Government's proposed 'three strikes' rule would damage business, say hotels and public institutions

Opposition to the government's digital economy bill has increased sharply, with strong criticism in the House of Lords for its failure to offer "due judicial process" to people accused of illicit filesharing under the proposed "three strikes" rules of the bill.

Outside parliament, hotels and educators have complained that the bill also endangers their businesses and provision of the internet to the public because of its insistence that organisations providing net access should be liable for the actions of their customers.

The digital economy bill, which is being sponsored by Lord Mandelson through the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, is a broad-ranging bill covering digital spectrum, greater powers for Ofcom, legislation over copyright infringement via the net, and the enabling of better access nationwide to faster internet connections.

The bill proposes a "three strikes" rule which would mean that persistent copyright breaches would be lead to disconnection from the internet. The aim is to reduce illlicit filesharing by 70%. But in a letter (PDF) to Lord Puttnam, representatives from institutions such as the University of London, British Library and the Imperial War Museum, said: "Because public institutions often provide internet access to hundreds or thousands of individual users, the complexity of our position in relation to copyright infringements must be taken into consideration."

It says that the bill is unclear about the role of "intermediaries" such as libraries in the bill.

The letter added: "If this is not done, a public institution such as a library, school or university's internet connection as a whole could be jeopardised, resulting in loss of internet access to large sections of the public, particularly the 15 million citizens without an internet connection at home."

Meanwhile, the British Hospitality Association (BHA), which represents thousands of hotel, catering and leisure establishments, worries that the requirement in the bill for hotels to provide guest details to an internet service provider (ISP) where copyright infringement is alleged could be impossible in some cases and that hotels might be disconnected if guests are persistently infringing copyright.

Disconnection would endanger a hotel's business which the BHA said would be a "grossly unfair consequence" of a guest's action.

"If it is passed in its present form, the difficulties of applying this bill to the hospitality industry, with its transient profile, appear not to have been considered," said Martin Couchman, deputy chief executive of the BHA.

The Lords' Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR) notes in a report published on Friday (PDF) that "at the moment the Bill defines a process of appeals with no presumption of innocence" and that "[this] process will be applied irrespective of the sanction or evidence."

That, they say, goes against natural justice, which should start with the presumption of innocence and the onus on the prosecution to prove guilt. "In the particular case of disconnection which is a severe punishment the need for a prior hearing based on an innocence presumption is unquestionably essential," the commitee writes.

The Open Rights Group, an advocacy group, is backing the industry groups' call for a guarantee that they will not become victims of the new legislation as well as other venues in similar positions and encouraging more people to protest at the provisions of the bill.

Jim Killock, ORG director, posted on its website: "The situation is exactly parallel for caf s, bars and hotels, as well as community centres: if you are involved in any of these you should make your views known to the front bench teams now."

TalkTalk, one of the three largest broadband providers in the UK, has criticised the bill on the basis that it assumes guilt, and is unworkable in practice.

In November, soon after the bill was originally published, Lilian Edwards, professor of internet law at Sheffield University, pointed out that the bill, as currently set up, threatens the British Library with its public Wi-Fi access, with potentially swingeing fines:

"The [British Library] is not set up to be a forensic investigator; obliging it to act as one will be a fantastically resource intensive exercise for a public body providing a free service. There is also an issue of privacy and anonymity, something academic researchers are often touchy about. And again, if the BL refuse to comply or more likely, simply says it can't it is, at least in theory, subject to a fine up to 250,000."

Whether that possibility applies has not yet been clarified in the bill.

However it is unclear whether it will succeed in passing through parliament, given the limited time left before the election must occur, and the amount of opposition that it is attracting from groups inside and outside parliament.

Internet groups fear alliance means US government could access personal information

Google's decision to enlist the help of the National Security Agency in tackling cyber attacks has caused alarm among internet groups and bloggers, who fear that users' personal information could be accessed by the US government.

The Washington Post reported yesterday that the internet giant had turned to the NSA, which conducts surveillance and codebreaking for the federal government, in the wake of a cyber attack it believes came from China.

The agency is responsible for securing the US administration's computer networks against similar breaches, and is said to be helping Google to understand and analyse the attacks.

Sources say that the agreement will not allow the NSA to view users' searches or access email accounts, but the deal has angered some members of the online community.

The Electronic Privacy Information Centre, a public research centre based in Washington, has filed a freedom of information request seeking details of the agency's relationship with Google.

