and speaker system. It was ridiculously expensive, but I didn't regret it at all.

Mac or PC, and why?
Mac, because I hardly ever get any junk mail or viruses on the Mac. Once I switched I didn't want to look back, so I'm kind of sold on Mac.

Do you still buy physical media such as CDs and DVDs, or do you download? What was your last purchase?
I still buy CDs and DVDs. My last purchase was on Oxford Street, London I bought the BBC series Life, and even though my Blu-ray player does not play this region.

Robot butlers a good idea or not?
I don't think so, because eventually you have to get your butt off the couch and move and do something. I think robot butlers will make us very lazy.

What piece of technology would you most like to own?
I'm waiting for the completely electric car. I have a hybrid myself, but that's half and half. I'm waiting for the time when cars do not need gasoline any more.

Andreas Deja is a supervising animator on the new Disney film The Princess & The Frog, out today in London and 5 February across the UK.

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."

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.

Listorious is building a directory of Twitter lists that will help you find the most interesting people in more specialised subject areas

Listorious goes some way to solving one of the biggest problems for Twitter users: finding people who are interested in the same topics as you. That could be something as broad as News or as select as the cast and writers from the BBC comedy, The Thick of It .

If you want a list devoted to Airports or New York City Food Trucks and Other Street Vendors, you can find them here. If you can't find what you want, you can create your own list on Twitter then add it to Listorious. If you don't add it, of course, then Listorious won't publish it.

Listorious provides a more open and democratic source of lists than Twitter's own Suggested User List (SUL), which offers new users a selection of people to follow. The SUL means some accounts now have hundreds of thousands of followers that they have not "earned" on the merits of their tweets.

Twitter has recently taken a step in the right direction by dividing the SUL into categories such as Books, Politics and Travel, but it's still dominated by American celebrities. If you want to find people in more specialised areas, or a decent sample of non-Americans, then you'll have to try a different directory. The main ones are probably Listorious, Twellow and WeFollow, but there are also more specialised guides such as Sawhorse Media's MuckRack (journalists), Championist (sport) and other subjects.

Which is not to say that Listorious couldn't be better. It now offers so many lists that most people are not going to look beyond the first few at the top the ones that already have the most followers. Also, Listorious works by using the tags added by whoever created the list, and these are not necessarily accurate. (It makes sense to use lots of tags because then your list appears in lots of Listorious categories, but if you make a mistake, you can't edit the tags later.)

If users could search using more than one tag, that would help people to narrow lists down to what they really want. Some form of geo-tagging would also be useful for international users.

For those who want a quicker option, Listorious has its own lists, often based on 140, which is the number of characters allowed in a tweet. The biggest is the Listorious 140, which shows the 140 biggest lists by number of followers. Actually, it shows the top 1,400, spread over 10 pages. There are similarly long lists of The Most Followed People on Twitter and The Most Listed People on Twitter. "Most listed" is probably a better guide to tweet quality than "most followed", though it only includes lists added to Listorious.

People have always created lists, and Listorious probably taps into some deep human need, even if it's only to save time by focusing on things you consider important. Listorious means you can save even more time by letting other people create them.

Technology Guardian's Dr Aleks Krotoski turns TV presenter tomorrow night for a new BBC series that examines the impact of the world wide web

You may have noticed the absence from these parts particularly on the Games blog of our colleague Aleks Krotoski in recent months. That's because she's been busy travelling the world for a new BBC series about the history of the world wide web and finishing her PhD, of course.

The first part of the fruits of her labours, The Virtual Revolution, airs Saturday at 8.30pm on BBC2. Travelling with a team of BBC documentary makers, and accompanied on part of the journey by web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Aleks journeys across four continents and six countries and speaks to more than 50 people who have made the web what it is today including some rather famous names, such as Bill Gates, Al Gore, Stephen Fry, Jimmy Wales, Arianna Huffington, Mark Zuckerberg, Chad Hurley, Stewart Brand, Jeff Bezos and the President of Estonia.

For Dr Aleks (as she now insists we call her), the making of the series was a very personal journey: "It was an amazing opportunity to meet the people who have helped to create exactly the things I've been writing about and studying for the past decade," she says. "I managed to meet most of the people I referenced in my PhD thesis, and was able to ask them all of the difficult questions I had been thinking about in my research.

"It really was an extraordinary adventure that allowed me to test a few theories, challenge some of my long-held ideas and to dream up a few more along the way."

You can find out more about The Virtual Revolution at this article by Dr Aleks in the Observer, or by listening to the Tech Weekly podcast.

