Google has acquired search startup Aardvark in its latest attempt to improve its standing in the growing social search market.

Aardark co-founder and CTO Damon Horowitz confirmed to the Guardian that "we have signed the deal" - but did not comment on the report from Silicon Valley news blog Techcrunch, which first broke the story, that put the value of the acquisition at $50m.

The San Francisco-based company - which was founded in 2007 by a group of former Google employees - offers what it calls the chance to "tap the knowledge of people in your network" by matching a user's questions with friends and contacts who might be able to provide an expert answer.

Users first link their account to other social networking sites, such as Facebook. When they type a query into the Aardvark search engine - such as "what is the best pizza in Brighton" - the system searches several degrees of friends, determines which individuals could provide the best answer and then contacts them to ask for their advice.

While the system so far has only a user base in the thousands - and is reliant on growth to make itself more powerful - it has drawn rave reviews from many quarters for providing a more elegant, personalised solution to searching for information.

If the reports of a $50m valuation are accurate, it marks an astonishing price to effectively secure a return to Google for the company's four founders - who had previously worked on products like AdSense and Google Suggest before leaving the search company.

It will also provide a significant return for Aardvark's investors, who pumped nearly $6m into the company last year.

Horowitz told the Guardian last month that the company was actively seeking new investment, and there had been previous rumours that Google was interested in acquiring the company.

The deal marks the Californian internet giant's latest move to improve its standing in the social web, after a series of troubled attempts. Recently the company started including "social circle" results - including photographs, blog posts and other information drawn from a user's contacts - and earlier this week announced Google Buzz, a product that brings many elements of social networking into Gmail.

While initial responses to Buzz were largely negative, the company has made it clear that it is making its expansion into social networking and social search a priority.

BT's decision to throw allow its rivals to install their own broadband lines in its infrastructure was not the political victory being claimed by the Conservatives, according to experts - nor will it necessarily lead to any increased competition.

Earlier this week, BT chief executive Ian Livingston described himself
as "relaxed" about providing access to the company's millions of miles
of underground tubes that house its phone lines and called on rival
firms to open up their infrastructure.

The move was warmly welcomed by the Tories who had been pushing for the move and believe that promoting infrastructure competition will bring the next generation of super-fast broadband within the reach of more of the nation's homes.

"We welcome BT's announcement that they are preparing to open their underground ducts to other broadband providers," the party said
earlier this week. "This is something the Conservative Party has been
calling for for over a year and is a central part of our plans to roll out super fast broadband across the country."

Super-fast broadband services - offering speeds of up to 100Mb per
second - require the installation of fibre optic cabling.

Virgin Media has already upgraded its existing fibre network, which actually uses copper lines for the final connection to homes, so that it can offer 50Mbps now and speeds of over 100Mbps in future.

BT, on the other hand, is rolling out its own fibre network at the rate of 80,000 new premises per week. It is pushing fibre to roadside cabinets, using copper for the final connection and its BT Infinity service offers speeds of 40Mbps.

Meanwhile, BT's Openreach business is offering its fibre network to rival ISPs such as Zen Internet. Openreach was set up under a deal with regulator Ofcom in 2005, and controls BT's local network to ensure that any company can use it to offer services at regulated prices.

Prohibitive costs

Despite this investment, however, neither BT nor Virgin Media reckon that fibre will get beyond about 60% of the country because the costs are prohibitively high. The government has proposed levying a 50p a phone line tax to raise funds to extend coverage to 90% of households by 2017 but the Conservatives would rather use part of the BBC licence fee to pay for the extension of broadband into more rural areas.

The government has already earmarked that cash to ensure that everyone can get a basic broadband service by 2012.

Analysts are unconvinced that opening up ducts will make any great
difference to coverage, while some in the telecoms industry believe
BT's fiercest critics - TalkTalk and BSkyB - are actually dragging their feet in order to protect the hundreds of millions they have spent on existing infrastructure by putting their own equipment into BT's local telephone exchanges.

Duct sharing is already available in other countries, such as France,
where the incumbent has an even fiercer grip on the market than BT,
but there has not been significant take-up. Livingston himself said
duct sharing is "unlikely to be the silver bullet to get fibre to every home" but it might "help BT and others extend coverage".

In a note on the move, Cazenove's well-respected head of European telecoms and media research Paul Howard described BT's move as
"sensible and well thought through".

"It feels premature to be worried about competing fibre investment and (I) would highlight some 'game-theory' at play here," he added.

The European Commission, for example, is already on track to mandate access to ducts.

"The bigger question is whether the likes of Carphone and Sky really
want access to BT's ducts in order to invest in their own fibre and
what the practicalities of such access would be. It is hard to envisage duct access providing both Carphone and Sky with even half of their long-term provisioning requirements. In addition, we suspect investors in both TalkTalk and Sky would be very nervous regarding any planned fibre investments," he said.

Earlier this week Jeremy Hunt, shadow culture minister, told the Financial Times that he had talked to some of BT's rivals and "there is a willingness to invest substantial sums of money" in fibre.

No equivalents

Industry insiders, however, are unconvinced. Both companies have spent large sums putting their own equipment into about 1,000 of BT's 5,500 local telephone exchanges - essentially those exchanges in large metropolitan areas.

Taking part in the process of local loop unbundling has allowed them to stop buying BT's wholesale broadband service and instead merely 'rent' BT's local copper lines. It is a switch that has helped turn TalkTalk's broadband business into a major money-spinner that Carphone Warehouse is now looking to demerge from its retail operation.

But there is no equivalent 'local loop unbundling' process for BT's
fibre network and both firms risk seeing their investment superseded
by BT and Virgin's cable networks. TalkTalk was involved in BT's trial
of fibre technology in North London but has yet to sign up to Openreach's wholesale fibre product. Sky, meanwhile, has been very
quiet on its fibre plans.

Both companies have complained, however, that Openreach's wholesale fibre - or Generic Ethernet Access - offering is inadequate. They want more 'flexibility' so they can use BT's fibre to create their own products.

Cazenove's Howard reckons neither company is keen to put its own cash into building a brand new network and anyway, "having multiple fibre investments would represent a negative for the whole industry and (I) suggest the local loop should be considered a natural monopoly or at least a duopoly in urban areas given the cable industry."

"We believe regulation should focus more on achieving adequate
wholesale access to an incumbent's fibre network."

"The difficultly is that regulators across Europe have provided incumbents with certain regulatory freedom (for example no formal
price controls over BT's fibre network) in order to promote investment
in high speed networks," Howard added.

"Sky and Carphone are therefore forced to focus on the threat of alternative investments in order to persuade BT to tailor a more suitable wholesale product. We suspect Ofcom's current vision, which we suggest is one where BT Openreach deploys fibre on behalf of everyone and provides access at reasonable wholesale prices is still the most appropriate.

"However, we should expect a lot of noise and politics to cloudy the issue in the short to medium-term."

'Very odd'

Any regulation is only likely to fall on BT. Ofcom has not found that
Virgin Media has significant market power, which would bring it within
the regulatory framework. Any publicly-funded fibre roll-out
programme, meanwhile, would almost certainly come with 'open access' conditions attached and so BT is likely to be the only builder.

Over at Morgan Stanley, Nick Delfas has looked at the Conservative
Party's plans to ensure that speeds of up to 100Mbps are available to
half the population by 2017 and branded them "very odd".

"Virgin alone will shortly provide this much; Virgin is already at 50 Mbps but getting to 100 Mbps... is in the works. So this is a policy commitment to let what will naturally happen take its course."

"It is already EU policy to unbundle ducts," he added. "The French
have already concluded a huge project to map and price all the ducts
in the country. Even so, competitors say operationally it is difficult
to get access. In the UK we doubt there is a comprehensive map of the ducts; BT may even not know itself where they are or what exactly
there is in them. And then there is the issue of capital availability
for an operator to take advantage of them."

Livingston himself suggested as much when earlier this week he
stressed "duct access has been adopted in other countries but normally as the only way for companies to access an incumbent's network.