"Google and NSA are entering into a secret agreement that could impact the privacy of millions of users of Google's products and services around the world," the centre's executive director Marc Rotenberg told the New York Times.

Sam Diaz, blogger and senior editor at ZDNet, a technology website, said he felt "squeamish" about the possibility of information sharing between Google and the government, and was sceptical about the NSA's ability to help protect the company's infrastructure.

"I mean no disrespect to my country or my government but I have to ask: Is Washington really the best choice if you're looking for help with something as serious as cyber security?" he wrote.

"After all, I wouldn't exactly place any Washington agency at the cutting edge when it comes to fighting what was referred to as one of the most sophisticated cyber attacks experts had ever seen."

Andrew Beal, writing in Marketing Pilgrim, said: "Big brother just partnered with big brother.

"While it's unlikely that Google's going to hand over any user information, I still don't like how close and how quickly Google is snuggling up with perhaps the scariest of all government agencies," he blogged.

Referring to the NSA's monitoring of the email and telephone calls of thousands of Americans after the 2001 terror attacks, Beal wrote: "This is the same agency that tapped your phones and emails without a warrant after 9/11. We're supposed to feel confident it won't take a poke around Google's sensitive data?"

Noah Shachtman, writer of Wired magazine's national security blog Danger Room, described the NSA as a "particularly untrustworthy partner".

"We all know that Google automatically reads our Gmail and scans our Google calendars and dives into our Google searches, all in an attempt to put the most relevant ads in front of us," he wrote.

"But we've tolerated the automated intrusions, because Google's products are so good, and we believed that the company was sincere in its 'don't be evil' mantra."

Shachtman said Google's pledge that its agreement with the NSA would not compromise user data was "hard to believe, given the NSA's track record of getting private enterprises to co-operate, and Google's willingness to take this first step."

The company said it was subject to a "highly sophisticated and targeted attack" in December 2009, which it said originated from China. In January, Google said that it was no longer willing to censor search results on its Chinese service.

Analysis suggests the hacker was in east coast of America and operated over a number of days, but much remains unknown

Figuring out who was behind the hack of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia requires some digital forensic skills and an insight into the mindset of those who were trying to get at CRU's files at the time.

Analysis by the Guardian and digital forensics experts suggests that an outside hacker gained access to a server at the UEA which held backups of CRU emails and a collection of staff documents. It also suggests the access occurred over a period of days, if not weeks, and was carried out from a computer based on the east coast of north America.

The release of hacked emails and documents came just months after climate change sceptics had filed more than 50 freedom of information requests querying the CRU's refusal to release of raw data and program code during the summer.

Egged on by a group of sceptical bloggers, the requests almost all began with the words "I hereby make a EIR/FoI request in respect to any confidentiality agreements restricting transmission of CRUTEM data to non-academics involing the following countries." Others sought "a copy of any digital version of the CRUTEM station data set that has been sent from CRU to Peter Webster and/or any other person at Georgia Tech". All were refused under FoI exemptions because of commercial confidentiality.

Into that silence came the release of the archived "zip" file by someone with clear hacking skills: first they grabbed the files, then they broke into the RealClimate blog to upload the archive and prepare a draft post; then, when that was thwarted, they uploaded it to a Russian website, and posted links to it on climate sceptics' blogs using web servers located in Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

That sequence of events led Sir David King, the government's former chief scientist, to say that it must have been "carried out by a team of skilled professionals, either on behalf of a foreign government or at the behest of anti-climate change lobbyists in the United States". But he quickly backed away from that statement, admitting he had no inside information.

The Guardian's analysis shows that a small group of just four of the scientists from among the dozens employed at the CRU were targeted in the sifting of email. They are: Phil Jones, the head of the CRU; Professor Keith Briffa, who studied tree rings; Tim Osborn, who worked on climate modelling for modern and archaeological data; and Mike Hulme, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. All are either recipients or senders of all but 66 of the 1,073 emails, and almost all the rest are sent from mailing lists, such as the Met Office's "scenarios" listing, to which at least one of the four would certainly belong.

A few remaining emails are sent by, or to, other CRU staff indicating that the hacker had access to a backup server holding CRU emails dating back to 1996. That it is a backup is confirmed by the presence of a duplicate sent to Osborn: separated by one second, both have the same document attached, but from different machines. That suggests that the UEA's system administrators had backed up emails from CRU staff's machines onto a server and that the hacker got into it, and also at a set of documents held on the same machine.

