Eric Schmidt has stressed that Google's involvement in mobile is designed to make the operators money, not leave them out of pocket

Google chief executive Eric Schmidt has extended an olive branch to the mobile phone industry saying he is "not trying to run rough shod" over the operators or turn them into "dumb pipes" in the air.

Speaking for the first time at Mobile World Congress, the industry's largest trade show, Schmidt faced angry questioning from some in the industry who fear that Google is piggybacking on their massive investment in infrastructure, through ventures such as its Android mobile phone platform, but giving them no return.

"I feel very, very strongly that we depend on successful businesses for the operators globally and I disagree that we are trying to turn the operators into dumb pipes," he said. "We need advanced sophisticated networks, we are not going to be investing in broad scale infrastructure, we are going to have the operators do it."

After the meeting he stressed that Google's involvement in mobile is designed to make the operators money, not leave them out of pocket.

"Almost all of the interesting growth in operators now is coming from mobile data, so both Google and the operators are growing because of this explosion in usage," he said.

"From our perspective we recognise that the operators have large fixed costs and they have also purchased bandwidth, which is limited in its nature, and so we are not trying to run roughshod over that principle. On the other hand, most of the operators are telling us that we, Google, should build applications that will help them sell their new higher speed services they are spending so much money on."

Schmidt added that he does not care whether the network operators try to get back some of their investment by doing deals with content providers, taking a share of their revenues in return for proving a guaranteed connection for services such as HD video. But he invoked the concept of "net neutrality", which is currently being fiercely debated in the US it calls for all web traffic to be treated equally.

"Google defines net neutrality in the following way: if you have a content category like video we want to make sure that the operator does not favour one video [provider] over another because that would then allow the operator to pick winners in the category," he said. "Imagine a situation where the operator also owned a TV network and discriminated in favour of that TV programming against the other choices, that would not be seen as fair."

Asked whether Google itself would pay, he replied "The answer is, we wouldn't".

His comments followed a warning from Vodafone chief executive Vittorio Colao earlier in the day that the current debate about net neutrality in the US could hamper any potential attempt to raise cash from content providers.

Network companies should be allowed to do deals with content companies who want to ensure a certain quality of service for users. "The solution is to be able to freely deal up and down the value chain," Colao said. "So network operators, content owners, application owners should be able to freely deal and we should try and have competition in all segments."

In Europe, the topic is likely to feature highly as the new telecoms commissioner Neelie Kroes, former EU head of competition, takes over from Viviane Reding. The Vodafone boss said: "It is important that the new [European] Commission, and to some extent the Federal Communications Commission in the US, take a holistic view of the whole value chain and ensure that the rules they put in place are rules that really enable competition at all levels.

Google is apologising after criticism that Buzz invades user privacy - but there are some important lessons to learn

It's been a torrid week for Google Buzz, the activity stream system that was added to Gmail but has since been heavily criticised for invading people's privacy. While the company's chief, Eric Schmidt, tries to woo the phone industry at Mobile World Congress, the Buzz team have been scrabbling to get back on the front foot.

Over the weekend the company made a number of tweaks and now product manager Todd Jackson has been put around a number of news outlets to give a public mea culpa - and suggest that more changes are forthcoming.

Millions of users were "rightfully upset", he told the BBC, adding that the company is "very, very sorry... we know we need to improve things".

Still, it's not giving up all the ground.

"Getting feedback from 20,000 Googlers isn't quite the same as letting Gmail users play with buzz in the wild," he told the Wall Street Journal. "We needed to launch to the public and get feedback from users."

Here's what we know:

- A number of iterations and tweaks have already taken place, and Google plans another set of tune-ups, as early as this week.

- Problems they have acknowledged revolve around 1) exposure of personal information, 2) being unable to see information that's relevant or important, 3) being swamped by updates and 4) what happens for people who decide to opt out altogether.

- Buzz was tested internally by thousands of Google staff, but the company did not run tests outside the company (as it has with some other products). It plans to move outside its own walls for future product tests.

From where I'm standing, there are two separate but related issues here - one about the product, another about the process.

For the product, some of the issues are pretty straightforward tweaks that you would hope get better over time (such as surfacing good information to users). Many of the others are slight tweaks or power user stuff, like the way the system prioritises heavy users, or the noisiness - lots of elements described by Robert Scoble, who was a heavy user of FriendFeed (which is very similar to Buzz).

All these are fixable as the product develops. Little problems may turn people off in the short term, but they don't kill it. I think it's a little unfair to expect great products first time around, and people should be glad that Google is adapting the product through real-world usage (though the fact the company didn't label this a beta test has also worked against it).

But the second issue is one that it's going to find a lot harder to deal with, and that's how Google's processes ended up getting it to this point.

The company hasn't always tested on a purely internal basis, but it did in this case. However, it seems to have taken it by surprise to discover that 20,000 engineers and sales people - all entrenched in the technology industry - do not have the same concerns and interests as 150m email users.

On top of that, of course, there's also the realisation that when you're inside the firewall there are far fewer of those tricky human issues that the Googlebots missed... the abusive ex-husbands, the cheating girlfriends, the anonymous emailers and so on.

One important thing Google needs to learn here is that while your email contacts are a social network, the people it covers are not the same as the circles on Facebook, Flickr or elsewhere. And just because you want to share your photos with friends or family, you don't want to share them with your work colleagues or other email contacts.

And they should make the "off" switch easier to find. If you're going to encourage people to share information about themselves, let them know precisely what that information is and how it will be shared, and how it can be made private again - not hide things behind layers of confusing and unintuitive menus. Facebook did a similar thing with its privacy settings recently - adding complexity and obscurity, while changing the default settings to expose more public information.

Ultimately, Google must realise that it has reached its Microsoft moment (as described last summer by Anil Dash). What is good for it isn't necessarily good for everybody, despite what the people inside the Googleplex may think.

Using and testing your own products - also known as eating your own dog food is something plenty of technology companies do.

But at the end of the day, dog food is still dog food.

Lord Robert Winston discusses his book Bad Ideas? on the dangers humans may face from our inventiveness, Richard Wray gives us the highlights from Mobile World Congress, and social search with Damon Horowitz of Aardvark - a service bought last week by Google.

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Xbox 360/PS3/PC; 39.99; cert 18+; Rebellion/Sega

Plenty of games come to be seen as ahead of their time, but few are afforded the luxury of a remake using the full force of modern technology.

