Clear implication of Milan court's judgment against three executives is that every hosted video should be pre-screened

The judgment by a Milan court against Google's employees throws a bucketful of sand into the machinery of YouTube, the video site that the search engine company bought for $1.65bn in October 2006. The clear implication of its decision is that every video should be screened before it is put on to the site and with more than 20 hours of video uploaded every minute worldwide (Google does not break down the figure for Italy), monitoring all that content, even for a single country, could prove enormously expensive.

That in turn would put profitability for the site which is thought to have lost between $100m and $500m in 2009 further away than ever. YouTube has never made an operating profit in its five-year history, and Google has been trying to sell adverts on videos to make the site profitable.

Italy recently seems to have taken a more extreme stance over internet content than many other European countries. Its tax authorities have demanded that eBay should hand over information about its customers relating to goods sold on the site between 2004 and 2007; Yahoo was fined 12,000 last year after Milan's public prosecutor demanded information about private emails sent by suspected criminals; and the Italian interior ministry has required Facebook to hand over personal information about users who created groups said to "glorify" Mafia bosses, and again last October over a group said to promote the violent death of Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister.

Today's judgment found three Google executives David Drummond, Google's senior vice-president of corporate development and chief legal officer, Peter Fleischer, global privacy counsel, and George Reyes, a former chief financial officer guilty of invasion of privacy following the uploading to Google Video in September 2006 of footage of four Italian teenagers bullying a youth with Down's syndrome. The premise is that Google is responsible for any content that appears on its site.

Google said on its blog that the ruling "attacks the very principles of freedom on which the internet is built". The company had argued that because it removed the video immediately after being notified of its content, and co-operated with the Italian authorities to identify the bullies so they could be brought to justice, it had discharged its duty. It said hosting platforms such as YouTube, Facebook or Twitter did not create their own content and so could not be held responsible for what other people upload.

Google is already fighting a number of legal actions over content on YouTube. The largest is from the entertainment company Viacom, which has accused the site of "contributory infringement" and other offences for carrying videos uploaded by users containing Viacom's copyrighted material.

The Italian decision creates a monumental headache for Google, which is already under pressure in Europe after the announcement last night that it faces an anti-monopoly investigation into whether it penalises competing websites in its search rankings. If it has to monitor every video before it appears on YouTube, that would push its costs up substantially: people are a comparatively expensive link in any business chain, which is why Google has sought to replace them with computers where possible.

The censoring of websites has become a hot issue in Italy in recent months, following a spate of hate sites against officials, including Berlusconi. The government briefly studied plans to black-out such sites after fan pages emerged praising an attack on the premier, but the idea was dropped after executives from Facebook, Google and Microsoft agreed to a shared code of conduct rather than legislation.

Document sharing website Scribd to challenge Apple and Amazon in the mobile market

Document sharing website Scribd is making a more direct challenge to Amazon and Apple by launching a mobile service that it hopes will make it easier for millions of people to read on the go.

The move could put the well-regarded startup described as "YouTube for documents" into more direct competition with larger rivals such as Amazon and Apple, which is set to launch the iPad and its iBooks application next month.

Scribd already offers more than 10m documents online, including books from major publishers such as Random House and Simon & Schuster, but from today will also begin offering users the chance to read their files on any smartphone or ebook reader.

A simple system to send files to their device regardless of what it is may help erase complexity and give people easy access to much more content, said Trip Adler, Scribd's co-founder and chief executive.

"Right now people are confused about which e-reader to buy, they're confused about how to get content onto their devices," he told the Guardian. "This solves all of that by putting all these devices so you can read any content on Scribd on your device."

At the moment, most ebook readers acquire new titles through applications specifically built by the makers of their gadget such as Amazon's Kindle book catalogue. Adler suggested that providing a broad range of material across all devices was largely uncharted territory, but that it should boost the popularity of ebooks and downloads of other types of documents.

"This should help increase sales, because if people can read things they buy on the web on their device, they are more likely to buy it," he said.

Amazon already offers access to its catalogue of books through the Kindle, as well as an iPhone application, but Scribd's 50 million users will also be able to download other documents shared through its site including how-to guides, research papers and self-published books.

The move is part of a wider mobile strategy that the company says will help it tap into the huge mobile devices market. Over the next month, it plans to launch a range of applications for the Kindle, iPad, iPhone and Android handsets, as well as a number of other platforms.

It is also launching developer tools that will enable programmers to create their own applications to search and link to any of the documents held in Scribd's archive.

"There are maybe a million ebook readers out there, but there are billions of smartphone users," Adler said.

The launch comes on the heels of a similar effort by Kobo Books, an American ebook retailer which earlier this week unveiled its own system aimed specifically at the UK market.

Kobo has agreements in place with most major publishers including Bloomsbury, Penguin and Faber & Faber and says it will also offer many titles for free.

But while the ebook industry has plenty of momentum, it has also been dogged by controversy.

Some publishers have said they will delay ebook releases to protect hardback sales, and Macmillan recently found itself in a feud with Amazon over the price of digital texts.

The outlook for sales, meanwhile, remains unclear. High street retailer Waterstone's, which has its own ebook store, said that just 80,000 titles were sold in the run-up to Christmas and Amazon is still silent on Kindle ebook sales despite continuing to boast that they now make up a significant part of its business.

Adler said that platform-agnostic selling was a significant step forward that would not only encourage more people to buy ebooks, but could also convince publishers to sell unprotected files, rather than encumber their products with anti-piracy locks.

Scribd has raised almost $14m from investors since being founded in 2007, with backers including Netscape founder Marc Andreessen and former PayPal executive David Sacks.

Why is Apple pulling blue.. er, porn.. er, "adult" content from its App Store? Is it to cleanse it ahead of the launch of the larger-screen iPad? Is it a sudden fit of blue-stockinged horror at the sight of what Gok Wan would term ladies' "bangers"?

Apple announced the change (to developers) in an email last Friday: "We have decided to remove any overtly sexual content from the App Store, which includes your application," the letter from the iPhone App Review department reads. "Thank you for your understanding in this matter. If you believe you can make the necessary changes so that [app name] complies with our recent changes, we encourage you to do so and resubmit for review."