And after watching the first episode on Saturday night, please pop back here and give us your thoughts in the comments

Which? campaigned for the Office of Fair Trading to scrutinise the proposed tie-up, rather than authorities in Brussels, because it was a deal that affected British consumers
Poll: Should Orange and T-Mobile merge?

Consumer groups today welcomed confirmation that UK competition authorities have asked Brussels for permission to investigate the proposed merger of Orange and T-Mobile.

A spokesman for Which? said this morning that it had campaigned for the Office of Fair Trading to scrutinise the proposed tie-up, rather than authorities in Brussels, because it was a deal that affected UK consumers.

"We have been very keen to have this looked at because T-Mobile and Orange have networks here. This merger affects British consumers and we think it should be looked at," a Which? spokesman said.

If T-Mobile and Orange merge they would have a 37% market share of retail customers in the UK, or 40% including the virtual mobile network operators such as Virgin Mobile that use the two companies' networks to run their services.

In December Consumer Focus and the Communications Consumer Panel wrote a joint letter to Neelie Kroes, the Brussels competition commissioner, urging a UK review of the deal, which is originally under the scope of Europe because two thirds of the turnover of the parent companies France T l com and Deutsche Telekom respectively is generated outside the UK.

The OFT confirmed to the stock market this morning that it had made a request to the European commission to refer the UK aspects of the proposed joint venture between the two companies.

"The OFT's initial view, following consultation, is that the joint venture threatens significantly to affect competition in mobile telecommunications in the UK," the OFT said in a brief statement.

"If the request is granted, the OFT intends to examine the proposed joint venture with a view to deciding whether it should be referred to the Competition Commission for an in-depth investigation," the OFT said.

If the OFT is handed the powers to investigate, it would delay the plans by the two mobile phone companies to consummate their deal, which was originally announced in September and slated for approval by the Brussels competition watchdogs as early as mid February. The OFT would conduct its own analysis of the situation before deciding whether to refer the tie-up to the Competition Commission for a detailed investigation that could last as long as six months.

The OFT said it had petitioned Brussels under Article 9 of the EU merger regulations.

Macmillan capitalises on bitter rivalry by forcing through price increase for digital versions of its bestselling titles

In a plot twist worthy of one of its own thrillers, publisher Macmillan has capitalised on the bitter rivalry between two of America's largest technology companies to strike a blow for old media by forcing through a price increase for digital versions of its bestselling titles.

Apple and Amazon are locked in a fight over the future of the book. Both are trying to dominate the market for ebooks, which are expected to become increasingly important to readers in the digital decades ahead.

Amazon made an early play two years ago with its monochrome Kindle ebook reader, but last week Apple's tanks arrived on Amazon's lawn with the launch of its latest invention. Having taken the music market by storm with its iPod and iTunes combination, Apple now hopes to repeat the trick with its new iPad and iBookstore.

Macmillan is one of five publishers the others being Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Hachette that have signed up with Apple to make ebooks available through its online store.

In doing so, they have moved the pricing of ebooks away from the bargain $9.99 ( 6.26) price Amazon has been criticised by publishers for charging in an attempt to lure more people on to the Kindle.

Last weekend, Amazon removed Macmillan books including Booker prize-winning Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel from its US website in protest at the publisher's demand that Amazon stop discounting its titles and start selling them instead at the $12.99 and $14.99 suggested by Apple.

There was outrage in the publishing industry at Amazon's move, and hours later it was forced into a U-turn.

It is now assumed that Amazon will have to match Apple's price for ebooks on Macmillan titles.

"We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles," Amazon said, before adding ominously: "We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan's terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for ebooks."

It may seem like a local tussle between American firms, but it is being closely watched by British publishers. As one editor at a London publishing house put it: "Whatever happens in the US will dictate what happens elsewhere in the world."

Some publishers sensed Amazon gearing up for a legal fight with its use of the word "monopoly" in its response.

"I think they very specifically used that word," said one source, "as a way of pointing out to regulators: 'We wanted to sell ebooks for under $10 but there is a pact between publishers and Apple which has forced the price of ebooks up'."

The deal between Apple and its publishing partners has been likened to the Net Book Agreement, which aimed to keep retail prices high and was eventually declared illegal in the 1990s by the UK's competition authorities.

Under the traditional book-selling model, publishers sell their titles at a wholesale price to retailers, who then decide what price to sell them to readers. On some titles they may decide to make a loss in order to get punters through the door.