Cambridge developer Rebellion, though, managed to enlist the backing of Sega in order to revisit its 1999 classic, uniting two of the most iconic terror-inducing alien creatures from the movie world the dreadlocked xenomorph from Predator, and the terrifyingly-jawed, acid-spitting eponymous alien which took its original bow from inside John Hurt's stomach.

Rebellion's 1999 original for the PC was notable for being one of the first truly compelling online games and, sure enough, the 2010 version shares that focus, with six multiplayer modes (some team based) while others mix aliens, predators and human marines in Deathmatch free-for-alls. However, this time around there's some decent single-player action to be had, too.

Technically, the single-player side comprises three games, as you can play through aspects of the same story as marine, alien and predator. The story itself is basic humans find a mystical pyramid on an alien-infested planet, and marines are sent to investigate but each of the protagonists brings its own gameplay. As a predator, you can make yourself invisible, jump to designated areas, perform devastating melee attacks, see your surroundings in infra-red vision and perform limited range attacks (the power you require to do so must be recharged by plugging yourself into human machinery).

The aliens are fantastically quick and can run up walls and ceilings, but have to get close to enemies in order to launch attacks. The marines, meanwhile, operate much like the protagonists of any other first-person shoot-em-up, with lashings of firepower but no other discernibly superhuman skills. The end result is three games albeit short ones for the price of one. When playing as alien or predator, you must take a stealthier approach (the alien levels add an element of puzzle-solving, as you work out how to traverse labyrinthine tunnel in order to pick off isolated marines). But perhaps the game's biggest strength is the joy of playing as the predator, with his all-round hunting skills and flashy visual effects.

Whichever species you fancy, you'll find something enjoyable online you can opt for single-species face-offs if you like. But be warned: Aliens vs Predator is very much a game for the hardcore, even though it is much more forgiving than the original demonstrating how the definition of hardcore has imperceptibly shifted, as with all other aspects of gaming, towards the mainstream in the past 11 years. Despite that, if your primary experience of gaming took place on the Wii, you'll find it impossibly frustrating. On the other hand, if you've rinsed everything from Modern Warfare 2 and are seeking a new challenge worthy of your skills, it has come at just the right time.

Rating: 4/5

As expected, the highly-regarded and well reviewed Bioshock 2 has come straight in at No.1

Leisure software charts compiled by GfK Chart Track
2009 ELSPA (UK) Ltd

As church leaders call for a technology fast on pancake day, we review applications from Metro, Freeview and Localpeople

Have you read that church leaders are calling on people to have a "technology fast" for Lent and try a day without their TV, iPod, computer or mobile? We love our technology here on PDA, so instead we're going offer you a feast of iPhone apps.

The iPhone is a high-carb food source, bringing publishers a steady stream of revenue. Those joining the feast this week come from the world of television (Freeview), newspapers (Metro) and hyperlocal websites (Localpeople).

Since launching at the end of January, freesheet Metro's iPhone app has been downloaded 100,000 times, making it No1 in the free news app category as well as catapulting it to the top 10 of free apps overall.

To be honest, Metro's app is a bit frustrating, as allows the user to see tiny versions of the print pages, which they can browse only by flicking through them. According to Associated Newspapers 20.5% of visitors read more than 20 pages per visit, but afterwards they might be so frustrated that they never visit again.

Operations director Stuart Wood still has high hopes for the app. He said that the page model is attractive to advertisers and he expects to make revenue from the iPhone app. "For advertisers and sponsors, the iPhone app offers further benefits, such as links direct from the newspaper editions to their websites, driving customers and revenue streams," he said.

Like Metro, Freeview's iPhone app is free. The digital service launched a free TV guide as an iPhone app "designed to help viewers plan their TV viewing whilst on the go". That is good. Now you don't have to wait for the fight about the remote with your partner, you can argue on the way home! Plan ahead and catch your favorite shows before your partner bags them as Freeview has a lot of content worth fighting about.

Last but not least in today's iPhone feast is Localpeople, the iPhone app launched by the hyperlocal project of the same name. Localpeople is a network of websites for people to connect in the same area. Initially launched to cover the south-west of England the project has grown from 23 to 70 sites (including London).

The iPhone app enables the user to read the local news nearby and browse businesses in their area using Google Maps. It includes a "top places nearby" feature with content provided by real users, not advertisers.

Do you think a technology fast is a good idea? What iPhone apps would you download before you start?

Steve Plunkett explains how milestones such as Project Canvas will bring together broadcast television and online media

There is a real feeling within the TV business that the year ahead looks set to become something of a milestone for our industry. The long-heralded convergence of television, video, broadcast and the internet is reaching a tipping point. But why are things about to change dramatically and what is this likely to mean for programme-making, post production editing, sound, special effects and delivery of TV content?

Looking back at the past decade, highlights that will change the trajectory of the industry in the next 10 years include the steady migration to digital media at all points from acquisition to consumption, the emergence of an increasingly universal transport medium built around the internet protocol (IP) and the ever-expanding reach, capacity and performance of the public internet as a viable platform for rich media distribution, including video.

But the most significant recent innovations have actually happened away from television sets and the broadcast networks that serve them. They have taken place on the PC via the internet. The huge success of iPlayer and similar catchup TV services as well as Hulu, YouTube and many others have changed the expectations of PC-savvy TV viewers. But the next major evolution of the TV experience is only just beginning and the action is moving back from the PC to the big-screen TV.

Project Canvas the joint venture with backers including the BBC, ITV and BT planning to bring video-on-demand content to the TV sets of Freeview and Freesat viewers, in the first instance could be a significant milestone, not just because it has so much potential but because it is representative of a new model of the television experience that is gaining common currency around the world. This is the bringing together of broadcast television, online media (on-demand, streaming, linear and non-linear), communications and applications in a highly integrated "hybrid" manner.

While the hybrid model has been discussed for some time, this year is when it is actually going to meet the public. Analysts are predicting that 20% of televisions sold in Europe in 2010 will be internet enabled. Combine this with the fast-growing range of digital receivers and games consoles that are starting to offer television and video content delivered via broadband and it becomes clear that a new model is emerging.

What then are the implications of this trend for programme-making, post production and delivery?