Why? Why why why? And what is "overtly sexual"? The vagueness of the phrasing is annoying iPhone developers, who would like to know why the criteria for getting an app approved in the iPhone App Store have changed yet again. Getting an app approved - and getting it to stay approved - sometimes seems less like moving goalposts than being Harry Potter chasing the darting, elusive golden snitch in a game of Quidditch.

What is clear is that hundreds of apps that incorporate, um, bangers and so on have been removed from the store. And now Phil Schiller, Apple's vice-president of marketing, has sort-of explained why to the New York Times.

"It came to the point where we were getting customer complaints from women who found the content getting too degrading and objectionable, as well as parents who were upset with what their kids were able to see," Schiller told the NYT.

OK, Mr Schiller, that's helpful. Um - by the way, why can one still get Sports Illustrated's swimsuit issue [although the swimsuits stay resolutely on - CA] and Playboy [where they don't]?

At this point things get a little more slippery. "The difference is this is a well-known company with previously published material available broadly in a well-accepted format," he said (of Sports Illustrated, though the logic must also apply to Playboy).

So - well-known company's breasts good; startup never-heard-of-ya company's breasts bad. And stay with us, because we have fully-clothed breasts bad too. (Update: or not. stay tuned.)

The move hasn't exactly pleased, or made sense to, developers or commentators.

John Gruber, whose Daring Fireball blog reflects and links to plenty of developer reaction, comments:

"I don't see how it's anything other than hypocrisy to say that Time Warner can have an app showing swimsuit models and others cannot. I totally understand Apple's desire to keep the App Store free of flat-out or even borderline pornography. I do not think it's wise to remove/ban R-rated content, though isn't that exactly what the 17+ rating is for?

"But to allow Sports Illustrated and Playboy to publish it and others not? That's bullshit."

However at the WSJ-owned AllThingsD blog, Kara Swisher suggests that it's a storm in a teacup:

"For anyone with even a passing knowledge of Web history, this practice [of hypocrisy over sexual content] has been all too common.

She explains:

"AOL, which I dubbed "The House Sex Chat Built" in my first book about the once popular service, drastically cut back on its sexually controversial stuff, as it moved to the mainstream. In fact, it even considered doing a separate gated business that dealt with racier online fare.

"Perhaps Apple will do this, creating an area of the App Store that is much more clearly blocked and less accessible. And perhaps not. After all, it is Apple's App Store and not subject to collective decision-making by those who think it a basic right to swipe clothes off a lady on the iPhone."

Well, OK, but it gets weirder. A maker of real swimsuits has found their app removed from the store: "Designer swimwear retailer Simply Beach, based in the UK, was removed from the iPhone and iPod touch App Store last Friday - and received the same "overtly sexual" email as other folk.

It's one thing to say that you don't want to have "overtly sexual" content in your store. However it makes no sense to ban non-sexual swimwear companies while allowing overtly sexual content such as Playboy. It's not just hypocritical - it's contradictory, absurd and quite possibly puts Apple in a position where it could get sued for unfair restraint of trade and misrepresentation. That's not smart. Especially not when it has a "17+" category of apps which warn people.

Is the problem that the strait-laced Americans can't bear to see search results that hint at sex and sexuality? (The Americans are so strange: a fabulous First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech, and then a madly restrictive approach to such speech.) Then why not check the age of the person using the store (you need to have a credit card and give a birthday, surely?) and only provide age-appropriate apps?

Truly, it's a strange story which is only going to get more heated in the weeks ahead.

Update: we've now heard from the developer of the Swim Beach app and the company itself that the app has been reinstated "without any accompanying communication". The developer, Andrew Long of Exploding Phone, writes: " It can take a little while for application status changes to propagate their way into the app store which is probably why you couldn't see it last night." The same seems to have happened to the Daisy Mae's Alien Buffet application, which was out, and then returned. See below for a video of Ms Mae at work.

Meanwhile, if you're a developer who's got an app in the Store that's been banned (or reinstated), we'd love to hear from you - email me (charles.arthur@guardian.co.uk).

(Weds 1020am GMT: Post updated with new information, some tweaks to style.)

Is crippling our sets, and handing over our cultural regulation to a foreign cartel, the best way to get viewers switched on to high-definition?

In my last column, I asked why Ofcom was so willing to surrender oversight of the BBC by allowing the broadcaster to opt into a DRM scheme that put British telly rules into the domain of a cartel of offshore entertainment giants.

Truth be told, I think I know the answer: Ofcom's worried that if the US media giants (as well as sport leagues and other major rightsholders) make good on their threat to boycott unrestricted high-def television, the ensuing absence of "good content" will stop you from upgrading your receiver. If enough people refuse to upgrade, it will be politically difficult to complete the "analogue switchoff" (termination of all non-digital TV broadcasts) in 2012.

Nothing upsets a voter like a broken telly, after all.

Why does anyone care about analogue switchoff? Spectrum. The last major British spectrum auction was one of the most successful money-raising exercises in the history of world government, with more than 50bn coughed up by telecoms companies for 3G licences. As government struggles to patch the yawning pits in its balance sheet, another 50bn would be most welcome. And, more importantly, the failure to realise the expected windfall would be fatal to the career of any civil servant who could be blamed for it.

The problem of how to get punters to replace their tellies is a hard one. TVs tend to enjoy second and third lives in the kids' rooms, in the garage or in the shed. Chucking them out or even buying Freeview boxes for all of them requires major carrot (Freeview is free) and stick (analogue switchoff makes your set obsolete), and it's never a sure thing.

The history of earlier changeovers is a colourful one. My favourite example is the US colour TV transition. In the mid-1950s, the US regulator and NBC (a broadcaster whose parent company, RCA, made colour sets) began the process of rolling out colour broadcast apparatus across the nation. This was a substantial investment, and in order to recoup it, the broadcasters would need to see an increase in the number of viewers (this being before practically every American household owned a TV penetration in 1955 stood at 64.5%) and a higher rate from advertisers for reaching those viewers, on the strength of the new possibilities opened up by colour adverts.

But there was a problem: there was practically no colour programming. Broadcasters didn't want to commission colour broadcasts to transmit to a nation of black-and-white sets; viewers didn't have any reason to switch their sets to colour if everything being aired was in black-and-white.