There are plenty of existing ways in which companies can access BT's network and so its impact may be less dramatic in the UK. We will only know for sure once they are opened. BT is taking a considerable degree of commercial risk by rolling out fibre and it will be interesting to see if others are willing to join us."

Bloggers told they have violated terms without further explanation, as years of archives are wiped off the internet

In what critics are calling "musicblogocide 2010", Google has deleted at least six popular music blogs that it claims violated copyright law. These sites, hosted by Google's Blogger and Blogspot services, received notices only after their sites and years of archives were wiped from the internet.

"We'd like to inform you that we've received another complaint regarding your blog," begins the cheerful letter received by each of the owners of Pop Tarts, Masala, I Rock Cleveland, To Die By Your Side, It's a Rap and Living Ears. All of these are music-blogs sites that write about music and post MP3s of what they are discussing. "Upon review of your account, we've noted that your blog has repeatedly violated Blogger's Terms of Service ... [and] we've been forced to remove your blog. Thank you for your understanding."

Jolly as Google may be, none of the bloggers who received these notices are "understanding" in the least. Although such sites once operated on the internet's fringes, almost exclusively posting songs without permission, many blogs are now wined, dined and even paid (via advertising) by record labels. After the success of blog-buzzy acts such as Arcade Fire, Lily Allen and Vampire Weekend, entire PR firms are dedicated to courting armchair DJs and amateur critics.

Despite the de facto alliance between labels and blogs, not all of the record companies' legal teams have received the message. In a complaint posted to Google Support, Bill Lipold, the owner of I Rock Cleveland, cited four cases in the past year when he had received copyright violation notices for songs he was legally entitled to post. Tracks by Jay Reatard, Nadja, BLK JKS and Spindrift all attracted complaints under the USA's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, even when the respective MP3s were official promo tracks. As a publicist for BLK JKS' label, Secretly Canadian, told Lipold: "Apparently DMCA operate on their own set of odd rules, as they even requested that the BLK JKS' official blog remove the song." It's not clear who "DMCA" is in this case, as the act does not defend itself.

"I assure you that everything I've posted for, let's say, the past two years, has either been provided by a promotional company, came directly from the record label, or came directly from the artist," Lipold wrote to Google.
The company's first official response came only late yesterday, as #Musicblogocide2k10 sped up Twitter's trending charts. "When we receive multiple DMCA complaints about the same blog, and have no indication that the offending content is being used in an authorised manner, we will remove the blog," explained product manager Rick Klau. "[If] this is the result of miscommunication by staff at the record label, or confusion over which MP3s are 'official' ... it is imperative that you file a DMCA counter-claim so we know you have the right to the music in question."

The trouble with filing a formal, legal DMCA counter-claim is, that most bloggers don't know how. What's more, many of Blogger's DMCA notices allegedly omit the name of the offending song. Bloggers aren't even sure what they are denying.
Take the case of Masala, co-founded by Guillaume Decouflet in mid-2005. Together with his partners, Decouflet has introduced hundreds of thousands of readers to underground genres such as kuduro and funk carioca. Masala's writers weren't typical music bloggers, waxing lyrical about Neon Indian and the new Phoenix remix: mostly DJs, they shared South African electronica, Japanese dancehall, UK funky and Senegalese hip-hop. "We haven't been posting any Whitney Houston or anything," Decouflet explained. He only recalls receiving one DMCA notice ever from Blogger. As this email did not name the offending song, he says he doesn't know what caused the complaint. Masala's bloggers responded to Google's email, Decouflet insists, but never heard back. That is, until their entire site and more than four years of archives were deleted this week.

"It's just sad because we were documenting young people's music from all around the globe," Decouflet said. "For a lot of people, it was music they wouldn't have been able to discover elsewhere." Decouflet is now trying to "salvage" the Masala archive, using Google's own Reader tool to dig up old posts. Other banished blogs have taken similar steps. Living Ears, It's a Rap and Pop Tarts have relaunched at new URLs, generally without any older material.

Not all music blogs are as innocent as I Love Cleveland and Masala. Although the majority of bloggers share only single songs, showing particular affection for the obscure and out of print, some blogs are the most banal sort of pirates offering links to download entire new releases. However, these sites are ostracised by the blogging mainstream, left off aggregators such as the Hype Machine. No one protests when Google quietly removes their Blogspot accounts and yet ironically, amid the "musicblogocide", dozens of these still remain online.

The two largest Blogspot-hosted music blogs, Gorilla vs Bear and My Old Kentucky Home, show no sign of being affected, although they will still find these developments alarming. "I don't post anything that's not approved, and obviously nothing on major labels," said Gorilla vs Bear's Chris Cantalini. "But apparently that doesn't matter in some of these cases."

In a press release last year, Google seemed to recognise this distinction, announcing a new policy vis-a-vis music bloggers. From now on, it wrote, DMCA notices would not result in the instant deletion of offending blogs. Instead, individual posts would be temporarily removed, with a prominent notice to help bloggers respond to the allegations. "Music bloggers are a large segment of our users and we know that for those who've received one or more DMCA complaints in the past, this may have been a frustrating experience," Klau wrote in August. Almost six months later, the experience doesn't appear to have become any less frustrating.

Decouflet sounds weary. "Google is treating bloggers like Big Brother," he said. "Shoot first, ask questions after."

Kenneth Geers, the US representative at the Cyber Centre of Excellence in Estonia, leads the team through the annals of cyber warfare, and helps to dissect the implications of the recent Google-China conflict.

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, tells Mercedes Bunz about his new initiatives, Wikia and Hunch.com, and sticks up for user-generation in 2010. But is there value in contribution? Charles, Aleks and Kevin debate the resilience of web 2.0 in the face of an increasingly consumer-focussed digital world.

All this, plus more on the increasing opposition to the UK government's Digital Economy bill, your comments from the blogs and the team's take on the other headlines making waves around the web.

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PS3/Xbox 360; 49.99; cert 18+; 2K Games

It is difficult to know where to start with a game this perfect, so let's go straight to the headline act: the storyline.

Much has been made of Bioshock 2's narrative, and for good reason: it's glorious. You could watch someone else playing and enjoy it as a movie. At its centre is the ideological battle between free-market individualist Andrew Ryan and proto-Stalinist collectivist Sofia Lamb, and this philosophical conflict affects everything you do. You are moving through the wasteland that they created, trying to find the girl you were charged with protecting, and as you progress you learn more about Ryan who was the deus ex machina in the first game and about Lamb, who is a new addition. There is an ongoing argument about whether games can be considered as literature, and this one presents by far the most compelling case yet for "yes".

The dilapidated underwater city of Rapture is rendered so lovingly that simply exploring it is a pleasure. The art deco, jazz-age-meets-Jules-Verne architecture is achingly beautiful, and the environment brims with thoughtful little touches. For example, Splicers (your main enemies, the grunts of Rapture) do not simply stand and wait for you to arrive; instead, they have their own lives, and conversations on which you can eavesdrop. At one point, I crept into a dilapidated bar to see two of them dancing together, one of many genuinely touching moments.

But Bioshock 2 isn't just a pretty face: there is a fundamentally excellent shooter here too, with some of the best combat dynamics in the business. Fans of the first game will understand the significance of playing as a Big Daddy. For the uninitiated, these are the titanic guardians of the vulnerable Little Sisters half deep-sea diver, half behemoth killing machine. You start with a gigantic rock drill and an industrial-sized rivet gun as your primary weapons. Because you are so big, the combat has become necessarily much grander since the first game, but the combat mechanics are perfectly judged satisfyingly meaty when you just want to go nuts, but allowing for all sorts of cunning alternatives as well.

There are larger, scarier enemies after you than Splicers, too, including the genuinely unsettling Big Sisters spiky terrors that come after you when you free their diminutive siblings. Their screeches warn you of their approach, giving you time to prepare, setting traps and choosing the best defensive position from which to meet them. Similarly, Big Daddies do not attack until you attack them, allowing you to prepare yourself before doing battle. This ability to pick your fights is a welcome alternative to the standard boss-fight convention.