Under the Apple mode, however, the Californian company is merely an "agent" for the publishers, taking a commission on sales rather than setting the price itself. Its effect, however, is exactly the same: setting a floor for book prices. Macmillan's new deal with Amazon is also based on this "agency" model, with Macmillan selling its wares as though Amazon were little more than a books version of eBay.

For Apple, its intervention in the books market is partly an act of revenge. A few years ago, some of the music labels teamed up with Amazon to try to break Apple's grip on the online music market by allowing Amazon to sell tracks without so-called digital rights management (DRM) at $0.89 each, undercutting Apple. Apple was forced to give the music companies greater pricing flexibility in return for DRM-free tracks on iTunes.

The fight between Amazon and Macmillan is also typical of a traditional media company trying to get to grips with doing business digitally, according to Duncan Calow, partner at law firm DLA Piper. "The whole publishing industry is predicated on being a paper industry the clauses in writers' contracts that talk about approvals, for instance, still talk about approving bindings and trying to turn it around and into a digital content industry takes time. This kind of debate is not just about short-term pricing but whether the model that we use to distribute on paper should be the model that develops for digital," he said.

The pain of this transition is being felt across the media landscape, with everyone from newspaper and magazine publishers to music companies and film producers struggling with the power of the web. But the book industry has a couple of advantages over businesses in other areas which have seen the internet wipe out their profits.

The companies trying to sell ebook hardware need the involvement of publishers. When Apple launched the iPod, buyers could take their existing CD library and digitise it. Downloading music from the web came later the iTunes store was launched two years after the first iPod appeared.

But readers cannot easily digitise their books for a Kindle or iPad. To sell their devices, the likes of Apple and Amazon need publishing firms to agree to make digital versions of bestselling titles available on the same day as the printed work is published. The technology firms recognise that demand for ebook readers will be limited if readers have to wait months to get the latest books.

Secondly, online piracy is still embryonic in ebooks. While pirate copies of bestsellers such as Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol appeared on the web within hours of their release, the scale of piracy is nothing like it was when Apple opened its music store. Napster, for instance, had been closed down for two years by the time the iTunes music store launched. As a result, publishers are not as desperate to see the launch of legal digital stores as their music counterparts were five years ago. They want a good deal, rather than a deal at any price to stem the flow of piracy.

They also want to see more than one player in the ebook market. And later this year Google will launch its own ebook store, Google Editions. The search engine plans to let publishers set their own prices. There may be another twist to this tail.

Whistleblowing website says it cannot continue without public donations and has appealed for cash

The whistleblowing website Wikileaks has temporarily shut down because of a lack of funds.

The site, which has been a major irritant to governments and big businesses since it launched in 2007, says it cannot keep going without more public donations.

Wikileaks' organisers announced the suspension in a statement on its site. "To concentrate on raising the funds necessary to keep us alive into 2010, we have reluctantly suspended all other operations, but will be back soon," it says.

Pleading for more cash, it explained that publishing hundreds of thousands of previously secret documents each year costs money.

"If staff are paid, our yearly budget is $600,000 [ 372,000]," it said.

The site, which is part of the not-for-profit group Sunshine Press, adds: "We have raised just over $130,000 for this year but cannot meaningfully continue operations until costs are covered. These amount to just under $200,000pa."

Wikileaks refuses to accept corporate or government funding for fear of compromising its integrity.

Described by the Guardian as the "brown paper envelope for the digital age", it rose to prominence last year by hosting the Minton report on the activities of the oil trader Trafigura while the firm's lawyers were trying to prevent the press from revealing its contents.

Last year it also published a membership list of the British National party and it told the unfolding secret story of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon by releasing 500,000 intercepted pager messages.

Wikileaks's appeal for cash has prompted widespread support on the web. A Facebook group called Save Wikileaks has been formed and there are numerous supportive messages on Twitter.

Blogging for the Spectator Martin Bright, the former political editor of the New Statesman, wrote: "I know money is tight, but I urge anyone who cares about liberty to visit the site and donate."

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.

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."

After years of dominance by the boys, the signs are that the gender balance of computer gaming is changing

When I was a child, I never knew that computers, or computer games, were supposed to be "for boys". To me, the Sinclair game Cyber Rats wasn't so far away from the board game Mousetrap, and my Snoopy Tennis hand-held game was a just more exciting kind of travel solitaire. Board games weren't gendered; why would computer games be?

I think it was only when I arrived at university and realised that everyone playing Doom in the college computer room was a man, that I started to feel out of place. In my 20s I certainly felt my gaming habit was unusual among my female friends, though I couldn't work out why.

