Chinese authorities have not commented on NY Times reports that intelligence has linked the hacking strikes to two schools

A spate of internet attacks that hit Google and other companies have been traced to two schools in China, according to reports but Chinese sources have responded by denying knowledge of the strikes.

According to the New York Times, security experts investigating a string of hacking attacks on American companies have linked them to origins in mainland China.

The story, which quoted anonymous sources close to the investigation, said that the so-called Project Aurora attacks appeared to originate from Shanghai Jiaotong University and the Lanxiang Vocational School in Shandong province.

Jiaotong is well regarded as a centre for computer studies, and has an extensive information security programme that boasts its "high-level talent" and has links to military research projects.

Lanxiang, around 250 miles south of Beijing, is a prominent school that has developed some reputation for developing computer skills.

The report suggested that intelligence agents working on the case had linked the strikes to a specific class taught at Lanxiang.

While the Chinese authorities have not commented on the report, a female member of staff from Lanxiang told the Guardian that the school was not aware of the attacks on Google.

"We did not know Google was hacked before the New York Times contacted us when they called, we told them we know nothing but they still made the story up," she said. "Our students are middle school graduates, and we train them to use software like Photoshop. If our students are so skilled they can hack Google, then what are they here for?"

She also urged caution against drawing the conclusion that Chinese schools were training hackers to attack American targets.

"I hope the media can be cautious about this report," she said. "We don't want to worsen US-China relations or draw national attention."

Google, which has continued investigating the source of the attacks since going public, did not respond to a request for comment.

It has been more than a month since the internet company revealed that it had been targeted in a series of strikes aimed at uncovering personal details of Chinese dissidents and stealing elements of its software.

At the time the company threatened to stop censoring its Chinese search engine in protest at the attacks, which it called "highly sophisticated".

"This information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech," said the company at the time. "These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China."

The company has not yet acted on its threat to stop censoring its search results a move which would be likely to result in its expulsion from the country but has drawn support from the US government.

Google and a number other companies hit by the Aurora attacks have been investigating its origins, and have linked up with America's National Security Agency as they attempt to pinpoint the culprits.

It is not the first time that such attacks have been attributed to Chinese hackers.

In 2007 investigators said they were tracking the activities of a notorious gang of Chinese hackers known as Titan Rain, linked to the military and responsible for raids against western governments including the US defence department, British Foreign Office and the Houses of Parliament.

And yesterday it was revealed that another attack had struck around 75,000 computers worldwide in an attempt to steal sensitive personal and financial data. The so-called Kneber botnet consisting of millions of PCs that had been infected with a piece of malicious software struck nearly 2,500 companies and government agencies around the world.

Although the extent of the damage was not clear, experts suggested that the strike which is believed to have been in operation for over a year was far broader than the targeted attack on Google and others.

"While Operation Aurora shed light on advanced threats from sponsored adversaries, the number of compromised companies and organisations pales in comparison to this single botnet," said Amit Yoran of NetWitness.

About 75,000 personal computers in almost 2,500 companies and government agencies worldwide have been caught in a botnet based on a new variant of the ZeuS Trojan

About 75,000 personal computers in almost 2,500 companies and government agencies across the globe have been caught in a botnet uncovered by a researcher at the US-based NetWitness network forensics firm. Hackers were able to collect logins and passwords for Facebook, Yahoo, Hotmail and other accounts, including online banking sites. They were also able to access some corporate servers used to store confidential data, including one used for processing credit-card payments.

Companies reportedly attacked include Paramount Pictures, Merck, Juniper Networks and Cardinal Health in the US, but affected computers in more than 200 countries including Egypt, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Turkey. The Wall Street Journal reported that Merck and Cardinal Health said they had isolated and contained the problem, and Merck said "no sensitive information was compromised".

NetWitness's Alex Cox uncovered the botnet while installing monitoring software to help a large corporation deal with cyberattacks. He found a 75GB cache of data generated by the botnet, which NetWitness has called Kneber after a username linking the infected systems. NetWitness said in a statement: "Disturbingly, the data was only a one-month snapshot of data from a campaign that has been in operation for more than a year."

The PCs in question, almost all running Microsoft Windows XP or Vista, had been compromised by a new variant of the well-known ZeuS Trojan, which is one of the "top five" in its class. Cox told the SearchSecurity.com site that the variant used in the latest attacks had a detection rate of less than 10% among antivirus software. The botnet communication was also shielded from detection by existing intrusion detection systems.

"This is not about a single piece of malware on 75,000 machines, it's about how bad the security industry is responding to these incidents and how bad the problem is," said Cox.

SearchSecurity.com said "the cybercriminals exploited vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash as well as holes in Adobe Reader and Acrobat using malicious PDF applications in spear phishing attacks, according to Cox. They also used exploit kits to set up drive-by attacks to infect victims."

The discovery of the Kneber botnet follows publicity about attempts to penetrate Google and other companies, dubbed Operation Aurora. In this case, the botnet command centre appears to have been in Germany, while ZeuS appears to be mainly the work of cybercriminals based in Eastern Europe. ZeuS is often used to collect data from online forms, including names, dates of birth, and account names and passwords, and one special feature is that it can work with the Firefox web browser.

Amit Yoran, chief executive of NetWitness and former Director of the National Cyber Security Division, said: "While Operation Aurora shed light on advanced threats from sponsored adversaries, the number of compromised companies and organizations pales in comparison to this single botnet. These large-scale compromises of enterprise networks have reached epidemic levels. Cyber criminal elements, like the Kneber crew quietly and diligently target and compromise thousands of government and commercial organizations across the globe. Conventional malware protection and signature based intrusion detection systems are by definition inadequate for addressing Kneber or most other advanced threats."