The game deserves its 18 rating; it doesn't pull any punches, gore-wise, and is genuinely scary at times partly because the quality of the writing makes you very quickly invested in the characterisation. But it manages to be vastly rewarding intellectually as well as viscerally satisfying. Bioshock 2 is a modern classic; a 7-star computer game. More than that, it is a powerful answer to anyone that still thinks all computer games are mindless, childish or dull.

Rating: 5/5

The only way to encourage developers to create great apps for all mobile phones, and not just Apple's iPhone, is to reward them and that means paying more

Easy to use mobile applications of the kind that Apple is pioneering are a huge economic opportunity to generate growth and jobs but also a conundrum. At a time when the whole world of computing is migrating into the "cloud", with data stored out there on the web rather than on our computer desktops, the mobile world is moving in the opposite direction: nearly all of these games and services are being downloaded on to our mobile devices.

The result is that we are using our apps and few more so than me through dedicated silos rather than on the web. This has advantages, not least because data stored on your phone can be accessed more quickly, but also a big downside. This is partly because you are a prisoner of your service provider such as Apple, but mainly because if these apps were made for the web, then every phone would be able to access them, users would have big opportunities to share and developers wouldn't have to spend money they haven't got making multiple apps for incompatible phones.

At the moment, if you want to port an iPhone app to devices running Google's Android operating system, you have to start building again from scratch. Apps would be much cheaper if they could be built to run across different platforms. Tom Hume, managing director of Brighton based FuturePlatforms, points out that Apple developers have to work in the Objective C computer language, whereas the HTML5 standard requires only minor changes between platforms.

FuturePlatforms operates a Google-style "gold card" system, allowing staff time off to do their own things. One developer used this option to produce an unofficial app of the Guardian for phones using Google's Android operating system which in some ways is more flexible than the iPhone app (eg, it can download the paper during the night).

Make no mistake, something really big is happening with apps as this amazing device we still call a mobile phone extends its tentacles ever deeper into our lives. Today it is games, social networks, reading, search, location-based services; tomorrow health, work, painting, education, who knows what.

The stats are startling. According to technology research company Gartner, physical downloads of apps reached 2.5bn last year. These were overwhelmingly on iPhone and iPod Touch devices. But since iPhones amount to less than 1% of all phones, you don't have to be a genius to realise the enormous potential. It could be that Gartner's predictions of 4.5bn downloads this year and an astonishing 21.6bn in 2013, equivalent to more than three for everyone on the planet, will prove an underestimate.

The good or bad news, is that a staggering 87% of these downloads will be free for users. That's great for you and me, but it is not an obvious way to encourage a growing industry to hire people to make up for the black hole caused by the banking collapse. Many of these "free" downloads will be supported by advertising and others will be corporations promoting their brands. But most will be free because creators don't think they can charge for them.

At the moment, there is a grave distortion in the balance of power. Most of the money is going to the app shops such as Apple which controls the gateway to the developers, who are often on 60 or more an hour with the content providers squeezed in the middle of an increasingly crowded market.

I have been talking recently to developers partly to research this column and partly because I am trying to do an app of my own to see how difficult it is (more of that at a later date, maybe). The overwhelming message is how difficult it is to make enough profit to justify the investment when costs are so high and the market flooded with freebies. Sure there are some who make good money, such as existing branded games being repackaged in mobile form and niche services. The most successful income-earning apps last year satellite navigation guides at 30 a pop have been undermined by Google bringing out a free turn-by-turn street navigation option.

Unsurprisingly then, ustwo of Shoreditch maker of, among other things, mouthoff, an app that enables the phone screen to mimic movements of your mouth, which had mouth-watering publicity here and in the US couldn't make a respectable profit at 59p. Indeed, the company admits "the bottom line is that it's impossible to make money at the 59p price point for 99% of studios".

Toiluxe, a neat 59p iPhone app that uses satellite signals to tell you where the nearest toilet is in London whether the Ritz hotel or a public convenience got publicity in several newspapers but not enough to make a respectable return given that the developer only ends up with only 60% of income after Apple and Vat (levied at higher Irish rates where the servers are based).

The obvious answer is to raise prices, but that is easier said than done in an environment where so much is available for nothing as newspapers in a different neck of the woods know full well.

It is all quite crazy, really. People who pay more than 2.50 for a cup of coffee that is gone in a few minutes are reluctant to pay 1 for a paper that will last for hours or an app that will be with you for ages, probably with free upgrades. It is also becoming increasingly difficult to find an app among the hundreds of thousands on offer on the iPhone despite the growth of apps helping you to do just this (ie, looking for relevant apps) such as Chomp, or Mplayit on Facebook or Apple's Genius. There must be hundreds of great apps that hardly anyone has discovered. Goodness knows what it will be like in a few years time.

There is an elephant in the room even though it is invisible at the moment: the bedroom programmer, shorthand for individuals working on their own. The reason is that it is very difficult to write code for a phone in the way that kids could program their BBC or Spectrum computers in the 1980s, a phenomenon that led the same kids to create a thriving computer games industry. Uncle Steve won't let you near his phones except on his own terms. It may start to change with Google's Android operating system based on open source, and I know of at least one developer working on an app to enable people to do their own coding on a phone in a (relatively) simple way.

If that happened maybe a new generation of cloud coders could send the apps revolution off in a whole new and much cheaper direction. The best things in life are not always free.

twitter.com/vickeegan

The corporation is endangering its own future by letting the Hollywood studios set the rules for its HD broadcasts

Back before the Christmas break, it looked like Ofcom was ready to do its duty and stop the BBC from adding digital rights management technology to its high-definition broadcasts. After all, DRM doesn't actually prevent copying even the BBC agrees that the scheme it's proposed won't stop a determined copier, and once that copy is on the internet, everyone else will be able to get at it with a couple of clicks.

And DRM imposes social, monetary and public interest costs: a DRM scheme will never be able to embody the flexibility built into the law that instructs judges to carefully weigh up the copyright holder's exclusive rights against the public's legitimate use of copyrighted works for personal archiving, format-shifting, commentary, education, and the other traditional uses that have fallen outside of the exclusive purview of copyright corporations to approve.

And because DRM requires that devices hide things from their owners that they prevent owners from gaining access to their media except according to the DRM's rules that means that DRM can't be implemented in free/open source software. The BBC's plans will mean locking open devices the kind of thing that British entrepreneurs can knock up in a garage without permission or licences from giant multinationals out of the market.

Finally, since the rules for the BBC's DRM are set by a consortium that takes its orders from the Hollywood studios, this plan would move the BBC's regulation from Ofcom to studio bosses 9,000 miles away in California. You see, the BBC's plan is to scramble some key information needed to watch high-def broadcasts, a block of data that includes subtitles and other information used by disabled people, who are making increasing use of open devices that can be readily repurposed to add assistive features.

Ofcom may decide to order the BBC to allow these open devices to unscramble broadcasts, but the BBC doesn't have the authority to grant this exception it will have to be decided by the studio heads (from the same companies whose trade association, the MPAA, has come out against a UN World Intellectual Property Organisation treaty to safeguard the rights of blind and disabled people to gain access to copyrighted works).

So when Ofcom told Auntie that it hadn't made the case for DRM, that the social harms outweighed the benefits, and that it wouldn't allow the BBC to add DRM after all, it seemed like the regulator had really stepped up to do its duty: protecting the public interest, protecting the rights of disabled people, protecting the rights of British firms to field innovative new devices into the British marketplace.

And then Ofcom caved. In its latest consultation on the matter, Ofcom takes it as a given that the BBC will be allowed to add DRM to our licence-funded television signals. Instead of asking whether there is a case for DRM, Ofcom offers up a string of "have you stopped beating your wife yet?" questions, like, "Do you agree that the BBC's proposed approach for implementing content management would safeguard citizens' and consumers' legitimate use of HD content, and if not, what additional guarantees would be appropriate?"

Did you catch that? Not "Can DRM be used to safeguard legitimate uses?" but rather, "Which DRM should we use to make sure this happens?"