One fundamental difference is that a hybrid model provides virtually infinite channel capacity as the broadband connection is augmenting the traditional digital receiver. More than this though, it should dramatically lower the cost of entry for content and channel owners as platforms such as Project Canvas are intended to be open.

The use of internet rather than broadcast economics will allow much more specialised content and channels to become viable. Expect to see a large number of "brand channels" coming to these new platforms. Content will also become more fluid across devices and platforms as IP-delivered sessions now reach the TV, PC and mobile device, driving a "three-screen strategy" for channel owners.

In summary, the long tail of television and video can be fully realised in this new environment both technically and commercially. The relationship between linear broadcast content and non-linear media is likely to converge and both will change because of it.

This in turn will both drive new demand and encourage new innovation all the way along the programme-making, post production and delivery chains. History has shown us that periods of disruptive innovation can be very exciting and rewarding for those who try to understand, anticipate and influence what's next.

Here's to an interesting new decade for what used to be called television.

Steve Plunkett is director of customer innovation at Red Bee Media, the TV and web branding and channel management agency, which is attending the Broadcast Video Expo conference this week

An addictive new website that links strangers' webcams is gaining popularity and notoriety

A new website that has been described as "surreal", "addictive" and "frightening" is proving a sensation around the world and attracting a reputation as a haven for no-holds-barred, explicit material.

Chatroulette, which was launched in November, has rocketed in popularity thanks to its simple premise: internet video chats with random strangers.

When users visit the site and switch on their webcams, they are suddenly connected to another, randomly chosen person who is doing precisely the same thing somewhere else in the world.

Once they are logged in together, chatters can do anything they like: talk to each other, type messages, entertain each other or just say goodbye, hit the "next" button and move on in an attempt to find somebody more interesting.

Chatroulette describes itself as a "brand new service for one-on-one text, webcam and microphone-based chat with people around the world", but no one is sure who started the site. The owners did not respond to an attempt to contact them by email, and they have gone to great pains to protect their identities. This may be because Chatroulette appears to operate largely as an unregulated service and, as a result, has rapidly become a haven for exhibitionists and voyeurs.

A large contingent of people seem intent on using the service's string of random connections as the basis for some sort of sex game.

Users regularly describe unwanted encounters with all sorts of unsavoury characters, and it has become the defining aspect of the site for some. Veteran blogger Jason Kottke, who has spent years documenting some of the web's most weird and wonderful corners, tried the site and then wrote about witnessing nudity, sexual activity and strange behaviour.

"I observed several people drinking malt liquor, two girls making out, many, many guys who disconnected as soon as they saw I wasn't female, [and] several girls who disconnected after seeing my face," he said, adding that he also witnessed "three couples having sex and 11 erect penises".

Yet despite the highly offensive nature of much of the site's content, Kottke like thousands of others has been hypnotised by the glimpses the site offers into other people's lives. "Chatroulette is pretty much the best site going on the internet right now," he wrote.

Although the site says that it "does not tolerate broadcasting obscene, offending, pornographic material" and offers users the option to report unsuitable content, the restrictions do not seem to prevent users from broadcasting explicit videos of themselves online.

However, like the chatroom explosion in the late 1990s or the early days of YouTube, spending time inside Chatroulette is becoming a peculiarly modern form of entertainment, particularly popular with students in campuses around the world. In just a couple of months the site has expanded significantly as it tears through universities by word of mouth, spreading virally in a similar manner to sites such as Facebook. This has catapulted the site up the charts and brought it increasing amounts of attention from bloggers. The site had just a handful of visitors at launch, but now boasts more than 10,000 concurrent users at any one time often rising to 16,000 and beyond.

One chatter, who identified himself as Dan from Philadelphia, said that he had been using the site since very early on and that it was largely populated by people looking for any kind of instant amusement. "Everybody wants to be entertained," he said.

He said he regularly goes on the site with a group of friends to hold "Chatroulette dance parties" playing records and dancing in front of the camera in an attempt to bring a smile to the face of any passing visitor.

Although Chatroulette takes the idea of random connections between people to extremes, its raison d' tre is not entirely new. Internet chatrooms have been around for a generation, while an explosion of webcam sites emerged in the late 1990s. Meanwhile, millions of people use video chat services such as Skype every day to talk to their friends and families, and YouTube which was bought by Google in 2006 for $1.65bn is among the biggest sites on the web.

There are also a number of self-broadcasting services online, including blogTV, Justin.tv and qik.com though most provide only one-way connections.

With constant campaigns against cyberbullying and abuse on the internet, there are still questions about potential abuses of Chatroulette and its dangers, but the site's rise is creating interest in many quarters.

Among those wanting to chart its development is Fred Wilson, a New York-based venture capitalist with Union Square Ventures who has invested in dozens of dotcom companies, including Twitter.

While Wilson says the level of "perversion and sexual innuendo" is sky-high and does not suggest that anybody puts money into the service he admits that it taps into something primal about the web.

"The internet is this huge network with over a billion people worldwide on it. Chatroulette feels like a pretty cool way to take a quick trip around that network, meeting people and talking to them."

A Kindle or ebook won't have that 'new book smell' but no one's going to judge you by its cover

Following my blithering about the iPad the other week, I found myself thinking about ebooks. That's my life for you. A rollercoaster. Until recently, I was an ebook sceptic, see; one of those people who harrumphs about the "physical pleasure of turning actual pages" and how ebook will "never replace the real thing". Then I was given a Kindle as a present. That shut me up. Stock complaints about the inherent pleasure of ye olde format are bandied about whenever some new upstart invention comes along. Each moan is nothing more than a little foetus of nostalgia jerking in your gut. First they said CDs were no match for vinyl. Then they said MP3s were no match for CDs. Now they say streaming music services are no match for MP3s. They're only happy looking in the rear-view mirror.

Crackly warm vinyl sounds wonderful, but you can't listen to it on the bus, or squish it into a machine the size of a raisin. And unless your MP3s are encoded at such a low rate that it sounds as though the band's playing woollen instruments in a water tank, and provided you're listening to some halfway decent music in the first place, your brain quickly cancels out any concerns about "lossiness" and gets on with enjoying the music. I've never quite understood the psychological makeup of the self-professed audiophile the sort of person who spends 500 on a gold-plated lead and can't listen to a three-minute pop song without instinctively carrying out a painstaking forensic audit of the sound quality. That's not a music fan. That's a noise- processing unit.