NetWitness also said that "over half the machines infected with Kneber also were infected with Waledac, a peer to peer botnet." This suggests some level of co-existence if not active cooperation between cybercriminals, where a PC could continue to operate in one botnet even if the other was found and removed. Earlier this month, there was a small "botnet war" after the upstart Spy Eye appeared with a feature called Kill Zeus. This aims to remove ZeuS from the victim's PC, giving Spy Eye exclusive access. However, by far the biggest and best botnet is still Conficker, with more than 5m PCs.

The proposed link-up between Microsoft and Yahoo has been approved by European regulators, paving the way for the two companies to combine their search engines and take on Google together.

Senior figures said that plans to implement the 10-year agreement, which was first announced last summer, were now underway after the European Commission said it did not believe the deal would harm consumers. The US Department of Justice had previously said that it was happy with the proposal.

Under the terms of the agreement, Microsoft's technology will now power Yahoo search, with the two companies sharing revenue generated by the site.

Yahoo chief executive Carol Bartz, who brokered the deal soon after being installed in the job last year, said that the idea was to allow her company to focus on providing services that internet users enjoyed - not on developing the technology.

"This breakthrough search alliance means Yahoo can focus even more on our own innovative search experience," she said in a statement.

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer said that the two companies could offer better competition to Google together than separately.

"Although we are just at the beginning of this process, we have reached an exciting milestone," he said. "I believe that together, Microsoft and Yahoo will promote more choice, better value and greater innovation to our customers as well as to our advertisers and publishers."

The approval marks the latest step forward in an arduous process that first started more than two years ago with Microsoft's surprise $44bn bid to buy Yahoo outright.

The Californian web company initially rebuffed those advances, with co-founder Jerry Yang - then chief executive - repeatedly saying that the deal undervalued Yahoo.

While Microsoft submitted a renewed bid shortly afterwards, Yang attempted to engineer a deal with Google that would fend off the software giant - only to see Google pull out after the agreement was questioned by US regulators.

Yang stood aside in January last year to be replaced by Bartz, while at the same time Microsoft relaunched its own search engine under the name Bing and began investing heavily in marketing as it attempts to claw back market share from Google.

In a posting on Yahoo's website, the head of the company's search team said it was "full steam ahead".

"With Microsoft providing us the underlying list of search results, our Yahoo team can now focus on making the overall experience of finding stuff online and getting things done easier for you," said Shashi Seth, the company's senior vice president of search products.

Despite its troubles in recent years, Yahoo remains the world's second-largest search engine. In the US, Google is responsible for 66% of all searches, with Yahoo significantly behind with 17.5% and Microsoft trailing in third place with 10%.

According to worldwide figures from web company StatCounter, however, the gap is even wider globally - with Google receiving around 90% of searches, Yahoo 4% and Bing 3.4%.

The deal is still pending approval from authorities in Asia, but the first full implementation of the joint agreement is not expected to be in place until 2012.

Aleks Krotoski: Are we empowered, connected and enlightened with the world's knowledge at our fingertips?

PS3; 39.99; cert 15+; Quantic Dream/Sony

The death of originality in modern video games has, it seems, been greatly exaggerated. Heavy Rain almost instantly telegraphs its differentiation from its gun-obsessed peers by encouraging you to brush your just-awoken character's teeth and shave him, using right-analogue-stick gestures, prescribed button-presses and shakes of the motion-sensing PS3 controller, which (very vaguely) correspond to their real-life counterparts. As you guide architect Ethan Mars through a period of family life, the novelty lies in performing mundane tasks.

Soon, though, things take a turn, when one of Mars's sons is run over during a disastrous mall visit, and he ends up divorced, in a grim flat, trying to reconnect with his remaining son, while a serial killer dubbed the Origami Killer embarks on a spree. Soon, you're introduced to another innovative game device. Over the course of Heavy Rain, you take control over three other characters insomniac photographer Madison Paige, FBI operative Norman Jaden and private eye Scott Shelby all of whom also seek the Origami Killer. When Mars's remaining son becomes his latest kidnap victim, they work out that he will stay alive until six inches of rain have fallen; an unrelenting monsoon, documented in terms of rainfall inches, adds a sense of urgency.

Heavy Rain gets closer than any previous game to conveying the sense that you are controlling the protagonists in an interactive movie firmly entrenched in the film noir genre, its storyline (twist-laden, naturally) is able to suck you in completely, thanks to the most convincing facial and bodily animation yet seen in a game. Gameplay-wise, despite the cleverly conceived controls, it remains very much rooted in the venerable point-and-click adventure genre. At key moments, you must press and hold increasingly arcane combinations of buttons, triggers and stick-gestures, a process akin to playing Twister with your fingers. At times, it appears to cheat by withholding your desired outcome, even though you jumped through the designated hoops. More than a tad frustrating, even if it does add replay value to what is a disappointingly short game.

Atmospherically it is gloriously, unyieldingly miserable and at times positively harrowing, demonstrating an astonishing and enormously laudable refusal to compromise by developer Quantic Dream and publisher Sony. Curiously, though, once the novelty of the control system wears off, the most satisfying tasks you perform seem to be the most trivial ones. When you're finally given a chance to shoot a character, rather than talking him down, you accept it with relief even though the game strongly hints that you shouldn't. At other times, your emotional investment in the characters actually proves counter-productive for example, when you can choose between multiple courses of action, yet all are complete anathema to what you would do if you were him or her. Still, it's impressive that the game makes you feel like an actor rather than a puppetmaster.