Jones, Briffa, Osborn and Hulme had been the focus of sceptics' ire because their high-profile scientific papers had been used to back the IPCC's reports on global warming. At the same time they had declined to release either the data (citing commercial agreements with suppliers) or the computer code they had used to analyse that data and draw their conclusions, to the frustration of many outside academia who wanted to repeat or discredit the work.

Early speculation that the release of the emails and documents came from a one-off hack also appear to be wrong. Digital forensic analysis shows that the zipped archive of emails and documents was not produced on a single date. Instead it was created by copying the files over a number of weeks, with bursts on 30 September 2009, 10 October and 16 November. On the last date a folder of computer analysis code by Osborn was added to the package.

The digital forensics on the files indicate that they were created on a computer set at some times four hours behind GMT, and at others five hours behind plants the hacker on the eastern seaboard of Canada or the US.

Then early on 17 November, RealClimate's blog was hacked, locking out legitimate administrators, and the hacker tried to create a blogpost claiming that global warming was a myth, and enclosing the emails and documents.

Gavin Schmidt, one of the RealClimate administrators, says that "my information is that it was a hack into [CRU's] backup mail server".

But who was the hacker, and what were they after? Jeff Condon, who runs the climate-sceptical Air Vent blog which posted one of the links to the archive told the Guardian that the content of the emails and documents actually points to someone who is not expert in the topic.

Referring to an email it includes from Tim Osborn which says "we usually stop the series in 1960", Condon says that: "The only interesting detail in that email was the data, but that's not what the person wrote. What that means to me is that whomever posted these emails doesn't have a terribly deep understanding of the issues in paleoclimate science. Although the emails themselves featured some scientists who do know the issues and had some very nice details in them.

"Therefore if it's an inside job, it's likely not by a paleo or climate grad student, definitely not by a scientist," Condon said, adding: "If it's an international conspiracy I would have guessed someone on the team would know the science better than that."

But how would an outside hacker get in? Although UEA has security in place, it has seen a number of accidental security breaches of the UEA system in the recent past. On one occasion a server was configured wrongly, so that anyone outside doing a search would "fall through" to directories of files. (UEA closed that hole after being alerted about it.) A misconfigured server could have left just the hole that a capable hacker with a determination to find the data being denied via FoI requests could have exploited. But they are not government-class skills.

So what was the hacker looking for, and how? Besides the clear targeting of the four scientists, it is obvious that this is not the entirety of the CRU's emails: there are none of the routine administrative messages about fire alarms, holiday reminders and so on. Therefore the emails have been filtered. One quick way to see into the hacker's mind is to use "concordance analysis" - examining what the common words or phrases are in the emails and documents. Though usually used in linguistics to compare translations or the frequency of words, concordance software can be used to demonstrate authorship of papers, by combining a "stoplist" of words to be ignored (such as "the" or "and") with a straight analysis of the frequency of words in the text.

Concordance analysis of the emails suggests that the hacker did some careful sifting. But working out precisely what is complicated by the fact that this is the wheat not the chaff. For instance, the hacker has clearly removed standard words such as "holiday" except where they appear in emails to or from Jones, Briffa, Osborn or Hulme. There's no other way to explain how such a comprehensive catalogue has so few emails about time off.

Instead, emails with the words "data", "climate", "paper", "research", "temperature" and "model" prevail, according to a concordance plot. That may have been precisely what the hacker was looking for and the fact that he also ignited a controversy over techniques might have been a surprise to him as well as the rest of the world.

(Note 5 Feb 12:42GMT: the concordance analysis that was here has been moved to a separate file. We will also post a graphic of the analysis in due course.)

The first MP to start a blog, Labour's Tom Watson, loves his Mac and wind-up radios, but the slow computers at the House of Commons drive him crazy

What's your favourite piece of technology, and how has it improved your life?
It's a small wind-up radio. Great for camping and supports a busy disorganised life. It always takes me beyond Sailing By on Radio 4 before slowly fading out until its morning wind up.

When was the last time you used it, and what for?
This morning. Our 20-month-old daughter, who has a habit of waking before 6.30am, likes to play with the circular handle, earning us 10 extra minutes in bed.

What additional features would you add if you could?
It already has a little torch at one end. I would probably like it to be a wind-up recording device, too.