Just as it was easy to dismiss MP3s until you'd test-driven an iPod, so the advantages of an ebook really become apparent only when you use one. Yes, there's no "new book smell", no folding the pages over, and if you drop it in the bath you've ruined it but on the other hand, the whole "electronic ink" malarkey actually works (so you don't feel as if you're squinting at words made of light), downloading new books is easy, and it can store about 1,500 titles; approximately 1,499 more than I could comfortably carry otherwise. It can also read books aloud, which is great if, like me, you've spent years wondering how the great works of literature might sound if recited by a depressed robot.

But the single biggest advantage to the ebook is this: no one can see what you're reading. You can mourn the loss of book covers all you want, but once again I say to you: no one can see what you're reading. This is a giant leap forward, one that frees you up to read whatever you want without being judged by the person sitting opposite you on the tube. OK, so right now they'll judge you simply for using an ebook because you will look like a showoff early-adopter techno-nob if you use one on public transport until at least some time circa 2012 but at least they're not sneering at you for enjoying The Rats by James Herbert.

The lack of a cover immediately alters your purchasing habits. As soon as I got the ebook, I went on a virtual shopping spree, starting with the stuff I thought I should read Wolf Hall, that kind of thing but quickly found myself downloading titles I'd be too embarrassed to buy in a shop or publicly read on a bus. Not pornography, but something far worse: celebrity autobiographies.

And coverlessness works both ways: pretentious wonks will no longer be able to impress pretty students on the bus by nonchalantly/ demonstratively reading The Journals of Soren Kierkegaard, at least until someone brings out an ebook device with a second screen on the back which displays the cover of whatever it is you're reading for the benefit of attractive witnesses (or more likely, boldly displays the cover of The Journals of Soren Kierkegaard while you guiltily breeze through It's Not What You Think by Chris Evans).

I like the notion of this blunt technological camouflage, where it looks as if you're doing one thing while you're doing the exact opposite. Here's another idea. Modern 3D cinema technology works by ensuring your left eye sees one image while your right sees another. But they could, presumably, issue one pair of specs comprising two left-eye lenses (for children to wear), and another with two right-eye lenses (for adults). This would make it possible for parents to take their offspring to the cinema and watch two entirely different films at the same time. So while the kiddywinks are being placated by an animated CGI doodle about rabbits entering the Winter Olympics or something, their parents will be bearing witness to some apocalyptically degrading pornography. The tricky thing would be making the soundtracks match. Those cartoon rabbits would have to spend a lot of time slapping their bellies and moaning.

Anyway: eBooks. They're the future. The only thing I'd do to improve them is to include an emergency button that automatically sums the entire book up in a sentence if you couldn't be arsed to finish it, or if your plane starts crashing and you want to know whodunit before exploding over the sea. Ideally it'd shriek the summary aloud, bellowing something like "THE BUTLER DID IT" for potboilers, or maybe "THE SCULPTRESS COMES TO TERMS WITH THE DEATH OF HER FATHER" for highbrow fiction. Which means you could effectively skip the reading process entirely and audibly digest the entire contents of the British Library in less than a month. That's ink-and-paper dead, right there.

Photoshop, the ubiquitous photo manipulation program that is 20 years old, is now so popular it's a verb in common usage

You're browsing the online catalogue for Heine, the German interiors-and- everything-else shop, when a "secretary table" catches your eye. The white one looks hideous, but there's a brown one so you click the picture to see it in more detail. It looks nice, but there's something unsettling about the picture. The table looks fine, but the chair behind it somehow manages also to have a leg in front of the table. It's interior design, as done by MC Escher.

Except this isn't the fine artwork of Escher it's lousy gruntwork by someone using Photoshop, the image manipulation program that turns 20 next Friday. The image is just one of a whole stream that have been sent to the Photoshop Disasters blog since it started in March 2008. An eerily unreal, doll-like Ashlee Simpson graced its first post.

Photoshop has, like Google, transcended its origins in the world of computing, and become a verb. But whereas "to Google" is almost always used positively to express usefulness, Photoshopping is almost always a term of abuse: "That picture was Photo shopped" has become a shorthand way of saying it is untrustworthy and misleading (Adobe, the company that sells Photoshop, decries its use as a verb: "It must never be used as a common verb or a noun," it tuts. Too late.)

Examples of its use, or misuse, are legion: a faked image of John Kerry and Jane Fonda apparently sharing a platform at an anti-Vietnam war rally which dragged at Kerry's 2004 US presidential bid; a picture of missiles being fired at Lebanon by an Israeli jet which turned out to have been "tweaked" by the photographer - the caption suggested that missiles were being fired, while the (single) item being let off by the plane was an anti-missile flare; Kate Winslet's legs magically elongating when she appeared on the front cover of the February 2003 edition of GQ.

The defence put up by Dylan Jones, GQ's editor, of the Winslet images was telling. He said that her picture had been manipulated "no more than any other cover star", and that "practically every photo you see in a magazine will have been digitally altered in this way . . . these pictures are not a million miles away from what she really looks like". In other words, that's not actually what she looks like. And, Jones is saying, we should be used to it by now.

Altering images is certainly nothing new. The technique of "retouching" photos and fiddling with negatives has a long and inglorious history dating back to the 1860s, and one stirring picture of General Ulysses S Grant astride a horse in front of his troops at City Point, Virginia, during the American civil war. It turned out to be a compo site of three pictures, in which the body isn't Grant's at all.

Stalin's infamous purges also included photographic ones, of all the political figures who had fallen out of his favour. Visual trickery has peppered politics ever since: in 2007, the then culture secretary James Purnell was grafted into a picture of the opening of a new hospital.

But it was Photoshop that made altering images routine. It began circumspectly as a program written by Thomas Knoll, who, in the autumn of 1987, was doing in a PhD in computer vision but for fun wrote a program to display images with grey in them on a black-and-white monitor. Knoll called the program Display, writing it on his Mac Plus computer. Then his brother John, who worked at George Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic company, which did the visual effects for the Star Wars films, noticed its potential. They collaborated, bought a Macintosh II capable of displaying colours! and set to work; the program's name mutated until they hit on Photoshop.