Heavy Rain is the perfect riposte to anyone who contends that games are mindless orgies of violence but, unfortunately, its determination to prove that point brings about periods of deeply annoying gameplay. However, it is at the very least an emotional tour de force, and a must-buy for PS3 owners which will generate considerable bragging rights to use against owners of rival consoles.

Rating: 4/5

At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the industry's largest trade show, some of the biggest names in technology competed for attention. Here are some of the highlights, in pictures

With the iPad and e-readers on the rise, will pirated books become as common as illegal music and films?

For years, we have been able to combine our taste for music and film with our desire to stick it to the man, and all from the safety of our PCs. Our literary habits, however, have perforce remained largely legal. The closest we could come to the same thrill is by wearing a deep-pocketed coat to WH Smiths which is such an analogue approach to theft. Soon, however, even the bookish will be able to frustrate Lord Mandelson because, at long last, thanks to the iPad, digital book piracy is almost upon us.

The surest sign of this is that industry figures have started producing dubious statistics to show how endemic it is. In the US, it's just been announced that 10% of books read are now pirate texts. The same report claims that piracy has cost US publishers $3bn. But the source of the statistics was a company named Attributor, who provide online piracy protection for the publishing industry. Like a plumber tutting over the state of your pipes, they have a vested interest in finding problems.

A glance at the top seeded ebooks on Pirate Bay shows that Christopher Ricks isn't about to lose much sleep over the downloaders. Filling the top slots are Windows 7 Secrets, Adobe CS4 for Photographers and, shamelessly playing up to the stereotype of all geeks being lonely boys, the Jan/Feb edition of Playboy magazine. According to Freakbits, the only non-technical or sexual downloaded book in 2009 was the Twilight series a choice that only goes to show how masturbation and Photoshopping mess with the mind.

More mainstream books are found on Scribd, a site you might well use it's great for finding free books, citations and excerpts. It's also home to an awful lot of copyright infringements. You can find everything: Tintin in America, Martin Amis's Time's Arrow, Alastair Campbell's The Blair Years, Richard Brautigan. Heck, there's even a bunch of Guardian book bloggers, bundled together in a self-published book of literary quotations.

The interesting thing is just how openly available these books are from the site's servers. In fact, Scribd has a very old-school approach to piracy. It pitches itself as a document-sharing service, just as Napster pitched itself as a way of sharing sound files a euphemism as transparent as a newspaper ad offering "escorts".

Publishers' lawyers will most likely eventually compel Scribd to close, or to turn it into a legal online shop (authors such as Stephen King already sell their digital copies through the site). Certain juicy targets for piracy, such as Stephanie Meyer or JK Rowling, have already had their legal battalions ensure no illicit Potters or vegetarian vampires appear online. That the rest of the industry hasn't yet bothered shows how small the impact of piracy has been on publishers thus far. Faber clearly don't see the need to police the Alan Bennett plays available on Scribd, since most of their audience still prefer physical copies.

The blog The Millions recently hosted an amazing interview with an American book pirate who provides e-copies of books because of his open-source, anti-copyright beliefs. Dutifully, he scans and proofs every book he uploads. The thought of all that repetitive effort, a kind of digital ironing, is quaintly charming like a farmer tending to his patch with a sickle, his back squarely turned to the rolling Google combine harvester. It's such a lot of work and, outside textbooks, it makes so little impact that publishers haven't needed to pay the lawyers' fees to stop it.

But this is about to change. As e-readers become ubiquitous, publishers know they need to go digital. And being digital, no matter how much drm you shove in, means content will be pirated. Anyone will be able to get any new book you want if you know how to look for it.

But, despite the statistics, I don't believe book piracy will ever be as endemic as it has become with music and film. We've moved on from the pre-iTunes days when the only way of getting an MP3 of a song was to find it on Napster. Publishers were keen to get on board with the iPad straight from launch because they knew it was the safest way to protect and to disseminate their product. One editor at a big publisher told me just how desperate his company have been to woo Apple over the last 18 months.

More importantly, though, publishers have a headstart on the music and film industries and already have some experience of what happens when controlled content is made widely available for free. Victorian publishers were convinced public libraries would ruin them: they didn't. Lending libraries brought books off the estates and into the tenements, and publishers were suddenly selling a lot more books to a lot more people. This happened as the result of a system that, like Spotify, allowed readers to legally obtain books for free while the authors still received some money. If the publishing industry can remember its own history, digitisation should be a doddle.

NPA says members believe BBC apps 'will undermine the commercial sector's ability to establish an economic model'

The technology industry breathed a sigh of relief on Wednesday, after the world's largest computer manufacturer, Hewlett Packard, announced a 20% jump in quarterly profit.

The Californian company said that revenues and income had risen significantly from this time last year, in what many saw as the strongest sign yet that the economic slump's impact on technology spending was almost over.

Revenues for the first quarter of 2010 were up 8% to $31.2bn ( 19.9bn), with profits rising to $2.3bn - up from $1.9bn a year ago. The company also said it was expecting more signs of recovery in the coming year, with projected earnings narrowly ahead of expectations.

"HP is well-positioned to outperform the market," said chairman and chief executive Mark Hurd, who has worked to cut costs at the company since taking over in 2005.

The growth largely came from HP's computer and printer manufacturing businesses, as consumers - who had been reticent about purchasing during the downturn - started buying again.