Do you think it will be obsolete in 10 years' time?
No, I think more people will be using them to live more sustainable lives.

What always frustrates you about technology in general?
Battery life, particularly on the iPhone. Sort it out, Steve Jobs.

Is there any particular piece of technology that you have owned and hated?
Every computer in the House of Commons library probably tops the list. They're ridiculously slow and cumbersome, and until last week used Internet Explorer 6.

If you had one tip about getting the best out of new technology, what would it be?
Never be an early adopter.

Do you consider yourself to be a luddite or a nerd?
An apprentice nerd.

What's the most expensive piece of technology you've ever owned?
Oh, that's the telly. A big flat 46in Panasonic. Great for PS3 gaming.

Mac or PC, and why?
Mac. They rarely crash even when you drop them.

Do you still buy physical media such as CDs and DVDs, or do you download? What was your last purchase?
I've not bought CDs for years, but I'm hardly downloading either since subscribing to Spotify. The last thing I purchased was Joni Mitchell's Blue for the umpteenth time. I've got iTunes lists on four different devices and can't merge them all properly.

Robot butlers a good idea or not?
They beat MP flatmates every time.

What piece of technology would you most like to own?
After the robot butler it would have to be a Midway Addams Family pinball machine. The best, ever.

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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Presenter Aleks Krotoski is shown the 'inner sanctum' of the server room at Mountain View, California responsible for 80m dot.com addresses by Verisign director of operation Paul Maijer

Thanks to its team of volunteers, OpenStreetMap has now mapped most of the world including Haiti

If you want to find an up-to-date map of Haiti, then there is only one place to go. It is not Google Maps or any of its competitors. It is the admirable OpenStreetMap.org (OSM), which is being updated even as I write by volunteers all over the world.

It is the Wikipedia of the mapping world, and is used by millions of people. Started a little over five years ago in London by Steve Coast, it has steadily built up its database to the point where most of the world has now been mapped by a formidable team of volunteers which is doubling every six months: there were 212,000 at the last count, of whom 10% are active during any one month. At the end of January there were 239 people rebuilding the map of Haiti. For a bird's eye view of operations, go to the Ushahidi site.

When the earthquake happened it was a signal for OSM members around the globe to start downloading satellite images (either freely available or donated by Yahoo) and then to start tracing the outlines of streets on top so a map emerged. Volunteers on the ground in Haiti, often using Garmin GPS locators, added vital local information such as which roads were passable, where the hospitals were situated, where refugee camps were, or walls, pharmacies, hedges and so forth so rescue workers had an invaluable tool. The result is a new, detailed map that is updated frequently, unlike most commercial maps.

This is only one of a number of open projects operating in Haiti in what may come to be seen as a seminal moment in the harnessing of the web to help those in need. Others include CrisisCommons, WeHaveNeed, Sahana, open source medical software and numerous others, not to mention Twitter tags such as #haiti. One of the problems of using appropriate technology in disaster regions is that bricklayers in Haiti don't know of innovations that might have been pioneered in remote parts of Africa, a problem that Akvo is trying to solve with regard to water. There are also signs that Hexayurt low-cost housing projects are starting to seed in Haiti.

OpenStreetMaps is itself at a turning point as it tries to progress from a techie-driven project to one that the ordinary consumer can not only understand but contribute to as well. It suffers from what might be dubbed "open source syndrome", a complaint that also affects other OS projects including the Linux operating system the involvement of skilled volunteers can make the early stages a bit difficult to understand for laypeople.

However, they have been working on it and it is now much easier to do. A few days ago I added my local curry house to the map (next to a post box someone else had already inserted). All I needed to do was to drag a symbol of a restaurant from the bottom of the screen to where I wanted to put it and then add the words "Indian Diner". That in a nutshell is the comparative advantage that OpenStreetMap claims over other online maps. Users can add whatever detail interests them such as cycle routes, skateboarding areas, cycle parks, paths through parks the parts Google can't reach. You have to register (it's free) as a member to alter the map. There is an iPhone app, Mapzen, produced by Cloudmade (company founded by Coast and Nick Clark to exploit mapping opportunities) that enables you to insert places of interest you have found on the move. If that takes off, it could lift the project to a new level.

Often volunteers create maps where there was nothing before as in Kibera in Kenya where basic amenities such as drinking water sources and latrines as well as churches are located to improve living standards and combat illness (eg, where latrines are located too near water sources). The Kibera team have been asked by Ushahidi and Google to include mapping of the slums of Port-au-Prince as part of the relief effort, something that hasn't been done before.