What caused Ofcom to give up its commitment to sanity in TV policy? The clue is here, in the opening: "The BBC believes copy management would broaden the range of HD content available on DTT, and hence would deliver benefits to citizens and consumers."

In other words: the BBC has been told by its licensors that they won't allow their programmes to be aired in high-def without DRM. When I met with Ofcom about this, it was clear that this was uppermost on their minds, the threat that "high quality content" would migrate away from public service media and into the private broadcasters' silos, where Ofcom wields far less power and influence.

But how credulous do you have to be to take a threat like this seriously? Let's look at the record on threats to boycott non-DRM broadcasting from these companies. In 2003, the US Broadcast Protection Discussion Group (a committee in the Hollywood-based Copy Protection Technical Working Group) went to work on a plan for adding DRM called the Broadcast Flag to America's high-def broadcasts. I attended every one of these meetings, working on behalf of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the free/open TV projects it represented, including MythTV (an open video-recorder) and GNU Radio (an open radio/TV receiver).

Over and over again, the rightsholders in the room during the Broadcast Flag negotiations attempted to create a sense of urgency by threatening to boycott American high-def telly if they didn't get DRM. They repeated these threats in their submissions to the Federal Communications Commission (Ofcom's US counterpart) and in their meetings with American lawmakers.

They were very compelling. How compelling? Well, one ranking senator, Fritz Hollings, sent the head of the FCC a memo urging him to adopt the Broadcast Flag before America's entire HD transition collapsed in the face of a boycott. Hollings (whom Hill insiders used to call "The Senator from Disney") was so convinced by the MPAA's arguments that he let them write the memo he sent to the FCC, as we discovered when we downloaded the Word file the FCC posted and found metadata in it indicating that it had been composed on a computer registered to an MPAA staffer.

The FCC caved, just like Ofcom. They ruled that America would have DRM on its high-definition devices. They ruled, in effect, that holding a copyright in a movie or TV show gave you the right to design all the devices capable of playing it. This is exactly the same power that Ofcom wants to hand to the BBC: the right to tell you what your telly and all the devices connected to it can and can't do, how it must be designed, which kinds of industry can and can't build it. Not copyright, but "deviceright" an unprecedented expansion of the modest right to control copies of your work into the right to design all devices capable of making copies.

So we sued. Along with the American Library Association and Public Knowledge, we asked a Federal judge to rule that the FCC didn't have the right to appoint itself Device Czar for America, with the power to approve or veto the features that one might build into a TV, a receiver, or a PC that might connect to either.

The court agreed with us. They recognised that being a telcoms regulator doesn't give you the right to regulate receivers and the devices they connect to. The Broadcast Flag died before it could be enacted.

And oh, you should have heard the copyright cartel! How they rattled their sabers and promised a boycott of HD that would destroy America's chances for an analogue switchoff. For example, the MPAA's CTO, Fritz Attaway, said that "high-value content will migrate away" from telly without DRM.

Viacom added: "[i]f a broadcast flag is not implemented and enforced by Summer 2003, Viacom's CBS Television Network will not provide any programming in high definition for the 2003-2004 television season."

One by one, the big entertainment companies and sporting giants like the baseball and American football leagues promised that without the Broadcast Flag, they would take their balls and go home.

So what happened? Did they make good on their threats? Did they go to their shareholders and explain that the reason they weren't broadcasting anything this year is because the government wouldn't let them control TVs?

No. They broadcast. They continue to broadcast today, with no DRM.

They were full of it. They did not make good on their threats. They didn't boycott.

They caved.

Which is exactly what they'll do today if Ofcom and the BBC stand up for the licence-paying public. After all, every American programme aired on British telly is aired first (or simultaneously) in the US, without DRM (because the Broadcast Flag was defeated). Which means that Britons who want to pirate HD TV can simply get a copy that originated on the American airwaves and not the British airwaves. Same programme, though.

What if the studios grow a spine this time around and make good on the threat? Well, so what? The BBC commissions telly. It can commission telly from British firms that are not so piracy-crazed that they demand DRM that doesn't work and pisses off the viewers. It'll be good for the balance of trade, too.

I love the Beeb, honestly I do. I am just as worried about charter renewal in 2016 as anyone in White City. But how on Earth can the BBC's masters believe that adding DRM will win over the affection of the Britons whose support Auntie will need during the next government?

Honestly, if you wanted to sabotage the BBC's future and abandon all hope of the licence fee, you could find no better starting point than this ridiculous exercise.

As for Ofcom, it's always disappointing when the entity appointed to be the grown-up in the relationship turns out to be just as credulous as its ward. Look, the Americans aren't going to boycott British telly, especially not in a down economy where their shareholders are baying for every penny. This is the same empty, ridiculous posturing they tried in 2003 in America, and the only thing dumber than their threats is your taking them seriously.

Cory Doctorow is a digital activist, science fiction author and co-editor of the popular blog Boing Boing

Less than a year after he was parachuted in to run MySpace, Owen Van Natta is out of a job as the ailing social network tries once again to revitalise itself.

Van Natta, who spent several years as a senior executive at Facebook, was brought in by News Corporation last April to replace ousted MySpace founder Chris DeWolfe.

But in a surprise move late on Wednesday, the company said that Van Natta himself was being replaced by two other executives brought in alongside him, Mike Jones and Jason Hirschorn. The duo are now MySpace's co-presidents, reporting to News Corp's digital chief, Jon Miller.

Miller, himself a former chief executive of AOL, was hired by Rupert Murdoch to reorganise the mogul's internet businesses. In a statement, he said that Van Natta's contribution had been an important one.

"Owen took on an incredible challenge in working to refocus and revitalise MySpace, and the business has shown very positive signs recently as a result of his dedicated work," he said.

"However, in talking to Owen about his priorities both personally and professionally going forward, we both agreed that it was best for him to step down at this time. I want to thank Owen for all of his efforts."

Once seen as a darling of the dotcom world, and bought by Murdoch in 2005 for $580m, MySpace has struggled in recent years to match the explosive growth of Facebook.

Since the shakeup which brought Van Natta on board, the company has undergone drastic reorganisation as News Corp's digital businesses have come under increasing pressure to reap more financial benefits for their parent company.

Despite redesigning and relaunching the site, however, things have remained problematic at the Los Angeles-based company.

Last year MySpace cut 30% of its US workforce and then slashed its global operations by two-thirds.

"MySpace is an incredibly unique place and we're made real gains," said Van Natta in a statement. "I'm proud of the work we've all accomplished together and look forward to watching its continued growth."

Sites such as Spotify will still carry the label's artists as CEO says free music is 'not positive for industry'

Warner Music has indicated it may stop licensing its songs to free online streaming services such as Spotify and We7. The record label's chief executive, Edgar Bronfman, said yesterday that allowing people to access free music on such sites was "clearly not positive for the industry".

A spokesman for Warner Music confirmed that this will not affect deals currently in place, meaning songs by artists such as T.I, Fleetwood Mac and Estelle will still be available to hear on the likes of Spotify. He could not confirm how this would affect future deals, except that Warner did not feel ad-supported free services was a sustainable business model for the music industry.

Bronfman's comments come in response to the latest financial figures posted by Warner Music, which show a loss of $17m ( 11m) in the last quarter of 2009. CD sales for the third-largest record label in the world continue to shrink, but figures show digital sales were up 8% on last year.

Bronfman expressed his reservation over Spotify, which is currently only available in Europe, entering the US market as a free streaming service. "The 'get all your music you want for free, and then maybe with a few bells and whistles we can move you to a premium price strategy', is not the kind of approach to business that we will be supporting in the future."

Instead, Bronfman suggested Warner Music would be looking to take a bite out of Apple's share of the market with iTunes by offering its own subscription service.

Bronfman also hinted that a merger with EMI, who posted losses of 1.8bn since March last year, was not out of the question.

As Beaker is recording Dust in the Wind, he gets a severe flaming from a bunch of YouTube haters

Oh yes! After Bohemian Rhapsody, MuppetsStudio has released another classic rock song once again with a Muppets edge. This time it is Beaker's Ballad, in which the timid assistant to Dr Bunsen Honeydew mee-mee-mees Dust in the Wind, a 1977 song by American prog-rock band Kansas.