In September 1988, Adobe Systems signed a licence to distribute it wisely, the Knolls took a royalties deal that made them very rich. And on 19 February 1990, Photoshop 1.0 became available. At the time it fitted on to a single floppy disk nowadays it takes a DVD although it had, even then, fallen foul of piracy after the Knolls demonstrated it to some Apple engineers, who "shared" the demo disks that were left behind with a few hundred of their closest friends. Nowadays, Photoshop is reckoned to be one of the most pirated programs in the world, behind Microsoft's Windows. Its high price around 560 is indicative of the fact it has no real rivals.

Photoshop quickly became embedded in computer culture. Apple would try to prove its computers were faster than those running Windows by holding "Photoshop bake-offs" during Steve Jobs's keynote addresses: a Windows machine and an Apple one would run through an automated process to tweak and manipulate an image in exactly the same way. Oddly enough, the Apple machine always won.

Photoshop has even created its own two-player sport, "layer tennis". The first player "serves" an image: the opponent then alters it and sends it back; the first player continues the process. Done in public, with commentary, it takes on its own strange allure.

Do not, though, expect to join the ranks of elite players immediately. Seeing Photoshop running on a computer is like viewing the cockpit of a 747; what, you wonder, do all those buttons do? Many experts say they have taught themselves how to use it over a decade or more. Creative technology consultant Richard Elen describes it as less like flying a plane, more like dealing with a huge house some people never visit all the rooms. "I probably use 50%-70% of what the apps can do," Elen says. "There are features I seldom, if ever, use. Others I use all the time clone tools, for instance [which copy an item inside an image] and I think I'm fairly adept at them."

Russell Quinn, a computer scientist and self-taught Photoshop user, says it's "akin to picking up a guitar for the first time. The whole world is there for the taking, but it's difficult to get started." He thinks two years is a reasonable timescale to get on top of it.

Steve Caplin, who has done photomontages for the Guardian for 20 years, recalls his first use of the program: "An illustration in Punch of the Queen. Photoshop was very much simpler then, but it had real power." He too has featured on the Photoshop Disasters blog "A missing shoulder on the cover of my book, ironically called How to Cheat in Photoshop!" and says he feels real sympathy for those who have run into trouble with the program.

"It's all too easy to overlook something that's then blindingly obvious when it's printed. It's just like spelling mistakes in print, really."

This article was amended on 12 February 2010. The original referred to a case where a photo of an Israeli jet firing one missile was "tweaked" to show more than one. The reference has been corrected because it was the photo caption that suggested missiles were being fired, while the projectile shown was an anti-missile flare.

Does the Microsoft co-founder who pushed tablet computers back in 2001 think that the iPad is the perfect version? And what about the iPhone, which competes with Windows Mobile?

Bill Gates has said in an interview with the news site Bnet that he doesn't think the iPad is a dramatic move compared to what Microsoft has done with tablet computers - but admitted that he is envious of the iPhone's features.

Interviewed by Brent Schlender, Gates - who said in 2001 that he thought tablet computers would be the predominant form of computers sold "within five years" (but saw that prediction fail), was lukewarm at best.

"You know, I'm a big believer in touch and digital reading, but I still think that some mixture of voice, the pen and a real keyboard - in other words a netbook - will be the mainstream on that," he told Schlender.

Gates has long been a proponent of voice recognition technology for computers: in 1998 he tried to demonstrate a voice-drive system at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Seattle, and forecast that by 2011 computers would be able to recognise their owners' faces and voices.

But the iPad, which is a completely touch-driven system, using fingers rather than an easily-misplaced stylus for its control - just like the iPhone - does not impress him in the same way.

"So, it's not like I sit there and feel the same way I did with iPhone where I say, 'Oh my God, Microsoft didn't aim high enough.' It's a nice reader, but there's nothing on the iPad I look at and say, 'Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.'"

Gates's admission that he looked at the iPhone, unveiled three years ago in January 2007 and which went on sale in June that year, and thought that "Microsoft didn't aim high enough" is a startling revelation from the man who drove the company to focus on mobile.

The iPhone has leapfrogged Windows Mobile in share of the smartphone market since its launch; Microsoft has not released figures for the number of licences sold for the past financial year, but it has seen high-profile defections by companies such as HTC to Google's Android mobile operating system.

The iPad has garnered great excitement from publishers and TV companies which see the possibility of selling more content through online stores akin to the iTunes Music Store and App Store.

However Cambridge City Council has denied reports that it was planning to buy a number of iPads for its councillors in order to save paper. It called the reports in the local and national press incorrect, and implied that it is instead looking at Windows-based tablets.

As the web becomes a bigger part of our everyday lives, are we giving away too much of our private information?

Tomorrow night's episode of The Virtual Revolution, The Cost of Free, looks at the dark corporate underbelly of the web, and how it's transforming our notions of privacy and culture in the 21st century. It's also the one that excites me the most.

I am a dystopian from way back, and I'm both thrilled and terrified to see how we have been complicit in our own 1984. What does Google have on us? How is Amazon's recommendation system contradicting the most powerful opportunity for new inforamtion that the web offers serendipity and manipulating us into homogenous proles for its own benefit?

As assistant producer, Jo Wade, explains in an article for the BBC:

Every day in Britain millions of searches are carried out on Google for free. Every month we spend millions of hours on Facebook for free and read millions of articles from free newspapers. But now look at it the other way round.

Every day Google gathers millions of search terms that help them refine their search system and give them a direct marketing bonanza that they keep for months.

Every week Facebook receives millions of highly personal status updates that are kept forever and are forming the basis of direct advertising revenue.

Every month free newspapers plant and track a cookie tracking device on your computer that tells them what your range of interests are and allows them to shape their adverts and in the future, even content around you. So you're not just being watched, you're being traded. The currency has changed.

The Virtual Revolution airs on BBC2 at 9:15pm Saturday

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

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."

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

Peter Ferdinando, who stars in new film Tony, started out with a Commodore 64, but now wants a motorcycle like Tron

What's your favourite piece of technology, and how has it improved your life?
I've found that everyone around me has got one, and so I've had to submit, and I've found it a godsend it's the iPhone.

When was the last time you used it, and what for?
This morning I used it to check my emails.

What additional features would you add if you could?
I think the battery life is not very strong I find that over the course of the day it just doesn't last and I have to find somewhere to charge it.

Do you think it will be obsolete in 10 years' time?
Technology moves so fast, I'd say probably. We may have a chip implanted in the back of our heads or something.