The traditional explanation has been that women aren't as interested in computers, maths or technology. But I wonder if that's the whole story. In her book The Playful Self, Rebecca Abrams suggests that while feminism has made great strides in getting women's work taken more seriously, it hasn't addressed the importance of women's play. Men's sports are given more media time than women's, arcades and pool halls have traditionally been very masculine environments, as have other gaming venues such as betting shops and poker clubs.

The signs are that the gender balance of computer games is changing, though. Manufacturers are attempting to target women and not only with pink consoles. Estimates are that at least 60% of players of The Sims are women. Women are increasingly involved in role-playing games and now form a larger contingent of PC gamers than men. And games such as Mass Effect and Fable 2 allow players to choose whether their character is male or female: a welcome innovation for women tired of playing as male characters.

This is nothing but good news. I had it right when I was eight: play doesn't have a gender, and neither does the joy of gaming.

We pick three of the best meat thermometers

Originally published on 4 February 1966

Luna-9 made a soft landing on the moon just after 6.45 last night. This triumph for Russian technology, a step forward in space exploration even greater than the journey of the American Mariner Mars probe last year, was confirmed by observations made from Jodrell Bank.

The 1 -ton spacecraft's retro-rockets fired at 6.44, and the landing was made one and a half minutes later.

After a short silence, the spacecraft transmitted a series of television pictures. These signals ceased shortly after 7pm, and although it is not yet clear what pattern of transmissions will follow, there is no doubt that some at least of the equipment on board is operating satisfactorily.

The landing itself is an achievement of great magnitude, for it will provide the first close studies of the nature of the moon's surface, which are of importance not simply to the moon race but to science itself.

Clearly, the area of the surface chosen for the landing in the Ocean of Storms, west of the Reigner and Marsa craters has no great depth of dust.

The Russians have made no statement about the kind of equipment on board, although there is no doubt that it will send back information about temperatures, the residual atmosphere, radiation, the magnetic field, and possibly surface materials.

The most eagerly awaited items, however, will be the television pictures, for they should show surface details sufficiently fine to distinguish structure, and both the attitude and depth of sinking of the craft will probably be in itself revealing at least to the Russians. In the meantime, the Americans, whose surveyor moon-landing programme is just getting into its stride, will express admiration, suppress the natural jealousies, and perhaps accelerate their own activity.

Throughout their moon-landing programme, the Russians have worked methodically. This, the fifth attempt, follows within three months of an almost successful landing in December.

Technique mastered

Having mastered the technique and the progression suggests a mastery, not a stroke of good fortune it seems probable that further instrumented landings, using exploring automated laboratories, will follow fairly quickly.

With experience of surface effects on machinery and equipment then the stage will be set for a manned landing. Whether the first men down are American or Russian hardly matters now. The Russian flag is already there and apparently waving.

Do the new body scanners at airports expose travellers to excessive radiation?

So-called "naked" body- scanning machines at airports, the latest defence against would-be plane bombers, have already raised concern for breaching flyers' privacy and, potentially, feeding the voyeurism of security officials. But could being screened also pose a health risk?

The question arises because one of the two types of new scanner those that deploy "back-scatter" x-ray technology uses ionising radiation to generate the images that indicate if someone is concealing something dangerous. The Department for Transport, which ordered the introduction of whole-body scanners at all UK airports after the plot to blow up an aeroplane over Detroit on Christmas Day, says that they are completely safe.

"The level of radiation that you usually receive from a back-scatter machine is equivalent to what you would naturally receive [from the sun] from two minutes of flying at about 35,000ft," says a DfT spokesman. He points to a report this week by the Health Protection Agency, which says that standing to be examined by back-scatter technology involves receiving a dose of just 0.02 micro sieverts or less of radiation, a tiny fraction of the 2,700 microsieverts that a typical Briton is exposed to naturally every year from sources such as radon gas, cosmic rays and building materials.

"That's a very small dose of radiation," says Professor Richard Wakefield, a radiation expert at Manchester University's Dalton Nuclear Institute. "I can't say that these scanners pose no risk, but at the doses you are talking about it's verging on the ridiculous to be worried about them." Many of us may well prefer the notional risk from those minute doses to the risk of being on a plane that is blown up, anyway.

But Douglas Boreham, professor in medical physics and applied radiation sciences at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, cautions that there is a small possibility of harm for frequent flyers or those who are sensitive to the effects of radiation. Radiation from x-ray scanners could be more highly concentrated than radiation encountered naturally at high altitudes, he says. He wants the possible impact to be monitored. "We don't have enough information to make a decision on whether there's going to be a biological effect or not," he says.