There was one source of ready-made colour material that could have gone out over the airwaves: Hollywood had been shooting feature films and accompanying short subjects in colour for decades and had amassed a prodigious back-catalogue of material that might have jumpstarted the colour TV transition.

There was another problem, though: the studios hated TV, feared it, and would like to have seen it dead and dusted. It was the competition.

Until Walt Disney decided to build Disneyland, that is. The Walt Disney Company came through the second world war as a publicly listed firm, and Walt spent the next decade chafing against shareholder control and squabbling about spending with his brother Roy, the adult in their partnership. When Roy refused to open the company coffers to him for the $17m he needed to embark on a mad scheme called Disneyland, the company instead raised millions by opening their vaults to ABC, a broadcaster.

In 1961, the Disney show moved to NBC, where its mission became the promotion of colour TV. The programme was eventually retitled Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color, and each episode featured subjects that were apt to make the black-and-white viewer feel like she was missing out on something special, indeed.

My favourite segment from those days is something called The Spectrum Song, which was presented by the character Ludwig Van Drake (himself a remix of the Nazi war criminal and rocket scientist Werner Von Braun, whose reputation Disney had helped to rehabilitate with TV specials that presented the former SS Sturmbannf hrer as a cuddly, daffy scientist who would help America win the space race).

In it, Von Drake sits down at a piano keyboard whose keys have the "octave" of colour red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet (yes, it's an octave with seven members!) and he sings a song that names all the colours and the colours that they can be combined to make. As he names the colours, they shoot out of the organ and dance around the screen (the whole video is available on YouTube watch it before Disney copyright-nukes it from orbit!).

The best part is the version so that people with black-and-white TVs don't feel left out: the keyboard's saturation fades to monochrome, and Von Drake begins to play and sing: "Black, black, grey, grey, black, black, black, white, black, grey," and so on.

And there you have it: a cuddly duck based on a fearsome Nazi, gently taunting the technological refuseniks who wouldn't stump up for the next generation in colour TV.

It's hardly the most plausible way to get a TV transition, but it certainly has more plausibility than crippling our sets and handing over our cultural regulation to a foreign cartel as a means of getting there.

Rickrolling duping people into watching a Rick Astley video on YouTube will no longer work in many cases because YouTube has removed the video [update: and has now restored it]

The rickroll, one of the internet's favourite memes, has been badly hit by the removal of the video on which it was based. Instead of being tricked into watching Rick Astley singing Never Gonna Give You Up, victims who click the link get a YouTube message: "This video has been removed due to terms of use violation".

Update: If you clicked the above link earlier, then you just might have been meta-rickrolled. It turns out that the video was removed by mistake, after YouTube suspended a user account flagged by a member of its spam team. So RickRoll'D is back, and it still has more than 30m views.

Rickrolling started at the 4chan forum (via the eggroll and duckroll), but became part of the mainstream in 2008. It brought Astley a new level of fame, though one that perhaps became tiresome. In response to a Fox News query, "a spokesman for his record label wrote back a single line: 'I'm sorry, but he's done talking about rickrolling.'"

There are, of course, several videos of Astley singing Never Gonna Give You Up and other songs on YouTube, so you can keep right on rickrolling people, if you really must. The problem is that removing the D version breaks a large number of internet links, and there's no way to repair the damage short of YouTube reinstating the missing video.

Also, that kind of thing ultimately reduces trust in the net....

Hat tip: Neowin and its update.

Aleks Krotoski and Bobbie Johnson meet a host of digital idealists on this week's programme, including social entrepreneurs in San Francisco like Catapult Design, Inveneo and Architecture for Humanity, who are bringing technological solutions to developing countries.

Plus musician and philosopher Jaron Lanier explains how 30 years at the heart of internet culture have transformed him from a utopian to a virtual pragmatist.

Aleks also tackles the latest headlines from around the web, including the latest on Google and China, as the US government tightens the net around the likely perpetrators, and Microsoft's decision to offer its consumers a choice of web browsers in Europe after an agreement was reached between the software giant and the European Commission.

And in a daring feat of ducking and diving, Aleks fields listeners' feedback about Google's social search golden goose, Vark.com, and asks for listeners' most wanted: who would you like to see at a live Tech Weekly event in London? Answers, please, in the comments below.

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Computer giant regains number one position from Google in annual Business Superbrands top 500 survey

Microsoft has toppled its internet rival Google from the prized top spot in a survey of the UK's strongest 500 business brands published today.

Google, which held the top position in 2008 and 2009, slips to fifth place while Microsoft enjoys the number one slot after coming second in the annual Business Superbrand top 500 survey in 2007 and 2008, and fifth last year.

Rolls-Royce Group retains its second position in this year's poll, with BlackBerry rising from 42nd to third.

Back in the top 10 is British Airways, which bounced back into eighth place from its worst position last year (36th) but souring this improvement is fierce rival Virgin Atlantic, which is new into the top 10 in fourth position.

The survey is compiled for the Superbrands organisation by the Centre for Brand Analysis, which creates league tables based on the opinions of marketing experts, business professionals and thousands of British consumers.

Stephen Cheliotis, chairman of the Centre for Brand Analysis, said Google and Microsoft had been battling it out for four years.

"Google has started to lose some momentum with its market dominance becoming more and more evident whilst it has increasingly been criticised in the media for, among other things, its privacy policies," said Cheliotis. "Both brands remain powerful forces but Microsoft must be delighted to finally beat its younger upstart."

Also among the new entries into the top 10 are the credit card company Visa in ninth (14th last year) and accountancy group PriceWaterhouseCoopers in 10th (17th last year).

Reflecting the fall-out from the financial crisis, the list of the top 10 brands reporting the biggest falls include banks UBS and Morgan Stanley. Royal Bank of Scotland has crashed out of the top 500 altogether and lost its Business Superbrands status for the first time.

However, not all the financial brands suffered equally. HSBC and Barclays, which both avoided direct government financial support, rose in the rankings; the former jumped from 60th to 41st and the latter from 107th to 73rd. The other big winners in the financial services category is the Co-operative Bank, which climbed from 320th to 229th, and Barclaycard, which achieves its highest score to date at 57th.