Gordon Brown, the UK prime minister, has just rediscovered cooperativism as a way of galvanising people to vote Labour. He would have been much more in tune with the times if he had widened it to include the open source movement in all its different aspects. It is one of the most interesting phenomena of our times, a kind of global mutual society. While the likes of Apple and Amazon, though producing fantastic products, are becoming ever more controlling and proprietary, it is sobering to be reminded that one of the basic instincts of human nature mutual cooperation for no cost is thriving on a global scale.

Follow Vic Keegan on Twitter

Mobile phone operating system can now be modified by anyone as Nokia's platform struggles to compete with Apple and Google

Symbian, the operating system used in the majority of the world's smartphones, is now available as an open source platform four months ahead of schedule as it looks to compete with Apple and Google's Android.

In a move widely seen as a desperate attempt to prevent Google and Apple from grabbing an ever-larger slice of the smartphone pie, Nokia took control of the UK-based Symbian in the summer of 2008, announcing plans to make its mobile phone software free of charge.

Nokia helped create Symbian with the UK-based Psion more than a decade ago and it is installed in some 330m mobile phones across the world. But its share of the smartphone market has come under attack. Two years ago, Symbian devices accounted for almost 60% of the market, but now account for less than 50%. Industry experts Ovum reckon that figure will fall to below a third by 2015, in part because of the influence of Android, which is also open source.

The Symbian Foundation, which runs the platform, said the switch from a paid-for proprietary model, where developers had to pay a licence fee to create devices using the software, to a free open source model is the largest in software history.

Any individual or organization can now take, use and modify the code for any purpose, whether for a mobile device or another piece of kit.

Lee Williams, executive director of the Symbian Foundation, said: "The development community is now empowered to shape the future of the mobile industry, and rapid innovation on a global scale will be the result.

"When the Symbian Foundation was created, we set the target of completing the open source release of the platform by mid-2010 and it's because of the extraordinary commitment and dedication from our staff and our member companies that we've reached it well ahead of schedule."

The hope is that allowing any developer to use Symbian will speed up the development of new and innovative devices, which will help the platform to see off the threat of Apple and Android.

But it is competing in an increasingly crowded market. Handset manufacturers from LG and Samsung to Sony Ericsson have their own proprietary operating systems, as do RIM, maker of the BlackBerry, Palm and Apple. Microsoft is still trying to gain traction for its Windows phone operating system, while a slew of handsets with Android installed will be launched this year.

All 108 packages containing the source code of the Symbian platform can now be downloaded from Symbian's developer website under a public licence. Also available for download are the complete development kits for creating applications and mobile devices.

New site aimed at revolutionising shopping is approved by internet-hostile regime

The internet has long been viewed with suspicion by Iran's Islamic regime: a drive to stifle dissent has seen online speeds slowed to a crawl, websites hacked and filtered, email accounts monitored and a special police force formed to detect internet "crime". But amid a technophobia that has intensified in the face of continuing opposition protests against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's re-election, officials have now found one cyberspace activity they approve of: e-shopping.

A state-linked technology group has established the country's first online supermarket aimed at revolutionising the shopping experience in a country generally lacking the gleaming emporiums that can be found elsewhere.

Meydoonak.com is offering 2,500 grocery and household items at competitive prices. The supermarket will initially cover Tehran and operate from 8am till midnight six days a week excluding Fridays, the Islamic day of rest.

Managers believe they can woo customers with a home delivery service which is designed to liberate consumers from the chore of shopping in the city's notoriously traffic-congested streets.

The supermarket has been launched by the Rouyesh Technical Centre, a group linked to a state-run body, Jahad-e Daneshgahi, which has promoted a host of other hi-tech developments, including animal cloning.

The embrace of e-commerce contrasts with a generally hostile official attitude to the internet among Iran's theocratic leadership. The Paris-based group Reporters Without Borders has included Iran among the world's 13 worst enemies of the internet.

In recent months Iran has filtered several opposition websites as well as social networking sites such as Facebook in an intensive effort to silence the criticism that greeted Ahmadinejad's disputed election victory last June.

And in a haiku form, no less. But could you perhaps do better than he did to explain the failure of the company to thrive?

Jonathan Schwartz has tweeted his last goodbye to Sun Microsystems, the computer company that he wasn't quite able to rescue from its own weight of expectations.