What always frustrates you about technology in general?
For me, when things go wrong and I don't know how to fix it.

Is there any particular piece of technology that you have owned and hated?
My first computer was a Commodore 64 I'm showing my age and that was an awful thing. But it was revolutionary.

If you had one tip about getting the best out of new technology, what would it be?
Not being extremely technical, I would say keep the same password for everything. I'm always forgetting passwords.

Do you consider yourself to be a Luddite or a nerd?
In between, I think.

What's the most expensive piece of technology you've ever owned?
My Triumph Daytona 675 motorcycle.

Mac or PC, and why?
I have a PC, but I would prefer a Mac. I can see the difference by a long way. I just haven't got around to getting a Mac yet. But I will make the step up.

Do you still buy physical media such as CDs and DVDs, or do you download? What was your last purchase?
I do both, but I do like to buy CDs and DVDs; I do like to have the physical object in my hand. The last thing I bought was Working on a Dream, by Bruce Springsteen I'm a big Springsteen fan.

Robot butlers a good idea or not?
I'd like to maybe try the idea to confuse them I'd find that quite amusing.

What piece of technology would you most like to own?
The Tron Legacy motorcycle, from the new Tron movie. If that was real, I'd want one if I could afford it.

Peter Ferdinando stars in the British thriller Tony, which is now showing across the UK

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.

Jack Arnott briefly got his hands on the hotly-anticipated title and chatted with two of the game's creators

Next month, Final Fantasy XIII will be released to great fanfare around the gaming world. Expectations are simply huge for a series that has consistently set the standards for role-playing games over the past 20 years. I was allowed a first play of the game a few weeks ago today the embargo lifts and I can share with you some of my impressions.

First off, the game looks absolutely incredible. Breathtaking. If you have a large HDTV and you want to make the most of it, this is the game for you. And I'm not just talking cutscenes - one section shown to us featured the controlled character walking around a huge plain, while in the distance a huge dinosaur type creature grazed. I don't think I'd be exaggerating to say the experience was something close to watching Jurassic Park.

Swivelling the camera around also showed the incredible detail they've managed even during regular gameplay. These are some of the most advanced facial representations I've seen, and you can pick out individual hairs and the shine on the buttons on their jackets. I'm going to stick my neck out and say that, once released, FFXIII will be graphically superior to any other game available on this generation of consoles.

Once my jaw had been picked up from the floor however, the small matter of actually playing the game came under my scrutiny.

The combat system's been tweaked yet again, this time pitched roughly as a sped-up version of the one in Final Fantasy VII - somewhat similar to that featured in FFVII Crisis Core on the PSP. It is turn based, but the balance is tipped towards action over tactical gameplay which may not please RPG purists.

Old favourites such as summons, looking better than ever, and potions, spells etc remain, as well as plenty of slightly daft looking highly-coiffured baddies. It certainly feels like a Final Fantasy game.

In the first 20 minutes of the game that I got to play, it was rather cut-scene heavy. I counted 9 or 10 in this inital stage alone. If this is indicative at all of the game as whole, it could prove frustrating for those (like me) who easily get impatient or irritated by the cheesy dialogue and bubblegum characters. Thankfully though you can skip them - although I'm sure Square would rather we didn't.

The prospect of side-missions and exploration is handled mainly using a (once again) Crisis Core-like system of picking missions from savepoints. An example shown was a savepoint in a large plain where you could take on the task of slaying a certain amount of a type of creature for money and exp points. I fear this could get somewhat repetitive, but for many it will be preferable to random battles, something that a lot of gamers found pretty annoying.

Meanwhile, the main game is split up into chapters, and around 50-60 hours of gameplay is to be expected to run through the main storyline.

There are some really nice touches I noticed during the initial presentation. For starters, there won't be any more hammering the X button to cycle through conversations with townsfolk and the like. The 'Nautilus' shopping mall section of the game had the character simply overhearing conversations of passers by to retrieve information.

The 'paradigm shift' system too seemed a clever way of handling combat. You can assign a compatriot to a 'Medic' or 'Commando' role and they'll automatically heal you or fight in a certain way - no more scrolling to Curaga hundreds of times in every boss battle.

I must admit though that nothing I saw had the charm that many feel has been lost from earlier outings of the series - remember Cloud's cross-dressing? It's going to be a big ask (if you'll allow the football parlance) for the game to live up to the quality of its graphics, and for a lot of us those FFVII glory days will never be recaptured. Early signs look promising though, so keep your eyes peeled for our review next month.

Interview

I had a brief opportunity to put some questions to producer Yoshinori Kitase and director Motomu Toriyama (via their translator) - all questions are answered by both conferring with each other, unless specified.

Could you introduce FF13 for our readers?
It's part of a series, and the series has been going on for 22 years. This is the 13th numbered title. It's based in a fantasy universe but this time we've used sci-fi elements as well. For the first time the series will be available for high-definition consoles like Xbox 360 and PS3, therefore we're very proud of the high quality graphics. The story is based on a really 'human' drama.

Which other Final Fantasy games is FF13 similar to?
It probably has the most similarities with FF7, it has magical spells but it's also quite futuristic. You can imagine a more evolved version of FF7, perhaps.

What games was FF13 influenced by?
When it comes to the battle scenes, maybe Call of Duty 4? Atmosphere on the battlefield, that sort of thing. We took some inspiration from that series.

Do either of you have a particular favourite Final Fantasy game?
(Toriyama) FF10 was my favourite. It was developed by the same team, and was strictly story driven. Like FF13 there was a lot of humanity in the story.

What sets FF apart from other RPG series?
Maybe two things, one is obviously the series is very good at telling a story - all the movie scenes are excellent, of a very high quality. Also, when we create characters and their movements, obviously we use motion capture like most, but also they're each meticulously created and finished off by different animators, so graphically it's really excellent as well.

How long does it take to develop a game like this?
The game was originally meant to be for PS2, so from that particular point it's been about 5 years. Since switching to high-def consoles we had to start from scratch with some elements, so it's been about 3 and a half years since then.

Normally in the west we have to wait a long time for Japanese games to be overdubbed. How did you manage to get this game released so quickly?
From day one we've been trying to create both versions simultaneously. Our CEO was very keen to make the timelag to be as small as possible. When we came to Europe to promote FF10 there were lots of questions and complaints about always having to wait such a long time, so this time we've done our best

Are there any plans to use downloadable content in FF13?
The ideas have not been finalised as yet.