Proving that even a controversial re-brand can have a positive affect Aviva - formerly Norwich Union - is the second highest riser in the top 500 climbing from 315th to 144th. The biggest year-on-year riser is Premier Inn, which has jumped 197 places to 240th. Other fast risers include delivery firm DHL, accountancy firm BDO and trade media title Management Today.

The Guardian app has broken the 100,000 barrier in just two months and it has been nominated for a British Press Award

Confirming the ever-growing demand for mobile content, the Guardian App has been downloaded over 100,000 times in just over two months. It is currently number one in the top paid-for app charts.

Launched in mid-December and costing 2.39, the app had been downloaded 101,057 times by Sunday, showing that users are willing to pay for online news on mobile devices. "Breaking the 100,000 download barrier in just over two months is an enormous achievement for the Guardian App," said Emily Bell, the director of digital content, Guardian News & Media.

Shortlisted for a British Press Award in the Digital Innovation category, the Guardian app enables readers to access breaking news, comment, podcasts, picture galleries, and more. It can be easily personalised according to each user's interests, is readable online and offline, and has been praised for its elegant and simple design.

"The feedback we received at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last week from both the industry and users was very complimentary, and we are thrilled that the app is being showcased in Apple's latest television campaign," Bell added.

The Guardian app is available in most European countries at Apple's app store.

Some 6,500 writers, from Thomas Pynchon to Jeffrey Archer, have opted out of Google's controversial plan to digitise millions of books

Former children's laureates Quentin Blake, Anne Fine and Jacqueline Wilson, bestselling authors Jeffrey Archer and Louis de Berni res and critical favourites Thomas Pynchon, Zadie Smith and Jeanette Winterson have all opted out of the controversial Google book settlement, court documents have revealed.

Authors who did not wish their books to be part of Google's revised settlement needed to opt out before 28 January, in advance of last week's ruling from Judge Denny Chin over whether to allow Google to go ahead with its divisive plans to digitise millions of books. The judge ended up delaying his ruling, after receiving more than 500 written submissions, but court documents related to the case show that more than 6,500 authors, publishers and literary agents have opted out of the settlement.

As well as the authors named above, these include the estates of Rudyard Kipling, TH White, James Herriot, Nevil Shute and Roald Dahl, Man Booker prizewinners Graham Swift and Keri Hulme, poets Pam Ayres, Christopher Middleton, Gillian Spraggs and Nick Laird, novelists Bret Easton Ellis, James Frey, Monica Ali, Michael Chabon, Philip Hensher and Patrick Gale, historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, biographer Victoria Glendinning and bestselling author of the Northern Lights trilogy Philip Pullman.

Ursula K Le Guin, who gained significant author support for her petition calling for "the principle of copyright, which is directly threatened by the settlement, [to] be honoured and upheld in the United States", also opted out.

"My feelings were, in the end, that I doubted I would lose out by opting out, whereas I might do by opting in. Also there was the principle that copyright is important," said novelist Marika Cobbold, author of books including Guppies for Tea and Shooting Butterflies, who opted out. "It would be like handing over my babies to a babysitter I'd never met, [and] I couldn't understand what was in it for me. I love Google, and in principle making information accessible is wonderful, but things are moving so fast, and authors are losing so much control over what we've done, that my fear was who knows, in five to 10 years' time, how this information could be used?"

Gillian Spraggs has also set up a new group that will campaign in support of authors' rights. For "UK authors and agents who are deeply concerned about the Google book settlement, the Digital Economy Bill, and other current threats to the fundamental principles of copyright", its manifesto states that "authors have the right to have their intellectual property protected by the state [and] decide whether and where they are going to publish, and in what format(s)".

"The [Google books settlement] is in some trouble in the States. Following serious criticisms from the US Department of Justice, there are big questions over whether the court will approve it, and if it does, in what form," writes Spraggs. "But if authors in Britain don't make their voices heard now, they may find that a similar scheme (or a worse one) has been imposed over here by government decree." Her group, Action on Authors' Rights, "aims to bring home to the UK government and opposition the well-founded concerns of UK authors about the Google book settlement and the Digital Economy Bill, and to have an input into the debate on digitisation and copyright in Europe", she said.

"I decided to opt out of the Google book settlement on the advice of my agency, David Higham Associates, and on the advice of Gill Spraggs, who had read the small print. Then I was inspired to read the small print too, and I didn't like what I found. Google's preemptive action has 'turned copyright law on its head'. It seems they plan, unilaterally, to take ownership away from the writer, and the ownership doesn't pass to the readers (fat chance!) but to a giant profit-making corporation. A vast entity allegedly intent on 'doing nothing evil' has simply decided this will be so, and then hired a fleet of lawyers to make it happen," said award-winning science fiction author Gwyneth Jones. "The danger to me, and every other writer, is not that our works will be available free online (I offer most of my recent novels free online already. These 'portable document format' novels are the text as I wrote it, and they do my sales no harm at all). The danger of the digital 'publishing' corporations is their unprecedented access to billions of tiny payments, for product that costs them effectively nothing, at their point of entry. This seems to mean they don't have to worry about any form of resistance at all. I don't like the sound of that, not from anybody's point of view."

'Jammers' overwhelm anti-theft devices on cars and lorries and later versions could be used to disrupt air traffic

Criminal gangs have begun using GPS "jammers" imported from China to help them steal expensive cars and lorries carrying valuable loads and there are fears that terrorists could use more powerful versions to disrupt air traffic, a conference in London will hear on Tuesday.

The "jammers" put out radio signals at the same frequency at the Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites, overwhelming the timing signal that in-car devices use to plot their position. That means a tracker device built into a lorry with a valuable load, or a car with an anti-theft GPS device which should report its position if stolen, cannot distinguish the correct GPS signal.

"It disappears from the radar," said Professor David Last, of the University of Wales at Bangor, who has been a police expert witness in a number of cases over the past 18 months in which GPS jammers have been seized.

Some German drivers are also believed to use such jammers to try to evade GPS-based road charging, which was introduced for trucks in 2005. There have also been robberies in Russia where such jammers have been used against both GPS systems and mobile phones on lorries to prevent the driver from contacting the authorities.

In Germany, as in the UK, it is illegal to sell or use such jammers although it appears to be legal to import or own them.