While figures released by industry analysts Gartner suggested that shipments in western Europe were flat, the company experienced what Hurd called "accelerating market momentum".

That could be partially due to the impact of Microsoft's Windows 7, which launched last autumn and gave many PC manufacturers a boost by encouraging shoppers to purchase new hardware.

The company's services business - which expanded significantly in 2008 with the $12.6bn purchase of EDS - did not enjoy a revival, however, with revenue falling by 1%.

HP's results will please investors and analysts, but they have not been without its costs. The company has cut tens of thousands of jobs in the past two years, including 25,000 as a direct result of the EDS acquisition, and plans a further 8,600 by October.

Last month more than 1,000 HP staff who work for the Department of Work and Pensions took strike action in protest at job losses.

Shares rose marginally in after hours trading, to 50.12.

The new VoD service looks impressive, but it could struggle over charging - and making it on to TV screens as well as computers

SeeSaw's launch yesterday left unanswered a range of questions, largely related to its all-important business model.

The impression I formed is that it is being rushed onto the market, to take advantage of the rapidly rising tide of interest in on-demand programming, which has been warmed up by the BBC iPlayer.

SeeSaw is attempting to get a foothold for its brand in the UK video-on-demand market, which will soon become crowded with some really big opposition, led by BSkyB.

The Arqiva-owned VoD service is simple to call up and use at the moment, and it is entirely focused on television programmes, with some 3,000 hours in its library.

SeeSaw currently is offering users within the UK only free programmes, which are streamed live over the web to their computer.

But in a few months, by June, comes the tricky bit, adding on a pay-per-programme feature, which, according to one executive, will prove much more testing: that's the bit that is not yet ready.

So far it is using the well-designed technology behind Project Kangaroo, which was to be the joint BBC, ITV and Channel 4 on-demand service until it was torpedoed last year by the Competition Commission. This was then snapped up by broadcast transmission company Arqiva, which has deep pockets.

Each show you watch on SeeSaw has just two minutes of advertising, a pre-roll and middle break. The advertising will either be sold by the sales forces of programme suppliers, such as Channel 4 and Channel Five, or a third sales house, Video Initiatives. SeeSaw also promises to target adverts and programme offers, as it acquires information about the tastes of users.

The price of such advertising, compared with broadcast television, is painfully low. So the business model's success must depend, to a large measure, on subscription, and striking keen but acceptable prices.

When the subscription option is introduced users will most likely have to supply their credit card details once, and then will be debited for small payments as they select programmes. But finding an acceptable balance and presenting free and pay together might be tricky. John Keeling, SeeSaw platform controller, said the pay area would be made clear to users.

The window to "rent" a television programme and view will be shorter than the seven-day period for free VoD catchup services such as the iPlayer, just 48 hours, with terms clearly spelt out to users.

Popular US shows will be among the programming users are asked to pay for and Pierre-Jean Sebert, the SeeSaw chief executive, said his buyers were currently talking to the Hollywood studios.

There is also one obvious gap in SeeSaw's UK programming ITV has yet to decide whether to join. ITV had been wooed by SeeSaw's US rival Hulu, which is looking to launch in the UK and wanted exclusive rights.

The real weakness of SeeSaw and other VoD offerings is that they still remain a service primarily aimed at computers and laptops, rather than plugging directly to television screens. Nor will it deliver HD-quality pictures.

However, several people at the launch, including Keeling, told of how their children had used their PlayStation consoles to run SeeSaw-streamed programmes on a traditional TV set.

One of the biggest managerial things in SeeSaw's favour, is that the launch team is largely formed from the TV industry, rather than technology.

Google's new video map of the Trans-Siberian Railway is a thing of beauty, says Benji Lanyado, but can virtual travel ever replace the real thing?

Yesterday I browsed the Trans-Siberian Railway. Yup, browsed it. I loitered on the platform at Yaroslavsky station before accelerating into identikit Muscovite suburbs, then glided across the Volga, raced through the Lower Urals, sped across the Barguzin Mountains, before pulling up in Vladivostok a few minutes later.

My humble steed, of course, was the wonderful new map-cum-video guide unveiled by Google Russia and Russian railways. The project sews together a series of videos shot from the window of a Trans-Siberian carriage as it spans the 5,752-mile length of the world's most famous long-distance railway.

Various images and bite-sized history lessons pop up along the way, and, from time to time, the window seat footage is complemented by city video tours courtesy of the perky Yelena Abitayeva. Even the soundtrack is considered - with optional Russian radio, balalaika music, Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace read in Russian, or simply the rumbling of the train wheels.

Desktop travelling has become an increasingly all-inclusive experience over the past few years. There was a time when all we had were actual holiday snaps. Then came online albums and video clips, usually aimed at office-bound friends on Facebook.

Then it got a bit weird. Rather than risking the imperfection of a real-life holiday, people began living out their getaways virtually, saving up their Linden dollars for a holiday home on the outer rim of a floating unicorn island on Second Life.

Then we were all at it, escaping grey Tuesday mornings for a 360-degree peek around the Vancouver Winter Olympics venues, or for a wander around stately British landmarks. And then we all started hooking our brains up to wires and transporting into worlds populated by strangely attractive blue people and exploring the floating mountains of Pandora on dragons and... oh, wait.

There's only so far this can go, really. For now, anyway. But it's fun. As far as I'm concerned there's every reason to get deeply excited about video-maps of the outskirts of Irkutsk, and yes, these desktop adventures probably can go some way to sating our ever-itching, increasingly penniless wanderlust.