As Beaker sits in front of his computer preparing for a home recording, viewers start to comment on his performance. The comments suddenly pop up in the video, saying "fail", "I can't believe I wasted 15 seconds on this", "sounds like someone punched a goat", and then users even start to get into a discussion: "plz don't blame the goat."

As the comments get stronger, poor Beaker's computer catches fire, and the users' hectic misspellings "moar fire", and "is he died?" show that the MuppetsStudio really does understand the internet.

In fact, the MuppetsStudio which is owned by Disney is actively reaching out to a new audience using digital media. The Muppets have a YouTube channel (Bohemian Rhapsody was watched more than 12m times), a Facebook page, a Twitter account and an iPhone app where you can build your own monster with Elmo. And of course, there is the Muppet Wikia as well, and their news blog the "Muppet Newsflash".

The two old hecklers Statler and Waldorf have their own opinion on new media. "Shall we click on this Digg button?", asks Waldorf in the end of Beaker's Ballad, and Statler answers: "Absolutely. Let's keep digging till this thing is buried!"

Oh, in case you haven't seen it:

Lovely.

Conservatives and Labour look beyond billboards and party political broadcasts by firing opening salvos on website

Forget airbrushed billboards signs that this will be the "Mumsnet election" have arrived as the major parties go to war on the parenting website.

Labour fired the first salvo with an advert on the main forum page, which attacked the Tories over child tax credit. "Are you earning more than 31,000?" it said. "Say hello to David. And goodbye to your child tax credits. Vote Tory and you'll get less than you bargained for."

Labour claims a new report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies shows a Tory pledge to save 400m through scrapping tax credits to families with incomes above 50,000 is unachievable without affecting families on more than 31,000.

The Tories are poised to launch a riposte on the site in a video featuring Theresa May, the shadow minister for women.

Kerry McCarthy, Labour's media campaigns spokeswoman, said Mumsnet users were "political animals, in that they are very interested in issues that affect their families and lives, but wouldn't necessarily watch Newsnight every night We really have to look beyond the billboards, the party political broadcasts, the newspapers and mainstream channels."

Justine Roberts, co-founder of Mumsnet, said the site's managers had thought "long and hard" about allowing the adverts. "We are happy for our members to see the messages being put out. They are very engaged in the election. They are not dim enough to accept everything at face value, either."

In 2009, the internet's share of UK ad spend rose by the amount that newspapers lost. Coincidence?

Hark, the herald angels sing! Total UK ad spend will rise this autumn, after nine consecutive quarters of annual decline, according to an Advertising Association and WARC forecast.

The rise is modest Q3 2010 is predicted to be 2.8% up from the year before. But it's heartening after last year, when total ad spend fell 12.7% from 2008 in the worst ad recession since 1982, according to the AA and WARC.

Internet ad spend finished the year to September up (4.2%) but far less than in previous years, and by less than cinema (10.2%). They were the only two media to attract more ad money in 2009

In fact, the internet's share of total UK ad spend rose by exactly the same amount as newspapers lost (4.2%). Coincidence? Probably not especially in time of recession, brands that wanted to keep on advertising flocked to a medium with greater guarantees and more metrics

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.

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.

The BBC2 series about the web blends mainstream, interactive and virtual elements

There was a moment on location last year while filming the BBC2 documentary series The Virtual Revolution when I realised we were actually creating two projects. I was uploading a photo I had taken on the shoot to my Flickr site, or dispatching another update to my Twitter followers, when the director of photography asked: "Why?"

For him and the rest of the crew, I was doing a lot of extra work that was distracting from the real reason we were there: to create a piece of non-interactive storytelling that would broadcast to a mainstream audience in a primetime slot. For me, I was contributing to an interactive archive of a process that explained our thesis about the social, political, economic and psychological impact of the world wide web. When I jokingly described him as one of the "linear people", he looked utterly bewildered, as if I'd created a category out of thin air. I was convinced that media consumers had already graduated to a multi platform world, and that the old ways of storytelling were becoming obsolete.

From the start of the process in early 2009, The Virtual Revolution's production team envisaged two audiences: the first would be an online community who would help to develop the themes we would explore, clarify hard-to-grasp technological concepts, tell us when we were heading in the right or wrong directions, and really put their stamp on the finished programmes. In the tradition of the new breed of wikinovels, wikiarticles and wikifilms, this would be an open and collaborative project within a larger old media landscape that hoped to engage an increasingly disjointed and distracted audience in a new media way. In return, they'd have access to our rushes that they could use to spin their own documentaries about the web.

As someone who has spent my professional life flirting with old and new media, the openness and collaboration was one of the biggest draws when I was approached by the series producer last March. From my point of view, it would be a gross oversight to create something on this subject without the input of the online peanut gallery.

The second audience would be the BBC2 viewing public. They needed grabby content "on rails", as game developers describe it, evoking images of a journey viewed through a window. This was the paydirt audience: watching the show that would get the reviews and the ratings. The complex concepts that we worked through with the online community would be presented in an easier-to-consume, more streamlined way. And, despite my interactive bias, it turned out that this was where the art of storytelling really emerged.

It was also where the conflict between the linear and multiplatform aspects really came to a head. By the time we had started production with each of the directors and producers for the four films, we had an enormous archive of debates and ideas from hundreds of virtual participants, including people who eventually took part in the series, such as the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, and the author Andrew Keene.

It was the production teams' job to reduce this into a clear, single journey, and to put our own stamp on it. Only five people decided what each film would become: the executive and series producers, the film's director and assistant producer, and me. Mirroring the conclusions of the first programme, The Great Levelling?, we were the gatekeepers that curated the content that people saw. Our experiment has produced excellent results: four authored films and a huge public archive that has recorded a snapshot of what the web thinks the web has done in 20 years. And, despite the scepticism of my linear director of photography, we also have my diary made up of hundreds of entries of less than 140 characters each.

Message on Vodafone's official Twitter account prompted hundreds of followers to contact the mobile phone company

Vodafone has been forced to issue a grovelling apology to its thousands of followers on Twitter after one of its customer service staff broadcast an obscene message on the micro-blogging service.

The message appeared on Vodafone's official Twitter account, which is used by the company to deal with customer complaints. Instead of the usual helpful hints on how to make the most of its range of handsets or direct responses to individual customer service queries, VodafoneUK's 8,824 followers were treated this afternoon to a message reading "VodafoneUK is fed up of dirty homo's and is going after beaver".

Within minutes of the message appearing hundreds of Vodafone customers had contacted the company through Twitter to ask whether its account had been hacked. Despite Vodafone deleting the message from its Twitterfeed, hawk-eyed users of the service saved a copy and were quickly sending it across the internet.

Vodafone was forced to release a stream of apologies, replying to each user individually to say "we weren't hacked. A severe breach of rules by staff in our building, dealing with that internally. We're very sorry". By the evening the company had been forced to release that message to hundreds of individual followers.

"An individual posted an obscene remark on the Vodafone UK Twitter account," said a spokesman for the company. "The individual has been suspended pending further notice."

The "tweet" is understood to have emanated from Vodafone's customer service centre in Stoke, where its web team uses social networking sites such as Twitter to keep in contact with users.

It is just the latest in a growing list of social networking gaffes. As more people sign up to services such as Twitter and Facebook, organisations are having to police their activities as well as maintain their own presence on such sites.

A year ago Virgin Atlantic sacked 13 cabin crew after they used Facebook to call passengers "chavs" and claimed that the airline's planes were full of cockroaches.

Some companies have had their own use of Twitter hijacked by enterprising web users. Last April the Telegraph newspaper set up a so-called "Twitterfall" for its coverage of the budget. The idea was to include any tweets being created on the service that included the tag "#budget". Unfortunately Twitter users spotted that it was unmoderated, and embarrassed the paper and its owners with a stream of tweets such as "Breaking news: Barclay Brothers to pick up your tax bill in unprecedented act of philanthropy. #Budget" and worse.