Satnav devices rely on being able to "see" at least four of the 30 satellites orbiting about 20,200km (12,550 miles) above the earth: by correlating the very precise timing and identification signals they transmit, a ground-based device can calculate its own location to within about 1 metre. However, the jamming devices do not have to put out a strong signal to disrupt GPS reception.

"The problem is that the signal from the satellites is extremely weak it's the equivalent of picking up the light output of a 25-watt bulb on the satellite," said Bob Cockshott, another conference speaker who heads the location and timing program for the Technology Strategy Board, funded by the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills.

"That means you only need a jammer with an output of about 2 watts to swamp any signal from the GPS satellites over an area of a few metres." Such a device would be billions of times more powerful than the GPS signal at ground level.

Cockshott says that such more powerful jammers could have multiple uses for criminal gangs. "They would work over tens of kilometres, so drugs gangs might use them to disrupt navigation in the Thames estuary if they were taking a delivery and didn't want rivals to be able to trace them."

Such systems have been found in the hands of criminals arrested by police over the past 18 months, said Cockshott. The jammers could be built by a competent electronics expert, though the gangs appear to prefer to import them from Chinese makers in Shenzhen.

"We need to make users of GPS aware of the threat," said Cockshott. "They need to use a complementary technology so that their systems work without GPS." Systems that triangulate on mobile phone masts, and another which uses a ground-based network, called eLoran, can operate even when GPS signals fail, he said.

Professor Last said that the use of these systems by criminals and terrorists had been anticipated since 2002, when the US government produced a report pointing out that disruption to GPS could cause "severe safety and economic damage to the US".

Charles Curry, the managing director of Chronos Technology, who also heads a consortium which is building a GPS-jamming detection system with a 2.2m UK government grant, said that the biggest fear was that a powerful GPS jammer with an output of 20W or more might be used by terrorists near an airport.

"If you lost GPS capability on planes or other things that rely on accurate timing, such as the emergency networks or power stations, then if they don't build in the ability to mitigate against such attacks there could be very serious consequences." The detection system is now in its prototype stages and would be used at airports, harbours and other locations which rely on the nanosecond accuracy of GPS outputs.

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.

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.

Broadcaster Jonathan Ross bought one of the very first 'portable' Macs 'It weighed about 60lb'

Listen to the interview in full

What's your favourite piece of technology, and how has it improved your life?
I'm gonna have to start by saying I find it hard to pick favourites in anything favourite movies, favourite comics, favourite foods. I like too many things, so even in technology, that applies. If I have to settle for one thing I would say the mobile phone, and if I had to narrow that down I would say the iPhone, because it is just an incredible piece of technology as I'm sure anyone who has got one knows. It's an incredible convergence device it's changed our lives in ways that haven't even been realised yet.

When did you last use it?
About 10 minutes ago, to check my mail. I've got a BlackBerry as well, which I've been clinging on to because I convinced myself that it was a slightly more efficient tool for business. But I don't think that's true any more, now that the iPhone's gone 3GS. My only problem I've got with the iPhone is storage space.

What additional features would you add if you could?
More memory and battery life they're the key issue in all these devices, I think.

Will it be obsolete in 10 years?
In 10 years almost all the things we use right now will be unrecognisable. It's going to be commerce that drives it, as always, and at the moment because we're in the grip of what appears to be a global recession I don't know whether the pace will keep up. I guess the iPhone will change drastically, as will most things. I can't see the iPhone getting that much smaller, but I imagine it will get slimmer and more portable. I don't think it will change that much, because I think it's pretty nearly a perfect thing.

What frustrates you about technology?
PCs and Apples and devices that don't work together. I'm someone who have a lot of these things bouncing around, and I'm very much someone who grabs hold of the new item and gives it a go. So often I'll find that an old computer won't talk to a new computer, and I'd like to be able to synch my mailbox in about 10 or 20 different computers.

Is there any particular piece of technology you have owned and hated?
Oh, loads of stuff. I bought the very first Apple Mac portable, which was only portable if you were Arnie fucking Schwarzenegger. It weighed about 60lb and it came in a case that was about two foot by about a foot and a half. I've still got it, it still works. That wasn't one I hated, I'm just saying I've always bought the early stuff. I still stupidly will blunder in and buy the next thing when it comes out.

If you had one tip for getting the best out of technology, what would it be?
I'm not a great one for giving advice, which is probably just as well. Learn to use the item you've got to its full potential. Often we buy a new thing and use it in the same way we used its predecessor we don't realise it's got so much more to give.

Are you a luddite or a nerd?
Clearly, I'm in the nerd school. But in some ways I'm fairly luddish, in that I sometimes resent the march of technology and change for the sake of it.

What's the most expensive piece of technology you've ever owned?
It would probably be a car. I bought myself a Morgan, because I always loved the look of those old cars, and even that only cost about 28 grand, so it's not wildly expensive for a car. I would probably invest in a robot. If Honda started selling Asimos, I'd probably save up and buy one, because I love the idea.

Mac or PC, and why?
Mac all the way. They're better looking, they're more interesting, they're certainly easier to use, and they've always suited my lifestyle more. It's what I grew up with. For me, it was always Mac and it always will be.

Do you still buy physical media such as CDs and DVDs, or do you download?
I buy DVDs; I don't buy CDs so much, I get given a lot. I think I'd probably download music more than a movie I don't like streaming movies much because the bandwidth isn't quite there yet. There's something about having the hard DVD in your hand at home.

Robot butlers a good idea or not?
It's a fucking great idea. That's it. That's all you need to know. What's wrong with a robot butler? Once again, though, I bet the battery life won't quite be good enough, I bet they'll sometimes malfunction, and I bet the Windows ones won't talk to the Mac ones. But yeah, bring it on.

What piece of technology would you most like to own?
Apart from a robot butler, I've always loved the idea of a reliable, not-too-dangerous jetpack. But you know, I'm really happy there are other people out there, smarter people, making new stuff for us all the time.

Jonathan Ross is hosting the British Academy Film Awards tonight. His first comic book, Turf, is published in April

Minister rather than Parliament to determine timeframe for 'temporary suspension', leading to fears of indefinite bans

A government minister, not parliament, will decide on the maximum period for which people found guilty of illicit filesharing can have their accounts suspended if the Digital Economy bill becomes law.