And there's that gnawing evolutionary thing, too. If seeing distant lands is increasingly unaffordable and/or unsustainable, perhaps these online portals are the best we can hope for. And when things of beauty like the Trans-Siberian map arrive - watch as dawn breaks through columns of steel over the Zeya river - I begin to wonder: could this ever replace the real thing?

Could rather odd little projects like Twinity, which aim to create virtual, navigable versions of cities across the world, be the cut-price holiday fad of the future?

Hmmm. On second thoughts, hopefully not.

Aleks Krotoski is joined by Lord Robert Winston, Professor of Science and Society at Imperial College, London, to discuss why every new technology we develop makes us as a species more vulnerable.

We also hear from Richard Wray from the frontline of the Mobile World Congress about Windows' latest operating system for mobile devices, and Bobbie finds out all the dirt on vark.com, the social search company that Google recently purchased for a whopping $50 million.

Don't forget to ...

Comment below
Mail us at tech@guardian.co.uk
Get our Twitter feed for programme updates
Join our Facebook group
See our pics on Flickr/Post your tech pics

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?

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

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.

Ten years after the original game was released, Keith Stuart samples the latest incarnation of the Aliens vs Predator franchise and meets the people who made it all happen

Microsoft has slashed the UK price of the version of Office 2010 that most business users will buy, while also offering a new Starter version free with new PCs

Microsoft has slashed the UK price of the version of Office 2010 that most business users will buy, while also offering a new Starter version free with new PCs.

A new version called Microsoft Office Home and Business 2010 will be priced at 239.99, where the previous Standard version of Office 2007 cost 349.99. The new package also includes the OneNote note-taking program plus Office Web Apps, so users will get more software as well as a price cut.

Further cost savings will be available for those willing to do without the usual packaging and physical DVDs and buy what Microsoft calls Product Key Card versions of Office. The key card only provides a license key that can be used to activate a copy of Office 2010 that has been pre-installed on a new PC or perhaps downloaded online. This drops the price of Office Home and Business 2010 from 239.99 to 189.99. With the top-of-the-range Office Professional, the Key Card cuts the suggested price from 429.99 to 299.99.

The familiar Office Home and Student version continues with, again, the addition of OneNote and Office Web Apps. 2010 prices will be 109.99 for a boxed copy and 89.99 for the keycard. Members of a family can install this version on three PCs.

The cheapest version of Office 2010 will be free, but only when pre-installed on a new PC from selected PC manufacturers. Chris Adams, Office Product Manager for Microsoft UK, says Starter 2010 provides "lightweight versions of Word and Excel" that lack advanced features such as change tracking. "Starter is really replacing Microsoft Works," he says.

Office Home and Student includes Word 2010, Excel 2010, PowerPoint 2010, OneNote 2010, and Office Web Apps. Office Home and Business 2010 includes all of those plus Outlook 2010. Office Professional also adds Publisher 2010, Access 2010, and "premium technical support". The Office range has been reduced to three packages, though there will also be Volume Licensing for Office 2010, to be announced, for large enterprises.

UPDATE: We originally gave the price of the boxed version of Office Professional 2010 as 399.99. The correct price is 429.99. Microsoft has apologised for supplying us with the wrong figure.

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."

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.

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.

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.

Thanks to the social networking tool, we can now see instant photographs of Earth taken by two astronauts

It is an intriguing combination of two technologies in action. As the $100bn International Space Station, scheduled for completion over the next 12 months, circles the planet, its astronauts relay the wonders of living on board history's most expensive construction site by using Twitter to communicate with the world.

Flight engineer Soichi Noguchi, a Japanese astronaut on board the station, and US engineer Jos Hern ndez, have been particularly adept at using the microblogging service to send hundreds of pictures back to Earth via their accounts. The results provide a dramatic and highly accessible portfolio of images of life in space and of Earth when viewed from a height of 185 miles. Noguchi's efforts include photographs of the shuttle's interior as well as pictures of deserts, islands and ice floes on Earth. Both astronauts' efforts have gone down a treat with space watchers round the globe. "Bellissima foto!" responds one follower; "Buena foto," states another.

As Twitter messages make clear, it's the immediacy of the pictures that causes the real excitement. "I've seen plenty of official space photos that were equally breathtaking, but there's something about getting them from Twitter that makes this feel more intimate," says one of them.

They took away my telephone and internet. Now I worry that I have lost my memory

Frank Skinner might have the fastest comedy mind of a generation, but he takes bloody ages to set a cribbage hand. They don't tell you that on the tour posters.

I've had a strange week.

Making good on a New Year's resolution to say yes to everything I would normally avoid through fear (like the Dice Man, but with less S&M sex and more determination finally to clean behind the loo), I agreed to be a guest on the new BBC topical quiz, The Bubble.

As if it weren't terrifying enough to be grilled about the news in front of an audience, this show has a twist: all contestants are locked in a secluded Lincolnshire house for four days before the programme, in order to prevent them from knowing what the news actually is.

Four whole days without telephones or internet! It was like having a holiday in Shakespeare's time. Except with snooker. (Snooker being the one thing, most people agree, that would have really improved Hamlet.)

The first adjustment was living without news. My alternative resolution, rejected in favour of the Dice Man principle, was to give up smoking; quitting newspapers proved even harder. For a couple of days, I was shaking from the withdrawal. That first newspaper in the morning. The relaxing newspaper after a meal. Reaching instinctively for a newspaper during a long, heartfelt chat

It made me realise, in this age of noisy rolling TV news and assault by internet, how important it is to save newspapers. Like saving the whale. Only more so, because I never wake up in the morning yearning for a whale.