Will there be any differences between the Xbox and PS3 versions?
The content is exactly the same, although Xbox users will have to use 3 different discs. They'll only have to swap discs twice during the game.

What's new in FF13 that sets it apart from the rest of the series, apart from the high-def graphics?
The series has always been known to present a new battle system in each work - it's what fans expect. We have been using ATB (Action Time Battle) - this game uses the same system but makes it speedier so that it plays more like an action game.

Final Fantasy XIII will be released in the UK on 9 March

Departure of Owen Van Natta, the social networking site's chief executive, calls into question Rupert Murdoch's digital strategy

Days after MySpace, the struggling social network site, replaced its chief executive, a leading media pundit has said that interference from its owner, Rupert Murdoch, has left the business in a state of "total desperation".

Last week the site, which was bought by Murdoch's News Corporation in 2005, made the shock announcement that Owen Van Natta was stepping down as chief executive after less than a year in the job.

Since then, reports have suggested that his departure was the result of tension between Van Natta and Jonathan Miller, the former chief executive of AOL who now operates as the head of News Corp's digital businesses.

But Michael Wolff, author of The Man Who Owns the News, a biography of Murdoch, said that the roots of MySpace's problems were much deeper. "It certainly is not [Van Natta's] fault he inherited a business in which you could only manage decline," he said.

Instead, he suggested, the reshuffle is indicative of a wider panic over the way in which News Corp deals with its online businesses.

"The thing that's going on at News Corp right now is total, total desperation over this digital stuff," he added. "Rupert is saying, 'What's going on with MySpace? What's happening? Why isn't this working?' It's impossible to explain to him that it's not working because it's over, because this is the way the technology business goes. Once it's past, it's really past. There is almost no way to get that back."

Five years ago, Murdoch surprised the media industry by spending $580m on MySpace, at that time an up-and-coming force in the rapidly expanding business of social networking. With the acquisition, News Corp believed it had acquired a significant lead in online media through a site that boasted a huge following and good relations with the music industry.

While the site has generated plenty of cash for News Corp at one point, advertising on the home page alone was valued at $1m a day a series of missteps has left it in turmoil, struggling for success and flailing in the wake of its rivals.

Competition has chiefly come from Facebook, which first overtook MySpace in popularity last summer and has gone on to significantly extend its lead since then.

Figures from comScore, the internet traffic analysts, suggest that MySpace has about 57 million users in the US, down from a peak of more than 75 million. Facebook, meanwhile, has experienced incredible expansion in the past 18 months and now boasts more than 400 million users worldwide.

Shift of power

While that shift of power has left the site looking like second best, it has had other, material implications: last year Google chopped the value of a contract with MySpace to provide search services by $100m after the social network missed its traffic targets.

Faced with this growing litany of problems, Murdoch brought in Miller, who left AOL in 2006, to oversee MySpace and News Corp's other digital businesses. Once installed, Miller acted quickly, first removing the website's co-founder Chris DeWolfe as chief executive, then bringing in Van Natta a former Facebook executive to refocus the business.

With a new executive team in place, the company sold off a number of smaller properties that it had acquired and slashed more than 700 jobs worldwide, nearly half its total workforce.

One person familiar with Miller's approach is Jason Calacanis, who sold his online publishing company to AOL in 2005. He says that, under the circumstances, bringing in a new chief executive with a reputation for deal-making was a mistake, but that the company could still rebound.

"Jon is a really great manager of product people, and the people MySpace needs right now are product people," Calacanis said.

"It was probably, in hindsight, a misstep to put a deal person into a company that needs product leadership. But they took quick action to reverse that, which I give them credit for."

However, history is not on the side of MySpace. Social networking has been a graveyard for the media industry, with users happy to leave behind sites that fail to continue innovating, in favour of younger, faster rivals. Friends Reunited, bought by ITV in 2005 for 120m, was sold off last year for a mere 25m, while AOL is said to be looking to offload Bebo, which it bought for $850m in 2008.

Faced with struggles across News Corp's digital businesses, Murdoch and his lieutenants have begun taking an aggressive approach, calling for news sites to charge readers for content and labelling Google a "parasite". He aims to put his newspapers, including the Times and the Sun, behind a paywall, something described by the co-founder of Twitter, Biz Stone, as a vain attempt to "put the genie back in the bottle".

Wolff said that this was a result of Murdoch's fundamental misunderstanding of the differences between the technology and media industries. While the 78-year-old mogul craves leadership in the digital world, Wolff suggested that a career spent building traditional media businesses has left Murdoch struggling to understand the speed and innovation required on the internet.

"He absolutely has no idea," he said. "If people really quite understood how little feeling he has for this business, they would fall down laughing or crying."

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."

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

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."

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.

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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Bad news for moms, dads, dieticians and much-missed pets as Academy Awards call time on everlasting speeches

Bad news for moms, dads, directors, producers, agents, friends, lovers, deceased grandparents, dialogue coaches, yoga teachers, therapists, dieticians, inspirational teachers and much-missed pets.

The organisers of this year's Academy Awards have called time on that appallingly fascinating Oscar-night staple, the everlasting and tearful acceptance speech in which several telephone directories of names are thanked as an actor grapples with the twin shock of industry recognition and performing without a script.

Winners at next month's ceremony will instead be instructed to give two speeches: a pithy onstage one explaining the personal significance of their Oscar triumph, and a backstage one delivered to a "thank you cam" in which they can express their gratitude to anyone and everyone as unrestrainedly as they wish.

The backstage video will then be posted on the web for winners to share with their fans, peers and loved ones through email or Facebook.

The idea, said Oscars co-producer Bill Mechanic, was quite simple the elimination of what he termed "the single most hated thing on the show".

News of the initiative was broken at the annual Oscar nominees lunch in Beverly Hills yesterday.

Guests at the event including George Clooney, Sandra Bullock, Meryl Streep and Jeff Bridges were given tips on how best to use a 45-second acceptance speech and instructed to "share your passion on what the Oscar means to you", rather than embark on a marathon of thank-yous.

To hammer their point home, the ceremony's producers resorted to aversion therapy by playing a video of past winners' thoughts from the podium.

The tape included the speech that Ren e Zellweger unleashed after lifting the best supporting actress Oscar in 2004 for her role as a tough farm girl in Anthony Minghella's Cold Mountain.