Although the government insists that it would only implement "temporary suspension" of internet accounts of people deemed to have broken copyright law, it has not defined how long "temporary" is and the definition does not appear in the bill now before Parliament.

Instead, the secretary of state at the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (DBIS) will decide on how long it should be, based on a recommendations from the Ofcom, although the regulator's suggestions are not binding.

Presently, the person responsible would be Lord Mandelson, who has been particularly vociferous about the need to take action against persistent illicit use of the net.

The only brake on the "temporary" suspension being of unlimited length would be the Human Rights Act whose applicability to internet access is untested and the definition offered by DBIS was that "temporary suspension can't effectively mean termination of an internet connection". But there is no definition in the bill of what marks the legal difference between "suspension" and "termination".

On Monday the Guardian noted that Downing Street had responded to a petition calling on it to reject plans to disconnect people found guilty of illicit file sharing by saying: "We will not terminate the accounts of infringers ... [but] ... We added account suspension to the list of possible technical measures which might be considered."

The Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (DBIS) on Tuesday said that "suspension" meant "temporary suspension".

But the Open Rights Group said that this was "semantics" and that the government had simply chosen a different form of words to mean the same thing.

Asked for clarification, a DBIS spokesperson said: "Any move to using technical measures on internet connections would only be made as a last resort and only if our initial measures to deal with unlawful filesharing did not have the desired effect.

"If government decides to use technical measures the Secretary of State would be required to consider an independent report from Ofcom on whether they should be imposed, and on the most effective and proportionate measures."

The secretary of state would then decide the upper limit for a "temporary" suspension which the DBIS indicated would be at least a few days.

The implementation of the upper limit would then be laid before parliament in the form of an order constituting secondary legislation amending what would be the Digital Economy act.

However, an Order cannot be amended by parliament; it can only be accepted or rejected. Any government with a working majority will be able to get an order passed and so would be able to implement a "temporary" suspension of indeterminate length without any legislative review.

Ministers have repeatedly referred to "temporary suspension" rather than cutting off internet abusers, for example in a speech by Treasury secretary Stephen Timms on 21 January at the Oxford Media Convention.

TalkTalk, the ISP which has been most vocal in its opposition to the government plans over filesharing penalties, said on Tuesday: "The government's latest announcement on its copyright protection proposals is nothing more than semantics.

"It is still the case that on the say-so of record labels and film studios people will have their internet connections suspended (ie disconnected). All that the Government seems to be saying is that permanent disconnection will be reserved for the very worst offenders. But they have been saying that since day one. There is no change.

"This is simply spin which masks the real issue. The detection system will implicate innocent people whose connections have been hacked into. They will still be deemed 'guilty' and then have to prove their innocence.

"The Digital Economy Bill will give rights holders the power to act as a judge and jury, allowing them to demand that ISPs disconnect their customers without having to prove their case in a court of law. TalkTalk is the only major ISP that has said it will simply refuse to do this and will fight its case in every court in the land and in Europe if it has to.

"The proposed copyright protection measures are utterly futile. Determined filesharers will find other, undetectable ways to access material, leaving innocent people to bear the brunt of this oppressive legislation."

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

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

Investigators said to have linked suspected author of computer code used in attacks to Chinese officials

Investigators are closing in on the source of internet attacks that hit a string of US companies, most notably Google.

Over the weekend, two Chinese schools linked to the attacks which hit dozens of companies in an attempt to steal private information and trade secrets denied their involvement. Reports last week suggested that the source of the strikes had been traced to Shanghai Jiaotong University and the Lanxiang School, a large vocational training centre in Jinan.

Today a report in the Financial Times suggests that US officials have tracked the individual they believe authored the computer code used, and have linked his work to Chinese officials.

The Chinese state news agency Xinhua reported that the two schools had nothing to do with the strikes, dubbed Operation Aurora by security experts. "We were shocked and indignant to hear these baseless allegations which may harm the university's reputation," Xinhua quoted a Jiaotong spokesman as saying.

The organisation added that the evidence said to link the school to the attacks centred on the hackers' internet protocol (IP) address, which can easily be forged. "The report of the New York Times was based simply on an IP address. Given the highly developed network technology today, such a report is neither objective nor balanced," the spokesman said.

Communist party officials at Lanxiang, which trains up to 20,000 students in trade skills, said the report was false and suggestions that the attacks were performed during a class taught by a Ukrainian professor were "unfounded".

"Investigation in the staff found no trace the attacks originated from our school," said Li Zixiang. "There is no Ukrainian teacher in the school and we have never employed any foreign staff."

China has expressed concerns about its own online vulnerability, and there are reports today that a senior Chinese army officer has called for a new national body to enforce internet controls, and for a reduction in the reliance on foreign technology.

Major General Huang Yongyin said China needed to match the defensive efforts of other major nations, arguing: "For national security, the internet has already become a new battlefield without gunpowder."

Writing in the latest issue of Chinese Cadres Tribune, a magazine published by the Communist party's influential Central Party School, he said: "Lawless elements and hostile forces at home and abroad have increasingly turned to the internet to engage in crime, disruption, infiltration, reactionary propaganda and other sabotage activities."

The internet attacks, first revealed in January but which have been taking place for some time, led Google to threaten that it would stop censoring its Chinese search engine, and have raised concerns about diplomatic relations between the US and China.

US officials have been working with representatives from the companies affected believed to include Adobe Systems, Yahoo and Northrop Grumman as well as experts from the National Security Agency, the US surveillance and codebreaking agency.

Early indications suggested the attacks may have been carried out under direction of authorities in Beijing. That possibility led the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, to request clarification from the Chinese government, which denied any involvement.

Dan Blum, principal analyst for the IT consultancy Burton Group, said the preponderance of evidence pointed to Chinese involvement. "Myself, and a lot of people, are well past 99% sure," he said. "Hillary Clinton, who spoke for the US in officially denouncing the attacks, would not do so lightly, and would probably agree with me."

'Town square' site to cross barrier of western news agencies
Advanced translation software not used on divisive subjects

A new website hopes to bridge the divide between the west and the Middle East, by allowing English speakers to read news articles originally printed in Arabic and vice versa.