Schwartz took over as CEO from Scott McNealy, one of the company's founders, in 2006. At the time McNealy was seen as having been too tied to having big fights with Microsoft, but more importantly to the idea that Sun, despite its "Microsystems" name, was too wedded to the idea of selling Big Iron with Expensive Operating Systems to companies that didn't have the budget or the inclination to buy both.

Though Sun flourished during the first dot-com boom, when having one of those funky purple Sun cabinets was all the rage and tweaking Solaris to run your web shop just that little bit faster was everyone's idea of a fun night in, the coming of cheap hardware, plus the emergence of Apache, Linux, MySQL and PHP/Perl meant that lots of startup companies could instead spend next to zero on software and kit, and just get the job done.

Schwartz was thus in an impossible position, and though he tried hard by embracing open source, the reality was that Sun's products were always going to be niche. Fake Steve Jobs - aka Dan Lyons of Newsweek - fed the snark by dubbing Schwartz "My Little Pony" (because of his ponytail - which, let's admit it, is never a good idea on a man; if you have any doubts at all, discuss at Ask Hadley). Schwartz though had bigger problems and the layoffs at Sun made it look like the end would be brutal. Instead Oracle bought it (snatching it from IBM), which simply made it a brutal continuation.

And so to Schwartz's farewell. Rather than McNealy's wordy letter, a sort of My Way to shareholders and staff, Schwartz chose the much more abbreviated form of a tweet - in haiku.

"Financial crisis/Stalled too many customers/CEO no more," he wrote.

Nice to be able to blame the financial crisis - though he could equally well have written "Price of our hardware/Return on expenditure/Unbridgeable gap".

OK, you have a go. Can you explain Sun's demise, in haiku?

(Just as a reminder, it's 5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables. Bonus points if you write it in Japanese. Though we can't actually read Japanese.)

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.

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.

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.

This atmospheric Bioshock sequel is balanced, intuitive and looks set to be a classic of the genre

"Jack from the first game wouldn't last long in this new Rapture," I am told, as I get my first glimpse of Bioshock 2. In which case it's lucky that you now play a Big Daddy the huge, hulking baddies that made the first game famous and are armed with a drillbit the size of Optimus Prime's arm and a boltgun that could take out a T-rex.

But this is 10 years after the original Bioshock. Splicers are unsurprisingly easy to kill, but there are a hell of a lot more of them; and there are other, more powerful foes to contend with. These include the sinister Big Sisters, terrifying creations which hunt you as if you were a gigantic metal fox, making for a genuinely nerve-wracking, edge-of-the-seat experience.

Getting stuck straight in, the combat is some of the most satisfying of any game I have played. Balanced and intuitive, it is serious fun, and more tactical than in the first game, too. For example, you adopt a Little Sister, but when you set her to work collecting ADAM mutagen for you, a rush of splicers will appear. There are a large number of tactical options: hack the bots hacking has been streamlined lay a minefield, prepare a fire plasmid to ignite an oil spill, or just power up the drill and fight them off the old-fashioned way; it's all up to you.

The game's atmosphere, too, is outstanding. The mournful, ominous screech of a Big Sister stalking you is genuinely unsettling; radios play big-band classics in a broken-down theme park, with working attractions; you can sneak up on a pair of splicers and eavesdrop on their conversations. The attention to detail is stunning.

The kitsch 50s artwork and music are juxtaposed perfectly against the Kubrick-esque ultraviolence, and if that sounded dangerously like literary criticism it's because this game has real literary aspirations. The original game was at the forefront of the games-as-art movement: the founder of the fictional city-state of Rapture, Andrew Ryan (his name intentionally recalls the philosopher Ayn Rand), and the disastrous dissolution of his underwater utopia was a work of exquisite satire, and the sequel goes even further.

In the brief demonstration I played I spotted references to Jules Verne, Rand again, Ralph Waldo Emerson, some Shakespeare and Walt Disney, just to name a few; and satires so diverse as to lampoon American consumerism one minute and Russian socialism the next. Nor is the game merely a series of satirical and literary vignettes; the storyline is rich and intense, and the gameplay sublime.