But the internet was a strange absence, too. If we didn't know a fact, we couldn't immediately look up a slightly wrong version of it on Wikipedia. We had to use our actual brains.

We had one of those conversations that I haven't had for 10 years: the kind where you forget a celebrity's name and you sit there for an hour discussing what letters it might begin with ("A J definitely or it could be an M "), listing everything you can remember that might jog someone else's mind ("Wearing nothing but two straps across her nipples, possibly with bullets attached, like those things Mexicans wear in old cowboy films, what the hell are they called ") then moving on to something else entirely until, right in the middle of an irrelevant chat about why all this snow proves rather than disproves global warming, somebody suddenly shouts: "Jodie Marsh!" and there is a collective sigh as though everyone in the room has simultaneously undone their belts after a Christmas dinner.

And then, in the middle of the night, you are woken by the sound of someone jubilantly shouting: "Bandalero!" from a room down the hall.

It is all terribly good for the brain. If you pause for a moment from the relentless input of information (not just rolling news, but all the minute details on your friends' whereabouts that flood in through the iPhone and the Crackberry) you actually have a chance to process the things you already know. You reflect. You remember. You dream about events in the distant past, rather than the last thing you googled before falling asleep, and wake up feeling whole.

The most disturbing thing I have read since being released is the story of the Jones family from West Yorkshire who have banned television, mobile phones and computers from their home and run into difficulty with their children's schools.

The schools insist the children need internet access to do their homework. How did that happen in one short generation? It's not so long since I was a kid, hurrying round to the house of the one girl who was lucky enough to have a ZX Spectrum, behind which we all queued for our turn to make the words "LAURA SMELLS" appear 10 times in magical pink writing on the screen. Letters went round from the school about these new "toys", warning sternly about the distraction from important things like homework and going to the library.

How did we get so quickly to a point where parents in a house with nothing but books are receiving the opposite instruction?

Googling is a famously dangerous way to "do research". Do the teachers cross-refer to encyclopaedias in their marking or does the whole system rely on search engines? If so, we'll soon be in a world where Hamlet really did play snooker. All it takes is for the top hit to say so and that fact will be checked, written up, cross-checked and passed into reality: the Dane burned off all his energy chasing a 147 break, shagged Ophelia over the corner pocket and nobody died.

Oh, who knows. Maybe that would be a better world.

That's not the Eric I know

It's all very well playing a panel game where you emerge from seclusion to guess what has or hasn't happened in the news, but last week was a tricky time to play it.

Does Prince William dye his hair black? Does David Cameron love darts? Did Ashley Cole give his mobile to a friend who lent it to another friend who sent nude photographs to a model? Or were these all invented by the producer? Turns out they weren't, but that doesn't mean they weren't invented. We live in confusing times.

In revealing his unexpected devotion to the arrows, David Cameron apparently told a fond anecdote about meeting Eric Bristow at a Christmas lights ceremony.

I met Eric Bristow once. We had played the same poker tournament. I introduced myself and said: "Congratulations on making the final! I'm in it too."

"I don't give a fuck who's in the final," spat Bristow. "I'm going to win." Then he turned his back and walked off to the pub.

If David Cameron says it was a delight to meet him, there is definitely something fishy in the tale.

www.victoriacoren.com

If you want to know our online future, ask a musician

Psst: want to know the future of cyberspace? You could try asking a rock star. Why? Well, some of them have turned out to be perceptive futurologists. Eight years ago, for example, David Bowie said this to a New York Times reporter: "I don't even know why I would want to be on a label in a few years because I don't think it's going to work by labels and by distribution systems in the same way. The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I'm fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing."

Bowie then went on to make one of the most perceptive observations anyone's ever made about our networked world. Music, he said, "is going to become like running water or electricity". To appreciate the significance of this, remember that he was speaking in 2002, a year after Apple unleashed the iPod on an unsuspecting world. At the time, millions of people were transfixed by the idea that they could carry their entire music collections around with them in a tiny device. But Bowie perceived that this blissful state might just be transitory that iPod users were, in fact, the audio equivalent of travellers to primitive countries who carry bottled water because public supplies are unreliable or unsafe. In a comprehensively networked world, Bowie surmised, people would eventually become more relaxed about carrying their supplies of bottled music: when they needed it, they would just get it streamed from the network.

Six years later came the launch of Spotify, an astonishing service which streams music with very little buffering delay, and which has become so successful that it eventually had to close subscriptions to its free (i.e. ad-supported) service. Admission is now strictly by invitation only, but paid subscriptions are, as you might expect, readily available. Anyone who has used Spotify will instantly recognise the perceptiveness of Bowie's insight all those years ago.

Music has been one of the most powerful drivers of internet development because, after alcohol and sex, it's probably the thing young people value most. And when people want something that badly, then they will get it one way or another. The record labels spent nearly two decades pretending that the net didn't exist. They persisted with a business model based on plastic discs which made it unprofitable to supply individual tracks. But the demand for tracks endured and eventually a peer-to-peer file-sharing service called Napster made tracks available to anyone with a PC and an internet connection. The result shattered the industry, leaving it utterly dependent on a computer company Apple which found a way of legally supplying tracks.