The latest version of Office has lots of new bells and whistles none of which will make either Adobe or Google happy

I'm writing this using the beta of Microsoft Word 2010, part of the Office 2010 suite due to hit the shelves later this year. You can try out the whole suite for free, too the beta is available for download.

So what's new in Office 2010? A hell of a lot: the reviewer's guide that Microsoft helpfully provides for the likes of me runs to 174 pages, covering everything from the extension of the ribbon interface to Outlook 2010 to how to drill down and display data in Excel pivot tables. Other highlights include being able to slice and dice video into a Powerpoint presentation, and out-of-the-box PDF support, which Adobe isn't going to like. Neither is Adobe going to like the fact that you'll be able to edit images directly within Office apps.

What's more interesting, however, is the determination of Microsoft to make Office 2010 as widely available as possible, including online and via mobile devices. There's no need to buy for large sums of money the entire suite; you will be able to access via any browser and your Windows Live login pretty much full-featured versions of Excel, Word, Powerpoint and OneNote and use them to work collaboratively. If you're a business, you'll be able to host the Web Apps on your Sharepoint server and your minions will be able to access them via that.

This means, for example, if you're at a conference with a Powerpoint presentation on a USB stick and no laptop, and suddenly some new data arrives via email on your mobile, you'll be able to plug the stick into any computer and update the presentation using the online version of Powerpoint. It doesn't matter if it's a Mac and doesn't have Powerpoint installed; and, unlike the current version of Outlook Web Access on Exchange 2007, it doesn't matter what browser you use, either: the Web Apps are fully featured on any browser.

Clearly a riposte to the mighty Google and its Google Docs, Microsoft's Web Apps are, for my money, a better and richer experience than Google's offering. Like Google Docs, they will be free for the casual user. But why offer a free version of one of your biggest cash-generating suites of software? The answer is to expose as many people as possible to Office 2010, and to hope that they'll love it so much they'll shell out for the entire suite.

This version of Office is very much more focused on the world outside your PC. As well as the collaborative nature of the Web Apps, you'll be able to keep on top of what your colleagues and contacts are up to, either via your company's Sharepoint infrastructure or via the big social networks. So, via Outlook, not only will you be able to check up on whether Jack from Accounts has said yes to the meeting, you'll also be able to see, via Facebook, if he's still hungover from the weekend. Which would explain why he's showing up in your People Pane in Outlook 2010 as "out of the office".

As is usually the case with Microsoft, there will be lots of different flavours of the suite, ranging from the least eyewateringly expensive version aimed at students and home users which, infuriatingly, won't include Outlook up to the all-singing, all-dancing Office Professional Plus.

Pros: richer multimedia tools, ability to use apps free online and to collaborate online.
Cons: Bound to be expensive, sheer size of suite and variety of tools can be confusing.
Office.microsoft.com

Will the future be cyber-attacks and an uneasy balance of terror or cultural collaboration hosted by Google's servers?

"THE FUTURE", WROTE the novelist William Gibson in a justifiably famous aphorism, "is already here: it's just not evenly distributed".

The challenge is to spot those uneven ly distributed peeks into our future. The Apple iPad launch provoked a storm of peeking: optimists saw it as a sign that the computer industry had finally got the message that most people can't be bothered with the mysteries of operating systems and software updates and want an information appliance that "just works"; pessimists saw it as a glimpse into an authoritarian world dominated either by governments or a few powerful companies; sceptics saw it as just another product launch.

Last week provided yet another enigmatic glimpse of what may lie in store. The Washington Post said Google, still reeling from the sophisticated cyber-attack that allegedly prompted a rethink of its activities in China, had turned to the US National Security Agency for help. The Post reported that there are delicate talks on teaming up with the spooks with the goal of "fortifying Google's defences against the kind of espionage-oriented hacking attacks launched from China against it and dozens of other US companies in December".

If you think this is creepy, then join the club. In terms of collective IQ, Google is the smartest company in cyberspace: for five years it's been taking the cleverest graduates from elite universities and the most experienced computer engineers. It's been such a magnet for talent that even Microsoft is enraged. In 2005, for example, an ex-Microsoft engineer named Mark Lucovsky alleged in a sworn statement to a Washington state court that Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive, became so enraged on hearing that Lucovsky was about to leave Microsoft for Google, that he picked up his chair, and threw it across his office. (Ballmer called this a "gross exaggeration".)

So Google is unlikely to be turning to the NSA for technical advice. Why then is it calling in the spooks? One reason could be that the world's dominant internet company is now in the crossfire of early skirmishes of the next cold war.

This thought was reinforced by Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman. He'd been to the International Institute for Strategic Studies for a briefing on its annual survey, Military Balance. "The thing I found most interesting," he said, "was the confirmation that cyber-security is the hot issue John Chipman, the head of the IISS, says the institute is about to launch a study of cyber-security which raises all sorts of issues. What if a country's infrastructure could be destroyed as effectively by a cyber-attack as by an invasion of tanks? How do you defend against that? How do you identify the culprits? What does international law have to say might we have to revise our definitions of what constitutes an act of war?

"Chipman argues, plausibly, that we are now at an equivalent period to the early 1950s. Just as strategists had to devise whole new doctrines to cope with the nuclear age, so they will have to come up with new ideas to cope with the information age."

Another glimpse of a possible future comes from the British Council. A surprising source of such insights, you might think: Oone used to associate the council with cultural imperialism and heritage-fuelled nostalgia. But things have changed. The British Council has got technology. "Learn, share, connect worldwide" is the slogan on its website. It commissioned Charles Leadbeater to think about the cultural implications of "cloud computing" ie when the network, rather than the PC, becomes the computer.

His report, "Cloud Culture: the future of global cultural relations", is being launched tomorrow with a debate at the ICA (details at http://bit.ly/9ZTSin). It's a well-informed, provocative sketch of a world in which most cultural products will be published online and held in the "cloud" enabled by the huge server farms of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple etc. As a primer on the debate between optimists and pessimists about the cultural implications of ubiquitously available internet access, it'll be hard to beat.

Leadbeater calls himself a "realistic optimist" and thinks a cloud-based approach to cultural relations will build communities of collaboration around shared interests and ideas on an unimaginable scale. As a realistic pessimist, I hope he's right. But I keep coming back to the question: who controls the cloud? And where does the NSA fit into this?

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 Black 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.

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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."

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.

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.

Whether it was democracy in action, or defence against malicious attempts to disrupt research, climate scientists were driven to siege mentality by persistence of sceptics

In a unique experiment, The Guardian has published online the full manuscript of its major investigation into the climate science emails stolen from the University of East Anglia, which revealed apparent attempts to cover up flawed data; moves to prevent access to climate data; and to keep research from climate sceptics out of the scientific literature.

As well as including new information about the emails, we will allow web users to annotate the manuscript to help us in our aim of creating the definitive account of the controversy. This is an attempt at a collaborative route to getting at the truth.

We hope to approach that complete account by harnessing the expertise of people with a special knowledge of, or information about, the emails. We would like the protagonists on all sides of the debate to be involved, as well as people with expertise about the events and the science being described or more generally about the ethics of science. The only conditions are the comments abide by our community guidelines and add to the total knowledge or understanding of the events.

The annotations - and the real name of the commenter - will be added to the manuscript, initially in private. The most insightful comments will then be added to a public version of the manuscript. We hope the process will be a form of peer review. If you have a contribution to make, please email climate.emails@guardian.co.uk.

The anonymous commenting facility under each article will also be switched on so that anyone can contribute to the debate.

This story is dark; there are no heroes. Environmentalists will be distressed at what happens in the labs; many may think we should not publish for fear of wrecking the already battered cause of fighting climate change. But some of it, according to the British government's Information Commissioner, may have been illegal.

Remember two other things. First, this was war. The scientists were under intense and prolonged attack, they believed, from politically and commercially motivated people who wanted to prevent them from doing their science and trash their work. And they had, as their most vocal protagonist Professor Michael Mann puts it in one email, "dirty laundry one doesn't want to fall into the hands of those who might potentially try to distort things ..."