There is a very exciting multiplayer component, too, set back in the time-frame of the first game, which features several familiar locations. Plasmids carry over from game to game, and your character changes and improves as you win matches. This part is being coded by Ontario-based Digital Extremes, who were largely responsible for the fantastic Unreal Tournament series and know the Unreal engine backwards and inside-out, meaning that the gameplay is likely to be top-notch, though expect familiar modes like deathmatch, team deathmatch and capture the flag.

By this point it will hopefully be clear that I liked this game. A lot. If it lives up to the promise of the demo level, then BioShock 2 is going to be a classic.

Bioshock 2 is due for release on February 9, 2010

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.

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.

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.

Dick Brass, who developed the tablet concept at Microsoft, says that internecine strife killed the most effective use of the tablet concept - and that Microsoft has ongoing problems (updated)

2002: Bill Gates speaks on stage at the announcement of the availability of Tablet PCs and Windows XP Tablet PC operating system in New York; he had previously shown them off at Comdex in 2001

The head of Microsoft's Office team - one of the cash cows of the software company - personally blocked the effective use of the program on tablet computers when they were released in 2001, according to a former executive at the company.

Dick Brass, who was a vice-president at Microsoft between 1997 and 2004, says in the New York Times that in 2001 when his team was building tablet PCs - which use touch screens rather than keyboards, "the vice president in charge of Office at the time decided he didn't like the concept. The tablet required a stylus, and he much preferred keyboards to pens and thought our efforts doomed. To guarantee they were, he refused to modify the popular Office applications to work properly with the tablet."

The result, says Brass, was that "if you wanted to enter a number into a spreadsheet or correct a word in an e-mail message, you had to write it in a special pop-up box, which then transferred the information to Office. Annoying, clumsy and slow."

Although Bill Gates announced the tablet concept at Comdex in November 2001, saying that "within five years I predict it will be the most popular form of PC sold in America." Instead the format flopped, constituting less than 1% of sales in 2009.

Writing in the New York Times, Brass says that Microsoft's own organisation has worked against the creation of new ideas that could have brought in future benefits. Of being blocked in 2001, he says: "even though our tablet had the enthusiastic support of top management and had cost hundreds of millions to develop, it was essentially allowed to be sabotaged. To this day, you still can't use Office directly on a Tablet PC. And despite the certainty that an Apple tablet was coming this year, the tablet group at Microsoft was eliminated."

Meanwhile Apple last month unveiled its tablet-style iPad, which some analysts think will spark a rush in sales of computers which do not have an attached keyboard. ABI Research forecasts that 4m of the devices could be sold in 2010, rising to as many as 57m in five years' time, compared to the 300m or so PCs sold in 2009.

Brass says that Microsoft now has "a dysfunctional corporate culture in which the big established groups [for Office and similar high-earning products] are allowed to prey upon emerging teams, belittle their efforts and over time hector them out of existence. It's not an accident that almost all the executives in charge of Microsoft's music, e-books, phone, online, search and tablet efforts over the past decade have left."

He concludes that "it's an open question whether it has much of a future."

Brass was previously profiled in 2000 by the New York Times, which credited him with impressing Gates with the idea of the ebook and tablet, which had 100 people working on its development.

Update: Microsoft's vice-president of corporate communications, Frank X Shaw, has responded in a blog post in which he argues that what matters is not "innovation at speed" - which he in effect accuses Brass of demanding - but "innovation at scale".

Shaw writes: "Dick generally focused on ClearType, noting that this technology was "stifled" by existing business groups. For the record, ClearType now ships with every copy of Windows we make, and is installed on around a billion PCs around the world. This is a great example of innovation with impact: innovation at scale."

He adds: "Now, you could argue that this should have happened faster. And sometimes it does. But for a company whose products touch vast numbers of people, what matters is innovation at scale, not just innovation at speed. And in response to Dick's comment about Tablets and Office, I'll simply point to this product called OneNote that was essentially created for the Tablet and is a key part of Office today."

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.

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.

One astronaut is using Twitter to send some extraordinary pictures of Earth from on board the international space station

Once you've performed your systems check, goofed around with a ball of floating water and tried to go to the loo with some gravity-free dignity, what else is there to do when you're orbiting the earth in the international space station? Soichi Noguchi, a Japanese aeronautical engineer who has been in orbit since December, is entertaining his 50,000 followers with Twitpics sent from space. He's tweeted (@Astro_Soichi) some extraordinary snaps, including this one of the Golden Gate Bridge. He also describes life on board the space station: "De-gassing of the portable water bags complete. Now, on to the treadmill!"