Now spool forward again to today, when the angst du jour is how to get people to pay for online "content". Once again, the most perceptive insight may come from the music business specifically from an iconic 60s band, the Grateful Dead, whose archives have recently been donated to the University of California at Santa Cruz. Marking the event in a recent article in The Atlantic, author Joshua Green reminded us of how the Dead pioneered ideas and practices that are only now being reluctantly embraced by corporate America. "One was to focus intensely on its most loyal fans," Green observes. The band "established a telephone hotline to alert them to its touring schedule ahead of any public announcement, reserved for them some of the best seats in the house, and capped the price of tickets". He adds: "Only in the 1980s, faced with competition from Japan, did American CEOs and management theorists widely adopt a customer-first orientation."

Quite so. More significantly, though, the Grateful Dead decided that they wouldn't try to stop people making bootleg recordings of their concerts, figuring that what they lost in royalties would be more than compensated for by being more widely known, and by the resulting sales of merchandise. It turned out that they were right. The band anticipated by decades the "Freemium" business model now being touted by expensive managerial gurus. Stand by for a best-selling business book entitled Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead. And if you want to know the future, ask a musician.

PS3, Sony/ Quantic Dream 49.99, Cert 15, out Friday

Video games have long been in thrall to Hollywood an obsession with turning virtual playthings into "interactive movies" that has cursed countless releases. The dichotomy of the two mediums that films are for watching, and games for playing is too powerful to overcome: cinematic creations sacrifice their power in allowing interaction and games lose their focus when the narrative leaves the players' control. A dead end, leading, at best, to brave failure and, at worst, ignominious farce. Until now. Until Heavy Rain.

A slick neo-noir, this is the most intense crime drama seen on any games machine of any era, intelligent and mature when its contemporaries are simply "adult". Developers Quantic Dream have presented an elaborate and disturbing murder mystery that lets players assume the role of four leading characters. Hence scenes jump between a tormented father, a likable private detective, an open-minded FBI agent and a savvy female journalist. To detail the events that unfold would be to spoil the thrill of playing, but to explain how it works is to reveal one of the most ambitious contributions to the medium in years.

Essentially, Heavy Rain places destiny in players' hands letting you affect the decisions and actions that ultimately determine how the game unfolds. Even the smallest act can lead to a huge narrative twist that would otherwise be missed, and a normally banal chore can carry as much tension as the many stand-out fight sequences. More remarkable still is that you feel your personality and mannerisms reflected in the interactions of the cast. Heavy Rain's abstract control system might be occasionally ungainly, but it allows you to prod at the narrative in a way that is extraordinary, to assume the role of both actor and director.

Along with the plot's breathless pacing a sumptuous score is delivered with skill, and the game is beautifully shot. The poetry of cinematography fully realised, combined with a genuine ability to evoke sadness, fear and guilt, make for one of the most emotionally provocative titles ever.

Quantic Dream's latest may not only be the best game you've ever played it could even become one of your favourite films.

PS3, XBox 360, PC, Rebellion, 49.99/ 29.99, Cert 18, out now

Attention to detail is a forte of director Ridley Scott. His Alien featured beer cans printed with the Weylan-Yutani brand that engineered the first encounter with the xenomorph. The "Company"s role expanded in the sequels (becoming Weyland-Yutani under James Cameron in Aliens) and was central to the Alien vs Predator franchise that brought the beasts head-to-head on film. Whence it comes to gamers, in the form of its Lance Henriksen-voiced boss opening a Predator temple setting the scene for this first-person hunter-shooter-killer hybrid and the chaos that ensues.

Gameplay varies between the three protagonists. Marines operate a standard gun-led dynamic that begins superbly in the dimly lit confines of a base but becomes less invigorating as it moves to the more repetitive jungle scenarios. Predators offer stealth, a variety of melee and ranged weapons and are the easiest entry point to the title. While the Aliens possess speed, agility (crawling on walls and ceilings) and, oh yes, that second set of teeth

Which is a feature. This is gory, in more detail than the 1999 PC version although both share a superb sense of atmosphere. Particularly evident in the sound affects here. Fans of any of the films will swoon over their accurate rendition, from the creatures themselves to the urgent phut of the pulse rifle and the nerve-jangling beep of the motion sensor. There's nothing groundbreaking here but there is much to be enjoyed Indeed, as Heavy Rain blurs the boundaries between media, it's notable that compared to the woeful Alien vs Predator: Requiem film, as a piece of entertainment, this game is superior, the devil in Scott's detail let loose on a whole new medium.

XBox 360, PS3, Wii, Sega, 39.99, Cert 7, out Friday

Two parts Mario Kart to one part OutRun, Sonic and Sega All-Stars Racing appropriates the gleeful, exaggerated powerslides of the latter and pilfers almost everything else from the former. It's a game with no other ambition than to ride the slipstream of Nintendo's benchmark racer and with over 20 million sales of the Wii version alone, it's not hard to see why. That it does so reasonably successfully is a result Sega will likely be delighted with.

It shares so many similarities with Nintendo's famous series that one wonders why Sega didn't go the whole (hedge)hog and name it Sonic Kart. Weapons are simple reskins of Mario Kart staples, KO gloves replace green shells, rockets are red shells by another name and the homage doesn't end there. Sliding around corners triggers a turbo boost, while bikes are capable of tricks on straights to compensate for their relative fragility. Racers can even pull mid-air tricks to gain a burst of speed upon landing. Stop me if you think you've played this one before.

But Sega's game does have a few ideas of its own. The often amusing All-Star moves give backmarkers the chance to catch up thankfully blue shell equivalents are absent here while an enthusiastic commentator's interjections are informative rather than irritating. And while the action can get a little too busy at times (one track resorts to huge arrows to guide confused players), the winning blend of riotous track action and impressive fan service should appeal to long-time Sega acolytes and casual gamers alike.