Meanwhile, their attackers came to believe that the scientists were fraudsters. In many ways, what follows is a Shakespearean tragedy of misunderstood motives.

There are two competing analyses of what "climategate" means. One sees it as the mob entering the lab the story of a malicious attempt to disrupt, cross-question, belittle and trash the work of mainstream scientists. This may or may not have been the motivation for the original hack, but it has certainly been the motive of some who have driven the news agenda since.

The second analysis sees it as democracy in action the outcome of an entirely laudable effort by amateur scientists and others outside the scientific mainstream, headed by Canadian mathematician Steve McIntyre, to gain access to the complex data sets behind some of the climate scientists' conclusions, and to subject them to their own analysis.

The interweaving of these two narratives has created the tragedy of climategate. The bunker mentality of climate scientists such as the key email correspondents headed by the director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, Phil Jones is exposed in the emails. But so too is the chaos caused in the labs by the efforts of outsiders to question what was going on, without using the established rules of science, like working through publication in peer-reviewed literature. The clash of cultures between the blogosphere and the pages of august journals such as Nature could not be greater.

All this happened against the backdrop of a long-term assault by politically motivated, and commercially funded, climate-change deniers against the activities of many of the key scientists featuring in the emails. Indeed it is striking that people with a limited scientific involvement with CRU who have been victims of past attacks such as Kevin Trenberth of the US government's National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and Ben Santer of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory became regular email correspondents with Jones and his colleagues. They were huddling together in the storm.

Through the emails we also see that some insiders were always demanding more openness from their colleagues and providing candid criticism of shoddy or mistaken work. One person stands out in this: Tom Wigley. He was Jones's former boss, having preceded him as head of CRU. Now based at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, in Boulder, Colorado, Wigley kept up a vigil for honesty and integrity in emails over many years. If there is a hero in this sorry tale, perhaps it is Wigley.

The science discussed in the emails is mostly from one small area of climate research the taking of raw temperature data from thermometers, satellites and proxy measures of historical temperatures such as tree rings and turning it into useable information on temperature trends. The result being iconic graphs like the famous "hockey stick", first published 12 years ago and one of climate science's most famous and controversial products. It shows a long period of natural stable temperatures followed by a sharp, exceptional warming in the late 20th century.

In this area of work, CRU has been crucial. Under Jones's management, it has assembled the most comprehensive thermometer data record in the world, much of it under contract to the US Department of Energy. It is also home to some leading tree-ring researchers like the deputy head of the CRU, Dr Keith Briffa. The acerbic correspondence of Jones and Briffa with Michael Mann of Penn State University, the chief creator of the hockey stick graph, is a central feature of the emails.

CRU's work is the prime (though not the only) basis for the claim that man-made global warming is happening now and is exceptional in history. But as it comes under assault, it is worth remembering that it does not directly touch on other key issues like the physics of climate change, forecasts of future climate change and so on. Even if all the work of CRU were revealed as entirely phoney, which is far from being true, it would not demonstrate climate change was a hoax, or even much alter predictions of future climate.

The emails reveal that Jones, Briffa, Mann and other emailers were the gatekeepers of the science on which they worked. These men (there are virtually no women in the emails) reviewed papers by colleagues and rivals. They held key writing positions with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its assessments of the science of climate change. So if they are damaged, then so is the IPCC.

Their correspondence reveals that there is some basis to the charge, made in October 2009 by climate contrarian Ross McKitrick, an environmental economist at the University of Guelph in Canada, that that "the IPCC review process is nothing at all like what the public has been told. Conflicts of interest are endemic, critical evidence is systematically ignored and there are no effective checks and balances against bias or distortion." There are more than a thousand leaked files of emails to and from scientists and CRU. The emails are clearly a small subset of all the emails that would have been sent and received by CRU scientists since the first one in 1996. Nobody is yet clear why this set made it into the public domain, but they are overwhelming between CRU scientists and foreign compatriots. They include technical discussions about tree ring chronologies and data analysis, scheming about how to repel Freedom of Information (FoI) requests, and bitching about their enemies among the sceptics the group the scientists referred to as "the contrarians".

Our analysis finds previously undisclosed evidence of slipshod use of data and apparent efforts to cover that up. It also finds persistent efforts to censor work by climatic sceptics regarded as hostile especially those outside the scientific priesthood of peer review or those able to generate headlines in media outlets thought unfriendly, like Fox News.

We would agree with Judy Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology, a leading climate scientist who maintains contacts with both camps, who says: "There are two broad issues raised by these emails ... lack of transparency in climate data, and 'tribalism' in some segments of the climate research community."

McIntyre's war

Climategate would not have happened without one man: a Canadian squash-playing blogger and data obsessive in his 60s called Steve McIntyre. Hero or villain, his data wars with Mann, Jones, Briffa and Santer largely created the siege mentality among the scientists, set them on a path of opposition to freedom of information, and by drawing in scores of data liberationists inside and outside the science community, almost certainly inspired whoever stole and released the emails.

McIntyre, a trained mathematician, had a successful career heading small Canadian minerals companies, often using his statistical prowess to analyse mineral prospecting data and out-bet his rivals. In 2002, he took up a new hobby investigating climate change science. It started with an email from his home in Toronto to Jones at CRU asking for some weather station data. Initially the exchanges, as revealed on McIntyre's website ClimateAudit, were civilised. But as the years passed, and his data demands grew greater, relations soured.

From the start, McIntyre deconstructed studies that claim to show evidence of large-scale warming of the planet and of the human fingerprint in that warming. He pioneered the use of freedom of information legislation in the US and UK to demand the raw data behind the studies. It was not normal practice for scientists to publish this full data, nor the computer programmes they devised to analyse it.

McIntyre clearly doubted the statistical techniques being employed by the climatologists, and felt that, as a trained mathematician, he could do better despite his ignorance of climate science. And, as he grew more suspicious, he suspected them of cherry-picking data. He wondered exactly how Mann turned dozens of studies on the past climate, including a series of tree rings studies managed by Briffa at CRU, into his neat hockey stick graph. And he questioned the reliability of the thermometer data used by Jones to produce his graphs of warming over the past 160 years.

He found that no independent researchers had seriously tried to replicate the findings a cornerstone of scientific inquiry. "Nobody's ever checked this stuff with any sort of due diligence," he said recently. He says too much is taken on trust in the cosy, collegiate world of science.

The climate scientists came to regard him as a meddling, time-wasting and probably politically motivated wrecker, who rarely published his own papers and devoted his retirement to trashing theirs. So when he tried to access their raw data and computer programmes, they resisted. The emails reveal that the researchers shared tactics, encouraged each other and competed for the rudest invective against McIntyre. And they grew even angrier as other wannabe investigators joined the data hunt. Men such as Doug Keenan, a former financial trader on Wall Street and the City of London, and a retired electrical engineer from Northampton called David Holland.

Many have accused McIntyre, Keenan and others of being hired hands of corporations out to fight climate change legislation. The Guardian has found no evidence of that. Instead, they appear to be an unanticipated outpost of the rise of "grey power", retired numerate professionals with time on their hands, an obsessive streak in their heads and a cause to pursue. The story of the battles of McIntyre and his acolytes to access the raw data, and the protracted and generally failed attempts by the scientists to repel him, is the central story of the leaked emails from 2003 onwards.

At first McIntyre published regular peer-reviewed scientific papers, co-authoring a couple with Ross McKitrick. The mainstream climate scientists responded angrily to them. They often used their influence to exclude what they regarded as substandard papers from major journals. So McIntyre, McKitrick and other sceptical authors, like Patrick Michaels of the University of Virginia and the Cato Institute and later Keenan, increasingly used Climate Research and Energy and Environment two peer-reviewed journals widely disliked by mainstream climate scientists.

Tensions were strained further when McIntyre published more of his deconstructions of published papers on his website, but without scientific peer review.