A fixation with Facebook is a far cry from the sort of depression that put me into hospital

The world through a keyboard. The universe possibly. The relief effort in Haiti. Pictures from Hubble. Shakespeare's sonnets. A share price from Hong Kong. Anything you want in your own home. The internet offers it in milli-seconds. More than we can absorb, more than we can understand, and always the potential to add more. More, more.

It's the stuff of Renaissance dreams, the stuff that's meant to make us happy. And yet for some, the internet has become a final circle of hell. Palms sweating, eyes swirling, you know you're wasting your time, your life. But you can't stop.

Leeds University scientists have just completed a study, reported in the journal Psychopathology, that has uncovered a link between internet addiction and depression. This won't come as total surprise. The clue was possibly in the word addiction. Anyone who is addicted to anything is more likely to be depressed. It's called mental illness.

No one has worked out the causation. Are depressed people more likely to waste hours in front of a computer, or will staring at a screen for most of your waking life leave you questioning existential futility? It does matter. Here's the problem. There's depression and depression, and it's never clear just what anyone is talking about. At one end there's total darkness, blankness, nothingness; at the other, feeling a bit fed up.

So let's start at the lighter end. How long do you think a normal person could spend surfing the net before starting to feel really depressed? The Leeds researchers identified social networking, porn and gambling sites as the natural habitat of depressed addicts. No surprise there. Talking online to people you don't really know, sweaty silicon faking orgasm, and losing money you can't afford to lose. All in perpetuity. What's not to get depressed about?

The thing is any website will make you depressed if you spend enough time looking at it. Even the Guardian's, though perhaps I shouldn't be pointing that out. Imagine you are forced to watch a site devoted to positive thinking. Hour after hour of Paul McKenna bullying you into thinking yourself happy. How long could you last before you felt like killing yourself? Or him?

More interesting research might have been to identify which sites make you depressed the quickest. Could 10 minutes of Facebook or porn make you feel quite happy? It's minute 11 and thereafter you have to watch out for. And I can easily imagine feeling ecstatic if I was a couple of grand to the good after a quarter of an hour on a poker site.

Or is even 10 minutes of happiness too much to ask for? Just a few minutes of the relentlessly upbeat Tottenham Hotspur website to which I am compulsively drawn two or three times a day is usually more than enough for me to reach for the plastic cutlery. Here's Harry Redknapp "gutted to concede another goal in injury though overall the boys played well". Really? Yet I keep coming back, for odd moments of undiluted joy. Like Monday's announcement that Robbie Keane was off to Celtic.

It is of course possible that I go back because I am an addict. It wouldn't be the first time. Then neither would it be a surprise if I were to go back because I am clinically depressed. It's a condition I've suffered from for years. So maybe I'm nailed either way. But there is still a qualitative distinction to be made.

Having done time in hospital with depression, I can't help feeling that anyone with the energy to switch on a computer and even care what's happening on Facebook is showing a level of engagement with the world well beyond the catatonic. So it may not be quite as healthy as actually chatting to someone, but it's a vast improvement on staring at the wall. My shrink would certainly have taken it as a positive sign.

Launch of rocket carrying mouse, two turtles and worms shows country can soon begin manned-space travel, says Ahmadinejad

Iran has launched a research rocket carrying a mouse, two turtles and worms into space showing that the country can defeat the west in the battle of technology and that it will soon send its own astronauts, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad saidtoday.

Iranian state television broadcast images of officials placing the animals inside a capsule in the Kavoshgar 3 (explorer in Farsi) rocket before blast-off, although it did not report where or when the launch took place. The Iranian Students News Agency said the capsule had successfully returned to Earth with its "passengers".

Western powers fear the technology used by Iran's space programme to launch satellites and research capsules could also be used to build long-range intercontinental missiles. A US defence expert said the launch underlined the closeness of Iran's space and military programmes.

Ahmadinejad was unveiling three new Iranian-built satellites and the model of a light booster rocket, named Simorgh, which is in production.

He told state television: "With God's help, [Iranian] scientists will be sent into the space and they will observe the universe from there." He added: "The scientific arena is where we could defeat the [west's] domination."

On the same day last year the 30th anniversary celebrations of the 1979 Islamic revolution Iran launched its first domestically produced satellite. The news agency said Iran will name 3 February Aerospace Technology Day.