The digital guru tells us why he wants to reinvent the web

Even if he didn't sport dreadlocks, you could easily recognise Jaron Lanier as a digital utopian. The 49-year-old native New Yorker has been involved in the web for 30 years, a key figure, along with visionaries such as Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow and authors Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly, in nurturing its early culture from hobbyist pastime to global communications revolution. He popularised the notion of virtual reality, and his ideas about open culture and open access paved the way for the triumph of first-generation web success stories such as Google and Amazon and second-generation online applications including Twitter and Facebook.

Now, however, Lanier who is also an accomplished musician feels increasingly sceptical about the way the web is developing. In a new book, You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto (Allen Lane, 20), he describes the development of what he calls digital Maoism: here, users of the web are a proletariat toiling for the benefit of an all-powerful (virtual) bourgeoisie. This volte-face perhaps says more about the journey that this philosopher has travelled than the evolution of our online world.

What is digital Maoism? Twenty-five years ago some friends and I had this thought that perhaps the internet would be a fount of wealth and opportunity, that it could be entirely open such that people could give away the fruits of their brains and hearts, and the rewards they would get in return would be huge. Unfortunately, I've come to believe that was a mistake.

We're faced with a stark decision: we give people a way to live off their brains to earn with dignity, to not have to constantly sing for their supper or we have to accept that our problem is socialism, that we're trying to shut down personal reinvention and self-determinism and want to create a system where people will be universally supported by some institution. I personally support the former.

I call the alternative digital Maoism because, unlike other Marxists, the Maoists had this real distaste for people earning from their brains. They worshipped the peasant, the person who's really toiling. Every time we give a musician the advice to give away the music and sell the T-shirt, we're saying, "Don't make your living in this more elevated way. Instead, reverse this social progress, and choose a more physical way to make a living." We're sending them to peasanthood, very much like the Maoists have.

So what is the solution? Criticism is always easier than constructive solutions. In You Are Not A Gadget I propose five different approaches to a solution. The one I am the most hopeful about is to return to the very first vision of the web: a universal micro-payment system. For practical purposes, that would mean that there's only one copy of a creative thing, and you pay a half penny every time you access it.

With things like the iPad and the Kindle and Xbox Live, we're creating this big studio system. I'd much rather see a world where, when you make some quirky comment on a blog or news story or you upload a video clip, instead of just a moment of fame for your pseudonym, you'll get 50 bucks. The first time that happens, you'll realise that you're a full-class citizen. You have the potential to make money from the system. Once you hit that point, you'll realise there's a social contract, and then maybe you'll stop illegally downloading content for the same reason you don't break into houses or cars even though you could: because it's part of a system that's better for everybody.

People would try to play that system. Wouldn't that create an environment where people seek to earn back based on what they think would be a hit? I don't doubt that would happen. But having everything freely accessible to everyone else actually just creates a mediocre mush. The wisdom of crowds works when the crowd is choosing the price of an ox, when there's a single numeric average. But if it's a design or something that matters, the decision is made by committee, and that's crap. You want people and groups who are able to think thoughts before they share.

You say that this open system ultimately ends in mediocrity, but online, people gather into single-interest groups to preach to the converted, parsing and creating what it is they want to see. That's the same process. Human beings either function as individuals or as members of a pack. There's a switch inside us, deep in our spirit, that you can turn one way or the other. It's almost always the case that our worst behaviour comes out when we're switched to the mob setting. The problem with a lot of software designs is that they switch us to that setting.

When you have a global mush, people lose their identity, they become pseudonyms, they have no investment and no consequence in what they do. Whenever that situation exists, there's a sequence I find to be common whether it's a jihadi chat site or a chat site about beach balls. Initially people aren't sure what the pack is. Somebody tries to ridicule something else, and other people who want to play it safe join in so that they're not the target. Gradually, the pack forms. You can tell it's formed by two things: an internal enemy and an external enemy. The internal enemy is the low person on the totem pole who gets ridiculed. And then there's the external enemy, the "other". What we have online is a total lack of communication across those boundaries but this is the inevitable consequence of matching the human spirit as it really exists, our true biology, with this open mush environment. We see this in playgrounds, we see this pack mentality in other, non-web environments.

That's because it comes from the people, not from the machine.

You present a compelling idea that software designers are psychologically manipulating us, through the very way they're designing their systems: to engage us, to facilitate their applications. Do you think they're aware of this? No, absolutely not. I'm not suggesting a conspiracy. What it is instead is religion. There's this theological drive to equate people and computers, more and more designs have that quality. So one of the ways in which the web 2.0 stuff suppresses individuals and brings out this mob identity is because it allows us to pretend that the machine is becoming intelligent and doing work. Larry Page can say that Google's servers are coming alive, but that's because we don't see the people behind the curtain.

Humans are able to create and appreciate culture. You argue that culture is disintegrating. Aren't mash-ups evidence of a sophisticated repackaging of culture?

The difference between real culture and fake culture is whether you internalise the thing before you mash it. Does it become part of you? Is there some way your meaning, your spirit, your understanding has touched this thing? Or is it just a touch of novelty for a moment to get some attention? Culture involves some work, some risk, some exploration, some surprise.

As a digital optimist, can you see anything good from the web in general? Oh, I think the web has been a massive success. The web gave us the first empirical evidence that vast numbers of people really are creative, really do have things to offer, and really will do it really will get their acts together. I am a huge enthusiast overall of what's happening online. The stuff I don't like is web 2.0. It regiments and anonymises people. I think that's a huge wrong turn.