Strident though his website often is, McIntyre has usually avoided outright personal abuse. The abuse was usually only a link away on other sites, however. And few of McIntyre's targets distinguished him from more politically motivated foes. Santer, for instance, concluded in one email in 2008 that McIntyre "has no interest in rational scientific discourse. He deals in the currency of threats and intimidation." He believes McIntyre saw himself as the "self-appointed Joe McCarthy of climate science".

Last September, RealClimate, a website run by Mann and other climate scientists, summed up how mainstream scientists felt about this kind of scientific discourse. "The timeline for these mini-blogstorms is always similar. An unverified accusation of malfeasance is based on nothing, and it is instantly telegraphed across the denial-o-sphere while being embellished along the way to apply to anything hockey-stick shaped and any and all scientists. The usual suspects become hysterical with glee that finally the 'hoax' has been revealed ... After a while it is clear that no scientific edifice has collapsed and the search goes on ... Net effect on lay people? Confusion. Net effect on science. Zip."

McIntyre, they complained, kept his hands relatively clean. He never talked about a hoax being exposed, and rarely questioned the "edifice" of climate science. He just picked away, providing fodder for his more excitable and less fastidious fans. As the RealClimate post went on: "Science is made up of people challenging assumptions and other people's results ... What is objectionable is the conflation of technical criticism with unsupported, unjustified and unverified accusations of scientific mal-conduct." McIntyre rarely makes such charges personally but, they complained, he "continues to take absolutely no responsibility for the ridiculous fantasies and exaggerations that his supporters broadcast".

There was a clash of cultures, too, between the ways of Canadian mining prospectors and those of academia. As one academic put it to me: "I think McIntyre confuses the more aggressive and confrontational style of business he used as a geophysical consultant with the more even responses in scholarship exchanges." On the other hand, the CRU emails hardly suggest that the scientists are shrinking violets. When Australian climate sceptic John Daly died, Jones commented, "In an odd way this is cheering news."

In the final months before climategate, the battle was not a cultural one, or even really about climate change. It was about data pure and simple. McIntyre wanted the scientists' data. In one week in the summer of 2009, he showered CRU with 58 freedom of information requests. He often made it clear that he did not have any particular reason for requiring the data. He just wanted to liberate it. It was a battle to break down the walls of the ivory towers, to blow apart the cosy world of peer review. It was a battle for the heart and soul of science, and for its lifeblood: data.

Then came the stolen emails. Whether hacked from outside or leaked from inside, the emails lit a fuse, but the fuel of mistrust had been piling up for years. As a result, the bonfire has been spectacular.

Scientists in the firing line

Many of the researchers caught up in the "climategate" saga have spent years in the firing line of sceptics. And they have felt the heat.

In late 2006, I interviewed a number of them for an article in New Scientist magazine, which focused on how the propaganda war was shaping up prior to the publication of the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment the following year.

Kevin Trenberth had suffered abuse for publicly linking global warming to the exceptional 2005 Atlantic hurricane season, which culminated in hurricane Katrina. He told me: "The attacks on me are clearly designed to get me fired or to resign."

Ben Santer of the Lawrence Livermore laboratory in California, and formerly of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, was attacked for his role in writing the 1995 IPCC report, which claimed to see the hand of man in climate change. He said: "There is a strategy to single out individuals, tarnish them and try to bring the whole of science into disrepute."

Prof Mike Mann of Pennsylvania State University, fresh from his battle over the hockey stick in 2001, said: "There is an orchestrated campaign against the IPCC."

Funding trails to some of the more prominent sceptics also emerged at that time. Steve McIntyre, who runs the influential sceptic blog Climate Audit was free of financial conflicts of interest, but it emerged that prominent sceptic Patrick Michaels received hundreds of thousands of dollars in "consultancy" fees from the Intermountain Rural Electric Association, a coal-burning electric company based in Colorado. A leaked letter from the company's general manager, Stanley Lewandowski, said: "We believe it is necessary to support the scientific community that is willing to stand up against the alarmists."

The funding of climate sceptics has a long and probably ongoing history. In 1998, I revealed in the Guardian leaked documents showing that the powerful American Petroleum Institute (API) was planning to recruit a team of "independent scientists" to do battle against climatologists on global warming. The aim was to bolster a campaign to prevent the US government ratifying the Kyoto protocol.

The API's eight-page Global Climate Science Communications Plan said it aimed to change the US political climate so that "those promoting the Kyoto treaty on the basis of extant science appear to be out of touch with reality".

The leaked document said: "If we can show that science does not support the Kyoto treaty this puts the US in a stronger moral position and frees its negotiators from the need to make concessions as a defence against perceived selfish economic concerns."

Its first task was to "identify, recruit and train a team of five independent scientists to participate in media outreach". It is not clear if the plan went ahead, but the policy objective was achieved.

Lookalike infringes trademark rights, says US search firm
Goojje launches after row with Beijing over censoring

Google has warned the creators of a lookalike Chinese site to scrap their logo because it infringes trademark rights.

Goojje appeared shortly after the US internet company said it was no longer willing to censor its Chinese service and its home page included what appeared to be a plea to the firm to remain in China. The Chinese doppelganger offers search and social networking services.

Today one of its college student creators said Google had sent them a letter from its lawyers warning them to stop using its current logo or anything that might mislead the public into thinking there was a connection with the American firm. A Google spokeswoman told Reuters it had asked Goojje to stop copying its trademarked logo.

The Chinese website's logo also incorporates the paw-print motif of Baidu, the domestic company that dominates the search market in China.

In an email to the Guardian one of the site's founders, who uses the pseudonym Xiao Xuan, said: "We will continue the site; we will insist on our own path; we will not give up; we won't abandon it. Anyone who knows Chinese knows the difference between the two."

The site's name is a pun because the second half of Google's Chinese name, Guge, sounds like the word for older brother, gege. The latter part of Goojje sounds like "jiejie" or "older sister".

The homepage of the website originally bore the slogan: "Brother is leaving ... sister will miss him." That appeared to be a reference to Google's acknowledgement that its decision to stop self-censoring could lead to its departure from China. After executives stressed they hoped to keep doing business on the mainland, Goojje changed the statement to express happiness that "brother stayed for sister".

Xiao told China's Global Times newspaper the site had 60,000 registered users and had repeatedly suffered cyber attacks.

Fang Xingdong, founder and CEO of Chinese blog portal Bokee, told the paper: "I don't believe Goojje will survive long. It's likely that these college students set up the site for fun. If they mean to be serious, it would cost a lot of cash and need advanced technology to support the website."

Giant Schengen database holds a host of personal details that could be of use to criminal gangs

Privacy campaigners expressed shock last night after it emerged that large amounts of confidential personal information held about British citizens on a giant computer network spanning the European Union could be accessed by more than 500,000 terminals.

The figure was revealed in a Council of the European Union document examining proposals to establish a new agency, based in France, that would manage much of the 27 EU member states' shared data. But the sheer number of access points to the Schengen Information System (SIS) which holds information regarding immigration status, arrest warrants, entries on the police national computer and a multitude of personal details has triggered concerns about the security of the data.

Statewatch, a group that monitors civil liberties in Europe, said it was aware of a case in Belgium where personal information extracted from the system by an official was sold to an organised criminal gang.

"It is well known that the greater the points of access, the greater the number of people who have access and the greater the chance that data will be misplaced, lost or illegally accessed," said Tony Bunyan, director of Statewatch. "The idea that mass databases can be totally secure and that privacy can be guaranteed is a fallacy."

The rapid expansion of the EU has played a significant part in increasing the size of the network. In 2003, there were 125,000 computer terminals across the EU with access to the system, according to official documents. But following EU enlargement, the number of computer terminals with access to the system increased dramatically.

According to the Council of the European Union "Inter-institutional File", "the SIS is built around a central database that is networked, via national systems, to more than half a million terminals located within the security services of the member states". The file goes on to explain that the system "currently contains more than 30m alerts [for wanted persons, stolen vehicles and stolen or lost identity papers and documents]". While the SIS is credited by its supporters with helping to track wanted criminals and illegal immigrants, there are concerns that the personal data it holds could be invaluable for fraudsters.

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.

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.

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.

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.