She plucked a sheet of notes from her clutch bag before taking to the stage and memorably paying tribute to, among others: the academy; her fellow nominees; Charles Frazier for writing the novel on which the film was based; the film's producers, cast and crew; director Minghella for his "masterpiece"; her friends at Miramax; her fellow actors Vincent D'Onofrio and Tom Cruise for, respectively, "teaching me how to work" and demonstrating that "kindness and success are not mutually exclusive"; and her glorious family, especially "my immigrant mom and dad", her brother and his new wife.

The two-speech directive will not be the only break with tradition this year. Impatient winners keen to display their award prominently or put it to more modest use as a doorstop or bathroom ornament will be able to take their fully engraved statuette home after the ceremony.

Until now, the victorious parties have had to wait weeks for the academy to inscribe their names on the gold-plated trophies they are handed out without nameplates as the winners' identities are kept a closely-guarded secret.

This year, winners will be able to get their nameplates affixed to their Oscars at the gala governors ball straight after the ceremony. RS Owens, the company which makes the statuettes, will produce and engrave 197 nameplates one for each nominee in every category.

The engraving will include the nominee's name, category, film title and year.

"An Oscar statuette just isn't complete until a nameplate is attached," said Tom Sherak, the president of the academy.

"The governors ball is the perfect place for Oscar winners to add that final touch as they celebrate their accomplishment and the year's movies."

Once the winners have been announced, the unlucky runners-up will suffer the additional indignity of having their nameplates recycled.

Xbox 360/PS3/Wii; 49.99; cert 12+; Activision

Van Halen's spandex-clad brand of cock-rock has never gone down particularly well in the UK even in their mid-80s pomp they only had two top-10 hits so Activision's decision to slap a premium price tag on their third band-specific Guitar Hero game (following on from Aerosmith and Metallica) feels slightly strange.

Alas, that's not the only puzzling decision. The track list is piecemeal and concentrated very much on the early years of the band with the Sammy Hagar era, all 11 years of it, airbrushed out of history. Unlike Guitar Hero Aerosmith and Metallica, there are no behind-the-scenes videos and interviews. The latter was clearly made by diehard fans, with considerable input from the band members themselves if the behind-the-scenes video and "Metallifacts" are anything to go by. That game revels in its source material: even the in-game menus are designed with the band's look in mind. No such devotion can be found in Van Halen.

Most disappointingly for those hoping to stretch their virtual spandex, the avatars of David Lee Roth and Eddie Van Halen are represented as they are now: somewhat plump-looking 50-somethings who, judging by their hobbling around stage, are suffering from advanced arthritis. Next to them on bass you have pudgy young 17-year-old Wolfgang, heir to the Van Halen rock empire: though not, alas for him, its bone structure. The band's earlier rock god personas can be unlocked later in the game, but only after you've endured a distracting amount of digitalised middle-aged chest hair.

As well as the 25 Van Halen numbers, you can rock your way through a further 19 songs from bands supposedly influenced by them though some of these choices are just odd. Do Weezer really cite David Lee Roth as a formative influence? These tracks were apparently chosen by young Wolfgang, apparently himself a Guitar Hero fan, but you get the distinct impression the choice had more to do with licensing than music.

Despite the faults, there's still a decent guitar game lurking in here: no Guitar Hero game can ever, to my mind, be a total washout. As usual you can choose your mode of rock: picking your instrument and playing alone or in band mode. The "expert" level is as RSI-inducing as ever: Spanish Fly and Hot for Teacher in particular, and a long set list will have you nursing your aching wrists. But the problem with this game is it's neither one thing or the other: for the Guitar Hero/ Rock Band fan, there are no innovations at all, and for the Van Halen devotee, it's just not enough love on big-haired display.

Rating: 2/5

Wii/DS; 39.99; cert 3+; Disney/Griptonite

Traditionally, Disney's video game offerings have fallen into two camps: outstanding, genre-defining titles of the highest quality, or limp rush-releases pegged to whichever film they're currently promoting.

Sadly, for those seeing the company's name and visualising such classics as Castle Of Illusion, Mickey Mania and Kingdom Hearts, here's another for the miserably long list making up the latter category. Developer Griptonite, with several middling film-based titles to their name, emerge with their iffy reputation relatively unaltered here.

The game is set in the immediate aftermath of the film, with Tiana looking back to and beyond her amphibian-based ordeals to a future as a New Orleans restaurateur. The arc of the game sees her undertaking a series of challenges which then tenuously result in cosmetic improvements being applied to her dining room's interior. Inevitably, these take the form of a suite of mini-games, taking in rhythm-based tasks, click-and-drop errands, Junior Krypton Factor-style memory puzzles, plus the obligatory "Eh? How did I win that?" chop and wave affairs. All but a few of the 25+ games can be played by up to four players, and more is certainly the merrier where younger gamers are concerned, as the computer-controlled characters are unforgivingly clinical at times.

It's disappointing, attached as it is to a gorgeous, hand-drawn animated film, that the graphics are occasionally quite clumsy. Figures are frequently jagged, and viewing the jerky cut-scenes it's easy to forget that you're looking at a current-gen release. In addition, while the game retains much of the talent from the big-screen, voice acting is at times wooden, and lip-synching is half-arsed at best. More of an issue though, the dialogue is wearyingly repetitive after an hour's play, the frequent references to beignets and gumbo grate appallingly.

A New Orleans-set title was unlikely to be a letdown on the music front, and happily there's a pleasing mix of Dixieland jazz throughout indeed, some of the better challenges on offer tend to be those which make use of the soundtrack. While these never threaten to be on a par with the best rhythm titles around, they're a pleasant antidote to, in particular, the excruciating memory games.

Controls, while helpfully signposted before each game, lack intuitiveness, and all too often gameplay takes the form of a mad flail with the remote as you try and remember if the particular game you're playing uses the A or B button, or a particular stirring or wafting motion to perform the task at hand.

It generally comes across as a Raving Rabbids-lite for the under 9s, and there's little here that hasn't been done far better in Ubisoft's series. Still, for plastic tiara'd fans of the film happy enough gathering like-minded friends to manoeuvre their favourite characters around for an hour or two, there's enough here to while away a few play sessions until the next Disney juggernaut rolls around.

Rating: 2/5