San Francisco-based Meedan, which launches tomorrow, will provide translations of news articles in both languages in an attempt to help foster better relations between the two.

"There is a tremendous amount of media attention focused on the Middle East, but for the most part we're looking at those stories through the prism of western news agencies," said Ed Bice, Meedan's co-founder and chief executive. "We don't have a good way of seeing the media that's being written in Arabic and represents the way the region is understanding these events itself."

The non-profit site the name of which means "town square" in Arabic will also translate from English to Arabic, as well as providing a community forum that will let speakers of the two languages communicate with each other in near-real time.

"Outside of the news agencies like the BBC and al-Jazeera that are doing programming in two languages, Arabic speakers are unable to access information written in English," he added. "The goal is to provide more media exchange across both these languages."

The system, which has been in development for more than three years, is based on advanced automatic translation technology developed by IBM and uses an international team of 30 translators and editors to find news and polish the language.

Many media organisations have partnered with translation services in recent years to help spread their information to new areas, particularly in repressive countries such as China where even the English versions of news websites are often blocked. However, that process can also capture the attention of the authorities. In December, Yeeyan, a Chinese community translation website used by the Guardian was closed down by officials in Beijing.

Bice said that the site would steer clear of controversial subjects, since the aim was to get accurate versions of news and opinion to as many people as possible.

"We are trying to respect the boundaries of speech and not agitate against them," he said. "We are respectful of the many and changing boundaries that define what can be spoken about when and where in the region."

But with language seen as a major barrier to more successful diplomatic and cultural relations, accurate automated translation has long been an ambition for generations of technologists and linguists.

While progress has been slow, many groups are now beginning to make significant steps. Late last year Google showcased a new mobile phone application that will help translate spoken words across a variety of languages reminiscent of the universal communicator devices used in science fiction programmes such as Star Trek.

But the need for accurate translation could be more pressing than ever, thanks to a decision last year by internet administrators which will soon give websites the ability to have names in new alphabets such as Mandarin, Arabic and Cyrillic.

With the potential for highly localised websites that cannot even be reached by outsiders let alone understood many have worried about the potential for a series of so-called "splinternets" to evolve.

According to Meedan's community manager, George Weyman, this means that schemes to help people overcome language barriers will become even more common.

"Everything posted on Meedan is translated first and foremost by machines, and then humans supply improvements to that. We show the translation history, much like Wikipedia, so you can see how it's evolved," he said.

"We're improving the quality of machine translation into Arabic. Over time, we should be able to translate more things, better. It's very exciting to see that happen we're ploughing a furrow that we hope will benefit many other cross-language projects on the web."

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."

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.

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.

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.

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Sometimes the skills demanded just take too long to master

This may surprise those who never play computer games, but they're quite hard work.

For one thing, there's the "grinding" common to many role-playing games. Grinding means doing the same tasks again and again to increase your in-game character's strength or dexterity or their ability to summon ancient and hideous demons from the netherworld. I once lost four months of my life grinding in World of Warcraft predecessor Diablo II. It can be soothing at least in a computer game if you put in the work, you'll get the achievement. But after a while I started to wonder whether the best way to relax after a day doing repetitive tasks in an office was to do the same thing at home.

Games often involve skills that take a lot of effort to master. Some, like the millisecond-timing of platform games, are transferable, and some have to be acquired fresh each time. It can sometimes be dubious whether it's worth the effort required to master those skills. It took me 120 hours of lessons to pass my driving test and I'm not ashamed to admit it. All right, I am quite ashamed. I'm an adequate driver now, but only because I spend about an hour every day practising. So while I love mucking about in Grand Theft Auto IV, stealing cars and cinematically leaping from their burning carcasses just before they explode, I'm pretty lousy at completing the actual missions. I find it hard enough to drive across town at the best of times, let alone when being timed, shot at and chased by the police.

I suppose hardcore gamers might say that I need to play more to reap the rewards, but frankly it sounds like a bit too much of an effort to me.

Google is baffled at the charge of search bias it's all automated. But that is also its great weakness

There will be confusion and pain in Mountain View following the European commission's decision to begin preliminary investigations into whether Google has abused its dominance of internet search by (it is claimed) submerging results from rival sites. Not because Google's executives will think they have done any such thing and it's entirely possible that they haven't. But because to them the idea that Google, the company where the algorithm rules above all, should do such a labour intensive thing as suppress particular sites is pretty much unthinkable. It goes against everything Google stands for which is the machine, not the man.

Google was built on one fantastic rule: the sites that get linked to by other sites are higher up the reputation tree. That is the basis of its world-beating search engine. Once it had also figured out how to make money by selling ads against search results and web pages (done, again, with machines - you bid online to place an ad against a search term, and the computer chooses who wins), it could start piling on the profit. Which it has. And that has allowed it to expand its ambition "to organise the world's information and make it accessible". That is actually its mission statement. (The stuff about "don't be evil"? Just advisement.)

For all its grand expansion, to video (YouTube), online processing (Google Appspot), books (Google Books), and even online payment systems (Google Checkout) Google hews to one truth: humans aren't as good at doing things as machines, so you should let the machines do it. Does the internet have lots of sites that just refer to themselves (to pretend they have lots of "links", to push themselves up the search results)? Tweak the algorithm to push them down. Are there lots of spam-laden sites that pretend to have whatever search term you're after to get up the results? Tweak them out too. The machine rules; the human tries to stay out of it, because no good can come of people trying to keep up with the scale of the internet. If you had to hire people to sift through everything being uploaded to YouTube more than 20 hours every single minute you'd need a team of more than 3,600 people working eight-hour shifts every single day.

Google doesn't do that. It has about 20,000 staff worldwide, and it wants as few as possible doing grunt work like video reviews. Let the computer do it: so videos are checked (by a machine) to see if their soundtrack or visual fingerprint matches known copyrighted material. If so, it won't get up.

But this focus on the machine does lead to a blind spot, as we'll see.

It was inevitable that the company's immodest ambition would, as the American media business journalist Ken Auletta describes it in his new book Googled, "wake up the bears" those organisations and companies which had been comfortable where they were until this upstart came along.

The Chinese government is already roused to anger by Google's electric-shock reaction to the discovery that its systems were hacked by people seeking information about Chinese dissidents. And now there's the European commission, which tends to gnaw and gnaw away until it gets what it wants, as Intel fined 1bn last May for anticompetitive practices and Microsoft obliged to allow European users to pick their own web browser on Windows 7, starting this week, because of the way it forced Internet Explorer on Windows users have discovered.

So what does the European commission want? Initially, for Google to explain why companies such as Foundem, eJustice and Microsoft-owned Ciao don't seem to rank in its search results. Foundem, a British company, has tried without success to get an explanation since 2006.

But in the longer term, it may want it to be less aggressive in how it tweaks its algorithms. That might be good for spammers (not that I'm suggesting any of the three complainants is; far more likely they are collateral damage of tweaks by Google). But in the longer term, the warning may be not to do what Microsoft did, and use its power in one field to try to overwhelm another.

That could be a good thing. Two weeks ago, Google launched "Buzz", its own effort to create a Twitter-style network for the 400 million users of Google Mail. It would immediately create a network of people you had swapped email with, and let you converse, Twitter-style, with them in short text bursts.

Except it had only been tested internally, among the algorithm-loving engineers. Unleashed on normal people, who exchange emails with people they hate, or want to keep separate the people they swap emails with, it created social collisions all over the place. Buzz outraged many; parents have discovered that it does not secure children from would-be stalkers.

It turns out that algorithms can't tell us everything about human nature. It was a moment when Google was suddenly caught in the headlights. And now it risks being mauled by the commission if not over this, then over related matters. What will count then will be how the company recovers. Microsoft has not yet recovered from the battering it took from the US department of justice and the commission over its browser tactics. Google might but how well it does will be down to the humans, not the machines.

Google says it is 'deeply troubled' by conviction of three officials on privacy charges over bullying video hosted on site

Google responded furiously today after an Italian court found three of its executives guilty of violating the privacy of a child with autism who was shown being bullied in a video posted on its site.

The company vowed to appeal against the ruling, which it described as "an attack on the fundamental principles of freedom on which the internet was built". The three executives were given six-month suspended sentences.

The two prosecutors who brought the case against the US-based firm praised the ruling for protecting personal interest above corporate profit.

"We are very satisfied because by means of this trial we have posed a serious problem: that is to say, the protection of human beings, which must prevail over corporate interests," they said in a statement.

The video, which showed the boy being beaten and insulted, was made by four students at a Turin secondary school in May 2006. It was posted to Google Video on 8 September and remained there until 7 November, when it was taken down after a complaint by Italian police.

The case has potentially vast implications for the future of the internet. Hosting platforms such as Facebook and YouTube argue that they cannot be held responsible for content created by their users until they are informed that something is illegal. The Italian prosecutors contended that Google was negligent in not removing the video sooner.

This issue became fundamental to the trial. Google's lawyers said the company had taken the video off the site within three hours of being formally notified by the Italian police. But the prosecution argued that it had shot to the top of the most-viewed list and been a subject of heated controversy long before.

The indictments had been sought by a local lobby group for people with Down's syndrome, and the four Google executives were sent for trial before a Milan judge, charged with libel. Three, including Google's senior vice-president and chief legal officer, David Drummond, were also charged with privacy violations.

The judge, Oscar Magi, dismissed the libel accusations but upheld the other charges. The other two people sentenced were Google's retired chief financial officer George Reyes and its global privacy counsel, Peter Fleischer. The judge also ordered that a summary of the sentence should be published in all of Italy's main national daily newspapers.

The Down's syndrome lobby group and Milan city council, both of whom have sought damages for libel, had their petitions rejected. The relatives of the boy who was shown being bullied had also brought a civil suit against the executives, but their case was dropped.

All of Google's employees, who were convicted in absentia, denied wrong doing. It is expected that the company's lawyers will argue on appeal that the verdict is at odds with an EU directive from 2000 that gave hosting platforms a so-called "safe harbour" from prosecution, so long as they acted promptly to remove illegal content.

In a statement, Google called the outcome of the case "surprising to say the least, since our colleagues had nothing to do with the video in question: they did not make it; they did not upload it, and they have not seen it.

"We are deeply troubled by this conviction for another equally important reason," it added. "It attacks the very principles of freedom on which the internet is built. Common sense dictates that only the person who films and uploads a video to a hosting platform could take the steps necessary to protect the privacy and obtain the consent of the people they are filming."

The prosecutors maintained that "this was not a trial about freedom of the internet as some have said. Instead, and for the first time in Italy, a serious issue has been raised about the rights of the individual in today's society."

Britain's third largest chain reaches a deal with Disney and drops its boycott of Tim Burton's 3D retelling of the Alice in Wonderland stories

Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland will be screened in all cinemas owned by Britain's third largest chain, Vue, after the firm said it had reached an agreement with Disney. The move increases the pressure on rival chain Odeon, which said earlier this week that it would be boycotting the 3D fantasy over studio plans to shorten the window between theatrical release and the movie's arrival on DVD to just 12 weeks.

In a statement, Vue's CEO, Tim Richards, said the firm had entered a "far-reaching agreement" with Disney.

"We are delighted that we have reached an agreement with our partners at Disney," he said. "This is a win-win for everyone in the entertainment business and in particular for our customers by offering greater film choice."

The decision means the film will be shown in Vue's 69 cinemas across the country. Cineworld, the UK's second largest exhibitor, will also show the movie in its 77 cinemas.

Odeon, however, which has more than 100 cinemas in the UK, is not playing ball. The firm fears Disney's proposals would inevitably lead to a standard 12-week window for most films in the UK, cutting the time and, presumably, the revenues that exhibitors have come to rely on. Disney, however, has argued that the vast majority of a particular film's audience have seen it within two months. Keeping the window to its usual 17-week minimum, it suggests, only serves to play into the hands of pirates.

Some cynics have suggested that Disney's actions may spring from its concern over Alice in Wonderland's critical reception. Burton's film, which stars Johnny Depp, Mia Wasikowska and a host of British talent such as Helena Bonham Carter, Stephen Fry and Alan Rickman, is currently under a review embargo, but the word in the blogosphere is that it could be in for a kicking when that lifts in the runup to the UK and US release date of 5 March.